Rome built greater cities in Spain than Mérida, but it was the one whose monuments have been best preserved, and a visit to its museum and excavations is like a trip to ancient Rome. It has a wealth of important structures: an immense circus seating 30,000, where chariot races were held and where flooding enabled boats to engage in naval battles; a well-preserved amphitheater of 14,000 seats, where slaves were fed to wild beasts; an aqueduct of giant proportions; and numerous arches and memorials. Three sites, however, are of special attraction. The theater, which we know to have been built during the second year of the city’s existence, must have been a thing of marked beauty; it was a perfect semicircle with four separate flights of seats reaching high in the air. The proscenium utilized the full diameter of the circle and was backed by five double-tiered pulpits, or forums, supported by innumerable white marble columns. For about sixteen hundred years the theater lay forgotten beneath rubble, which preserved it, so that when serious excavations started in this century most of the stones and pillars still existed and had only to be raised to their original positions. Today the theater is a masterpiece of imperial architecture, and one can sit in its lovely semicircle and imagine how it must have looked when Plautus or Terence was being presented. Or he can climb onto the central forum, where statues of gods once more decorate the rostrum, and imagine what it was to have been a Roman actor touring the provinces. This theater is a national treasure of Spain and is again being used for dramatic presentations.
The museum housed in an old church in the center of the city is more informative in that it contains a fine cross section of the art uncovered in Mérida in the last two hundred years. Its massive heads and clean-limbed statues are some of the best that have reached us from Roman times, including an especially provocative head of Augustus as a god, wearing a mysterious cowl over his marble locks, but I preferred two smaller heads which legend claims are his adoptive son and grandson, Tiberius and Claudius. The statue of the former shows a fleshy young man with heavy jowls, thick neck and flat-topped imperial hair. The face is handsome but the mouth is thin and cruel, and if this is indeed a portrait of Tiberius, it catches the spirit of that difficult man. Claudius, on the other hand, shows a frail and narrow face, slight neck and small ears. The hair is done in a more poetic manner and is less flat. The marble face has a thoughtful look that could be taken perhaps as vacant, and the mouth is weak like that of a stammerer. Again, the essential personality of Claudius has been captured.
But the glory of Mérida lies in the Roman bridge, a half-mile long, composed of eighty-one huge arches. It crosses the two arms of the Guadiana and today carries autobuses on its ample roadway where two thousand years ago it carried marching legions and their carts. It is a splendid construction, and those solid pillars that bear the brunt of any flood are pierced by a small narrow arch to permit the passage of excess waters. It was built of granite, perhaps before the birth of Christ, and has this curiosity: the arches are numbered beginning at the Mérida end and records have been kept as to what happened to which. Thus we know that Arches 11–16 were rebuilt by a Visigothic king in 686. Arches 21–22 were blown up by Spanish-English forces in 1811 to prevent Napoleon from using the bridge during the siege of Badajoz. Arches 29–31 were washed away during the flood of 1860, and 32–33 were lost in 1877. The Roman bridge was so important to this part of Spain that in Extremaduran documents it was referred to simply as ‘the bridge.’ It remains a majestic structure.
The arches have long served a double purpose, for they not only support the bridge but also offer protected camping sites for gypsy caravans that travel this road. I used to walk out across the bridge and descend to the meadows on the far side, and there under the arches I would see gypsy families, their beds spread out beneath the arches, their tables set with spiced food, their women in bright costumes, their men in more somber dress but each with a rattan cane which was his badge as a horse trader. Beyond the arch I would see groups of cattle, and I suppose that these camping sites have been used in this way for the five hundred years the gypsies have been in Spain. They are an undigested element in Spanish life, beyond control of state and Church alike. Up to a few years ago they were not even allowed in the armed forces, and when Spaniards argued with me about discrimination in the United States, I used to ask them about gypsies in Spain. Their answer was, ‘Gypsies! They’re different.’
