Iberia (38 page)

The kangaroos that were introduced somewhat later than the
camels have already vanished, as have the monkeys which were
brought to Sanlúcar from nearby Gibraltar. So far as climate and
food are concerned, there is no reason why monkeys should not
have prospered in Las Marismas, but once more the peasants of
Sanlúcar, who must have been an unusually suspicious lot,
protested that the almost-human faces of the monkeys scared
them at night, and that if God had wanted such beasts…The last
monkeys were killed off about fifty years ago.

More rewarding than the camels that one occasionally sees are
the melons, which are among Spain’s best. They grow luxuriantly
wherever sandy soil remains soft enough during the early summer
to permit the vines to mature; most often the blazing sun absorbs
all moisture and the plants wither, but if they survive, the fruit
they yield is delicious. Apart from the rice, it is the only edible
thing grown here commercially.

But whatever the season, Las Marismas is primarily the
residence of birds, and what happens to men or camels or melons
is a secondary concern, and so as summer ends one looks again
to the sky and sees aloft the great bustards, accompanied by their
cousins the little bustards, coming to glean the hard ground for
seeds and bees and insects. They fly in splendid circles and land
in two or three hops. Their quick eyes scan an area in seconds to
determine where the good feeding will be, and they pick the land
clean, quarreling among themselves as to who saw which first.
When they take their short hops and rise again into the air they
see below them only a parched earth, blazing in heat as great as
that of a desert, with the somnolent Guadalquivir wandering
southward through the middle of Las Marismas, and at its mouth
the sunburnt adobe of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, blistering in the
sun as it did in the days when Columbus stopped there.

The best time of year, for me, in Las Marismas is autumn, because
three things happen to make it both bearable and exciting: the
dreadful heat diminishes, so that temperatures become quite
pleasing; the first rains come and with them a new color in all
living things; and the movement of birds is captivating. As for
the heat, Las Marismas, which in midsummer seems as hot as
tropical Africa, stands at about the same latitude as San Francisco
(Sevilla 37°, 27’ N; San Francisco 37°, 40’; Richmond 37°, 30’,
Wichita 37°, 48’). Therefore, when autumn comes and the baleful
effect of winds blowing in from Africa and the Mediterranean
has gone, the temperature is delightful; one wears loose clothing
during the day, a substantial jacket of some kind after dark, and
if one wishes to ride over Las Marismas at midnight to spot
wildlife, a sturdy coat. I would suppose that anyone who loved
the outdoors, and especially the tracking of birds in their larger
migratory movements, would find Las Marismas in autumn
almost irresistible, for then nature changes its aspect daily, and
what has been a barren wasteland marked by whitened carcasses
becomes a meadow which will sustain millions of birds in their
migrations.

The change begins with the first rain. Year after year it arrives
sometime between the twentieth and twenty-fifth of September,
as if it had been waiting for summer officially to end. This is only
a slight rain, not even enough to heal the cracks that mar the land,
but it is followed in desultory fashion by one or two others. On
Columbus Day, October 12, celebrated throughout the Spanish
world as El día de la raza (The Day of the Race), the people who
live along the edges of Las Marismas enjoy their last guaranteed
clear day and their picnics are apt to be gay, for with strange
regularity, on October 13, comes the first drenching rain of
sufficient duration to soak the ground, but even though enormous
quantities of water fall in this and subsequent storms, there is still
not enough for any to collect. No lakes re-form and the permanent
rivers are no higher than they were before; this water seeps into
the dried earth. In doing so it reactivates plants, and even before
the swamps re-form they look as they did when water was
plentiful.

Now a few courageous ducks and geese begin to arrive from
Scandinavia, and they must be sorely frustrated by what they find,
for there are no lakes and food is bitterly scarce, for seeds of
autumn have not yet fallen and the water plants on whose roots
the birds exist have not matured. There is even trouble in finding
a lake on which to rest; most are dried basins, their cracks just
beginning to heal. And even when some accidental lake is found,
its water is extremely brackish and unable to provide the
swimming life which ducks and geese use to supplant the seeds
and roots. But these first arrivals struggle with their problems and
no living thing in Las Marismas must welcome subsequent rains
with more excitement. One day I watched as a group of
land-bound geese wiggled and cried with delight as rain came
down upon them; it was the promise of a fruitful autumn.

