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The SARAPHINA MOSEY Guest Writers Anthology Notes from Iberia By R. Genn Notes from Iberia In a Church Museum, past a rococo, gold-encrusted diorama of a lifelike Christ calling out in pain as he drags his cross; a ruddy-faced man, dapper like an undertaker or a deacon, crouches behind a high desk and sorts cash and tears small tickets into two pieces. "It is an extra 50 escudos if you take a photo," he says. The right transept of the church of San Francisco in Evora is adjoined by the Casa dos Ossos, a chapel the walls of which are covered with human bones. Over the entrance is the inscription: "Nos, ossos, qui aqui estamos, pelos vossos vesperamos." (We bones wait for yours to join us) The bones, countless thousands of them, are for the most part embedded in masonry, with occasional skulls here and there for punctuation. Arches are formed with matched femurs, digits frame the small windows. Many visitors seem transfixed by the depravity and ghoul of the Church, failing to read the philosophic message. Schoolgirls make jokes and photograph one another in front of tibias and fibulas. In the church the treasury exhibits a gem-encrusted reliquary containing three fingers of a little known saint. Through an ornately mounted magnifying glass, a sort of monstrance, there are a few nail-clippings of yet another. Curious guests look uneasy. The Church in Portugal now does better from tourismo than from the plate. Except for an occasional bowed woman who silently lights a candle or brings a flower to a special saint, this would seem to be a museum of former thought.
Love in Evora In the Evora Art Museum, two life-sized figures leap up in unison, enraptured together, a young man and a girl in marble, their diaphanous robing concealing flimsily their erogenous zones. Their faces are purity and joy. The life-size piece was carved in 1898 in neo-classical style by the Portuguese sculptor Alberto Nunes. In the park below the museum a pair of university students dismount from a motorcycle, remove their helmets, shake out their hair, and sit together on a bench in a quiet corner, backlit by the late afternoon sun. She stretches her legs across his. They speak in low murmurs and laugh privately while toying with each others' ringlets. One of his fingers is in a cast and she examines and gives sympathy to his hand. He holds her hand to his mouth and discretely kisses her fingers and between her fingers. He puts one of his fingers gently into her mouth. His large and dark eyes look earnestly into hers. Without removing his finger he kisses her lips. They smile through one another and beyond, appearing to exist in each other's connection.
An Honest Opinion There are sculptures in the Diana Park in front of the pousada in Evora Portugal. Some of it is classical and traditional--like the one in front of me. It's of a former mayor, Dr. Barahona, "The Reconstructor of Evora." The statue was erected in 1908. It's a pillar on which stands his oversized bust. A female figure who appears to represent "knowledge" sits below and looks toward him in adulation. Nearby in the park are the Portuguese equivalents of Henry Moore, and Brancusian obelisks, some broken as part of the motif--one is a tall phallus pointing into the cloudless sky. Under the swaying pines of the park, between the sculptures, the people sit, some asleep or almost so, alone with the integrity of their benches. A middle-aged man and his wife are looking at a piece of modern sculpture--trying to figure. They are of the typical pasao, conservatively and neatly dressed, proper hat and tie, she with a dark discreet skirt and sensibly heeled shoes. "No es arte, no es arte, no es arte," he says, in increasing volume. Then they walk to the Quiosque du Diana and buy small cups of coffee.
A Painting of Evora Over the edge of the wall, in the shade of the park below the Temple of Diana, I make a painting. Topsy houses with terra-cotta roofs angular and flat tumble away, a stroke at a time, furrowed by narrow streets. Whitewash is dazzling orange in the late sun, and shadows crawl in deep translucent purple. Beyond, the smiling Alentejo plain is striped cobalt and ochre, dotted, like a field of sheep, with dark viridian cork-oaks. Of the houses in the foreground, which is the pattern of the painting, every facet is an angle and a gradation, each window an eye. Abstraction is ready made. Foreshortened mankind moves, glimpsed through arches or in quick cameo in the streets. A woman in black leans from an upper window, stridently scolds someone unseen, then reaches around and shutters further argument. Other windows are opened to receive personal and often delicate items from short clotheslines. Caged song-birds are taken in for the night. A muffled church-bell at annulus rings flat. People don't figure in the painting. It has the smell of cigarette and coriander and olive oil. If there is a sound it's autos negotiating the maze, the sandpaper and blackboard voice of Portuguese argument, and a two-stroke echoing intermittently, magnified by the sounding-box of reverberating walls.
