During the procession, everyone chants the biblical story of the Passion; in fact, the phrase “vile Jews” used to crop up frequently, until it was finally removed by Pope John XXIII. By five o’clock, the ceremony itself is over and there’s a moment of silence, until the drums begin again, to continue until noon on the following day.
Another fascinating aspect of this ritual are the drumrolls, which are composed of five or six different rhythms, all of which I remember vividly. When two groups beating two different tempi meet on one of the village streets, they engage in a veritable duel which may last as long as an hour—or at least until the weaker group relents and takes up the victor’s rhythm. By the early hours of Saturday morning, the skin on the drums is stained with blood, even though the beating hands belong to hardworking peasants.
On Saturday morning, many villagers put down their drums and retrace the Calvary, climbing a Way of the Cross on a hillside near the village. The rest continue beating, however, until everyone gathers at seven o’clock for the funeral procession, del entierro. As the bell tolls the noon hour, the drums suddenly fall silent, but even after the normal rhythms of daily life have been re-established, some villagers still speak in an oddly halting manner, an involuntary echo of the beating drums.
4
Saragossa
MY PATERNAL grandfather was known as a “wealthy” farmer, meaning that he owned three mules. He had two sons. One became a pharmacist, and the other—my father—left Calanda with four friends to join the army in Cuba, which at that time still belonged to Spain. When my father arrived in Havana, he had to fill out a form, and thanks to his demanding schoolteacher, his handwriting was so elegant that he was given a desk job. (His friends in the infantry died soon after of malaria.)
When his military service was over, my father decided to stay in Cuba, where he became chief clerk to a shopkeeper. Apparently, he applied himself so energetically to his job that he was soon able to go out on his own. He began with a ferretería, a kind of hardware store that sold everything from guns to sponges. A shoeshine man used to drop by every day to see him, and they soon became fast friends. As my father’s business grew, he established a partnership with some of his employees, and with the shoeshine man; but just before Cuba became independent, my father took the money he’d earned and returned to Spain. (Cuba’s independence, by the way, was greeted with resounding indifference in Spain; everyone went to the bullfights as usual that day, as if nothing special had happened.)
When all was said and done, it seemed that my father had accumulated what was in those days a tidy fortune. When he arrived back in Calanda, forty-three years old, he married my mother, who was then a young woman of eighteen. He bought a sizable piece of property, built the main house, and then La Torre. I was the oldest child, conceived at the Hôtel Ronceray near Richelieu Drouot during one of their trips to Paris. Four sisters and two brothers followed soon after. (The older of my brothers, Leonardo, a radiologist in Saragossa, died in 1980; the other, Alfonso, fifteen years younger than I, died in 1961 while I was making Viridiana. My sister Alicia died in 1977. At the moment, there are four of us left, myself and my sisters Conchita, Margarita, and María.)
Calanda was originally a Roman town, but since the time of the Iberians there have been so many waves of invaders on Spanish soil—from the Visigoths to the Moors—that there’s really no such thing as “pure” blood. In the fifteenth century, there was one old Christian family in the town; all the other inhabitants were Arabs. Thus, even today, strikingly different physical types often appear within the same family. My sister Conchita, for example, with her blond hair and blue eyes, could pass for Scandinavian, while my sister María looks as if she had escaped from the harem of an Arab sheik.
In 1912, sensing the approach of a European war, my father suddenly decided to return to Cuba. I remember the prayers we said every night for Papa’s bon voyage. Unfortunately, the two partners he’d left behind in Havana refused to take him back into the business, and he came back to Calanda, heartsick. (During World War I his ex-partners made millions of dollars. Several years later one of them, driving a convertible, passed my father on the Castellana in Madrid. Neither acknowledged the other by word or gesture.)
