Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

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.

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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.

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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.