Such a challenge I had not met before. Not long ago my wife and I had been present when Chagall’s ceiling at the Paris Opera was unveiled; we had sat right in front of Andre Malraux and had behaved rather well, craning our necks back till we were staring into Malraux’s face, and shortly thereafter we had attended an opening at Lincoln Center and had not hooted, but apparently the music building in Barcelona was another matter. ‘What you had better do,’ Dr. Frauenfelder suggested, ‘is simply go into the building and allow it to absorb you. Don’t say anything. Just look.’ We agreed to do this, and at a late hour that night we appeared at the Palau (Palacio) de la Música and one look at the bewildering façade satisfied me that no amount of previous warning from Frauenfelder could have prepared us. The Palau had been erected in 1900 when architects in many parts of the world were getting fed up with old formalisms and fake Greek temples, but the Barcelona architects had had the courage to do something about it. They cast aside balance and austerity and above all they avoided standard types of pillars and capitals. They invented new kinds of pillars, big and small. They devised capitals that looked like turbans and others resembling mushrooms. They tacked on balconies, offset windows, and in one area added a statue of Richard Wagner in his well-known beret. On one shelf someone who looked like Joan of Arc came striding out of a sculptural group, but she was wearing a beard. And wherever I looked I saw not stone or concrete but a mixture of colored ceramic and brick, delightful to the eye, since light played across the surface unevenly, here reflecting as if from a mirror, there deadened by the rough surface of the brick. It was an extraordinary façade, appropriate for the illustration to a Gothic fairy tale, and my wife whispered, ‘What must the inside be?’
Gritting my teeth, for I had never before entered such a building except at an amusement park, I followed Dr. Frauenfelder inside, and at the door he whispered, ‘Remember, let it flow over you.’
We entered a large auditorium each square inch of which seemed to be covered with florid decoration consisting of pillars covered with broken pieces of ceramic, gigantic sculptural groups featuring flying horses, and colored stones set at odd angles. The effect was that of crawling into an overwhelming grotto, but before I could embarrass Dr. Frauenfelder by laughing, I glanced at the empty stage and saw that its two side walls were covered with eighteen of the strangest statues I had ever seen. They were larger than life size and showed women in medieval costume playing a variety of unfamiliar instruments. They had been carved in a way that was new to me: everything from the waist down was painted flat on the wall in a stylized manner, using pieces of mosaic glass for effect; everything above the waist was carved in stone naturalistically and stood out from the wall like an ordinary statue. The union created an effect that was completely charming, bearing no relationship to reality but a great deal to art.
It was these curious stone women who won me over. They seemed exactly right for the stage of a music hall, and once they established the tone, all the other bizarre phenomena fell into place. Why not have the angle where the proscenium joins the roof covered by rearing horses flying through space? No other symphony hall had such horses, and when I looked closer I saw that Valkyries were riding them. Why not? If this is a place where you come to hear music, why not have a gigantic bust of Beethoven on the right of the stage and someone who looked like Josef Stalin on the left? Dr. Frauenfelder had given me good advice: ‘Let it flow over you.’ I sat down and did just that, and slowly the wonderful harmony of the place asserted itself; in Rome and Chicago and Tel Aviv I had been in dozens of concert halls, and they’d all been alike and quite uninspiring, but nothing else on earth was like Barcelona’s Palau de la Música, and when the chorus of Catalan singers came out and stood on the stage, surrounded by the eighteen stone maidens playing their antique instruments, it was astonishing how the living and the dead united to form one majestic whole.
To residents of Andalucía who might have an adventurous or inquiring mind, Barcelona is as foreign and as exciting as France.
I fell in love with this crazy hall. I went to it night after night, and no matter what the style of music, the hall seemed to accommodate itself, and what was the more surprising, the stone girls adjusted their manner of playing, too. I heard Illinois Jacquet and Bud Freeman give a jazz concert, and the girls played jazz. I heard a tenor soloist, and they accompanied him. Best of all, I heard one of the Madrid symphonies play a Wagner program, and during the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ not only did the eighteen girls join in the music, but high on the ceiling I heard stone horses neighing and warrior maidens shouting, ‘Ho-yo-to-ho.’
