The Rotting Room

It was said in the newspapers,  in those early years of Spanish tourism, that the two most visited monuments in Spain were the Alhambra, first, and then El Escorial.  That; I knew, was because the tourists were almost all foreigners, in search of colourful romance. 

The pleasure palace of the Moorish sultans responded perfectly to their expectations, a delightful, sprawling villa built and inhabited by people who, it was assumed, could only have been delightful too. On the other hand, the dour, stony monastery-palace of “Felipe Segundo”, ruler of the world and world champion of Catholicism, impressed for its size rather than its warmth.

Being the fortress of faith that it was, it had a belligerent, inhospitable look which suggested that the kings and monks who lived there were a murderous bunch, at any rate more so than the charming Moors of Granada.  Such is the folly of tourism, which judges people by the monuments a few of them, for political and religious purposes, left behind.

Tourists visiting strange places and confronted with their history remind me of myself as a kid, when I arrived late at a cowboy movie. Seeing two bands of desperados trading bullets across a mountain pass, I would breathlessly sit down next to my best friend who got there at the beginning and hissed, “Which ones are the good guys?”. And that was all I needed to know, to see who the bad ones are.

For the Spaniards I knew in 1960, the Alhambra – on the very few occasions when it was mentioned, usually on my instigation - was little more than a curiosity. They saw it, along with other relics of the Moorish past, as an imported bibelot, albeit an ancient one, which had no bearing on the great national destiny in which, incredibly, they believed.

But the Escorial, even for the many disbelievers among them, was the maximum symbol of Spain’s grandeur and of the Spanish way of being.  I even came to think of their peculiar mentality of the immutable, the symmetrical, the mineral, by the name of “Escorialism”.  It was the boxy, angular, sharp-cornered mentality which I was to bump up against for years to come, until I finally learned to skirt gracefully around it.

Philip II built the Escorial as a monastery, but, because he wanted to live in it himself as the great monk, it also had to be a palace worthy of the most powerful man on earth.  Spain’s monarchs had never had a royal palace of their own to rule from, because they were always roaming over the country, and over Europe, fighting wars in Andalucia and in the Lowlands, getting married with foreign sovereigns to form alliances, quelling disputes and rebellions.

Felipe’s father, Carlos - who was the first Charles of Spain and the fifth of the Holy Roman Empire, and so is called both Carlos Primero and Carlos Quinto, but usually Carlos Quinto - ordered a great palace to be raised in the midst of the Alhambra citadel. But then he went off to fight the Turks in Vienna and the Protestants in Holland, and never saw a stone of it. 

His grandparents, Isabel and Ferdinand, wanted Granada to be the capital of Spain, because, having conquered it from the Mohammedans, they believed it was a “new Jerusalem” and the most brilliant jewel in their crown.  But Granada was too far from the center of the country, and too hard to get to among its snowy mountains.

So Felipe, a sedentary soul by nature, set about first turning an arid village into Madrid, where his ministers and many thousands of officials could run the world. Then he raised a monstrous monastery at the foot of a stony mountain range, some leagues to the west, where he could, in daily prayer and sacrifice, ask God how to do it.

The Escorial’s first and official raison d’être was to provide a single burial place for the kings and queens of the Trastámara and Hapsburg dynasties.  They had been laid to rest in their favourite castles or monasteries, all around the country, until Felipe’s grandparents decreed that the Royal Chapel of Granada should be built for the purpose, as Spain’s first Panteón de los Reyes.

But Felipe had a great aversion for Granada, and brought all the royal bones except those of his grandparents and a few of their immediate relatives to his new Pantheon of Monarchs, carved deep beneath the huge monastery. 

Although Philip II was essentially a man of duty, the reason for his Granada phobia was uncannily Freudian, in spite of the fact that he was conceived there during his parents’ legendary honeymoon, in the year 1526.

When he was just 12, his mother, the beautiful Isabel of Portugal, died in northern Spain.  His father, Carlos, was so stricken with grief that he withdrew to a cloister to mourn, leaving to his son the duty of accompanying the corpse to Granada, for burial beside his grandparents.

