Iberia

  However, when Carlos ascended the throne, the Christian hierarchy of Córdoba saw a chance to do something they had long wanted to do but which Fernando and Isabel, sensitive to the Moorish architecture of the south, would never have permitted. They wanted to erect across the inconspicuous nave a transept, which when properly covered and cut off from the rest of the mosque, would constitute a proper cathedral. They therefore petitioned Carlos for permission to do this, and he, knowing nothing of the problem for he did not appreciate the south, carelessly granted it. Speedily Christian stonemasons went to work and built, right in the heart of the mosque, their monstrous structure. When Carlos finally visited Córdoba in 1526 and saw what had been done under his aegis he was ashamed, saying, ‘If I had known what you were up to, you would not have done it. For what you have made here may be found in many other places, but what you have destroyed is to be found nowhere else in the world.’

  I do not share the emperor’s lament. As my own experience proved, one can visit the mosque without at first being aware that the gigantic church is there. It certainly did not spoil my visits, and while I know that without the cathedral I would have seen vistas that must have been profound, I could still see so far along the outer walls that my eye got lost in the arches. That the Christians had a right to use the mosque as a cathedral, there can be no question; that they found it necessary to build a transept, and such a gross one, is regrettable.

  Islamic tracery.

  I spent many hours inside the church, for I found the choir a comfortable place to rest. I grew to like the intricate vaulting, and particularly the pink marble ox that held up the black pulpit; his carved entrails had burst loose in conformity to the local legend, which said that the Córdoban ox which bore the pillars for constructing the cathedral burst his insides with joy to think that the building was once more to be a church. The white eagle that served as a lectern also attracted my attention and I did much of my reading in its shadow. I rather liked the idea that what had once been a pagan temple of the Romans, then a Christian church of the Visigoths, next a mosque of the Muslims, was now a church for Catholics; it was proper and in the order of things, but in spite of the hours I spent there reading and thinking, I never felt it to be a consecrated place. It was more like an ornate museum, as if the contamination of having been a mosque had not been properly cleansed. This feeling did not arise from the fact that the cathedral was an ugly building, for in a sense that was appropriate; much of what Christians introduced when they expelled the Muslims was uglier than what it replaced, but on balance the change was inescapable; it was necessary for the development of Spain.

  I was less generous in my judgment of the endless chain of second-rate chapels that usurp the outer walls of the mosque; once these walls had stood open so that worshipers might enter the mosque from any direction, and then when one was inside he looked through this maze of columns out to the free sky of Andalucia, and the impact must have been tremendous; but since the building was now a cathedral it required chapels, so the once-open walls were bricked shut, and as mournful a bunch of cubicles as I have ever seen was strung along them. How many are there, unused, undusted and unsung? One morning I walked past the locked gates of each one, not slowly, but pausing now and then to look at the moldering statues and the bad painting, and it took me twenty-nine minutes to make the circuit, for there must have been more than fifty. A few had touches of real charm, and I could see that others had historic validity in that they related to important figures in Córdoba’s history, but for the main part they were a dismal, unattended group of structures which came off poorly when compared with the mosque they had helped deface.

  One must be careful not to generalize about this matter, for a distinguished French critic whom we shall meet later in another context points out that it would be fallacious to condemn the Christians for defacing a Muslim master-work, because Muslims had very little to do with the building of this mosque! The design came from the Christian basilica around which the original mosque was built. Most of the marble columns and their capitals were appropriated from existing Christian monuments in Spain or Africa. The workmen who built the mosque were Christians; even the glorious mihrab which I had liked so much was built by Christian workmen loaned to Córdoba by the Christian emperor at Constantinople, who also sent as a gift three hundred and twenty quintals of glass pieces for the mosaics (about thirty-five tons). ‘Accordingly, in this great sanctuary of Islam, the first after that of Mecca, everything, or nearly everything, is Christian: the plan of the edifice, the material employed, and even the workmanship.’

  Much confused, I left the Great Mosque. In many respects it was unsatisfying; its Christian and Muslim halves were uneasy with each other and failed to attain that harmony one finds in Sancta Sophia, There is here a sense of imbalance and restlessness, as if the Muslim component of Spanish life had accepted its role of submission and were trying to escape; or as if the Christian component were not content with its conquest and were endeavoring to suppress even further the Moorish. In such circumstances the Muslim explodes to the surface through weakened fissures. There is in much of Spain this contradiction: it is a Christian country but one with suppressed Muslim influences that crop out of unforeseen points; it is a victorious country that expelled the defeated Muslims from all places except the human heart; it is a land which tried to extirpate all memory of the Muslims but which lived on to mourn their passing; and it is a civilization which believed that it triumphed when it won the last battle but which knows that it lost in fields like poetry, dancing, philosophy, architecture and agriculture. To me Córdoba’s mosque was the most mournful building in Spain, and on the evening after my first visit I went into the old Jewish quarter, where memories of the Moors still linger, to see if I could banish my unease.

