The Pillars of Hercules Read online

  Graves’s son and daughter still lived at the house, I was told. I decided not to ring the bell—for fear of intruding but also for fear of being turned away, rebuffed for invading their privacy. Apart from curiosity I had no profound reason for poking my nose in. I was simply interested in what his desk looked like, the room, the books, the pictures; it gave some idea of the writer’s mind.

  I looked too disreputable for La Residencia; I had a cup of coffee in the village and spent the day walking around the steep lanes, admiring the fruit trees and the tidy houses. The village had great dignity and enormous physical beauty. It was a place, I decided, I would gladly return to.

  Even in Deyá, in casual conversation I did not find anyone who knew Graves’s poetry. But no matter. The question that was in my mind was about Franco, and in particular his hold on Mallorca. Because the Spaniards are so polite generally and reserved it was a long time before I could steel myself to ask. Also, asking about a dictator who had been in power so long was also a way of asking people about themselves, a question like “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

  Anyway, in Deyá, I popped the question. The man I asked was of that generation, in his early seventies, a thoughtful person out walking his dog. I had caught him unawares, while we were discussing the route to Valdemosa. Then he considered my Franco question.

  “In that time”—he seemed to be avoiding saying the Franco’s name—“we could not do certain things. We could not say certain things. Some things we could not think.”

  “So there was political repression?”

  “Yes. We were not as free as we are now,” he said. “But there was work for everyone and there were tourists. When you have work you are satisfied and you don’t ask questions. You get on with your life. If you have work and food you don’t think about political matters.”

  “And if there’s no work?”

  “Ah, then you ask questions.”

  “So under Franco there was full employment?”

  “The country was growing. But that was a different time. Now everything has changed.”

  “Was the Catholic church stronger then?”

  “Much stronger.”

  He was talking about Spain’s entering the modern world. Long after the rest of Europe had joined it, little had changed in Spain. I took That was a different time to mean that it was ancient history. And in a short time, only since the late seventies, Spain had worked to catch up—to lighten its mood and learn how to vote; most of all to cope with the humiliation of having lived so long under a dictator who presumed to think for them. It must have been like living in an abusive household.

  Rather than spend the night here in Deyá I decided to stay at Valdemosa, another lovely place above a fishing port; more olive trees, more fruit trees and fincas, but an altogether more level town. Part of Valdemosa’s fame rested on the fact that George Sand had brought her lover Chopin here in the winter of 1838–39 and, while he recovered from an illness and wrote his “Preludes,” she had quarreled with the locals. Afterwards she had written a famously cruel book about their sojourn.

  This seemed the perfect place to read the copy of Winter in Majorca that I had bought in Palma. It was a locally published edition, translated and extensively annotated by Robert Graves—most of his notes were rebuttals or else cleared up Sand’s misapprehensions or her willful judgments.

  At the time of their visit, Chopin, younger than George Sand, was twenty-eight; she was thirty-four. Her real name was Baroness Aurore de Dudevant, née Dupin; “the child of a mésalliance between an aristocrat and an ex-milliner, was the uncrowned queen of the Romantic,” Graves wrote.

  Chopin passed as her husband, but it was known that they weren’t married and perhaps that was why the locals did not warm to the foreigners, who perhaps suspected that she was pursuing a secret love affair. It was the worst, most rainy winter in years, the olive crop was a failure, and George Sand’s writing was not going well. As if that were not enough, Chopin suffered an attack of virtuousness and began to think godly thoughts. This provoked his anticlerical mistress, who liked to think of herself as a liberated soul. It was not a happy household. The village disapproved. The island was cold.

  The book was George Sand’s way of settling scores. She wrote it, raging, after she got back to France. She railed about the vulgarity and spitefulness of the people, she complained about everything from the way the Mallorcans built their houses and looked after their animals, to the poor quality of their olive oil, which she called “rancid and nauseating.” She called them monkeys, barbarous, thieves and “Polynesian savages,” as if the civilized navigators of the Pacific had not already been ill-used enough by the French.

  At one point, she quotes a French writer who begins a sentence, “These islanders are very well-disposed, gentle and hospitable,” and suddenly interrupts with, “We know that in every island, the human race falls into two categories: the cannibals and the ‘very well disposed.’ ”

  In another aside, she used the Mallorcans in order to generalize about Spain, how easily offended and thin-skinned the Spanish are. “Woe betide the traveler in Spain who is not pleased with everything he encounters! Make the slightest grimace on finding vermin in a bed, or scorpions in the soup, and you draw upon yourself universal scorn and indignation.”

  “We nicknamed Majorca, ‘Monkey Island,’ ” she writes, “because when surrounded by their crafty, thieving yet innocent creatures, we grew accustomed to defending ourselves against them,” and then, showing a certain ignorance about the natural world’s distribution of primates, she goes on, “but felt no more scorn than Indians feel toward chimpanzees or mischievous, timid orang-outangs.”

