NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (11 page)

“I’m reading it because it’s funny.”

“It’s full of lies about Valdemosa.”

“It’s not about Valdemosa,” I said. “It’s about George Sand.”

“Yes.” He was relieved and saw me as an ally. “That is right.”

I drove the next day down the long hill back to Palma, across the island. It seemed to me that tourist Mallorca was at the beach, the masses of hotels on the south and the east. But even the town of Palma seemed traditional Spanish, not touristy, and it even had a venerable look to it—the lovely thirteenth-century cathedral, one of the few in Europe that had never been sacked or bombed.

“This place is nice now,” a man from Cordova told me. “But it is madness in July and August.”

I stayed in a small hotel in a suburb to the northeast, where there were just working people and inexpensive boardinghouses. People getting by. I shopped in the supermarket, drank in the bar and watched football and bullfights like everyone else. And living in this way I tried to sum up the Spanish contradictions. They still puzzled me, the way the independent spirit of Spain had endured a dictatorship for forty years; the way Spanish passion seemed at odds with Spanish courtesy. They were churchgoing Catholics who were loudly anticlerical. And how could one reconcile the strenuous libido (the papers crammed with personal ads for everything from boyfriends to sado-masochism) with the low birthrate?

The elderly people in Spain were often the most broadminded. Pornography was the most vivid example of their tolerance. There were porno shops and movies in all the Spanish towns and cities, and even the smaller places like Cartagena had at least one or two porno outlets.

It seemed incontestable to me that a country’s pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth but it contained many clues and even more warnings. Japanese porno is unlike anything in Germany, French is unlike Swedish, American unlike Mexican, and so forth.

Spanish pornography baffled me. It seemed beyond sex, most of it. It involved children and dogs and torture; men torturing women, women being beastly to men; much of it was worse than German varieties, possibly the most repellent porno in the world. Some of it was homegrown—hermaphrodites and toilet training. One film I saw concerned a woman, a
man and a donkey. Another, one of the strangest I have ever seen, concerned a Moroccan boy of about thirteen or fourteen, and a very bewildered goat.

In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno—not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and
How to Knit
is S
& M Monthly
, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help!
Socorro!

Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be so off-putting and disgusting—and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia.

“If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down,
señor.”

One sunny morning I boarded the ferry at Palma and sailed past the lump of Ibiza under blue skies back to the mainland port of Valencia. It was eight hours, mostly sunshine. There were about thirty of us on the ship that could accommodate fifteen hundred. I sat on deck, scribbling. Inside, a roomful of men watched the day’s bullfight on television, and each time the coup de grace was delivered, the whole length of the matador’s sword driven into the stumbling bull, a thrill of satisfaction went through the room, an intense sigh of passion.

            
I
f a quest for the Holy Grail began in Valencia it would be a very short quest, because the Holy Grail is propped on an altar in a small chapel of the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Zaragoza, in the middle of Valencia. It is the real thing, that was drunk out of by Jesus at the Last Supper, and then passed around to the Apostles. This chalice, teacup size, was carved from greenish agate (chalcedony), as is the base, an inverted cup set with pearls and emeralds, with gold handles, and it is held together by a gold post and jeweled bands. The whole thing is seven inches high, small but complex. The simple cup might have acquired the gold and jewels since Jesus used it. The authorized Cathedral pamphlet offers all this conjecture as fact.

The Last Supper was held in the house of St. Mark. After this, Joseph of Arimathea collected drops of blood in it from Jesus’ crucified body. The cup—usually called the grail—was taken to Rome by St. Peter and it was used as the Papal Chalice until the time of Sixtus II. It was then sent to Huesca by St. Lawrence, first Deacon of the Roman Church, where it stayed until 713. It was carried as part of the portable paraphernalia of the Court of Aragon. In the eleventh century it was in Jaca, in the twelfth century at Juan de la Pena Monastery, in the fourteenth it was taken to Zaragoza by King Martin the Human, and in 1437 it was presented to Valencia Cathedral by Don Juan, the King of Navarre. Most of the churches
in Valencia were vandalized or bombed during the Spanish Civil War (euphemistically called “the National Uprising”), but the grail remained intact. It had been taken out and hidden in the village of Carlet, in the mountains southwest of Valencia, so that it would not be smashed.

It is venerated. It “receives a continuous growing cult … The cup is very ancient work and nothing can be said against the idea that it was utilized by the Lord during the first eucharistic consecration,” J. A. Oñate writes in his definitive book on the subject.

Oh, well, all of this might be true. But even if it isn’t the Holy Grail, the agate cup is much prettier than the chunks of the True Cross that are displayed all over Italy—enough pieces of the cross, it is said, to rebuild the Italian navy.

A priest was saying mass in the Holy Grail chapel each time I took my skeptical self to examine it. This continuous mass struck me as being exactly analogous to the plot device in Paul Bowles’s short story “Pastor Dow at Tacaté,” where an American preacher can only attract Indians to his church by playing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” on a wind-up Victrola. As long as the song plays the Indians sit quietly, and when the music stops (and the Indians get up to leave the church) the preacher rushes over and gets the music going again.