Green-eyed, well built, and muscular, my father was about five foot seven, and very strict. Basically, however, he was kind-hearted, and forgave people quickly. In 1900, when I was barely four months old, he grew restless and decided to try Saragossa, so we moved into a large and very “bourgeois” apartment, formerly a police headquarters, which had ten balconies and took up the entire second floor of the building. Except for vacations in Calanda, and later in San Sebastián, I lived in this apartment until I passed my baccalaureate exams in 1917 and left for Madrid.
The old city of Saragossa had been largely destroyed by Napoleon, but in 1900 it was the capital of Aragón, had close to one hundred thousand inhabitants, and was orderly and peaceful. Despite the presence there of a factory that made trains, no labor unrest had yet broken out in the city that the anarchists would one day call “the pearl of trade unionism.” It was a flat, calm city, where horse-carts rumbled alongside streetcars. The centers of the streets were paved, but the shoulders were solid mud, which meant that no one could cross the streets on rainy days. There were chimes and bells in all the churches, and on death days the ringing bells filled the city with their music from eight at night until eight in the morning. The most exciting newspaper headlines tended toward “Woman Faints, Felled by Fiacre.”
Up until the Great War, the world seemed a vast and faraway place, shaken by events that appeared to have nothing to do with us and which, even when they arrived in Saragossa, seemed as insubstantial as shadows. If I knew that there was a war between the Russians and the Japanese in 1905, it was only because of the pictures on the inside of my chocolate-bar wrappers. (Like so many boys my age, I had a picture album that reeked of chocolate.) During the first fourteen years of my life, I never saw a black person, or an Oriental, except in the circus. Thanks to the promptings of the Jesuits, our only prejudices concerned the Protestants. The most daring thing we ever did was to throw an occasional stone, during the yearly fair at the Festival of Pilar, at a poor man who sold cheap bibles.
There was no suggestion of anti-Semitism, either. It was only later, in France, that I discovered this particular form of racism. In their prayers and in their stories of the Passion, the Spanish might vilify the Jews as the persecutors of Jesus, but they never confused those Jews with their contemporaries.
The wealthiest person in Saragossa was reputed to be Señora Covarrubias, who apparently owned property to the tune of six million pesetas. (To put this in context, the richest man in Spain, Count Romañones, was supposed to be worth one hundred million pesetas.) In Saragossa, my father ranked fourth or fifth. I remember my family telling about the day my father donated his entire account to the Hispano-American bank because they were in financial straits. Apparently, it was enough to keep the bank out of bankruptcy court.
The fact of the matter is that my father did absolutely nothing. His daily routine consisted of waking up, performing his morning ablutions, and reading the paper (a habit I seem to have adopted myself). Afterwards, he would check to see if his cigars had arrived from Havana, do some trivial errands, occasionally pick up some wine or caviar. A prelunch aperitif rounded out the first half of the day.
The only thing my father would carry in the street was his elegantly wrapped jar of caviar. According to social convention, men of “rank” were never supposed to carry anything; that’s what servants were for. Even when I went to my music lesson, my governess always carried the violin case.
After lunch and a siesta, my father changed his clothes and went to his club. There he whiled away the time before dinner playing bridge or tresillo with his cronies. In the evenings, my parents sometimes went to the theatre. There were four of them in Saragossa, and in the largest one, which was lavishly decorated in gold leaf, my parents had
a box. Sometimes there were operas, sometimes plays given by traveling repertory companies, sometimes a concert. (That theatre is one of the few landmarks from my childhood still standing.) Almost as majestic was the now defunct Pignatelli Theatre; the Parisiana, somewhat more frivolous, specialized in operettas. The fourth was a kind of circus where I was often taken to see plays. One of my most exciting memories is of going to see an elaborate zarzuela called Los sobrinos del Capitan Grant; I must have seen it half a dozen times, but I never failed to be impressed when the huge condor came plummeting down out of the heavens onto the stage.
