Settling In, part 18

Our next foray was to El Escorial, one of Spain’s most famous structures. Constructed in the 1500s for King Felipe II of Spain, it was a massive monastery that housed the Royal Pantheon, the resting place of most of Spain’s monarchs. Built on a massive scale, the monastery was designed in the rectangular pattern of the grill on which San Lorenzo was martyred.

I lived just forty minutes from El Escorial, but I hadn’t been there yet. Mike had pointed it out to me in April when we’d taken the train to Segovia. Huge as it was, it was easy to see even from a great distance. I collected my maps and my parents and headed northwest.

There were stunning views of the tremendous building as we drove over the foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains. We wound our way up to the adjacent streets, where we were amazed by the scale of the austere, squared-off structure as we rolled slowly by it. There were boys playing soccer on the broad pavement outside and cars parked up and down all the streets. I let Mom and Dad off at the entrance, parked, and returned to meet them.

It was cold inside the stone building. I bought our tickets, and we passed through an airport-style security setup before entering. The guidebook had said there were tours available in English. The guard I checked with said there were none that day, but that the route for visitors was clearly marked.

“That’s okay,” Dad said. “It will be more fun to go by ourselves.”

The visit started in the basement, where some rooms had been set up as an art gallery. A large El Greco painting was well displayed in the first room.

Next came a section the guidebook said was fairly new—a museum of the building of El Escorial. The curators had assembled some of the giant tools used to cut and place the massive stone blocks that made up the walls. There were original plans and models and some visuals detailing the building process over the twenty-one years it took. My dad, a handy person and a dedicated do-it-yourselfer, was impressed by the scale of the undertaking.

I should have been more alert by this time, but I had failed again to notice that those who walk down are eventually going to have to walk back up. We were confronted by a steep flight of stone stairs that led to the next part of the tour. Dad looked at it and blanched. “Let me ask if there’s another way,” I said weakly.

I walked back to the previous room and found a guard. “Mi padre no camina muy bien,” I said—my father doesn’t walk too well. “Hay otra vía para llegar a la planta baja?” Is there another way to get to the main floor?

“No,” she said.

“Es posible ir directamente al Patio de los Reyes?” Can you go directly to the Pantheon?

“No,” she said again, sympathetically. There was nothing like handicapped access yet in Spain.

I went back to where Mom and Dad were waiting and looked again at that big, dark staircase. “There’s no other way,” I said, sighing.

“That’s okay,” Dad said, sounding determined. “I’ll go up. I’ll just take my time.”

He did fine, stopping only once to rest for a minute. He looked pretty pleased when he reached the top. My mother’s face mirrored my own relief.

Up there we walked through a long gallery of antique maps. Tall windows looked out onto the gardens, formal and rectangular like the building itself. There was a beautiful wood floor with narrow planks set in a herringbone pattern. The next several rooms were filled with period furnishings, set up to recreate the simple bedrooms of Felipe’s time. It was no accident that he had chosen to live in a monastery. He had an austere nature and cherished this retreat from the pomp of the royal court.

From there we followed signs to the stairs leading down to the Pantheon. At last we were all tuned into the stairway problem, so we conferred before going down. “What do you think?” I asked Dad.

“It’s fine, I can do it,” he said good-naturedly. So we went down and down, lower than we’d been before. It was cold and silent, even with a few other visitors there, as we entered the Pantheon.

The octagonal room was all marble and gold, well lit by a chandelier. Niches were built into several of the walls, filled with huge bronze sarcophagi holding the remains of kings. There were queens, too, according to the guidebook, but only those who had borne sons that later became kings. Three sarcophagi remained vacant for future use.

After a few minutes we moved along to the Pantheon of the Infantes, several rooms of marble tombs for the princes and princesses, and for those queens who did not bear kings. These rooms were dimmer, and the heavily carved marble seemed to me a little frothy for funereal monuments.

There was just a short set of stairs at the end, and Dad took those without trouble. We walked through some elaborately decorated assembly rooms and then out into the courtyard. We made a brief visit to the basilica, which had a gigantic altarpiece, and decided not to try to visit the library, which was up yet more stairs.

We found a place for lunch and studied the guidebook a bit. “It says that Franco’s tomb is near here. Can we go there?” Dad asked.

I winced. I’d seen the tomb from the car other times when I’d driven north. The huge white cross was easy to spot from the highway. I’d only lived in Spain a little while, but I’d caught a tremendous distaste for anything related to Franco. Ana had said only a little about living under his regime—“My mother always told us to be very careful about what we said outside the house”—but I related well to the present socialist atmosphere of the country and automatically hated the dictator. “I don’t know,” I said. “It says it looks like the Wizard of Oz’s palace.”

“Come on, let’s go see it,” Dad said. Why not, I figured.

Not everybody in Spain hated Franco. In the Serrano neighborhood, where my art history class was, there were always tables set up on the sidewalk where Franquista memorabilia was for sale. Little old men worked behind the tables. I’d been told that there were many people in that neighborhood who had fared well under Franco and had lost their privileges when he died.

We drove a short way north to the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), where Franco and his fellow Falangist, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, were buried. The dictator had forced Republican prisoners to build the monument after the civil war, and many had died during the process. It was ostensibly a memorial to all the civil war dead, but surely Republicans got little comfort from it.

A winding road led up the mountain to the monument. We parked and saw the large white building with the gigantic cross behind it. We entered the huge, dimly lit hall—it really did remind me of the dark, threatening interior of the palace in Oz—and walked to the bronze disks on the floor that marked the tombs. The place was cold and damp, with occasional leaks in the ceiling. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

“Let’s drive around and see the cross,” Mom said when we got back outside. I was fed up with the place by now, but my mother wanted to see what there was to see, so we drove up to the base of the cross, which I found truly repellent.

“Sure is big,” she said, and we agreed, and then we went home.