Off the Road (8 page)

I don’t want to tell him
that “ma” is the word for mother in nearly every language on earth, since it’s
typically the first consonant-and-vowel combo a baby can pronounce. I also
realize there is a bit of ethnic trendiness going on here. If, instead of the
Japanese, the group with the reputation for hard work, intelligence, and
cunning were Micronesians, somehow I suspect I’d be hearing tales of rafts
rounding Tierra del Fuego and coming ashore on the beaches of Santander. When I
change the subject to Roland, he immediately picks it up as if he’d been
talking about it all along.

“The truth of the matter is
confused,” he says. “Charlemagne did not come here with the purest of motives.
You will hear that he entered Spain to liberate Christians suffering under the
rule of infidels. Charlemagne had other ideas—to expand his empire. He crossed
the Pyrenees, but nothing worked out as he intended. This is Spain! This is Basque Spain! He tortured the Basques of Pamplona and allowed his men to
have a little too much”—and he says this phrase in English—“rest and relaxation
with our women. When he was preparing to cross the Pyrenees, the Basque
shepherds who lived around here heard about what had happened in Pamplona. And Basques are the best shepherds. We can talk to animals. Basques can talk to
wolves. Our shepherds and the wolves slipped into the woods up near the steep
pass when the time came. They blew their
irrintzi
[horns made of wild
oxen]. And then we killed them.” He grins.

He points to my paperback
copy of the
Chanson de Roland
and says with a sneer, “You won’t find
much truth in that.” He explains that none of the protagonists at the time
wanted to tell the truth about Roland because no one was served by it. The
French didn’t want to admit that the death of Roland was the result of
Charlemagne’s unchristian intentions. The Spaniards didn’t want to tell the
truth because they welcomed French propaganda (and assistance) in the war
against the Moors. And the Arabs? In the Basque version, they don’t figure into
the telling. In the
Chanson de Roland,
they become the most feared
people on earth.

That evening, Brother Don
Jesus takes me to the third floor of the monastery’s sleeping quarters. I pass
a dozen doors marked with the names of the other brothers. I never see them or
hear them. Each door warns me in Spanish not to disturb. On the top floor the
pilgrim’s quarters are several rooms with rough-hewn wooden bunks built three
beds high into the wall. On a thin mattress I lay out my bag and turn on a
flashlight. I pull out a new copy of the
Codex Calixtinus,
the
twelfth-century tour guidebook I had discussed with Madame Debril. Among the
Roland ashtrays and plastic Olifants, the monastery’s gift shop sells a fresh
edition of the pilgrimage’s first
Baedeker.

The
Codex
is
attributed to a French cleric named Aimery Picaud. The book is amusing because
the author’s pro-France/anti-Spain bias is the most comically exaggerated in
history. His critical reviews of the towns and food along the way are filled
with crazed invective. France is all elegance, and Spain is a country of
poisoned rivers, granite bread, and lethal fish.

Naturally Picaud has an
opinion of the Basques. As a gumshoe errant, I can’t help but wonder if his
writing in 1160 wasn’t influenced by the same rumor I heard this morning,
because it is for the Basques that Picaud saved his most ornamental
condemnations. Picaud says the Basques of Navarra are a thieving people who
force strangers to take down their pants. Their language sounds like the
barking of dogs. They eat with their hands. In a bit of etymological
overreaching, Picaud traces the origin of the region’s name, Navarra, to the
Latin
non verus,
the land of liars. But once Picaud really warms up his
pen, the reader can’t help but suspect that his loathing of the Basques
reflects the French memory of what really happened in 778:

This is a barbarous people unlike all other peoples in
customs and in character, full of malice, swarthy in colour, ill-favoured of
face, misshapen, perverse, perfidious, empty of faith and corrupt, libidinous,
drunken, experienced in all violence, ferocious and wild, dishonest and
reprobate, impious and harsh, cruel and contentious, unversed in anything good,
well trained in all vices and iniquities, like the Geats and Saracens in
malice, in everything inimical to our French people.... In certain regions of
their country, that is, in Biscay and Alava, when the Navarrase are warming
themselves, a man will show a woman and a woman a man their private parts. The
Navarrese even practice unchaste fornication with animals. For the Navarrese is
said to hang a padlock behind his mule and mare, so that none may come near her
but himself. He even offers libidinous kisses to the vulva of woman and mule.
That is why the Navarrese are to be rebuked by all well-informed people.

