Iberia (99 page)

As I was watching the fiscorn players, for I had not before seen
this instrument, a strange thing happened all around me. A
moment ago the Catalans in the plaza had been listening to the
sardana; now, without anyone’s having given a signal, large circles
had formed, containing men and women of all ages down to eight
years old, so that the entire plaza was covered with people silently
performing the folk dance that accompanies the sardana. I was
astonished at how quietly this had happened, for there were at
least eleven of these large circles, some with thirty members, and
the dance was vigorous and beautiful, yet how it had started I
couldn’t say.

The sardana was like the movement of an animated clock that
ran in both directions. Slow steps left, slow steps right. Left, right.
Left, right, with arms held closely to the side. Then faster steps,
with hands slightly raised. Then fast, intricate steps, with hands
held high above the head and the body swaying beautifully as the
tempo of the music increased. Finally the entire plaza in motion,
with worshipers filing in and out of the cathedral and stopping
to join the dance if they felt so inspired. Then a tinkling clang of
the tiny cymbals, a ruffle on the toy drums, a wail on the oboes
and the dance ended. In the flash of a moment the circles
disbanded and the plaza was both silent and sedate for Sunday
morning. After ten or fifteen minutes’ rest the second orchestra
began and the dance was under way once more.

I found that if I took my eye away from the plaza for even one
moment, I missed the beginning of this strange dance. The fresh
orchestra would play for perhaps eight minutes and nothing would
happen. Stolid Catalans in dark suits would be looking off into
space as if dancing were the most remote intention of their lives,
and if at this moment I looked away, I missed the whole thing,
because when I looked back, there they would be, in great circles,
dancing slowly left and right.

I was determined to see who gave the signal for this dance, so
on several occasions I kept my eyes glued to a fixed spot where
experience had told me a circle would be formed. One moment,
not a sign of dancing. Then a girl, unaccompanied by any boy,
sedately placed her purse on the flagstones. Nothing happened.
Then a boy carefully took off his jacket, folded it and placed it
atop the purse. Within seconds a dozen purses, jackets, walking
sticks and coats were piled neatly in that spot, and around them
the Catalans, strangers one to the other, began their slow sardana.
More than anything else this strange beginning resembled the
process by which ice forms across the surface of water; now it is
fluid; now it is crystallized; the dance has begun.

Toward one o’clock that afternoon the orchestras combined
to play a very slow and mournful sardana and for a long time no
circles formed. Then an old man, with tears streaming down his
face, solemnly folded his jacket and placed it on the stones. He
was joined by others, and some of them were crying too, and soon
the plaza was filled with solemn music as a tragic song was
repeated over and over by the orchestras. I asked a man sitting
on the cathedral steps what was happening, and he said, ‘This
piece is called “Patética.” We play it when some famous person
has died.’ I asked whom it was memorializing, and he said,
‘Yesterday Maestro’--I didn’t catch the name--‘he died, and he
was one of our best composers of sardana music.’ I went down
to stand with the musicians as they played, because I wanted to
see how the music was written. It was written out by hand,
‘Patética,’ and as the fiscorns shrilled their lament for the dead
musician I saw that some of the players had tears in their eyes
too, for music is something to be taken with great seriousness in
Cataluña.

If I were to choose one man to represent the intellectual
curiosity which I found so marked in Barcelona, it would have
to be Luis Lassaletta (1921-1959), for although his history was
unique, it was also representative. He was a slim, extremely
handsome young man whose father had been Spanish manager
for the Hispano-Suiza company. At the outbreak of the Civil War,
Lassaletta senior was the only man in managerial status brave
enough to remain in the city, which was obviously going to fall
into the hands of the leftists. He paid for his bravery with his life,
shot through the head without trial and for no reason except that
he was an employer.

