Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 11

Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a st.u.r.dy town of countrymen, in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne. There, at a still different point of the compa.s.s, a ruined castle on a hilltop ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a country hunch-backed with hills. It was siesta-time when I arrived, the sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and misshapen hovels that made up the place. There were no inhabitants abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards. They leered at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive laughter.

"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."

I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers through rocky _barrancas_ and across sandy patches, gained as the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.

A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.

I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and the swelter of humanity.

As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side.

He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking.

At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights across the Tajo, cried out:

"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children are starving!

"Senor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."

He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned before I continued my way.

"Senor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to cover it?"

It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the Alkantara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard pa.s.sageways between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.

Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour or more before I was directed to a casa de huespedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others, the room to which I was a.s.signed, presenting toward the street a blank, windowless wall.

It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker. As he lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his workbench for something over three hours. His home and shop consisted of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a daughter of six who devised more amus.e.m.e.nt with a few sc.r.a.ps of leather than many another might with all the toys of Nurnberg. The shoemaker was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit waiting for. He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand. When he had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal to forty cents.

In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well ill.u.s.trated the two types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the next service. He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of man will who drifts through life without training himself to do anything. The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.

While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.

Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous cathedral surnamed "la Rica." "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry. We of the United States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up within the churches of Spain by the superst.i.tions of her people and the rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here.

"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women." If one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the stone flagging. The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history.

But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous stained-gla.s.s windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."

As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is not unlikely to be a.s.sailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic.

There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated a.s.sertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius solely for pure art's sake. Would they then have prost.i.tuted their years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superst.i.tions and servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain Syrian surroundings. Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her a.s.sumed motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.

Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel, centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary. Yielding to which characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself, many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s lopped off and lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping knives with fiendish merriment. These horrors, too, are set up in public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men on occasion. It is strange, indeed, if childhood's p.r.o.neness to imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar martyrdoms. How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far less repulsive.

There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is successful in running them down in her jungle of streets. Each such chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover, that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower of arrows. The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back into the relief of one of the radiating calles.

As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling p.r.o.ne on the dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to time over his cigarette:

"Una limosnita, senores; que Dios se lo pagara."

There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:

"A little alms, senores, and may G.o.d repay you."

Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere could not remake into the semblance of a man.

Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively. High or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look, not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those things that stand next above. Nowhere can one escape the cloth. Every half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes, pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout pa.s.ser-by. Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city swarms. Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the termination of a musical comedy.

I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed back through fully a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day straggles where she does in the procession of nations.

I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces. It was again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that, crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a vega fertile with wheat. Before long it swung sharply to the right and, laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.

The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging. I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither man nor habitation appeared. Toward eleven I gave up the search and, stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of s.p.a.ce unenc.u.mbered with rocks and lay down until the dawn.

The sun rose murky. In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera pa.s.sed only two squalid wineshops. Then rounding in mid-morning a slight eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon. It was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on across the ma.s.sive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the universe.

CHAPTER X

SHADOWS OF THE PHILIPS

A day or two later I was installed for a fortnight in a casa de huespedes in the calle San Bernardo. In such places as one plans to remain for any length of time there are few cheaper arrangements for ample fare in all Europe than these Spanish "houses of guests." My room, which was temporarily on the second-floor front, but solemnly pledged to be soon changed to the third-floor back, was all that an unpampered wanderer could have required. Breakfast was light; a cup of chocolate and a roll--no self-respecting traveler ventures to sample Spanish coffee more than once. But one soon grows accustomed and indeed to prefer the European abstemiousness at the first meal. In compensation the _almuerzo_ and _comida_, at twelve and seven, were more than abundant. A thick soup, not unseldom redolent of garlic, was followed by a salad, and that by a _puchero_, which is to say an entire meal on one platter,--in the center a square of boiled beef flanked like St. Peter's amid the hills of Rome by seven varieties of vegetables, the _garbanzos_--bright yellow chickpeas of the size of marbles--with the usual disproportion granted that robust comestible in Spain, overtowering not only every other eminence but carpeting the intervening valleys. That despatched, or seriously disfigured, there came a second offering from the animal world,--a _cocido_ or an _olla podrida_, after which the repast descended gradually by fruit, cheese, and cigarettes to its termination. Through it all a common wine flowed generously.

Even on Friday this st.u.r.dy good cheer knew no abatement. Centuries ago, in the raging days of the Moor, the faithful of Spain were granted for their Catholic zeal and bodily behoof this dispensation, that they might nourish their lean frames on whatever it should please Santiago, their patron, to bring within bowshot of their home-made crosspieces. The Moor has long since removed his dusky shadow from the land, but the dispensation remains. Indeed, there is left scarcely a custom the in.o.bservance of which betrays the non-Catholic; or if one there be at all general it is this: when he yawns--which he is not unwont to do even at table--the devout Spaniard makes over his mouth the sign of the cross, to keep the devil from gaining a foothold therein--an exorcism that is not always successful.

There is yet another custom, quite the opposite of religious in result at least, which the guest at a casa de huespedes must school himself to endure. It grows out of the Spaniard's infernal politeness. Figure to yourself that you have just returned from a morning of tramping through sweltering Madrid on the ephemeral breakfast already noted, and sit down at table just as a steaming puchero is served. With a melodious and self-sacrificing "Serve yourself, senor," the addle-pated Spaniard across the way pushes the dish to his neighbor; to which the neighbor responds by pushing it back again with a "No! Serve _yourself_, senor,"

followed in quick succession by "No! No! Serve yourself, senor;" "No!

