IN OUR CARRIAGE, as we travelled slowly southward, there were three other people besides ourselves. One was a very fat man with a large white head like an egg and two little, plumply lidded eyes set transversely in it. As soon as the train had started, he put on a soft travelling cap, spread a handkerchief over his face and went to sleep. Next to him sat a lean, nervous man in the middle-thirties, with one of those thin, eyebrow-like moustaches often worn by Fascists, and his pretty wife. They talked in monosyllables, while the man kept taking up and putting down his newspaper and moving restlessly from one side of the carriage to the other. Since he avoided my eye, it was obvious that he did not wish for conversation.
We passed Aranjuez with its tall elms, silent in the morning light, and entered the dreary reddish-yellow steppe that prepares the way for the equally dreary plain of La Mancha. At a station the fat man woke up suddenly and got out. Through the window I could see him cross the platform and climb into a diminutive horse bus, which apparently connected the station with the town. Where it could lie was a mystery, for we could see for miles in every direction.
My wife had started a conversation with the smiling woman who sat opposite her, and I joined in. Her husband listened in a moody silence. The conversation languished. Then Valdepeñas came and we decided to have lunch. The hotel had provided a lavish four-course meal and we pressed our companions to share it. They yielded, and over a cold omelette, red mullet and a bottle of wine the man’s hostility broke down and he began to talk.
He had plenty to say for himself. He was a doctor who, while still a practicante or medical assistant (a rank we do not have in England), had joined the Blue Brigade and gone to Russia. Here he had spent two years. He said that he liked the Russians: they were a good-natured, simple people, easily imposed on by their rulers, and at bottom more sympathetic than the Germans. But their standard of life was terribly low. The Ukrainians, who lived rather better, hated Communism, and for that reason had deserted in large numbers. When the Brigade returned to Spain many of them had begged to come with them: we should find two or three in Málaga. I asked him how he had liked the Germans. Not much, he said. They were too technical and too fanatical. That was why they had failed, in spite of their many great qualities.
He questioned me about England. Like all the other Spaniards I had met, he was full of curiosity to know what the conditions of life were in our country. But there was resentment mingled with his rather grudging admiration. Why had we outlawed Spain? I said that we had no wish to outlaw Spain (it is odd how when travelling abroad one becomes the official spokesman of one’s country), but that it was impossible for us to have close or friendly relations with its present regime. Our foreign policy was governed by the political struggle with Russia and if we admitted General Franco’s government to the union of Western European nations, many people in France and Italy who at present supported that union would give their votes to the Communists. We could not afford to make such a gift to Russian propaganda. This was a point of view that seemed entirely new to him and he sat brooding over it for a few moments in silence. But when I added that if a monarchy were to come in in Spain, we might feel that the position had altered, he became very excited.
‘This Don Juan,’ he said, ‘with his talk of elections and of friendship with Prieto will never rule in this country. Never – you may take my word for it. For if he were to, in a few years’ time we should be back where we were in 1936 and all the work of the Liberation would have to be done over again. That would mean another civil war.’
As we talked, we were passing out of the flat tableland of La Mancha into a different region. Round, sage-green hills, topped by whitish rocks, began to collect round us – at first in ones and twos and at some little distance from the track, as if to prepare us for the change that was coming, then crowding close about us in massed formations. In the brittle air the rocks glittered faintly and patches of broom, which the Spanish peasants call novia de los pastores, or shepherds’ sweetheart, made yellow smears upon the grey-green hillsides. All at once, as we crawled up a little pass, the train began to move faster and looking out we saw that we were racing down a steep grassy valley; jagged cliffs and rock pinnacles sprouting ilex and umbrella pine stood up on either side, rising above one another in distant recession. In an instant the whole scene had changed from the motionless and classical to the picturesque and romantic. We were in the Pass of Despeñaperros, the only breach in the three-hundred-mile wall of the Sierra Morena. I went out into the corridor to look at the view and the doctor joined me.
‘Is it true,’ I asked, ‘that there are bandits in the sierra?’ ‘You bet there are,’ he replied. ‘All those rocks and peaks you see are full of them. Some people call them the Maquis, but you can take my word for it that they are nothing else but bandits and murderers. When they want food, they come down from the mountains to raid farms and then they shoot everyone they see. They spare no one. If, as they pretend, they sought out their personal and political enemies, I should respect them. One knows where one is with people who fight for their ideals: either you kill them or they kill you, but the fight is pure. But these people – no. They have no ideals, they just kill for money and love of bloodshed.’
