Chapter IV Aragon
a. The Atom
b. The Way of the Atom
A. The Atom
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north boundary of Spain is mountain. To the east it is called the Pyrenees: a wall of snowy rock that falls, save for a space above the fertile fields of Catalonia, into the desert of Aragon and Navarre. Westward, the wall is lower and has another name: Cantábrico. It too is wild, but the more moderate moisture covers it with pine and its fall southward is but a step to the high meseta of León and Castile. Within this barrier that like a jagged knife cuts Spain from Europe lived the Christian Remnant before the Arabs. And from two fastnesses of this wall—where the Arabs never gained a foothold—went forth at once the Reconquista which for eight hundred years, thrusting, expanding, retreating, made war upon the Moslem and at last after innumerable shifts of fortune drove him out. The western point of the Reconquest’s birth lies in the perpendicular rocks of the Asturias. This is the cradle of the Kingdom of León, which, thrusting from the Cantábrico, became Castile. To the east, the nucleus of the long “push” south was in the bleakest and highest Pyrenees of Spain: the Ribagorza and Sobrarbe whose hard squat Iberian chieftains were the first kings of Aragon. Not till the last decades of the fifteenth century, at the end of the long battle, did the two Christian forces join and become Spain. During seven hundred years, they had waged war against Mohammed; they had grown great in Spain; they had flung their power northward across the mountains, eastward across the sea to Italy and Greece: but they had lived—Castile and Aragon—separate from each other and for the most part hostile.
Within the Pyrenees—the stratified chaos north of Huesca and Barbastro—the atom of Aragon lives above the splendor it has given forth. Here, if anywhere, is the aboriginal Spaniard—unchanged as his mountains. The Iberians who were pushed north from the desert or south from Acquitaine into the Sobrarbe and the Ribagorza found themselves in a sort of Continental crow’s-nest, high above invasion. The Romans did not tarry here, nor the Visigoths. The Arabs were beaten back, south of Jaca, and had to veer to the east to enter France. For countless ages, these primeval men beside the river Aragon lived uninvaded, until their atomic energy grew to be explosive and they became invaders.
But they are still the atom. They live in the crannies of mountains, in the steep stretches of valleys torn by torrents. The sky above them is shut in by rock. Northward the Pyrenees stand ordered and columned upon France. But in their southward march they become a delirium of broken walls. They symbolize the cacophony of Spain. The little villages perch on a precipitous bench of mountain or are lost within the immense sweep of a moor. They too are stone. The houses are gathered fragments of the heights. Often there is no wooden door. Windows are tiny apertures of space. The houses huddle so close that they appear to be a single rock, whence rise the blind walls of the church—fortress rather than church—like an irregular edge. Another such obtrusion seems the entire village upon the high face of the mountains. If it is low in a valley, still the monotone is there. For the moor is gray and mournful like a stone; and the furze of summer makes it but faintly fluid as if from the blaze of the sun. The rushing river sends splinters of gray fume over the teeth of its rapids. Stone....
From these stone towns come the creatures who have built them. Small weazened men they are, with heads like nuts and eyes like iron. They have no sensuality and no art. Indeed, they too are fragments of the fragmented mountains: atoms of rock who have detached themselves and learned to walk about. They are silent, impenetrable. They have the mineral virtues. They are strong, they are steadfast, they are inexpugnably honest, they are brave. To dislodge them from the inertia of their world is as hard as to lodge an idea in their heads. And as they walk about, their slow and clumsy gait perfects the sense that they are walking stones: that this human venture is a masquerade: that presently they will cast their uncouth manhood and go back into the eternal mountain sleep.
They wear black leathern breeches slashed at the side and ending well above the knee. In the split at the side and below, the drawers bulge white or gray. The calf is enclosed in heavy leggings of white wool, doubly lined with buttons. The feet are wrapped in a cloth and shod in a sole of wood or wool that is thonged with leather, and bound about the ankle. About the waist is a huge sash—faja—coming down thick on the buttocks and serving as the pocket. The jacket is short. The aboriginal Aragonese wears no hat: a handkerchief slanted athwart his head absorbs the sweat of his labor and leaves the cropped crown free. When he wears a hat, it is an adaptation either of the boina of the Basque or a lumpish variant of the pie-shaped hat of Castile. His invention has not gone so high as his head.
The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly. The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of masquerade persists. This man is a stone—an atom of the horizons. With his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still too mineral to need a hat.
His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth—dark brown and gray—from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the savage and swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes.
Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him along.
They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity has come. They build monasteries—mountain fortresses for God. Strife has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains, nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights. But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....
The valley of the Ebro—Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her bloods—is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The wall of the Pyrenees, in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but drops, not as northward upon smiling France—drops to desolation. Aragon which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro trickles. The soil is still subaqueous: marl, clay, gypsum, alkalis make its sterile surface. Salt lies free on it. Even the heather and grass of the upland moors do not live here.
But the Aragonese lives here: and here is the second stage of his progression. Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay. There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.
This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. And its dwellers are worthy of their weather. They are not degenerate like the inbred natives of Las Hurdes between Extremadura and León. Nor are they spiced and strained with eastern bloods, like the cave-dwellers of Murcia and Almería. They are simple human stock extraordinarily coarsened. Dull-eyed, crude-lipped, slow-moving, slow-talking: they lack the mineral sheerness of the mountain men. The air that they breathe is not snow-swept. Their flesh has no crystal tarn for neighbor. They live in a roadway of unleashed elements. Dust, clay, salt, drug their air and clog their pores. But there is something else. There is the roadway, and the mobile spirit of the roadway. Movement and action infuse this brutish people.