  Soon after the book appeared it received solemn rebuttals. It is one of the livelier and funnier Mediterranean travel books, and for gratuitous rudeness it is on a par with Evelyn Waugh’s Labels as an example of a traveler’s bad temper in the Mediterranean.

  I mentioned A Winter in Majorca to a man in Valdemosa. “It’s a silly book. And it’s old. I’m surprised that people still read it.”

  “I’m reading it because it’s funny.”

  “It’s full of lies about Valdemosa.”

  “It’s not about Valdemosa,” I said. “It’s about George Sand.”

  “Yes.” He was relieved and saw me as an ally. “That is right.”

  I drove the next day down the long hill back to Palma, across the island. It seemed to me that tourist Mallorca was at the beach, the masses of hotels on the south and the east. But even the town of Palma seemed traditional Spanish, not touristy, and it even had a venerable look to it—the lovely thirteenth-century cathedral, one of the few in Europe that had never been sacked or bombed.

  “This place is nice now,” a man from Cordova told me. “But it is madness in July and August.”

  I stayed in a small hotel in a suburb to the northeast, where there were just working people and inexpensive boardinghouses. People getting by. I shopped in the supermarket, drank in the bar and watched football and bullfights like everyone else. And living in this way I tried to sum up the Spanish contradictions. They still puzzled me, the way the independent spirit of Spain had endured a dictatorship for forty years; the way Spanish passion seemed at odds with Spanish courtesy. They were churchgoing Catholics who were loudly anticlerical. And how could one reconcile the strenuous libido (the papers crammed with personal ads for everything from boyfriends to sado-masochism) with the low birthrate?

  The elderly people in Spain were often the most broadminded. Pornography was the most vivid example of their tolerance. There were porno shops and movies in all the Spanish towns and cities, and even the smaller places like Cartagena had at least one or two porno outlets.

  It seemed incontestable to me that a country’s pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth but it contained m
any clues and even more warnings. Japanese porno is unlike anything in Germany, French is unlike Swedish, American unlike Mexican, and so forth.

  Spanish pornography baffled me. It seemed beyond sex, most of it. It involved children and dogs and torture; men torturing women, women being beastly to men; much of it was worse than German varieties, possibly the most repellent porno in the world. Some of it was homegrown—hermaphrodites and toilet training. One film I saw concerned a woman, a man and a donkey. Another, one of the strangest I have ever seen, concerned a Moroccan boy of about thirteen or fourteen, and a very bewildered goat.

  In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno—not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and How to Knit is S & M Monthly, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help! Socorro!

  Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be so off-putting and disgusting—and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia.

  “If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down, señor.”

  One sunny morning I boarded the ferry at Palma and sailed past the lump of Ibiza under blue skies back to the mainland port of Valencia. It was eight hours, mostly sunshine. There were about thirty of us on the ship that could accommodate fifteen hundred. I sat on deck, scribbling. Inside, a roomful of men watched the day’s bullfight on television, and each time the coup de grace was delivered, the whole length of the matador’s sword driven into the stumbling bull, a thrill of satisfaction went through the room, an intense sigh of passion.

  4

  The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

  If a quest for the Holy Grail began in Valencia it would be a very short quest, because the Holy Grail is propped on an altar in a small chapel of the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Zaragoza, in the middle of Valencia. It is the real thing, that was drunk out of by Jesus at the Last Supper, and then passed around to the Apostles. This chalice, teacup size, was carved from greenish agate (chalcedony), as is the base, an inverted cup set with pearls and emeralds, with gold handles, and it is held together by a gold post and jeweled bands. The whole thing is seven inches high, small but complex. The simple cup might have acquired the gold and jewels since Jesus used it. The authorized Cathedral pamphlet offers all this conjecture as fact.

  The Last Supper was held in the house of St. Mark. After this, Joseph of Arimathea collected drops of blood in it from Jesus’ crucified body. The cup—usually called the grail—was taken to Rome by St. Peter and it was used as the Papal Chalice until the time of Sixtus II. It was then sent to Huesca by St. Lawrence, first Deacon of the Roman Church, where it stayed until 713. It was carried as part of the portable paraphernalia of the Court of Aragon. In the eleventh century it was in Jaca, in the twelfth century at Juan de la Pena Monastery, in the fourteenth it was taken to Zaragoza by King Martin the Human, and in 1437 it was presented to Valencia Cathedral by Don Juan, the King of Navarre. Most of the churches in Valencia were vandalized or bombed during the Spanish Civil War (euphemistically called “the National Uprising”), but the grail remained intact. It had been taken out and hidden in the village of Carlet, in the mountains southwest of Valencia, so that it would not be smashed.