‘Are there many of them?’
‘Their numbers vary. Sometimes there are only a few, at other times there are thousands. When the police press them in one place, they move to another. They travel where they like and the towns are full of them. While they are in the mountains they live in caves and fire from behind bushes at the Civil Guards who try to close with them. Then they raid the farms and villages and carry off the cattle and pigs. As they kill any landowners or bailiffs they can catch, the estates are not supervised and agriculture suffers. The whole of the river valley above Córdoba is terrorised by them.’
‘This is the classical region of Spanish brigandage,’ I remarked. ‘José María made himself famous here a century ago.’
‘Yes, but these are not caballeros like José María,’ the doctor insisted. ‘They kill, kill, kill. And they don’t defend the poor against the rich as he did. They rob for their own pockets.’ We had come out of the pass into a rolling country planted with olives. Soon we saw on our left a slow, muddy stream bordered with tamarisks and oleanders: it was one of the headwaters of the Guadalquivir. Periwinkles and yellow marigolds were in flower in the hedges and the farmhouses we passed looked white and clean with their pots of geraniums and their iron rejas. Everywhere we saw horses, mules, asses and ragged children. There was no need to be told we were in Andalusia.
We began to talk of the conditions on the land.
‘They are not good,’ my fellow traveller said. ‘It’s the old, old story – the landowners won’t pay a living wage. We do all we can to press them in the syndicates, but they refuse to budge. Yet they are some of the richest people in the country. Look at Espejo, for example. The whole town and all the country round it are owned by the Duchess of Osuna, yet the workers on her estates are starving. The Reds ought to have shot those people.’
I told him that at Málaga, where I had been living when the civil war began, the Reds had not shot the landlords, but only the industrialists and the small people.
‘That’s just it,’ he said, very excited. ‘The Reds didn’t shoot the right people. They left the landowners alone, and now we have to pay the price for it.’
The train drew up at Andújar and a crowd of miserable, starving creatures, dressed in rags, stood on the platform.
‘Did you see Russians who were poorer than that?’ I asked. He admitted that he had not, but added that whereas all the Russians in the country districts were miserable, except the commissars, only a few people in Spain were undernourished.
‘It’s what I’m telling you,’ he went on. ‘This is the fault of the landlords. They pay wages that no family can live on. And for half the year they pay no wages at all.’
‘But why can’t you do something about it?’ I asked. ‘After all, Spain is a dictatorship. Franco can do anything he pleases.’
‘Ah, Franco!’ he broke out. ‘Don’t talk to me of Franco! He’s the best man Spain ever had. He’s a saint, that man is. He’s so good his image ought to be on all the altars. If anyone ever had a heart of gold, it’s he. But he doesn’t know what’s going on round him. Poor man, he’s always surrounded by his guards, has to travel in a bullet-proof car and see Spain from hoardings and balconies. If only he could step just once into a bar or café and listen to what people were saying, the country would change overnight. And then he’s so unjustly blamed. If it doesn’t rain and the crops fail, they say, “It’s Franco’s fault. It’s all because of Franco. If we had a king, we should be better off.” Is that fair?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But they do say that some of the people round him are robbing the country.’
‘And so they are. Look at —’ (naming a well-known political figure). ‘He made a pile by pure swindling, ran off to America and lived there for a year. Yet now he’s back again and more influential than ever. But Franco doesn’t know this. He is muy caballero, a very great gentleman, and trusts the people round him. And this is how they repay his confidence!’
The train drew into Córdoba and we got out. The doctor shook hands and gave me his card. From it I could see that he was one of the leading figures in the Falange of the province. Something neurotic in his bearing told me that during the civil war he had been responsible for many disagreeable things, and this impression was confirmed later. Yet I left him with a feeling of respect for his honesty and frankness, as well as with pity for the disillusion he had suffered. It is strange that fanatics, because they live tragically, should often be more likeable than reasonable and balanced people.
I have been carried away this evening by the beauty of Córdoba. Our hotel is an eighteenth-century house in the middle of the city, built like all old houses in Córdoba round a patio. It is quite a modest place – we pay only 40 pesetas (i.e. 8s.) a day – and bears the time-honoured name of the Hotel de Cuatro Naciones. From the moment when I went upstairs to the corridor and bedroom and smelt the sour smell of washed tile floors that is so characteristic of Andalusian fondas, I felt completely at home here. This was the Spain that I knew.