During my wanderings in Mérida I stayed at the Parador Nacional, and because I shall be tempted to describe so many of these paradors scattered about Spain, I had better describe this one fully and have done with it. The noun parador is derived from the verb parar (to stop). A parador is therefore a stopping place, an inn, and these have been established by the government in recent years to help meet the sudden and enormous influx of tourists. They stand in spots which tourists would like to visit but where private capital either could not or would not build adequate accommodations, and in the opinion of travelers they are the best system of inns in the world. Their charges are unusually low, about a half or two-thirds of what one would normally pay for a good hotel in Spain, and the plan seems to be for the government to operate them only as long as necessary and when they have proved their feasibility to sell them to private operators.
Where practical, the paradors are housed in ancient buildings, such as old convents, monasteries, castles no longer in use, hospitals dating back to the age of the Catholic Kings or inns in which Columbus may have slept. One characteristic distinguishes them all. In Spain interior decoration is apt to be pretty bad, favoring dark massive objects unfitted to the human eye or fundament, but the paradors have been decorated by some of the most skilled art connoisseurs in Spain so that each is an experience in good design; each contains handsome old furniture and is embellished with paintings and brocades centuries old. The food is exceptionally good; the personnel is trained centrally and then sent out to the remote areas where the paradors are located. To travel across Spain by halting each night at a parador is to know travel at its best and most reasonable.
At Mérida the parador is housed in the Convento de los Frailes de Jesús, which stands in the heart of town and dates back to sometime around the year 1500. The numerous air-conditioned rooms stand on several different levels, which indicate how the old convent was added to as the number of friars increased, and as one climbs extremely old stone stairs to his room, with its floor of hand-hewn planks eighteen inches wide, it takes no imagination to picture oneself in Spain four centuries ago. But the chief beauty of this parador is the cloister of the convent, now used as a kind of salon. It exists unchanged from its original days, a quiet, beautiful square outlined by columns and arches. The former are very old, but the capitals which top them are something you may not see again in your travels, for they go back to Visigothic days, that period during which raiders from the north of Europe swept over Spain, drove out the Romans and established Christianity as the state religion. The central part of the cloister is now a garden filled with flowers and fine shrubs and with a well so old no one knows its date.
During the year of which I shall be speaking I should be visualized as living in such surroundings. Many of the paradors I stayed in were more beautiful than the one in Mérida; some were larger; others were in older buildings; and in still others the food was so good as to qualify as some of the best in Spain. Of course, large cities like Madrid, Sevilla and Barcelona have no paradors, for there they are not needed, but in most areas of the country they are within striking distance and represent the best value in Spain.
I especially enjoyed the parador at Mérida because from it I could walk to the Basílica de Santa Eulalia, and I want to spend a few moments discussing this stalwart old medieval church, since it established certain themes which will recur in this book. In either A.D. 303 or 304, when Christianity was fighting for a foothold in Spain, a group of children in Mérida became infected with the new religion, held to be both infamous and treasonous by the priests of Rome’s official paganism, and much effor
t was spent in trying to win the children away from Jesus, but they were truly inspired with the new religion and refused to apostatize. One day when a high official pleaded with special force, the girl Eulalia, then twelve or thirteen years old, reared back and spit in his eye. To teach the others a lesson she was burned at the stake. Her tomb is reputed to be somewhere within the area covered by the present basilica; however, when we get to Barcelona we will find that certain partisans of that region are convinced that her remains were translated there, where she is also the patron saint, but serious students believe that two different saints are involved, the Barcelona one being a literary version of the Mérida. At any rate, their saint’s days are different, December 10 in Mérida and February 12 in Barcelona. Much bitterness has been spent on this issue, complicated by the fact that the city of Oviedo claims that Eulalia’s tomb was moved there in 783.
Roman bridge. Romany folk.
On the ancient wall of the church appears in huge letters the name JOSE ANTONIO, and beside the main entrance stands a very old Roman temple. As I entered the basilica I had the good fortune to meet a priest whose life had centered upon Mérida, Father Juan Fernández López. From a very small village he had come here to school at the age of six, had gone to Badajoz for his seminary training and then returned to Mérida to work. He looked as if he were still in his twenties, with a squarish face, dark complexion and bubbling enthusiasm. He was an exciting guide and I mention him in such detail because wherever I went in Spain I was to meet either by accident or plan such men. They are scholars in a quiet way, enthusiasts for their city or their church, willing sharers of what they know. I shall not list them all as I go along; let Father Fernández of the Basílica de Santa Eulalia represent them, for they are one of the chief adornments of Spain, a country where education is not widespread and where the truly educated man is a kind of monument to himself.
