The saving of Carlos’ life was a mixed blessing. In the six years that followed, the young man degenerated pathetically; crippled, hunchbacked, of wandering mind and evil habits, he became a kind of incubus, and it was even rumored that he might have been toying with the idea of becoming a Protestant. What seems more likely is that he had initiated or had been caught up in some kind of intrigue against his father, King Felipe. At any rate, there can be no question about the fact that Felipe believed his son was plotting treason and that the pathetic and even repulsive young man was a danger to Spain. Therefore, at midnight on January 18, 1568, Felipe, accompanied by advisers, marched into the room of Don Carlos, who looked at his father and asked, ‘Are you planning to kill me?’ Felipe told him to calm himself and in this manner placed him under arrest, without ever giving Carlos or the world any substantive reason for having done so. ‘I have reasons,’ Felipe said.
Almost immediately the young prisoner, twenty-three years old, began to decline, and this time there was no Dr. Vesalius, no Moor with repercussive unguent and certainly no cadaver of a saint to cure him. What was his malady? No one knew. Was there any specific or even probable cause? No one could say. It was a general illness without seeming focus and on the evening of July 24 he died. King Felipe refused to give an explanation even to the Pope, and when rumors of the most evil sort circulated, he did not dignify them with notice, let alone an explanation. He spoke of the matter only once, eighteen years after the event, when a book appeared in France claiming that Don Carlos had been killed because he was a secret Protestant. Then Felipe said to the ambassador who reported this, ‘You are right in becoming indignant over the false testimony that he was not a good Catholic. It is not wise to allow such a great lie to run current.’ Ten years after the death of Don Carlos, Felipe had a second son, by his fourth wife, Ana of Austria, and it was this boy who grew up to be Felipe III, never a great king, never approaching the quality of his father Felipe II or his grandfather Carlos V, but certainly not a degenerate like Don Carlos, who would have inherited the throne had he not died so mysteriously.
In July, 1966, events occurred which were to make the city of Cuenca an almost obligatory excursion from Madrid, and I had the good fortune to make mine in the company of a talented Filipino who had been centrally involved in those events, Don Enrique Francisco Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo Torrontegui Zambrano, Havard 1949, sometimes bibliographical expert in rare books at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, etcher extraordinary and one of Spain’s major abstract artists.
Don Fernando drove me ninety miles east and a little south of Madrid through virtually empty land; a few white-walled villages appeared here and there, clean and inviting in their harsh simplicity, and I was once more impressed with how swiftly in Spain one passes from the heart of a major metropolis like Madrid into empty countryside. On this street a fourteen-story apartment building; fifty yards farther on, open land. In Spain prudent people have long learned to live within the safety of city walls. When we did come upon a village I again noted something that I had often reflected on before: that the rural children of Spain all look as if they had been fifty-six years old at birth. How ancient their faces are.
Our route to Cuenca took us through several types of land that could have been a summary of Spanish history. Here the flat lands of Castilla reminded one of how the clever kings of this region had built a nucleus around which to unite the country. Don Fernando suspected that at one point we were close to the upper edge of La Mancha, and when I saw how bleak and empty it was, without a house to be seen in any direction, I appreciated why Cervantes, wishing to poke fun at the pretensions of would-be nobility, had set his knight down in such prosaic terrain. Next we came to the pine forests of Cuenca province, mile after mile of tilted and rocky land, and I could understand how the Muslims, once they had captured such a fastness, were so difficult to dislodge.
‘In some ways a most uninteresting drive,’ Zóbel said, ‘but if you can imagine the ebb and flow of forces, the movement of kings and peasants, one of the best.’
We passed through two tunnels that served somewhat as the gates to Cuenca and in a short time we saw the distant hilltop city perched above the gorges of two rivers that meet here for a run down to Valencia on the coast. Don Fernando was eager that I see Cuenca at its best, so we stopped the car for me to look up at the remarkable collection of houses perched along the edges of some very high cliffs; they seemed about to fall into the rivers but were kept aloft by sturdy cantilevers set into place some five hundred years ago. Porches and balconies projected well out into space and even from below induced vertigo.