One of the more spectacular events that came to Saragossa was the air show given by the French aviator Védrines. We children were beside ourselves; for the first time, we were actually going to see a man fly! The entire city gathered at a bend in the road called Buena Vista; the hillside was packed as we watched Védrines’s plane rise into the air—about twenty meters off the ground. The crowd applauded wildly, but to tell the truth, I was too busy catching lizards to pay attention. (When you cut off the tips of their tails, the pieces still wiggled a bit among the rocks.)
While still very young, I developed a taste for guns. At fourteen, I somehow managed to get hold of a small Browning that I carried around with me secretly. One morning, my mother suspected that something was not quite right; she made me raise my arms and started to search my clothes. When she felt the gun, I took off at a gallop, not daring to wait and see what would happen. When I got to the courtyard of our building, I threw it into a garbage can, to fish out when the commotion had died down.
Another time, I was sitting on a bench with a friend when two golfos (guys who had nothing better to do) sat down next to us and began pushing us slowly down to the end. They kept at it long enough to push my friend off the bench altogether, at which point I leapt to my feet and shook my fist at them. One grabbed a bloody banderilla (something you could always pick up at the bullfights) and shook it back at me. So I pulled out my Browning and there, in broad daylight, took aim. They shut up and sat down. Later, when they got up to leave, I apologized; my rages never last very long.
I remember, too, the day I stole my father’s pistol, took off for the country, and taught myself to use it. I used to ask my friend Pelayo to raise his arms and balance an apple or a tin can in each hand. (I never hit either him or the apple.)
If you can put up with my penchant for digression, I remember another story from that period about the day my parents received a gift from Germany of a complete set of china. It came in a huge crate, which I can still see, and each dish was stamped with the portrait of my mother. Much later, during the Civil War, the china was lost, but years after the war ended, my sister-in-law came across one of the plates in an antiques store in Saragossa. She bought it and gave it to me. I still have it.
My schooling began with the Corazonistas, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an order apparently more highly esteemed than the Lazaristas. Most of the brothers were French; they taught me to read in their own language as well as in Spanish. In fact, I can still recite one of the exercises:
Où va le volume d’eau
Que roule ainsi ce ruisseau?
Dit un enfant à sa mère.
Sur cette rivière si chère
D’où nous le voyons partir
Le verrons-nous revenir?*
At the end of that first year, I entered the Jesuit Colegio del Salvador as a day student, and I remained there for seven years. (The enormous building that housed the school is gone now and has been replaced by a bank.) Every day began at seven-thirty with Mass and ended with evening prayers. The boarders were entitled to complete uniforms, but we day students only had the right to wear the school cap with its regulation stripe. The Jesuits felt that heating one room was quite sufficient, so my keenest memory of this period is of a numbing cold, a great many heavy scarves, and chilblains on our ears, fingers, and toes. True to tradition, their iron discipline tended to make life even colder. At the merest infraction, a student would instantly find himself on his knees behind his desk, or in the middle of the classroom, arms outstretched, under the stern eye of the proctor, who surveyed the entire room from a balcony flanked by a ramp and a staircase.
We never had a moment’s privacy. In study hall, for example, when a pupil went to the bathroom (a rather slow process, since we had to go one by one), the proctor watched him until he went out the door. Once in the corridor, the pupil found another priest, who kept an eye on him the entire length of the hallway, until he reached a third priest stationed at the bathroom door.
Yes, the Jesuits took great pains to make sure there was no contact among us. We always walked double file with our arms crossed on our chests (which kept us from passing notes) and at least a yard between the lines. We marched to the courtyard for recess in two silent columns, until a bell signaled permission to shout and run. Those were the rules—constant surveillance, no “dangerous” contact, total silence—in study hall, in the chapel, even in the dining room.
Firmly grounded in these rigorously enforced principles, our educations proceeded apace. Religion had the lead role; we studied apologetics, the catechism, the lives of the saints. We were fluent in Latin. Basically, the Jesuits used many of the same pedagogical techniques that had governed scholastic argumentation in the Middle Ages. The desafío, for instance. If I were so inspired, I could challenge any one of my classmates to a debate on any of the daily lessons. I would call his name, he would stand up, I would announce my challenge and ask him a question. The language of these jousts was strictly medieval: “Contra te! Super te!” (Against you! Above you!) “Vis cento?” (Do you want to bet a hundred?) “Volo!” (Yes!) At the end of the tourney, the professor designated a winner, and both combatants went back to their seats.
