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Copyright © Carmel Bird
2004. All rights reserved. |
cats and dogs of spain
The camera resembles
a small silver cake of soap I can slip into my pocket. It is
called an ‘elph’, a name I find sweet and whimsical and
friendly. It is not a digital camera, producing with ease lovely
sharp images which can, if I wish, be panoramic. I bought the elph
specially to take to
Spain
in December 2001, such a very short and breath-catching,
heart-stopping time after the eleventh of September.
You don’t have to take pictures of the things you see in foreign
places, but for some reason I had a sense that I needed to have a
camera. I can really only begin to explain why I was going to
Spain in 2001 by returning in memory to 1956 when I studied at
school a story by Prosper Merimée, and became as a result of the
study fascinated by the European phenomenon of strange,
mysterious, ancient statues of black goddesses. The story I read
was ‘La Venus D’Ille’ in which the key character is a
beautiful black statue of Venus, goddess of love, who has the
power to kill. And the will to do so. My teacher tried to deflect
my interest from the thrilling nature of the Venus to the
writer’s skill with language and narrative. She became I recall
quite impatient with me. This probably only fanned the flame of my
desire to know more about the statue, more about Venus, dangerous
goddess of love. This interest gradually translated into a kind of
obsession with the existence of weird black statues of the Virgin
Mary, many of which have made their appearance in sites once
dedicated to Venus, Isis, Cybele or Diana.
I am prepared to believe, through observation and reading, that
there is a cultic continuity between the pagan goddesses of love
and the Virgin Mary, and that the location of devotions to black
images of Mary in places once dedicated to other black goddesses
signify that continuity. The new deity replaces the old, takes on
some of her habits and powers, and fulfils some human need,
embodies some deeply important idea. I don’t mean here to launch
into a thesis, but I do need to clarify my position, since it is
the basis for my journey with the elph, and also is the
inspiration for a manuscript I plan to write in 2005.
In the sixties and seventies I visited Black Virgins in
France
,
Italy
,
England
and
Spain
, gathering material in a piece-meal and sentimental way. I
didn’t know what I was going to do with it exactly, but I felt
compelled to collect it. I had no real central secondary
documentation until 1985 when I read The
Cult of the Black Virgin by Ian Begg. Then by the late
nineties I knew I was going to write a novel that had its origins
back in ‘La Venus D’Ille’, and that I had an urgent need to
go to
Spain
and somehow make a deep connection there with the Black Virgin –
by which I mean – what? Visiting shrines and taking pictures
with the elph?
If part of the impulse in writing fiction is connected to a desire
to explore personal obsessions and their narrow and wide meanings,
then my visits to the Black Virgins would be partly to fulfil that
desire. Notice the ‘if’. Another part of the impulse I know is
associated with an exhilarating feeling of freedom I derive in the
act of writing. So I went to
Spain
with a little camera to take pictures of some old statues, hoping
these statues and pictures would nourish and to a certain extent
explain some of the material I was planning to write about in a
novel. Or else I was writing a novel because I wanted to explore
in some fictional way the meanings of the old statues. You must
know that I have no easy answers to these questions. Perhaps I
have no real answers at all. Perhaps they are not questions.
Then built into my reaction to the notion of taking pictures of
the statues was the sudden impulse to add a counter-balancing
project. I decided that when I was in
Spain
I would take pictures of cats and dogs. So with my duel objectives
of the Black Virgins and the cats and dogs, I arrived at
Madrid
airport in November 2001.
The world was nervous about airports, and sure enough at
Madrid
my flight to
Barcelona
was surrounded before take-off by emergency vehicles and security
police. All the luggage was unloaded onto the tarmac, and all
passengers had to line up and claim their suitcases. When everyone
had been matched to their luggage, and when unclaimed pieces had
been whisked away, we were allowed to get back on the plane and
fly to
Barcelona
.
By contrast, when I was leaving
Spain
to come home again, I set off from
Granada
. I had an opposite and perhaps more alarming experience. The
check-in queue was exceptionally slow, so that by the time the
final boarding call for my flight came I still had not reached the
counter with my luggage. I abandoned my suitcase and rushed over
to the departure gate and explained my problem. Swiftly a man in
uniform grabbed me by the elbow, took my suitcase, rushed me onto
the tarmac, pointed to the plane and said ‘Run!’ The he ran
off with my case towards the back of the plane and I ran to the
front. I did not have a boarding pass, but it didn’t seem to
matter. My luggage and I eventually turned up together in
Singapore
from where we set off for
Melbourne
. Was I protected perhaps by the powers of a dark goddess?
