Spain (15 page)

A sense of strength or defiance infuses her. It was in the Alcazar that Isabel, recently proclaimed Queen of Castile, found herself besieged by a furious mob, but rode so bravely into the thick of it,
alone upon her charger, that the crowd fell back subdued by her very presence. It was in the Alcazar too that the daring King Alfonso the Wise actually ventured to doubt, poring over his books one day, whether in fact the sun moved round the earth: instantly, such was the effect of this proposition, there was a flash of lightning, and the King, hastily dismissing the whole idea from his mind, ever afterwards wore a rope of St. Francis around his waist, a perpetual penance for a rash thought. It was in the queer little Church of Vera Cruz, beneath the castle, that the Knights Templar performed their secret rites of chivalry, standing vigil over their arms all night, in all the mysterious splendour of seneschal, gonfalon, and accolade. It was the image of Our Lady of Fuencisla, in the Carmelite convent, that was officially made a Nationalist Field-Marshal in the Civil War; she still carries a Marshal's baton, and it is said that when Hitler was told the story, he swore that nothing on earth would induce him to visit Spain. Even the calamities of Segovia have a boisterous air: the old palace of the Alcazar, which was burnt down in 1862, was destroyed, it is said, by the cadets of its artillery school, because they wanted the school to be moved to Madrid. Even her miracles are thoroughgoing: one night in November 1602 an intense light shone over the convent of Santa Cruz, and the crowd that hastened there was gratified to find an eminent Dominican theologian, Melchor Cano, lost in prayer upon his knees, but suspended a good four feet above the level of the ground.

The finest sight in Castile, is how Segovians sweepingly define the first appearance of their city, and I agree with them: there can be few urban compositions on earth to equal the impact of Segovia, when you cross the last ridge on the approaching road, and see her bulk riding there above the fields. For myself, though, I remember with no less pleasure a stroll I took inside the city on my first evening there. It was a wet night, the lamplight shining damply on the streets, and as I wandered aimlessly through the drizzle I came upon a small plaza down the hill from the cathedral, called in the vernacular the Place of the Sirens. It is set upon a flight of steps, rather like the Scala d'Espagna in Rome, and feels
like some slightly overpainted opera set—so theatrical that you almost expect it to revolve beneath your feet, to carry you onstage. To its left stands the lovely Romanesque atrium of San Martín, with a tall square tower above it; in its centre there stands the effigy of a well-known Segovian patriot, waving a flag; on the right, as you climb the steps, there is a row of enchanting small houses, ferns and flowers dripping over their balconies; above the rooftops there looms a four-square fortified palace, where Wellington stayed when he took Segovia; and at the top of the steps there is a small courtyard, enclosed on three sides by walls.

It was very shadowy in this yard that night, and I could not see very well. The street lights behind me, reflected in the puddles, only made the darkness darker. On the left-hand side, however, close to the wall, I could just make out two squat, plump stone shapes, crouching in the dark; and when I cautiously stumbled over to them, I found them to be a pair of queer primitive animals, with snouts, tails, and very solid bellies. Were they pigs? Were they lions? Were they gods? Were they devils? Nobody really knows, but I took no risks that evening, and hastily backed away from them: I was in Segovia, a city of spirit, and I thought they might bite.

Lastly Toledo, which stands to Spain as Kyoto to Japan—a repository of all that is proudest, oldest, and most private in the national consciousness. When you think of Old Spain, you think of Toledo—‘a clear and illustrious nightmare', as the poet Garcilaso de la Vega once irreverently described her. Toledo was once the capital of Spain, and is still the seat of the Spanish Primate, and within her walls the Castilian, Jewish, and Moorish cultures, productively co-existing for several centuries, created a rich and tolerant civilization of their own. Everybody knows what Toledo looks like, from El Greco's famous idealization of the place, and even the most determinedly flippant tourist, taking an afternoon excursion from Madrid, usually feels it necessary to cast an eye over this celebrated city, provided of course she can get back by cocktail time.

