(Ordóñez, shameless one. Ordóñez, pays the newspapers.)
The drabness of the Pamplona fights was underscored by the arrival that afternoon of Brewster Cross, an American architect, who during his years of work in Spain had learned to take such fine color photographs of bullfighting that they appeared on the covers of bullfight journals. For the past six years he had been seeing an average of ninety fights a year and during that time had turned down numerous promotions to work in other countries because, as he said, ‘I’ve discovered an ambiente I love and I’d be nuts to lose it so long as I can make a living here.’ He was delayed in coming to Pamplona, he told us, by a bullfight in Madrid. ‘I’ve been waiting through more than two hundred fights to see that one special thing. That afternoon which the Spaniards describe as culminating. Each time you enter the gates you say, “I hope this is going to be it.” But always you’re disappointed. The other day, however, Curro Romero was on the program, and although I’d never seen him in top form, I knew he had the capability. If the right bull came along. On his first bull, nothing. But on his last animal, the greatest single performance in the world of art I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen people like Horowitz and Menuhin. It was the most evocative, the most elegant, the most artistic. When he finished with that noble animal, my palms were wet with tension and Aristotelian catharsis.’
The fights had been bad that afternoon, but there are compensations. After the last bull the mob wandered slowly over to the square to drink beer and consume vast plates of expensive breaded shrimp. A gang of college kids from California, on marijuana and LSD, sprawled at a table served by the debauched waiter, who looked no worse than they, and Orson Welles, very handsome with slightly grayed hair, conducted an interview with Kenneth Tynan for the benefit of television cameras. Matt Carney surveyed the scene with bleary eyes and condemned it all as bad, while a group of Scandinavians, who had skimped to buy their tickets for the disastrous fight, sat glumly in a land from which the sun had vanished.
But by ten-thirty all had changed. From the public square a rocket ripped into the night air and exploded with a huge bang to initiate a half-hour of fireworks which festooned the sky with fiery banners. This night they were under the supervision of Pirotecnica Vicente Caballer of Valencia, the Vatican of fireworks, so they were bound to be good. There were colored rockets and noisy ones and flowered ones, and at the end two powerful shots which signified that the display was over.
Now it was midnight again, and from the Coralles de Gas six more dark shapes emerged to run quietly across the bridge and up the hill to the temporary corrals, from which they would erupt next morning at seven to chase brave young men through the streets.
If I have not spoken in this account of orderly sleeping and eating it is because one does not worry much about such matters during San Fermín. The most gracious thing you can do for someone you meet in the plaza is to say, ‘I have a bath at my place. You look as if you need one. Come along.’ The invitee has been sleeping in a bank lobby for six nights and needs a wash. As for food, it is available if you can elbow your way to the counter.
The true heroes of San Fermín are not those who run with the bulls, nor the amateurs who dodge with the heifers, nor even the matadors who do the fighting, but the police of the city. With an unruly mob of many thousands on their hands, and most of them young people of high spirit from foreign lands, the quiet police steel themselves to show courtesy, tact, humor and a benevolent indulgence. To do so is not easy, for a young man who has just run before six Miura bulls is not apt to be frightened by a policeman, but at five o’clock one morning as I sat in the square I witnessed the following incidents, none of which unnerved the two stolid policemen who were keeping order. A sports car flying the flag of the American Confederacy roared past with two buglers playing their mangled version of the rebel yell. Three Swedish girls, who had slept in the streets, were playfully molested from four sides, to their delight. An impromptu band of six instruments played three different pieces of music, accompanied by revelers dancing in the streets and over the tables. An Englishman insulted two Spaniards, who quickly took care of him, but his place was taken by a Chinese student who came out flailing karate chops and elbow jabs; him the two policemen watched admiringly. Two drunken newspaper vendors sat in the middle of the street assuring each other in brotherhood, ‘I’ll sell your papers and you sell mine.’ A French car banged through the square sideswiping two parked cars at different corners, then steamed off at top speed.
