He was cousin to the Conde de Ybarra and knew well the history of the region, especially that of El Rocío. ‘It’s a great pity you couldn’t have seen it during celebrations,’ he said. ‘You won’t get much seeing it this way.’ And I must admit that as he drove me across the swamps to a large grove of eucalyptus trees I could not visualize eighty thousand pilgrims converging on this lonely spot, for there was nothing to commend it, neither natural beauty nor buildings of interest. When we reached the village itself I was astonished by its emptiness; we were like characters in a romance who had come upon a sleeping town. Here were the houses, street after street of them, and the stores, and a church and all the appurtenances of a village except people. It was uncanny, and I asked, ‘It’s empty like this all year?’ He nodded and pointed to one of the larger cottages. ‘My family’s. We’ve come here one week a year for as long as I can remember. Beneath these eucalypts there will be tents for ten thousand. Farther along many refreshment bars. No roof, no walls. They will serve thousands of snacks. Over here beer stands. More than you could count.’
As he spoke, I wished that we were in one of those movies in which, as the hero begins to explain something, the scene he is describing begins to take form. I should have enjoyed seeing this deserted village spring to life for its one wild week, and I was lucky to find, in a small town on the other side of the Guadalquivir, an unusual Englishman who had settled there years ago as the Volkswagen representative for southern Spain, and he turned out to be both an El Rocío enthusiast and a spirited raconteur and it was through his account of adventures on the pilgrimage that I gained some sense of what it must be like.
He was John Culverwell, a handsome bull-necked fellow with a petite wife from the English Midlands who was fluent in Spanish and a fine horsewoman. Without repeating the questions I asked to keep their commentary flowing, I should like to report on their experiences in undertaking a Spanish pilgrimage.
‘Cecilia and I had been so often that three years ago our community came to us and said, “Señor Culverwell, you and your wife are as good Spaniards as any of us, so when the grand parade is formed to ride past the Virgin next week, we want your wife to ride at the head of our column and carry the flag of our village. You are to ride at the end of the parade and carry the standard of the Virgin of El Rocío.” You can imagine that this struck us as something of an honor, because I can’t recall another instance when a foreigner was invited to carry the flag of his community at El Rocío.
‘The pilgrimage occurs each year at Whitsunday, which if you were a Catholic you’d call Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, that’s the fiftieth day, when something or other important happened. From our side of the Guadalquivir you can get to El Rocío only on horseback, so early in the week we arrange for our horses and at sunup on Friday we leave home and ride to Sanlúcar, where we meet with hundreds of horsemen who have collected from towns around here. We ride down to the river’s edge, where barges wait to ferry our horses across to the other side, and after delivering them we walk to a different pier, from which we are taken across in small boats. On the opposite bank we recover our horses, saddle up and head for an adventure you’d never believe if you hadn’t seen it.
‘Did you know that on the other side of the Guadalquivir there are first pine forests, then sand dunes for eight or ten miles? Yes, big, flowing, beautifully sculptured sand dunes with hardly a tree or shrub. During the trek to El Rocío horsemen frequently get lost in these dunes. I don’t know whether any have died in recent years, but I do know that a couple of years ago I got separated from Cecilia and the others and it was rather touch-and-go before I got back. A wilderness of white sand with desert birds you won’t spot elsewhere.
‘Well, we ride for many hours through the dunes and it’s difficult to believe that we’re in Spain, but toward evening we come in sight of the palace … Yes, there’s a full-scale palace hidden away in the loneliest part of Las Marismas, off beyond the dunes. I’ll explain some day why it’s there. Anyway, we ride up to this palace and there we spend the first night among so many birds you’d not credit the number. My chief delight these days is studying birds, and I doubt if there is a better place in the world to do this than at the palace, for there you get land birds, sea birds, swamp birds, dune birds … everything a man could want to see. Whether you ever get to El Rocío or not, you really should try to see the palace.
‘On Saturday morning we rise early, saddle our horses and cut off along the edge of Las Marismas, past the famous heronries and into the eucalyptus groves and to El Rocío itself. It’s about a seven-hour ride as we take it, because we stop to check on how many birds are nesting. You can see, I would suppose, several thousand nests without much searching, but toward midafternoon we come in sight of El Rocío. You can tell where it is because of the enormous cloud of dust that rises over it. Thousands of oxcarts converging on the shrine. We spur our horses, dash into the village, go straight to the chapel and from outside salute the Virgin, then make a couple of circuits to inform the world that our contingent has arrived.