  If I had been disappointed by the mosque, I was enchanted by the little courtyards of the Jewish quarter, for I suppose they represent one of the perfect sights that a stranger can come upon in Europe, like the Spanish Steps in Rome or the island museums of Oslo. They are a series of small, informal patios strung out by accident along unimportant back streets, and they number perhaps a hundred. You see them casually through doorways as you walk along, and occasionally one acquires a greater importance than the others because it stands behind formal arches and has had professional attention. Mostly, however, they are family gardens, but unlike any you have seen before.

  By luck, the first one I happened upon as I was looking for the restaurant to which I had been directed by a friend, was one of the best. I saw it through an open doorway, an ordinary patio surrounded on three sides by a low two-story house whose walls were whitewashed. The floor of the patio was paved with pebbles set on end, so that it had a pleasing design. A flight of stairs led to a second-floor balcony, over whose edge hung nineteen potted flowers with tendrils covering the wall of the balcony. The top of the balcony was lined with twenty-seven flowerpots which also dropped flowers in abundance, while the six posts supporting the roof each held three beautiful flowering plants. The two side walls could scarcely be seen. In one corner of the patio stood a well with a masonry rim, whitewashed and containing a dozen larger pots of roses and dahlias, while around the line where the walls met the patio floor scores of pots were ranged, each with some flowering plant. To the right of the entrance a low wall had been erected in previous centuries, perhaps when Jews still occupied the house, and it must originally have been intended for visitors to sit on like a bench, but now it too was crowded with flowerpots, all of whose plants were in bloom. The little patio was thus a theater offering a ballet of color against the stark whiteness of the walls. The flowers danced up and down the stairway, pirouetted across the balcony, around the well, up and down the posts, and in a kind of majestic march moved about the lower walls. How many separate plants were there? Well over a hundred, I suppose. How many colors? More than I could count. How many different kind of flowers? I’m not good at identifying them, but there were at least a dozen. br />
  There was one patio which quite captivated me, for I had not heard of such a way of using flowers. In a whitewashed area of rough walls and arcades, some sixty flowerpots were hung from wire loops, and all were painted Muslim blue. This is a dark blue often seen in the Middle East, where it is popular as a charm guaranteed to keep away evil spirits; on the road from Tel Aviv to Haifa, in the heart of Israel, there is an Arab village named Faradis (Paradise) that used to be painted blue. In Córdoba the concentration of blue pots against white walls was most charming, and when varied flowers crept down from the pots to hang in a hundred festoons, the effect was unlike anything I had seen before.

  These two patios were in no way exceptional; I must have seen about sixty that evening as I wandered down the street of the Good Shepherd in the general direction of the Maimonides statue, but finally I found my restaurant and much to my satisfaction saw that a flamenco concert was scheduled for that night. I had dinner in a delightful room which duplicated something of the charm of the patios, and while waiting for the program to begin I wondered whether the spectacular display of flowers I had seen was an inheritance from the Moors, who were reported to have been excellent gardeners. I suppose I could have found comparable gardens elsewhere in Spain, but as a matter of record I didn’t, so I concluded that these Córdoban patios were a Moorish carry-over.

  About flamenco there is much debate. The easy explanation of this unique art form, which combines guitar playing, singing, chanting, dancing and staccato handclapping, is that it is a very old inheritance from Moorish days, in which the distinctive wail is an echo of the muezzin’s cry with Jewish overtones; but if, as some think, it was derived from gypsy patterns imported from Asia rather than from Africa, it must be a fairly recent importation, for the gypsies did not reach Spain till 1435. We know that the name dates only from 1520, when the Flemish courtiers of Carlos V burst on the drab Spanish scene with slashed doublets showing flashes of brilliant color and gave their name to anything conspicuous or garish, like the flamingo bird and the flamenco dance.

  I had been introduced to flamenco under appropriate conditions in that café in Valencia, because there I heard some first-class guitar playing and that important flamenco song ‘Petenera.’ In intervening years I had bought most of the good flamenco records reaching America, but they were not many, for much junk was then purveyed as flamenco, a custom which has not been broken. In Mexico I attended several flamenco parties, and they were awful, though the versions offered in New York were worse. The fact was that after that first superb evening I had heard no acceptable flamenco and it was gratifying to find myself now in the heart of the flamenco country, where I could catch up.

  The room in which the dance was to be held could hardly have been more suitable, a cellar-type place with old iron-studded doors, a beamed ceiling, intricate trellises up which vines crept, and what looked like authentic Roman pillars except that they were topped by rude, country-style capitals that seemed just right for this room. The furniture was rough, and as the people near me talked I was pleased to find that the room had a fine resonance, for the brick walls absorbed sound. It promised to be an exciting evening.

