Iberia (6 page)

In fact, the only thing in nature that moved was the sun, terrible
and metallic as it inched its way across that indifferent sky. I was
relieved therefore when the bus descended a long hill and we came
to a meadowland filled with trees, but such trees I had not seen
before. They were not tall like elms, nor copious like maples. They
were low, extremely sturdy, with dark gray trunks and gnarled
branches that reached wide, so that each tree was given a
considerable area to itself. The meadowland in between was filled
with small yellow flowers, as if it were a carpet of gold, accented
here and there with concentrations of white daisies and
punctuated by the massive trees with their dark crowns.

I had barely inspected this pleasing landscape when the trees
changed radically. Their trunks, up to a height of perhaps ten feet,
turned suddenly bright orange, as if they had been painted that
morning. And before I could adjust to orange-colored trees they
were replaced by trunks of angry russet, then by trunks of a dark
and heavy brown, and finally by trees whose trunks were the
original gray I had seen at first; but all the trees, whether orange
or gray, sent their limbs twisting and turning in the hot air as if
they were gasping for breath.

‘What is it?’ I asked the driver.

 

‘Cork forest. The bright orange means a tree that was stripped
of its cork a few days ago. Enough time and the bark grows gray
again.’ We saw a low shed back among the spacious trees but no
sign of life. ‘The cork harvesters are taking a siesta,’ the driver
explained.

 

We next came to a grove with quite different trees; the trunks
were badly shattered, as if the trees were dying; in some there
were holes through which I could see; the branches were low and
carried delicate leaves that were dark on top, silvery gray on
bottom, with clusters of small black fruit. ‘Olive grove,’ the driver
said. ‘When the breeze comes through, the leaves flutter.
Beautiful.’ But this day there was no breeze.

 

Most of the land was barren, with no trees at all. The soil was
rocky and red from decomposing ferrous elements. At times a
stream-bed, empty of water for the past five months, crawled like
a wounded snake across the plain, but often there was not even
this to watch. I longed for at least a buzzard to mark that merciless
sky, but none appeared. ‘Sleeping,’ the driver said. ‘Everything is
sleeping.’

 

We came to a village, a truly miserable collection of adobe huts
clustered about an unpaved square. One bar was open, apparently,
for its doors were not closed, but no men were visible behind the
strands of beads that served as a curtain for keeping out the flies.
Farther on there was a town, and since it was now nearly five in
the afternoon people were beginning to move about, but the heat
was so intense that no work was being done. It was a town that
had little to commend it except its longevity; Roman legions had
known this town, and when their expeditions had ended in the
years before the birth of Christ, Caesar Augustus had allowed the
oldest veterans to take up land here. Over the ravine at the edge
of town ran a stone bridge that had been used in its present form
for more than two thousand years.

 

‘You want to stop for a drink?’ the driver asked.

 

‘Not in this town,’ and we pushed on.

 

We came now to fields that looked as if they might have been
cultivated and to a series of oak and olive forests that were well
tended. ‘We’re getting close to Badajoz,’ he said, pronouncing
the word with respect. As evening approached, the heat grew
more bearable and in one river valley we actually felt a breeze.
We climbed a hill, turned west and saw below us the Río
Guadiana, which farther on would form the border between
Portugal and Spain, and in its valley stood a city without a single
distinction: no towers, no ancient walls, no exciting prospects.
The eastern half looked old and unrepaired; the western half, new
and unrelated to the rest; and there was no apparent reason why
a man in good sense would descend the hill to enter that particular
city, for this was Badajoz, the nothing-city of the west. ‘Precisely
what I wanted,’ I said.

 

In America when I had explained to my friends that I was
heading for Badajoz, they had shrugged their shoulders because
they had never heard of it, and when I told my Spanish friends
they grimaced because they had. ‘For the love of Jesus, why
Badajoz? It has absolutely nothing.’ In Spanish this last phrase
sounds quite final: ‘Absolutamente nada,’ with the six syllables
of the first word strung out in emphasis. They tried to dissuade
me from going, explaining that Badajoz was a mere depot town
along the border, that it was lost in the emptiness of Extremadura,
and that if I was determined to visit a remote town, why not a
beauty like Murcia near the Mediterranean, or Jaén in the
mountains, or Oviedo, where the relics of Christ were kept? ‘Why
Badajoz?’