The journey took several weeks, under a blazing sun.  When the solemn cortege reached the ancient kingdom of the Moors, the hastily embalmed body had begun to decompose, and a foul stench emanated from the coffin.

It was Felipe’s duty, as Isabel’s son, to publicly view her remains and ascertain that it was the Queen’s body that was being laid to rest.  The horrific sight so affected him, and all those who stood by, that he swore to create a new cemetery for his family closer to home.

But the Escorial also played a more temporal rule, as the King’s headquarters in the war against heresy, the most virulent form of which was the Lutheran reformation.  Since many Catholics agreed that Luther was right to attack the corruption and laxity of the clergy, although not the Church itself, a great effort was launched to impose discipline and revive spirituality.  Since this movement aimed to counter the Protestant’s demands for reform, it became known as the Counter-Reformation, and Felipe was its greatest champion, as his father Carlos Quinto had been before him.

The Inquisition took care of Spain’s few remaining Jews and Muslims, but the sophisticated Protestants of northern Europe needed to be attacked with learned arguments.  For this purpose, a great library was created in the Escorial, gathering together thousands of manuscripts, maps and charters, many of them richly illustrated, and many, also, in Hebrew and Arabic. Books that the Inquisitors publicly burned because they preached Judaism and Islam were jealously guarded by Felipe’s scholarly monks, and studied by Catholic scholars from the four corners of Europe.

The monastery was dedicated to Saint Lawrence, because Felipe fought and won his first battle, against the French, on  the 10^th of August, 1557, which is el día de San Lorenzo.  And the square, criss-crossed layout of the building, with courtyards in the hollows created by the intersecting wings, was inspired by the gridiron on which the saint met his death by fire.

Compared to the Alhambra, artfully nestled on its wooded hilltop on with the Sierra Nevada in the background, the Escorial first struck me for the harshness of the setting, even the name.  It was built on at the foot of the bleak, stony Sierra de Guadarrama, near an ancient mining town called El Escorial, which dismayingly means “The Slagheap”. It seems the slag from a foundry was dumped there, giving the place its uninviting name.

But one of the charms of the Escorial, I immediately realized, was precisely its regal contempt anything so frivolous as charm. A house built for so great a God by so great a King did not need to please. 

Yet it has a virile charisma of its own, which takes the place of beauty.  Having wandered through the Escorial, the Alhambra and their French counterpart Versailles for so many years, I find the Alhambra more charming than Versailles, Versailles more splendid than the Alhambra, and the Escorial more gripping than either of the others.

 The fact that, in our times, the equally stony mausoleum to the victims of the Civil War, the “Valley of the Fallen”, was built just a few miles away made of that forbidding region a veritable symbol of Spanish authoritarianism, intolerance and fanaticism.  Perhaps that was why the government party, La Falange, chose it to build their residencia, where I spent a week with a group of students from the University in Madrid.

  It seemed modern and luxurious compared to the one I was staying in near the Plaza de Espala, and there was central heating!  We arrived at dusk.  From the full length windows of the conference room, I looked down on the snow-scattered rooftops of the village and, just beyond it, standing apart from the houses like a great ship moored in a port, the monastery.

It seemed less like a monastery or even a palace than a planet, a square-shaped planet built by the planetary king, whose domains stretched from Holland to Patagonia, and who gave his name to a country off the coast of China, the Philippine Islands. He ruled over the Empire on which the sun never set, where his missionaries toiled to spread the Catholic faith.

In the morning I was there, with my scarf wrapped up to my ears and leather gloves protecting my hands against the icy wind which sliced through the clear blue sky like the sword of a conquistador. I was in love with Spain and in love with myself, so even if the Escorial had few pleasures to yield up, I was still in the right place!

It was not just the sheer size, the 1,200 doors, 2,600 windows, or even the 10 miles of corridors of which, the guide assured us, only a few were open to the public, which awed, but an artfully created effect of optical illusion.  The fact that the ample proportions of the baroque columns and lintels and gables were almost entirely lacking in baroque ornamentation gave them an imposing, full-blown smoothness, which made it all seem even bigger than it was.

