Authors: James Michener
Since you left Barcelona I feel very old and defeated, but also very
young and hopeful. The cause of the first is Marisol. Of the second,
Gironella. Marisol has announced that she’s going to get married!
I had thought she was about fourteen but she’s in her twenties
and it all seems dreadfully wrong and I seem very ancient. But
your friend Gironella has given us much courage by daring to
discuss openly in the paper the deficiencies of the new constitution
we’ve been promised. You would have been thrilled by his
clear-cut, honest statement:
In my opinion Spain has had for many years two basic
problems. One, that of progressive democratization; the other,
that of what’s going to happen when a vacancy occurs in the
Chief of State’s office.
I do not believe that the Ley Orgánica [Organic Law]
approved with such bewildering speed by the Cortes solves
either of these two problems.
Gironella continued with a lucid analysis of what the law should
have done…The kinds of things you and I talked about so much
and he had the extreme guts to end:
Occasionally my inquiries into the intellectual life of Barcelona
bore unexpected results, as when friends took us to see the old
monastery of San Cugat del Vallés, lying some distance from
Barcelona in a country region. It was there that I saw one of those
plain and powerful Romanesque churches which will play so
important a role in the final chapter of this book, and as I was
admiring its solid simplicity, my guide said, ‘While we’re here,
let’s have lunch at El Rectoret,’ which was easier suggested than
accomplished, because we drove for some time about the
countryside without finding it. Finally a shepherd told us which
turns to take and we came upon a dilapidated farmhouse standing
completely alone. Only an optimist would have believed that
within those flaked and weather-beaten walls he would find food.
In a sense, we didn’t. What we found was an adventure in
family living in which food was incidental. That it was some of
the best food in Spain was beside the point, for El Rectoret could
have been called ‘Cataluña at Table.’ It consisted of eight or nine
farm rooms, as beat up as the exterior, jammed with simple tables
and chairs. I was invited to inspect the fifteenth-century kitchen,
where I stayed for more than half an hour, watching a unique
operation. El Rectoret serves only four dishes: sausage, chicken,
lamb chops and rabbit, with the last selling about as much as the
other three combined. With whatever meat you choose you also
get a raw salad, a pitcher of marvelous sangría and a terrifying
dessert called for some inexplicable reason ‘a pijama,’ that is, a
large soup plate lined with mixed fruit in heavy syrup around a
center of flan, the whole smothered in gobs of vanilla ice cream.
Salad, rabbit, sangría, pijama! The farm tables were crowded with
hundreds of stalwart Catalans, stubborn rocklike people with a
passion for good food and music.
The kitchen was a madhouse of open grills, smoking charcoal
and sizzling meat. About sixty cooks and waiters moved in and
out, all relatives of one huge family. The grandmother checked
salads to be sure they contained onions. One aunt did nothing
all day long but cut the tops off huge tins of mixed fruits for the
pijamas. Another unmolded flan after flan. One traffic manager
stood on a little box and shouted numbers at the women tending
the grills: ‘I have twenty chickens waiting, fifteen sausages, ten
lamb chops and forty rabbits.’ At the huge fires one man kept
applying charcoal as the women opened enormous flat grills and
placed the meat upon them, then closed them and thrust them
over the fire, where grease from the cooking sizzled all day.
Fifty years ago the grandmother and her husband had opened
their farmhouse kitchen to the mule drivers of that day, and in
the intervening years they had not altered the menu. Now, on
Sundays, customers might wait for a couple of hours to find a
place at one of the tables, but as they stood in line they could see
great-grandchildren of the original couple washing vegetables in
the yard for use in the salads.
Wherever we went on such excursions we met by accident
Catalans who represented the best of their culture. Friends took
us to the well-known Los Caracoles restaurant (The Snails) at the
foot of Las Ramblas, and at the next table sat Joan Alavedra, an
elderly man built square, with a rumbling voice, a wild head of
hair and a thick homespun suit. He was a poet whom other
Catalans respected for his integrity, and throughout the evening
many came to pay their respects. When he heard we were in the
room he wanted to tell us of his adventures with President
Kennedy. It was a poet’s story, roundabout and not to the point,
but very moving in its conclusion: ‘I am the man whom Pau Casals
has honored, for it was my poem “The Manger” that he chose as
the basis of his great choral composition. Same name. I was with
him in Greece when
‘So when this great honor came to Casals in Puerto Rico he
wanted me to share it with him, and I flew there to do so. We
were to fly to the White House in Washington to receive in person
the gold medal of freedom of the norteamericanos. Old Pau, as
you probably know, speaks only Catalan in public. Only Catalan,
and I would interpret for him. But the week we were to go your
President was assassinated. Old Pau sat in his room, rocking back
and forth, saying, “I can’t believe it. He was my friend.” Mrs.
Kennedy invited him to participate in the funeral and I urged
him to go. “Play one last piece at the grave of your friend,” I said,
but he was afraid of the crowds.
‘The reason I’m telling you this, Señor Michener, is that when
I came back to Barcelona my heart was filled with grief and I wrote
a poet’s account of my visit to Pau and by extension to the
Kennedys. It was called “Carols and Kennedy,” but in Catalan,
of course, and within two hours of the time word flashed through
the city that it was available, every copy was sold and I don’t even
have one for myself. It now sells for more than five dollars on the
black market. Because Pau and your President stand for the same
thing in the hearts of the Catalans. They stand for freedom.’
At another time it was Lluis Oncins Ariño, the unpremeditated
Catalan painter who had spent the middle years of his life as the
Spanish representative of the Reynolds Aluminum Company but
who suddenly announced that he would henceforth be a painter.
