I have long believed that any man interested in either the mystic or the romantic aspects of life must sooner or later define his attitude concerning Spain. For just as this forbidding peninsula physically juts into the Atlantic and stands isolated, so philosophically the concept of Spain intrudes into the imagination, creating effects and raising questions unlike those evoked by other nations. During the four decades that I have traveled in Spain I have always wanted to describe the impact this vibrant land has had upon me, and now I have an opportunity to do so.

Did any traveler ever enter Spain in a more appropriate manner than I? While a student in Scotland, I had shipped as chart boy aboard a Clydeside freighter which lugged coal to Italy and brought back oranges from Spain to be used in the marmalade factories of Dundee. We sailed from Glasgow, buried in coal dust, as ugly a little tramp steamer as ever skirted the Bay of Biscay. Against head-winds we made only ninety-six miles a day, pitching and tossing the while, so that I was well fed up with the trip before we ever saw land. Then out of the Atlantic we spotted Cabo Finisterre off the port bow, and for much of one stormy day we kept it in view, a tantalizing taste of Spain, solid, dark, mysterious, looming out of the gray waves.

As our freighter rose and fell in the troughs this glimpse of land began to haunt me. More than anything else in the world I wanted to see the Spain of which Finisterre formed the western rampart. Past this point three and a half centuries ago Sir Francis Drake had come to harry Spanish shipping and to burn Spanish ports. Here the Armada had formed for its assault on England, and the headland as I saw it that stormy day was well suited to historic purposes. It was dark, heavy, unlike anything I had previously seen. It was in truth land's end, the western promontory of the European continent, and it challenged the mind.

Well, we left Finisterre and plowed our way monotonously south, and a long time later, when I had grown accustomed to the pitching of our uncomfortable freighter, we steamed into the Straits of Gibraltar and I saw, again to port, the sun-drenched uplands of Algeciras, and they were so different from what I had seen in the storm off Finisterre, so inviting and so startling in the vividness of their color, that I again felt the urge to flee that ship and go ashore, forgetting Italy, which had been the purpose for making this trip.

But we left Gibraltar behind us, then Mallorca, then Corsica, and finally we emptied our coal at ancient Civitavecchia, that dreariest of all Italian ports, where Michelangelo had once served as city architect in charge of fortifying the harbor and where Henri Beyle had spent long years as French consul, publishing his reflections under the name of Stendhal. He and Michelangelo distracted me for a while, but often as I traveled over Italy on leave from the coal barge I recalled those two fleeting glimpses of Spain and longed for the day when our empty ship would sail into some distinguished port like Valencia or Barcelona to pick up our oranges. I imagined myself striding ashore to inspect at first hand the greatness which I felt sure existed in that dour land. The captain of the freighter wasn't certain which of the ports we would head for, but trusted Glasgow to advise him by the time we reached Mallorca.

When we were abeam of that island the wireless finally spoke: 'Castellón de la Plana,' and the captain was pleased. 'Beautiful little city,' he said.

I ran to my charts and found that Castellón lay between Barcelona and Valencia, the actual city being some two miles or more inland from the harbor. It was a major port for the shipping of oranges and traditionally the scene of Spain's first fair of the year, at which the opening bullfights of the season were held. 'Castellón is one of the best places in Spain for beginning a visit,' the captain assured me.

During the passage from Mallorca to the mainland I memorized the shipping instructions contained in Pilot for the East Coast of Spain and prepared myself spiritually for my entrance to the country by rereading the best passages of Don Quixote. But on the last evening we received a wireless directing us to avoid Castellón de la Plana and to proceed instead to the tiny village of Burriana, where oranges were awaiting us.

'Burriana has no harbor!' I protested, for the Pilot said: 'Ships anchor in the roads and prudent ones keep a sharp watch on their lines.'

'They barge the oranges out to us,' the captain explained.

'Then we don't land?'

'No.'

My disappointment was so apparent that he added, 'But you can ride ashore on one of the barges and join us next week in Valencia.'

I had rarely heard finer words, and all that night I stayed on deck, waiting to catch my first glimpse of the point at which I would enter Spain, but no lights showed, and finally in the east, over Mallorca, which we had left astern, the sun began to rise and a soft Mediterranean beauty suffused the air.

My first view of Burriana? It wasn't a view. It was a smell, for the offshore breeze carried to our dirty little freighter the odor of orange blossoms, heavy and pungent and inescapably the odor of Spain. Then, in the direction from which this superb aroma came, I saw the low shore begin to rise from the waves and with incredible swiftness present itself. Our ship slowed. The anchor chains went out. Lines were thrown to men in rowboats, who attached them to buoys, and gradually we swung in to the current, ready to receive whatever cargo awaited us.

It was than that I saw the immemorial aspect of Spain, and my introduction in the minutes that followed was so perfect that it still stands for me as a permanent vision of Spain. Later I was to see the bullfights in Ronda and the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and the roomful of Velázquez paintings at the Prado, and the pass at Roncesvalles where Roland perished and the great, bleak olive orchards of Badajoz and the Holy Week processions in Sevilla. I was to see the Spain that men have written about for two thousand years, but seldom would I see anything so representative of Spain.

Since the little farming village of Burriana had no harbor curving out to protect the shore, it could have no pier; storm waves driving in from the east would periodically destroy attempts to maintain a quay. So the huge barges which conveyed the oranges to the freighter had to be loaded ashore. Each barge was hauled onto dry land and crammed with barrels containing oranges until it must have weighed several tons.

