Fourteen different conductors from nine different nations, using singers from all parts of the world including Russia and Japan, were presenting twenty-one different operas from eight different nations, including Russia and Belgium. What impressed me most was the fact that in the twenty-one operas only nine war-horses like Aïda and Tannhäuser appeared, but eight that I never had a chance to hear, like the German Zar und Zimmermann by G. A. Lortzing: the French La Carrosse du Saint Sacrement of H. Busser; the Portuguese Serrana by A. Keil; and the Mexican La Mulata de Córdoba of J. P. Moncayo. The charge of provincialism that can justly be made against Spanish music in general certainly does not apply to Barcelona opera, because a season’s attendance at the Liceo would give one a wider purview of what was happening in this genre than a season in New York or London.
I was advised that this catholic taste, like so much that was commendable in Cataluña’s cultural life, stemmed from the French influence of which Dr. Poal had spoken. A man at the opera told me, ‘We have a mania for knowing what’s happening in the world. We read. We have a constant fear of sinking into the intellectual lethargy you find in … well … Andalucía. No norteamericano loves his English heritage the way a Catalan loves his French. If I thought I would never again read a French book or hear an opera in French, I think I would wither.’
A man who was listening added, ‘We’re not French, you understand. We’re Catalans. We don’t want a separate state and a seat in the United Nations. The world should be moving toward larger units, not smaller. And since we have to be a part of something, it’s best to be a part of Spain. But we are not Spaniards, we are Catalans, and in the future this fact will be stressed. We want our own language, and our newspapers, and our university. We were on our way to having these things when Civil War overtook us in 1936. Everything was lost … lost. How tragic it was. That damned war. Now we must begin over again, slowly. But we will be Cataluña. We will be Catalans.’
I asked numerous residents of the city, ‘Do you consider yourself a Catalan?’
‘What else? Did you happen to attend that great performance of Haydn’s The Seasons at the Palau de la Müsica? Notice how the soloists imported from England and Germany sang in German. But the choir, God bless it. sang only in Catalan.’
These attitudes naturally arouse in the rest of Spain a suspicion against Barcelona. Time and again in other parts of Spain intelligent Castilians or Andalusians queried me as to what I thought of Barcelona, and when I said, ‘I’ve never been there,’ they frowned and said, ‘It’s a shame you’re saving it for last. It could have an injurious effect.’
Marisol.
Between Madrid and Barcelona there is open war. Forty years ago the latter city was the industrial leader, with its access to the Mediterranean and its superior contacts with Europe; the intellectual center too, the progressive, clean, handsome, well-educated city, and as such it constituted a kind of affront to the rest of the country. Barcelona was both envied and ridiculed; often I heard the statement, ‘Who would want to be a Catalan? All business and no soul. There’s not a man up there who comprehends pundonor.’
In recent decades, of course, with the central government concentrating in Madrid and with Barcelona suspect because of its anti-Franco role in the war, there has been a concerted effort to draw major industry to Madrid, and it has succeeded. Madrid is now the larger city in population and much the more important industrially. An Englishman connected with the business of distributing films explains what’s been happening: ‘As you know, the film industry has always centered in Barcelona. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, J. Arthur Rank, Warner Brothers … all have their offices here. For good reasons. In Barcelona you have linguists, typists, people trained in business. I judge it’s three to five times easier to conduct business here than in Madrid. But starting about 1950 a quiet pressure has been applied on all us Johnnies, “Move to Madrid. Move to Madrid.” And I wouldn’t be surprised to see us frozen out of here before much longer.
‘It works this way. You require a piece of paper signed. “Bring it to Madrid and we’ll handle it for you in ten minutes.” So you fly to Madrid, because if you don’t, you get no signature. You want to talk about quotas. “Fly to Madrid.” You’re interested in a peseta deal. “Fly to Madrid.” After four years of this you get the message. We’ll all have to fly to Madrid, but where we’ll find the trained personnel no one can say.’
