Iberia (96 page)

 

‘The ideal Catalan, as I study the type in my office, would be
Ben Franklin. If you understand his practical nature, you
understand Cataluña. No, one more thing would be necessary.
He’d also have to be able to sing.

 

‘But you came here to talk about doctors. Remember this. There
is no analogy between the role of the doctor in Spain and the
doctor in any other country. Our tradition stems from the great
Jew Maimonides and the Muslim Averroës. A sick man must be
cured, factually. We are not prone to philosophizing about
medicine or the good life or the nature of cure. A man is sick,
cure him. We set a high pragmatic standard and this gets to be
known in the community. From Maimonides and Averroës we
also inherit the high position enjoyed by the doctor. This was
never a Spanish trait. It was a Jewish and a Muslim trait, and
fortunately for us it was adopted by our society.

 

‘Our pragmatic attitude to medicine allows us much mental
space for speculation in other fields. No group in Spain reads as
much as we do. In all languages. We’re the educated ones…in
medicine and everything else. You see my books. I don’t buy them
because they have pretty covers, but because I need to know what’s
going on in the world.

 

‘This means that we come to have the reputation of knowing
more than we really do. But we try to know, therefore we are
applauded by the people. Oftentimes the doctor is the only
educated man a family will know. His opinion is given more
weight perhaps than it deserves. But if you look at Spain’s position
in the world at large, you find that it is only our doctors who stand
at the top when judged internationally. We produce good men
who do their best to keep up with what’s happening in Vienna
and Massachusetts General.

 

‘Now, because of our unusual position in Spanish life, we find
ourselves constantly invited to lead liberal movements. I suppose
doctors the world over incline toward the left in politics, because
we see society as a whole. We are driven to become intermediaries
because of the trust imposed upon us, and as learned men we
must lean toward social justice and a more liberal interpretation
of society.

 

‘But let’s confine ourselves to Spain. The average family knows
only two persons in whom it can trust, the doctor and the priest,
and since the priest is obligated to support a certain status quo
of which his church is a major component, the family can look
only to the doctor for the liberal interpretation toward which it
may be groping.

 

‘I’ve thought about this a great deal, because in Spain, doctors
have been foremost champions of advance, as they are everywhere,
and I’ve come to two conclusions. We are able to espouse liberal
causes where others would be afraid to do so, because we have a
prepared position to which we can retreat. If we are savagely
rebuffed in attempting to get better housing, we can still live,
because doctors are needed. We can absorb enormous defeats
and still live. A priest might be thrown out of the Church. A
newspaper editor might be fired and be unable to find work. But
we have that prepared position.

 

‘The second factor is that because medicine was for so long the
prerogative of Jews and Muslims, children of the best families
won’t go into it. Only the middle-class families provide medical
students. When I was a student in Sevilla we had a young duque
in class. He asked me one day what I was going to be, and when
I said, “Médico,” he said, “My God, I’d rather be a bullfighter.”
To boys like me medicine was a form of democratic opportunity,
the escape from mediocrity, and that’s true of all the doctors you
see. Middle-class origins, first-class brains. That’s a powerful
combination. But having come from such backgrounds, we have
a natural interest in social betterment, as all doctors should, and
I judge that accounts for our favorable position.’

 

The longer I talked with Dr. Fernández-Cruz the more obvious
it became that he felt a personal identification with the
Maimonides--Averroës tradition, and like thousands of his
associates, was ready to act upon it. One of the most moving
things in Spain is the frequency with which one sees in small
towns the rude statue to some local doctor who had led the
community’s fight for social justice. In Badajoz, in Teruel, in a
dozen nameless little villages I had seen these evocative
monuments: ‘To Dr. Teófilo Gómez, predilected son of this
village, to whom we are indebted.’ It seemed to me that about
half the books I read on recondite subjects of Spanish life were
written by medical men like Marañón, but my lasting memory is
not of their scholarship but of their unfailing championship of
liberal causes.

