Iberia (97 page)

 

Later in the week, when evening dress was not essential in the
upper balconies, we were allowed to buy two rather poor seats
for $9.40 each to see a performance of
Turandot
, and most of
those in the tiers below us and on the main floor were in formal
wear. The performance was excellent, and during one of the
intermissions, which lasted forty-five minutes each because the
Catalans wanted to be seen parading the handsome foyers, I had
a chance to study the program for that season, and better than
the words of some Catalan enthusiast it demonstrated the musical
taste of this city.

 

Fourteen different conductors from nine different nations,
using singers from all parts of the world including Russia and
Japan, were presenting twenty-one different operas from eight
different nations, including Russia and Belgium. What impressed
me most was the fact that in the twenty-one operas only nine
war-horses like
Aïda
and
Tannhäuser
appeared, but eight that I
never had a chance to hear, like the German
Zar und Zimmermann
by G. A. Lortzing: the French
La Carrosse du Saint Sacrement
of
H. Busser; the Portuguese
Serrana
by A. Keil; and the Mexican
La Mulata de Córdoba
of J. P. Moncayo. The charge of
provincialism that can justly be made against Spanish music in
general certainly does not apply to Barcelona opera, because a
season’s attendance at the Liceo would give one a wider purview
of what was happening in this genre than a season in New York
or London.

 

I was advised that this catholic taste, like so much that was
commendable in Cataluña’s cultural life, stemmed from the
French influence of which Dr. Poal had spoken. A man at the
opera told me, ‘We have a mania for knowing what’s happening
in the world. We read. We have a constant fear of sinking into
the intellectual lethargy you find in…well…Andalucía. No
norteamericano loves his English heritage the way a Catalan loves
his French. If I thought I would never again read a French book
or hear an opera in French, I think I would wither.’

 

A man who was listening added, ‘We’re not French, you
understand. We’re Catalans. We don’t want a separate state and
a seat in the United Nations. The world should be moving toward
larger units, not smaller. And since we have to be a part of
something, it’s best to be a part of Spain. But we are not Spaniards,
we are Catalans, and in the future this fact will be stressed. We
want our own language, and our newspapers, and our university.
We were on our way to having these things when Civil War
overtook us in 1936. Everything was lost…lost. How tragic it was.
That damned war. Now we must begin over again, slowly. But
we will be Cataluña. We will be Catalans.’

 

I asked numerous residents of the city, ‘Do you consider
yourself a Catalan?’

 

‘What else? Did you happen to attend that great performance
of Haydn’s
The Seasons
at the Palau de la Música? Notice how the
soloists imported from England and Germany sang in German.
But the choir, God bless it, sang only in Catalan.’

 

These attitudes naturally arouse in the rest of Spain a suspicion
against Barcelona. Time and again in other parts of Spain
intelligent Castilians or Andalusians queried me as to what I
thought of Barcelona, and when I said, ‘I’ve never been there,’
they frowned and said, ‘It’s a shame you’re saving it for last. It
could have an injurious effect.’

 

Between Madrid and Barcelona there is open war. Forty years
ago the latter city was the industrial leader, with its access to the
Mediterranean and its superior contacts with Europe; the
intellectual center too, the progressive, clean, handsome,
well-educated city, and as such it constituted a kind of affront to
the rest of the country. Barcelona was both envied and ridiculed;
often I heard the statement, ‘Who would want to be a Catalan?
All business and no soul. There’s not a man up there who
comprehends pundonor.’

 

In recent decades, of course, with the central government
concentrating in Madrid and with Barcelona suspect because of
its anti-Franco role in the war, there has been a concerted effort
to draw major industry to Madrid, and it has succeeded. Madrid
is now the larger city in population and much the more important
industrially. An Englishman connected with the business of
distributing films explains what’s been happening: ‘As you know,
the film industry has always centered in Barcelona.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, J. Arthur Rank, Warner Brothers…all
have their offices here. For good reasons. In Barcelona you have
linguists, typists, people trained in business. I judge it’s three to
five times easier to conduct business here than in Madrid. But
starting about 1950 a quiet pressure has been applied on all us
Johnnies, “Move to Madrid. Move to Madrid.” And I wouldn’t
be surprised to see us frozen out of here before much longer.