‘Cuenca is like the prow of a ship sailing into space,’ Zóbel suggested, and his image was appropriate. ‘When they first proposed Cuenca to me I couldn’t visualize locating here, but once I spotted these fantastic houses, these cliffs, winding streets and the tremendous views one gets from everywhere, I knew that this was what I’d been seeking.’
As he spoke, we were in the lower town, which dates from relatively modern times, say four hundred years ago, but we left this by a steep and twisting road which carried us upward at a good rate, and in a few minutes we came upon a medieval square and a very old cathedral with a new face. I entered because I had long ago heard of the four remarkable jacent tombs of Church dignitaries dating from the sixteenth century, and these I wanted to see. They were as lovely as I had been told, four high-relief slabs of stone carved with figures of dead prelates, each highlighted by the addition of a few streaks of color which made them seem almost alive. The tombs were delightful and set the stage for what I was about to see.
Don Fernando led me down a side street which ran along one wall of the cathedral, then took me on a cobbled street which ended in a cul-de-sac marked by several medieval doors of handsome design. ‘This is it,’ he said as he unlocked one of the huge doors and swung it slowly open.
I entered upon a wonderland, something so unanticipated in a remote city like Cuenca that it has become world-famous in less than a year, for it is a museum of Spanish abstract painting set down in three of the cliff houses, so cleverly interrelated with flights of stairs, balconies, strange corners and large exhibition areas that it is a delight to the eye and a challenge to the mind. From the windows one looks off into miles of empty space, with the Río Huécar six hundred feet below in the gorge. Inside, one sees a series of varying rooms filled with handsome paintings by young artists whose reputations have been made not in Spain but in Paris, London and especially New York. One sees the finest work of men whose names are well known in all art circles: Antoni Tápies, whose earthlike canvases speak so strongly of Spain; Antonio Saura, whose works are in most modern museums; José Guerrero, better known in New York than he is in Madrid; Luis Feito, whose work is as modern and colorful as any being done in the world; Eduardo Chillida, whose heavy, powerful sculpture is much appreciated in foreign exhibitions; and Rafael Canogar, whose reputation is the most recent of the Spanish internationalists.
‘This is some of the best painting being done today,’ Zóbel says enthusiastically as he points to one after another of the fine canvases. ‘Only New York excels in concentration of talent. I believe we have more superbly gifted young painters in Spain today than they have in either Paris or London and certainly more than Berlin or Rome. This group of men is going to create the art history of the next quarter-century. Tell your friends who may be interested that these men are as good as Picasso and Miró were when they began.’
As we wandered through what must be one of the world’s loveliest museums, Zóbel estimated that there were more than thirty young Spaniards who had a chance to build major international reputations. ‘That’s what makes this museum so fascinating,’ he said. ‘The culture of a nation coming into focus in a way it has not done since the early 1600s.’ We found chairs from which, if we looked to the right, we saw the spectacular valley or, to the left, a series of brilliant canvases by painters I had not previously heard of. It was a v
isual feast, but what interested me as much was the conversation.
Zóbel: For the first time in many years Spain is taking its contemporary artists seriously. This is good for the country. Good for the artists.
Michener: But is it not true that at least eighty out of every hundred canvases these men paint leave the country? In Pittsburgh we Americans appreciate this art. In Sevilla you Spaniards don’t.
Zóbel: Up to now that’s been true. This museum may change the percentages. Spaniards may begin to buy Spanish art, other than Sorolla-like scenes in which colorful fisherwomen sell baskets of clams.
Michener: The other day I had lunch with José Ramón Alonso, the editor, and he said the typical Spanish attitude toward art was that of a friend of his who asked, ‘Pictures? We have three pictures. Why would we want more?’ Alonso asked him what three he had, and he replied, ‘One Velázquez, one El Greco, one Goya.’