The imperturbable police did nothing, but what I didn’t know until later was that at two that morning, when things had quietened down a bit, these same policemen had walked slowly through the sidewalk bars and had arbitrarily arrested the six or seven worst-looking hell-raisers, and these we would not see again for some days.
During San Fermín the government distributes thousands of copies of a pamphlet in Spanish, French and English warning against unacceptable behavior: ‘Any act uncivil or offensive to common decency, such as a lack of respect to women, will be severely punished. All behavior that offends the moral sensibility of the people will be absolutely repressed.’ This high-sounding dictum is enforced in a curious way. A French girl in our group nearly fainted when a Spanish man ran his hand so far inside her dress that he reached her navel. The police smiled. An English girl was astounded when another Spaniard slipped his hand deep inside her sweater. The police laughed. But at the bullring, when a deluge interrupted the fight one day, a Swedish boy happened to take off his shirt to wring it out, and the same policeman grabbed him, roughed him up and hauled him off to jail on grounds that his behavior had ‘offended the moral sensibility of the public.’
I wander back to my hotel to read briefly in Pedrell’s collection of old songs and to think how inappropriate to Pamplona is the famous one attributed to Juan del Encina (1469–1529). It is a mournful chant dating from around 1505 and probably referring to some royal death, perhaps that of Felipe I in 1506. In recent years certain pessimists have proposed it as an appropriate lament for the passing of Spain’s age of greatness:
Sad and hapless Spain,
all should weep for thee,
bereft of joy
now and forevermore.
I have never felt that Spain deserved such a lament; her Golden Age vanished, to be sure, but there are many signs that she is capable of creating another, on altered terms. There is an enormous natural vitality in this country which, properly channeled, could produce a new age of literature, art, philosophy and even government.
Certainly the national sadness referred to in the chant is nowhere evident during San Fermín, so I turn, to another of Pedrell’s recoveries, a song which probably could not be sung publicly in Spain today. It is numbered 79 and the words were written about 1555 by some unknown poet and set to music by an irreverent troubadour named Juan Navarro (fl. 1540–1565) of Sevilla. Pedrell entitled it ‘The Nun’s Song’ and in it are reflected the anti-religious feelings which are always cropping up in Spain at unexpected places:
Alas for hapless me!
What a hard life within these walls!
What a close jail these bars make,
Annoying, gloomy prison!
Cruel convent, vexatious, avaricious, scornful:
Would that I might see you burning in bright flame.
Oh, what a harsh rule,
Dismal and irksome choir!
Why should one have beauty and grace
If they cannot be seen or enjoyed?
Life without hope!
What a great injustice, what fate so hard,
that only death should free us!
San Fermín provides a constant kaleidoscope of visual imagery. The parades vary; papier-mâché giants fifteen feet tall wander through the streets; sometimes additional bullfights are offered at eleven in the morning; and on Thursday morning the bullring is occupied by a weird exhibition of Basque sports featuring two events that defy reason. In the first, four huge men in rope sandals, wh
ite trousers and T-shirts march forth, each bearing two long-handled axes whose heads are protected by leather sheaths. The men divide into teams of two each and stand at attention before the wood they must chop: two rows of logs laid out on the ground, each row consisting of eight logs about eighteen inches in diameter
Referee and timers appear and the contestants untie the leather sheaths; then you see how carefully the cutting edges have been honed. A whistle blows, and the lesser man on each team leaps onto the first log of his row and begins cutting a wide V into it, sending the chips flying as he swings the ax with fierce energy against the wood. When he has the V well defined and about half cut, he leaps down and his more skilled partner takes over, swinging with even greater force, and he completes the V half-way through the log, which is rather difficult, for as the cut grows deeper, wood grips the ax and lets go only when the man gives a powerful upward jerk.