His son Luis, fifteen at the time, was thrown into jail and kept
in a hole in which he could neither lie down nor stand up, with
water dripping on him and a bright light shining in his eyes. He
later reported that it was only through the exercise of will that he
avoided going insane. When the war was over and he was released
from prison, along with his younger brother José María, he was
so dedicated to freedom that he was determined to go to the freest
place he knew of, the African jungle. He grabbed a ship out of
Barcelona, as young men like him had done through the centuries,
and landed in Africa with enough money to sustain him for three
months; but once ashore he exhibited skill in trapping wild
animals and in training them. ‘He spoke to them,’ a friend says,
‘and they spoke back. With his intense eyes he looked into the
hearts of his animals, and although he was known as a “great
white hunter” he never shot animals…or at least, not for sport.’

The fame of Lassaletta spread over Europe and he was consulted
by zoo directors and naturalists. He was offered jobs by many
different nations but his love was life in the jungle with his friends,
and there he became a legend. In Gabon, in the Ubangi country,
along the coastline of Lake Chad, he was the man who appeared
suddenly out of the wilderness accompanied by Negroes bearing
a live python or a cage containing a gorilla.

Then one day during the Christmas holidays, which he was
spending in Guinea, a Gabon viper bit him in the face. ‘Luis knew
there was no anti-venom serum in the district, so he went to the
hospital and told the doctors, “I am going to die. It will be three
hours and painful but you mustn’t worry, because there is nothing
you can do.” In the most dreadful agony he died, and the
Barcelona papers mourned, “When Luis Lassaletta, who was the
friend of all animals, dies from the bite of an animal, the world
makes no sense.”’

I of course never knew Luis Lassaletta but I did have the good
luck to meet his two younger brothers, and with José María, who
has inherited Luis’ affection for animals, I spent some time. He
kept in his back yard a tame hyena that he had captured in Africa,
for it is now he who supplies European zoos with wild animals,
and for some reason which I cannot explain I became close friends
with this hyena; perhaps it was because I was lonely for my two
dogs, whom I had not seen for nearly half a year; perhaps it was
my fascination with his tremendous jaws which could bite through
the thighbone of an ox. At any rate, this ugly beast and I had a
great time. He seemed to know that I would play with him, no
matter how rough he got, and there were times when he would
take my forearm in his mighty jaws and bring his teeth against
my skin and grin at me as if to say, ‘Can you imagine what I could
do if I had a mind for it?’ I knew, and with my free hand I would
bang him in the snoot, and he would roll over backward with
delight.

José María went to Africa to recover his brother’s possessions,
among which he found a letter in which one of Luis’ bearers
sought help for the murder of four people:

Douala, French Cameroons
14 July 1955

Dear Sir, Professor of Help,

 

I have the honour most respectfully to put this humble petition

 

towards your understanding.

 

My life is very poor and as such I shall be very grateful if master

 

could give me a helping hand towards the battle of life by giving

 

me some money for killing the understated persons as victims.

 

Meanwhile the secret shall only remain the both of us.
Names of Victims

I
John Osungwe
a man

All these are the enemies who try to kill me. I would be very
grateful master could grant my plea.

 

II
Andrew Oruh
a man

 

III
Sadrack Mbeng
a man

 

IV
Nkhnge Enota
a woman

 

Your future customer,
Joseph Ayok

I suppose that most visitors to Barcelona sooner or later make
the trip to Montserrat (Serrated Mountain) but, paradoxically,
few ever see it. They see the famous monastery, of course, and
the shrine beloved of all Catalans, and they take one of the
numerous téléphérique rides to the tops of peaks, but the
mountain itself, one of the most exquisite in the world, they do
not see, for this can be done properly only by going far north of
Barcelona to the ancient town of Vich, which is worth a trip in
itself if only to see the church decorated in gold murals by José
María Sert. From Vich, whose hotel has a restaurant of notable
reputation, one drops back south to where Route N-141 cuts off
toward the mountains, and as one drives down this twisting road
he comes to a spot from which Montserrat in all its wonder stands
forth against the southern sky.

The mountain is prodigious, a chain of sawtooth peaks that
resemble the Tetons of Wyoming except that the former are not
so tall, only 4072 feet against the Grand Teton’s 13,747 (of course,
Montserrat starts from sea level whereas the base of the Tetons
is well above it). The peaks of Montserrat are more compact, and
if one can use the word in this sense, more artistic. They blaze in
the sky like tongues of flame, not one or two peaks but scores of
them thrown together to make a jagged pattern. When I saw
Montserrat from this ideal vantage point I’d already seen most
of the world’s famous mountains, but for an assembly of peaks
of limited scope I had seen nothing to surpass this group.

