Seth Nottebohm
For thousands of years, Spain, located on the frontier of Europe, across the sea from Africa, was a battlefield for various empires, beliefs and peoples, and was known as "the brazier of civilization and the melting pot of faith". There are many ways to visit this country, but the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has opened up a curious personality path: for more than twenty years, he has taken the spiritual capital of Spain- Santiago as the coordinates, the ancient and modern documents and stories as the starting point, the first-hand observation and visit as the method, in the book "The Spanish StarLight Road", he shuttles between the boundary between the real and the imaginary, and restores the historical scene of the millennium conquest with abundant imagination. Presents a world that ordinary travelers can't see.
Considered a contemporary of Calvino and Nabokov, he was highly regarded in the literary world, and Byert called him "one of the most outstanding novelists of modern times", and he went deep into the Spanish hinterland again and again, building a moving literary travelogue and urban history with the enthusiasm of pilgrims, the imagination of adventurers, and the erudition of historians.
With the permission of the publishing house, excerpt the author's whereabouts during his exploration of the Sigunza Cathedral, follow his footsteps, and explore the treasure.
The Spanish Trail of Stars, by Seth Nottbohm [Netherlands], translated by Peihua He, Translated by Linh Publishing House, March 2022
I drove along the steep road up the fortress of Alvaracin. There were no sentries, no infantry or scalding asphalt on the walls, only two nuns piloting a 2CV Citroën. The white face resembles a baker who has not seen the light of day, sprinkled with God's flour.
The old houses at the foot of the castle come together for protection: they are like loose messy teeth scattered over majestic rock walls. Cars are useless here. I parked my car at the gate of the past and set off on foot, roaming the narrow streets. The silence, the geraniums on the windowsill, a clock, and the fortified walls that towered above me, now enclosed a clearing where the wind whistled.
I drank a glass of black wine in some dimly lit cellar. It was cool inside the church. In the small additional museum, a small priest with sad glasses is sitting and reading the ever-changing daily newspaper. A gray knit shirt hung over the back of his chair, and the weather in Alvarazin was quite cold. We look at each other and have nothing to say. I wandered through treasures, a holy grail, a book, a faded tapestry from Brussels, and few people visited from the priests who buried their heads in reading.
I bought a little book containing pen sketches of the (once great) cathedral, the castle, and the tall Houses of Castile towering over the edge of the gorge. He counted the money I gave and put it into a wooden coin box. Here, as elsewhere: these highland villages used to be protected by their geographical location, but today the same terrain has led to their isolation.
Alvaracin townscape wiki commons diagram
A wild dream: if you grasp the edge of Spain, pull it hard, and place it above France on the other side of the Pyrenees, many things that are still unknown to most people will suddenly belong to the treasure trove of European cultural heritage. The Spanish mantra (or well-being, whatever you want) is the sun-drenched stretch of coastline that draws all the attention. If Alvarazín were located on the Côte d'Azur, now flooded with tourism, like Saint-Paul de-Vence, I think I would be grateful, but on the other hand, I was annoyed: it was only four hundred and forty kilometres from Barcelona, and thousands of Bairza people hurried through (or flew by) every year, but it was a completely unknown world.
Have you ever heard of Sigüenza, San Baudelio, El Burgo de Osamar, Alvaraçín, Santa María de Huerta? The food is simple, the wine is cheap, and it's a paradise for individual travelers, and occasionally you'll bump into adventurers who go it alone: an elderly couple carrying a heavy travel guide, or a young man with a sketchbook on his back who is almost extinct. People always complain that there is not enough peace and quiet, but there are many here, millions of tons of emptiness, hundreds of millions of years of rest, a thousand liters of silence, and a respected past, as if the locals had accepted subsidies from some international committee to keep everything as they were a thousand years ago.