There used to be newspapers in Catalan, but after the war they were forbidden. Once church sermons were in Catalan, but they too were forbidden. Catalan resistance was formidable: ‘After the war they installed a Madrileño as editor of our best newspaper. La Vanguardia. To police us, and he was a true swine. One morning he happened to be in an out-of-the-way parish church when the priest, feeling himself secure, gave his sermon in Catalan. After mass the editor grabbed the priest and said things like “You dog. You’ve been warned not to use Catalan. I’m going to report you to the police.” An old woman happened to overhear the threats, which were much worse than I’ve said, and she alerted the city. By nightfall almost every major business had canceled its advertising in Vanguardia. And kept it canceled. Well, planeloads of people flew up here from Madrid, and one general kept shouting, “We’ll knock the city down.” Enormous pressure was brought on us to reinstate our advertising, but our leaders were clever. They never mentioned Cataluña or the real problem. They simply said, “How can we advertise with a man who abuses a priest?” In the end the government had to give in. The editor was removed. Word swept through the city, “He’s being replaced by a man who respects priests.” And we were very happy.’
Today Barcelona once more has a Catalan newspaper, but it is watched closely by the police. I was in one printing plant when officers from the Guardia Civil swept in, confiscated the entire printing of a calendar and burned it. The proprietor sequestered two copies, which he let me see. At first glance it was innocuous enough, printed in Spanish as such things had to be. But at the bottom of each month appeared in fine print a list of events under the heading Never forget these days. I was not allowed to take the calendar or to copy the dates that had made it illegal, but I recall them as something like this: ‘On this date Comte Ramón Berenguer el Gran betrayed Catalan hopes. On this date Spanish armies burned Barcelona. On this date brave Catalans defied the forces of King Felipe IV.’ On and on went the litany of hopes seduced and infamy rampant; for each month the Catalans had six or seven evil events to remember, and I suppose the official who gave orders to the guardia was prudent in deciding to burn this calendar, for it was inflammatory.
At the same time that I was being inducted into the arcane mysteries of Catalan nationalism, I was walking through the museum quarters of the city and I cannot recall a more pleasant experience. Margarita Tintó, a tall and beautiful archaeologist, led me through the amazing subterranean museum that lies under the Gothic quarter, showing me the columns and viaducts of the Roman city, the remnants of Visigothic times and a few fragile relics of Muslim rule. At one point, as we climbed across a viaduct many feet below the surface, Señorita Tintó said, ‘We are now under the nave of the cathedral. See where its roots begin.’ I commend this unusual museum, for in no other have I ever been taken into the bowels of a living city in order to witness its birth.
More spectacular is that unparalleled collection of buildings called El Pueblo Español, where behind a stone-for-stone replica of the entrance gate to Avila hides a complete village which could house about eight hundred people. It was erected in 1929 as merely One feature of an international exhibition, but it proved so popular that it was converted to permanent status and is now one of the most enchanting museums in the world. It contains eighty-one major buildings, each faithfully copied from some famous original and so distributed that all regions of Spain are adequately covered. This attractive little house comes from Toro, where King Fernando V offered to duel King Alfonso of Portugal. Every stone in the copy is faithful to the original. These three handsome old houses have been
copied from Teruel; this one reproduces a family shield we saw in Santillana del Mar. In addition to the houses, which are strung out along streets duplicating real streets in the various provinces, there is a plaza mayor where concerts are given in summer, half a dozen smaller plazas modeled after real ones, a cathedral and a full-sized monastery with a cloister. There are about eight major streets, and to see everything would require the better part of a day, but for one who has visited most of Spain, a tour through this village is an architectural treat, for at every corner he sees some famous house that he visited a month ago. For the person just beginning his tour of Spain, I could imagine no better introduction to the quality of small-town building than this; the village is a synthesis of all that is most typical in Spain.