 

‘It works this way. You require a piece of paper signed. “Bring
it to Madrid and we’ll handle it for you in ten minutes.” So you
fly to Madrid, because if you don’t, you get no signature. You
want to talk about quotas. “Fly to Madrid.” You’re interested in
a peseta deal. “Fly to Madrid.” After four years of this you get the
message. We’ll all have to fly to Madrid, but where we’ll find the
trained personnel no one can say.’

 

There used to be newspapers in Catalan, but after the war they
were forbidden. Once church sermons were in Catalan, but they
too were forbidden. Catalan resistance was formidable: ‘After the
war they installed a Madrileño as editor of our best newspaper
La Vanguardia
. To police us, and he was a true swine. One
morning he happened to be in an out-of-the-way parish church
when the priest, feeling himself secure, gave his sermon in Catalan.
After mass the editor grabbed the priest and said things like “You
dog. You’ve been warned not to use Catalan. I’m going to report
you to the police.” An old woman happened to overhear the
threats, which were much worse than I’ve said, and she alerted
the city. By nightfall almost every major business had canceled
its advertising in
Vanguardia
. And kept it canceled. Well,
planeloads of people flew up here from Madrid, and one general
kept shouting, “We’ll knock the city down.” Enormous pressure
was brought on us to reinstate our advertising, but our leaders
were clever. They never mentioned Cataluña or the real problem.
They simply said, “How can we advertise with a man who abuses
a priest?” In the end the government had to give in. The editor
was removed. Word swept through the city, “He’s being replaced
by a man who respects priests.” And we were very happy.’

 

Today Barcelona once more has a Catalan newspaper, but it is
watched closely by the police. I was in one printing plant when
officers from the Guardia Civil swept in, confiscated the entire
printing of a calendar and burned it. The proprietor sequestered
two copies, which he let me see. At first glance it was innocuous
enough, printed in Spanish as such things had to be. But at the
bottom of each month appeared in fine print a list of events under
the heading
Never forget these days
. I was not allowed to take the
calendar or to copy the dates that had made it illegal, but I recall
them as something like this: ‘On this date Comte Ramón
Berenguer el Gran betrayed Catalan hopes. On this date Spanish
armies burned Barcelona. On this date brave Catalans defied the
forces of King Felipe IV.’ On and on went the litany of hopes
seduced and infamy rampant; for each month the Catalans had
six or seven evil events to remember, and I suppose the official
who gave orders to the guardia was prudent in deciding to burn
this calendar, for it was inflammatory.

 

At the same time that I was being inducted into the arcane
mysteries of Catalan nationalism, I was walking through the
museum quarters of the city and I cannot recall a more pleasant
experience. Margarita Tintó, a tall and beautiful archaeologist,
led me through the amazing subterranean museum that lies under
the Gothic quarter, showing me the columns and viaducts of the
Roman city, the remnants of Visigothic times and a few fragile
relics of Muslim rule. At one point, as we climbed across a viaduct
many feet below the surface, Señorita Tintó said, ‘We are now
under the nave of the cathedral. See where its roots begin.’ I
commend this unusual museum, for in no other have I ever been
taken into the bowels of a living city in order to witness its birth.

 

More spectacular is that unparalleled collection of buildings
called El Pueblo Español, where behind a stone-for-stone replica
of the entrance gate to Avila hides a complete village which could
house about eight hundred people. It was erected in 1929 as
merely one feature of an international exhibition, but it proved
so popular that it was converted to permanent status and is now
one of the most enchanting museums in the world. It contains
eighty-one major buildings, each faithfully copied from some
famous original and so distributed that all regions of Spain are
adequately covered. This attractive little house comes from Toro,
where King Fernando V offered to duel King Alfonso of Portugal.
Every stone in the copy is faithful to the original. These three
handsome old houses have been copied from Teruel; this one
reproduces a family shield we saw in Santillana del Mar. In
addition to the houses, which are strung out along streets
duplicating real streets in the various provinces, there is a plaza
mayor where concerts are given in summer, half a dozen smaller
plazas modeled after real ones, a cathedral and a full-sized
monastery with a cloister. There are about eight major streets,
and to see everything would require the better part of a day, but
for one who has visited most of Spain, a tour through this village
is an architectural treat, for at every corner he sees some famous
house that he visited a month ago. For the person just beginning
his tour of Spain, I could imagine no better introduction to the
quality of small-town building than this; the village is a synthesis
of all that is most typical in Spain.