No! No! senor! Serve yourself!" "No! No! No! No! serve--" and so on to the end of time, or until a wrathy Anglo-Saxon, rising in his place, picks up the source of dispute and establishes order.

Our household in the calle San Bernardo consisted of a lawyer, a "man of affairs"--using the latter word in its widest signification--of two young Germans, "Don Hermann" and "Don Ricardo," for some time employed in the city, and of the family itself. Of this the husband, a slouching, toothless fellow of fifty, and the grandmother were mere supernumeraries. The speaking parts were taken by the wife and daughter, the former an enormous, unpolished woman with a well-developed mustache and the over-developed voice of a stevedore. Indeed, a stentorian, grating voice and a habit of speaking always at the tiptop of it is one of the chief afflictions of the Spanish women of the ma.s.ses--and of their hearers. Is it by chance due to the custom of studying and reciting always aloud and in chorus during their few years of schooling? Quien sabe? There was presented during my stay in Madrid the play, or more properly playlet--zarzuela--"Levantar Mueros--Raising the Dead"; but I dared not go lest it turn out to be a dramatized sewing circle.

But it remains to introduce the star member of the cast, the center of that San Bernardo universe around which revolved mother, supernumeraries, and guests like planets in their orbits--the daughter.

I fully expect to wander many a weary mile before I again behold so beautiful a maid--or one that I should take more pleasure in being a long way distant from. She was sixteen--which in Spain is past childhood--a glorious, faultless blonde in a land where blondes are at high premium, her lips forming what the Spaniard calls a "nido de besos"--a nest of osculatory delights--and-- But why drive the impossible task further? Such radiant perfections in human form must be seen at least to be appreciated. It is sufficient, perhaps, to mention that her likeness was on sale in every novelty shop in Madrid and found more purchasers than that of Machaquito, King of the Toreros. In short, a supreme beauty--had she been captured early and suitably polished instead of remaining at home with mother until she had acquired mother's voice, and mother's roughshod manners, and a slothful habit of life that was destined, alas, in all probability to end by reproducing her mother's bulk and mustache.

There are two things worth seeing in howling, meeowling, brawling, blistering Madrid--her outdoor life and the Prado museum. It was the latter that I viewed by day, for when relentless August has settled down the capital is not merely hot, it is plutonic, cowering under a dead, sultry heat without the relief of a breath of air, a heat that weighs down like a leaden blanket and makes Seville seem by comparison a northern seaport. A saying as old as its foolish founder's grave credits the city with three month's invierno and nine months' infierno, a characterization that loses much in symmetry, though gaining, perhaps, in force by translation. It was my fortune to have happened into the place when the lowest circle of the latter region was having its inning.

Wherefore I went often to the Prado; and came as often away more physically fatigued than after a four-hour watch in a stokehole, and with my head in a bewildered whirl that even a long stroll in the Buen Retiro only partly reduced. It is like the irrationality of man to bring together these thousands of masterpieces, so close together that not one of them can produce a tenth of its proper effect. Of the pictures in the Prado the seeing alone would require two years of continuous work, the attempt to describe, a lifetime; pictures running through all the gamut of art from the fading of the pre-Raphaelites down to Goya, that plain-spoken Goya who seems to have stood afar off and thrown paint by the bucketful at his canvas--with marvelous results. A pandemonium of paintings, not one of which but off by itself would bring daily inspiration to all beholders. It is the tendency of all things to crowd together--wealth, art, learning, work, leisure, poverty; man's duty to combat this tendency by working for a sane and equitable distribution. The Prado collection would be a treasure, indeed, had those who exerted themselves to bring these paintings together given half that exertion to spreading them out. Then it might be that in a land as rich with art as Spain one would not find daubs and beer-calendars hung in the place of honor in the homes and fondas of "the ma.s.ses." When the good day comes that the acc.u.mulation of the Prado is dispersed I shall bespeak as my share the "Borrachos" or "Vulcan's Forge" of st.u.r.dy Velazquez.

[Ill.u.s.tration: La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard']

center of the universe]

Those who are curious may also visit, at seasons and with permissions, the unpleasing royal palace, about the outer walls of which sleep scores of fly-proof vagrants in the shade of half leafless trees, and sundry other government buildings, all of which--except the vagrants--are duly and fully described in the guide-books. There is, too, the daily _juego de Pelota_, imported from the Basque provinces, a sort of enlarged handball played in a slate-walled chamber in which the screaming of gamblers for bids and their insults to the players know no cessation.

Wandering aimlessly through her streets, as the sojourner in Madrid must who cannot daily sleep the day through, I found myself often pausing to admire the splendid displays in the windows of her tailors. Spain has no wool schedule, and as I gazed a deep regret came over me that I could not always be a dweller in Madrid when my garb grows threadbare or a tailor bill falls due. But there was sure remedy for such melancholy.

When it grew acute I had but to turn and note the fitting of these splendid fabrics on the pa.s.ser-by, and the sadness changed to a wonder that the madrileno tailor has the audacity to charge at all for his services.

[Ill.u.s.tration: An Alameda by day--chairs stacked until busy night-time]