Iberia (88 page)

 

‘It comes from squeaking machinery.’

 

‘It’s a kind of fish that lives in the ditches.’

 

‘An insect. Very bothersome.’

 

‘It’s made by the swallows going to bed.’

 

‘Snails. It’s the mating call of snails.’

 

Now, obviously the sound came from either an owl or a tree
frog, and to have five local experts fail even to include these
animals in their suggestions was unnerving, but Fulton came up
with the first practical observation: ‘Whatever it is, is singing
down there in that sewer.’

 

Vavra refused to accept what seemed to me conclusive evidence
that the singers were frogs; he claimed that what Fulton was
hearing was an echo coming from the sewer, and we left Santillana
not knowing what was responsible for the twilight serenade, but
some days later Vavra, who takes these matters seriously, reflected,
‘It would be extraordinary for an owl to live in a sewer.’

 

Excellent as Santillana was, it was our third excursion that
remains most vivid in my mind. I have never bothered much
about whether or not people will remember me when I am dead;
but I am sure that as long as my generation lives, in various parts
of the world someone will pause now and then to reflect, ‘Wasn’t
that a great picnic we had that day with Michener?’ I have lured
my friends into some extraordinary picnics, for I hold with the
French that to eat out of doors in congenial surroundings is
sensible: in Afghanistan we ate high on a hill outside Kabul and
watched as tribesmen moved in to attack the city; at Edfu along
the Nile we spread our blankets inside that most serene of Egypt’s
temples; in Bali we picnicked on the terraces and in Tahiti by the
waterfalls; and if tomorrow someone were to suggest that we
picnic in a snowstorm, I’d go along, for of this world one never
sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the
gentlest and loveliest things we can do. Picnics are the apex of
sensible living and the traveler who does not so explore the land
through which he travels ought better to stay at home.

 

One of my happiest experiences in Spain was the discovery,
many years ago, of a remarkable American woman who loved
picnics almost as much as I did. Patter Ashcraft, in her late thirties,
the descendant of a distinguished Cleveland family, had been
early in life inoculated with bull fever. When I first knew her she
had a monstrous Buick convertible, in which we drove like
demented Spaniards, but now she had a more sedate Volkswagen,
in which she followed the ferias up and down Spain, spreading
hilarity wherever she struck. She was known to her friends as
L’Incomparable, and she spoke in such a low whisper that her
husband Edwin, a Princeton CIA type, had to be constantly
reminding, ‘Darling, turn up the volume control.’

 

It was during the Sevilla feria one year that we discovered our
mutual interest in picnics; we organized repeated forays into Las
Marismas, and in subsequent years we had cajoled our friends
into the countryside at Salamanca, along the western rivers of
Spain, in the rural areas near Madrid, and at the spot from which
El Greco painted his famous view of Toledo.

 

Patter and I disagreed on only one detail: she thought a picnic
should be composed only of items that could be bought in stores,
like a round of cheese, a slab of ham, six bottles of wine, whereas
the best picnic I had ever attended prior to Pamplona had
consisted of ramekins of lima beans baked with traces of baked
ham, garlic and black strap molasses, a green salad with a good
dressing and ice-cold éclairs, three to a customer. In other words,
Patter was of the American school; I of the French—and the latter
is obviously superior.

 

On this day Patter’s theory was to prevail, and her car was
loaded with choice cans and bottles when we set out to a picnic
ground which I had selected years before; I had spotted it on my
pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. We were eight as we left
Pamplona after the morning running of the bulls: Patter and her
husband; Bob Daley, long-time European sportswriter for the
New York Times
, and his French wife, both with a good sense of
what makes a picnic; Vavra and Fulton; the Hemingway double
and I. We were headed north, toward the Pass of Roncesvalles,
that historic and mystery-laden route through the Pyrenees which
Charlemagne had used in 778 for his retreat through the mists
and where he had failed to hear the battle horn of his dying
Roland.