Father Fernández was especially eager that I see two things: the pair of old and friendly chapels flanking the main altar, for they showed all the ancient grace of line and structure that I had missed in the cathedral at Badajoz, and the pulpit. At the latter Father Fernández wanted me to note particularly the bas-relief scenes depicting the saints Servandus and Germanus, because he had a tale to relate about how these boys who he claimed were from a nearby village, but who were actually from Sevilla and Cádiz respectively, had attained sainthood. I did not hear what he said because I was attracted by a quite different saint carved on the pulpit, and since he is to form the leitmotif of this book and the subject of the last chapter, I had better introduce him properly at this first appearance.
He was Santiago (St. James), the patron of Spain. He was presented as a squat, sturdy man holding a staff, and a big-bellied gourd and wearing a large-brimmed hat decorated with cockleshells. He was a pilgrim, and judging from this first statue of many that we shall see, a doughty traveler prepared for whatever he met on the way. This was the famous Santiago. My heart warmed to meet him, for he had played an intimate role in the building of Spain.
Before I left Mérida I went to the two final buildings that help summarize its history. The first was a gangling, ugly fortress at the end of the Roman bridge. It was a square structure, much longer than a football field on each side, and had been built originally in 835 by Moors who had by then thrown out the Visigoths and established Islam as Spain’s religion. In 1230 Christians again occupied the city, and the fortress passed into the hands of that para-military organization, the Knights of Santiago, who ruled it as their personal domain, a misrule which lasted to 1500.
The final building was something quite different. Atop a small hill at the south end of town stood a modern bullring, where bullfights were held occasionally in the summer, and normally I would not have bothered with what appeared to be an ordinary modern edifice that could be duplicated in any of a dozen small cities. The unique thing about the bullring in Mérida was that by accident it stood precisely upon the spot where in Roman times a great Mithraeum had stood, that mysterious and dark temple to the rock-born Persian god Mithras, who had killed the divine bull from whose body sprang all plants and animals on which man exists. In any Roman garrison town, and at its height Mérida housed 90,000 legionnaires, the Mithraeum was the most important temple, because in its subterranean caverns occurred the taurobolium, the ritual in which soldiers banded together to purchase a pristine bull, then huddled beneath a grating on which the bull was ceremoniously slaughtered so that the hot blood of the animal could run down over them, conferring invincibility in battle. How many bulls must have been slain in the Mithraeum of Mérida in those years when Spain was the manpower reservoir for the empire!
Today, on the spot where these sacrifices occurred, other bulls of that same breed are sacrificed for somewhat similar emotional reasons: their mysterious power confers immortality on those who fight them and on those who participate in the spectacle. I did not see any bullfights in Mérida because prior to my departure from home, Conrad Janis, son of the well-known New York art dealer, had taken me aside and said, ‘The one thing you must see when you get to Spain is this new matador Curro Romero. Hottest thing to come along in many years. The greatest.’ He spoke with a certain intensity. ‘Curro cites the bull from a distance, seems to mesmerize him. Brings him forward very slowly, as if he were a lap dog, then wraps the bull around him to form a magnificent piece of sculpture. He’s enchanting—and remember his name. Curro Romero. No matter how far you have to travel to see him, take my word. He’ll be worth it.’
Young Janis was a hard-headed witness, not given to hyperbole, and if he spoke so highly of a new matador, the man merited attention, so I studied the posters that appeared in Mérida, but unfortunately Romero was not scheduled to fight and I did not see him performing at the Mithraeum, where bulls had been worshiped two thousand years ago.