These newcomers face an additional problem, for when they
are kept from their normal feeding and hiding grounds, they lay
themselves open to attacks by the imperial eagles, who now move
in for easy kills. Perhaps easy is the wrong word, because the eagles
have to exercise real skill if they want to catch a graylag goose who
has protected itself in the north for the last six months. No eagle
flying alone has ever been seen to take a goose except by sheer
accident, for although the eagle is stronger and has powerful
talons, he cannot overtake a goose in full flight; pursuit is useless.
Therefore, the eagle finds himself a partner and as a pair they
become formidable. One flies rather high, in the fly-space of the
goose, and somewhat awkwardly, so that the target gets the idea
that he can outfly this enemy. The other eagle flies low and well
behind the first, and as the awkward eagle maintains altitude on
the goose and makes a series of futile passes at him, the big bird
takes the easy way out and with adept spirals evades the eagle by
dropping to a lower altitude, where the second eagle sweeps in
with terrifying talons.

There is other death in Las Marismas now. The cattle who have
been browsing all summer on the safe flat lands begin to withdraw
to higher ground as the rains start to engulf them, and by
following paths long established, they retreat, but often one
stumbles into an ojo, now camouflaged by growing grass and
shrubs, or he waits too long and is trapped on an islet, where he
dies, or the long trek weakens him. In any case, he is carefully
watched by the vultures who scout the vast expanses day after
day. In Las Marismas nothing rots.

For human beings in the region the autumn is as exciting as it
is for the birds and animals, because this is the season of the
vendimia (vintage) when the first fruit of the vine is pressed to
the accompaniment of week-long celebrations. If one wanted a
single painting of Spain to remind him of the best of the country,
he could do worse than choose Goya’s exquisite painting of the
vendimia, now hanging in the Prado in Madrid, in which idealized
peasants bring in the grapes while a nobleman, his pretty wife
and their little boy, dressed in green velvet and red sash, taste
them. Spaniards love this unpretentious work, for it speaks to
them of the land, the rich, hard land of southern Spain when the
harvest is under way.

In Sanlúcar the vendimia is celebrated with the same rustic
vigor that it has been for the last thousand years, but at nearby
Jerez de la Frontera, from which sherry takes its name, occurs the
most renowned vendimia. Then the world-famous families who
make and sell sherry—Domecq González, Byass, Osborne—set
up kiosks where wine is served. Countrymen arrive to promenade
in carriages drawn by six horses. There are bullfights and
celebrations that last through the night. All around the rim of Las
Marismas there is festivity in which Catholic Spain remembers
pagan rituals and combines the old religion and the new in
fascinating juxtapositions.

Now, too, is the time when huntsmen concentrate on the
swamps, for the latter contain two enormous herds of deer, an
indigenous red deer with pointed horns, which is held to be an
honorable target for the huntsman, and the grosser-formed fallow
deer with palmated horns imported from Asia in the early 1900s,
and not allowable as quarry for a gentleman. One autumn I was
in a car filled with huntsmen speeding over the macadam-hard
swampland, scouting for deer, and because I wear rather strong
glasses I could see farther than my companions. ‘Buck!’ I shouted
with some excitement as I spotted a handsome animal with large
horns off in the distance. The car slowed down; the men looked;
and there was silence as we drove on. I concluded that I had
mistaken a doe for a buck, but shortly thereafter I spotted what
could only be a buck. To my eyes he was majestic, with a spread
of antler exceeding any I had seen before. ‘Buck!’ I cried, this time
with firmness. The car stopped; the men looked; and in
embarrassed silence drove on. On the third spotting, for I was
still seeing animals before the others, I cried, ‘Goddamn it, that’s
a buck.’ This time the car did not even bother to slow down, but
one of the Spanish gentlemen did whisper, ‘Michener, look at the
horns! No gentleman would shoot a beast like that.’ I had been
spotting fallow deer, and they didn’t count. After a long silence
I saw a herd of perhaps sixty deer, and they were different, red
instead of spotted brown, pointed horns instead of palmate.
‘Buck!’ I shouted for the fourth time, and there stood a series of
noble beasts with proper horns. My alarm caused some
excitement, and the gentleman at my side whispered, ‘Well done.
Those are deer.’