On the left wall of the stage, as one faces it, the eighth girl plays a drum and wears a high Chinese-type hat beneath which appear long Saxon braids. She has a determined face, with distinct ridges at the corners of her mouth, and her head is twisted in an enchanting manner. She is completely adorable in a resolute, stubborn sort of way, and after the Dama de Elche she is my favorite statue in Spain, for she symbolizes for me the Catalan temperament, and often as I sat in her palace, listening to music, I stared at her and thought not of Haydn or Wagner but of Cataluña.
Next morning I had the good luck to meet José Porter, who runs a bookstore not far from the cathedral and who is a dedicated Catalan. For some time I had been searching for a book relating to one of the greatest Spaniards, Ramón Llull, and I asked Señor Porter to help, but this day he was inflamed over a fact which exacerbates all Spanish intellectuals: the United States had once more used Columbus Day as an excuse for honoring Italians.
‘My God!’ Porter cried in his jumbled office, his round face getting red with the indignity he was suffering. ‘Only a fool believes in the face of modern research that Colón was an Italian. Don’t Americans ever read books?’
I pointed out that the best extant biography of Columbus was by an American, Samuel Eliot Morison, and that he had accepted him as an Italian. To this. Porter, whose name was Catalan with French overtones, exploded, ‘Nonsense. Do you know nothing of Armand Bernardini-Sjoesedt?’ I shook my head, and he said with blistering contempt, ‘It’s time his works were known in America.’
Porter was a short man with the pugnacious appearance of a prize fighter, and now with a jabbing forefinger he proceeded to give me ten reasons why Columbus was not Italian. ‘First, even the standard biographies which claim he is Italian admit that he came to Spain when he was already a middle-aged man, yet not once do we find even a shred of his writing to be in Italian. Second, those who claim he was Italian never agree as to where he was born. Third, some time ago I was invited to address a learned society in the United States, Cleveland I think it was, and the chairman, knowing my research, took me aside and said, “Señor Porter, we’re proud to have you with us, but I must insist that in your speech you make no mention of the fact that Colón was not Italian. All of us who are scholars know that to be a fact, but it would be suicide to say so in this country. The Italian politicians are too strong and they’d cut off our funds.” So in what you like to call the freest country in the world, the truth was muzzled. Fourth, it was a Jew of Barcelona, Luis de Santángel, who put up the money to finance Colón’s trip of discovery, and we in this city believe he did so because of reasons which I will develop as we go along. Fifth, it seems to me significant that when’ Colón returned to Spain he reported not to Sevilla or Madrid but to Barcelona.’ Here I said that this could have been because Fernando and Isabel were here at the time, but he was already into his sixth point. ‘When Colón reached this city he handed Luís de Santángel, a letter of appreciation for his money, and it was written in Catalan. Seventh, no existe in todo el mundo ninguna carta firmada Colombo [there does not exist in the entire world one letter signed Colombo] but only those signed Colón, which is Catalan for pigeon; in other words, he never wrote in Italian or signed his name that way, but he did write in Catalan and he used a Catalan signature. Eighth, the first missionary to accompany Colón to the New World was a Catalan, Bernard Boyl. Nint
h, the foremost soldier to accompany him was also a Catalan, Pere Margarit. Tenth, none of his portraits look Italian, but they do look Catalan.’
Triumphantly Señor Porter threw his arms wide, rose from his desk and ran to stand over me. ‘It seems completely clear to me that Cristóbal Colón was a Catalan. Look it up in Bernardini-Sjoesedt.’
It was that afternoon when my wife and I discovered the full flavor of Catalan patriotism. We were taken by subway beneath the boulevard which runs northwest from the Plaza de Cataluña, and at the terminus we climbed out to board a dinky little blue-and-white trolley, which deposited us at the bottom end of a funicular railway. This lifted us to the top of a very steep hill, crowned by a Catholic shrine of some importance, which was surrounded cheek-by-jowl with a rowdy amusement park. ‘This is El Tibidabo,’ our Catalan guide said, ‘the place where the devil tempted Jesus.’