 

Why indeed? I had not tried to explain, but there was an
explanation and a good one. When I heard the word Spain, I
visualized not kings and priests, nor painters and hidalgos, nor
Madrid and Sevilla, but the vast reaches of emptiness, lonely
uplands occupied by the solitary shepherd, the hard land of Spain
stretching off to interminable distances and populated by tough,
weatherbeaten men with never a ruffle at their throats nor a
caparisoned hose beneath them. In short, when I thought of Spain,
I thought primarily of Extremadura, the brutal region in the west,
of which Badajoz was the principal city.

 

There was a reason. Apart from my first brief visit to Castellón
de la Plana and Teruel as a student, my introduction to Spain had
come in the American southwest, in the empty areas of New
Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California, where the Spanish impact
had been great. To me, a Spaniard was a man like Coronado, who
had ventured into Kansas in 1541. Hernando de Soto and Cabeza
de Vaca were my Spaniards and the unknown men who settled
Santa Fe and Taos. The Spain I had known in western United
States was a heroic Spain, the Spanish landscape with which I was
familiar reached at least four hundred miles in any given direction
over largely empty land. To have been a Spaniard in those early
days in New Mexico and Arizona signified, and the closest
approach to that Spain in the home country was Extremadura.

 

My second contact with Spain was different. I had spent
considerable time in Mexico and at one period or another had
lived in all but two of its states, always seeing Mexico as a land
that had been discovered, occupied, developed and ruined by
Spaniards. I knew well the routes traveled by Hernán Cortés in
his conquest of the Aztecs, and I had studied those haunting
plateresque churches built by his followers in towns where silver
was mined. There were few Spanish buildings in Mexico that I
had not explored, and some of the happiest days of my youth
were those spent in drifting across the plateaus of Chihuahua or
exploring the jungles west of Vera Cruz. But whenever I looked
at Mexico, I saw Spain. Mexican culture was meaningful only as
an extension of Spanish culture, and the cyclones of Mexican
political history were merely a reflection of the home country.

 

Early in my study I discovered that most of the Spanish heroes
who had operated in the Americas had come from Extremadura.
The New World was won for Spain not by gentlemen from Toledo
and Sevilla but by a group of uneducated village louts who,
realizing that they had no future in their hard homeland, had
volunteered for service overseas, where their Extremaduran
courage proved the most valuable commodity carried westward
by the Spanish galleons.

 

Extremadura was my Spain, and no one who had missed my
experiences in New Mexico and Old could appreciate what
Badajoz meant to me, but when I saw this unlovely, battered town,
called Pax Augusta by the Romans, and when I saw about me the
suspicious, dour Extremadurans, whose ancestors had conquered
not cities but whole nations and continents, I felt that I had come
back to my own land.

 

My first experience in the city proved that I was in
Extremadura. The hotel to which I had been sent was dark and
mean and tucked away on a side street. The clerk growled, ‘We
can let you have a small room for tonight. Fifty pesetas.’ This was
eighty-three cents and I judged I could go a little higher, so I said,
‘I’ll be here for a month, so if you have a larger room…’

 

‘A month! In that case the room will be sixty pesetas.’

 

This confused me, and I started to explain that elsewhere if a
man stayed for a month the price went down, not up, but he
stopped me. ‘We don’t want people coming here. We have too
many already.’ I looked about the dark lobby and saw no one. I
was about to point this out when he snapped, ‘You can’t have a
room for a month. Nobody can have a room for a whole month.’
He looked at me suspiciously, as if to ask, ‘Why would a foreigner
want to stay in Badajoz for a month?’

 

My second experience was one that I look back upon with
affection. Through the warm night I walked to the main square
and asked a policeman where a hungry man could get a decent
meal, and he took me by the arm and said, ‘There’s only one
place—Restaurante Colón. And you’ll thank me later.’ He led me
to an old narrow building whose face had recently been lifted
with purple plastic, chrome and neon. I hesitated but he pushed
me in, and I found a menu which offered a bewildering selection:
green plate, gray plate, black plate, ivory plate and white plate,
each for about a dollar twenty. When the waiter came, a very tall,
thin Extremaduran, he grabbed the menu away and whispered,
‘If you want the best, take the zarzuela.’ I was pretty sure I knew
what a zarzuela was, so I asked, ‘How’s that again?’ And he
growled, ‘Take the zarzuela.’

