SPAIN : iBuenos! : Coming to Terms With a Little Spanish Town

A hundred miles north of Valencia, on a narrow spit of gritty sand thrusting into the Mediterranean, stands a great rock flanked by sharp cliffs that descend abruptly into the depths. Clinging to this precipice in a state of 14th-Century vertigo is a golden-toned village called Peniscola.

If some modern Merlin would give me a chance to return to any place in the world--I’ve seen most of it--my choice wouldn’t be an elegant city or the African jungle or the exotic Far East, but Peniscola, that hidden corner of Spain that hypnotized me with history more than 20 years ago.

The film “El Cid” needed a setting that looked 1,000 years old. Peniscola is far older than that, with foundations going back to the native Iberians of prehistoric times, but its sea-worn battlements made a convincing substitute for what is now the modern city of Valencia, where the Cid defeated the Moors in 1096. Itching for a chance to photograph something different from the usual Spanish tour--real villagers in an untouched historic setting--I accompanied my actor-husband to the Costa Azahar.

Spain has several enticing coastal areas, including the Costa Brava near Barcelona and the Costa del Sol above Gibraltar, but the most beautiful of them is little known: the Costa Azahar, the “Blossom Coast,” lying between the two. In February the Azahar glows violet-pink with thousands of acres of almond trees in bloom, wafting a fragrance that can send a smog-clogged Californian into a trance.

Today, opulent hotels surround the area of Peniscola, and the curve of the north beach sports hundreds of whitewashed condominiums. But in 1961 there were no accommodations on the rock itself. Each morning before dawn, actors and crew would leave the Hotel del Golf in Castellon de la Plana and drive 60 miles to Peniscola. There we would crowd, shivering, into a comforting little cafe on the beach to reinforce ourselves with thick coffee laced with that brutal Spanish brandy, Fundador. Crew and actors would then brace for the battle scenes, while I, a Leica M2 in one hand and a 5-year-old son in the other, would set off with expectations of photographing the uncommon people of Peniscola.

When I first saw their faces, my hand trembled on the shutter. The women appeared in high-contrast black; the fishermen wore snappy berets, and the red-cheeked children sparkled with good health in spite of the desperate economic situation in Spain. My first encounters with those redoubtable citizens, however, were less than gratifying. There was a strange coldness that I’d never experienced before. I would smile “Buenos dias!”

“Buenos . . .” they would mutter, continuing on their way. I kept reminding myself that I knew reasonable Spanish and had seven weeks to explore them and their village, but time whisked past and I accomplished little.

And then one day I happened to wear a skirt. My usual costume had been a pair of canvas pants, but this day I had switched to a cotton skirt. The difference was riveting.

“Buenos dias, senora!” called a woman from a second-story window. “Donde esta America?” asked a boy, giggling.

Suddenly it was all right to be photographed. Even the fishermen shook my hand. Those proud Peniscolans had a clear idea of what was appropriate for a woman to wear, and it did not include pants. Today a photographer could wear a bikini on the streets of that village or anywhere else in Spain.

Conservative they may have been, but they were also forgiving. Pilar invited me to sit with the women as they wove red plastic thread into shopping bags to sell in Madrid. Laughing and chatting, they enjoyed the winter sunshine, but theirs was not always a sunshine life.

Ana showed me how she repaired her husband’s fishing nets. “I hope he will come back,” she told me with a small, rueful smile, “but the sea is not always our friend.”

The Mediterranean, I learned, has violent and fatal changes of mood. “Don’t women wear black in America?” Ana asked.

“We always have breakfast on our boat,” a fisherman told me. “That way, if we don’t come back, at least we have something in our stomachs.”

Having a child with you can be a photographic asset, I discovered, as Fraser began to play with the Gypsy children hanging about the edge of the sea. Although the wind was bitter, they wore very little, and a Gypsy mother contentedly nursed her baby while the damp breeze ruffled her rags. I began to feel guilty about Fraser’s leather coat and brought the children small toys from Castellon. Soon, even the local children forgot the camera as they played “cup and ball” and showed Fraser the sea creatures they had found. Their blazing vitality, I decided, was probably due to a large intake of Vitamin C. Along with the almond crop, oranges are a principal commodity on the Azahar.