'Why barrels?' I asked, watching the procedure with binoculars. 'They are barrels, aren't they?'

'Steel barrels.'

'Why?'

'You'll see.'

Obviously, when the barges were loaded they had to be dragged back into the water in order to be floated so that they could be rowed out to our ship. How to do it? In Roman times businessmen using this coast for the transfer of freight to Italy had solved the problem. They reared a breed of oxen that thrived in salt water, and now these huge beasts, working in the sea with often only their eyes and horns visible, backed close to a barge while workmen attached chains to their harness. Then with men who also lived mostly in the sea whipping at them and cursing, the great beasts strained while everyone ashore pushed on the barge. Slowly, slowly the near-swimming oxen and the men and the shouting got the barge moving. Slowly it left the shore. The massive oxen moved deeper and deeper into the sea, so that men directing them had to keep afloat by grasping the oxen's horns, and in this way the oranges in their steel barrels were ferried out to our ship.

The first Spaniard I ever met was a workman of Burriana, dressed only in a breechcloth, swimming to meet me with his left hand grasping the horn of an ox. He was a poor man and existed only by this brutal work, which kept him half submerged all day, but he had the face of a satyr rising from a swamp, and when I first saw him he was laughing. His skin was bronzed like leather and he had not shaved for some days. He had enormous arms and very quick eyes and saw at once that I was a stranger, perhaps an American, who might pay for a ride ashore in his barge. In a guttural voice using a Valencian argot, he grunted at me. Of the first sentences spoken to me in Spain I understood not a single word.

I did understand, of course, that he was proposing to carry me ashore in his barge, for a fee. I agreed and started to climb into the barge, but our captain interrupted. 'There's no point in going ashore now. It's only five o'clock. No buses to Castellón yet.' He was right, so to the disappointment of the bargeman I said I'd wait.

'But only me,' he insisted in words I did understand. 'Not those other...' He indicated the next barge coming to our ship, and I wished I had enough command of the Valencian dialect to understand his profane description of his competitors. It must have been extreme, because when he repeated it for the benefit of the incoming crew they threatened him. But he laughed.

Till the sun was high I stayed on deck, watching the nautical oxen of Burriana haul loaded barges, then talking with the rugged men who brought the barges to our freighter, but each time my satyr returned he renewed his contract with me. 'When I go ashore I'll go with you,' I assured him. I would have been afraid to go with another.

I now discovered why the oranges were being delivered in steel drums, for the captain directed that a hose be thrust down into the Mediterranean where the water was clear, then ordered the deck hands, 'Knock out the bungs,' and presently all the drums were opened and I saw that the oranges inside had been cut in half. The resulting juice, of course, did not fill the barrel, and the empty space was now to be filled with sea water.

'What's the idea?' I asked.

'Everything sloshes back and forth, all the way home to Dundee,' the captain said.

'To accomplish what?'

'It prepares the rind for making marmalade.'

There were two schools of thought aboard our ship. The captain held that the action of salt water ate away the pulpy part of the rind and left the skin translucent, as required in the better brands of marmalade. The pulp and juice would be thrown away. 'Nonsense,' one of the deck hands argued. 'Everything in that barrel is mixed with sugar and then boiled down to make that bittersweet taste of true Dundee marmalade. Without the salt water it wouldn't be worth a damn.'

A tugging at my sleeve reminded me that my laughing satyr was back, and this time I allowed him to lower me into his barge, now empty of drums. He had arms like some prehistoric man, and to him I was a child. His animals were unlike any I had ever seen before, and together we moved toward the shore of Spain. When I saw the process of launching the barges close up I was appalled at the energy required. It was medieval or worse. It was an expenditure that I could not comprehend and it continued all day and all year, men and animals working themselves to death.

But the men thus engaged were so handsome, their smiles so compelling that there was something different about them, something powerful and stoic. This was their lot and they would not complain. Ashore some were having breakfast and they invited me to join. I knew that I was taking someone's share, but I could not resist such an opening meal in my new country and I paid my bargeman for my share of food. I can taste it yet: anchovies, which have always been my delight, hard bread, harder cheese and red wine. How good it was, how honest in its Spanish quality.

I wondered if any previous traveler to Spain had entered through this nonexistent Burriana? Later I was to enter through many different ports, but none has ever compared with the beauty of that first morning, nor with its significance. Because in subsequent years, no matter how superficial my visits might be or my reactions to them, I could rely on the fact that at the beginning, if only for a moment, I had been allowed to see deep into the quality of Spain. I saw the toiling men, the congenial peasants, the straining beasts, the honest food. I smelled the salt of the shore, the oranges of the inland fields, the burning chicory that passed for coffee, the sourness of the red wine, the harsh seductiveness of cheap anchovies. It is this Spain that has been with me through the years, and whenever in subsequent visits I have again come close to that particular vision I have felt at home.

