Iberia (36 page)

We drove south to the end of the road. Parking our car in the
rain, we set out on foot along a narrow earthen path that might
have been passable in the dry season but which was now so muddy
that going was difficult; if we stepped off the path on either side
we were in swampland, not the green-covered stagnant swamp
of fiction but an interminable area extending for miles in all
directions, consisting of completely flat land covered with grass
and two or three inches of water. ‘These are the swamps of the
Guadalquivir,’ the matador said, and for the first time I looked
out upon the infinite desolation which was to attract me so
strongly and in so many ways.

The storm clouds swept rain squalls ahead of us which beat
down upon the brackish waters to bounce back in tiny droplets,
so that it seemed as if there were no horizon, as if sky and earth
alike were made of mist and grayness. For two reasons that first
day persists in memory. The immensity of the swamps astounded
me; I had not realized that Spain included so large an area of
primitive land, a retreat given over primarily to wildlife, where
birds from all parts of Europe and Africa came in stupendous
numbers to breed; this swamp, lying so close to Sevilla, was as
wild as the seacoast of Iceland, as lonely as the steppes of Russia.

What I remember most vividly, however, is that on this
introductory day, for reasons which no one has been able to
explain, as the matador and I walked a flock of swallows stayed
with us, perhaps a hundred in all, and when we took a step they
swooped down to the tips of our shoes, then off into the sky, one
after another, so that we moved in a kind of living mandorla such
as encloses the saints in Italian religious painting. At times the
swallows came within inches of our faces, swooping down with
an exquisite grace past our fingertips and to our toes, flicking the
swamp water with their wings. This continued for about half an
hour, during which we seemed to be members of this agitated
flock, participants in their spatial ballet, which moved with us
wherever we went. It was one of the most charming experiences
I have ever had in nature, comparable I suppose only to the day
when I first skin-dived to the bottom of the coral beds off Hawaii;
there was the same sense of kinesthetic beauty, of nature in
motion, with me in the center and participating in the motion.

Why the swallows stayed with us for so long, I cannot guess;
once during the walk I wondered if our feet, to which they seemed
to be paying most attention, might be kicking up insects too small
for us to see but inviting to the birds; but I had to dismiss this
when I saw no evidence that the swallows were catching anything.
There was also the possibility that our steps were throwing up
droplets of water which the birds were taking in the air, but again
there was no evidence that we were doing so, and I concluded
that they were simply playing a game. This was not unreasonable,
for obviously they were enjoying our walk as much as we were.
At any rate, they served to remind me that these swamps existed
as a realm for birds and that in entering it I was trespassing on
their terrain.

The area is called Las Marismas (The Tidelands, in this instance
a twofold tide, one coming in from the Atlantic Ocean direct and
a more important one creeping up the Río Guadalquivir to spread
out over an immense area). Las Marismas is roughly forty miles
from north to south, thirty-five miles from east to west, but it is
not square and has an area of less than a thousand square miles,
or about six hundred thousand acres, of which only about three
hundred thousand could be called swampland proper, the rest
being equally flat and bleak but free of water most of the year.

I was fortunate in visiting Las Marismas for the first time in
winter, for this was the rainy season and I was thus able to see the
bull ranch in maximum swamp condition; it seemed to me that
about seventy percent of its land was either under water or was
so water-logged that if I stepped on what appeared to be a solid
tussock, it collapsed beneath me with a soft squish, so that my
feet were again in water. It was on such land that the Concha y
Sierra bulls flourished, but it was not until the matador led me
to the dry area on which the ranch buildings stood, and I saw the
famous brand of an S inside a C scrawled on the side of a corral,
that I was ready to believe that this was the territory of the bulls
about which I had read so much.

The Concha y Sierra bulls had a brave history, and many a
noble head had gone from the bullring to the taxidermist’s and
from there to the wall of some museum, with a plaque beneath
to inform the visitor as to what this bull had accomplished before
he died.