I learned more about Peniscola under the hair dryer than anywhere else. The hairdresser is not a timesaver in Spain, and I was always amazed at the number of complete soapings and rinsings we endured. No doubt this meticulous care accounts in part for the world-famous beauty of Spanish hair and represented a remarkable feat for beautician Rosita Sanchez, who had to carry each bucket of water from the street fountain four flights below. I never thought to protest the time involved because the local gossip delighted me.

“It’s so strange,” Maria told me, “to think of not being engaged anymore. The wedding day is almost here.”

“How long have you been engaged?” I asked.

“Only a few years--eight, I think,” she said.

Because of financial pressures, this stressful pattern was common. I spoke with another young woman, begging her to tell me why she was racked with sobs. “Oh, senora ,” she wept, “it’s the pesetas . . . the pesetas!” She meant that she feared having a child who would need to be fed and clothed.

The most sanguine person I met was Rosita’s 90-year-old mother. In her tiny dining room, surrounded with crucifixes and religious paintings, she treated me to an Italian liqueur. Spaniards are among the longest-lived people in Europe, and Rosita’s mother, with her laughing eyes below the black scarf that she wore indoors and out, was a revealing example. I realized that she had never been off that rock, and I began to question my own peripatetic life style.

“You have to travel? That’s too bad. But maybe your husband will get another kind of job and you won’t have to travel. Don’t worry about it,” she instructed me. “Don’t worry about anything.”

I promised I wouldn’t and found my way down the rough cobblestones of the nearly vertical streets. Everything in Peniscola had an aura of historical significance, but it was a history that did not impress the Peniscolans.

“Oh no, senora ,” the baker informed me as he stuffed live-oak twigs into the oven tucked into the wall of his establishment. “This isn’t an old oven; it was only put there in the time of Philip II.” We spread contraband peanut butter, smuggled down to us from Andorra, on his fragrant round loaves. “Mantequilla de cacahuetes!” He shook his head. “Why would you do that? North Americans have a strange diet.”

The inhabitants of the village had been so diverting, cheerfully accepting the presence of the film company, that when the last day came, I had not yet seen the jewel of the community, the 14th-Century castle. The hike to the top is worth a few extra breaths. The sandstone blocks are golden in the afternoon light, and the caretaker is bursting with details. It was built after the Crusades by the Knights Templar on the site of an Arab castle, which was built on a Roman castle, a Phoenician castle, a Greek castle and an Iberian stronghold. And then, he paused, there was El Papa.

“Whose Papa?”

“El! El Papa!”

I finally understood that he was referring to the Pope, or rather the anti-Pope, Benedict XIII, who ruled the Catholic Church during that improbable time when it was based in France. Originally named Pedro de Luna, he was a member of the family that produced Juan de Luna, founder of Pensacola, Fla. ( Pensacola is a distortion of the name Peniscola . ) For 20 years Pedro de Luna had happily supervised Santa Marie-in-Cosmedin, the elegant and ancient church at the foot of the Roman Forum. Suddenly he was snatched to Avignon, to be the Pope.

“I don’t want to be Pope,” he kept insisting, “but I am the Pope, so I must be the Pope.”

Then the Roman faction reappeared and imprisoned Benedict in the papal palace at Avignon. “Abdicate!” the Romans demanded. “We can’t have two Popes. We must have peace.”

Instead, Benedict managed a hairbreadth escape to Spain, where he sequestered himself in the castle on the rock of Peniscola. I looked up at the small windows near the very top of the castle and imagined what it must have been like for him to spend those silent years after the hectic bustle of Rome and Avignon, still protesting that he was the Pope.

His death was the stuff of pure Greek tragedy. Surviving seven other Popes, he never gave up. With his last breath at age 90 (in 1423), he scratched the names of four new cardinals and gasped: “I am the Pope. There is no other.”

On the last afternoon, I hugged Rosita’s mother and said goodby to the Gypsies. I watched a tall-prowed fishing boat float smoothly into the harbor. For the last time I smelled the salty air, thinking that I had seldom seen a place of such color, vitality and endurance.

We packed away the last roll of film and drove out through the almond orchards of the Azahar. The last of the violet petals was floating to the ground.