Thirty-five years ago the road from Burriana to Castellón de la Plana ran through orange groves, at the end of which stood the charming little city that was immersed in festival when I saw it for the first time. For two days I enjoyed about as fine an introduction to Spanish life as a young man could have, for it was the custom in Castellón in those years to conduct the traditional evening parade along unique lines. In the center of town, as in all Spanish localities, unattached men walked round and round the plaza in a counterclockwise direction while unmarried girls walked arm-in-arm in the opposite direction, so that in any one complete transit a man who kept to the outer circle was constantly staring into the faces of beautiful girls, each of whom he would encounter twice. I know it is difficult for people who have never courted in this way to believe how easy it is to conclude understandings in two hours of such parading, but when one has actually participated in the constant meeting and judging and winking and nodding that takes place, he knows how effectively the courtship is conducted.

Well, this evening paseo is the same in all Spanish small towns and in some large ones too, but Castellón added a feature which was most attractive. Only half the girls paraded in the square. The other half rested in balconies overlooking the promenade, from which they threw down onto the men passing below small darts trailing colored streamers. Since I had been easily recognized as an American, not many of whom got to a place like Castellón in those days, I found myself the target of many such darts and I brushed them away.

'Stupid!' a harsh laughing voice sounded, and I turned to see that the satyr bargeman who had ferried me ashore that morning was walking behind me and explaining in a proprietary manner who I was. 'Stupid!' he repeated, gathering up the darts which I had brushed from my clothing. He explained that it was not the darts but the colored streamers that were important and must be saved. 'Because,' he said in Spanish that I only half understood, 'at the end of the parade you are entitled to visit any balcony decorated in the colors matching the streamers you hold.'

We paraded as a team, and when I saw my bargeman in ordinary clothes and shaved I realized that he was not much older than I and already his thundering life in the surf hauling immense weights had made him an old man. We collected many darts that first night, and when the music stopped he led me to one balcony after another, and we danced and drank and ate anchovies and met the beautiful and shy girls who had pinned us with their streamers. Since I was a stranger, and what was worse, probably a Protestant, the older women of the houses kept severe watch on me, but the bargeman whispered that any girl of Castellón who had even a little intelligence would know how to slip down into the square, and he was right.

Later that night he led me to a corner where two girls waited, and the four of us went to a vaudeville show, where the bargeman insisted upon paying for the tickets. I tried to prevent this, knowing that I could afford the money better than he, but in true Spanish style, as if he were a nobleman of the grand school, he flashed the money I had paid him that morning for the ferry ride ashore and said loudly, if I understood his Spanish correctly, 'He paid this morning. Tonight I pay.'

I remember the entertainment for two reasons: there I saw my first zarzuela (brief light opera) and was captivated by it; and in the vaudeville portion I watched two robust comedians who, whenever they wanted an extra loud laugh, announced that they had come from Burriana. At each mention of my nonexistent seaport the crowd roared. It was like comedians in New York who coax cheap laughs by saying they're from Brooklyn or those in Chicago who achieve the same effect by being from Peoria. Apparently every community has a neighbor which it regards as ridiculous and I had chosen for my landing place in Spain a town that was the butt of the coast between Castellón and Valencia. My bargeman did not laugh at the jokes nor did I.

What a marvelous fiesta that was, my first in Spain, with a huge workman to guide me and orchestras and girls throwing streamers and comedians making jokes about Burriana, and the great warmth of Spanish hospitality as one knows it in a provincial city.

I cannot remember now how I discovered my technique for exploring a strange land, for I have followed this procedure for as long as I can recall. I enter the country unannounced and without a letter to anyone. I stand back and look at the scene before me, talk with anyone who cares to talk with me, then go to the bus station and buy a ticket for the end of any random line. This drops me in some village out in the country, and there I spend a couple of days just sitting and looking and talking. This produces some very dull days, but also some memorable ones.

At the end of World War II, I did this in Canton and saw enough of China to nourish my imagination for decades. I used the same system in Bali, and later in Japan I skipped out of Tokyo and wound up in Morioka, a small city to the north, where I had a series of experiences through which I gained an understanding of Japan that would have been denied me otherwise. I often forget Tokyo but never Morioka. With its lantern-lit little shops and its sprawling rock-strewn river, Morioka will be with me always. Anything good I have written about Japan stems from Morioka.

Now, in Castellón I went to the bus station and found that my plan wouldn't work. It seemed that the only buses then available ran to Burriana, but there was a railroad which wandered about the countryside, and on the advice of a straggler I purchased a ticket to Teruel, thus projecting myself into a corner of Spain not often visited by strangers.

The train that carried me there consisted only of third-class carriages, a euphemism for boxcars lined with rough-plank benches which were filled before the whistle tooted, so that more than half the passengers had to stand. When started, the train moved quite slowly and threw an unusual amount of cinders through the screenless windows. It was jerky in motion, creaky in sound, antique in appearance and utterly captivating.

For it was filled with human beings of a kind I had not met in my college textbooks on Spain. Here there were no grandees, no industrial giants. There were no caballeros in leather, no beautiful women in mantillas. There was only a jostling crowd of extremely poor people, dressed in the oldest of clothes, huddled together in a dirty boxcar. This was a Spain for which I was unprepared, yet as I settled down and began to make friends with these apparently suspicious and silent people, I found myself among some of the most congenial persons I had so far encountered in Europe, and the interminable trip developed into exactly what I had hoped for.