Our window opens on to the fretted stone balustrade of the Romanesque church of San Miguel, built towards 1240, immediately after the reconquest. Yellow mouldering walls, yellow peeling wash, for yellow is the prevailing colour of this city. Its harsh, jangling bell, angry and hurried like a bird’s alarm chatter and lasting only a few moments, is calling the devout to evening service.
After a coffee in the plaza we went for a stroll in the warm air given off by the houses. The sun was just setting and we let ourselves be carried by the crowd down one of the narrow, winding streets that lead to the river. Soon we came to the mosque with its long blank walls of yellow stone and its lovely Renaissance minaret. Beyond it lay the river. ‘O gran río, gran rey de Andalucía,’ as Góngora addressed it: the river of Tartessos, whose roots, said the Greek poet Stesichorus, lie among silver. Here, below the stone parapet, it rolled slowly by, a brownish-yellow current spotted with white bubbles, and beyond it a low sandy shore, scattered with washerwomen and donkeys and girls carrying pitchers: farther off still, the white village of the Campo de la Verdad.
19 February
The mosque of Córdoba is certainly the first building in Spain – the most original and the most beautiful. From the moment of entering the great court planted with orange trees, one gets a feeling of peace and harmony which is quite different from the mood of religious holiness and austerity imparted by Christian cloisters. The small reddish oranges cluster among the dark green leaves, butterflies chase one another, birds flit about and chirp, and the great marble cistern for ablutions seems to be there to say that the warmth and richness of Nature and the instinctive life of Man are also pure because they have been willed by God.
When one enters the mosque itself one is likely to suffer at first from conflicting impressions. The Renaissance choir built in the centre disturbs one’s view of the forest of columns: some of the restorations, especially the rather garish painting on the ceiling, clash with the warm colour of the stone and marble: and then the double horseshoe arches, striped buff-white and brick-rose, arrest one by their strangeness and novelty. One has to visit the building several times to allow its magic to sink into one.
This mosque is surely a first-rate example of the adage, so true of all the arts, that necessity is the mother of invention. The Arabs, when in 785 they began to build it, had no style of their own. They wished to make use of the Roman and Visigothic columns that littered the city and, since these were too slight to support the heavy pieces of masonry that would be needed to continue them if the roof was to be raised to a sufficient elevation, they were compelled to strengthen the arches by inserting above the abaci a second lower range of arches to act as buttresses. This contrivance – so clumsy structurally but so beautiful in effect – paved the way for the later invention of the wonderful intersecting arches of Al-Hakam’s maqsurah, which is the crowning glory of the building. A new style, put together from the syllables of a Byzantine idiom, had come into existence.
No two modes of architecture could well be more different from one another than the Muslim and the West Christian. West Christian architecture in its early phase is filled with the craving for weight and massiveness; and in its second phase, the Gothic, in that for a spectacular liberation from that weight in a skyward ascent. In both cases there is an emphasis on the tremendousness of the force of gravity, either in the form of great masses of stone weighing downwards, or of lofty columns springing up like trees in defiance of the down-pull. The load of original sin that oppresses the human conscience and seeks to drag the world back into the savagery of the Dark Ages is expressed in a load of stone. The sense of duration, too, the confidence in man’s firm establishment on the earth, is emphasised: the Universal Church has been built on a rock and will last for ever, and, while it lasts, it will interpret history in terms of moral profit and loss, as the Old Testament has taught it to do.
Muslim architecture is quite the opposite. A mosque is to be a court, a square, a market-place, lightly built to hold a large concourse of people. Allah is so great that nothing human can vie with Him in strength or endurance, and in a society where the harem system complicates the line of descent, the pride or orgullo of the feudal ages – which comes from their association of land tenure with family and from the vista of the long line of descendants – is out of place; in the feudal ages a man thought of his line as stretching forward into the future, in the aristocratic ages he thought of it as stretching back into the past. Even the Muslim castles, large though they are, give the effect of being light and insubstantial. But a mosque is also a place for the contemplation of the Oneness of Allah. How can this better be done than by giving the eyes a maze of geometric patterns to brood over? The state aimed at is a sort of semi-trance. The mind contemplates the patterns, knows that they can be unravelled and yet does not unravel them. It rests therefore on what it sees, and the delicate colour, the variations of light and shade add a sensuous tinge to the pleasure of certainty made visible. This, at all events, is the only explanation I can give of the strange state of mind set up by Al-Hakam’s maqsurah and mihrab. Another building not to be missed in Córdoba is the synagogue. Though erected as late as 1315 – that is to say, after the Christian occupation – its arabesque plaster designs are in the purest Muslim style. Close by lived Maimonides, the great Jewish poet and philosopher, whose tomb is still shown at Damascus. A square nearby has been renamed after him.