It is difficult to describe how tastefully this has been done, or indeed how it was done at all. The village is now nearly forty years old, but it remains clean and fresh. It has deteriorated in no way and looks stable enough to weather another twoscore years. Obviously the eighty-one buildings are merely false fronts, just deep enough to permit a chain of attractive shops to function inside; here one can see the old arts of Spain performed by experts: glass blowing, printing, weaving, candy making. What perplexed me was how the buildings had been put together. Let’s begin with this flight of stone stairs duplicating those before the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. They are real stones on which hundreds of thousands of people have walked, and that wooden balcony over there on the house from Oviedo is real wood upon which people can stand. The cut stones in this arch are also real and have been quarried on the site from which the originals were cut, but imperceptibly the real merges into the unreal, because this wall is clearly stucco only a few inches thick but skillfully etched to represent stone. A builder could spend a profitable morning trying to detect the real and the unreal; I was not able to.
I visited eighteen major museums in Barcelona and the only second-rate one was the newly opened Picasso museum. In appearance, of course, even it was excellent, for it occupied one of the city’s old private palaces, which had been remodeled in exquisite taste. Also excellent were the interesting materials on the life of Picasso, which could not, I suppose, be duplicated elsewhere, and these too were well arranged. For example, I here learned for the first time that one of Picasso’s chief works, the enigmatic ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, got its name not from the papal city of Avignon in France but from a well-known Barcelona house of prostitution bearing that name.
What was depressing about the museum was that it had so few paintings by Picasso! The spacious walls were covered mostly by lithographs which any private collector could duplicate for a few thousand dollars, a few etchings, a couple of drawings and a handful of paintings, rarely of top quality. I can think of fifteen American cities that could throw together an infinitely better exhibition of Picasso’s work by showing only those paintings owned by collectors in the city. Picasso is a Spaniard, but Spaniards have never collected his work.
In a mournful way the museum exemplified the intellectual tragedy of contemporary Spain. Her foremost talents have either been destroyed, like Garcia Lorca, or muffled, like Pío Baroja, or they have turned their backs on Spain, like Picasso; Jiménez, the Nobel Prize poet; and Pau (Pablo) Casals, the cellist. To me it is beyond explanation that an event of such magnitude as the Civil War should have produced no artistic synthesis. In Germany, Russia, England and Italy there has been such synthesis, but Spain has stifled hers, both in the field of plastic arts, where a new Goya should have arisen to depict the contemporary horrors of war, and in the drama and novel, where works like those of Günter Grass and Alberto Moravia could easily have been evoked. I can think of no nation of modern times, except Turkey, which has experienced such traumatic shock without its artists’ having reacted to it in works of grandeur. This is the severest criticism one can make of the dictatorship and the most pertinent: it has forbidden the artistic statement and has therefore crushed it, for the authentic statement once stifled cannot later be revived.
There is, however, a commendable attempt to catch up now, and the Picasso museum is an example, for Spain is desperately eager to reclaim this man as her son. In one year I must have read fifty articles about Picasso the Spaniard: one referred to him as the jovial Málaga painter. On his eightieth birthday sincere felicitations were extended, and if the Picasso museum in Barcelona is not much good, it is certainly crowded with young people hungry to know what kind of man this fellow Spaniard was. There is also a chance that the Gironella novels may pave the way for an honest evaluation of recent Spanish history, but I doubt it. A professor said, ‘It is one thing for Picasso to be brave in the safety of Paris. Hell, you complain about Spaniards having no Picassos. During most of the last twenty-five years I’d have been arrested as a suspicious character if I owned one … even supposing I could afford it. But for a writer, who has got to live in Spain, to write the way you’re talking about … that would be suicide … now and for the next twenty-five years. We are a state that is determined to live without ideas.’ In fact, twice during my stay in Barcelona I was supposed to meet with professors who were described to me as ‘cautious men, middle of the road, but with profound ideas concerning the future of Spain.’ In each instance the interview had to be called off because gangs of bullyboys established for the purpose of terrorizing intellectuals had waited outside lecture halls and had beaten the professors unconscious. Their crime? They had dared to discuss serious questions seriously.