For the first hour the train chugged south along the coast toward Valencia and the oppressive smell of the boxcar was offset by the sweet aroma of oranges, but then the line diverged abruptly to the west and we began to climb a steep valley marked by low mountains, a rushing stream and poor forests. Most of the day we climbed slowly upward, so that I became convinced that Teruel must be perched on a considerable mountain, an impression which has never left me. How dull, how tedious that long day's trip could have been, with cinders in my eye and hunger in my stomach. The land was bleak, with scarcely a town or any human element to relieve the monotony, and such stragglers as we did see appeared to be shepherds, incredibly poor. Even their dogs were scrawny and lovable.

But the more forbidding the terrain the more delightful the peasants in my boxcar. These were tremendous men and women, hard as treated leather, determined as the mountains among which we were traveling. When at a junction I purchased a generous supply of bread and cheese to throw into the common pot, I gained admission to the group, as it were, and the wine bottles were passed to me and the tins of anchovies and the rock-hard ends of sausage. We were all so hungry by now that our odds and ends of food seemed a feast and it was natural that the men and women who sang best should offer us a series of quiet songs, nothing boisterous and nothing to tempt a man into unseemly bellowing, but rather a quiet, forceful series of statements about love and rural life and the fiestas that occur in small towns. I could understand few of the words.

But as the day wore on I talked much with these people of the boxcar. They were peasants, even those who lived in towns like Teruel and Castellón, and their life was indescribably hard; one of the strangest bits of information I gathered in my long conversations was that most of these people were wearing their best clothes. It was something important to be making so long a trip by train and they were wearing the best they had. How pitiful they seemed, with trousers mended four times at the same spot with four different swatches of cloth, with dresses in which whole panels had been replaced by cloth of a different color. Shoes were shabby beyond description and socks were filled with holes even in the nonessential parts that clung about the ankles. The men's caps were mostly torn and the women's shawls were ragged at the edges, and not because of fringes either. Such teeth as had been lost had not been replaced and many of these people showed need for a doctor, to whom apparently they had no access. Speaking only of outward appearances, these people were as poverty-stricken as any I had ever seen.

But about them, in all they did, there was a stolid dignity and a profound joy. When they sang it was as if they were in a cathedral, for they took each note seriously but not pompously, and their voices blended for powerful effect. When they spoke it was only after weighing each word, not for its effect but for its appropriateness. The volubility which one thinks of in relation to Latin peoples was not evident here, but rather the taciturnity of New Englanders or Scots. But in both the singing and the conversations there was joy, and when a joke was told it brought forth the guffaws common to all rural people.

It was a remarkable day, one of the best I would ever spend in Spain, and at last our tired and cinder-throwing engine chugged up the final hill and brought us into the station at Teruel. 'Adiós, norteamericano!' the passengers said softly as I hauled down my small bag and asked directions for the heart of the city. These people had provided me with a solid introduction to Spain and I would be forever indebted to them. I was loath to separate from them, but the journey was ended and they were now headed for their separate homes. I visualized them going to English-type cottages with hollyhocks about the door, as if they were the ordinary rural people of Europe. Later I would see what kind of homes they actually lived in.

For me Teruel was the introduction into a new world, the hard, remorseless, poverty-stricken world of provincial Spain. The lives I saw in Teruel were terribly confined within some of the narrowest circles I have ever known. The streets were equally narrow, as if hewn out of solid rock. The architecture was not pleasing, like the panoramas shown in my textbooks on Spain. The restaurants were uncongenial, the theaters were ugly and the band in the central plaza played off-key. But there was a compelling durability about this town that one had to admire, and the longer I stayed there the better I liked it. I remember chiefly the acrid smell of roasting chicory or some similar coffee substitute, so that even today whenever I chance upon the smell of burning chicory I think of Teruel.

On my first morning in the city, according to habit, I wandered out past the edges of town to see in what respects it might be different from the Burriana region or from Castellón, and as I was walking along a country road I heard a voice calling, 'Eh, norteamericano!' I turned to find at the doorway to a house one of the men with whom I had shared my bread and cheese on the train the previous day, and he invited me into his home, something that I later wished he had not done, for I can still see it as it was that day, and having seen his home I could no longer preserve storybook myths about this powerful land of Spain.

The walls were of stone unchinked with cement or mortar. They had, however, been tightly packed with clay and were both water- and wind-proof, forming a solid and pleasing barrier against the elements. The floor was of packed earth, worn smooth by centuries of use, for I judged the house to have been built at least three hundred years earlier. No dust rose from the floor and it was surprisingly even, for through the centuries the earth had been leveled until it was now at least as flat as an average flagstone floor. The house had two rooms, the partition between them consisting of some of the poorest lumber I have ever seen, scarcely good enough for the making of a cheap industrial crate in a country like Germany. I could see through the wall at many spots where warping had occurred or the chipping off of fragments, for the boards were paper-thin, and this in an area where forests had once abounded and where to a lesser degree they still existed. If lumber was being harvested in the Teruel district, none of it was filtering down to homes like this.

The house contained one table, one chair, one bed, one cradle. That was about all. There were no cupboards, no shelves, no rocking chairs, no benches, no sideboards, no bathroom, no iron stove, nothing. A man some fifty years old and his wife of about the same age had each worked in Teruel for forty years, for they had begun at the age of ten, and frugally they had saved their money, and at the end of twoscore years of labor this was what they had accumulated.