On June 1, 1857, the Concha Bull Barrabás participated in what
the books describe as ‘one of the most famous accidents in the
history of bullfighting’ in that, with a deft horn, it caught the full
matador Manuel Domínguez under the chin and then in the right
eye, gouging it out. It was assumed that Domínguez would die,
for his face was laid open, but with a valor that had characterized
his performance in the ring he survived, and three months later
was fighting again as Spain’s only one-eyed matador, having
stipulated that for his return the bulls must again be from Concha
y Sierra. For another seventeen years he fought with only one eye
and enjoyed some of his best afternoons with Concha bulls. He
is known in taurine history as Desperdicios (Cast-off Scraps, from
the contemptuous manner in which he tossed aside his
gouged-out eyeball).

On August 3, 1934, the Concha bull Hormigón (Concrete)
verified his name by killing the beginning bullfighter Juan Jiménez
in Valencia, and on May 18, 1941, in Madrid the gray Farolero
(Lamplighter) killed the full matador Pascual Márquez, thus
ending the career of a young fellow of great promise. On August
18, 1946, the Concha bull Jaranero (Carouser) killed young
Eduardo Liceaga, brother of one of Mexico’s best matadors. And
so the story goes, with the great gray bulls of Concha y Sierra
defending themselves valiantly in all plazas.

The matador and I left the ranch buildings and on horseback
set off across the marshes to see if we could find any of the bulls
in pasture, and after we had ridden for some time in the direction
of Guadalquivir, that meandering, desultory river of such force
and quietness, the matador suddenly cried, ‘Look!’ and off to our
left, rising from the reeds and thistles like an apparition, loomed
a gray bull, his horns uptilted, his ears alert. We stopped the
horses. He stopped. We stared at each other for several minutes,
and then we saw, gradually appearing from the mists behind him,
the shapes of fifteen or twenty other bulls, and slowly they moved
towards us, not in anger but rather to see what we were doing.
They came fairly close, much too close for me, but the matador
said, ‘They won’t charge as long as they’re together and we stay
on the horses,’ and so we stayed, among the bulls who had
materialized from the swamps, and after a while they gradually
drifted away and the mists enveloped them.

It was while wandering in this fashion in Las Marismas that I
became aware of the Spanish seasons—the rain and the drought,
the cold and the heat, the flowering and the harvest—and I
decided that if I ever wrote about Spain, I would endeavor to
cover each of the seasons. I have never spent all of any one
calendar year in Spain, but I have visited each major area except
Barcelona during at least two different seasons so as to see the
effect of the passing year upon it; so far as I can remember, the
only month I have missed is February, and it is possible that one
of my Easter visits started in late February, but if so, it could have
involved only a few days, and I do not remember it. I have seen
Las Marismas in all seasons, never as much as I would have liked
but enough to teach me a few facts about the land of Spain.

Spain! It hangs like a drying ox hide outside the southern door
of Europe proper. Some have seen in its outlines the head of a
knight encased in armor, the top of his casque in the Pyrenees,
the tip of his chin at Portugal’s Cabo de São Vicente, his nose at
Lisboa, his iron-girt eyes looking westward across the Atlantic. I
see Spain as a kaleidoscope of high, sun-baked plateaus,
snow-crowned mountains and swamps of the Guadalquivir. No
one of these images takes precedence over the other, for I have
known fine days in each of these three contrasting terrains. That
snow should be a permanent part of my image may surprise some,
but Spain has very high mountains and even in the hottest part
of July and August, when the plains literally crack open from the
heat and when the blazing skies described in Spanish fiction hang
everywhere, snow lies on the hills less than thirty miles north of
Madrid. In the middle of August not long ago I drove across the
mountains that separate the Bay of Biscay from the city of León
and saw snow about me for mile after mile; at another time, when
I had come to Spain in midsummer for my health, doctors in
Philadelphia asked, ‘Is it wise to visit Spain in July? Won’t you
suffocate?’ But my plans took me to the high north, where during
much of the summer I needed a topcoat at night.