 

On the other hand, I also noticed that no matter where I went,
it was the doctor’s house that was the most luxurious, his car the
biggest. If he read more books than anyone else in the community,
it was partly because he alone had the funds to buy them. I felt
sure that the schoolteachers I met would have enjoyed reading
more, but their condition was so pitiful that they barely kept
ahead of their students; if the condition of the doctors of Spain
represents one of the best aspects of the country, that of the
schoolteachers represents one of the worst.

 

There was one publishing company which I particularly wanted
to see, much to the astonishment of my Spanish friends, for I
thought its operations threw much light on one aspect of life in
Spain. To explain, I must detour to a cinema hall on Las Ramblas
that carried a banner which I had seen across Spain: ‘Marisol:
Cabriola
.’ Along with the banner were motion-picture stills
showing a delightful blond girl of unascertainable age named
Marisol; when supposed to be winsome, she was photographed
as thirteen, but when sexy in a refined sort of way, she looked
more like nineteen. In either case she was adorable and apparently
most of Spain thought so, for her movies were the most popular
then being shown. I had intended for some six years to see a
Marisol show and there would never be a better opportunity.

 

All Marisol pictures were alike, I was told, but this one had
special features in that it had been written and directed by Mel
Ferrer when he was not engaged in various movies that his wife,
Audrey Hepburn, was shooting in Europe. And Cabriola was the
name of a famous horse ridden in the ring by the Andalusian
bullfighter Angel Peralta. Shortly after completing the film,
Cabriola had been killed while fighting at Alicante or somewhere
in the south, so that the movie was a kind of funeral ceremony
for a notable beast.

 

The theater and all that transpired within was a fairyland.
Children were everywhere, waiting for their idol to appear, but
there were also many middle-aged women, wondering why their
daughters had not turned out as well as Marisol. When the curtain
finally opened, after eighteen minutes of advertising slides, a lovely
gasp rose from the crowd and a story of complete improbability
unfolded.

 

Marisol, photographed with a skill that I admired, came on
screen as a gamin with a beat-up old horse and a cart in which
she collected garbage in the slums of Madrid. She lived with her
younger brother (this was apparently de rigueur in a Marisol film,
since it allowed little girls to imagine how much fun it would be
if they could escape parental control) in a makeshift hovel on the
edge of the public dump. In addition to the horse that pulled her
dump wagon she had another, one of the most beautiful mares
ever bred (played by Peralta’s Cabriola, a gelding), but how she
got her or why was never explained. Through a variety of plot
complexities that were winsome if not logical, Marisol trained
her horse to fight in the bullring, and with no explanation as to
where the money came from, she suddenly appeared with the
horse at the ranch of Angel Peralta on the edge of Las Marismas.
She was dressed in a whipcord costume that must have cost four
hundred dollars.

 

Now, all this time she was dressed as a boy, and part of the
delight the children experienced was in whispering to their friends,
‘She’s really a girl but the matador doesn’t know.’ Since Marisol
sings, an orchestra had to appear in Las Marismas. Since she
dances rather well, a famous flamenco male dancer appeared with
her in a dream sequence. I think one would have to be a
misogynist not to enjoy such a film if seen in the presence of
young girls and middle-aged women, gasping with apprehension
when little Marisol found herself by accident in the middle of the
bullring facing an enraged animal from whom Angel Peralta
would rescue her. And of course there came that electric moment
when the matador discovered that she was a girl, so that the film
could end with her in another mysteriously provided costume
riding behind him in the grand parade of Sevilla’s feria.

 

The publishing company I wanted to visit was called Editorial
Felicidad, and there could not have been a happier choice of
names, because it published the small hard-bound books which
were released in conjunction with each Marisol film. They
consisted of the plot of the film, or the major incident of the plot,
told in simple words and illustrated with scenes from the picture.
The books did a tremendous business not only in Spain but also
in Latin America, for Marisol was just as popular in Buenos Aires
as in Barcelona.

