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.