Iberia (114 page)

 

Naturally, the authenticity of a tale like this was bound to be
challenged in later years, especially since the Italian Boccaccio in
1353 told practically the same tale under the title ‘Girolamo e
Salvestra,’ except that he introduced considerable salacious and
amusing material. The question thus became: did Boccaccio in
1353 hear reports of an event which actually happened in Teruel
in 1217 and adapt it to his pen, or did someone from Teruel in
1400 happen upon the tale of Boccaccio’s and adopt it as a local
legend? Powerful minds have addressed themselves to this
problem, and for some decades at the beginning of this century
it was pretty well agreed that the yarn had originated with
Boccaccio.

 

But recently this conclusion has been subjected to serious
review, and in 1963 Señor Don Jaime Caruana Gómez de Barreda,
cronista of Teruel, summarized all available studies and offered
substantial reasons for believing that the tale had originated in
real events which occurred in Teruel as stated, in the year 1217,
when Don Domingo Celada was judge. (One wonders what might
have happened to the cronista’s job had he concluded otherwise.)
An aspect of the argument that has carried much weight with me
is one which I have not seen in print in any books relating to the
lovers. I offer it to Professor Caruana for consideration in his next
edition: When a story is told in two different versions, only one
of which stresses erotic elements, it is likely that the more erotic
version came second; specifically, it is difficult to find instances
in which popular taste borrowed an erotic tale from a professional
writer and retold it with the erotic elements missing. Applying
this tentative theory, it is unlikely that the simple folk of Teruel
borrowed a naughty tale from Boccaccio and cleaned it up in their
retelling; whereas it would be within reason for a sophisticated
writer like Boccaccio to borrow a sentimental folk tale emanating
from Teruel and to introduce erotic elements in his version. It
therefore seems probable that it was Boccaccio who did the
borrowing and the ‘sexing-up,’ as Hollywood terms it. Other
curious reasonings supporting the authenticity of the Teruel
version can be found in Professor Caruana’s book.

 

In recent years Teruel, aware that it had on its hands one of
the top attractions of Spain, enclosed the mummies unearthed
in 1560 in a reverent new chapel and engaged the sculptor Juan
de Avalos to fashion the two new tombs which we have seen. In
doing so, he created a masterpiece of popular art. The caskets are
made of grained marble and emblazoned with shields of the
Segura and Marcilla families, but it is the lids that draw the
crowds. On the Marcilla casket Diego lies, very tall, barefooted,
sallow-cheeked and handsome. His hand reaches out across the
open space separating the two and almost touches Isabel’s, but
not quite; religious propriety would not permit him to do so since
Isabel was already married. Isabel’s figure, draped in a
loose-flowing gown, her fair head resting on two pillows, is one
of the most charming portraits carved in recent years, and what
is surprising, one of the sexiest. Indubitably she is a woman;
indubitably she is lovely. As Don Francisco says, ‘Whether the
Lovers lived or not, I want to believe they did.’ And so, apparently,
does most of Spain.

 

There are, of course, dissenters. Schoolchildren herded in to
see the mummies sing a blasphemous little jingle:

 

Tonta ella y tonto el.

 

Reversing the order of the last line so that it conforms to the
chronology, this might be translated:

 

Ah, the Lovers of Teruel,

 

He was a dope and she as well.

Without being aware of what I was letting myself in for, when
I returned to the parador I studied the various books Don
Francisco had brought me, and in cronista Caruana’s essay I came
upon the passage in which he tries to explain why the Italian
Boccaccio, hundreds of miles away from the scene, had dealt with
the strange deaths, whereas no one in Teruel had even so much
as mentioned them in writing until a good three hundred years
later: ‘In Teruel nothing was written during the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, nothing that had any literary
character, neither a novel, nor a poem, nor any other form or
genre of literature…Naturally, since Teruel had neither a great
poet nor a literary man of any quality, no one sang or conserved
the true happenings in the epic or lyric form which such a
tradition merited.’

That night I lay awake, pondering the case of a city in which
for three hundred years no one wrote anything of merit, and I
wondered what the citizens of that city had visualized their major
responsibility to be. It would be difficult to find another city of
nineteen thousand in which, during three centuries of vast change
and heroic impulse, no one had written anything or painted
anything or composed anything, especially when one of the most
compelling natural incidents in world literature had occurred
within the city boundary. It is not difficult to imagine Boccaccio’s
hearing from some traveler the account of the Lovers of Teruel
and starting that night to write his version; it is difficult to imagine
the citizens of Teruel living with the story for three hundred years
without any inclination to do anything constructive about it, but
that seems to have been the case.

