Iberia (22 page)

Obviously Cisneros is a hero of mine, for wherever one meets
his trail one finds greatness. It is my duty, therefore, to report
that he undertook two additional responsibilities: he served as
head of the Holy Inquisition for all Spain and many of its worst
excesses were committed under his leadership. When Carlos,
writing from Flanders prior to his arrival in Spain, suggested to
Cisneros that reforms in the inquisitorial process might be
advisable, the cardinal wrote back: ‘The Inquisition is so perfect
that there will never be any need for reform and it would be sinful
to introduce changes.’ It was also Cisneros who supported Isabel’s
expulsion of the Jews from Spain, but later, when planning his
Poliglota, he searched Europe for Jewish scholars expert in Hebrew
and brought them to Alcalá de Henares, where he protected them
as they taught.

While renewing my acquaintance with the cathedral I continued
to experience Toledo tourism, and I began to appreciate why
personal services were so bad. Each morning as I walked
downstairs, for the hotel elevator still didn’t work, I found fifty
or sixty suitcases stacked in the lobby and buses waiting at the
door. Foreigners streamed down the stairs, checked their luggage
with bleary eyes and crawled into the buses, not to return. It
reminded me of herding Texas cattle, and there was no reason
why the overworked men behind the desk should bother to
identify as individuals the animals moving in and out. In fact, I
was surprised that the service was as good as it was, except that I
was somewhat irritated one morning when the desk man looked
up with surprise and said, ‘Dios mío, are you still here?’ Finally,
one afternoon as I returned weary from a long walk through the
city, the elevator was working. It lifted me to floor two-and-a-half
and there conked out altogether, leaving me suspended for thirty
minutes.

On the other hand, I had found a good restaurant and a waiter
who actually laughed. Once when I tipped him rather more than
usual, he confided, ‘I’m saving this to get to Madrid.’

‘You taking a job there?’

 

‘No. I love bullfights and Curro Romero is fighting on Sunday.
He’s the best. Care to come along?’

I was much tempted, because I had not yet seen Romero, but
I had reached the point where my extended walks into
out-of-the-way places were beginning to produce an affection for
Toledo which I did not want to imperil. ‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll see
Romero later.’

‘Don’t delay,’ the waiter warned me, ‘because he does such
things with the bull that any day he might get hurt.’

 

My walks took me into many corners of Toledo, one of the
most interesting being the south side of the city, where the poor
lived. I had not intended going there, but a donkey came by
hauling a milk cart and I followed it for some time and found
myself in a warren of medieval streets that led down the cliffs to
the banks of the Tajo. In a few instances I saw the kind of poverty
I had seen in the farm villages in Extremadura, but most of the
houses I stopped at were those of what one might call the
respectable poor, with adequate clothing and good food but not
quite enough of either; and no matter how poor the house it
usually was next to one with a television aerial. I spent some time
with a pauper who made his living by walking into the country
and collecting reeds which he bound into whisk brooms, tying
their ends together with a rope he made from vines. He worked
at the base of a tree near the river. ‘This is my factory,’ he said. It
consisted of one very old knife for cutting his materials and a stick
on which he wound his rope, with room at each end for him to
stand on, so that when the time came to bind his reeds he could
pull very hard against the stick held down by his toes; old beggars
must have used this system in Egypt two thousand years before
the birth of Christ. ‘I make enough to live on,’ he said. When I
asked him how much, he said, ‘I can make three of these brooms
a day, when the weather’s good, and I sell them for eight cents
apiece.’ I asked if he could live on twenty-four cents a day, and
he said, ‘I beg too.’ When his whisk was finished he showed me
how to bang it against the tree. ‘Women appreciate it when you’ve
knocked out the seeds.’

 

I now came upon a courtyard which explained much about
Toledo’s noise, for a group of six or seven young men were
preening their motorcycles as carefully as men in London preen
their Jaguars. The motorcycles were of a kind new to me, for
although each had one front wheel, it had two rear wheels on
which was slung a trucklike body capable of carrying, I should
judge, about a quarterton. It was these motorcycles which made
the noise and moved the cargoes of modern Spain. The rich in
Spain have always loved automobiles; recently the middle class
have been able to afford them too; but the poor can afford only
their motorcycle trucks, and the government would face
revolution if it passed laws forbidding them. If I were dictator of
Spain, I would certainly not restrict the motorcycles, but I would
earmark a large budget for the development of a muffler system.

