A street lamp in the Plaza Mayor.
Two points are amusing. Because Spain for many years was lacking in consumer goods, it was obligatory to prove that the United States had lost its soul in pursuit of such goods. Special contumely was heaped upon our system of time payments. ‘Americans have the television set, but they never own it. It has been loaned to them on time payments, and to meet those payments they mortgage their souls.’ The soul of Spain, these articles pointed out, was not corrupted by time payments. But with the arrival of television the initial cost of a set was so great that the average Spanish family could not advance the cash at one time. A system of time payments was obligatory and one was initiated, but if you ask a Spaniard about this he says, ‘Yes, but the system we worked out doesn’t corrupt the soul.’
If on almost every topic Spain is reasonably fair to America, on one it is not. Spain hates Yale University. I suppose that if the government called for volunteers tomorrow to invade Connecticut and raze Yale, it could have an expeditionary force by twilight; in a period of three months I read four assaults on Yale, some lamenting that a great university should have fallen so low, others threatening reprisals. The trouble stems from the announcement by a group of Yale professors in 1965 that they had found a map proving that Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover America in 1492 but that a Scandinavian had by 1118 and possibly as early as 1020. ‘The lie was bad enough,’ a Spanish scholar told me, ‘but to have announced it on the eve of October 12, El día de la raza, when the world was preparing to honor our great Spanish explorer—that was too much. With that action Yale blackened its name.’
It is surprising to find that most Spaniards consider the Italian Columbus as one of them, just as they nationalize the Greek El Greco. At the same time they protest when the French government includes Pablo Picasso in a list of French painters. When I commented on this contradiction, a Spaniard pointed out, ‘You Americans insist in your literature courses that Henry James and T.S. Eliot were Americans, even though they emigrated to England, but you also claim a painter like Lyonel Feininger and a scientist like Albert Einstein, even though they did most of their work in Germany.’
Apart from such natural chivvying, the American traveler meets a more congenial reception in Spain than in other European countries, but I suspect this will not be true much longer, for the signs are that with affluence Spain will go the way of France. In Salamanca I decided to take advantage of the favorable travel conditions and visit a cluster of five small towns to the northeast, for in them I would be able to trace out a network of lives that had helped make Spain what it is today.
Madrigal de las Altas Torres (Madrigal of the High Towers), could there be a more poetic name for a town, even though the derivation must have been from some prosaic word like madriguera (burrow or lair of animals)? And could any town so named be lovelier than this, nestling sun-baked within its circle of ruined towers? Today it looks almost as it must have in 1450, its walls forming a complete circle, not large in diameter, its narrow streets wandering beneath arches. The same notable buildings are there, and when the church bells ring they send their evening song out across the same fields of wheat.
Only the towers are not quite the same. They still stand, of course, but many have lost their tops through crumbling, and the once impregnable defenses are no longer so. In spite of all I had read about Madrigal, I had not visualized what an excellent monument it was, a gem of medieval life protected within its walls.
The town is very ancient, dating back perhaps to Roman times. When the Moors reached this far north Christians tried to halt them here, and the town was destroyed in a series of sieges and countersieges, but when the Moors triumphed it was rebuilt and given both the towers and the name it bears today. It was the walls that attracted the kings of Castilla, for once inside these battlements they were safe, and it was here that Juan II, the one who sponsored the Conde Alvaro de Luna, whose genuflecting statue we saw in Toledo, built a palace in the early 1400s. Later it was converted into an Augustinian convent where surplus females of the royal line were hidden away, and it was in this convent that I picked up the thread I was to follow through the five towns.
I first saw the convent from a distance, an ugly, low palace with miserly windows and little to commend it. Walls in the shape of a lozenge enclosed a large garden, and I judged the whole could accommodate about three hundred nuns, but their lives would presumably be rather hard, for the old convent seemed cold and forbidding. I went to what must have been the main entrance to the castle when kings lived here, but it was closed.
‘You enter by the side,’ a woman called from the street, and I walked along the bleak wall until I came to a corner, where I found the present entrance tucked away under three handsome stone arches that formed a small protected porch containing a device I had often read about but never seen. It was a torno (wheel), a large lazy Susan with sides about two feet tall and set into the wall in such a way that the nun inside the convent who turned it could not see the person who might have deposited a bundle on the other side. This was the way in which the unwed mothers of Spain had traditionally turned their unwanted babies over to a convent without being recognized. Many notable Spaniards had started life in the turning of some torno.
I rang the bell which hung beside the contraption, and after a moment the torno slowly revolved while a nun inside checked to see if I had abandoned a baby.
‘What do you want?’ an unseen voice asked.
‘To see the cradle of Spanish history,’ I said, repeating a phrase seen on posters advertising Madrigal.
‘Wait.’
There was a long pause, then finally a door, far removed from the torno, opened and I was greeted by two of the shortest, oldest nuns I had ever seen. ‘Come this way,’ they said, leading me into the convent that had once been a palace.
It was a quiet spot, marked with rough dignity rather than formal beauty. The double-tiered cloisters were low and unadorned, but they stood in such stateliness around the enclosure that they seemed more attractive than ornate ones I had seen elsewhere. In the center stood a low octagonal well, again of deep simplicity, protected by a plain tiled roof.