I then began to imagine how different the results would have
been had Teruel in those days produced one young man like
Thomas Hardy or Truman Capote, and my imagination began
running wild through the long dark hours as I tried to construct
what these talents would have done with this story in medieval
terms. It was a game of vast dimension and unexpected twists: it
was not difficult to imagine Capote tracking down each nuance
of the story and taking delight in depicting the journey of rich
Don Pedro de Azagra from Albarracín to Teruel to claim the bride
he was to know for only eighteen hours, and I could visualize
Hardy working slowly to construct a study of rural passions.

But then the strange affliction of being a writer overtook me,
and I was no longer concerned with Thomas Hardy; I was in bed
in Teruel, imagining what my responsibility would have been had
I been a citizen of this beloved town during the days of its
intellectual aridity, and I started to draft my medieval epic on the
legend. At first I was perplexed by what had happened to Diego
Marcilla during his five years’ absence and for a couple of hours
I wasted my time devising an explanation for this lacuna; finally
I recalled that every writer who had dealt with the legend after
Boccaccio had ruined his story through bothering about what the
boy had done during these years. Whoever had told the story
originally had hit upon an idea that could not be improved: ‘After
five years’ adventuring in the great world, Diego returned to
Teruel, entering by the Zaragoza gate.’ Take it or leave it; he was
absent for five years and he came back.

What was important, I realized, was not the detail but the
universal fact that young men leave their villages in search of
adventure that will make them famous or success that will make
them rich, and the problem for the storyteller was to reflect the
permanence of this theme. At about five in the morning, as dawn
was breaking, I began to visualize the Zaragoza gate as it must
have been in the Middle Ages. Now, when Diego left Teruel on
his five years’ pilgrimage I could hear the stones of the gate
admonishing him, saying that they had watched many young men
leave on missions such as his and that the fame they had sought
proved meaningless; the riches they had won were unrewarding,
for the love they had abandoned would not be recaptured.

Like most men, on the rare occasions when I am kept awake
through a night I fall asleep at dawn, but on this long night I
didn’t, for the dialogue of the stones preoccupied me during
several more hours, after which I began pondering how a medieval
writer might have depicted the triumphant homecoming, and I
was thrown into a Greek-chorus type of passage in which the
stones of the Zaragoza gate both welcome him as their long-absent
son and comment on his journey, and I was winging away for
another two hours. When I finally went down to breakfast the
people I was with said, ‘Michener, you look all beat up. Where
have you been?’ I replied, ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it,’
for I had spent my night at the Zaragoza gate.

(Late in the editing of this manuscript friends brought to my
attention the fact that an art cinema in Philadelphia was offering
a French motion picture titled

The Lovers of Teruel
, which had
won a top prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1962. A
Russian—French cast headed by Ludmila Tcherina had been
photographed in marvelous color patterns by Claude Renoir, son
of the painter, and the result had been highly regarded by critics.
I took the long trip and was more than gratified. Poetic and
surrealistic, the picture told of a grubby little traveling show which
had set up its stage opposite the railroad yards of a small French
town in order to present a mime-dance version of the Spanish
legend, but the real-life actors were finding their personal lives
paralleling those of Diego and Isabel. Scenery, acting, fantasy and
movement were exceptional, and a splendid sense of the old
legend was achieved, but unfortunately neither in the real-life nor
in the inserted play was the overpowering simplicity of the original
achieved. Diego died not of love but from the dagger of his rival.
Isabel died from the same dagger. Great folk-sentences like ‘The
year 1217, Don Domingo Celada being judge of Teruel’ and ‘There
was a clatter at the Zaragoza gate’ were not caught, and I went
away supposing that the legend was so primary that it could not
be reproduced in art; but upon reflection I cannot believe this. I
therefore draw attention to the legend, trusting that sometime
within the next hundred years someone with talent will direct
himself to it.)

For a chain of happy days I wandered about the city, nodding
to the bull on his pillar, revisiting the places I had known before
and talking with groups of men wherever I found them. And then
on the third evening as I was standing in the garden of the parador
I felt a voice within me saying in an accusatory manner, ‘You
didn’t come to Teruel to feast on entremeses or to wander about
looking at bulls and mummies. Get to the main problem.’