 

The success of our picnic was assured by the fine tins Patter
had bought and by the rare site I had selected, but insurance was
taken out when Bob Daley, fearing that we didn’t have enough
food, stopped in the town of Espinal, and while we seven studied
the fine modernistic church, quite radical in its architecture, he
bought an extra loaf of bread, and in doing so, acquired a culinary
masterpiece: it was round and flat, about the size of a large chair
cushion and not more than two inches thick, so that it was
practically all crust, and better crust was never baked.

 

We drove to the statue of a pilgrim which marks the southern
end of the pass, and thought with what relief the religious
wanderers of the medieval period must have reached this spot
and given thanks to the statue for having escaped the robbers that
infested the dark woods of the area. Farther on, at the lonely
monastery, the gates of which had rescued thousands and fed
millions in the long years of its existence, the others studied the
stalwart and well-carved church, but I wandered through the
network of stables and barns from which the small fields in the
pass had been farmed for twelve centuries. Everything was low
and compact, to fight against the winter winds that tormented
the area, and all things had a sense of past ages, so that one stood
surrounded by history, whether in the barn or in the transept.

 

I had in mind a spot well beyond the monastery of Roncesvalles,
a spot where a small stream came out of a woods, but Patter was
by now in the lead car and she caught sight of a meadow far below
the road where seven rivulets converged, their banks lined with
moss-covered trees, and when I saw it I had to acknowledge that
her choice was best. We lugged our tins and bottles and Bob
Daley’s marvelous chunk of bread down to the seven streams,
and there in a glade so quiet, so softly green that it seemed as if
defeated knights might have slept in it the evening before, we
spread our blankets and prepared the meal.

 

It was not a picnic we had but a kind of dedication. We were
in a pass where significant events had occurred, where the legend
of Roland had been created to give meaning to Christianity’s fight
against Islam, and before we had been in the silent place for a
dozen minutes it had possessed us and made us a part of history.
‘If there ever were dryads,’ Vanderford said, ‘they must have lived
here.’

 

For some hours we wandered along the rivulets and talked of
the feria at Pamplona. One group of trees had strange knees that
protruded to make fine chairs, and in them we sat as we discussed
the bullfighters, the disappointments they had caused and the
near-tragedies that had occurred at the running of the bulls. As
we ate, and relished the bread from Espinal, John Fulton told of
the American military personnel in Spain who had planeloads of
American bread, white, gooey, lacking in everything except
chemicals, flown across the Atlantic to the PX’s ‘so that our
children can grow up knowing what real bread is.’ The idea was
so fascinating that no one could think of any comment.

 

And then the mysterious thing happened that made of this
picnic with Charlemagne a thing of haunting beauty, so strange
and memorable that all who participated would afterward say,
‘Remember that picnic in the Pass of Roncesvalles,’ except that
Peggy Daley, being French, would call it ‘Roncevaux.’ A fog rolled
in and blotted out the sun. It was not a cold fog, but it was heavy,
and soon we were immersed not in a woods cut by rivulets but
in a dream through which strange figures moved and horns
echoed. We could barely see from one to the other and the trees
on which we had been sitting became vague shapes, but no one
thought to leave, for a curious light pervaded and voices seemed
unusually clear, though echoes were no more.

 

The voices said strange things. Bob Vavra surprised us by
announcing that he was a gypsy, a real gypsy with roots in
Bohemia in Czechoslovakia. ‘You ought to see my father in
California. In his seventies and as bronzed and lean as a hickory
limb.’ We recalled that unbelievable day, May 23, 1435, when
through these passes came the Original Band of gypsies to burst
upon an unsuspecting Spain. They were led by that engaging
rascal, Thomas, self-proclaimed Earl of Little Egypt. The gypsies
had also learned that Christian Europe was much concerned about
the advance of Islam, so Thomas explained that his band had
been forced to flee from Little Egypt because they were Christians
and their kingdom had been overrun by the infidel. Thomas said
he could stay in Europe only a little while, collecting funds for
the recapture of his native land. Then, at the head of a mighty
crusade, he would lead his victorious Christians back to Little
Egypt and win new laurels for the faith. What had made him an
earl? He was vague about that. Where was Little Egypt? He was
vague about that, too. When would the crusade start? Any day
now. In the meantime, money must be collected, and for a whole
hilarious decade Earl Thomas and his brazen band hoodwinked
Spain and gathered funds. ‘Spaniards have ever since held gypsies
in low regard,’ Vavra reflected. ‘Up to a few years ago they could
have no passports, were not inducted into the army and suffered
all sorts of restraint. You’d be surprised how many Spaniards stop
cold dead when I say innocently, “But I’m a gypsy.”’ What was
at first held most strongly against them was the fact that after
gathering all that money from Christian Spain, they made no
effort to recapture Little Egypt, nor would they even divulge where
it was.