The ascent from the north is also more exciting, I think, than
the traditional approach from the south, which is how one climbs
if he starts from Barcelona, but by either path the narrow road is
magnificent and the final turn which throws one onto a small
plateau just under the summit of the mountain is surprising, for
unexpectedly one finds himself face to face with a series of massive
buildings wedged into crevices below the rocky spires that rise
above them like a crown. I had expected to end my climb at a
shrine; instead I found enough recent buildings to house a small
town and was amazed to think that all these rocks and timbers
and steel girders had been lugged up this steep mountain.

Obviously, centuries had been required to build this complex.
As long ago as the year 700, religious hermits had established
themselves in these caves and had launched the legend of pure
men hiding in inaccessible mountains. Their isolation ended after
the year 880, when shepherds found in one of the caves a beautiful
wooden statue of the Virgin, dark of face and majestic in manner;
she had been hidden there when Muslims overran Cataluña. A
Church commission affirmed that she was the last statue carved
by St. Luke. She made the mountain famous; Goethe and Schiller
visited the monastery that developed in her honor, as did
innumerable kings and cardinals. Throughout Europe, Montserrat
became identified with the legendary Monsalvat, the hiding place
of the Holy Grail as depicted in Wagner’s

Parsifal
, so that pilgrims
had a double reason for climbing the mountain; even today the
path is crammed with devout travelers who know that if they can
complete this journey, some special blessing will be accorded
them.

Even if one were not religious, an expedition to Montserrat
would be a rewarding experience, for when the buildings are
reached the day has only begun; from them téléphériques swing
upward to the tips of the highest peaks, from which amazing views
of Cataluña can be seen, even as far as Las Islas Baleares (the
Balearic Islands). There are also picnic grounds tucked away at
high altitudes and trails across the plateaus to needles which can
be climbed if one has ropes and crampons.

Montserrat is the shrine of Cataluña; here couples come each
day of the year to be married, a custom which became additionally
popular during the years when the Catalan language was
proscribed, for at Montserrat the wedding service was conducted
in Catalan, no matter what the Madrid bureaucrats decreed. As
one middle-aged woman told me, ‘I wouldn’t feel married if the
priest had done it in Spanish.’

But Montserrat has always been, and still is, primarily a
monastery. In many-tiered buildings, whose multiple windows,
set against rocks, reminded me of the Buddhist lamaseries of
Tibet. Benedictine monks maintain the old traditions of prayer
and work. It is they who occupy this plateau set among spires;
they operate the stores and collect the profits from the
téléphériques. They live far removed from the problems of Spain’s
ordinary life and seek a perfection which not even the average
monk living elsewhere could attain. Says the official guide: ‘The
monks’ chief occupation is reciting the Mass, and this they try to
perform with the utmost care in every particular, so that it may
be effective to the Glory of God and for the good of the Church.’

As I traveled in and out of Barcelona, and especially when I
went to high points like El Tibidabo and Montjuich, I became
aware of a singular building in the eastern section of the city.
From a distance it looked something like a church, except that it
had four main steeples and a covey of smaller ones. When I asked
what it was, a friend said, ‘El Templo de la Sagrada Familia, The
Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. But its real name should
be Gaudí’s Folly.’ When I asked why, he said, ‘Go look. You’ll
understand.’

When I told the taxi driver that I wanted to see the Expiatory
Temple and so on, he interrupted: ‘Gaudí, okay,’ and after a short
drive, put me down before one of the strangest-looking serious
buildings in the world, a huge unfinished cathedral, a gaping
wound in the heart of genius. For some minutes I stood in the
street, just looking at the fantastic thing. All I could see was a
façade terminating in the four spires I had noticed from El
Tibidabo. Behind the façade…nothing, but off to the right I could
see what looked like one spur of the transept topped by the group
of lesser spires.