What was the main problem? In 1932 I had seen, by merest
accident, a Teruel which existed for all practical purposes in the
sixteenth century. It was the most backward of the provincial
capitals, and when judged by ordinary cultural indices, had least
to commend it. But it had caught my fancy as typical of the
problems of Spain, and during the years that followed, I kept it
much in memory. This, however, would not alone have accounted
for the striking significance of Teruel in my life nor for the fact
that when I approached it from the Río Turia my hands were wet
with perspiration.

For a brief moment, in the winter of 1937-38, the chances of
history made Teruel the most important city in Europe, where
decisions of great moment were in the balance. It became also,
for men in all parts of the world, a source of moral anguish and
has continued to this day to be a source of moral guilt. I doubt
that many men live entire lives without incurring some sense of
regret; for many of my generation their regret centered on Teruel,
and the guilt which it evoked has never been discharged, not at
Anzio nor at Guadalcanal nor at Bastogne.

In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, I was at an age
when it would have been relatively simple for me to have broken
loose from my prosaic job of teaching in Colorado and come to
Spain to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, composed of
Americans who wanted to help defend the Republic. Some of the
men I respected most in American life were so serving, and when
I thought of them doing the job that I should have been engaged
in, I felt ashamed, for most of them knew nothing of Spain and
had no spiritual connection to it, whereas I did know and the ties
which bound me were strong indeed. I had watched at close hand
the birth of the Republic and had seen its first faltering steps; I
had spoken with the president and while he had not impressed
me I had applauded many of the changes his party had introduced
into Spanish life. I had read the brave words of his lieutenants
and had picked out of the Spanish newspapers to which I
subscribed the doings of this group of dedicated men. That change
was overdue in Spain, I knew better than most, and when an army
revolt arose to end that change I was desolate. Of all the young
men available in America in those crucial years, I should have
volunteered to defend the Republic, for I saw clearly what must
ensue in Europe; I was convinced that a world war was upon us
and that in the end my country would be involved.

Then why didn’t I fight in Spain? For three reasons. First, I was
not invited. Recruiting campaigns for the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade were conducted mainly in the big cities, and although
some of my friends were active, they were in New York and made
no approaches to me, for they were seeking a different kind of
person. In the absence of a specific opportunity to join, I was
never confronted by a hard choice. Why didn’t I volunteer? In
my life I have rarely volunteered for anything, nor sought
anything, even though I have been willing to take unusual risks
when they evolved, and I still find this a logical attitude. Second,
since I was convinced that America would soon be at war and
since I had taught my students that our survival depended upon
its successful prosecution, even pinpointing Singapore and the
Philippines as the spots where the war would probably begin (one
student had asked, ‘How about Hawaii?’ and I had explained,
‘Impossible. The Japanese would never dare’), I was willing to
wait until we made our entrance, satisfied that the Spanish
Republic could hold out till then. Third, and I believe this was
the most important, those men and women engaged in enlisting
Americans for the Brigade, even those who were my personal
acquaintances, were people whose general judgment in other
matters I did not respect. For some years certain of them had
been goading me to join the Communist Party, a step which I
refused for the good reason that in Europe I had known many
Communists and had found them ill-informed on politics, corrupt
in personal judgment and ruthless in their attempts to force others
into their orbit. In Europe they had posed a difficult problem for
me, and now in America they did the same, for although I
sympathized with many of their objectives, as did many of my
generation who had watched the depression puncture pompous
old verities, I was suspicious of their immediate judgment and
their long-term intention. I was especially schizophrenic regarding
the Communist relationship to Spain; as a sensible man I had to
applaud the efforts of this long-misruled nation to achieve a
modern government, but the manner in which my Communist
friends proposed to dictate to that government disgusted me and
I could not find it within myself to support them. Did I, in 1936
and 1937, suspect that they might have a goal beyond the apparent
one of defending the Republic? Did I anticipate that their
ambitions would quickly escalate to the point where their goal
was no longer a Republic but a Communist dictatorship? I did
not. Such conclusions would have required greater insight then
I possessed. I believed that the Communist commitment was
deeper than mine and that it was only this enthusiasm which
caused them to say and do things which I considered nonsense.
But in the latter months of 1938 I began to read in impartial
journals reports which made me wonder if a serious change had
not occurred in Republican ranks. The defense of a free democracy
had been subordinated to the expanded goal of establishing a
Communist government, and the intuitive suspicions that I had
entertained in 1936 matured.