Between arriving in
Madrid
and leaving
Granada
I saw several Black Virgins and many cats and dogs. Their
likenesses lay dormant together on rolls of film, my serious
project and its balancing counter-part.
The large black, white and chestnut cat squats fatly on the glass
counter of the jewellery shop in Santiago de Compostella, within
sight of the cathedral. It is an ordinary Spanish jeweller’s
shop, the life-size statue of a saint, crowned in gold, visible in
one corner; the small picture of a witch on her broomstick, a
local legend, on the back wall. Had it not been for my cat and dog
project I would not have this nice record of the shop. The cat,
the dominant image, is flanked by white velvet displays of silver
and gold medallions and earrings; in the glass case beneath her
glitter trays of rings and bracelets. Her round eyes are green.
The diabolical eyes of the statue in the Merimee story are bright
almond-shaped, inlaid silver. “May the statue be gracious and
kindly, since it is so lifelike,” reads the ironic epigraph
(from Lucian) at the beginning of the story.
The sand on the beach at Candelaria on the Spanish
island
of
Tenerife
is black, volcanic. Close to the black beach, gleaming like
toothpaste and marzipan in the sun, is the spacious basilica of
Nuestra Senora de Candelaria. The story goes that in 1390 a black
wooden statue of a mother and child was found, by shepherds,
washed up on the sand. Miracles were reported in response to
prayers addressed to this Black Virgin. In 1836 she was once more
swept out to sea in a storm, so that the statue I photographed in
the basilica is a nineteenth century facsimile of the one that
emerged from the ocean. I find this a bit sad. Her eyes are
almond-shaped, not silver, but life-like brown with stark whites,
staring ahead, piercing, powerful, compelling, and not
un-sinister. Scary, not at all ‘gracious and kindly’. Her dark
face is strong like a goddess, heart-shaped, completely encircled
by a white silk coif embroidered with gold and jewels. And from
this coif falls a vast scarlet cloak encrusted with golden leaves
and vines and blooms. The dress beneath the cloak is white and
gold. The dark child who rests stiffly, awkwardly, in the crook of
his mother’s right arm is dressed in gold, his white embroidered
cloak falling in long lavish silky folds across his mother’s
clothing. Both figures are festooned with votive jewellery –
coral and gold medals and rosaries. The woman holds an imposing
wrought gold sceptre in her left hand, and both figures are
wearing the heavy, huge, elaborate golden crowns of serious fairy
tale. When the shepherds found the original, something like this
but probably not so clothed, seven feet tall, washed up on the
beach, they must have been – well – amazed. Then to think that
it returned to the waves.
Where is it now? Might it not wash up at maybe Rosebud one day
soon? I offered her a bunch of blood red carnations. In a side
chapel which was as full of blooms and people as a crowded flower
shop there were banks of electronic candles.(I confess I put in
lots of coins just to see a whole bank of them light up together.
It was terrific. The act of a gleeful childish tourist. Electronic
candles, for heaven’s sake, they were asking for it.) There was
something carnival about the whole thing in the basilica, so
bright, so close to the seaside, the children and dogs, the
restaurants and souvenir shops – yet eerie too, because of the
presence of miracles and that great staring statue with its black
face and splashy scarlet cloak.
One of my favourite pictures of dogs was also taken on
Tenerife
. It’s the panoramic image of the cobbled courtyard of a
monastery. Spaced across the area, four large fat black iron pots
from which spill and spring flurries of vigorous red geraniums.
Sunlight pours down, warming the soft grey stones which go fanning
out from the monastery door. And on the cobbles, two identical
large golden dogs are sleeping, still, stretched out, passed out
flat, like two pale yellow corpses which for some reason remind me
of a pair of abandoned gloves.
When I was very young, like three or so, I used to dream about an
enormous yellow dog. It was friendly but it was outlandishly huge,
and I did not understand that it was a dream – I confused the
illusion with reality, and I talked about my big yellow dog.
People dismissed the dog, but I thought the people were wrong and
the dog was real. It wasn’t until after I had looked at the
picture of the Spanish dogs on the cobblestones for a long time
that I realized they were probably my favourites because they
stirred the memory of my dear old yellow dog. They lie in the sun
and also in the zone of tension between reality and illusion, and
the tension between memory and now. Perhaps I bought the elph and
went to
Spain
to get the picture of the dogs on the cobbles on
Tenerife
. And not one dog but two. I am so very glad
I took the elph with me. A feeling of peace fills me when I look
at that picture on the dogs on the fanning-out cobbles. Dreams
come true.