I was a stranger and was not afraid of rebuffs, so I asked to see everything. What clothes did they have? What eating gear? What food supplies? What books? Books! Neither wife nor husband could read. Clothes? Mainly what they had worn on the train, plus older ones for working, and I have already described what the good ones looked like. Food? They had enough to live on for three days, for they had no refrigerator, and after three days they would go to the store and buy more food, if they had the money. I did not know the Spanish word for hope, but in a roundabout way I asked them what their plans were for the future. The future? What future?

And so I wandered back and forth across Teruel, that austere mountain city, and allowed the reality of Spain to beat in upon me. One evening I went to the cathedral, if I am using the proper word for so mean a church, and there I attended my first religious service in Spain. It was overwhelmingly impressive, with candles and choirs and priests who seemed to bear the weight of this poor settlement upon their necks. The people of Teruel that I saw worshiping that night were devout and to them religion was terribly important, but as I looked about the gloomy church I found in the congregation few of the peasants I had ridden with on the train. This praying group came from a different stratum and I was pleased to have a chance to see it. The church people were better dressed than my earlier acquaintances and better shaved too, but they were equally solid, and when I met them later in cafés or stores they were equally attractive.

I had an exciting time in Teruel, a moving time for a young man trying to discover for himself what Spain was like, and after I had seen several of the better-class houses in the city, finding them to have floors such as we had in Pennsylvania and bookcases and shelves for storing food and colorful patios, I began to wonder if I had been unlucky in first stumbling upon that earthen-floored hut containing almost nothing. Had I by chance been deceived? Was rural Spain better than I had judged?

So I went out into the country in the opposite direction and stopped at three different farmhouses selected at random, and at each I introduced myself and was generously received. The farmers and their wives offered me water and wine, if they had any, and seemed pleased to talk with a norteamericano who had taken the trouble to learn their language, however poorly. They showed me their homes: earthen floors, one table, not enough chairs to entertain formally even one guest, few clothes, no stores of food.

When I returned to Teruel, I was met at the edge of the city by two armed men dressed in nineteenth-century uniforms featuring two-cornered patent-leather hats called tricorns after an older version which had three points. They were members of the Guardia Civil, whose job it was to keep watch on everything that happened in rural areas like Teruel, and they traveled in pairs, having learned that it was safer to do so. They did not stop me but fell in beside me as I walked. They were cordial and correct as they asked, 'Looking at the countryside?'

'Yes.'

'Visiting friends?'

'Not friends.'

'And when are you leaving Teruel?'

'In the morning.'

When the train pulled out they were there, extremely pleasant and smiling, their highly polished hats gleaming in the morning sunlight as if they were part of the chorus for a New York production of Carmen. They were my last sight of Teruel.

I was to rejoin my ship at Valencia, that powerful and often rebellious capital of the eastern coast, and as my dirty little train chugged into the center of the city I was made aware that Valencia was to be something special. I didn't know it at the time, but I was arriving on the Saturday evening which marked the height of the fiesta that celebrates the end of winter, and as I left the station the sky above Valencia was filled with exploding fireworks and the air with shouts and music and screams of delight. Valencia is the fireworks capital of Europe and outdoes itself at the fallas (bonfires). In the public square enormous wooden structures are raised, representing horses or galleons or Mont Blanc in Switzerland or the leaders of the nation, and each foot of timber is wound with colorful explosives, while chains of smaller firecrackers hang in festoons in all possible directions. I mean that these structures are sometimes as high as three-story buildings and are very solidly constructed.

Well, when the maximum crowd has gathered and the wind is right, these mammoth things are set afire, and as the wood begins to burn and the explosives ignite and the lovely loops of firecrackers explode, it seems as if the whole city of Valencia is going up in flames. It is really something to see, one of the great spectacles of Europe.

And the cafés! They were filled with well-to-do people and the food was excellent, emphasizing fish provided by the Mediterranean. The theaters were crowded and the same comedians who had delighted me in Castellón had arrived to tell the same bawdy jokes about being forced to spend the night in the hotel at guess where... Burriana! And as the chambermaid was described and her sexual capacities suggested, the Valencian crowd roared approval. Each time the name Burriana was mentioned the people of Valencia howled. Here the paseo was a wild affair, with some of the best-dressed women I was to see in Spain going with the clock and hordes of young men in fine suits marching in the opposite direction to inspect them. Apparently, in Valencia the people of Spain lived well.

But what I can never forget was the next day, when a tall, heavy man stopping in my hotel said in fine Spanish, 'Sir, I trust you will be attending the bullfight.'

'Is there one?'

'At five,' he said graciously and offered to lead me to where I might buy a ticket. As we paraded through the streets I noticed that the men of Valencia paid deference to my companion and some spoke to him with a kind of reverence. At the ticket window, not at the bullring but at a downtown office, the same respect was paid, and I finally asked, 'Who are you?' and he explained that he was picador for one of the men fighting that afternoon. I was less impressed then than I was to be later.

The cartel that afternoon contained the names of three matadors who were to be remembered in the history of Spanish bullfighting: Marcial Lalanda, Domingo Ortega and El Estudiante. The first was one of the most poetic matadors ever to grace the rings of Spain, and passes which he invented are still being used by his successors. Ortega, an illiterate farm-hand often referred to as el de Borox (he from the trivial village of Borox), was to become the cold classicist and the idol of those who love an icy, controlled excellence. On this day in 1932 he was just beginning his career at the advanced age of twenty-four. In the 1950s he was still fighting now and then, a man remarkably durable and never hurried or vulgar. El Estudiante was something special, a young student named Luis Gómez who had graduated from high school but who had given up his studies for glory in the bullring. He was to make a less lasting contribution to the history of bullfighting than either Lalanda or Ortega, but his arrival on the scene and under the conditions I have described was emotionally exciting, and he was to have a series of good years.