The rooms followed the lead of the cloisters, for they too were square and unadorned. ‘This is the old kitchen,’ one of the Agustinas said, and when I commented on how large it was, she explained, ‘Yes, for in those days we had hundreds here. Now we are but twenty. And they speak of closing us down.’ I looked about me at the medieval spaciousness, and she said gloomily, ‘I know. It is large and we are small.’
Whenever the two nuns led me to a new part of the convent they first rang a warning bell, and I could sometimes catch the flight of skirts as someone disappeared around a corner, but if I did meet a nun unexpectedly face to face, and who had not heard the warning, she was always very old. ‘This is the hall where nobles were received on visits,’ my guide said, and for the first time I saw that long chain of portraits, painted in heavy brown by some untalented artist centuries ago. They are not good art, but they awaken powerful memories and convey an excellent idea of why such royal convents were necessary in the old days.
This tall, thin-faced nun is Doña María, the illegitimate daughter of Fernando the Catholic. This pleasant round-faced nun holding a skull in her right hand is Doña María Esperanza, also an illegitimate daughter of Fernando. This curious portrait of a nun who looks half infant, half dowager portrays Doña Juana, illegitimate daughter of Carlos V, while this austere nun proudly holding a crown is Doña Ana María, illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of Felipe IV and the actress María Calderón. And here is the most memorable of all, a saucy-faced young woman whom we must remember, for we shall study her strange career in detail. She is a delightful-looking person with her coif awry; of all the royal nuns she alone shows a peek of hairdo. She also is alone in wearing jewelry and in her left arm she carries a cute little puppy, and her whole manner is so provocative that one could predict from seeing he
r that ‘this one will come to no good.’ As a matter of fact, she ended her life as Mother Superior of the most powerful convent in Spain, but her road to that eminence was rocky. She is Doña Ana, illegitimate daughter of Don Juan de Austria, the illegitimate son of Carlos V. He was the admiral whose blue battle flags from Lepanto we saw in the museum at Toledo.
There are other portraits in this powerful row, many of them the illegitimate daughters of royalty, and one begins to understand why the existence of these girls, if they were allowed to move freely in society, could have been a considerable embarrassment to the crown. Since they were illegitimate they could not be offered in marriage to other heads of state, which meant that any adventurer might pick them up, sire a few children and claim hereditary rights to the throne of Spain. Great care was taken to keep them safely locked up and their imprisonment began at age five or six. The legend attached to the portrait of Doña Juana, daughter of Carlos V, tells the whole story: ‘Illegitimate daughter of the emperor, died a novice at the age of seven years.’ A legend across the frame contains a rather neat play on words:
Date a Dios en tierna edad;
Vivirás eternidad.
(Give yourself to God at a tender age, you will live eternally.) Many of these little girls matured to become responsible leaders of their convents.
‘And here is the chapel,’ the old nun intoned, ‘and the beautiful marble tomb of Doña María, natural daughter of Fernando, and here is the organ brought down from Germany to soothe the king with soft music’ She went to the keyboard while her partner pumped a huge bellows, and soft wheezing sounds came forth as they had done four centuries ago.
I was beginning to think that we would never come to the room which had lured me to Madrigal, but now we passed along the upper tier of the cloister while my guide rang her bell to disperse any nuns working there and we came to a window from which I could look down into the rather large garden of the convent, where four nuns were weeding. ‘We eat what we grow,’ my guide said, ‘and we don’t get fat.’ And then there we were! A very ordinary anteroom containing two royal portraits, an inner room with no window and only a big rough wooden door whose panels opened one by one so that servants outside could pass food into the room without being seen. ‘This is it,’ the nun said reverently.
And I was in the room where Isabel of Castilla was born, known to history as Isabel the Catholic, loyal wife of that Fernando who sired the impressive line of illegitimate offspring. The more one studies Spanish history, tracing out the actual sources and operations of power, the more highly he regards Isabel. In personality, devotion, intelligence, fortitude and above all in administrative power, she makes all other women of her age and most of the men seem puny. War, the presence of Muslims on her soil and the philosophical upheavals of the age confronted her, but one by one she triumphed over them, leaving when she died a kingdom on its way to solidity where before there had been only a hollow crown.
The representative fact about Isabel is that she bore five children, some of whom were to become notable in European history, and she gave birth to each in a different city, often after days and weeks in the saddle, protecting her realm. She was a colossus of her age, a woman who supported Columbus in his discovery of a new world, and Anglo-Saxon scholars fail to do her justice. For example, one major encyclopedia allots her only sixty-four lines while giving her unimportant daughter Catalina two hundred and forty-five merely because she happened to be the first wife of Henry VIII. And Mary Queen of Scots, who accomplished nothing compared to Isabel, is accorded a staggering eleven hundred and eight. This is not only insular; it is ridiculous.