This old Jewish quarter of the city is particularly lovely. The characteristic feature of Córdoba, as everyone who has been there knows, is the two-storeyed house built round a patio. These patios with their pots of ferns and flowers and their fountain in the centre have an irresistible charm and, since the street doors are left open, one gets a glimpse into them as one passes. The plan of these houses is Roman, but none are older than the sixteenth century and most of them were put up after 1700. A large part of the area of the present city was occupied by ruins and gardens until well on in the nineteenth century.
20 February
This afternoon we set off to see the famous hermitages in the sierra. To do this one takes the bus a couple of miles as far as Brillante, a garden city built since the war, and then walks. As we got out of the bus, a man came up and offered to show us the way. He was a pleasant, eager little fellow who was enchanted at the idea of speaking to two English people, because he was a regular listener to the Spanish programme of the BBC. Very soon his history came out. During the war he had been a sergeant on the Nationalist side: then he had been appointed schoolmaster of a village in the sierra, but, finding the pay insufficient to support him, he had put in a local man as locum tenens and opened a small business in Córdoba. He regretted having had to do this because he liked teaching and had a strong sense of its importance.
We were walking up a broad track between limestone boulders and evergreen oaks. Clumps of asphodels with their glossy leaves and elegant, starry flowers were scattered about and among them, under the trees, sat parties of picnickers, dressed in their gayest Sunday clothes, with bottles and slices of ham and cold sausages spread out on napkins. This was the Quinta de Arrizafa, where the Caliphs once had their summer palace.
Our friend talked a great deal, holding forth on politics and religion. His politics were Monarchist, his religion a sort of liberal Catholicism, tinged with mystical adumbrations. He believed in goodness. The steepness of the climb was alleviated by the frequent pauses he made to gesticulate and explain his views. But when I told him of the Falangist doctor I had met in the train, he stopped short in his tracks and dropped his voice. It is remarkable what a fear these Falangist extremists set up in some people, in spite of the fact that they have today lost most of their power.
People dry up when they discover that you know them. One only begins to understand it when one remembers the fantastic number of people that they are supposed to have killed in and after the war: here in the province of Córdoba rumour credits them with having shot 28,000. However our friend soon brightened up again and, in answer to my inquiries, told me that the picture that the doctor had drawn of the brigands in the Sierra Morena was greatly exaggerated: they had been a nuisance some time before, but were now of very little consequence. And they rarely killed anyone. They were all of them political men – Socialists or Communists on the run.
The schoolmaster turned back after a mile and we went on alone. The road climbed slowly in long hairpin curves, so we took a short cut. This led us past the mouth of a little cave or rock shelter, whose entrance had been blocked with a few household chattels. Behind these we discovered a woman lying on some sacks, who, when she saw us, got up and came out. She was a woman of under thirty, dressed in a very old and ragged black dress which showed her naked body through its rents. She had been ill, she told us, after the birth of a child, which had died because her milk had dried up. Her husband had been employed on an estate nearby, but as the work had come to an end and they could not pay their rent, they had left and come here. Now she could not leave because her clothes were not decent. She was obviously starving, but she did not complain, or ask for money, and, when I gave her some, appeared surprised. ‘Times are bad,’ she said with resignation. ‘Let us hope they will soon take a better turn.’
We arrived at the hermitage that crowns the rocky hill. Grey rocks, grey trees, white jonquils and asphodels, and no sound but the tinkling of goat bells. Far below we could see the white city, spread out like a patch of bird droppings by its brown river, and beyond it the red and green campiña, flowing in bright Van Gogh-like undulations. The hermits strike me as being museum pieces rather than examples of a serious contemplative life. There are ten of them, each occupying his own snug little hermitage, each dressed in a long brown robe and decorated with a bushy white beard that flows down over his chest in the true Carolingian manner. On Sundays they are on view and, as we walked down the path to the chapel, we passed one of them, seated on a chair under an ancient oak tree and reading from a calf-bound folio with the aid of a prodigious pair of cows’ horn spectacles. It was obvious that he was fully aware of his own picturesqueness.