If you believed the old travellers you would imagine Spain to
be one uninterrupted desert, absolutely denuded of vegetation; but Toledo is one city that really does live up to their descriptions —‘girdled in', as Augustus Hare put it, ‘by the indescribable solitude of its utterly desolate hills'. She stands only forty miles from Madrid, but there
is
a kind of indescribable solitude to her flavour, and the desolation of her hills, if scarcely utter, still is severe. If Segovia often feels like a flat backcloth, Toledo is heavily in the round. She is built on a rocky mound in a bend of the Tagus, and is thus surrounded on three sides by a deep gorge, with shingle and grey rock running down to the water's edge. The river runs fast here, with a clutter of old stone mills and two excellent bridges; a castle stands sentinel across the stream; harsh grey hills are all about: the setting of Toledo is all abrasion—nothing soft, nothing amusing, nothing hospitable. This is the Spanish character at its most intractable. If a city can be said to look like a person, then Toledo looks just like one of those El Greco characters who were in fact conceived here—towering, handsome, humourless, sad, a little bloodless.

The Church dominates this city, and reminds us that the Archbishops of Toledo have often been men more powerful than the State itself: the formidable Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros not only paid all the expenses of an expeditionary force to Africa, but actually led it himself, in the crimson. On the flank of Toledo's hill stands the fortress of the Alcazar, still recognizably large enough to hold, as it used to, two thousand horses in its subterranean stables. Unmistakably dominating it, though, its tower rising effortlessly above a tawny muddle of roofs and minor pinnacles, stands the cathedral. At night it is floodlit, and then the great luminous finger of this church, peremptory against the sky, makes even the transient sceptic think for a moment about immortality.

Inside the city, too, things of the spirit seem pre-eminent. They may be Jewish devotions that are remembered, in the haunted synagogues of this once-great Jewish city. They may be Muslim, in the adorable little mosque now called Cristo de la Luz—a tiny Córdoba, with its own small copse of horseshoe arches and its silent dusty garden. They may be memories of the Mozarabs,
those Christians who retained their faith throughout the Moorish occupation, and thus kept alive the ancient liturgy of Gothic Christianity. When Toledo was recaptured from the Moors in 1085, a dispute arose as to whether the old Mozarabic rites should be retained, or replaced by the Gregorian rites from Rome—adopted in northern Spain during the years of the occupation. The issue was put to trial by fire. The rival prayer books were placed simultaneously in the flames, but the Roman was whisked to safety by a heavenly wind, while the Mozarabic simply did not burn; and because of this stalemate, which both sides claimed as a victory, the old Gothic ritual is still celebrated, every day of the week, in one chapel of Toledo Cathedral. (They keep the doors closed during the service, and when I chanced to open it one day I found myself almost at the priest's side on the steps of the altar: so severely did he turn to stare at me, so disapprovingly did his acolytes look up, so long and empty did the chapel extend behind him, that I instantly closed that door again, and allowed the Mozarabic ritual to continue its survival without me.)

But Roman or Gothic, Gregorian or Mozarab, above all it is Spanish Catholicism, that imperial creed, that is honoured and reflected in this imperial city. This is the city of the Toledo blade—‘a sword of Spain', as Shakespeare called it, ‘the ice-brook's temper'; nowadays the swordsmiths make matador's swords and paper knives, but once they were kept busy making swords for Christian knights. In the Church of Santo Tomé there hangs El Greco's celebrated picture
The Burial of Count
Orgaz
, which epitomizes the alliance between God and the Spanish ruling classes. Count Orgaz was a Toledan so distinguished for piety that when he died the young St. Stephen and the old St. Augustine personally descended from Heaven to bury him. The painting shows them doing so, but more striking than their saintly figures are the Spanish gentlemen who stand behind. They look sorry indeed, but not surprised: they seem to represent a class of society that expect miracles as a matter of policy, and they are watching the saints at work rather as they might watch, with a certain patronizing interest, the technique of any foreign expert sent to do a job under reciprocal arrangements. To the right of the
picture a priest appears to be checking the operation in some instruction handbook. High above, Philip II, though still alive when the painting was done, is already among his peers in Heaven. It is a beautiful picture, most richly composed, most haunting in portraiture, given an unexpected twinkle by El Greco's signature—Domenico Theotokopouli—delicately embroidered on the hem of a page's handkerchief; but it seems to record, not an instance of divine grace but the payment of a national due.