The Old Men of Evoramonte They move slowly along the tiled marble sidewalk, under the decorative and laden oranges, through the small unfinished park. They cross back and forth on the main road, slowly, defying the charging trucks like mild drunkards, exchanging the time of day with the same names they have shaken hands with all of their lives. They look to one another as if there is something going on; politics, life, death. They look in expectancy, as if a second coming is at hand, or a lottery will come in. More than anything they are social--as if they accept and know the possibility that great things may come from their fellow man. They pay little attention to the extranheros--the tourists are too strange, too hopeless, too beyond redemption. They know enough to keep to their own village, their own park. Caps forward on their heads at a jaunty angle, skin bronzed from the year-round sun, they watch one another, stopping to chat, sitting down for a few minutes, laughing, arguing; men with men, mano amano. Moving on, slowly, keeping an eye here and there, right and left, stopping to watch the men leaning on their shovels--the men supposed to be shoveling away the tiles that were laid down only a few years before--the shoveling men who occasionally pick up a shovelful and slowly take it over to the pile they are slowly building as they work to join the others too old or too slow to be permanently employed, and who now take the sun and the companionship and keep an eye on one another, up and down, back and forth through the small unfinished park.
The Legend of El Cachorro A legend tells the story of a young man living in Triana, near Seville. He was tall and handsome and was admired for his guitar playing and flamenco singing. He was known as El Cachorro and no one knew about his love life, although there were rumors about a young woman from the higher class quarters across the river. At that time the sculptor Francisco Ruiz Gigon was engaged to carve the image of "Christ Expiring" for the Triana church. The artist worked on many sketches but none of them turned out to be what he was looking for. One night, while the artist wandered around the town, he heard a scream of pain and went to where it came from. There, on the street, he found a mortally wounded man. The artist was so impressed with the expression on the face of the man that he made a drawing on the spot. This sketch turned out to be the image of the Expiring Christ that he was looking for. Some time later Gigon's carving was being carried in a procession and the people of Triana called out in surprise--"Look, it is El Cachorro." It's said that El Cachorro was killed by a nobleman to save the honor of the young woman. Today, the carving, known as Cristo el Cachorro can be seen at the Capilla del Patrocino in Seville.
A Forgotten Monument It's a soft glade by a Spanish streamlet of small consequence--what they call here an arroyo, that is, a river that sometimes does not exist, at the same time a river that may run fiercely after a rain, so that it must be stopped along the way, directed into ditches and cisterns for profit, conserved and measured onto the parched and slow-yielding land. Here in this glade the river is held in check, forming a wide pond, reflecting the overhanging oaks and willows. From the ruin of a bell-tower in the old village which rises above a silent stork looks over the edge of her ragged nest. The furrowed fields have wary lapwings. Somewhere, in the distance, cow-bells of a variety of pitch make a concerto for the land. By the water-glade there is an overgrown and lichen-covered monument from the Peninsular War--which tells how the French army under General Sault waited here until joined by Spanish dissidents and their numbers were superior to the British under Wellington, and who made a morning attack and won an early victory with few casualties.
An Incomplete Work of Art An artist by the name of Fernando Vigli came in the late afternoons in 1888 at the same hour to catch the light in the Alkazar Gardens in Seville. The view he painted included the perspective of a tree-lined walkway, a formal fountain and a glorietta overhung with brilliant pink and purple. In the background was a golden Saracen tower. On several consecutive days the artist noticed a young woman wearing a white mantilla who sat in the same place on a bench within the composition. The woman stayed only a short while, and then moved on. Sometimes the artist looked up from his canvas to find that she had disappeared. Vigli decided that he might include the young woman in his painting, but that he would prefer her to be in a different location and posed in a certain way. He decided to look for her in the garden the following day, tell her who he was--he was already quite famous--and ask her to pose for him. But the next day and the next she did not appear. Vigli grew obsessed with the non-appearance of the woman and took to searching the streets for her. He went to the Fabrica Tabacos, which was nearby to the Alkazar Gardens, and where two thousand women worked. While he saw many women in the factory, he did not see the one he wanted to complete his painting. Eventually Vigli finished his painting without the young woman. Years later, when Vigli was quite old, he received a letter from the Duchess of Alba asking him to paint a landscape for one of the Duke's townhouses in Seville. When Vigli visited the Duchess to arrange for the commission he saw immediately that she was the same woman he had needed for his painting many years before. The Duchess, who was now old herself, remembered that she was troubled and sat in the Alkazar Gardens in the few days before her marriage to the Duke. When Vigli questioned her on the sweetness of her marriage, she said that there were regrets on both parts. Vigli then said he wished he had decided to include her in his painting only one day sooner. He then begged to have the landscape commission changed to a portrait of the Duchess, and it was this unfinished work that he was painting when he died.