These hermits own the mountain on which their cells are built and employ a man to look after their goats; otherwise they depend for their subsistence on alms, which are never wanting. I imagine that this is the oldest colony of hermits in Europe, for they have been here continuously since Visigothic times. But the age is hostile to the sentiment O solitudo, O beatitudo, and when I praised the beauty and seclusion of this spot to the hermit who was showing us over the chapel, he grunted and said ‘Es mucha soledad’ (‘It’s very lonely’).
The people of Córdoba are exceedingly proud of their city. If, for example, one happens to mention wine, they tell one that the wine of Córdoba (which is unknown anywhere else) is the best in Spain.
‘You have only to carry a bottle of Montilla across the river and it improves at once, and when you take it back again, it gets worse.’ Yet they know very little about the famous men their city has produced: Seneca they have heard of, but Góngora to them is just the name of a street and no one knows where his house stands. I had spoken about this to our schoolmaster acquaintance, who has a certain liking for poetry, and he promised that he would help me to find it. We met therefore by arrangement at a café.
Our first step was to visit the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza, or Secondary School, in search of the city archivist. This school was housed in a magnificent building with a large interior court. All the children in it were well dressed and came from middle-class families, so I asked our companion whether any working-class children found their way here.
‘Very rarely,’ he replied. ‘These children all come from the primary schools run by the Church. In most of these one has to pay something, but one gets a fine education. The state primary schools are today so neglected that the children who go to them make no progress. This suits everyone: the Church sees its schools well sought after and the ruling classes are pleased to have the poor kept in their place. Most of the children of the poor grow up without learning how to read or write.’
We found the archivist, who gave us the address of Góngora’s house and promised to show us other sites connected with him when we returned to Córdoba in a month’s time. Then we adjourned to a tavern to taste wine, not from Córdoba, but the far superior Montilla. We discussed bullfights and, after that, religion. ‘Yes,’ said the schoolmaster, ‘there has been a genuine revival. But you must bear in mind that the Church in Spain is like an old, old tree, some of whose branches have fallen and lie rotting on the ground. Not all the people you see dressed as Catholics are Catholic inside.’
He is a pleasant little man, combining gaiety with genuine kindness and a rather ineffectual enthusiasm for the things of the mind. A man with middle-of-the-road opinions. How many there are of them in this country, in spite of the Spaniards’ reputation for fanaticism! Yet how little effect they have had!
21 February
This morning we took a taxi to visit Medina al Zahra. This was the palace which the first and greatest of the Spanish Caliphs, Abderrahman III, began to build in 936 and which his successors enlarged and completed. The accounts given of it by the Muslim historians show it as being possibly the largest and certainly the most luxurious palace ever built in any age. Four thousand marble columns were used in its construction and the quantity of gold, bronze and silver employed in decorating it was fabulous. The whole Mediterranean region as far as Constantinople was ransacked for precious materials.
The most splendid of its apartments was the so-called Chamber of the Caliphs, a vast room entered by thirty-two doors, each decorated with gold and ivory and resting on pillars of transparent crystal. The roof was made of sheets of variously-coloured marble cut so thin as to let the light through, while the walls were of marble, inlaid with gold and silver. But the most astonishing feature of this apartment was the great basin, or perhaps fountain, which stood in the centre. It was filled with mercury instead of water and when set in motion it dazzled the onlooker with the flashes of light and colours which it set up.
Thirteen thousand male servants lived in this palace, not to speak of the harem and their attendants, whose numbers could scarcely be counted. The fish in the garden tanks alone consumed 12,000 loaves every day. The quantities required for the human inhabitants can be left to the imagination. And what became of this superb edifice? In the year 1010 the Berbers, who were besieging Córdoba, wrecked and looted it, and so complete was its destruction in the course of the ensuing ages that till a few years ago its very site was unknown, and wild bulls pastured and fought one another where once the most beautiful women in the world had yawned on their solitary beds and stuffed themselves with sweets and pastries.