At this point the first man takes over and starts the V on the opposite side, and when it is half cut, the second man jumps onto the log and hammers home a series of tremendous cuts until the log falls in two. Now the first man starts on the next log, and for some twenty minutes the two men alternate in chopping their way through the eight big logs, and remember that since they are standing on the log, to chop it they must bend forward so that the ax strikes below their feet, putting a severe strain on the stomach.
I was relieved when the leading team finally chopped its eighth log in two, for my stomach was hurting in sympathy, but to my surprise the two men ran from the row they had been chopping and across to those which their opponents had been cutting. It became apparent that both teams would chop through all sixteen logs with a combined thickness of at least twenty-four feet. Without pausing in the broiling sun, the superbly muscled men continued this extraordinary feat for some forty minutes and finished less than a minute apart. I could understand how the Basque in the bar had given Matt Carney the black eye.
What followed was for me even more memorable. Two Basque shepherds brought into the arena rams from the Pyrenees and allowed them to smell one another, whereupon the animals, each aware that a rival had come into its terrain, quietly withdrew to a distance of about twenty feet, dug their feet in and leaped forward, butting heads in the middle of the ring with shattering force. I expected them to have broken necks, but instead each blinked his eyes, shook himself and went back to his starting position, from which he leaped forward again, striking his opponent with unbelievable force, forehead to forehead. You could hear the impact a hundred yards away.
Colonel Tom Nickalls, father of Oliver and one of England’s top experts on horses, at the bullring in Pamplona.
This continued, methodically but with deadly intent, for some twenty or thirty butts until you would think the horns must drop off. Occasionally one would feint cleverly and the other would fly over his head, to receive a sharp butt from below as he went past, but usually the two beasts met head-on, and the blows became sharper as the fight continued. What surprised me was that when at the start of a round the two rams considered themselves too close for maximum effect, they would back off so that the blows would be more shattering.
Finally the judge declared the contest a draw, and I asked a Basque sitting next to me what would have happened otherwise, and he said, ‘They’d go right on till sundown. Or till one of them is killed.’
In view of the richness provided by San Fermín it seems captious to say that I arranged three excursions into the countryside, but there were places as important to me as Pamplona, so one morning, after no sleep, Vavra and Fulton and I set out for the little Basque town of Azpeitia, where I wished to pay my respects to a Basque who had played a significant role in history, Don Iñigo López de Recalde. The journey to Azpeitia was a delightful jaunt through the countryside of Navarra and Guipúzcoa. North of Irurzun we slipped through the Pass of the Two Sisters, a defile that reminded me much of the Iron Gates on the Danube but even more of the Cilician Gates in southern Turkey. From its northern exit it threw us into a fine hill country with alternate views across deep valleys and shrouds of fog which slowed us down to less than a walk. Finally, descending from a high plateau, we came upon Azpeitia, and it was exactly as I had imagined: a trivial place of no consequence, with an ordinary village church that one would not remember long and townspeople who greeted any stranger in French, for they stood close to the French border.
I got out of the car and started to walk to the small church, when a blacksmith at his forge, now converted into a garage, said, ‘It’s not here that you pay your respects but up the road a little farther.’ I had expected little in the town to remind me of Don Iñigo and I found little, so I was willing to proceed in the direction the blacksmith had indicated, and after driving for a mile or two I received one of my major shocks in Spain.
For we came not to some small church memorializing a great man, but to a vast establishment centering upon a huge eighteenth-century basilica built of the finest marble. This was the memorial to Don Iñigo, better known as St. Ignatius of Loyola, the man who founded the Society of Jesus. His army was given Papal approval by Paul III on September 27, 1540, and the powerful work of the order stems from that date.