‘How did it get that name?’
‘Tibi, Latin meaning: To thee. Dabo, Latin for: I give. It was to this spot that the devil brought Jesus when he tempted him with the pleasures of earth.’
‘Wait a minute!’ I protested. ‘The Bible says that …’
‘My friend, if the devil had taken Jesus to the top of some arid hill in Palestine and Jesus had rejected a hunk of desert, would that have had spiritual significance? But if the devil brought him here, and if Jesus turned down something as glorious as Cataluña, wouldn’t that signify? From the top of El Tibidabo he pointed out the glories of his land. ‘Down there the seacoast, the best in Spain. Back here the sacred mountain of Cataluña, Montserrat. There the Llobregat coming out of the hills. And before us at our feet Barcelona, like a carpet of beauty. This spot … right here on El Tibidabo …’ He was overcome with emotion, but with his right hand inscribed a complete circle, encompassing one of the loveliest views in Spain. Later he said, ‘If Our Lord was not tempted by what he saw on El Tibidabo, he was beyond temptation.’
Succeeding days were filled with trips illustrating many different aspects of Catalan life, and although it would be instructive to report the richness we found, it will be wiser to concentrate on our experiences with the intellectual activity of the region, because Barcelona specializes in this, and the reader may be surprised to discover how fine its quality is. That evening Dr. Frauenfelder arranged a visit to the home of a prominent hostess, where I had the good luck to sit with a spirited Catalan, José María Poal, a medical doctor eager to get me started right in his city. Approvingly he said, ‘Last night I saw you at the Palau de la Música, listening to Haydn being sung in Catalan. A proper introduction.’ Dr. Poal was a short man, as most Catalans are, with very dark hair, a beard but no mustache, and heavy glasses. Like many men from this region he was a brilliant talker and commanded three or four languages; ideas were a challenge to him, and when I asked a question, he would cry, ‘Ah, yes! I was thinking about that the other day,’ and he took pleasure in explaining his thought processes, or those of the typical Catalan, as if I were a student, which indeed I was. ‘Yes! What is a Catalan? I was pondering this only yesterday and came to the conclusion that we must be understood as the diametric opposite of the Hungarian, who came out of Asia and maintained himself as an enclave in the midst of surrounding European peoples. We’re the perfect mixture, a fusion of Celt-Iberian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, French, Aragonese, Catalan, with a sprinkling of Visigoth, Mussulman and Jew. Better than any other group in Spain, we’re’able to see the world as a whole … especially Europe.’
I asked Dr. Poal to identify the salient characteristics of the Catalan, and without referring to past contemplation he cried, ‘Not art. Not architecture. Not writing, although we’ve had some great ones. Music. Pinch a man on the streets of Barcelona and if he doesn’t cry out in pitch, he’s not a Catalan. Three years ago the choral group you heard last night was in financial trouble. Had to have ten million pesetas or go out of business. A group of us went quietly through the streets of this city. Telling our friends, “The voice of Cataluña is about to be silenced. The chorus that inspired your father and mine in the dark days is broke … busted … the strings on the lute are torn.” Within twenty-four hours we had the ten million pesetas, for a Catalan would rather miss a meal than his music.’
Dr. Poal reminded me of one fact which Americans tend to forget. ‘The influence of France on Spain has been considerable, and usually positive. Much of our best thinking has been inspired by French precept, and this is particularly true of Cataluña. In this room tonight I would suppose that better than fifty percent speak French and more than that read it. At many stages of history we were part of France, and if one were to carve out a linguistic Cataluña, much of it would be found over the Pyrenees in France. A man like myself … I feel a tremendous pull toward the Pyrenees. They exert a kind of fascination on the Catalan mind. Always keep your eye out for the French influence in Spain. It’s usually constructive.’