The excavations lie some four miles to the west of the city, on the lower slopes of the long grey-green line of the sierra. The situation is beautiful. Ilexes and lotus trees stand around in solemn dignity and under them grow daisies, asphodels and that flower of piercing blue – the dwarf iris. The ruins are scarcely worth seeing, since all the stones have been carried off to build a monastery on the hill above, though there are plenty of fragments of stucco arabesques, mostly of acanthus patterns and showing a strong Byzantine influence. The museum contains some interesting pottery with designs of birds, fishes and animals in pale green. However only a small area of the palace has yet been excavated: beyond it stretch acres of formless mounds, covered with creeping acanthus leaves and low-growing mandrakes and the dried stalks of fennel. The cormorant and the bittern, the screech owl and the satyr still have the place pretty well to themselves.
As we left, the new Civil Governor of Córdoba drove up in his car. I remarked to the chauffeur that he was said to be an energetic man who would attack abuses. But the chauffeur, an ex-sergeant in the Air Force, was a cynic.
‘If that’s so,’ he replied, ‘he won’t be here for long. A few years ago we had one who quadrupled the ration by seizing the stores the syndicates were keeping for their black-market operations. This allowed the poor to eat, which on the present scale of rationing they can’t do. So they got rid of him.’
One cannot walk about the streets of Córdoba without being horrified by the poverty. The standard of life has always been very low among the agricultural workers of this part of Spain, but this is worse, far, far worse, than anything known within living memory. One sees men and women whose faces and bodies are coated with dirt because they are too weak or too sunk in despair to wash in water. One sees children of ten with wizened faces, women of thirty who are already hags, wearing that frown of anxiety which perpetual hunger and uncertainty about the future give. I have never seen such sheer misery before: even the lepers of Marrakesh and Taroudant look less wretched, because, besides being better nourished, they are resigned to their fate. It presents one too at every step with a personal problem: what right has one to eat good meals, to drink coffee, to buy pastries when people are starving all round one? No right at all, and yet, being selfish by nature, I could not help doing so.
Most dreadful are those who creep about the streets without arms or legs. The government provides a small pension for persons who lost their limbs on their side, but those who were involved with the Reds, even if they are women or children, get nothing. They ought to have been living in some other place when the war broke out! The insurance scheme only caters for those workmen who have regular employment. Agricultural labourers, small shopkeepers, street vendors, bootblacks get nothing. If they fall ill, they will not even be taken into a hospital unless they can pay. A bootblack said to me:
‘When the civil war broke out, I had some money saved up. Then, after the Nationalist victory, all the currency in the Red zone was annulled and I lost it. Now I am getting old. I have no children and if I fall ill there is nothing left for me but to die of starvation. So I mean to try to get to France, where they treat people more humanely.’
The middle-class Cordobeses tell one that most of the destitute one sees in the streets are from other provinces. ‘From all over Andalusia they collect here.’ But this is their local pride speaking: the truth is that they are unemployed agricultural labourers from the large estates of the campiña. The system in use on these large estates is to keep a handful of men on the payroll all the year round and to take on the rest for short spells as the season requires. For every ten that are permanently employed, a hundred will be at the mercy of casual labour. This means that, even in a good year, an agricultural labourer will have to support his family for twelve months on what he earns in six or eight. Before the civil war it was just possible for him to get along in this way when the season was not too bad, but now, owing to the inflation, the value of wages has fallen considerably. To make matters worse, this has been an exceptionally bad year. The olive crop last Christmas was very poor – and it is on the money made by olive picking that a family dresses itself – while the drought has held up the spring hoeing. The consequence is a famine – a famine too which cannot be mentioned in the press and which the possessing classes shut their eyes to.
A bad mark for the Franco regime? Yes, certainly – but let us in fairness remember that every other regime, including the Republican, refused to grapple with this problem. What is needed is a complete reorganisation of the system of cultivating the land, coupled with a severe pressure applied to the landowners. And this is something that the present government, weak and discredited as it is and fearful of making more enemies, cannot do.
I had wished to visit the dungeons of the Inquisition, which are still apparently to be seen in the medieval alcázar, adjoining the Arab one. This, however, was not possible because the buildings have been converted to military use. Nor were my inquiries very well received. Spaniards are still chary of speaking of this once revered institution and, when a foreigner puts some question about it, profess ignorance.