 

A zarzuela, unless I was out of my mind, was what I had seen
in Castellón de la Plana, a short Spanish-type musical comedy in
which the songs are closer to opera than those of an American
musical. I had seen some good zarzuelas and had enjoyed them,
but now I was being asked to eat one.

 

I must have shown my apprehension, because the waiter said
an extraordinary thing: ‘My friend, if you trust in the goodness
of God, take the zarzuela.’ Such advice I could not ignore, so I
nodded, fearing the worst.

 

Instead I got the best: a ramekin containing olive oil, a judicious
amount of garlic, some baked potatoes, chopped onions,
pimientos, tomatoes and a heavenly assortment of shrimp,
crayfish, squid, octopus, hake and filet of sole, all done to a golden
brown and served with croutons and an effervescent white wine.
It was a savory introduction to Badajoz and I had to agree with
the waiter that sometimes the goodness of God must be trusted.

 

When I finished, it was still light and I had no intention of
going back to my gloomy hotel. I decided instead to stroll through
the streets of Badajoz and to see with a fresh eye how a Spanish
city looked. I wanted, as it were, to build a base of understanding
to which I could add as I visited the nine other cities of my
projected tour, and in retrospect I am glad that I did this, because
if one understands Badajoz he will understand Spain.

 

The Restaurante Colón stood on the main plaza, and as I left
it I faced the cathedral, a low, squat ugly building built many
centuries ago and one of the least attractive in Spain. It carried a
square tower of no distinction, decorated by nine urns on each
side, looking like the battlements of a fortress and not a cathedral.
Eight bells hung in the tower, but during my stay I did not hear
them ring. The massive walls had no Gothic windows, nor did
they carry any ornamentation to relieve their drabness. The
building was entered by a sadly inappropriate door flanked by
four Ionic columns which some architect had added in the
eighteenth century in an attempt to dress up the façade, and on
the great slab-sided front facing the plaza appeared the two words
which I would see carved into the walls of churches all across
Spain: JOSE ANTONIO. The letters were accompanied by
seventeen laurel wreaths cast in rusting iron.

 

Although the cathedral was unusually ugly it conveyed a sense
of dignity, for it was a frontier church-fortress, and only the
security which it provided had allowed Badajoz to survive its
sieges and attacks. It was then and remained now the center of
Badajoz life, and the society which it supervised was much like
it: ancient, unornamented, solid and well able to protect itself.

 

The plaza which the cathedral dominated was small and
awkward and as undistinguished a main square as I would see in
Spain. There were old buildings of no quality and others like the
Restaurante Colón whose face-lifted façade gleamed garishly in
plastic and neon. The Banco Mercantil had recently been redone
in ultramodern style and looked rather handsome. Its windows
were low, and to keep idlers from sitting on the sills, the latter
were decorated with sharp, tall spikes. The six white columns of
the Palacio Municipal supported a balcony ready for an orator
who never came.

 

What was the chief characteristic of the plaza? That it was
jammed with automobiles and had the same parking problem as
Rome, London or New York. The parking of cars was supervised
by a corps of crippled war veterans who collected their fee
whenever a car drew up to the curb. Traffic through the very
narrow streets leading into the plaza was constant and was guided
by policemen with a good sense of humor. Every four or five
minutes large buses passed through the square on various routes
which took them to all parts of the suburbs. The buses hauled
large numbers of passengers, as they did throughout Spain.

 

Having completed a rapid survey of the plaza, I closed my eyes
and asked, ‘Is there anything here that would prove I am in Spain?’
I looked again, and apart from the obvious signs in Spanish, saw
nothing that would betray the origin of this city. It could have
been Italy, or southern France, or even rural Texas. I want to
make this point secure because travelers often expect strange cities
to look a certain way, but with modern technology, architecture
and traffic most of them look alike. If I had tried this test of
‘Where am I?’ in the plazas of the villages and towns of southern
Extremadura the answer would have been, ‘This can only be
Spain,’ but in the cities, no. They are international.