I am developing suspicions,
especially since while I’m in the Basque region, everyone—shopkeepers, bankers,
priests—all tell me the exact same story. I bring up the subject, and the
locals speak of 778 as if it weren’t so long ago. I feel like a detective
arriving on the scene 1,200 years late to solve an old crime. Who killed
Roland?

The next morning I walk out
of Roncesvalles and I wander into the village of Espinal. A sign on a gift shop
invites me to ring the bell if it is closed. A buzz produces a shadowy presence
in the rear of the shop, a woman about fifty years old. Stepping around the
corner of the counter to open the door, she runs her hand through a tangle of
hair and whips the belt of a thick bathrobe into a knot.

On the left is a wall of
religious objects, crucifixes, crèches, Virgin Marys. On the right is a wall of
the local drinking jugs, called
botas.
Their long, tapered spout, which
protrudes acutely at the base, allows locals to pour the wine—often at a
distance —directly down one another’s throats without swallowing. But these
botas
are novelty gifts, delivering their contents through some potter’s best-slung
rendition of a penis. In the position of a
bota
spout, the penises appear
extremely cheerful and pose a bizarre contrast to the wall of suffering Jesuses
on the other side. The woman shows me some of her other naughty merchandise.
Each time she bends over to unlock a showcase, an errant breast tumbles out.
She replaces it giddily. Spain has certainly changed since Franco died. I ask
her about the recent murder of the Frenchman they call Roland. She laughs.

“We killed him, the
Basques,” she says as if all history had taken place in the last couple of
weeks. “We threw out the French then and now we’re trying to throw out the
Spanish.”

It turns out the Basques
aren’t the only ones with a story. One pilgrim version ended with Charlemagne
walking to Santiago as the official First Pilgrim. Since Roland died in 778 and
Santiago’s body was discovered in 814, this makes Charlemagne’s pilgrimage
not merely the first, but quite likely the slowest. But what’s a little
discrepancy among epic poets?

The local priests too had
their
Chanson de Roland,
built on a juicy piece of eighth-century gossip.
It was widely whispered in those days that Charlemagne’s libido often targeted
his own sisters. This variation on the story made Charlemagne’s lust the source
of the evil and Roland’s death inevitable since he was in fact Charlemagne’s
incestuous son. This rendition certainly gives Ganelon’s bitterness and treason
a sympathetic gloss. Since he was married to Charlemagne’s sister, he was, in
effect, the future Holy Roman Emperor’s beard. How Ganelon must have seethed at
the prospect of being humiliated by Roland—the product of his ongoing
cuckolding by Charlemagne.

Other variations of the
Roland story can be found throughout the continent, and even the epic cycle of
King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table is said to be an Anglo-Saxon
response to compete with the intoxicating tales of Charlemagne and his
counselor chevaliers.

The more I looked into the
case, the better it got for my Basque innkeeper. For example, Charlemagne’s
official historian, Einhard, never mentioned Roland in the written record until
after the emperor’s death. Then, Roncesvalles gets only a small
mention—probably to refute the stories of humiliating defeat and cowardice
circulating orally around the mountains. Einhard delicately notes that in the
Pyrenees, Charlemagne had no real problem to speak of “except for a reverse” at
Roncesvalles owed to little more than “W
asconiam perfidiam,”
literally
“Basque treachery.” In the list of the dead, Einhard mentions several nobles
and other worthies, among them a man with the unusual name Hruodlandus. Look
carefully at that mouthful and you will see the orthographic ancestor of
Roland. Then Einhard adds an astonishing kicker: “Nor could this assault be
punished at once, for when the deed had been done the enemy so completely
disappeared that they left behind them not so much as a rumour of their
whereabouts.”