Its proceedings at Córdoba were particularly revolting, or perhaps it would be better to say that we are particularly well informed about them. Take for example the case of Lucero. In 1499 a Canon of Cádiz Cathedral called Rodríguez Lucero was appointed Inquisitor of the Tribunal of Córdoba, and at once set to work to arrest and burn all persons of Jewish descent against whom allegations of doubtful faith could, rightly or wrongly, be made. When evidence was lacking, he employed professional perjurers. No objections were raised to this by the people at large, for such acts were in the ordinary line of Inquisitorial business and the conversos were unpopular. But finding that the thoroughness of his operations was exhausting this field, he began to extend them to persons of Old Christian descent, obtaining the evidence he needed by torturing their dependants. The object was money: the property of persons convicted of heresy was confiscated and paid into the Crown, who returned part of it to the Holy Office. Besides this there were the sums obtained by selling dispensations and imposing fines (termed penances), which went straight into the coffers of the Inquisitors, not to speak of what could be got by squeeze and blackmail. Few criminals have ever had greater opportunities.
Of course in arresting persons of impeccable orthodoxy and Christian descent there were certain risks, because the Inquisition had only recently been established and the country was not entirely cowed by it. However, Poderoso caballero es Don Dinero – money speaks – so that by buying one of King Ferdinand’s secretaries and, when the need arose, other important dignitaries, not excluding a cardinal, Lucero made sure of his position, and soon the reign of terror he set up was such that no one in the south of Spain was safe. Eminent ecclesiastics were especially attacked, because during their incarceration the income from their benefices was paid into the Inquisition funds, and a moment came when even the saintly Archbishop of Granada, who had been Queen Isabella’s confessor and was now eighty years old, was on the point of being arrested.
There is no knowing how far this diabolical man might have gone had not an accident intervened. In 1506 Philip the Fair landed in Castile and, anxious to exert some act of sovereignty, listened to the appeals of the clergy and municipality of Córdoba, which both Ferdinand and the Inquisitor General, who had a pecuniary interest in Lucero’s extortions, had refused to hear, and suspended him. In the trial that followed two years later his guilt was fully established, in spite of the fact that he had had time to burn most of the hostile witnesses, and he was therefore dismissed to his canonry at Seville (for an Inquisitor could not be punished), where he spent the rest of his days in comfort on the proceeds of the money he had accumulated. This is the only case recorded of an Inquisitor being either dismissed or brought to trial.
I have mentioned this episode, which is related at length in Lea’s abundantly documented History, because it has become the fashion of late to whitewash the Inquisition. Both its principles and its methods, it is asserted, were in accordance with the spirit of the age; it was slow in making charges, scrupulously fair in its prosecutions, just in its sentences, and so forth. But whatever may be said of its procedure in other countries, this was not the way in which it operated in Spain. In the lush and fertile soil of the peninsula, this institution not only reached the extremes of fanaticism and cruelty (we read for example of children of ten being prosecuted and imprisoned for life), but those of the most sordid corruption as well. And what is one to say of those scenes in underground chambers where elderly priests looked on whilst naked women and girls were tortured? Of all the rackets recorded in history, the Spanish Inquisition, during the first hundred years of its career, was perhaps the most mean and repulsive.
This evening we walked to the hermitage church of Nuestra Señora de Fuensanta, on the eastern edge of the town. On the way we passed a convent where two nuns, dressed in white starched caps, were distributing bowls of soup to the poor. A queue of some three hundred people stretched down the road outside. These nuns belong to an order which is confined to the city of Córdoba, and those who have the state of the poor on their conscience contribute to their fund.
The church we were looking for stands in a large open space on the edge of the fields. An avenue of plane trees led down to it and the sunlight flooded their grey trunks and lace-like branches, dotted with little red buds that would soon be bursting into leaf. A cantankerous-looking fig tree, growing among heaps of rubbish, filled the air around it with its dense, sticky smell, as if to show that it too was feeling the effects of spring and poetry. Entering the courtyard, we came to a long portico hung with ex-votos. Some of these consisted of crutches or tresses of hair: others of little figures cut out in tin and representing limbs: others again of crude paintings of miracles performed by the Virgin, which often had the charm and freshness of children’s drawings. There was also a narwhal’s tusk and a stuffed crocodile, formerly esteemed for their aphrodisiac properties, though why hung here I cannot say. Possibly the crocodile, which recalls that to be seen in the porch of Seville Cathedral, was at one time regarded as a maiden-eating dragon which some chivalrous saint of the type of St George had slain.
Passing through into the church, we found its interior cool and dark. The whole of one end was taken up by a vast gilt retablo in the centre of which – an insignificant doll-like figure – stood the miracle-working Virgin. We made our genuflexions and whispered our desires, then walked back by the warm evening light along the river.