 

‘We publish an edition of thirty thousand for Spain,’ one of
the Felicidad people told me. ‘For Latin America even larger. With
Cabriola
, because the horse is popular in its own right, we’ll
probably do better. And you must remember that a serious novel
is lucky if it sells three thousand. The books are sold in bookstores.
I saw one the other day that had sixteen separate Marisol titles,
although there may have been some Rocío Dúrcal ones mixed
in.’ Rocío is a late rival, a marvelous young lady with a face that
is perfectly square and a somewhat better figure than Marisol’s.

 

‘Some years ago we published a biography of Marisol. Huge
edition. You can’t buy a copy anywhere but maybe the president
of our company will mail you one to North America. [He never
did; no copies available.] She was born in the Calle Refino in
Málaga to a middle-class family and her talent was mysterious.
At the age of seven she was a professional, and the significant fact
about her is that in all the following years she never made one
false move. She must have had incredibly good advice. You’ve
seen how careful they are in photographing her. Everything must
be just right. A million parents in Spain pray at night, “If we must
have a girl, let her be like Marisol.” I feel that way myself.

 

‘Boys starting to read will often buy our books, but mostly they
sell to little girls and middle-aged women. But we find that even
older boys will sometimes peep into the books and whisper to
one another, “Well, if all girls were like Marisol it wouldn’t be so
bad.”’

 

I observed two interesting things about the Marisol fad. The
situations in which she finds herself are those which could be
especially alluring to girls being brought up in the restrictive
customs of the nineteenth century.
Marisol Goes to College. Marisol
on TV. Marisol, Girl Reporter. Marisol, Detective. Marisol Learns
Ballet. Marisol, Sports-woman
. I doubt that one can present to the
young girls of Spain such a standard of freedom without its having
some effect.

 

The other facet of the craze is that in most of her pictures the
plot, as we have seen, gives her an excuse to appear in men’s dress
and most effectively too, but in this respect her rival Rocío is even
more appealing, for she has a figure that seems to blossom when
shown in formal men’s wear. This is, of course, a carry-over from
the tradition we met in the zarzuela, for when a society aggravates
the difference between the sexes, postulating a completely manly
man and a womanly woman, the temptation to burlesque the
nonsense is great. Unfortunately, this is a low form of art, as
proved by that endless flow of abominable English movies in
which sailors are given an excuse to dress as women, to the
boundless delight of the unsophisticated British audience. In the
legitimate theater next to my hotel on Las Ramblas I had an
opportunity to see a play I had missed in Pamplona,
La tía de
Carlos
, which Spain’s fine rubber-faced comedian, Paco Martínez
Soria, takes back and forth across Spain, year after year, because
audiences love to see him caper as the old lady from Brazil. He
does a fine job, featuring long monologues in a crazy cracked
voice; his nephew’s fiancée asks him if they dance in Brazil, and
this is good for a nine-minute explanation of the rhumba, but
the significant fact about his popularity is that like Marisol in
men’s clothes, it is based on the exaggerated difference between
the sexes. Also, he is very funny.

 

In Barcelona books are important, but music is king. My wife
and I discovered this when we wanted to attend the opening of
the opera at the famous Liceo, which stood just down Las Ramblas
from where we were staying. ‘We can get you tickets but they’ll
be dreadfully expensive,’ the government official said, and I
nodded. Then he frowned. ‘But I’m afraid that even if you’re
willing to pay, it won’t do much good, because you
norteamericanos don’t travel with dress suits.’ I said I didn’t have
one, and he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I could get you the tickets,
but without a dress suit they wouldn’t allow you in.’ I explained
that we would be happy to sit upstairs in one of the balconies,
and he said, ‘Apparently you don’t understand. This is the opening
of the opera. All Cataluña will be there. And the people in the
balconies are more meticulous about their dress than those
downstairs.’ It was impossible for us to enter the building, so we
went like peasants to stand in Las Ramblas and watch the
limousines arrive with the great of the region, and although we
had attended opera in most of the fine houses of the world, and
sometimes under rather gala conditions, we had never witnessed
anything like this. The dress was impeccable, the excitement
intense and there must have been a couple of thousand of us in
the street, watching the entry of the Catalans into the Liceo.