  Then the troupe appeared, five people dressed a little too finely for the work at hand. The three men (guitarist, singer, dancer) wore suits that were too professional in their tightness and cut. The two girl dancers wore dresses strongly modified by French ideas and their heels were of an exaggerated height. What was most disturbing, the girls were too young and too beautiful; when this is the case the dancer is tempted to say, ‘Look at me, how lovely I am,’ and not to do much honest dancing. The sleazy guitarist struck a few dramatic chords, ran a series of notes and went into the kind of sequence burlesque orchestras use to announce the impending appearance of their chief stripper. One of the girls rushed forth, assumed a fatalistic pose, stamped her feet a couple of times and grunted, ‘¡Ole!’ I thought, Oh boy! All the duende of a boiler factory.

  What a horrible evening it was. I had been trapped in a tourist show of the worst sort: the dancing was strictly Hollywood, with much heel banging and head gesture; the guitarist was nimble rather than profound and his playing tended toward the staccato chord; the singing done by the pomaded man in the tight suit was closer to the Beatles than to either Moors or gypsies. All this I could have borne, but the girls were arch and danced so as to display their legs up to their navels and one even wore a rose between her teeth; when I thought I had seen the worst, and that can be pretty bad, for in this country when taste abdicates, the results are unpredictable, the girls called onto the stage two German sailors, wrapped mantones (shawls) about the bottoms of the two men and proceeded to burlesque one of the few authentic entertainments Spain has to offer its guests. It was shocking, as vulgar as the scenes in Hawaiian night clubs when hula girls lure men onstage to make asses of themselves. The two Germans were good sports and one had a bawdy sense of humor: he grabbed at the skirts of the flamenco girls; they stumbled and he fell on his face. The audience roared approval and the guitarist played a version of ‘Anchors Aweigh.’

  The performance was so dismal that all I could do was sit there and recall the jokes I’d seen on television about flamenco. A dancer does the foot-stamping bit and the comedian says, ‘He’s mad at the floor.’ The dancer looks back over his shoulder: ‘He’s very proud of his bottom. Wants to be sure it’s still there.’ The dancer looks under his left shoulder: ‘He wants to see if he needs a deodorant.’ The dancer stamps again: ‘He wants the janitor to send up more heat.’ It was on that level.

  When the miserable night was over I walked back to the Maimonides statue and in that peaceful place contemplated the mockery that Spain was making of certain of its treasures, simply to collect a few tourist kroner or francs. I was in a rather bitter mood, when the musicians from the show came out and one asked me, ‘How did you like it?’ I did not know enough Spanish to tell him, so I said, ‘I had rather hoped to hear something like a peternera.’ The men stopped, for it was obvious that the name of the song was a rebuke. The guitar which they had abused grew heavy and the pomaded heads became ridiculous. ‘Qué lástima! (What a pity!)’ the guitarist said. ‘Here we get few people who know peteneras.’

  Spain runs a considerable risk of cheapening the very things that have made her attractive to tourists. She has enjoyed an enviable reputation in reports of men like Mérimée, Havelock Ellis, Somerset Maugham, Henry de Montherlant and the others who have been captivated by an authentic Spanish culture displayed with fierce honesty. If this culture is to be made a mockery of, and by Spain itself, then there will be little reason for anyone of good taste to bother with it. I cannot believe that the notable visitors of the past, men like George Borrow, Richard Ford, Sacheverell Sitwell and especially the keen French and German travelers, would have tolerated a scene like the one that was forced on me in the Córdoba restaurant; and had they been required, as I was, to sit through it they could have described it later only in words of scorn. It was cheap, and vulgar, and an insult to the visitor; but even worse, it was an abuse of the cultural heritage and it was this more than my own deprivation which infuriated me.

  I am not going to bore the reader, city by city, with an account of my attempts to see in Spain a good flamenco; in each place I was abused about as badly as I was in Córdoba. It was all junk, save for a few nights when I happened upon a near-blind old man whose voice was gone but who had the pundonor of his trade and the gracia to communicate it to others. If on some subsequent trip to Spain I were to be told of a bar where one could occasionally hear real flamenco, I would travel a considerable distance to hear it; but if, as I suppose, it has all been corrupted by the quick tourist dollar, and if enough of the rest of Spanish culture goes the same way, I would be better off turning flamenco and Spain over to others, for it would no longer have much to say to me.

  As for Córdoba the city, my days there were delightful. I had nothing much to do and spent long hours lounging in the sun at one outdoor
bar or another in the Plaza José Antonio. Occasionally I would wander over to talk with old Bishop Hosius, but for the most part I rested and caught up with a lot of reading I wanted to do in the field of the Spanish novel.

  My stay was made extra pleasant by the fact that I had a room in the local parador, which stands some miles out in the country on a fine hillside from which I could overlook the Guadalquivir as if I were a caliph at Medînat az-Zahrâ, which lay not far away on roughly the same spur of hills. For some reason which no one explained in advance, this parador has developed the best restaurant in Spain, better, I thought, than even the ultra-posh ones in Madrid because its cuisine was more honest, and people traveled long distances to dine here. The menu was not exceptional in its variety, but each dish was properly prepared. For example, I would not have expected to find in Córdoba the best sole à la Colbert I have ever tasted, but there it was, delicately flavored with butter and crisp along the edges.