Spain (13 page)

In the cathedral of Barcelona there is a figure of Our Lord which is oddly twisted in the trunk; this, we are told, was taken to Lepanto by Don John, and twisted itself in the course of the action to evade a Turkish cannon-ball. In León Cathedral stands the Madonna of the Die: an unlucky gambler once threw his dice at this figure, and was horrified to find that the nose of the Christ Child began to bleed in protest. In the agreeable little cathedral of
Santander the heads of two local martyrs are kept in an illuminated socket in the front of the high altar; their skulls are fitted with silver replicas of their faces, and when I once asked the sacristan when they were martyred, he assured me kindly that it was ‘many years ago', as though I was afraid they might not be quite dead yet. In Valencia Cathedral there is a graceful goblet which is claimed to be the Holy Grail—and which indeed, though it was made some centuries after the Last Supper, really did inspire many of those deeds of devotion that created the Grail's legend, and thus is the true progenitor of Morte d'Arthur and Lohengrin. In the cathedral of Oviedo, preserved in a kind of deposit-crypt, a splendid eleventh-century coffer contains two thorns from Christ's crown, a sandal of St. Peter's, several pieces of the Cross, and one of the thirty pieces of silver—saved from the Moors by subterfuge, and from Napoleon's troops by bribery.

There are two handkerchiefs in Spain claiming to be St. Veronica's: one in the monastery of Santa Clara, outside Alicante, the other lying in an urn above the high altar of Jaén Cathedral, supported by golden cherubs and reached by pilgrims by means of a wooden ladder behind. An entire wall of a chapel in the monastery at Loyola, the birthplace of St. Ignatius, is covered with relics of the saint, from his bones to his gloves; as for St. Theresa, her poor body was exhumed some years after her death, and broken into miracle-working relics that are now scattered across Christendom. There are 7,500 holy relics inside the Escorial, including the sacred wafer which, so Augustus Hare darkly tells us, ‘bled at Gorcum when trampled on by Zwinglian heretics'; high on one of the central towers, if you look carefully from the north side, you may see a small rectangle of gilded bronze, said by some to contain the veil of St. Barbara, and certainly covered with invocations against lightning.

The
ex votos
of Spain are often fascinating. Sometimes they are only wax heads, limbs, or little figures, but often they are crudely painted pictures of escapes or recoveries—sick men rising from their beds, muleteers narrowly escaping trains at level crossings, appalling car accidents in which the grateful donor is miraculously thrown clear, X-ray pictures of needles in children's stomachs,
water-colours of people being gored by bulls, caught in revolving water-wheels, falling in fires, thrown off horses down precipices, or rescued from certain drowning, sunk as they are in the troughs of gigantic seas, by visions of Our Lady above the storm clouds. Even animals are sometimes remembered: in Oviedo Cathedral there is a statue of St. Anthony with his pig, symbolic of the earthly possessions he has renounced, and always hung around his waist are five or six small wax piglets, placed there in gratitude by peasants who assume him to be the Patron of the Sty. All over Spain there are statues whose feet are worn smooth by kissing, or whose heads shine from the touch of countless reverent hands, through several centuries of Christian certainty. The toes of a figure of San Pablo de Alcántara, which was erected outside Cáceres Cathedral only in 1954, are already rubbed smooth and brassy by the faithful; as for that statue of Maestro Mateo in the portico of Santiago, so many people have bumped foreheads with it, in search of inspiration, that it has a perceptible dent between the eyes.

And the oddest of all these manifestations is not a miracle at all, not even a very holy image, but only a clever piece of theatrical mechanics. If you go to Mass one Friday morning in the Church of Corpus Christi in Valencia, you will notice above the altar a fine picture of the Last Supper by Francisco Ribalta. At the climax of the service, while the choir sings the Miserere, there is a slight whirring and creaking noise from the recess behind the altar, and this picture suddenly vanishes—to be replaced first by blue velvet curtains, which are drawn to reveal black velvet curtains, which are drawn to reveal in a moment of undeniable excitement, a vividly illuminated life-size crucifix. The choir sings softly throughout this phenomenon, the congregation is on its knees, a genuine sense of drama emanates from the mechanism, and it is easy to see that not so very long ago, to the breathless peasants of the Valencia plain, it must have seemed proof positive that Christ was born to die for us.