 

I was often stopped by Spaniards who wanted to talk about
foreign countries or their own, and if the newspapers were afraid
to talk politics, the people were not. Jokes were common.
Generalísimo Franco was traveling through the countryside when
his coach broke down. Desiring to know what his people thought,
he walked alone to a farmer and said, ‘How’re things?’ and the
farmer said, ‘Lousy. The government doesn’t know its ass from
its elbow.’ Franco became angry and said, ‘Don’t you know who
I am?’ and the farmer said, ‘I’ve seen your face somewhere before,’
and Franco said, ‘You’ll find my name on all the principal streets,
everywhere.’ The farmer dropped his hoe, looked up with delight
and cried, ‘Oh! Señor Coca-Cola!’

 

When I say that ‘I talked with this man or that,’ I am using the
verb in a restricted sense. I read Spanish fluently, understand it
partially and speak it poorly, but I have memorized some twoscore
old-style phrases of considerable gentility and these I can rattle
off, so my speaking consists of something like this: ‘My esteemed
señor, would you do me the favor of seeing…’ I begin rapidly,
thus creating the impression that I know what I’m taking about,
but I end like this: ‘if…you have…one…beer…cold…very?’
Encouraged by the speed of my opening, my listener responds at
a natural rate, and when he does I understand about two-thirds
of what he says, especially if it concerns a subject on which I know
the basic vocabulary. Of course, in philosophical discussions I
am often at a loss in critical moments because I fail to catch
whether Miguel de Unamuno said that Spain was lost or that
Spain was inspired. But I do not hold back because of my
ineptness, and I have talked for many hours with many different
kinds of Spaniards.

 

I had now descended to the Tajo at the spot where a dam
constructed centuries ago created a waterfall, and here I stayed
through twilight; always before, I had seen the fall from the top
of a cliff, distant and silent and lovely, and I was now surprised
at how much noise it made. An old man came to sit with me and
we looked for some minutes in silence at the ruins of the mill that
jutted into the river. ‘You from América del Norte? Must be a
great place.’ I asked him why he thought so, and he said, ‘Our
newspapers say so many bad things about it.’ I asked him if he’d
want to go to America, and he said, ‘For the money, yes. Here it’s
hard for a man to earn enough. But for the life over there…the
speed…the noise…no, thank you.’ I asked him if Spain were
easier now. ‘Much better. At last they’re getting some sense into
their crazy heads in Madrid.’ Something moved close to me in
the darkness and I jumped. ‘What’s that?’‘My cows,’ he said. And
there, on an edge of Toledo I’d not seen before, a farmer was
herding five black-and-white cows who apparently found a good
living among the thickets that grew along the riverbanks.

 

Whenever I wandered back toward the center of town I found
myself engulfed in the deluge of tourists and I resolved to find
out how Toledo copes with this industry. Leaving the cathedral
one morning and keeping the cardinal’s palace on my right and
the city hall on my left, I followed a narrow path to the beautiful
Plaza del Consistorio, from which ran the Pasadizo del
Ayuntamiento, a covered footway running through the heart of
a store specializing in stones from early Christian times. Leaving
this I walked along a chain of pleasant streets that brought me to
Santo Tomé, the church which holds El Greco’s ‘The Burial of
Count Orgaz,’ and a little farther on I stopped at San Juan de
Dios, 20, at the damascene shop of Luis Simón, a handsome,
fleshy man in his forties, with prematurely gray hair. He said
business was slow at the moment and he’d be glad to show me
around his factory, and from what I saw I judged that he
specialized in good workmanship applied to the kinds of things
that were bound to sell: penknives, ash trays, brooches, decorative
swords. Taking a piece of steel and a blowtorch, he softened a
mixture of wax, resin, red earth and olive oil and set the steel into
it. As soon as the flame was withdrawn the mixture hardened and
Simón was ready to work. ‘I employ fourteen people throughout
the year. It took me five years to learn the trade, another five to
become good, but now in Toledo we have a school of applied arts,
and young men can speed the process. If they have skill they earn
a good living. You’ll notice my men are all young. During the
Crusade of 1936 we lost a whole generation of artists. Older men
were killed off. Younger men were not trained. The steel I’m using,
as you can see, is very soft. They make it for us specially in the
mills at Bilbao.’