You may sense the same air of high collusion all over Toledo. At one end the Church of San Juan de Los Reyes, above the bridge of San Martin, is a resplendent monument to the Reconquest. Its architecture, the most delicate and elaborate kind of Gothic, is like a smile of gentle triumph across the prostrate art of the infidel, and upon its golden walls there hang the chains of Christian captives released from Moorish camps and galleys. At the other end of the city the ruined Alcazar is a memorial, in many Spanish minds, to the last of the Crusades. ‘The heroic epic,' said a message from the young women of Burgos to the defenders of the fortress in 1937, ‘which your valour for God and Spain has written in our glorious Alcazar will be the pride of Spanish chivalry for ever': seventy priests had been murdered in Toledo, and when the Army of Africa fought its way in at last, the main street ran with blood, several wounded men were killed in their beds in hospital, and forty anarchists, trapped in a seminary, set fire to the building and burnt themselves to death.

And surveying all, the culmination of this city, Toledo Cathedral stands like a vast testimonial of Spain's divine destiny. The streets of Toledo are unbelievably tortuous, so narrow that along most of them a car cannot pass, and even a hand-trolley of oranges blocks the way; but when you have manoeuvred your baffled way along them, have discovered the unremarkable outer walls of the cathedral, and have entered its unobtrusive cloister gate, then the immense expanse of the interior, its nave of seven bays and its twenty-eight chapels, seems to express the ultimate escape of the Spaniard from himself,
via
glory, to infinity. ‘Valour for God and Spain' fills this great church like incense; and as witness to the working relationship between the two you may be
shown a small white stone, preserved behind a grille, upon which Our Lady actually set foot during a royal visit in 666.

Soldiers, saints, heroes, and great churchmen seem to populate Toledo Cathedral, and when there is a service at the high altar, with all the swift formality of its ritual, the bowing priests, the genuflecting servers, the bewigged attentive vergers, the clink of the censers, the gorgeous shimmer of copes and jewelled monstrances, the exchange of plainchant between altar,
coro
, and thundering organ—when the heart of the cathedral is filled with the sights and sounds of that tremendous spectacle, this really does feel like the nerve-centre of some formidable war machine, a bunker or a Pentagon, disposing its unseen forces in distant strategies. From the transept ceilings the Cardinals' hats hang rotting like battle-flags. In the Chapter House the faces of all the archbishops look back at you from their portraits like generals in a war museum. In the treasury the silver spheres, rings, breastplates, censers, and crucifixes glitter beneath their bright lights like State jewels. Above the high altar there stands the figure of a mysterious shepherd who, sent by God to help Spain, guided the Christians to victory over the Moors through the mists of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212; only King Alfonso VIII saw the face of this man, and the King it was, we are told, who carved the figure.

It is a great hall of triumph, a victory paean for the Christian culture. A superb assembly of treasures here upholds the Christian ethos—grilles by the great Spanish masters of wrought iron; sculpture and stained glass by virtuosos from Holland, Italy, and France; paintings by Rubens, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Goya, El Greco, Bassano, Giovanni Bellini; multitudes of stone angels, tombs of kings and prelates, sudden shafts of sunlight through stained glass, a vast, tumbled, restless, infinitely varied museum of the faith. Nothing in Christendom, I suspect, better expresses the militancy of the Church than the
retablo
or reredos of Toledo, which rises in serried magnificence from the high altar to the roof. It is fretted everywhere with stone canopies and niches, and in a series of elaborate stone tableaux, like the set of an experimental theatre, tells the New Testament story; with an endless profusion of detail, and an inexhaustible imagination—with saints on guard
at each flank, and angels fluttering everywhere—with a gleaming gold, and blue, and a glow of old stone—with an almost physical movement upwards, up through the sweet mystery of the Nativity and the splendour of the Ascension, up through a glittering field of stars in a deep blue sky—up to the very rafters of the cathedral, where your dazed eye reaches at last the supreme symbol of Calvary, portrayed there in immense tragic grandeur at the very apex of Christian Spain.

With such a cause, one feels, with such a champion, no Chris-tain soldier could lose. We are, however, in Spain, where the last victory is death itself—‘
Viva la Muerte!
' was the battle-cry of the Falange in the Civil War. A few feet away from that glorious reredos there stands the tomb of the Cardinal-Archbishop Porto-carrero, Viceroy of Sicily, Cardinal Protector of the Spanish Nation, Regent and Primate of Spain. He died in 1719, and has been described as ‘incapable, obstinate, and perfectly selfish'; but on his tomb, by his own orders, there was inscribed the dry Spanish epitaph
Hic Jacet Pulvis, Cinis, et Nihil
—‘Here Lies Dust, Ashes, Nothing'.