Sleight of hand indeed, but in Spain the Church is dealing with a populace in whose minds, even now, the Christian faith is
inextricably confused with older values. ‘The Spaniards are good Christians,' a Venetian ambassador once observed, ‘but immoral.' Where their pagan superstitions end, and where their Christianity begins, the most sophisticated candidate for canonry could scarcely begin to demonstrate.

Sometimes, though, beliefs and customs can be directly traced to the rites of paganism. At Mérida, the old Roman fortress-city, an elegant shrine to the god Mars has been turned into a chapel in honour of the child-martyr St. Eulalia—said to have been roasted on the spot in the reign of Diocletian. It is customary for the women of Mérida to toss locks of their hair through the chapel grille from the pavement outside, and the little building is regarded with such veneration that often you see people on the other side of the street, staid young couples or solitary old gentlemen, standing stock-still in prayer and contemplation before it. One evening I was standing before its grille, half lost in meditation myself, when I heard pants and footsteps beside me: two small girls in red coats were crossing themselves at my side, and when I looked down at them they hastily pressed their thin arms through the grille, dropped two pink-ribboned pigtails on the floor before the altar of Mars, crossed themselves again, and ran quickly home through the street lights.

Pagan or Christian? I do not know which to think the great fiestas of Spain, which have become, through the medium of tourist pamphlet and travel agency, as emblematic of this country as the
Folies Bergères
used to be of Paris. Marvellously varied is the form of these great displays. In some parts of Andalusia they lead lambs through the streets on strings, to celebrate Easter morning. In Catalonia, on Corpus Christi Sunday, they create elaborate patterns of petals in the city streets. To celebrate the feast of St. Joseph in Valencia, they build vast effigies of characters fictional, real, or symbolical, and burn them in a final wild orgy at midnight. On the feast of St. Fermín, in Pamplona, they let young bulls loose in the streets, and allow the youths of the city, gay in the yellow sashes of Navarre, to pit their courage against their horns.

The greatest of the fiestas are the Passion Week processions of
Andalusia. There are few spectacles on earth to match the holy parades of Málaga or Seville—events all the more haunting because their strangeness, dignity, and reverence are coupled with an odd matter-of-fact detachment, as though the whole affair is only one more job in the daily round, like catching the morning bus or doing the shopping. Imagine such an evening of display, in such a city of the Spanish South. It is almost certain to be warm —Málaga claims the finest climate in Europe, with the lowest rainfall. It is almost certain to be sticky, for so many people come south for Easter week that rents go up all along this southern littoral, and if you want a hotel room for a night you may have to book it for the whole week. It is almost certain to be slightly disorganized, for though the Spaniards are masters of crowd control, the only function they ever begin on time is the bull-fight—whose crowds will clap and cat-call if the opening trumpet is a moment late.

The pavements, then, are packed and jostling, the ice creams and fizzy drinks are selling well, the big-wigs are looking grand but uncomfortable upon their chairs of honour, and presently there advances at a funereal pace along the avenue one of the strangest of all processions. An equestrian officer leads it, perhaps, sword drawn and medals dangling, but hard at his heels there pace the penitents, living survivals of the old flagellating sects, grouped by fraternity, with tall conical hoods upon their heads, narrow slits for their eyes, wands in their hands, and bright silken gowns —crimson, blue, or white—trailing about their ankles. They move in singular movements, looking warily from side to side, for their hoods obscure their vision; and with the swaying motion of the head that this gives them, together with a general manner of casual, swaggering, lordly menace, they look like eerie travesties of regimental drum-majors, parading down some very different Mall. Lines of infant penitents follow them, jollied along by young priests, and chewing gum to keep them on their feet; a band may come next, playing the sombre hymns of Passion Week; and then there lurch into sight, grotesque and towering in the lamplight, the great floats that are the purpose of the procession—vast gilded images of Our Lord or the Virgin Mary, elaborate with palm
trees or tabernacles, decked in flowers, candles, and carpets, carried by ranks of bent-backed, panting, cowled or cassocked men. A hooded major-domo keeps them in time, walking back-wards before them and clanging a bell, and every few paces they have to stop, so enormous is the weight of the floats; and so in a sad and dreadful rhythm, to the muffled beat of a drum, they make their slow way through the city streets, so high, so ornate, so heavy, so queer, with the hoods of those penitents, the beat of that drum, the smell of the flowers on the air and the flicker of the candles, that the most tremendous of military parades, the tanks in Red Square or the Garde Républicaine down the Champs Élysées, pale in the imagination beside them.