‘El Rocío! If you haven’t been there I can scarcely describe it, but imagine a convocation of thousands of people, hundreds of gypsies, and drums and flutes, guitars, handclapping and a world of two-wheeled carts from the last century, and no sleep.
‘No sleep! You arrive Saturday afternoon and until late Monday there’s no sleep. If a man begins to nod, somebody wakes him up. He couldn’t sleep anyway. The noise is too tremendous. Bang, bang, bang! A clatter such as you’ve never heard before. Naturally, tempers get a little short. In fact, the game is to make the other fellow’s temper explode. You kiss his girl or steal his wine. But if he makes one move to hit you, everybody shouts, “¡Viva la Paloma Blanca!” As soon as this is said he has to laugh, shake hands and share a drink with you. One year I watched them badger a chap beyond endurance. He was about to clout his chief tormentor when we all shouted, “¡Paloma Blanca!” He went ahead and busted his enemy in the eye and shouted, “¡Paloma Blanca! ¡Ojo negro!” (White dove! Black eye!)
‘Each community in this part of Spain owns one of the cottages which it dresses up for Whitsuntide and it serves as your headquarters. Here you get free drinks, meet your friends, leave your wife when you want to raise hell somewhere else. But late Saturday evening you must report back, for now the formal parade of horsemen in honor of the Virgin is about to begin. As I told you, our group, which contains some of the best horsemen in the south, was to be led by Cecilia.
‘About nine o’clock at night there’s one hell of a noise. Flamenco music and shouting and general brawling. And then on all sides of the central plaza, the Real del Rocío, the parade forms, and for more than three hours we ride past the chapel of the Virgin and pay our respects. It’s something to see, a recollection of old Spain, but the best part comes after the formal parade breaks up, because then gangs of riders rip and roar through the village all night. When I am in England and try to recall why I love Spain so much, I think of two things. The birds at the palace and the night-riding at El Rocío.
‘On Sunday morning at ten o’clock something happens you wouldn’t believe. The Real is crowded with people who have come to celebrate a field Mass in which a portable altar is set up. Riders attend on horses, as they did in cavalry days, and when they dismount to kneel, it’s something to see.
‘Sunday night is a sort of bleary time, a sentimental wandering from one community house to the next. Men you wouldn’t bother with in normal business suddenly become good friends, because they took the trouble to visit El Rocío. The singing continues all night, and if there is someone who simply can’t take the noise any longer, he sneaks out into Las Marismas and sleeps under the stars.
‘Monday is the day! Early in the morning the Virgin, the original statue about which all this fuss is being made, is brought out of the church atop a rather large wooden structure like a float in order to make a paseo so that she can bless the pilgrims who have come to do her honor. Honor!
That’s the word. By tradition her float is carried only by the men from Almonte, because it was they who first did so when they took her from the tree. But the rest of us are free to volunteer, but if we do the men from Almonte push us away.
‘So how does a man win the honor of helping to carry the float? By gouging, kicking, pulling and clubbing whichever men have her at the moment. A shirt lasts about three minutes. I have seen fights in the shadow of this Virgin that makes one of your sales at Macy’s look puny. I’ve seen men so eager to touch the float that they rear back, take six running steps and torpedo themselves headfirst into the face of the man who was holding the float. You’d think the man who was hit wouldn’t have a tooth left in his head. He’d stagger back and want to fight, but someone would shout, “¡Viva la Paloma Blanca!” and he’d wipe his mouth and grin.
‘How long does the brawling last? Four or five hours. Maybe more. The Virgin moves a few yards at a time, trembles, teeters, almost falls in the dust, but hands always catch her at the last minute and keep her erect. The fighting continues at fever pitch because as soon as anyone is exhausted and has to withdraw, someone fresh plunges in determined to capture the float.
‘By late afternoon Monday the two-wheeled carts begin to drive back along the roads to sanity. The battered Virgin is restored to her quiet niche in the shrine and the community houses are slowly boarded up for another year. The stores that have been opened to serve the pilgrims are shut down. The gypsy bands move on to another fiesta and everywhere you look you see tired men and women sleeping on porches or under trees. Horses that have not rested for days sleep standing or graze along the edges of the swamp.