I could not have been introduced to bullfighting under more auspicious conditions: a professional picador to choose my seat, a poetic matador to open the fight and an austere classicist to compete with him, followed by the young student whom Spain was taking to her heart. I settled down in my front-row location and waited. The interior gates of the plaza swung open. The band burst into music. Bugles sounded and the opening parade was under way. I did not know enough to identify the matadors, nor the banderilleros, but behind them on horseback rode the man who had helped me buy my ticket, and in his leather pants, cockaded hat and articulated leg armor he looked enormous, as knights must have looked centuries ago when they ventured forth to battle. He nodded to me as he rode past and I felt that I was part of the fight.

Some years before, when still a student in a small Pennsylvania college, I had been cajoled into attending my first symphony concert, at which Arturo Toscanini was to conduct Beethoven's Fifth and Third in that order, and I can truthfully say that in the first minute of this music I understood as much about orchestral music as I was ever to know, even though I studied it avidly during subsequent years. So also, in that first minute in the bullring at Valencia, I understood bullfighting, even though I have been improving my knowledge at rather close range ever since. When Lalanda came out to unfurl his cape and with a series of breath-taking passes bring his bull under control, I understood that I was watching a theatrical display and not a sport. When the bull killed the first horse -- because if I remember correctly either pads were not used that day in Valencia or only inadequate ones if they were -- I understood that I was participating in a tribal tragedy dating back to prehistoric times and not in a game. At Valencia in those days they still used on cowardly bulls the black banderillas with firecracker heads that exploded harmlessly above the bull's neck muscles, frightening him into action, and when a pair of these went off not ten feet from where I sat, with the bull's face pointed at mine, I saw the effect on the animal, saw him stare at me in amazement, then leap sideways in the air and thunder off, and I was forever after a friend and a student of the fighting bull. And when on his first bull el de Borox took his truncated red cloth for the final act of his fight and dominated a towering bull as if the latter had been a tame puppy, I understood that this spectacle was intended to show puny man engaged in his war with the powerful forces of night. I was never to see Ortega better than he was that day, and I left the ring hopelessly addicted to this short, swarthy, cold perfectionist. I was curiously pleased to discover that my picador belonged to the cuadrilla of Ortega and not to one of the others. Later I was to travel briefly with this cuadrilla and to see Ortega in various plazas, and he was as great a matador as I thought him that first day. I concluded then, and have never changed my mind, that if I were to be a matador I would want to be like Domingo Ortega. Being far too chunky in the bottom to qualify as even a third-rate matador and not being hefty enough to be a picador aboard a horse, I never entertained any illusions in this direction even though at intervals I have spent a lot of time with the bulls and have even fought the smaller calves, but as a writer I have often remembered Ortega and have tried in words to attain some of the controlled effects he achieved with cloth and sword. To me, el de Borox would always be a Spanish archetype.

That Sunday night the picador and I went to a café near our hotel, where we were joined by a gang of Valencian bullfight fans who started to discuss the day's events in an animated dialect which I could little understand, and it was their opinion that Ortega had been exceptional. However, the purpose of the evening was not to rehash the bullfight but to enjoy a famous flamenco team of a woman dancer and a male guitarist. They had come from Madrid, I believe, or possibly Sevilla. At any rate, the smoky hall was crowded and waiters scurried about serving sweet wine and cakes or sour wine and anchovies, and our table chose the latter. Girls provided by the management wandered among the tables and three invited themselves to join us. The picador insisted that they provide one who could speak English, but none was available. They did, however, find one who spoke South American-style Spanish, and her I could understand.

What few lights the café had were dimmed. A single chair was placed on stage to be occupied by a round, fat, baldheaded man carrying a guitar. He was greeted with applause and launched directly into a composition which I would remember as one of the best I was to hear in Spain. I asked the girl beside me to explain the song, and she said that flamenco had more than a dozen standard types of song, like malagueños, fandangos and peteneras. This was a good example of the last. When I asked what words accompanied the music, she said, 'We have many versions. But the best tell the story of a beautiful Jewish girl named Petenera.'

Where are you going, Petenera?
Where are you going, Jewish maid?

I suppose that 'Petenera,' as this particular song was called, has become more a part of me than any other piece of folk music I have ever heard, the story of a Jewish girl and her tragic effect upon a small Spanish town. It must be very old, dating back at least to the 1400s, when Jews were common in Spain; the music is not exceptional and the words are arbitrary, but others have testified to the fact that the song as a whole has a powerful effect on them too, so I am not unusual in liking it.

It was obvious that this fat man on the chair was a notable guitarist, for he could make his instrument roar and whisper, laugh and sob. Both he and his music were very Spanish, and I relished each, but in due course he struck a series of commanding chords that sounded much like a machine gun, and onto the stage whirled my first flamenco dancer. She was a woman in her forties, not at all pretty and much fatter than I would have expected, but after that quick inventory I forgot her visible characteristics, for she could dance.