Occasionally a woman standing in the crowd, or leaning from some high balcony, breaks into the hard thrilling notes of a
saeta
—an arrow-song of mourning or remorse which she projects like a missile towards the passing image. Such interventions are mostly prearranged, however, and if you are close enough to the procession you will see that when those floats stop for a rest the men who carry them, stretching their backs and flexing their muscles in relief, often wave cheerfully to a friend in the crowd, exchange a few words of badinage with some hooded apparition, call jokingly for a Coca-Cola, or even light up a cigarette. They smell of sweat. They sometimes grumble. They are, one feels, only on contract to tradition, and old gods of atavism have signed their work-sheets.

‘Speak Cleanly! Law, Morality, and Decorum Alike Forbid Blasphemy.' So it says above the public washhouse on the waterfront at Corunna, and until a few years ago all it implied was true. Not only did Decorum and Morality prohibit Blasphemy, but the Law did too: not only was the Christian Church confessor and comforter to the people, it was also Authority. Today the old grip on public conduct has been broken. The ever-visible multitude of priests, monks and nuns, which used to give Franco's Spain an almost Tibetan feeling, is less apparent now. The Church itself stands uncertainly amidst the whirl of change: what would the bishops have thought in Franco's day, to see the young couples
publicly embracing in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, or find the lurid girlie magazines upon the bookstalls of Seville?

The death of Franco, the fall of his values, left Spain eager for all the liberties, including liberty of morals, so that within a year or two few countries in western Europe seemed more permissive. But it was deceptive in a way. The old standards were only out of fashion, and all over Spain, at any moment of any day, the old ways and rituals still proceeded. The X-certificate films might be packing the houses in Madrid, but at a thousand churches up and down the country a service was being conducted, if only for a congregation of two or three. In dozens of seminaries the pale young students still learnt their Latin. In scores of closed convents the nuns were praying. In many a village a local saint's day was being celebrated, and the first communicants were walking home from church in bridal gowns and sailor suits; more than 1,500 saints are honoured in the Spanish calendar, and each has his fervent devotees. (‘He's not a saint,' sniffed a caretaker when I asked the identity of a holy man buried in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, ‘
he's only a Blessed!
') On the north tower of Astorga Cathedral, on the north-east tower of the Cathedral of the Pillar at Saragossa, on the dizzy pinnacles of Gaudi's Church of the Sagrada Familia at Barcelona, on the staid mock-Gothic of the cathedral of Madrid—on all these great Christian structures, and many more, the builders were hammering and the cranes clanking. At the bull-ring the priest stood by for human casualties outside the little whitewashed chapel, and in a remote and lovely corner of Las Hurdes, a wild landscape of west Castile long supposed to be inhabited only by demons, the shy Carmelites of the monastery of Las Batuecas, locked away behind their high walls, had written beside their door-bell: ‘Brother! This is not a place of Tourism or Diversion! Unless you have Real Need, do not Ring this Bell!'

Did not God say, in the vision of the Great Promise, that Spain was a chosen land? Is she not still a nation of saints, mystics, hermits and evangelists? (St. Francis Xavier, the greatest missionary of them all, came—as the Spaniards would say—from a very good family in Navarre.) Was it not Spain, in our own lifetimes,
that Paul Claudel apostrophized in his poem
Aux Martyres
Espagnols
—‘sixty thousand priests massacred and not one apostasy'?

I dare say that Spain, now that she is launched on the libertarian path, will never be
quite
so Christian again. The decrees of the churchmen will never be so absolute, and the Church itself will never again be so formidable an estate of the realm. The loyalty of many centuries, though, does not wither in a generation, especially when it is shot through with faith: there may yet be a time when the Spaniards look once more to the Catholic Church, as they did in the days of the Reconquest, to lead them out of alien tyrannies, or give them pride again.