‘On Monday, Cecilia and I ride back to the palace, and believe me the birds are a welcome change from the madness we’ve been sharing. On Tuesday we return through the dunes and come to the edge of the river. On the other side we see the low roofs of Sanlúcar and wonder if the ferry will ever spot us and come to fetch our horses.’
In the spring of 1498, when Christopher Columbus proposed, to sail from Sanlúcar on this third voyage of exploration to the New World, he was forced to delay the departure of his six ships until the thirtieth of May, ‘because his sailors had gone off to El Rocío and would not return.’ When the five ships of Magellan assembled at Sanlúcar in 1519, prior to setting out for their circumnavigation of the globe, the season of El Rocío was well past, for it was mid-August, but most of his sailors from the Sanlúcar district would have made the pilgrimage earlier, for the Virgin looked after her devotees.
‘She’s a wonderful Virgin,’ Señor Ybarra assured me as we stood under the eucalpyts in her deserted town, ‘and she’ll forgive me if I say that the best single thing about El Rocío is the honey. Until you’ve tasted our honey, you can’t know what Las Marismas, is.’ I asked him why he spoke of ‘our honey,’ and he said, ‘Each Whitsuntide my father drives here in a carriage and opens the cottage as his father did before him. We send ships all over the world, but El Rocío is our spiritual home. Taste the honey.’
We had stopped at the only store which keeps open throughout the year, a thoroughly beat-up shack with earthy peasant proprietors who looked after the cottages during the silent months, and the wife brought us a kilo of dark honey in a glass jar that had once housed peanut butter made in California. How it had reached El Rocío, I could not guess, but the honey, when I tasted it on a piece of hard bread, was all that Señor Ybarra had predicted. I’ve sampled honey in most of the areas where it is made and have had some very fine brands, especially in Japan and India, but the heavy, dark El Rocío honey gathered from flowering weeds in Las Marismas was finer than any I had previously tasted. Señor Ybarra summarized its quality precisely when he said. ‘Tastes like Spain, doesn’t it?’ If Spain has a taste, it would be either that of El Rocío honey, or a dark red wine from Rioja, or a fish zarzuela from Badajoz or the anchovies of Barcelona or perhaps the incredibly good bread of Arévalo, which we shall meet later. Certainly this excellent honey would be one of the components.
Apparition in Las Marismas.
Like the honey, Señor Ybarra was a heavy, dark man with a graying mustache who spoke rapidly with both a lisp and a marked southern accent, but the subjects with which he dealt were so interesting that I found myself understanding him better than I did most Spaniards. ‘The unique flavor of El Rocío honey comes from the rosemary and eucalpytus on which the bees feed, and also from the swamp flowers.
‘One thing you must see while you’re here is the new chapel we’re building for the Virgin. Look! She’ll have a throne of pure silver. What a change from the tree trunk in which she used to rest. You ought to take a set of the El Rocío tiles home with you.’ He showed me the nine orange, blue and yellow tiles which when cemented side by side in a wall would create an image of the Virgin enthroned and surrounded by a grand halo of sixteen gold disks. ‘Our legend says that the statue was carved in Italy and sent to North Africa to help convert the heathen. She wound up in Morocco, and after converting that land, was brought to Spain to save us. When the Moroccans changed to Islam they wanted to take her back lest she bring us good luck, and that’s why Spain was invaded.’ In bemused silence she sits in her old shrine waiting for the new one to be finished, as profoundly loved as any Virgin in Spain, in a strange, wild way.
The more I was with Señor Ybarra the more impressed I was with his affection for the land; again and again he returned to this topic. ‘My father had a great love for the Guadalquivir, probably because he saw it in such majesty here in Las Marismas. Anyway, he said, “There’s nothing another river can do that our river can’t.” Somebody said that the Volga could produce caviar, and my father took this as a challenge. He remembered that even in Roman times the Guadalquivir was famous for its sturgeon. There was an old Roman coin found at Coria del Río which showed the sturgeon. So he searched through Europe to find Russian émigrés who knew how to make caviar and finally found an expert living in Cape Town. Brought him here in 1929 and within a year my father was producing all the caviar sold in Spain. You go into a fine hotel and ask for caviar … Well, a lot of people do. You get Guadalquivir caviar and even the experts can’t tell the difference.’