I also remember my philosophy course where the professor, smiling with pity and compassion, explained the doctrines of “poor” Kant, who was so lamentably deceived in his metaphysical reasoning. We took notes frantically, because in the next class the professor often called on a student and demanded: “Refute Kant for me!” If the student had learned his lesson well, he could do it in two minutes.
I was about fourteen when I began to have doubts about this warm, protective religion. They started with the problem of hell and the Last Judgment, two realities I found inconceivable. I just couldn’t imagine all those dead souls from all lands and all ages rising suddenly from the bowels of the earth, as they did in medieval paintings, for the final resurrection. I used to wonder where all those billions and billions of cadavers could possibly be; and if there was such a thing as a Last Judgment, then what good was the judgment that was supposed to come right after death and which, theoretically, was rumored to be irrevocable? (Today, of course, there are many priests who don’t believe in hell or the devil, or even the Last Judgment. My schoolboy questions would undoubtedly amuse them no end.)
Despite the discipline, the silence, and the cold, I have fond memories of the Colegio del Salvador. There was never the slightest breath of scandal, sexual or otherwise, to trouble the perfect order. I was a good student, but I also had one of the worst conduct records in the school. I think I spent most of my recesses during my last year standing in the corner of the courtyard, forbidden to join the games.
I remember one particularly dramatic episode that occurred when I was about thirteen. It was Holy Tuesday, and I was supposed to go to Calanda the following day to beat the drums. As I was walking to class about half an hour before Mass, I ran into two of my friends in front of the motorcycle race track opposite the school. Next to the track was a notorious tavern, into which my conniving classmates shoved me. Somehow they persuaded me to buy a bottle of a cheap but devastating cognac commonly known as matarratas, or rat killer. They knew full well how difficult it was for me to resist that particular temptation. We left the tavern and walked along the river, drinking as we went. Little did I know that as I was swallowing mouthfuls straight from the bottle, they were merely wett
ing their lips. In no time at all the world was spinning.
My dear friends were kind enough to lead me to the chapel, where I knelt down with a sigh of relief. During the first part of the Mass, I stayed on my knees with my eyes shut tight, just like everyone else, but when it was gospel-reading time, the congregation had to rise. I gathered my strength and made an enormous effort, but as I staggered to my feet, my stomach turned upside down and I threw up all over the church floor. I was immediately escorted to the infirmary, and then just as quickly home. There was talk of expulsion. My father was furious, threatening to call off our trip to Calanda (probably the worst punishment he could have imagined, at least in my eyes); but, ever tender-hearted, he backed down at the last minute.
I remember, too, when I was fifteen and about to take my final exams, the study hall proctor suddenly giving me a swift kick for no apparent reason. As if that weren’t humiliating enough, he followed it by calling me a payaso—an idiot, a fool. I walked out and took my exam alone in another room. When I got home that evening, I told my mother that it had finally happened—the Jesuits had expelled me at last. My mother rushed to the director, who assured her that such an idea was sheer fantasy. (It appears I’d gotten the highest grade in the class on that world history exam, and there was no thought whatsoever of expelling me.)
I, on the other hand, refused categorically to return, and so I was enrolled at the Instituto, the local public high school, where I studied for the last two years before my baccalaureate. During those two years, I met a law student who introduced me to certain philosophical, literary, and historical works (in cheap editions) that no one at the Colegio del Salvador had even so much as mentioned. Suddenly I discovered Spencer, Rousseau, Marx! Reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species was so dazzling that I lost what little faith I had left (at the same time that I lost my virginity, which went in a brothel in Saragossa).