Those who travel in Spain should free themselves from a sense of time, should disregard pre-planned itineraries and arrival times, should be willing to stay in simple village hostels, and have the courage to accept different concepts of impermanence. Climate, stubbornness, the domination of fate, and even just indifference have caused parts of Spain to remain as they are, making you think for a moment that the world is not so chaotic after all, not as ruthless and fleeting as newspapers and television images want us to believe, and you will find that there are things that are eternal and unchanging, even if they are composed of personal life, but the changes of fate that have survived. This ancient land has experienced many wars and disasters, historic movements, brutality, and fierce conflicts, most of which occurred in the recent twentieth century. These dramatic events destroy people, who think that everything will be destroyed with them, but today's travelers encounter the scenery, monuments, and people's views that are still the same. Modern people always exaggerate change, and their exaggerated views are constantly repeated by the news media, which has to advocate change in order to ensure its survival, because the immutable lacks attractiveness. There are other mediums that remain unchanged: museums, books, cathedrals.
Main entrance to Sigunza Cathedral The official website of Sigunza Cathedral
From a bird's-eye view from the air, Sigunza's castle looks rather human: a parallelogram in the midst of chaotic nature. If the people of that time could fly, it would be a fortress that was vulnerable to attack, and its construction would be meaningless. The Spanish government has now converted it into a state-run hotel, and I sleep between the battlements, empty armor in the corner of the stone gallery, and the faint blue light of the television sets flickering in the vast hall. The show that aired was a series: The History of Bullfighting. A 1916 bullfight film in Mexico, flashing black and white images, a little person moving too fast, a mini cow jumping ridiculously, no sound, clouds in the sky rushing by, how can I take all this seriously? I had to try my best to convert this accelerated version to a more natural speed so as not to laugh it out loud. For the matador, however, the battle was really dangerous, his injuries were real, and black juice spurted out of his embroidered bullfighting suit, spewing out too fast, but it was real blood. The same thing happens when you watch war news films from yesteryear. The grotesque little men crawled out of the muddy trenches, moved violently like toys with clockwork too tightly, staggered forward, and then were suddenly thrown into the air, fell to the ground, and screamed for their lives.
Interior view of Sigunza Cathedral The official website of Sigunza Cathedral
Early in the morning, I opened the window of the room, which was not actually a window, but a peephole. Through the small wedge-shaped cannon hole, I saw the desolate world, not the enemy army. I heard the bells of the cathedral, which itself was a fortress, like a dark shadow towering in the night.
The church itself is a fortress wiki commons diagram
At first sight, I was shocked: as soon as I walked into the southern entrance of the cathedral, I could only choose to step down the next row of stairs. The church is semi-embedded in the ground, so it is actually much taller, serene and spacious than it looks from the outside. I joined a small group of Spaniards who followed the guide, and the pale male guide was a storyteller. I was impressed by the concentration of others. I think they must have been so-called craftsmen of the past, their hands caressing wood, tapping stones, asking questions about historical periods, marveling at the intricate craftsmanship, agreeing that the painted wooden altars of Covarrubias needed to be wiped. They're right. When we came to the famous Dunsell statue, we all fell silent.
Dunsell statue wiki commons
Dunsell was an errand boy for the Catholic Queen Isabella, who died during the Siege of Granada in 1486. The Queen ordered the carving of the statue, and that was him, Don Martin Vazquez, reading a stone book, unconcerned about his own death, silent, lost in the world. His statues are vivid and mysterious. He lay in the tomb, his right hand propped up his upper body, his armored left knee slightly bent, and his short sword slid to one side. At his feet there was a kneeling figure. His parents lay side by side, their hands folded on their chests and their feet resting on the hounds guarding them. His grandfather was in the niche next to him. The spirit of the medieval samurai, the close relationship between relatives, at this moment everyone whispered softly, so as not to disturb its tranquility.
We followed our guide from the eleventh-century Sidious building at one end to the other, passing through Romanesque windows with tall, elaborate Gothic vaults above them, somewhat different from the sturdy style of the entire building. Medieval tombs, silversmith-style wall carvings, as if carved into silver, rather than chiseled from hard stone resistant to wind erosion. The serenity and sanctity of the church blends all the styles together, and it is one of the most beautiful churches in my mind.
Editor-in-charge: Zhu Zhe
Proofreader: Liu Wei