Zóbel: He was right on both counts. Families like that won’t buy paintings. And you’d be amazed at how many El Grecos and Goyas remain in private hands. Spain has always liked paintings, but only the ones they liked, if you understand the contradiction.
Michener: I see less evidence of connoisseurship in Spanish private homes than I would in similar homes in Israel, Japan or Germany.
Zóbel: The basic fact you must accept is the joyous provincialism of Spanish thought. Have you discovered that the Prado is really the most provincial great museum in the world? Only Spanish painting.
Michener: Wait a minute! What about those great Flemish and Italian paintings?
Zóbel: That’s what I mean. As long as Flanders and Italy were Spanish colonies we accepted their painting. That’s why we have Bosch and Titian. Because we thought of them as Spaniards. Once the colonies broke away, to hell with them and their painting.
Michener: You believe then that this group of artists will be able to make a living by painting in Spain? And selling to Spaniards?
Zóbel: They already are. Every painter you see on these walls makes a good living right now. And they don’t have to teach in art schools or colleges the way your painters do in the States.
Michener: They make a good living, but doesn’t it come from sales abroad? Do Spaniards buy?
Zóbel: Yes, they do. In the old days, all you could sell was the kind of romantic subject matter done by Zuloaga and Sorolla. You’re right that Picasso and Miró never sold in Spain. And Spanish families would have found it inconceivable to buy something like a Cézanne or a Paul Klee, because those men were not Spanish. Even today no one would buy a Francis Bacon or a Willem De Kooning or even a Morando. But they are beginning to buy Spanish works. And I am proud that this museum has had something to do with that change!
Zóbel had a right to be proud. That morning the Spanish government had convened a gathering of notables at which he was made a member of the Order of Isabel la Católica in gratitude for what he had accomplished in Cuenca, for not only had he personally paid for the heavy expense of converting the cliff houses into a museum, with splendid marblelike floors and much clean and freshly painted wall space, but all the canvases in the museum were also from his private collection. ‘Fifteen years ago I did a simple thing,’ he said as we finished our conversation. ‘I looked about me and saw that Spanish painting was good … very good. So I began to collect it. And now the world confirms my judgment.’
The paintings which I had been admiring, by artists I did not know, seemed to support his argument. There was a fine, swinging op art construction by Eusebio Sempere, only forty-three years old; a clean and hard collage by Gustavo Torner, forty-two; a most imaginative portrait of a group of men by the Equipo Crónica (Chronicle Team), a pair of twenty-five-year-old Valencians who collaborate on such excellent work that they must become internationally popular; and what pleased me most, a wonderfully poetic white canvas by Manuel Mompó, forty and also from Valencia. It was so good that I asked to see more of his work, and each thing I saw showed a lyrical quality that was enchanting. Mompó paints somewhat in the style of Miró, but with his own fairyland interpretation, and I suppose he will become well known throughout the world.
Part of the museum structure is leased out to an excellent restaurant, and as we finished our dessert of coffee and ice cream garnished with roasted and delicately flavored walnuts, a friend said of Zóbel, ‘He and his group are the avowed enemies of corsi.’
I thought, from the way the word was used, that Corsi must have been a competing painter. ‘No,’ my informant explained, ‘It’s the most in-word in Spanish society today. You can kill a man with it by saying at a cocktail party, “Cayetano tries hard but he’s painfully corsi.” ’ It means cheap but pretentious, kitsch but heavily pompous. Cuenca is the battleground of the Spanish mind in its war against everything that is corsi.
Some dozen major painters have taken up residence in the cliff houses of Cuenca. Travelers come from all over Spain to the Museum. In summer students flock to the exquisite valleys that surround the town, camp out and work during the daytime in the fine museum library. In autumn artists and townspeople alike climb down from their cliff to work in the fields, gathering, by means of delicate brushes, the golden pollen of a lavender flower on which the economy of Cuenca partially depends, for this is the saffron capital of the world. And each day the message of this unusual museum reverberates through Spain.