 

Matador Fulton told an equally strange tale. He was born in
Philadelphia, Fulton John Sciocchetti, to a conservative
middle-class Italian-Hungarian family who changed their last
name to Short, so his name was legally Fulton John Short, but in
the ring he was known as John Fulton. As an art student at the
Philadelphia Museum School he gained high marks, but reading
Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon
alerted him to the romance
of the bullring, and when his military duty took him to camps
along the Mexican border he began to train as a bullfighter, and
once he did this, he was lost. He kept us chuckling in the mists
as he recounted one after another of the misadventures which
seem to overtake all bullfighters: ‘I was fighting this time in
Tijuana and there was this dippy dame from some society or other
in southern California who conceived a passion for bullfighters,
one after another, and this week it was “our heroic American
matador, John Fulton.” As the fight was about to begin she leaned
down out of the stands, grabbed at my hand and told her husband,
“I have fallen madly in love with this young man and I warn you
that if the bull wounds him I shall leave you sitting here, because
my place will be in the ring with the wounded hero.” Her husband
looked at her, looked at me, then put his hands to his mouth and
bellowed, “Come on, bull!”’

 

Vanderford astonished me by having in his pocket the details
of that first bullfight I had seen in Valencia so many years ago.
Working in his patient way through the newspapers of the period
on file in Madrid, he had found answers to my questions: The
fight had occurred on the Sunday after Easter, April 3, 1932, in
the plaza at Valencia. The bulls were from the ranch of Don
Manuel Comacho of Sevilla, and the matadors appear to have
been regular, no more. Marcial Lalanda, so-so. Domingo Ortega,
details. El Estudiante, details. He continued with his deflating
analysis of the fight which I had remembered as something rather
more than regular. But there the record was: ‘The bulls were
mansotes y sosos’ (cowardly and dull). Then he stunned me by
saying, ‘And the second fight, which you recall as having been
held on Monday, actually took place on Tuesday, because on
Monday there was a comic bullfight.’ This I couldn’t believe. I
knew it was Monday, for I could recall every incident after the
first fight and how I had got my ticket for the second and the
conversations with the cuadrillas. If I was certain about anything
in the past, it was the day on which this second memorable fight
occurred, yet there the record was. Tuesday, bulls of no
consequence, three novilleros of limited ability who never
progressed to full matador. To me they had been good; the bulls
had been brave; and the fight had taken place on Monday. I
suppose much memory is like that.

 

Vavra coaxed Bob Daley to tell us how he had got married, and
Daley said that as a fledgling foreign correspondent about to sail
for Europe for the
New York Times
he had acquired from a chance
acquaintance the name of a girl in Nice whom the acquaintance
had seen once and had considered ‘the most beautiful girl in
Europe.’ When his ship docked, Daley had headed straight for
Nice, had searched for the girl and had married her on the spot.
‘Everybody should be so lucky,’ Vavra said, for all agreed that
Daley had got himself a gem. In what spare minutes I could find
during San Fermín, I was reading the manuscript of Daley’s
forthcoming novel,
The Whole Truth
, which dealt with a fledgling
correspondent covering Europe for New York’s major newspaper,
not named, and at last I understood where Daley had got his idea
for the central love story in which his young reporter goes to a
setting like Nice to marry a girl like Peggy. I was finding Daley’s
account of newspaper life overseas faithful to what I had observed
in Tokyo, Vienna and Paris but I feared that it would get an
adverse review in the