But now we are speaking of Las Marismas, in the heart of the
southland, and to appreciate it, and the land of Spain in general,
we must watch it through one whole year, and if in doing so I
seem to be speaking primarily of birds, that is appropriate, for
here is one of the great bird sanctuaries of the world, as if nature,
realizing how difficult it was going to be for birds to exist in a
constantly encroaching world, had set aside this random swamp
for their protection.

The Guadalquivir itself never freezes, of course, but occasionally
areas of shallow water with low salt content will freeze to a
thickness that would support a bird but not an animal. In winter
the tides run full, and even if no additional rain fell they would
be sufficient to fill the streams that crisscross the swamps; but
rains do fall, most abundantly week after week, and the tides are
reinforced, so that water stands on the land. The sky is mostly
gray, but when storms have moved away, it becomes a royal blue
set off by towering cumulus clouds moving in from the Atlantic;
Las Marismas is a product of the ocean; it is not a somnolent
offspring of the Mediterranean Sea.

Maximum flooding occurs in January, and then one can move
by boat across large segments of the land, and in this boggy,
completely flat wilderness life undergoes conspicuous
modification. Animals like the deer and lynx have taken refuge
by moving to preselected higher ground, and in their place come
several million birds from northern Europe to prepare for
breeding. Three hundred thousand game ducks have moved in
to winter, ten thousand large geese. In January untold numbers
of coots arrive to breed. Through a hundred centuries they have
found in Las Marismas a plentiful food supply, for the marsh
grasses provide seeds and roots and the shallow waters teem with
swimming insects.

Toward the end of winter the birds begin to settle upon specific
clumps of grass, testing them for strength and protection, and in
March they begin weaving nests which will house them for the
important work ahead in spring. Where do they get the material
for the million or more nests they must build? From all imaginable
sources but particularly from the weeds themselves. However, in
the nests I have seen feathers, bits of mouse fur and even strands
of hair from cattle.

In the winter men leave Las Marismas pretty much alone. Along
its edges, of course, towns have grown up and in them live skilled
hunters who know all the footpaths that cross the swamps. Here
also are herdsmen who pasture their cattle on the grassy portions
in the summer, and fishermen who work the Guadalquivir. And
there are, I am glad to say, a handful of men who simply love the
bleakness of the swamps and study it year after year, as they would
a book, but in winter even they stay mostly at home.

Over the vast area one sees mostly the movement of birds,
thousands upon thousands of them, birds that have known Siberia
and the most remote fjords of Norway, that will spend their
summers on the moors of Scotland and in the forests of Germany.
They live in tremendous families, each associating with its own
kind, but a single area of marshland may contain fifty different
species, waiting through the long winter till their summer feeding
places in the north have thawed.

On the thirteenth day of January each year, in obedience to
one of those unfathomable rules that govern birds, storks fly north
from Africa to their chimneys of Holland and Germany and
continue to do so for some weeks, so that the Spanish have a
saying which could be translated as:

Why they go north in midwinter has never been explained, but
in midsummer they will go south, as if their calendar were askew.
But there are also, in these months, the birds that live
permanently in the Spanish swamps, and in some ways these are
the most interesting because they are the ones that we shall see
in all seasons, like old friends. There is no more beautiful small
bird in Europe than the goldfinch of Las Marismas, a tiny gem of
color and design. I have watched a group of goldfinches for an
entire morning and have never tired of their display, the flash of
their color against the brown swamp, the chattering of their family
life. Large numbers are trapped here and sold throughout Europe,
for they make fine pets, and whenever I saw them caged in other
parts of Spain, I thought of Las Marismas, for they seemed to take
the swamps with them.

At the opposite end, so far as size is concerned, was quite
another bird. I remember one day, when I was on the Atlantic
Ocean edge of the swamps, seeing a huge creature fly into the
crown of a tree. It was slightly smaller than a griffon vulture,
which are common throughout Las Marismas, and of a different
character. Since it remained motionless in the tree, I was able to
study it at leisure, but it was not a bird with which I was familiar;
later I learned that I had seen an imperial eagle, the noblest
inhabitant of the swamps. There are partridge, too, and magpies,
and crested coots, and purple gallinules, and a species of owl.