  It is venerated. It “receives a continuous growing cult … The cup is very ancient work and nothing can be said against the idea that it was utilized by the Lord during the first eucharistic consecration,” J. A. Oñate writes in his definitive book on the subject.

  Oh, well, all of this might be true. But even if it isn’t the Holy Grail, the agate cup is much prettier than the chunks of the True Cross that are displayed all over Italy—enough pieces of the cross, it is said, to rebuild the Italian navy.

  A priest was saying mass in the Holy Grail chapel each time I took my skeptical self to examine it. This continuous mass struck me as being exactly analogous to the plot device in Paul Bowles’s short story “Pastor Dow at Tacaté,” where an American preacher can only attract Indians to his church by playing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” on a wind-up Victrola. As long as the song plays the Indians sit quietly, and when the music stops (and the Indians get up to leave the church) the preacher rushes over and gets the music going again.

  In the same way, godless visitors looking for the cup enter the chapel where a priest is saying mass, and as the Holy Grail is fairly small and far-off, these idly curious people are forced to sit down or kneel. Then, gawking at the Holy Grail, they are trapped by the mass. And there they remain, squinting, listening to the mass and the preaching and the denunciations.

  There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on the same spot.

  The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale youths, and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or churchgoers. Some others held elaborate signs. I am the father of three young children and I have no job.

  Valencia, an old provincial capital on the sea, had a pleasant aura. It was low and gray; it was not busy; it seemed to me happily unfashionable, and though it is Spain’s third-largest city it had an air of friendliness. The central part of Valencia was labyrinthine, dusty, full of shabby shops selling hardware and groceries and cheap clothes. This was Valencia in the winter, a city returned to itself, with no tourists and little traffic; but even in the summer I imagined that the tourists would be at the beach.

  Fishermen headed out of the nearby port of El Grao and netted sardines, farmers grew oranges near the city in the irrigated plain the Spaniards call a huerta. I had a sardine sandwich for lunch, and two oranges. Then I walked in the sunshine to the Torres de Serrano, not to marvel at the antiquity of these towers, but to see the flea market in the same neighborhood. This flea market told sad stories. It was a mass of old and semi-destitute people selling things no one could possibly want—broken eyeglasses, bent coat hangers, old plastic toys, rusted alarm clocks, faded cassette tapes, faucets, battered board games, old magazines, beads, books, and more. It was very grubby stuff. Only the old clothes were moving. Most of the people were browsing and chatting. This was one example of hard-up Spain, but it could not have been typical since nearly all the stuff was worthless.

  A man selling postcards caught my eye and said, “These are valuable.”

  “How much is this one?” It was General Franco.

  “Four hundred pesetas.” Three dollars.

  “Why so much?”

  “That’s El Caudillo in his military uniform. That’s from 1940.”

  Because I wanted to get him on the subject of Franco, I haggled a little, offered him less than he had demanded, and he said okay.

  “Why is it I never see statues of Franco?” I asked, pocketing the picture.

  “Here in Valencia there are none. But you’ll see them in Madrid, and in Barcelona. Plenty in Galicia.”

  “Why aren’t there any here?”
/>   “Politics!” he exploded, and threw up his hands.

  The portrait made Franco look like a Roman emperor, just the sort of image that a man noted for being personally timid would choose. He praised and attempted to flatter the Nazis, who returned the favor by nicknaming Franco “The Dwarf of the Pardo.” Paul Preston in his exhaustive thousand-page biography, Franco, writes, “the hunger for adulation, the icy cruelty and the tongue-tied shyness were all manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy.”

  “Despite fifty years of public prominence and a life lived well into the television age, Francisco Franco remains the least known of the great dictators of the twentieth century.” This is how Preston begins his book. “That is partly because of the smoke screen created by hagiographers and propagandists. In his lifetime he was compared with the Archangel Gabriel, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, Napoleon, and a host of other real and imaginary heroes.”

  Valencia Railway Station was picked out with ceramics of figures and fruit, and prettily painted, with flags stirring and a gold ball and eagle. It had the whimsy and hospitality of the front gate of a fairground. Entering it gave a pleasant feeling of frivolity if not recklessness to any onward train journey.

  The bullring next to the station was huge and well-made, elaborate brickwork, arches and colonnades, not old, but handsome and a bit sinister, like the temple of a violent religion, a place of sacrifice, which was what it was. There were no bullfights that week in the Valencia bullring, but there were plenty on television. Televised bullfights I found to be one of the irritations of eating in cheap restaurants—the way the diners stopped eating when the bull was about to be stabbed, the close attention they gave to the stabbing—a silence in the whole place—and then the action replay, the whole length of the sword running into the bull’s neck, the bull dropping and vomiting blood in slow motion.