Searching For Earlier Paintings When Carol and I lived here in 1964 and 1965 Fuengirola was a sleepy fishing and olive-pressing village in the first rumblings of tourism. Thirty-two years later it's like Miami Beach. Still, I find again the old places. I find where I painted one called "After the Rain,"--a pathway with puddles along the Rio Fuengirola with white and orange-tiled farm houses rising up behind on the hills of Mihas. I find the whitewashed farmhouse where I watched a Spaniard on his doorstep idly target-practising at the then plentiful songbirds. I find where I painted with a visiting French artist, M. Golleau, who told me that my work had "no mystere." The field where I found a sick Lapwing and took it home to nurse it until it died. The river's mouth where men shoveled sand into sacks on the backs of their donkeys until the animals groaned under the weight--and where I saw a man shoot his animal in the head when it was complaining too much. The beach where a dozen men pushed each wooden fish-boat into the late-lit breakers, and where the gas-lamps on the distant fish-boats, like fireflies, danced all night long. Where horseback shepherds drove sheep past our house, and where, when an ewe gave birth, the shepherd killed the lamb immediately, slinging the tiny wet corpse beside his saddle. I climb the ramparts of the Castle Sohail ruin, which stands between where we lived and the village, and where I painted some scenes that exist now only on canvas. I can see that the Hotel Mare Nostrum, built about 1960, where I exhibited and sold my paintings, is now deserted and in decay like the Moorish castle which stands above it.
A Chance Encounter One morning in January, 1965, I was walking in the countryside to the north of the village of Fuengirola and I saw a man on a small bridge who was painting a picture. He stood at an easel which held a large canvas, and as he was vigorously painting, another man knelt at his feet and polished his shoes. I circled around to size up the painting--it was very much in progress. Moving closer I inquired where he was able to get frames in the area. He said that his work was far too modest to consider framing. I said I felt the same about mine but I tried to get them framed anyway. We then began a conversation which lasted, with interruptions, for the next twenty-five years. Within hours of our meeting we were off with his wife and two young children on an excited "gathering material," trip. We entertained one another during their stay in Spain and later visited the family in their home in the countryside of Derbyshire, and in London, and traveled together in several trips in Canada Mexico, and the USA. Our transatlantic friendship continued and his children became our godchildren. Our talk was always art and the painting and collecting passion, pictures, painters: Velasquez, Murillo, Sorolla, Brangwyn, Constable. He quoted Houseman, Hopkins, and John Dunne. His composers were Mahler and Elgar. We met in London a few weeks before his wife died of cancer, and visited him for the last time when he was stricken by a stroke and unable to speak, in a hospital in Ladbrook Square. It is 1997 and I stand at the very spot where we first met, a place that now has shops and high-rise apartments. The little river and its bridge have been converted into a flume somewhere beneath the pavement. Tourists sit in the open-air bars and watch the passing life. Two taxi drivers argue their rank. Motorcycles like machine guns rattle the high walls. A large group of speeding bicyclists in their colors swish by. A man hangs a sheaf of lottery tickets in my face. In a small shop a boy is having his shoes polished.