What Dr. Poal overlooked telling me was something I already knew, that France did not reciprocate the warm feeling of Spaniards like Poal. Agitation for a separate Catalan state, or for a separate Basque, arose in northern Spain but involved substantial areas of southern France, for there were about as many Catalans and Basques living in France as there were in Spain. Therefore, this area of Spain was something of a headache to France. Contemptuously, French thinkers repeated the aphorism ‘Africa begins just south of the Pyrenees,’ and most Frenchmen dismissed Spain as something so exotic that no rationalist could comprehend her. In French regions adjacent to Cataluña the feeling was exacerbated in 1939, when hundreds of thousands of Spanish patriots fled through the mountains to take up what they considered temporary residence in France; they remained for more than a quarter of a century. Finally, during many periods of history, Cataluña formed a part of France and was governed by Frenchmen, so that it can be considered a defected province but one that France was well rid of.
I thought it best not to raise such questions but I did pose two others. First, what was the future of Cataluña? ‘Ah yes! I’ve been thinking about this a great deal and I know of no one in my acquaintance who dreams any longer of Cataluña as a separate state. At one time it could have been free … like Switzerland … or maybe a union of Basques and Navarrese of Spain and France … a rough confederation of some kind … but those days are gone. Everyone knows it. We must integrate fully with Spain, and everyone I know is eager to do so. But I would lie if I did not say that I feel more Catalan than anyone else in this room or perhaps in all Barcelona. My heart throbs to the rhythm of this land. I write poetry in Catalan. I should. It was my grandfather who compiled the Catalan grammar. Montserrat, Vich … these places are part of me and I would die rather than betray Cataluña. But politically our future rests in being a creative part of Spain. God, how the rest of Spain needs us!’
Second, with the continued influx of immigrants from Extremadura and Andalucía, would not the spirit of Cataluña be watered down until it vanished? ‘Now, now! I’ve just been reading a fine book on that very subject. You’ve got to read it. Francisco Candel’s Los otros catalanes [The Other Catalans]. It’s a probing analysis of this very problem, and Señor Candel claims that it works the other way. The Andalusian comes up here, sees the wonder of Cataluña … the schools, the hospitals, yes, and the big factories where men earn a decent wage. Señor Michener, in five years he’s a better Catalan than I am.’ I said I doubted this because my experience in other nations had been contrary, to which Dr. Poal replied, ‘Other nations, yes. But Cataluña is special. Because we are so mixed in our heritage we are not narrow-minded little provincials. We have a bigness of spirit … a singing of the heart. This communicates itself, especially to people like the Andalusians, who’ve lived in a bitter, narrow world.’
As a result of my talk with Dr. Poal, I acquired a typed copy of Dr. Salustiano del Campo’s research paper, ‘On the Assimilation of Immigrants in Cataluña,’ completed only a few weeks earlier. To me its statistics were interesting, because I had already wit
nessed in other parts of Spain the passion with which poverty-stricken families had said, ‘He’s lucky. He moved to Barcelona.’ Here was a study reporting the results of these moves.
‘Why did you immigrate to Barcelona?’ Nearly half replied, ‘Because I wanted to find a better life,’ but many made the tragic confession, ‘In my village I was unable to earn a living.’
‘Has the move worked out well?’ More than half replied that it had exceeded the hopes they had had when they left their villages. Only ten percent said they had been disappointed.
‘What kind of effect has the immigration had on Cataluña?’ Among those moving in, more than half believed that Cataluña had been lucky to get them; among the Catalans who had to make places for the immigrants, only a third thought the influx had been beneficial. About half doubted that the move was for the best.
‘Are the immigrants learning to speak Catalan?’ The testimony of both the immigrants and the native Catalans among whom they worked was unequivocal: very few learn Catalan. This is probably for the good of Cataluña, since it will make assimilation with the rest of Spain easier, but it must create apprehensions in the minds of fervid Catalans like Dr. Poal.
Then followed a series of tables which I found fascinating. They reported on Dr. del Campo’s attempt to identify the ‘social distance’ which separated the various groups of newcomers. People from twelve regions of Spain, such as Extremadurans and Andalusians, were listed, accompanied by people from twelve foreign countries, such as Frenchmen and North Americans. A variety of questions was then put to Catalans and immigrants alike, with the results shown in the table on this page.