Iberia (27 page)

 

‘I believe he really came here to get closer to God,’ the tall priest
said. ‘He prayed a good deal. He used to write to his son, “Above
everything else hold fast to the Catholic Church. Support the
Inquisition. Stamp out heresy.” He really believed in God.’

 

The chubby priest, who was the more sentimental of the two,
insisted that we go back into the monastery, although his friend
and I were ready to push on. He led us to a bare room, of which
he said, ‘Here Carlos died. What age did you say?’

 

‘Fifty-eight.’

 

‘His body was kept here in this chapel for…How many years
did you say?’

 

‘Many years.’

 

‘It was then translated to El Escorial and buried beneath that
pile of granite.’ He fell silent for a moment, then added, ‘But here
is where his soul will always rest.’

 

We three paid our respects to Carlos, ruler of much of the
known world, determiner of Spain’s history, defender of the faith.
The two priests prayed and we shook hands. The fat one said,
‘Amusing. An American who had no contacts with him. Two
Frenchmen who fought him all his life. We meet here to pay him
homage. What a miserable place.’

 

It was not till four years later that I came upon a modern
biography of Carlos V which took the edge off our prayers and
philosophizing at Yuste. Researchers have found documents that
spell out what happened at Yuste and it was somewhat different
from what the French priests and I had imagined. When Carlos
sat in cold Brussels, contemplating retirement, his thoughts kept
going back to a monastery he had once seen in the blazing summer
heat of Extremadura and it was this that encouraged him to give
up the crown and have some relaxation and pleasure in his last
years. He drew up a list of those who were to share his lonely exile
at Yuste and it totaled seven hundred and sixty-two people, but
when it was suggested that so many might crowd the place he
trimmed it down to a hundred and fifty, of whom two-thirds
actually accompanied him to the monastery, where he was visited
by a constant stream of nobles and members of the royal family.
At first he calculated that he could get by on a yearly allowance
of sixteen thousand ducats but soon found that he would need
at least twenty, with another thirty thousand to serve as a
contingency fund.

 

Inventories have come down to us of what Carlos lugged out
to Yuste: magnificent tapestries, choice furnishings, paintings by
Titian and jeweled bric-a-brac. The cells of the monastery were
for his entourage; for him a special house was built with a
man-made lake under his window so that he could fish for trout
from his living room. His kitchens were supervised by a
Portuguese who had been with him for years, a cook much
addicted to heavy German sauces which, when accompanied by
gigantic quantities of alcohol, inflamed his gout. When an attack
came, Carlos retreated for a few days to a salubrious diet, then
gorged himself on slabs of red beef and fish, both bad for gout.
He insisted upon hors d’oeuvres of jellied eel and stewed partridge
and loved desserts of the richest and heaviest sort. Such a diet
alone would have insured the return of his gout, but he was also
insanely fond of anchovies; his staff saw to it that little kegs of
them were sent ahead whenever he took a trip. Naturally, when
he had eaten his quota of salted anchovies he generated a huge
thirst, which he slaked with large bottles of beer kept in buckets
of snow brought down from the mountains.

 

When I read these new researches on Carlos the ascetic recluse
of Yuste, I felt very close to him, for I too suffer from gout and I
too crave anchovies above any other food; in this matter Spain
has been a temptation to me, a kind of self-inflicted purgatory in
which those marvelous little fish stare at me from every bar, in
every salad, and I had real tears in my eyes when I read of how
one day Carlos, after a long trip across the countryside, came to
an inn where his keg of anchovies waited, only to find that they
had been so jostled by horses coming across the mountains, they
were reduced to a formless pulp. Today, thank heaven, Swedish
research men have developed a simple pill which controls gout,
and when I read the letters of Carlos and Felipe, for the latter
inherited the disease in even more virulent form, and see how
they hobbled about much of their time and developed the evil
tempers which they vented on their underlings, I reflect that the
history of Spain might have been much modified had the two
kings been given not buckets of anchovies but a supply of Swedish
pills.

 

The strangest fact about Carlos was not his retirement, nor his
lust for anchovies, nor his extended absence from Spain, but that
he ruled the country from 1517 to 1555 without being legally
king, for during these years his mother, Juana la Loca, lived hidden
away in a filthy room that we shall visit later. She was
unquestionably Queen of Spain, and legal documents during the
period bear her name first, followed by that of Carlos as her
executor. She died on April 11, 1555, and Carlos abdicated the
Spanish part of his holdings on January 16, 1556, so that he did
finally acquire the kingship—but for only nine months. Scholars
in increasing numbers are turning up evidence which suggests
that Juana was not really mad but that it was to her son’s
advantage to keep her penned up, which he did.

 

Carlos V, this little man called upon to wage vast struggles, this
least of the quadrumvirate—Henry of England, Francis of France,
Suleiman of Turkey, Carlos of Spain—seemed at the time to be
victor by virtue of his obstinacy and his dedication to one religious
principle. It required the passage of two centuries to prove how
wrong his decisions had been, how hollow his victories. The ideas
of Francis and Henry blossomed into great kingdoms and empires,
whereas those of Carlos withered into national disaster. It is such
thoughts that torment one at the monastery of Yuste.
IV
CORDOBA

The traveler wishing to observe Islamic Spain has his choice of
two cities, Granada with its Alhambra or Córdoba with its Great
Mosque (in Spanish, Mezquita). Of the two the former is by a
considerable degree the more exciting and also the easier to
absorb, for its buildings, gardens and geographic setting are
immediately recognizable as significant. It would take a dull man
to miss the point of Granada, for its Alhambra is a museum of
Islamic memories.