This dualism, this seeking on the one hand for French enlightenment and the crushing of it on the other, explains the following letter:
Since you left Barcelona I feel very old and defeated, but also very young and hopeful. The cause of the first is Marisol. Of the second, Gironella. Marisol has announced that she’s going to get married! I had thought she was about fourteen but she’s in her twenties and it all seems dreadfully wrong and I seem very ancient. But your friend Gironella has given us much courage by daring to discuss openly in the paper the deficiencies of the new constitution we’ve been promised. You would have been thrilled by his clear-cut, honest statement:
In my opinion Spain has had for many years two basic problems. One, that of progressive democratization; the other, that of what’s going to happen when a vacancy occurs in the Chief of State’s office.
I do not believe that the Ley Orgánica [Organic Law] approved with such bewildering speed by the Cortes solves either of these two problems.
Gironella continued with a lucid analysis of what the law should have done … The kinds of things you and I talked about so much and he had the extreme guts to end:
In consequence, then, the new Ley Orgánica appears to me a movement of hope but not a solution.
Occasionally my inquiries into the intellectual life of Barcelona bore unexpected results, as when friends took us to see the old monastery of San Cugat del Vallés, lying some distance from Barcelona in a country region. It was there that I saw one of those plain and powerful Romanesque churches which will play so important a role in the final chapter of this book, and as I was admiring its solid simplicity, my guide said, ‘While we’re here, let’s have lunch at El Rectoret,’ which was easier suggested than accomplished, because we drove for some time about the countryside without finding it. Finally a shepherd told us which turns to take and we came upon a dilapidated farmhouse standing completely alone. Only an optimist would have believed that within those flaked and weather-beaten walls he would find food.
In a sense, we didn’t. What we found was an adventure in family living in which food was incidental. That it was some of the best food in Spain was beside the point, for El Rectoret could have been called ‘Cataluña at Table.’ It consisted of eight or nine farm rooms, as beat up as the exterior, jammed with simple tables and chairs. I was invited to inspect the fifteenth-century kitchen, where I stayed for more than half an hour, watching a unique operation. El Rectoret serves only four dishes:
sausage, chicken, lamb chops and rabbit, with the last selling about as much as the other three combined. With whatever meat you choose you also get a raw salad, a pitcher of marvelous sangría and a terrifying dessert called for some inexplicable reason ‘a pijama,’ that is, a large soup plate lined with mixed fruit in heavy syrup around a center of flan, the whole smothered in gobs of vanilla ice cream. Salad, rabbit, sangría, pijama! The farm tables were crowded with hundreds of stalwart Catalans, stubborn rocklike people with a passion for good food and music.
The kitchen was a madhouse of open grills, smoking charcoal and sizzling meat. About sixty cooks and waiters moved in and out, all relatives of one huge family. The grandmother checked salads to be sure they contained onions. One aunt did nothing all day long but cut the tops off huge tins of mixed fruits for the pijamas. Another unmolded flan after flan. One traffic manager stood on a little box and shouted numbers at the women tending the grills: ‘I have twenty chickens waiting, fifteen sausages, ten lamb chops and forty rabbits.’ At the huge fires one man kept applying charcoal as the women opened enormous flat grills and placed the meat upon them, then closed them and thrust them over the fire, where grease from the cooking sizzled all day.
Fifty years ago the grandmother and her husband had opened their farmhouse kitchen to the mule drivers of that day, and in the intervening years they had not altered the menu. Now, on Sundays, customers might wait for a couple of hours to find a place at one of the tables, but as they stood in line they could see great-grandchildren of the original couple washing vegetables in the yard for use in the salads.