B. The Way of the Atom
The men of the mountain and the desert store up great energy within their core: the outer world harries, arouses: the virgin force grows aggressive. East of Aragon are two rich and fluid lands: the Christian Principality of Catalonia, the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. Frankish Barcelona rivals Marseilles and Venice, in ships. (Ramón Lull, Spain’s most original schoolman, lived here: he wrote in Latin, Catalan and Arabic, books on love and wisdom. Chasdai ben Crescas, Spain’s most original Jewish thinker, lived here: he founded a new Prophetic lineage which three centuries later grew to be Spinoza.) Farther down the coast are the lush huertas of Valencia: a great port facing south as Barcelona east, a seat of Moorish culture.
As Rome once the subtle nations to her east, tough Aragon comes to control these affluent worlds. When in 1149 Ramón Berenguer IV of Barcelona wedded the daughter of Ramiro II of Aragon, the mountainous kingdom did not lose its sway. Catalonia became part of Aragon: and the currents of its open life the veins of the uncouth inland realm. A century later, Jaime I of Aragon with Catalonian help conquered Valencia. Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death, the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys, Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win it—for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples—in the name of Aragon again.
Aragon of the desert and the mountains has in its stone-like men an energy which informed the mental mobility of the Catalan, the sensuous fervor of the Valencian: prevailed upon them, dominioned them and made them tools at last to its own activity in Europe, to its ultimate partnership with Castile in Spain. Within itself, Aragon has little else. It lacked the elements for the creating of an indigenous culture. Aragon the core remained prehistoric: its history is its power to accumulate forces about it.
But this elemental virtue through its very neutralness served to fuse the diverse natures upon which Aragon worked. The initial urgency was Aragon: and Aragon was the name of the amalgam which resulted. When at the close of the fifteenth century the nation of Spain was born, its eye toward Europe was Aragon. Isabel of Castile was the spirit and the religious motor of that birth. Ferdinand of Aragon, with his infusion of Frankish-Catalan and Jewish bloods, was the diplomat and politician who turned the mystical Castilian dream into a European fact. Aragon took its place in that polyphony of elemental fusions which was Spain. But with this difference. That fusion, in Castile, Galicia, Portugal, Andalusia, had a preponderance of parts native to these provinces. In Aragon the fusion was of outer elements. Aragon was the port of Spain: it had become a power in Europe. But its own integral rôle in the cultural life of the Aragonese nation was that of a catalyst in a solution.
Although historic Aragon is dead, in the capital city, Zaragoza, the process is revealed. Zaragoza is Spanish: yet its parts speak all of the east, of the south, and of the north. The streets have a dark fluidity which suggests Naples. They are not rigid and bright like the streets of Castile. Their warmth is freeflowing like a blood under the swarthy stones. They brood, they rot: they are not transfixed in contemplation of their unity, nor in rapt service of their own high fate. They are not noble, not inspired streets like the most sordid in Avila or Burgos. Italy’s ageing paganism darklies them: and the Moor’s mobility which lifts Valencia into a dance gives them an elusive charm, a play of light and shadow which Naples lacks.
Upon the dusty shores of the Ebro where the trees bend in a gray burden to the tawny waters, Spain speaks through Zaragoza. Here stand two monsters, the cathedrals. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a long pile, drear as a Jesuit college, dull as a bull-ring: and from its mournful mass rise suddenly, inappositely, the huge azulejo domes, their hypertrophic rhetoric gleaming of Andalusia and Morocco. Within is a church in the style of Louis XVI of France! The other cathedral is more mellow, but not less hybrid. La Seo is Gothic. There is a Romanesque window: the façade is rich in Moorish bricks and tiles. The columns are Gothic; the walls are exuberant tissues of plateresque. Yet the whole is harmonious, is impressive. It is Aragon. There is here something at once pagan in mind and Christian in mood. The cathedral indeed is like the Latin Sea: a converted heathen whose thought holds to the limits of youth and from the Christian infinite has taken a boundless and vague melancholy. This crossing of sun and shadow is Aragon. Light is here—in eclipse: storm—sun-tinged. The immutable atomism of the Aragonese shivers in contradiction. The sun of Italy breaks into motes, dancing on a grave: the Spanish burden of death becomes the irrational refrain of a gay song.
In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of France and the east. In the jota, the basic material is Spanish. What is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808 against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of Andalusian cante hondo. The classic southern song becomes romantic. Its abstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a facile nervousness from Europe—this is the jota of Aragon.
So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of Aragon has no organic response for these racy cultures. They overwhelm it: they form an amalgam about the rigid core. And the harmony of Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing, evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an impenetrable center.
Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....
These men of the Sobrarbe and the desert have been too ruthlessly hardened by their world to receive the juices of spirit. Like a steel mirror, they reflected for an hour the suns of Italy, of Araby and Spain. This is the greatness of Aragon—a swift reflection in which affluent worlds were fused in the reflector and took on the form of the reflector’s contour. But the worlds swung past, life shifted: the light no longer fell on Aragon. Its surface becomes dull once more, and unillumined.