Beneath These Rocks Many artists have had a go at the bridge across the gorge in Ronda, and so must I. It's not in the golden sun of the late afternoon, as I had hoped, but closed-in with rolling cloud and rain at midday. Ronda is a city unique in all Spain as a hilltop fortress divided in two by a chasm cut long ago by a patient river. The place was known and prized by the Celts for its natural defense, then subsequently by Roman, Visigoth, Moor, and Christian conquerors. A secret staircase called the Mina was constructed by the Moors about the beginning of the 14th century. The 365 steps were cut inside live rock, partly protected by bricks, with a few small windows for illumination on the way down to the level of the river. Dungeons held Christian prisoners who were pressed into a human chain in time of siege to bring water up to the city. Marks on the walls tell of their cruel fate. When Ronda was reconquered by the Christians under the Marquis of Cadiz, the hidden Mina was discovered and put under guard so no Moor could escape through it. By the beginning of the 20th century the stairway was in ruin, but was restored in 1911, and the curious now pay a fee to use it.
Where Columbus Was His was a Spartan cabin, high on the stern, painted brown like the rest of his modest fleet. He had one window and a door facing forward, a curtained bunk bed fore-and-aft on the starboard wall, a couple of sea-chests, and one small window aft. In the middle of the cabin was a plain table, facing forward and fastened to the sloping floor, with a heavy armchair behind. In the cabin were what we now call low-tech navigational aids; sextant, spyglass, maps he made himself. This is the place where Columbus commanded his three vessels. From the door he could see to practically the whole operation of the Santa Maria, with the exception of the rudder's tiller, which protruded ten feet onto the deck directly under the cabin. For much of the voyage it was lashed in the same position. The Santa Maria was what the Spanish called a Nao, it was the largest at about ninety feet; the other two, Pinta and Nina, were Carabellas, and closer to sixty in length. This all came about because Columbus, and others at the time, had thoughts about the nature of the Earth based on what they'd seen of the moon and other objects in the sky, plus the observation that sailing ships seemed to go lower in the water as they went further away--"over the horizon,"--as we say. But it wasn't the potential of the "Round Earth Society" that made Isabella change her mind and foot the bill--it was the thought, proposed by Columbus in desperation, that there would be new lands to Christianize. I'm painting on the "Quay of the Caravels" in La Rabida, near Huelva. The three replicas float in their dedicated harbor. The sound system at the interpretation center plays Frank Sinatra singing "My Way." On the third of August, 1492, these three little vessels sailed from here relatively unnoticed, down the Rio Tinto, and turned right at the end of the bar.
What’s Done in a Storm The beach between Huelva and Sanlucar is attacked by a great storm with high winds and rain from the south Atlantic. Walkways down the cliffs are washed out and the yellow sand is alluviated across the beach. Waves crash dangerously and throw up plastic and other detritus from Africa and the Caribbean. Gulls wheel and hang on the gray wind, while partly obscured freighters, having made an unsteady turn after the bar, bash and roll against the broadsides sea. All the Algarve is in turmoil. Rivers of red mud run in the streets, blocking drainage and contributing to the flood. Clumps of floating land and countless trees twirl down the brown Guadiana. Power comes and goes from the village, and women, unable to open umbrellas, are shrouded like tents in their jackets in their rush to buy candles. Flags along walls are cut to tatters, and palm-trees explode like mortars and send leaf-fronds cart-wheeling across the field. I'm parked on a salt-marsh near Tavira. The Alfa is warm and rocking. Winds whip the shallow salt-ponds and blow white froth in balls over the dike. In the leas, sharing the lesser danger, the species huddle together, fluffed out for insulation, faced in the same direction, below the howl, silent as stones:--avocets, stilts, curlews, whimbrels.
An Encounter on a Beach It's a long golden beach with dunes rising to a sparse pine forest behind. Men move their brightly colored boats around the Tavira lagoon, some preparing to go out, some shutting down for the day. Other men spread nets on the concrete walkway--others lean on their boats or stand around talking. Maria's father has a small brush and is painting the red on the gunwale of his fish-boat. Well-worn by hard use, it's just about all done--red, white, green, turquoise, and blue. The boat has a small triangular eye painted near the bow. Maria's father is not sure she should be talking to a stranger. Maria and I are paying attention to her father's dog. It's black, about the size of an Airedale, with a soft and shaggy mane and a long unkempt tail. "I'll tell you about a Portuguese Water Dog," Maria says, speaking slowly and considerately so I will understand her Portuguese. "His name is Helder. Helder helps father by jumping into the water in any kind of weather and bringing back fish that get out of the net. Helder can dive very very deep in the water to do this. Helder has webbed toes--see?" She holds up a paw and lets me feel the web. "These dogs have them all the time," she says. "Come on over here Helder," says father. "You too Maria."