But for three personal reasons I chose Córdoba. It was more
prosaic and therefore showed its Islamic heritage with less
hyperbole. It had been the intellectual center of Islam, so that its
influence lasted long after the expulsion of the last Moors from
Granada. And in Córdoba had lived four of the Spaniards who
were most important to me and I wanted to see where these
excellent men had lived and why they had been born here and
not in some more congenial place. It is interesting but accidental
that each gained his greatest fame after he had left Spain.

Córdoba is a fine city laid out along the right bank of a bend
in the Río Guadalquivir, and to reach the site of my first
pilgrimage I had to walk down a pleasant avenue named after
Generalísimo Franco and through a shady park, at the end of
which I came to the limits of the old Jewish quarter, evacuated in
1492 but since occupied by working-class families. I followed an
ancient Roman wall which had outlined the Jewish quarter and
came to a Roman gate where a plaza had been built, providing a
rustic vista marked by three reflecting pools lined with roses,
cypresses and willows. At the end nearest the gate a series of low
stone walls, handsomely proportioned, created a small plateau,
in the middle of which rose a column of cream-colored granite
on which stood the statue of a shortish, baldheaded man in a toga,
bearing in his right hand a manuscript scroll of some sort, perhaps
a tragedy in verse. His face was what I would have expected, that
of a grave gentleman utterly unafraid of adversity or death or the
persecution that might be visited upon him by the tyrant Nero.
He stood looking away from the wall, away from Rome, and over
the distant hills of Andalucía, his homeland.

He was Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4

B.C.-A.D
. 65), whom many
consider to have been the foremost Spaniard who ever lived; more
consider him the representative Spaniard. Philosopher, orator,
essayist, playwright and poet, he not only had a distinguished
literary career that marked him as the leading intelligence of his
time, but he also became a political leader, serving as consul of
Rome. He had been appointed tutor to the boy Nero, whose
counselor he later became and whose excesses he modified. He
was a Stoic by nature, a city man by preference and a manipulator
of political forces by design. In all that he tried he succeeded and
he was both a perfect Roman and the ideal Spaniard. In the end
his flexible principles proved not elastic enough to keep up with
Nero, and the emperor commanded him to commit suicide, which
he performed with the noble stoicism he had recommended to
others.

Most Spanish intellectuals, especially those with a mordant
cast of mind, consider themselves the children of Seneca; his ideas
are as vital today as they were when he first propounded them,
and I have known one politician, one novelist and one bullfighter
who have assured me that the principles by which they live and
practice their art derive from Seneca. His capacity to see the world
cynically but with wit endears him to the Spaniard; his exaggerated
sense of pundonor was one of the foundations of that philosophy;
and his skillful use of words served as a prototype for Spanish
verbosity. I suppose that the best single thing I did to prepare
myself for intercourse with Spaniards was to read Seneca again;
he seemed as contemporary as a man lounging in a café, as
thoroughly Spanish as anyone I was to meet. The more I reread
his prosaic and often pedantic works, the more Spanish they have
seemed, and I imagine that the two pole stars of Spanish thought
are Seneca and Cervantes; at least they are the Spaniards who
speak most directly to me.

To catch the flavor of Seneca’s message it is necessary to hear
him speaking at some banquet in Rome, where he was often in
the company of the empire leaders. One recurring principle was
stoicism and to this he constantly returned:

Anyone may take life from man, but no one death: a thousand
gates stand open to it.

Behold a spectacle to which God may worthily turn his attention;
behold a match worthy of God, a brave man hand-in-hand with
adverse fortune.

Fire tries gold; misery tries brave men.

 

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare to attempt
them, but they are difficult because we do not dare to do so.

The fear of war is worse than war itself.

 

Life, if you know how to use it, is long enough.

Seneca was constantly concerned with the application of
philosophy to daily life, and some of his best writings are his
sententious prose essays on the virtues and limitations of moral
judgment. His plays, which deal with the same problem, are apt
to be pompous if not ridiculous, for in them he sounds as if he
were orating old-fashioned opinions to which he himself did not
subscribe (a common fault of Spanish writing), but elsewhere
some of his conclusions carry a striking sense of modernity:

As wool imbibes at once certain colors and others it does not,
unless it has been frequently soaked and doubly-dyed: so there
are certain kinds of learning which, on being acquired, are
thoroughly mastered; but philosophy, unless she sinks deeply into
the soul and has long dwelt there, and has not given a mere
coloring but a deep dye, performs none of the things which she
had promised.

Human affairs are not so happily arranged that the best things
please the most men. It is the proof of a bad cause when it is
applauded by the mob.

A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner;
it is much better to confine yourself to a few authors than to
wander at random over many.

Truth will never be tedious to him that travels through the nature
of things; it is falsehood that gluts us.

 

From the time that money began to be regarded with honor, the
real value of things was forgotten.

A recurring theme of Spanish history is the failure of Spaniards,
no matter in what part of the world they find themselves, to
develop a workable system of self-government. It is strange,
therefore, that the first great Spanish thinker directed himself
repeatedly to this problem. I suppose Seneca said more on this
topic than on any other, and to call him primarily a Stoic is
misleading; primarily he was a speculator on what the role and
forms of government should be:

He who dreads hatred too much, knows not how to reign. Terror
is the proper guard of a kingdom.