The world of photography, the world of memory, the world of
dreams, the world of myth – I think there is a strong connection
between all these – and again with the world in which fiction is
created. I wish I could think of a better word than ‘world’
for all these locations, but ‘world’ is the word that comes to
hand. I am forever worrying the point of where the impulse to
create fiction originates, and something that draws me, I know, to
phenomena such as the Black Virgins is the wild and delicate
element of the operation of the human imagination that I detect in
them.
The original Black Virgin on the high rugged other-worldly
mountain
of
Montserrat
outside
Barcelona
is reputed to have been carved by St Luke and taken from
Jerusalem
to
Spain
by St Peter. It was hidden in the mountains to save it from the
Moors. In the eighth century a choir of angels guided some
shepherds to its hiding place which had been a
temple
of
Venus
. (All the world’s a stage, and somewhere in the wings are
always waiting and ready a flock of shimmering angels and a handy
group of shepherds in green and brown and grey woolly cloaks, both
groups willing to participate in the drama of discovering and
singing about misplaced statues in remote places. Where would we
be without them?) The statue at
Montserrat
today, a twelfth century version of the original, is very very
different from her sister who was washed up in the storm at
Candelaria. She is only a metre high, carved wood, black, with her
golden crown and simple garments painted on.
The child sits on her lap, facing straight ahead. Her head is
over-large, with a long fine nose, sweet sad gentle smile, and
benign if staring black, black eyes. The crowned child raises his
right hand in blessing, and his little wooden toes peep from the
hem of his graceful wooden dress. This Virgin is particularly
effective in matters of marriage and fertility. In fact one of the
functions of some of the Black Virgins that particularly interests
me is that of the re-animation of babies who have died. I read
somewhere (in my unscholarly way I can’t tell you where) that if
you put a dead baby on the turnstile at a shrine to the Black
Virgin, the living child would be returned to you at a revolution
of the stile. I can think of a cynical purpose in this operation,
but it also has a certain terrible and inevitable charm.
The first time I went to
Montserrat
in the seventies I was on my honeymoon. You have probably guessed
that I am susceptible to the legends and superstitions as the next
shepherd. I confided to the Black Virgin at
Montserrat
my desire for a baby. This is an ordinary confidence after all,
but maybe not everybody shares it with ancient statues on tops of
high mountains. A few weeks later we were in
Toledo
. In the dark interior courtyard of a restaurant there was an old
old well, and beside the well sat an old old woman. We stopped to
speak to her and she offered me a cup of water from the well. As
she handed me the water she said: ‘Benediciones para ti y para
el nino prometido.’ By which blessing I understood her to mean
that she was telling me I was newly pregnant. There are rational
explanations to this – perhaps she had seen me gazing lovingly
at babies or at exquisite white embroidered baby clothes in a shop
window. Perhaps she said the same thing to every honeymooning
couple. But the supernatural interpretation is most seductive to
me.
The
temple
of
Venus
at
Montserrat
brings me back to the story that started the whole exercise. After
the bronze statue killed the bridegroom, she was melted down and
turned into a church bell. Surely a mistake I always thought. The
frosts that caused the failure of the grape harvest two years in a
row were attributed to the ringing of the bell. Actually I always
hated that – the idea of melting her down to make the bell, but
it was a neat enough way to end the story. It is a very sad story
– everybody, including the statue, loses except for the narrator
who treats the whole business as a story he has observed at
arm’s length. I have always admired the way he succeeds in
presenting the story as a kind of supernatural fact. Venus herself
is still able to wield her malice, in the tones of the bell, but
that is, I imagine less satisfying to her than wielding it as a
large and beautiful black statue.
It has taken me such a very long time to process the inspiration
that story generated, as if the ripples of sound from the fatal
bell needed to move out and out from the little green text book
until I heard, somewhere, and often enough, what I needed to hear.
But I don’t think that is necessarily so. That would be too
simple.
The silver elph came home, and in the luggage that had set off so
unceremoniously from
Granada
were many rolls of film. I would like to be able to tell you that
on a picture of a dog there appeared the ghostly image of a weird
holy mother and child, or even that the Black Virgin of Candelaria
turned out to be cradling a sweet black poodle wearing a lavish
golden crown. But no. However in one photograph a little black and
white terrier sits cockily between two motor scooters behind the
cathedral in
Granada
. And those scooters look for all the world like a pair of cheeky
bug-eyed aliens. It’s a nice picture. Good silver elph.
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