How did she happen to be born in Madrigal? When the Conde de Luna was running Castilla on behalf of the weak and widowed king Juan II, he engineered, if you remember, a marriage between Juan and Isabel of Portugal, the lady who shortly thereafter caused Luna’s head to be struck off and who later became demented. Juan already had one son, Enrique, who was first in line for the crown, and this Enrique would have a daughter Juana, who would be second in line. Isabel of Portugal would also present the king with a son, Alfonso, who would be third in line. Therefore, when in 1450 the queen announced that she was pregnant it caused little stir, for the crown was already protected with heirs, so while her husband in his feeble way watched over the government she hied herself to the family palace at Madrigal, not yet a convent, and there gave birth to a daughter, Isabel.
In the bare anteroom there was a portrait of her, and she looked to be a stocky, heavy-faced, powerful woman with large eyelids and a stunning air of command. Whether or not the portrait was physically accurate I did not know, but psychologically it was. No one ever reported her to be beautiful but many commented on the fact that she was a tender mother, a wise ruler and a woman of merciless determination.
While I had Isabel’s character in mind, I wanted to see Arévalo, which represented the next step in her development, so I left Madrigal by the southern gate, picked up a small road which led to the east and after some twenty miles I came to Arévalo and its brooding castle among the ruins. The town was strange in many ways; through the centuries an unusual number of churches had been built and the town found itself with a surfeit. Sensibly, some of the unnecessary buildings had been deconsecreated and converted into mental asylums, others into granaries.
Arévalo had a plaza, not the main one, which startled me, for it was unpaved and had the low monotonous buildings common five centuries ago, so that even when men in modern dress crossed it, I had the sense of being back in the time of Isabel. I stopped in a store facing the plaza and asked what accounted for this timelessness, and the woman explained, ‘We keep it this way so that motion picture companies can shoot their films here. We’ve been in the movies many times. Look! To make this five hundred years old you simply take down those two electric light wires and that Coca-Cola sign.’ She snapped her fingers and I made the imaginary transformation.
Today Arévalo is renowned for two accomplishments. It makes the best bread in Spain and the best roast pig. Of the bread I can say only that I ate it as if it were cake. Served in crusty small loaves, it seems to be made of honey, cream, rock salt and coarse grain which has lost none of its goodness through milling. Once I was in the area with a friend who at each meal ate three loaves, by himself. When I commented on this, he asked. ‘Why eat meat when this is here?’
As for the pig, at the Figón de la Pinilla (Eating House of Mrs. Pinilla), an old restaurant on the main plaza decorated with scenes from plays and movies, the dish is served each Tuesday, on all feast days and during the June feria. It is so well regarded in the region that Arévalo’s poet laureate, Marolo Perotas, has cast the recipe into heroic blank verse:
Everything is golden,
Everything is aromatic,
Everything is glistening
Because of the lard and garlic.
If the verses are reduced to prose, which hardly seems appropriate for such a dish, the directions become simple: ‘Select a fat suckling pig twenty-one days old and barely nine pounds in weight, because if it is larger the result will be greasy, tough and coarse. Remove all the hair and slit the pig open from head to tail. Then in a rough black earthen casserole bake it at a temperature of 185°, and in a little more than an hour and a half it is ready to eat.’ The result was so good that I had to fault the poet for having kept to himself the basting secrets. Suspecting that a good many herbs went into the dressing, I slipped into the kitchen of the figón to interrogate the cook. ‘Of course! Butter, onion, salt, lots of paprika, bay leaves, garlic, lemon, parsley, thyme and white vinegar.’ I complimented him, and he added, ‘Don’t go easy on the paprika.’ As he cooked it, the roast pig of Arévalo was a rich, greasy, succulent feast which Spaniards enjoy and foreigners approach with caution.
It was not for roast pig that Isabel of Portugal and her daughter Isabel, who was to be known as the Catholic, came to Arévalo, nor for the bread either. They came here to live in the castle, a large gloomy pl
ace but one that could be defended, while the king spent his last days in confusion and died. Young Isabel, still far removed from the succession, was of little importance, so mother and daughter stayed in the forbidding castle and slowly Isabel of Portugal went mad. She used to scream at her attendants and alternately love and berate her daughter. She beat her head against the wall on one occasion, but for the most part she receded to quiescence and sat for days staring at the walls of her self-made prison. Her daughter was allowed little freedom, and her long stay at Arévalo could just as well have been spent in any other of the nearby towns, for they were monotonously alike.
Isabel’s half brother, the infamous Enrique IV, ascended the throne and debauched the Spanish court to an extent that made him the worst king Spain ever had. Morals degenerated, sexual abuses became open, and it is generally believed that the austerity which characterized Isabel stemmed from her revulsion at her brother’s behavior. She became personally involved when Enrique discovered that in her he had a pawn of value and started those tedious negotiations whereby he offered her in marriage to this or that impossible French or German or Portugese royal personage. At one point he proposed a most decrepit Spanish nobleman and at another he conducted serious discussions over a possible marriage to the hunchback who later became Richard III of England, but Isabel shied away. It was degrading, to waste one’s time cooped up with a near-mad mother and to be bandied about by a degenerate half brother, but that was the way Isabel passed her days in Arévalo.