 

It is difficult to describe how tastefully this has been done, or
indeed how it was done at all. The village is now nearly forty years
old, but it remains clean and fresh. It has deteriorated in no way
and looks stable enough to weather another twoscore years.
Obviously the eighty-one buildings are merely false fronts, just
deep enough to permit a chain of attractive shops to function
inside; here one can see the old arts of Spain performed by experts:
glass blowing, printing, weaving, candy making. What perplexed
me was how the buildings had been put together. Let’s begin with
this flight of stone stairs duplicating those before the cathedral at
Santiago de Compostela. They are real stones on which hundreds
of thousands of people have walked, and that wooden balcony
over there on the house from Oviedo is real wood upon which
people can stand. The cut stones in this arch are also real and
have been quarried on the site from which the originals were cut,
but imperceptibly the real merges into the unreal, because this
wall is clearly stucco only a few inches thick but skillfully etched
to represent stone. A builder could spend a profitable morning
trying to detect the real and the unreal; I was not able to.

 

I visited eighteen major museums in Barcelona and the only
second-rate one was the newly opened Picasso museum. In
appearance, of course, even it was excellent, for it occupied one
of the city’s old private palaces, which had been remodeled in
exquisite taste. Also excellent were the interesting materials on
the life of Picasso, which could not, I suppose, be duplicated
elsewhere, and these too were well arranged. For example, I here
learned for the first time that one of Picasso’s chief works, the
enigmatic ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, got its name not from the papal city of Avignon
in France but from a well-known Barcelona house of prostitution
bearing that name.

 

What was depressing about the museum was that it had so few
paintings by Picasso! The spacious walls were covered mostly by
lithographs which any private collector could duplicate for a few
thousand dollars, a few etchings, a couple of drawings and a
handful of paintings, rarely of top quality. I can think of fifteen
American cities that could throw together an infinitely better
exhibition of Picasso’s work by showing only those paintings
owned by collectors in the city. Picasso is a Spaniard, but
Spaniards have never collected his work.

 

In a mournful way the museum exemplified the intellectual
tragedy of contemporary Spain. Her foremost talents have either
been destroyed, like García Lorca, or muffled, like Pío Baroja, or
they have turned their backs on Spain, like Picasso; Jiménez, the
Nobel Prize poet; and Pau (Pablo) Casals, the cellist. To me it is
beyond explanation that an event of such magnitude as the Civil
War should have produced no artistic synthesis. In Germany,
Russia, England and Italy there has been such synthesis, but Spain
has stifled hers, both in the field of plastic arts, where a new Goya
should have arisen to depict the contemporary horrors of war,
and in the drama and novel, where works like those of Günter
Grass and Alberto Moravia could easily have been evoked. I can
think of no nation of modern times, except Turkey, which has
experienced such traumatic shock without its artists’ having
reacted to it in works of grandeur. This is the severest criticism
one can make of the dictatorship and the most pertinent: it has
forbidden the artistic statement and has therefore crushed it, for
the authentic statement once stifled cannot later be revived.

 

There is, however, a commendable attempt to catch up now,
and the Picasso museum is an example, for Spain is desperately
eager to reclaim this man as her son. In one year I must have read
fifty articles about Picasso the Spaniard: one referred to him as
the jovial Málaga painter. On his eightieth birthday sincere
felicitations were extended, and if the Picasso museum in
Barcelona is not much good, it is certainly crowded with young
people hungry to know what kind of man this fellow Spaniard
was. There is also a chance that the Gironella novels may pave
the way for an honest evaluation of recent Spanish history, but I
doubt it. A professor said, ‘It is one thing for Picasso to be brave
in the safety of Paris. Hell, you complain about Spaniards having
no Picassos. During most of the last twenty-five years I’d have
been arrested as a suspicious character if I owned one…even
supposing I could afford it. But for a writer, who has got to live
in Spain, to write the way you’re talking about…that would be
suicide…now and for the next twenty-five years. We are a state
that is determined to live without ideas.’ In fact, twice during my
stay in Barcelona I was supposed to meet with professors who
were described to me as ‘cautious men, middle of the road, but
with profound ideas concerning the future of Spain.’ In each
instance the interview had to be called off because gangs of
bullyboys established for the purpose of terrorizing intellectuals
had waited outside lecture halls and had beaten the professors
unconscious. Their crime? They had dared to discuss serious
questions seriously.