I am not a huntsman, except with camera, so to me the
deer-stalking of autumn was less exciting than the subtle
transformation of the land. I have never seen Las Marismas in
late autumn when the water system of winter is fairly well formed,
but I have seen it twice in early autumn when the rains have begun
to take effect, and to see lakes quietly come into being, to watch
dead rivers creep back to life and above all to see the surface of
the land begin to collect its water and soften itself from concrete
into mud, with grasses and flowers gently appearing, is a profound
experience. I wouldn’t be able to say when the swamps had fully
reestablished themselves, perhaps by the first weeks in December,
but at any stage in the process they afford an insight into nature
that one cannot obtain elsewhere. How beautiful this
transformation is, how simple: the land was barren and a raceway
for the wind; it is now a meadow and a home for birds.

As always, it is the birds that inspire. A cold wind comes down
from Madrid and next day all the migrants from Africa have taken
flight. Remember, it is hardly five hundred miles from Los
Marismas to the first deserts of Africa, and beyond them it is a
couple of days’ flying time to the warmer regions in which the
birds are accustomed to spend their winters. The bee-eaters, the
hoopoe birds and some of the egrets depart, and in their place
come the robin and woodcock and widgeon. For a short period
the swampland seems relatively depopulated, for the birds that
have fled were conspicuous in size and color whereas the
newcomers are markedly less brilliant, but after a few weeks of
emptiness the damage is repaired, for now the real flocks of ducks
begin to appear, so that a lake that was empty one day may have
a thousand birds the next, and as the waters replenish themselves,
the birds do likewise, and the poetic year of Las Marismas draws
to a close.

It would be difficult to say where the capital of Las Marismas was,
because the Guadalquivir cuts the area into two parts, the larger
lying on the right bank, the more productive on the left. The right
bank contains no major settlement, although, as we shall see, it
does have the two major features, a shrine and a palace; the left
bank contains one of the most memorable towns in Spain, and
so far as I am concerned, it is the capital.

Sanlúcar de Barrameda is a dirty, low-lying settlement located
at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, a seaport par-taking of the
nature of both the ocean and the river. When I first saw it, only
one street was paved, and it poorly. The bullring was built in the
ancient Moorish style, with onion-bulb gates and crescent
windows. On the small hill that rises in the center of the town a
ruined castle perches; it houses a tribe of gypsies and four families
of peregrine falcons that fly out each morning to hunt the swamps.
In its alleys, incredibly dirty in comparison with the rest of Spain,
I saw many more horses than automobiles, and the only industry
I could spot besides fishing was the lonely salt bed in which
overflow from the ocean was trapped and allowed to evaporate,
leaving behind a brownish deposit, half mud, half salt. In one of
the bars a man said, ‘You’re in the best town in Spain. Real spirit
here. This is where we make manzanilla.’ If this was true, Sanlúcar
deserves more fame than it has received, for manzanilla is one of
Spain’s noblest wines, a sherry so pale and dry that it seems hardly
to be a liquid but rather a delicate spirit. I had not imagined it as
having come from a miserable spot like Sanlúcar.

But the more I came to know the town, the more attractive it
grew. In the old days every treasure boat from the New World
was required to drop anchor in these roads so that government
officials could go aboard and check the bullion. ‘The men in
Sanlúcar you could trust,’ a Spaniard explained, ‘but if the gold
once slipped through to Sevilla unweighed, there wasn’t an official
who was honest.’ It was from this dreary little port that
Christopher Columbus set sail on his third voyage to the New
World. He had a difficult time in Sanlúcar, for reasons
unconnected with the town, as we shall see shortly. It was also
from here that Magellan set sail to circumnavigate the globe, and
it was to Sanlúcar that one of his ships returned three years later,
but without him.