On Monday morning an event occurred that was to come back to me with terrible effect in the years that followed, although when it was happening I could not have anticipated its significance. I was in the central square, or at least one of the central squares, where the ashes of Saturday night's fire were being cleared, when from one of the government buildings I saw a procession crossing toward me. It was composed of many men in fine dark suits, including three or four in formal morning wear. In the center of the front rank was a most ordinary-looking man, apparently in his fifties, undistinguished in face, slightly dumpy in body and awkward in manner. I remember distinctly that even then I thought him to be a man of good though flabby will, and somebody beside me whispered that he was the President of Spain. It was Niceto Alcalá Zamora, the quiet man chosen to head Spain after the departure of King Alfonso XIII, who had slipped out of the country only the year before, thus avoiding the necessity of abdication. In this simple, fumbling man I saw the Republican alternative to the Bourbon dynasty (in Spanish, Borbón) and I was not impressed.

Then, to my astonishment, the cortege of black-suited men came straight at me, and a big crowd gathered behind me, so that I was wedged into position. President Alcalá Zamora -- a fussy lawyer who was known, in a mixture of affection and contempt, as Botas (Old High Button Shoes) -- spoke casually to several people in the crowd, then stopped and faced me.

'You are a stranger, I believe?'

'An American,' I said.

'Ah, norteamericano. How do you like Spain?'

'The fireworks last night,' was all I could manage.

'What else have you seen?'

'Teruel.'

There was a long silence, and the president softly said, 'Teruel. Not many get to Teruel,' and he was gone.

When I returned to the hotel I found that the picador had departed with Ortega's cuadrilla for a fight in some other part of Spain but had left me an envelope containing a free ticket for the novillada (a bullfight in which novices rather than full matadors appear) scheduled for that afternoon. The young matadors put on a fight of some skill even though facing bulls somewhat smaller than the full matadors had fought. Having tasted the day before the essence of bullfighting in the work of Lalanda and Ortega, I was eager to apply what I had learned to a less professional performance. I saw much that day and have often wondered who the three aspirants were. Did they go on to glory? Were they men whose names I am now familiar with? Or were they merely three more among the hundreds who manage a fight or two in Valencia or Sevilla or Córdoba and then vanish? I suppose there must be some way I could track down their names, because for that one Monday in Valencia they were proficient.

When the time came for me to leave Valencia, I reflected: I've seen the best Spain has to offer. The well-dressed businessmen. The luxurious clubs, they're as good as any in Europe. The gaiety of a first-class fiesta. Good hotels, good restaurants, good entertainment. A substantial city that seems to be well run. I've even seen the president himself, moving unguarded among his people and willing to talk with a norteamericano. I have seen Spain.

But as I rode out to the port of Valencia to rejoin my ship for the long haul back to Scotland, I could not help recalling the peasants of Teruel and the abysmal and almost terrifying poverty that was their lot. Between these two Spains, and remember that I had not yet seen the superarrogant nobility of Sevilla, there existed such a gap that I simply could not bring it into focus. It was like the test the oculist gives you when you have weak eyes: 'You will see before you two halves of a picture. Use all your muscles to make them form one single picture. Try! Try!'

Now, if the two halves are things like a countryman in Scotland as opposed to a banker in Edinburgh, there is at first a discrepancy, but as one exercises his muscles he can bring them together into one fused portrait of Scotland that is not difficult to comprehend. The countryman remains a countryman and the banker a banker, and they can stand side by side with no embarrassment. In the same way you can fuse a coal miner in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a storekeeper in Pittsburgh. But to fuse the rural peasant of Teruel and the rich clubman of Valencia lolling in his leather chair after a gorging meal was for me impossible, and I began at that moment to formulate that series of speculations regarding Spain which were to exercise me for the next decades. Whenever I read about Spain it was to find answers to these questions, and remember that they were posed some years before the Civil War disfigured the country. These are the questions of peace, and whenever I traveled in Spain or talked with Spaniards in America or England, I continued to study only these permanent questions. Later, after the war had ended, I applied myself to these speculations and did not torment myself with questions as to who was right or wrong in the war, for I have always regarded Spain as my second home and I have wanted to know about its enduring quality, not its current preoccupations. These are the speculations which have concerned me.

Speculation One. Spain and Italy are both peninsulas that jut out from the mainland of Europe, and in the north each is marked by mountains which formerly cut the inhabitants off from the main intellectual and political movements of the continent, but Italy was able to adjust to those continental movements and even to mold and lead them whereas Spain was not. Why? It is true that for a relatively brief period during the reigns of Carlos V and Felipe II, Spain succeeded in reversing this tradition and in governing much of Europe, but in the long run of her history she was emotionally confined to her peninsula whereas Italy was not. Why?

Speculation Two. In the period of greatness referred to above, Spain faced east toward her possessions in Italy, north toward her important holdings in the Low Countries, west toward her vast empire in the Americas and south toward involvement in Africa, but she never seemed able to make up her mind as to where her basic interests lay and thus frittered them all away. Why this indecision?

Speculation Three. During a period of some four centuries prior to 1492, Spain had shown herself more hospitable to varied cultural, religious and ethnic groups than any other major power, including those in Asia and Africa, and this tolerance appeared to be an established way of life, yet with startling speed she reversed herself and extirpated from Spanish soil all Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Illuminati and Jesuits, transforming herself into one of the most homogeneous and frightened people in the world. What accounted for this dramatic reversal?