He Had Many Names His real name was Fernando Pessoa and he was born in Lisbon in 1888, and died in the same city 47 years later. His father and brother both died before he was six, and the young man grew up in South Africa in the family of his mother's second husband. At an early age he was haunted by loneliness and it is supposed by scholars that he began writing in order to alleviate a feeling of isolation. Returning to Lisbon at age seventeen he never again left Portugal. It's estimated that during his lifetime he wrote more than seventeen thousand literary pieces under more than a dozen names. "Every artist should have more than one personality," he said. These were not just pseudonyms, these were other writers with unique personalities, styles, and influences, that lived within the same body. Pessoa went to some trouble to define and flesh out each writing personality, and make not just the characters in his writing unique, but the minds that created them. "I am only the stage," he said. On March 8, 1914, he claimed to "discover his mentor," through this medium he called heteronyms. This was the muse that fired his imagination and impelled his practically unbelievable productivity. Short of personal friendships and seemingly lacking in self-esteem (he never married, lived alone in rented rooms, and is known to have had only one girlfriend) he died in 1935, it is said, of loneliness and the effects of alcoholism. Now he is the subject of scholarly debate. He is enthusiastically read, studied and praised by a new generation and he now has an unusual place in world literature and universal curiosity. Pessoa's remains, along with those of Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and others, have recently been given a special resting place in the Jeronimos Monastery alongside those of other great Portuguese. There also lies a heteronym who wrote in English in a discreet and well-bred manner--a person by the name of Alexander Search.
The End of the World The Greeks sailed as far as this and called it the home of the gods. There was only empty sea beyond--a sea rougher than the Mediterranean--that went endlessly, until the water ran off the edge. It's called Cape Sagres and it's the very lower left hand corner of Europe--in Greek times the limit of the known world. Today there's a fierce wind, uneven, unpredictable. Today it has blown a rod-fisherman from the cliffs. In places waves crash a hundred meters above the level. No one ventures by boat in the dangerous sea. The cliffs are sun and shadow for the falcons which dive through the wind like arrows. The next cape comes and goes in the hard driven mist. Sometimes its lighthouse is lost in spray, its anxious dot of light temporarily extinguished. Sagres itself is sculpted around with a cloud of anger. There is a disturbing silence between the blasts which makes me fear some unknown, impending destruction. I cling to the walls of the Chapel of St. Catherine built by Henry the Navigator in 1443. This is where Drake prayed after he and his 800 men took the cape and it's town-site in May 1587. The chapel is open and apparently empty. Two candles gutter on the altar. Then I see a priest and a young man sitting in a dark corner inside the door. I hear the young man use the word brother, while the priest holds onto his hands.
A Monument from Lisbon to Vancouver It's dawn and I'm standing beside a statue of Vasco da Gama. The ancient Tagus laps at my feet and Lisbon's first risers hurry across the praha to catch the trolly which takes them to their places of business. Fish-boats of Phoenician influence pass down the river in the mist. I take a taxi up Innocente de Henriques. This major thoroughfare of Lisbon is named after Prince Henry the Navigator. At eight thirty I've left Lisbon airport and we're banking over the tower of Belem. We pass Oporto and the Basque region of Spain, over the Chateaux on the Loire, then low over the Dover cliffs, Dover castle, then Windsor Castle and on into Heathrow. At Heathrow there is enough time to phone a few friends, take an English-language look at the news of the world, check the downs and ups of the markets. In mid afternoon we climb from Heathrow in another jet--following the sun. I look out at a great dark spike, the wing, pointed at the horizon like a sculpture in a park. It aims at the midlands, then Scotland, the outer Isles, Iceland, Greenland, Canada--tundra, taiga, prairie, mountains, then the islands that are set in the gulf sparkle. The Pacific side. We make a roaring standstill in Vancouver. The sun has not yet set on this Vasco da Gama day.
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