The Pillars of Hercules

The Last Supper was held in the house of St. Mark. After this, Joseph of Arimathea collected drops of blood in it from Jesus’ crucified body. The cup—usually called the grail—was taken to Rome by St. Peter and it was used as the Papal Chalice until the time of Sixtus II. It was then sent to Huesca by St. Lawrence, first Deacon of the Roman Church, where it stayed until 713. It was carried as part of the portable paraphernalia of the Court of Aragon. In the eleventh century it was in Jaca, in the twelfth century at Juan de la Pena Monastery, in the fourteenth it was taken to Zaragoza by King Martin the Human, and in 1437 it was presented to Valencia Cathedral by Don Juan, the King of Navarre. Most of the churches in Valencia were vandalized or bombed during the Spanish Civil War (euphemistically called “the National Uprising”), but the grail remained intact. It had been taken out and hidden in the village of Carlet, in the mountains southwest of Valencia, so that it would not be smashed.

It is venerated. It “receives a continuous growing cult … The cup is very ancient work and nothing can be said against the idea that it was utilized by the Lord during the first eucharistic consecration,” J. A. Oñate writes in his definitive book on the subject.

Oh, well, all of this might be true. But even if it isn’t the Holy Grail, the agate cup is much prettier than the chunks of the True Cross that are displayed all over Italy—enough pieces of the cross, it is said, to rebuild the Italian navy.

A priest was saying mass in the Holy Grail chapel each time I took my skeptical self to examine it. This continuous mass struck me as being exactly analogous to the plot device in Paul Bowles’s short story “Pastor Dow at Tacaté,” where an American preacher can only attract Indians to his church by playing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” on a wind-up Victrola. As long as the song plays the Indians sit quietly, and when the music stops (and the Indians get up to leave the church) the preacher rushes over and gets the music going again.

In the same way, godless visitors looking for the cup enter the chapel where a priest is saying mass, and as the Holy Grail is fairly small and far-off, these idly curious people are forced to sit down or kneel. Then, gawking at the Holy Grail, they are trapped by the mass. And there they remain, squinting, listening to the mass and the preaching and the denunciations.

There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on the same spot.

The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale youths, and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or churchgoers. Some others held elaborate signs. I am the father of three young children and I have no job.

Valencia, an old provincial capital on the sea, had a pleasant aura. It was low and gray; it was not busy; it seemed to me happily unfashionable, and though it is Spain’s third-largest city it had an air of friendliness. The central part of Valencia was labyrinthine, dusty, full of shabby shops selling hardware and groceries and cheap clothes. This was Valencia in the winter, a city returned to itself, with no tourists and little traffic; but even in the summer I imagined that the tourists would be at the beach.

Fishermen headed out of the nearby port of El Grao and netted sardines, farmers grew oranges near the city in the irrigated plain the Spaniards call a huerta. I had a sardine sandwich for lunch, and two oranges. Then I walked in the sunshine to the Torres de Serrano, not to marvel at the antiquity of these towers, but to see the flea market in the same neighborhood. This flea market told sad stories. It was a mass of old and semi-destitute people selling things no one could possibly want—broken eyeglasses, bent coat hangers, old plastic toys, rusted alarm clocks, faded cassette tapes, faucets, battered board games, old magazines, beads, books, and more. It was very grubby stuff. Only the old clothes were moving. Most of the people were browsing and chatting. This was one example of hard-up Spain, but it could not have been typical since nearly all the stuff was worthless.

A man selling postcards caught my eye and said, “These are valuable.”

“How much is this one?” It was General Franco.

“Four hundred pesetas.” Three dollars.

“Why so much?”