 

As he spoke he was scoring the steel with a sharp-pointed knife,
laying down a series of fine lines with burred edges about 1/120th
of an inch apart. When he had completed a section running in
one direction he turned the steel and worked across the lines, so
that in the end he had an area completely covered by crisscross
lines of the finest delicacy. Luis Simón was obviously a master
workman, but in answer to my question he said, ‘Of course, I
could make any object you see in the shop. But today I’m too
busy selling. The manufacturing I must leave to my men. This
gold I’m using comes to us from Madrid but I believe they buy
it from Germany.’ Across the burred edges of the steel he was
running a strand of very thin gold wire of great brilliance, and
when he had laid out an ancient Arabic design consisting of
triangles and solid spaces, he gently tapped each wire into position,
and as he did so the roughened edges of the lines caught at the
gold and held it fast. He then picked up a small mallet and a
blunt-headed instrument and with some force hammered the
gold wires into permanent position, closing the edges of the lines
about them. ‘That gold can never be pulled out now. Try it,’ and
when I had unsuccessfully tried, he said, ‘We now bake the steel
so that the gold forms a permanent bond and the empty spaces
of steel become jet black. That’s what damascene work is.’ He
showed me his salesroom, where an ash tray seven inches across,
decorated in a gold-and-silver Moorish design of considerable
intricacy, sold for twenty-seven dollars. ‘Twenty-four karat gold
and pure silver,’ he explained, ‘but we have others of less
complicated design, same size, for as low as sixteen dollars.’

 

He was proud of the swords made in his shop, immense things
with braided-steel handles. ‘We have our own forge, and
water-temper the steel just the way they did in this street when a
Toledo blade was famous throughout the world. The sword you’re
holding is five feet long with a woven handle and we can sell it
for nine dollars. But this one, smaller size, gold inlaid, is an exact
copy of a sword used ceremonially by Queen Isabel…Try it, it’s
completely flexible. Costs three hundred dollars. We also make
fencing swords. This one for beginners, only four-sixty and
completely flexible. Best fencing sword with inlaid handle, sixteen
dollars. This one, of course, we’re proud of. The bullfighter’s
sword. Heavy. Very strong. For beginners this one for six dollars.
For the real thing, maybe fifty dollars. When my father worked
here, all matadors’ swords came from Toledo, because we were
the world’s finest sword makers, but starting about 1910 a firm
named Luna in Valencia took away the business, and they did
make good swords. Today most matadors get theirs from Bermeja
in Madrid, and so it goes.’

 

As to tourists, Señor Simón was in favor of them. ‘They are our
existence. We can survive if we get twenty good customers a day.
I try to meet each one because I have a funny sense about what
people want and what they’ll be willing to pay. More than half
our customers are French, but the norteamericanos come second
and they tend to buy more when they do come. I speak French,
English, Italian and a little German. My two daughters work with
me. One speaks French and English; the other, French and
German. I learned my languages by listening, when I was a boy
working at the benches, while others did the selling. I’d repeat
each word over and over. I used to work in a pretty big factory.
Forty people. We had a deal with travel agencies. They’d steer
their tourists to us and we’d sell a two-dollar bracelet for three
dollars and give the agency a split. They watched us like hawks
to see how much we were selling, and we’d try to work it so that
the tourists wouldn’t buy then but would come back later on. I
got tired of such business and started my own. No guides, no
agencies, no runners. We pay commissions to no one. I emphasize
this because Toledo has been badly hurt by the last printing of
Mr. Fielding’s book on travel in Europe. He warns the
norteamericanos, “Don’t buy anything in Toledo. You can get it
cheaper in Madrid.” One norteamericano after another tells me,
“Mr. Fielding told me to buy in Madrid, so I’m going to wait.” I
say, “Can’t you make up your own mind?” but they say, “Sure,
but who wants to be robbed?” Fact is, Mr. Fielding was right. The
shops to which the guides take you do rob you, and you can buy
the same thing cheaper in Madrid. But the truth is that if you
come to shops like mine, and there are dozens like me in Toledo,
even near the Zocodover, you get bargains that no one in Madrid
can match. Look at my prices and compare. The guides know this
and they have to protect themselves, so now they tell the
norteamericanos, “Sure, Señor Simón’s price is a little lower. Why
shouldn’t it be? Everything he sells is machine-made.” This is a
tough business but we make our way.’