I was now ready for my second expedition. East of Mérida, in a bleak landscape commanded by a low hill on which cowers a crumbling castle, stands the miserable village of Medellín, a collection of low houses strung along unpaved streets. In midsummer the heat is unbearable and the dust as copious as the flies. The church, whose thick old walls seem to be falling down, is closed most of the time, and the main plaza is as empty and unrewarding as any in Spain. Here is Extremadura at its most unforgiving, yet this little town is a shrine to which a few devoted travelers come each year from overseas to pay homage to one of the molders of history: Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico and archetype of the conquistador. Born of poor parents and foreseeing no opportunity in a village like Medellín, where life was dominated by whatever family happened to occupy the castle on the hill, Cortés struck out for the New World, where his harsh Extremaduran training enabled him, with a bare handful of men like himself, to conquer the Aztec empire and deliver it to Spain. His achievement was heroic, for he brought not only the gold and silver mines to the king but also a new race of people to the Church.
In the weed-grown plaza of Medellín, above the spare white houses with their tiny windows and red-tiled roofs, stands one of Spain’s uglier statues. Cortés in bronze looks over the land he deserted and he is brutal in his arrogance. His right leg is rigid and pushed back, so that his hip is high, while his left leg is cocked and resting on some vanquished object. His right arm, holding the baton of authority, is drawn back, while the left holds the unfurled flag of conquest. He wears an ornate helmet and his heavily bearded face is grim with determination. Behind his legs dangles the scabbard of a huge sword, and he might well be called ‘The Spirit of Extremadura.’
The heavy base is adorned by shields bearing the local spellings of the names of those strange places where the emigrants from this town gave their lives: ‘Méjico, Tebasco, Otumba, Tlascala.’ At the site of the cottage from which he left for conquest stands the plaque: ‘Here stood the house where Hernán Cortés was born in 1484.’ (Most scholars say 1485.) But one looks in vain for the school established with the wealth he won, or the library, or the hospital, or the unive
rsity, or even the factory set up for personal gain. The richness of Medellín, her men, was exported and nothing came back. No nation in history ever won so much wealth for itself in so short a time as did Spain in that half-century from 1520–1570, nor did any other nation ever retain so little for itself. Gold came by the shipload from Mexico and Peru, paused briefly in Spain and, having accomplished nothing, sped on to Italy and the Low Countries. Again and again in mournful repetition this will be the story of Extremadura, and when I see a defrauded village like Medellín, I am appalled at the bad deal Spain accepted in that crucial era. In fact, she ended up worse off than she had been when it began, for all the bright young men who might have developed Spain were gone. One might argue, I suppose, that the social system in Spain was such that if an energetic man like Cortés had stayed in Medellín he would have been submerged by the reactionary force of the castle on the hill, and that in escaping to Mexico he at least accomplished something. But whether that argument is valid or not, the fact is that when he succeeded in Mexico some of the fruits of his conquest should have filtered back to his homeland, but that did not happen and today Medellín stands as one of the most mournful places in Europe.
Gypsies.
A brief explanation regarding historical and geographical names in this book. It is not just to refer to Spaniards by their English names. The Catholic Kings, whom we shall meet later, were not Ferdinand and Isabella; the great emperor who will dominate the next chapter was not Charles the Fifth; and the mighty and complex man who married Queen Mary of England was not Philip the Second. They were, respectively, Fernando and Isabel, Carlos V and Felipe II. I once put this problem to a tertulia of savants, whom we shall meet later in Madrid, and they, having faced the problem in their own writings, proposed a sensible rule: ‘What name would you have used when speaking to the man face to face?’ The conquistador we know as Cortez was surely Cortés. Therefore I shall use Spanish names, except in the case of Cristóbal Colón; after all, he was an Italian who did not get to Spain until 1484, when he was in his lates thirties, so that Colón is as much a perversion of his name as is Columbus. The same rule will govern geographical names, which means Extremadura not Estremadura; Sevilla not Seville; Zaragoza not Saragossa; and La Coruña not Corunna; also, in Portugal, Lisboa and Porto. However, in the case of adjectives derived from place names, special problems arise. Strictly speaking, a man from Extremadura is an extremeño, a man from Madrid a madrileño, a man from Andalucía an andaluz, and one from the Basque Provinces a vascongado, all, you will notice, without capital letters. Some of these forms are so difficult to identify that I have preferred to use standard English forms, which in the cases cited above are Extremaduran, Andalusian and Basque; but in Spanish cultural life the word madrileño carries with it such specific meanings that I shall keep it, with a capital letter.