Before the basilica we found more than a hundred autobuses from all parts of Europe, for unexpectedly we had stumbled into a jubilee celebration of the order, and when we entered the basilica we found prostrate on the floor twenty-five young Jesuits about to be ordained as priests. Faces to the stone, dressed in white and gold, the candidates lay with their arms and heads covered by squares of gold cloth while a cardinal intoned a lengthy prayer over them while standing before a magnificent altar set among entwined Solomonic columns of gray-brown stone heavily ornamented in black and white and highly polished. Above the prostrate figures rose a statue of Ignatius Loyola, the young roustabout from Azpeitia who in 1521 at the age of thirty, while fighting for the king at Pamplona, had been severely wounded in the leg. During his convalescence, in a house that now stands encased as a shrine within the heart of the basilica, the young hellion had undergone conversion, and his years of travel and study had ensued, including a stay at Salamanca and a perilous brush with the Inquisition, which almost nipped his career at the start. He had persevered in his new-found devotion and had inspired others, Italians and Germans mostly, to an equal commitment, and with them had founded the order which was to shore up the Church at a time when it was beset by enemies from within and without. If Martin Luther was the scourge of the Catholic Church, then St. Ignatius was the scourge of Lutherans, and it was his movement in defense of Catholicism that helped establish a balance in Europe. He is my favorite Spanish saint, for I find Santo Domingo, founder of the Dominican order, too bloodthirsty for my liking—I cannot forget his persecution of the Albigenses—and Santa Teresa too nebulous. But Ignatius, the stubborn, worldly Basque who came to God late and then with such fury—him I can understand and him I regard with personal identification.
The history of the Jesuit Order in Spain has rarely been peaceful, but the lead in repressing the movement has usually come from neighboring countries. In 1759 Portugal decided that it must expel the Jesuits from both the mother country and the colonies. In 1764 France reached the same conclusion. So in 1767 King Carlos III of Spain announced the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and the New World alike, but later they crept back. In 1835, with the inauguration of reforms in government, they were expelled again, but again they returned; and in 1932, with the launching of the republic, they were ousted once more, but with Generalísimo Franco they reappeared. The loss involved in these expulsions was Spain’s, for even though the Jesuits might be difficult to manage, it was they who were mainly responsible for what education Spain offered, and they were usually expelled at the precise time when the nation needed the international insights which they offered.
Now, as the twenty-five young Jesuits lie prostrate, the order seems secure in Spain, and as the priest prays he uses appropriately the Basque tongue:
&nb
sp; ‘Ogi zerutik etorria
zu zera gure poz guztia
Bildots santua ara emen …
From the basilica of Loyola, whose magnificence had astonished us, we pushed on to Santillana del Mar, site of the Caves of Altamira, where in 1869 the world’s first concentration of prehistoric art was discovered by accident. When first I heard John Fulton’s reasons for wanting to visit Altamira, I must confess I could not express much enthusiasm for what he had in mind. He said, ‘I want to see how cave men drew their bulls and how they colored them, because I have in mind to publish a book with a series of bull pictures done as these early men did them.’
‘On rock?’ I asked.
‘No. With bull’s blood and a mixture of oil and ochre.’
I said to myself, ‘If that’s what a young man wants to do, why should I argue?’
For more than a thousand years before that day in 1869 when the Caves of Altamira were discovered as a major glory of western art, the small town of Santillana had been well regarded as an exceptionally fine village. Here three or four country lanes intersect and each is lined with rare old houses and churches that date back at least to the year 870. In Santillana it was a custom for proud families to emblazon their homes with heraldic shields, so that today the town could well be set aside as a museum showing what happens when everyone tries ‘to keep up with the Barredas,’ for one house is finer than the next and this family shield larger than that, until finally the Villa family offers an escutcheon so tremendously big that the human figures on it are known locally as giants. The guidebook warns: ‘This shield is so close to the spectator that the effect is perhaps a little pompous.’ On the other hand, the Collegiate church is an unpretentious gem of Romanesque architecture, and even the emblazoned houses have an unusual charm in that their ground floors are given over to the stabling of cattle, whose aromas permeate the village, making it doubly attractive and homelike.