In the same way, godless visitors looking for the cup enter the chapel where a priest is saying mass, and as the Holy Grail is fairly small and far-off, these idly curious people are forced to sit down or kneel. Then, gawking at the Holy Grail, they are trapped by the mass. And there they remain, squinting, listening to the mass and the preaching and the denunciations.

There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on the same spot.

The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale
youths, and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or churchgoers. Some others held elaborate signs.
I am the father of three young children and I have no job.

Valencia, an old provincial capital on the sea, had a pleasant aura. It was low and gray; it was not busy; it seemed to me happily unfashionable, and though it is Spain’s third-largest city it had an air of friendliness. The central part of Valencia was labyrinthine, dusty, full of shabby shops selling hardware and groceries and cheap clothes. This was Valencia in the winter, a city returned to itself, with no tourists and little traffic; but even in the summer I imagined that the tourists would be at the beach.

Fishermen headed out of the nearby port of El Grao and netted sardines, farmers grew oranges near the city in the irrigated plain the Spaniards call a
huerta.
I had a sardine sandwich for lunch, and two oranges. Then I walked in the sunshine to the Torres de Serrano, not to marvel at the antiquity of these towers, but to see the flea market in the same neighborhood. This flea market told sad stories. It was a mass of old and semi-destitute people selling things no one could possibly want—broken eyeglasses, bent coat hangers, old plastic toys, rusted alarm clocks, faded cassette tapes, faucets, battered board games, old magazines, beads, books, and more. It was very grubby stuff. Only the old clothes were moving. Most of the people were browsing and chatting. This was one example of hard-up Spain, but it could not have been typical since nearly all the stuff was worthless.

A man selling postcards caught my eye and said, “These are valuable.”

“How much is this one?” It was General Franco.

“Four hundred pesetas.” Three dollars.

“Why so much?”

“That’s El Caudillo in his military uniform. That’s from 1940.”

Because I wanted to get him on the subject of Franco, I haggled a little, offered him less than he had demanded, and he said okay.

“Why is it I never see statues of Franco?” I asked, pocketing the picture.

“Here in Valencia there are none. But you’ll see them in Madrid, and in Barcelona. Plenty in Galicia.”

“Why aren’t there any here?”

“Politics!” he exploded, and threw up his hands.

The portrait made Franco look like a Roman emperor, just the sort of image that a man noted for being personally timid would choose. He praised and attempted to flatter the Nazis, who returned the favor by nicknaming Franco “The Dwarf of the Pardo.” Paul Preston in his exhaustive thousand-page biography,
Franco
, writes, “the hunger for adulation, the icy cruelty and the tongue-tied shyness were all manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy.”

“Despite fifty years of public prominence and a life lived well into the television age, Francisco Franco remains the least known of the great dictators of the twentieth century.” This is how Preston begins his book. “That is partly because of the smoke screen created by hagiographers and propagandists. In his lifetime he was compared with the Archangel Gabriel, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, Napoleon, and a host of other real and imaginary heroes.”

Valencia Railway Station was picked out with ceramics of figures and fruit, and prettily painted, with flags stirring and a gold ball and eagle. It had the whimsy and hospitality of the front gate of a fairground. Entering it gave a pleasant feeling of frivolity if not recklessness to any onward train journey.

The bullring next to the station was huge and well-made, elaborate brickwork, arches and colonnades, not old, but handsome and a bit sinister, like the temple of a violent religion, a place of sacrifice, which was what it was. There were no bullfights that week in the Valencia bullring, but there were plenty on television. Televised bullfights I found to be one of the irritations of eating in cheap restaurants—the way the diners stopped eating when the bull was about to be stabbed, the close attention they gave to the stabbing—a silence in the whole place—and then the action replay, the whole length of the sword running into the bull’s neck, the bull dropping and vomiting blood in slow motion.

It’s not really a Catholic country, the Spaniards told me, but this express train to Barcelona was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. I asked the conductor why this was so. “It’s just a name,” he said.

The Virgin sped out of Valencia and along the Mediterranean shoreline
of gray sand and blue sea, a plain of gardens and trees and square houses of brown stone, the hills rising to mountains in the background, a classic Spanish landscape of dry overgrazed hills, some of it hardly built upon. But most of it, especially around the coastal town of Tarragona and beyond, is overdeveloped, full of houses. Yet even the most unsightly place was relieved by vineyards or lemon trees, orchards, palm trees. It did not have the nasty urban desolation of industrialized Europe.

There were mainly Spaniards on the train. A few foreigners were heading to Barcelona, others to Port-Bou, the last stop in Spain before the train entered France. There were clusters of Japanese, and French businessmen, and Moroccans. And Kurt, who was heading back to Germany. He was very fat and bearded, in a leather vest, with a tattoo on his wrist, and very drunk at two in the afternoon, in the buffet car.