The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Castile, near Medina del Campo, which prides itself upon producing the best wine in the region. When the apothecary had recited Eya Velar, I played on my fiddle the celebrated song which Salinas quotes in the sixteenth century as having been sung by the people describing the decree of expulsion against the Jews in 1492:

    Come now you Jews
    and make ready your bags;
    the Kings now ordain
    that you cross o’er the main. *

    No sooner had the young guitarist heard the tune than he cried that it was from the region of Medina del Campo and sung to ballads, and played as a dance even today. This little discovery was yet another link in the long chain of music telling the story of the Jews in Spain.
    As a climax to our evening of minstrelsy the saddle-maker recited for my benefit the quaint poem ‘The Drunken Cleric’ (El Clérigo Embriagado), one of the Milagros of Berceo, which describes the miraculous escape of the monk who drank himself insensible from noon to vespers at sunset, and was attacked by the devil in the form of a mad bull when he was tottering unsteadily to church. But Our Lady watched over him and when the fierce animal was about to gore him, she, like a consummate bull-fighter, drew the bull away with the fold of her cloak. 34
    Next morning, as I wended my way along the bank of the river Cárdenas towards the monastery of San Millán, which is in sight of the village of Berceo, I reflected on the destiny of the humble thirteenth-century village priest whose works were not even printed in their entirety until the end of the eighteenth century, and very few Spaniards, outside a small circle of scholars, had ever heard his name. But in modern days his name has been established after Menéndez y Pelayo stated that Berceo’s simple poems had more charm than most of the alembicated poems in the Cancioneros of the fifteenth century. 35
    It was when the young writers of the so-called ‘Generation of 1898’, whose minds were concentrated on the idea of rebirth after disaster, began to make war on false values that Gonzalo de Berceo became a consecrated figure among the poets. Rubén Darío, Azorin and Antonio Machado loved old towns, where life still preserved the eternal qualities of the Middle Ages, and they rediscovered the poet of the mountain valleys of the Rioja who sang of his local saints with all the naive innocence of a child of nature: of footsore pilgrims resting in a green meadow full of flowers under a tree whose branches housed countless birds singing their melodious madrigals; especially of Our Lady, whose supernatural intervention he describes in twenty-five ‘Miracles’ (milagros). 36
    Like St. James, she saves the robber who prays to her, even when he hangs on the gallows, by holding him up with her hands; and a lustful friar, who died in a state of sin, she raises from the dead in order that he may have an opportunity of repentance, even though the devils have already claimed possession of his soul. One of the most beautiful of these milagros and one that seems to have influenced even El Greco in his masterpiece, ‘The Vision of St. Ildefonso’, describes the apparition of Our Lady to the Saint when she presents him with a chasuble.

    To understand the spirit of the miracle as expressed in childlike simplicity by the folk-minstrel Berceo, we should visit the picture by the Cretan master, which hangs in the convent church of Illescas, on the way to Toledo. As the eminent German critic Meier-Graefe said, ‘that one picture would repay the journey to Spain, even if one had to go there in a tartana’. And he describes it as follows: ‘The Saint with the dark brown cowl sits at a jewel of a table, which is decorated by a blood-red cover hemmed with orange, and he is writing; his eyes raised to the small Madonna. The miracle is here and by El Greco. It is not the man who sits there in a chair, his face lifted and lost in thought, but the moment which he experiences. He might be a simple poet. This little Madonna by his side, on her golden pedestal and clad in a white garment with its gold lace, in front of a background woven of grey and orange, is so overwhelming that you need not be a saint in order to pray to her. And thus the miracle becomes human. A genius invented the representation of this poetic ecstasy. The moment is to be found in the turn of his head which does not gaze at the Virgin, but stares into emptiness, where he discovers an even more beautiful image. It lies also in