Taizé - my usual room at the Ermita - is now part of a bathroom with double showers and all the necessaries of modernity. Fifty years ago bathrooms were rudimentary. We showered in the garden, hauling water in buckets from one of the underground cisterns, pouring the cold water over each other and drying ourselves in the early morning sun. Free as nature made us, we bathed naked as mankind must have done before the fall.
Named after the Community of Brothers in the village of Taizé, the room reflected the austerity of the order - whitewashed walls, a bed, a small wooden desk, a chair and a lamp. And like them, it offered spirituality and peace to whoever rested there, a sense that simplicity and an unceasing openness to truth are the keys not to happiness, which is a paltry, evanescent thing, but to leading a productive and faithful life - faithful to the best that human beings can be, which is to serve humanity and to do what we can to safeguard our fragile world.
Though the room is no more, the Ermita remains. Externally little has changed. Mediterranean pines now obscure the view to the ruined Moorish castle lower down in the valley, but the stone column topped by a cross still guards the perspective, and the rough cobblestones of the forecourt and the heavy wooden doors of the entrance are as they were, unmoved by the passing of time.
Within, new terracotta floor tiles have mostly replaced the old ones that 250 years of use and the imperceptible but implacable movement of the earth had rendered worn and uneven. Fresh water comes directly from the village below, so that the cisterns that stored rainwater from the roofs are no longer in use. And the outbuildings that lay across the patio fell down years ago leaving only a façade. S and I slept in one of its rooms (Taizé being too small for a couple) and one night watched amused and startled as a rainstorm surged through one door, picked up our sandals, and bore them through the lower door into the orchard.
What remains is what matters: echoing corridors, chambers of rustic simplicity, and a chapel at the heart whose stately virgin enthroned in an intricately-carved retablo, gazes into an atrium lined with eighteenth century tile paintings depicting the victory of the Christians over the Moors; while high above, in the cupola, four stained-glass windows by Alfred Manessier shine with brilliant particoloured light as if from heaven. No one who comes to the Ermita can be in any doubt it is a holy place; but it is also one where for a time artists and writers convened, where conversation round the dinner table in the kitchen sparkled with wit and with the laughter of young men preparing for the priesthood.
Everyone’s story of the Ermita is different. Mine begins in a farmhouse outside Paris, country home of the Manessier family. S and I, teenagers in the flush of first love, were weekend guests, thrilled to be in the home of an artist whose works then occupied an entire salon of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Seated next to me at dinner was a man in his sixties dressed in the black tunic of a village priest. Portly in the style of a Catholic cleric, he spoke rapid French with careless disregard of grammar and with an accent unmistakably Iberian, but neither defect interfered with his ability to induce laughter in his listeners, or with the sense he gave of possessing an inquiring, educated and impressive mind. His eyes were kindly, yet piercing and restless as if in constant search for a truth that lay beyond mere vision - the spirit or essence of whatever met his gaze.
He was introduced to me as “Don Alfonso”, but he told me that his full name was Alfonso Roig Izquierdo, “Don” being a term of respect accorded by general consent in Spain to those considered to deserve it. Roig Izquierdo, his twin surnames, he told me delightedly, meant “Red Left” which coincided with his political views, though he would be grateful if I would avoid mentioning this to the Pope.
Conversation at table centred on the relationship between art and religion in the modern world - a subject on which Don Alfonso whom I later learned was a renowned teacher and art historian clearly knew a great deal, as did Alfred Manessier who, by that stage in his career, would have assented to being described as an artist of deeply spiritual inspiration. Conscious of my youth and lack of knowledge, I was content to listen, aware that I could add nothing of interest to the discussion. Towards the end of the meal, however, Don Alfonso addressed me directly. “Who,” he asked, “Is your father?”
I hesitated before answering truthfully that I didn’t know because I had never met him.
“In that case,” he said, looking directly into my eyes, “I am your father.”
Something in Don Alfonso’s regard, the gentle determination of his voice as he spoke those words, told me that he meant what he said. And so it proved.
“You are to visit me in Valencia whenever you can,” he told me as we said our farewells at the end of that magical weekend. “And from now on you can call me Alfonset, the diminutive of Alfons in Valenciano - Valencia’s version of Catalán.
In term time, Alfons, lived in the city of Valencia where he taught at the Metropolitan Seminary of Montcada, and the San Carlos School of Fine Arts. During vacations, and especially in the heat of summer, he moved to the Ermita which stands on a hillside overlooking the village of Llutxent and the Albaida Valley. Two hundred metres further up the hill is an abandoned monastery now largely restored, from the grounds of which the ruined Moorish castle remains visible in the middle distance. Terraces of olive, almond, citrus trees and vines descend from the hillsides into the valley - the Moorish system of cultivation designed to retain soil and moisture and never bettered in a region where rain may fall no more than a handful of times a year.
So for the remainder of my schooldays, and throughout my years at university, I spent part of my vacations in my father’s house, occasionally with S, but more often unaccompanied.
Men of the cloth in Spain were, by definition, bachelors, and Alfons, who gave little thought to domesticity, would have been hard put to look after himself were it not for the women of a certain age who in Valencia as in the Ermita, kept house for him, laundered his clothes, and cooked for him and his guests.