The pleasure of my visits to Madrid was enhanced when I met one day in the Ritz Hotel my hunting companion from Las Marismas, Don Luis Morenés y Areces. If he had been instructive in the marshes, he was more so in Madrid, for this was his city and he delighted in showing me aspects of it that I would otherwise have missed. I was surprised some time later, as we were walking down, the Avenida José Antonio, when a gentleman stopped us and addressed Don Luis as ‘Marqués de Bassecourt.’ When he had gone I asked Don Luis about this and he invited me to join him at one of the sidewalk cafés. What he said, often under insistent questioning by me, was a surprise.
‘Yes, my father happens to be a grandee of Spain. My family goes back in one straight line to the early eighth century when Pedro Duque de Cantabria fought the Muslims, but to make the line straight a few kinks have to be kicked out here and there. My father’s titles happen to be fifteenth Conde de Villada, eighteenth Marqués de Argüeso. In 1491 los Reyes Católicos confirmed our family titles as those of grandees immemorial. Duque de Infantado, Marqués de Argüeso and Marqués de Campoo. The present Infantado and the Campoo are uncles of mine. But I work in government offices, as you see. I’m a clerk who hopes one day to become a chief clerk.’
I asked him to what other families of Spanish history he was related, and he said, ‘My own title is eighth Marqués de Bassecourt. It sounds French and this is why. The Bassecourts were knights of the Artois and in the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 Felipe IV ceded to Louis XIV the territories in which my ancestors lived, but they refused to take up French citizenship and remained faithful to Spain; so in 1736 Carlos III made Don Francisco de Bassecourt a general of his army and then, because of his heroism in the Two Sicilies, created him a marqués. Alvaro de Luna, whose mobile statue you saw in Toledo, married into our family, which has always been associated with the Medinacelis, the Medina Sidonias and the Osunas. But like most young men from such families I have to work.’
Spanish soldier waiting for the parade to start.
I knew the nobles Don Luis was speaking about, for they passed like golden threads through the history of Spain, people of enormous power whose deficiencies had perturbed me in Sevilla. I asked Don Luis about this and he thought I was wrong. He believed that it had been the permanence of these families that had given Spain its solidity in duress. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the old charge of doing nothing no longer applies. Look at the leaders in government now being provided by these families.’
One of the recurring jokes in Madrid concerned just this matter. There was this management consultant who was explaining to a group of businessmen how he operated in select
ing candidates for top jobs in Spain. ‘This morning, for example, three contestants for a major job. All equally well groomed, equally educated. So I asked each one privately how much is two and two. The first said instantly, “Four.” Solid man, quick, stable, conventional. Second man thought a moment, saw a trap and said “Twenty-two.” Imaginative, willing to take a chance, best type of man to head a project entering new fields. Third man thought a long time looked at me suspiciously and asked, “What do you want to know for?” Finest type of scientific mind, probing, not easily satisfied with snap decisions, can be trusted to get at the heart of things. And that’s how we judge men in this business.’
‘But which one did you hire?’
‘Oh, the Duque de Plaza Toro, of course. We’ve got to have a title.’
I myself had been vaguely involved when a major American automotive company sought Spanish management for its Iberian branch. They had settled upon a most promising young man with training in London’s equivalent of the Harvard Business School and several years’ experience with a German motor company in France. To me he seemed an inevitable choice, but Spanish advisors warned the Americans, ‘We think you’d do better with the Duque de Plaza Toro.’ So the Detroit experts had an interview with Plaza Toro, who arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, dressed flawlessly, ten pounds underweight and with manners that could have charmed Artaxerxes. When questioned about his qualifications for the job, the duque said, ‘I’d want a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. And for this I’d let you use my apartment.’