It was unusual to find a Spaniard who spoke with such love of rivers and meadows and mountains, for Spain more than any other European nation has abused its land. It is in this respect that Spain is guilty of the charge that Frenchmen so often make against her, that she is not a European nation but an African: ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees.’ Demographically this is not so; in the abuse of natural resources it is.
The nearly eight centuries during which Spain waged intermittent war against African invaders, 711–1492, created a type of gentleman to whom the maximum good in life was knightly behavior in war, which was not in itself destructive, because for different reasons similar values were respected in all European countries, but in Spain a contempt developed for anyone who worked with his hands, especially farmers. It became an actual disgrace, from which a family could not cleanse itself, for a member to work at agriculture; inevitably, the land suffered.
What was worse, a system grew up whereby gentlemen who were not allowed to farm were allowed to herd the highly profitable Merino sheep, so long as the animals grazed at will over vast territories rather than on a single farm owned by one man. A gigantic cooperative developed, the Mesta (The Group of Proprietors of Sheep), and because only gentlemen were allowed to join, it won special privileges from the Spanish kings and flourished as a major economic agency in Spain from about 1300 through the first quarter of the 1800s.
Its flocks were so huge that in one poor year the census showed 1,673,551 sheep, ceaselessly in motion, like a great pendulum of destruction oscillating between the northern limit of the central plateau and the southern. In this heartland of Spain where a rational agriculture should have been developing, fencing off was not permitted; fields had to be kept open for the passage of sheep, and any settled farmer who tried to protect his crops from the
vagrant sheep was hauled not before a magistrate but before an officer of the Mesta who traveled with the sheep, dispensing a harsh and arbitrary justice. Before 1585 there was no appeal from a decision of the Mesta judges.
Many books have been written about the terror that possessed Christian settlements in Spain when the Muslims came up from the south; others have dealt with the fear engendered by the Inquisition when it was probing into private lives, but I suppose the best book that could be written, the one that would tell more about day-to-day Spanish life than any other, would be the story of some village whose farmers watched in dismay as the outriders of the Mesta crossed their fields, warning them that the sheep would soon follow. Then the farmers had to retire, remove obstacles, make no effort to protect their crops and wait in their huts until the all-powerful sheep had passed.
Why did this extraordinary condition prevail? Partly because sheep-herding had become recognized as an occupation for gentlemen but mainly because the kings of Spain had discovered that in the wool from their Merinos, which under pain of death could not be smuggled out to other lands which did not have them, they possessed a commodity which other nations would pay for at a price that Spain would determine. Merino wool was recognized as the best available and the Spanish economy was geared to produce Merino and to protect the men who tended the sheep that grew it. The Mesta existed as a mobile feudal kingdom, ravaging the best land and inhibiting its proper utilization. By the time the Mesta declined, an irreparable damage of two kinds had been done: the land was depleted and the ordinary agricultural processes which English, French and German farmers had mastered through the centuries were not known.
The capricious nature of this division between acceptable sheep growers and unacceptable farmers should not disturb the reader, for many other societies have made similar distinctions, equally impossible to justify. Thus in the American west it was the cattleman who was acceptable and the sheep man who stood outside the pale; I have been present when a self-respecting Coloradan entered a restaurant, took one sniff of the cooking odors, turned on his heel and stalked out, growling, ‘They’re serving lamb in there.’ It was in Hong Kong, however, that I observed arbitrary categories at their best. A long-time English resident, having volunteered to help me buy a watch, took me to a shop called something like Ledyard’s, and when a satisfactory deal had been concluded, he said, ‘Good fellow, Ledyard.’ In the street he reprimanded me for having said, ‘Mr. Ledyard.’ ‘The man’s in trade,’ he pointed out. ‘Should never be addressed as Mister. Couldn’t possibly be a gentleman.’ When I asked why, my friend said, ‘Ledyard could buy and sell me seven times over, but by God, in nineteen years I’ve never called him Mister.’ While I was in Hong Kong a convivial chap who ran a bar was finally admitted to one of the exclusive clubs, to which he had sought admission fruitlessly during many years; the club had not changed its rules excluding men who were in trade, but the saloon owner had that week sold his bar and gone into wholesale distribution of beer and whiskey, and that, according to British tradition, was not trade.