So Charlemagne did not
return to Spain at all. He left his nephew/son’s body to rot in the future bus
parking lot of Roncesvalles.

What had I stumbled onto
here? If Einhard’s reluctant admissions are true, then what does that make of
the
Chanson de Roland
? A cover-up? The poem’s not only wrong, but
magnificently wrong, intentionally wrong. Could the
Chanson de Roland
be
a brazen reversal of the truth, such as we often see in modem propaganda? Could
France’s national epic be the first use of the Big Lie?

Over the intervening 1,200
years, historians who admire Charlemagne have gone to heroic ends to spin the
events in Charlemagne’s favor. One nineteenth-century British historian, who
signs himself, J. J. Mombert, D.D., grunts with regret that this story has “two
or three particulars which few readers of this history might care to have
suppressed.” He offers a dozen excuses for Charlemagne’s cowardice in
Roncesvalles but finally throws up his hands at the end of one paragraph in
italic exasperation: Charlemagne “doubtless
tried
to win, although he
only came, saw—and
went.”
Something’s going on here, so I continue
looking.

The irony of my
investigation is that for most of history, despite so many competing versions
of the story, everyone knew that the Basques had something to do with killing
Roland and that Charlemagne had fled. But more recently, other, extenuating
circumstances allowed an “authentic” French version to become preeminent. In the
early nineteenth century, the fierce nationalism that gripped Europe had ripple
effects everywhere. In literary circles this impulse manifested itself with the
encyclopedic task of collecting a culture’s great works in one book called an
anthology. A country’s fiction—assembled in one place —became an epic story on
its own, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (always gloriously continued).
A country such as England, for example, could proudly open its national
anthology and find itself to be an island of constantly flowering talent whose
blossoms could be plucked backward in time until one came upon the original
bud—the tightly written, ancient work called
Beowulf.

And the French? Where to
“begin” French literature? For a while it was a problem. Then, in 1835, a
graduate student discovered a manuscript of the
Chanson de Roland
in (of
all places) a library in Oxford, England. This specific version of the story
was elegant, probably the work of a troubadour hired by a French aristocrat so
the poem could be read aloud on holidays. Specialists refer to the manuscript,
for arcane reasons, as Digby 23, giving it all the charm and mystery of a
distant quasar.

In it, Roland blows the
Olifant, Charlemagne storms back into Spain, the sun stops dead in its tracks.
We all know this story, because it is the
one
we all know—the classic
tale of slaughter and righteous revenge. Throughout the 1800s, the French
heavily promoted this version of the tale, and it became the First Work of
French literature. It was internationally anthologized. French children were
required to read this version in high school and still are. In translation by
Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics) or by any other translator, this version
is the
only
one available in bookstores.

This
Chanson de Roland
imposes on the past a dramatic and flattering story. Few people probably care
that much about the story of Roland, so there aren’t many who would want to
challenge the
Chanson de Roland
as the first great work of French
literature. But there are a few far-flung places where the cruel savagery of
778 continues.

In the rarefied world of
academic textual critics, there are those (mainly French) who insist that the
Chanson
de Roland
is the first great work. They say that the poem is an original
work of art written by a single artist named Turold, who is mentioned in the
last line. For these scholars, Turold is a real person who sat in his garret
timing out the iambs of heroic verse. They say he is an epic poet whose talents
compete with those of Homer and Virgil.

The other school of
criticism mocks all this. They say that Turold is nothing more than a scribe
who wrote down one version of the poem. At best, Turold polished a well-known
work so that it had a sophisticated sheen. The original bards who sang the poem
along the road and throughout Europe altered it to suit each particular
audience and happily added names, changed events, or altered outcomes. In France these minstrels emphasized French honor. Elsewhere, his Christianity was paramount.
In Spain the treachery of Arabs was key to their propaganda. In the Basque
version—and there is one—it is a story that confirms their legendary ethnic
ruggedness. The story of Roland is a collective effort, formed by slow
accretion of plot and details.