With a brooding palette of only four colors, ‘My cuisine,’ he calls
it, dark purple, a blue that is almost black, a very dark red and a
heavy orange, he paints heads representative of Spain’s varied
regions. He has a curious Goya quality, but if you mention this
to him he becomes bitter. ‘I am Oncins, metal merchant, with
my own vision of a crazy world.’ When I pointed out that his best
pictures seemed always to contain groups of heads, arranged
awkwardly but with force, he said, ‘With four heads you can’t
escape dramatic involvement, which seems to be what you prefer,
because it’s easy to perceive. The real drama lies in the single head,
if you could see it.’ When I tried to look again at a canvas I had
liked, he growled, ‘Don’t touch the paintings. The hands of the
non-artist corrupt.’
I was somewhat ill at ease with Oncins, because he looked
exactly like Hubert Humphrey and I expected him to talk politics;
also, in his best work he reminded me much of the American
painter Robert Henri, who had come to Spain from Philadelphia
and had painted the grandmothers of the models Oncins was
using. I started to tell Oncins of this, but he was impatient: ‘I’m
not interested in other painters. It’s a savage job to find out what
one wants to say, in one’s own way.’ In pursuit of this I asked him
how he had settled upon his four strange colors, and he growled,
‘They settled on me.’ I obviously wasn’t getting very far with this
hard-headed Catalan Hubert Humphrey, so I paid my respects
and moved on, but after I had been back home in Pennsylvania
for some weeks a traveler from Spain climbed my hill with a large
bundle.
‘This painter in Barcelona heard I lived in Pennsylvania and
he made me bring this to you. He said you were a tough man who
asked sensible questions.’ And with that my visitor unwrapped a
good-sized board on which, in his dark colors, Lluis Oncins had
painted me from memory against a background showing stylized
elements of the American flag. I looked like a Spaniard, a Catalan
to be exact, but the likeness was good, except that he gave me
somewhat more hair than nature allowed. However, the salient
characteristic of the portrait was that I was shown with a glowing
heart, painted in Oncins’ traditional dark orange because, as he
had explained to the messenger, ‘Michener’s love for Cataluña
was self-evident.’
With another painter I had a much different experience.
Norman Narotzky was an American working in Barcelona, for
he was married to a girl of that city, and while I knew him a
notable storm developed over a painting of his which synthesized
his reflections on Spanish history. A friend told me of the work
before I had a chance to see it for myself: ‘I’m afraid Norman was
ill advised. You see, he’s done a pair of portraits of Fernando and
Isabel and titled them “The Catholic Kings.”’ I said I thought this
was appropriate for an American, since it was these kings who
had launched the discovery of our country, but my informant
said, ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand. The portraits, which are
really very fine, serve only as the kick-off point for what Narotzky
really wants to say. Accompanying them are symbols of religious
repression through the ages. The swastika, the stake, the crucified
Christ wearing robes used by the Inquisition. It’s a real beauty!
Norman has omitted nothing.’
The two paintings, which I liked so much that I tried to buy
them, evoked a scandal. A government official pointed out that
since Spain was officially sponsoring a movement to have Isabel
declared a saint, the painting was not only offensive to the nation’s
historical sense but sacrilegious as well. He fulminated that his
country did not intend to sit idly by and allow intellectuals to cast
aspersions on the grandeur of the Spanish heritage. Others felt
that for an American to speak ill of the Inquisition was unfair,
unhistoric and probably subversive. Narotzky was investigated;
inquiries were made at the American embassy; and the dealer
who had exhibited the work was badgered by the police with all
sorts of hampering restrictions.
I found it was impossible for the tourist to understand the ins
and outs of Spanish censorship. Whenever a newspaper was
censored and taken off the streets clandestine copies circulated,
and I read them avidly to detect what had offended and almost
never was I able to do so; but my Spanish friends would take a
quick glance at the paper and almost always spot the article that
had caused the trouble. However, even when they told me which
article it was, I frequently read it without appreciating why it had
been found so offensive. The only insight I uncovered for myself
came in a bookstore when I saw William Faulkner’s
One Sunday morning as I was walking through the Gothic
quarter, of which I never saw enough, for it is not often that one
finds in the heart of a modern city an ancient one existing as a
kind of soul imprisoned in stone yet mysteriously vital, I heard
the lovely sound of rustic pipes and muffled drums. I could have
been in a woodland except that the cathedral rose above me, and
as I entered its plaza I saw that several hundred people or perhaps
even a thousand, all dressed in Sunday clothes, had gathered about
two orchestras that were playing a concert while worshipers
heading for the cathedral or coming from it after Mass passed by
and nodded approvingly, even though the music was not religious
The orchestras were special. Each was composed of a dozen
members whose instruments had been determined centuries ago:
one double bass, five country oboes, one trombone, three cornets
and two fiscorns, which were small and gave forth piercing sounds.
I was surprised to see there were no drummers, for I thought I
had heard drums, but when I approached the orchestras I saw
that the oboe players had tiny drums, not more than three inches
across, strapped to their left forearms, and these they struck from
time to time without interrupting their playing on the oboes. One
of the fiscorn players had a cymbal even smaller strapped to his
wrist, and this he struck with another which he held daintily
between his fingers. The music these orchestras produced, one
playing while the other rested, was delicate and unlike any I had
heard before, the wedding of oboe and cornet being especially
pleasing. Naturally, I compared this sardana, for so the music was
called, with the oboe music I had heard in Pamplona, and
although I much preferred the latter as being more raw and
mountainous, I respected the sardana as being more artistic. Since
the orchestras played for about four hours, I had ample
opportunity to judge their work.