The glacial cold was further accentuated by the absence of anything resembling humanity, with the macabre exception of the Pantheon of Kings.  We were led down a long marble staircase which seemed to penetrate the bowels of the earth.

On the second landing the guide stopped and told us that the wooden door on the right hand side led to el pudridero, “the rotting room”.  The precious coffins which lined the walls of the circular mausoleum were barely a yard long, so the corpses had to be turned to skeletons before their final burial. 

They were left in this vaulted room for over twenty years before the bones were removed and placed inside the golden caskets.  In the Pantheon were buried, with only two exceptions, all the monarchs of Spain and their mothers – reyes y madres de rey - since Charles I (Carlos Quinto, again) who died in 1558.

The guide added with relish that the fresh corpses were placed under a trickle of water to speed up the putrefaction, and that the Augustine monks in charge of the process brought in bricklayers to seal the room up with plaster, to prevent the smell from escaping into the palace.  We might have been inside a pharaoh’s pyramid!

The kindly seminarian who gave me Latin lessons in his home at night, Joaquin, had told me to pay a visit to a theologian he knew who lived in the Escorial.  So after the tour was over, I asked for him and was told to wait in an elegant drawing room, richly hung with crimson curtains.

You might wonder why a young libertarian, with the pleasures of life lying before him like a meal waiting to be devoured, would go out of his way to prod about in monasteries, where men had turned their backs on all the things I lived for, if their backs had ever been turned in their direction at all.  The reason is that the ascetic life attracted me, and I sincerely believed that one day I would also leave the world of action and desires, to meditate, if not to pray. 

Sinning without repentance seemed more like vulgar, sloppy behaviour of the “anything goes” kind, so I sensed I would have to end up my hedonistic career in retreat.  Who would read the confessions of Saint Augustine if he had been only a mindless sinner, or only a repentant saint?

The difficulty with prayer was that while I believed in the misery of godlessness, I didn’t believe in any form of god. But I was convinced that this would come of its own because, humble by nature if not in appearance, all I needed to be religious was faith. That is why I put such great store in my first encounter with a monk.

After listening to a clock ticking for a while, a pale, bespectacled young man entered, casting me a cold and quizzical smile.  He arranged his robes around his knees with a discreet flourish as he sat down on the gilded chair in front of me.  We studied one another in silence, and neither of us was impressed.

He seemed to me like a haughty intellectual who had nothing to learn from anyone, at least not from a brash pagan from the lands of the north. It was as if I could see myself in the glinting mirrors of his eyes: a spoiled foreigner with golden hair flowing over black velvet collar, sleekly encased in silk tie, leather boots and heavy loden hunting cape. How could he imagine that inside the worldly adventurer before him was a soul which longed for the greatest exploit of all?

When I nervously explained that I was a classmate of Joaquin’s, he responded with a distant nod of recognition, as if to assure me that worldly friendship did not mean to men like him what it did to men like me. I mustered what courage I had left and told him about my love of Spain and its poets, particularly the mystical ones such as San Juan de la Cruz. 

Little did I know that Saint John bore the stigma of pleasing unbelievers, because his love poems to God sounded so suspiciously like love poems.  Obedient Catholics preferred less ambiguous mystical poets, while the místico-erótico Saint John was left for poetry-lovers of no specific confession, or no confession at all. 

So my interest in this literary renegade got scarce sympathy from my proud priest at El Escorial.  He listened with a faint smile that might have been a nascent sneer and made some comment so bland that I cannot recall a single thing about it.

Within a few minutes I had thanked him profusely for his bloody attention, wrapped my cape around myself and bitterly hiked back to the residencia on the hill, to catch the afternoon’s conference on socially-oriented economics, franquista style.  But by the time of the pausa café my mood had mellowed, and I when I looked down through the bay window gazing down on that “monstre sacré”, if there ever was one, it was with the same awe as before.

 

xxx