Local clerics, writers and teachers were frequent visitors but many others, especially artists and religious thinkers, came from further afield. From time to time, Manessier and his wife would drive down from Paris to spend a few weeks at the Ermita; and each day, after breakfast, Alfred would go off into the countryside with his sketchbook returning in the evening with pages of drawings. These, at length, he turned into an exhibition of paintings at the Galerie de France in Paris entitled “Terre d’Espagne”.
A small group of students at the seminary, attracted as much to Alfons’ magnetic personality as to his intellectual brilliance, formed part of a circle of acolytes. They grew to love him as did everyone who knew him well - laughing at his foibles which were many - while seeking his advice and imbibing his wisdom. Most, perhaps all, of these young man suffered from knowing that as trainees for the priesthood, they were preparing for a life of abstinence and would never experience the heaven of a woman’s body - or of a man’s if their desires led in such a direction. In this Alfons could not help them. Scion of an impoverished rural family, he had entered the Church in his youth as a means of obtaining an education. And though I believe he was religious in his own way, he had little time for canonical strictures, and seemed to approve the idea that youngsters such as S and I could spend the night in each other’s arms. So far as I am aware, none of that group are now men of the cloth; for which, I believe, Alfons would have happily taken the blame. One of them now lives at the Ermita with his wife.
Not that Alfons felt free to voice his ideas within earshot of the local public. The Ermita occupies a role in the religious life of tthe village and the valley. Whoever lives there is by definition guardian of Mary, Mother of the Lord of Consolation, Virgin of the Ermita, a duty that must remain forever untainted by scandal or the least suggestion that unCatholic ideas might ever find expression within its walls. Because those whom Alfons invited to the Ermita were more often than not free thinkers, he kept apart from village life, though he threw open the doors of the Ermita on September 8 for the festival of the Virgin when people would come from far and wide to pray and to partake of a feast cooked in the Ermita’s kitchens by local volunteers. On such a day, the Ermita echoed with the sound of prayer in the chapel, and with the excited voices of people preparing and consuming a superabundance of food and wine.
Otherwise and more familiarly, the sounds of the Ermita were of birdsong and the buzzing of wasps and crickets, footsteps in the corridor, the quiet hum of a discussion in a courtyard; and daily, while she lived, the piercing voice of Señora Felicidad, wife of the previous owner, singing the poetic hymn to the Virgin of the Ermita in the chapel:
Puix bé, gràcia i salvació
posà Déu en vostra mà
Sigau per a tot cristià
Mare de Consolació
On most days we dined simply and sparely: bread, watermelon, eggs and wine from the village, figs from the tree outside the kitchen picked in the cool of dawn, prickly pears from the cactus in the orchard, rice grown and dried further down the valley; local produce hewn from the sun-baked terrain by a combination of toil and millennia of accumulated knowledge of how to turn dry, rocky earth into fertile soil.
Occasionally, to celebrate the arrival of a guest or as a farewell gesture to a departing one, Alfons would order a paella. This would be no ordinary, common-or-garden dish of the kind available in countless restaurants, but a paella de la montaña of rabbit, chicken, pork and white beans, cooked by Tío Salvador over an open fire in the downstairs kitchen. Thin, wiry, with a white stubble on his chin and a mordant wit, Tío Salvador was secretive about his methods. He suffered me to watch him on a couple of occasions, and even allowed me to write down his sequence of “moves”; but he refused to reveal his special ingredient, a mixture of ground herbs that imparted a rich yet subtle flavour to the rice, and whose recipe I believe he took to the grave.
Conversation during meals and in their wake was the seminal communal activity at the Ermita; but activities of the spirit in the stillness of our rooms occupied most of our daylight hours - though for younger members of the community, of whom I was one, the contemplative life sometimes had to give way to duties of a more mundane kind - mainly the harvesting of nature’s gifts from the orchard, especially of almonds, an unpleasant labour from which we emerged caked in a sweaty congealment of dust, dry leaves and tiny insects.
The Ermita might appear isolated and even remote to the casual visitor, but for those privileged to have known the silent refuge of its walls, and shared meals round the kitchen table - Alfons presiding - with artists, writers, priests and peasants, it can’t fail to occupy a special place in their thoughts; though in the end, it is not so much the building we are likely to remember, as the people it evokes, and the spirit it awakens in us.
I type these words in the room Alfons himself once slept in, on the crude 18th century desk where he wrote his last essays, and beneath a photograph of Miguel Hernandez, the great Valencian poet who died in jail at the hands of General Francisco Franco.
Once, as a seventeen or eighteen- year old, I arrived at the Ermita unannounced with my rucksack. It was the evening of 7th of September and the Ermita was full of people organising the annual feast for the following day. Alfons had gone to a meeting and not yet returned, and in his absence I met a hostile reception: the Ermita was full, Alfons was not expecting me, he would be furious at this sudden imposition on his generosity, I would do well to take a bus to Xátiva - the nearest town - where I would find accommodation, and so on. I was on the point of following this severe advice when Alfons showed up. On seeing me, he at once enfolded me in his arms, after which he took a book from his room and before all those present read to me one of Miguel Hernandez’s most celebrated poems - the Nanas de la Cebolla - composed for the poet’s young son:
….ríete mucho.
Es tu risa en los ojos
la luz del mundo……
….Tu risa me hace libre,
me pone alas…..
Es tu risa la espada
más victoriosa……
….Vencedor de las flores
y las alondras.
Rival del sol.
Porvenir de mis huesos
y de mi amor.