Speculation Four. With her drive toward uniformity and centralism, why has it been Spain who has preserved so strongly a regional pattern of life? With her devotion to a royalist theory of government, why has she so persistently produced strong democratic movements? With her love of personal freedom, why has she repeatedly sought her major solutions in dictatorial forms of government, and why do these work so well with the Spanish people?

Speculation Five. Why did Spain, when she was already one of the richest countries in Europe, spend so much energy gaining control of the riches of the New World, then allowing this influx of gold and silver to generate an inflation which converted her into the poorest country in Europe and one of the poorest in the world? This is a perplexing question, for it touches upon one of the real tragedies of history and has implications for present nations. I used to consider this self-impoverishment of Spain a tragedy that could not be explained and assumed that it had occurred without anyone's being aware of the problem; but that is not so. Recent studies have proved that certain Spanish theorists in the sixteenth century understood that a sudden importation of raw wealth which had not been created by productive work within the nation would create an inflation which would bankrupt Spain, and they warned against it. But they were not listened to. Why?

Speculation Six. Prior to the industrial revolution which re-formed the face of Europe, Spain was a leader in the manufacture of quality goods, a leader in world trade and a leader in agriculture. Had she merely projected this leadership at a normal rate of growth and had she been able to make the relatively simple adjustments that were afoot throughout the rest of Europe, she would probably have remained the leader in manufacturing, trade and agriculture and might even have improved her relative position. Instead, almost consciously and with calculated arrogance, she dedicated herself to an opposite course. She hamstrung her manufacturers, restricted her trade and crippled her agriculture. Within a few generations world leadership in these crucial fields had passed into the hands of France, Germany and England, and to a lesser degree, Italy. Who can explain this extraordinary series of wrong decisions?

Speculation Seven. For several centuries Spain was one of the exciting leaders in art, music, drama, poetry, the novel, philosophy -- both as producer and consumer. Then abruptly the leadership was abandoned. The traveler to Spain can have no more perplexing an experience than to visit the Prado Museum and see there the paintings of Italians like Titian, of Flemings like Roger van der Weyden and of Germans like Dürer and to realize that during the lifetimes of those men Spain was the art capital of the world, and then to search in vain for a Spanish museum which contains comparable samples of the Frenchman Cézanne, the Italian Modigliani, the Russian Soutine, the Austrian Kokoschka or the German Klee. One fails to find the work of even Spanish-speaking artists like Picasso, Miró, Orozco and Rivera. What can explain this dramatic volte-face?

Speculation Eight. No aspect of Spain is more perplexing to the foreigner than her passionate devotion to the Catholic Church, which she has defended at heavy cost in wealth and manpower, while never being reluctant to oppose the Pope when she considered him in moral or political error. Several times Spanish kings mounted armies to attack the Vatican, and both Carlos V and Felipe II, who are described in Spanish history as the nonpareils of Catholic orthodoxy, were excommunicated because of their anti-Rome behavior. Papal decrees were often refused entrance into Spain; Spanish kings and cardinals simply refused to promulgate them, and even today there is a tendency for the Spanish Church to consider one of its main tasks to 'save Rome from itself.' Such contradictory behavior is one of the continuing anomalies of Spanish history.

Speculation Nine. On my first day in Teruel I found that the contradictions I was becoming aware of could be explained only by reference to what might be termed the central mystery of Spanish psychology. How can the Spaniard, who is so outgoing, so earthy, so in love with the trivia of daily existence, be at the same time so withdrawn and inwardly mystical? In this book the reader will not find an answer to this permanent enigma, but he will find, I hope, certain illustrations of it from which he can draw his own conclusions.

In other words, to travel in Spain is not like traveling elsewhere. The people are exciting, but so are they in Greece; the land is compelling, but so is it in Norway; art forms like flamenco, the bullfight and the decoration of the central plaza are unique, but so are the art forms of Italy; and if reflections on Spanish history drive the stranger to speculation, so do reflections on German history. What makes Spain different is that here these speculations are positively unavoidable. The people are so dramatic in their simplest existence that one must identify with them, and when one does he begins to think like a Spaniard; the art forms are so persuasive that the stranger is sucked into their vortices, even against his will; and the problems of history are so gigantic and of such continuing significance that one cannot escape an intellectual involvement in them. Some travelers, of whom I am one, find also an emotional involvement in Spanish history, and when this happens we are lost, for then Spain haunts us as it has haunted our predecessors, Georges Bizet, Henry de Montherlant, George Borrow and Ernest Hemingway.

What I am saying is that Spain is a very special country and one must approach it with respect and with his eyes open. He must be fully aware that once he has penetrated the borders he runs the risk of being made prisoner. I believe I sensed this danger on that silvery dawn many years ago when I stood off the shore of Burriana and watched the heaving men and the straining oxen, dimly aware that in nearby Castellón there was a fiesta which awaited me and in the hills cold Teruel, which would be forever one of the principal cities of my mind. I knew then that Spain was a special land, and I have spent many subsequent trips endeavoring to unravel its peculiarities. I have not succeeded, and in this failure I am not unhappy, for Spain is a mystery and I am not at all convinced that those who live within the peninsula and were born there understand it much better than I, but that we all love the wild, contradictory, passionately beautiful land there can be no doubt.

Copyright © 1968 by Random House