Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 8

"Es medio loco, eso," he said, stepping forward with a shifty smile and nudging me with an elbow, "a half-witted fellow who will trouble you no more. With your permission I will show you all that is to be seen, and it shall cost you nothing."

I accepted the offer, not because any guidance was necessary, or even desirable, but glad of every opportunity for closer acquaintance and observation of that most disparaged cla.s.s of Spanish society. To one to whom not only all creeds, but each of the world's half-dozen real religions sum up to much the same total, the general condemnation of the priesthood of Spain had hitherto seemed but another example of prejudice.

This member of the order was a man of forty, stoop-shouldered, his tonsure merging into a frontal baldness, with the face and manners of a man-about-town and a frequenter of the Tenderloin. For three sentences, perhaps, he conversed as any pleasant man of the world might with a stranger. Then we paused to view several paintings of the Virgin. They were images deeply revered by all true Catholics, yet this smirking fellow began suddenly to comment on them in a string of lascivious indecencies which even I, who have no reverence for them whatever, could not hear without being moved to protest. As we advanced, his sallies and anecdotes grew more and more obscene, his conduct more insinuating. When he fell to hinting that I should, in return for his kindness, bring forward a few tales of a similar vintage, I professed myself sated with sight-seeing and, leading the way out into the sunshine to the stone terrace overlooking the Guadalquivir, with scanty excuse left him.

A walk across the stately old bridge and around the century-crumbled city walls lightened my spirits. In the afternoon, cutting short my siesta, I ventured back to the cathedral. The hour was well chosen; not another human being was within its walls. Unattended I entered the famous third _mihrab_ and satisfied myself that its marble floor is really worn trough-like by the knees of pious Mohammedans, centuries since departed for whatever was in store for them in the realm of _houris_. Free from the prattle of "guides," I climbed an improvised ladder into the second mihrab, which was undergoing repairs; and for a full two hours wandered undisturbed in the pillared solitude.

Night had fallen when I set out on foot from Cordoba. The heat was too intense to have permitted sleep until towards morning, had I remained.

Over the city behind, in the last glow of evening, there seemed to rise again the melancholy chant, ages dead, of the muezzin:

"Allah hu Allah! There is no G.o.d but G.o.d. Come to prayer. Allah ill Allah!"

The moon was absent, but the stars that looked down upon the steaming earth seemed more brilliant and myriad than ever before. In spite of them the darkness was profound. The Spaniard, however, is still too near akin to the Arab to be wandering in the open country at such an hour, and I heard not a sound but my own footsteps and the restless repose of the summer night until, in the first hour of the morning, I arrived at the solitary station of Arcolea.

There I stretched out on a narrow platform bench, but was still gazing sleeplessly at the sky above when a "mixto" rolled in at two-thirty.

The populous third-cla.s.s compartment was open at the sides, and the movement of the train, together with the chill that comes at this hour even in Spain, made the temperature distinctly cold. That of itself would have been endurable. But close beside me, oppressively close in fact, sat a woman to the leeward of forty, of the general form of a sack of wheat, in her hand the omnipresent fan. Regularly at two-minute intervals she flung this open from force of habit, sent over me several icy draughts of air, and noting the time and place, heaved a vast "ay de mi!" and dropped the fan shut again--for exactly another two minutes.

I slept not at all and, descending as the night was fading at the station of Espeluy, shouldered my bundle and set off toward the sunrise.

Three kilometers more and there lay before me the great open highway to Madrid, three hundred and seven kilometers away. I struck into it boldly, for all my drowsiness, reflecting that even the immortal Murillo had tramped it before me.

The landscape lay desolate on either hand, almost haggard in the glaring sunshine, offering a loneliness of view that seemed all at once to stamp with reality those myriad tales of the land pirates of Spain. Indeed, the race has not yet wholly died out. Since my arrival the peninsula had been ringing with the exploits of one Pernales, a bandit of the old caliber, who had thus far outgeneraled even that world-famous exterminator of brigands, the modern guardia civil. His haunt was this very territory to the left of me, and not a week had pa.s.sed since a band of travelers on this national carretera had seen fit to contribute to his transient larder.

But his was an isolated case, a course that was sure to be soon run.

The necessity of making one's will before undertaking a journey through Spain is no longer imperative. In fact, few countries offer more safety to the traveler; certainly not our own. For the Spaniard is individually one of the most honest men on the globe, notwithstanding that collectively, officially he is among the most corrupt. The old Oriental despotism has left its mark, deep to this day; and the Spaniard of the ma.s.ses asks himself--and not without reason--why he should show loyalty to a government that is little more than two parties secretly bound by agreement alternately to share the spoils. Hence the law-breaker is as of yore not merely respected but encouraged. Pernales in his short career had become already a hero and a pride of the Spanish people, a champion warring single-handed against the common enemy.

Without pose or pretense I may say that I would gladly have given two or three ten-dollar checks and as many weeks of a busy life to have fallen into the clutches of this modern d.i.c.k Turpin. His retreat would certainly have been a place of interest. But fortune did not favor, and I pa.s.sed unmolested the long, hot stretch to the stony hilltop village of Bailen, a name almost better known to Frenchmen than to Spaniards.

There, however, I was waylaid. I had finished a lunch of all that the single grocery-store offered, which chanced to be stone-hard cheese and water, and was setting out again, when two civil guards gruffly demanded my papers. This was the only pair I was destined to meet whose manners were not in the highest degree polished. The screaming heat was, perhaps, to blame. I turned aside into the shade of a building and handed them my pa.s.sport, which they examined with the circ.u.mspection of a French gendarme. In general, however, it spoke well of my choice of garb that I was rarely halted by the guardia as a possible vagrant nor yet by the officers of the octroi as a possessor of dutiable articles.

It would seem the part of wisdom in tramping in southern countries to walk each day until toward noon and, withdrawing until the fury of the sun is abated, march on well into the night. But the plan is seldom feasible. In all this southern Spain especially there is scarcely a patch of gra.s.s large enough whereon to lay one's head, to say nothing of the body; and shade is rare indeed. On this day, after a sleepless night, a siesta seemed imperative. In mid-afternoon I came upon a culvert under the highway and lay down on the scanty, dust-dry leaves at its mouth, shaded to just below the arm-pits. But sleep had I none; for about me swarmed flies like vultures over a field of battle, and after fighting them for an hour that seemed a week, I acknowledged defeat and trudged drowsily on.

Soon began a few habitations and a country growing much wheat. In nothing more than in her methods of husbandry is Spain behind--or as the Spaniard himself would put it--different from the rest of the world.

Her peasantry has not reached even the flail stage of development, not to mention the threshing machine. The grain is cut with sickles. As it arrives from the field it is spread head-down round and round a saucer-shaped plot of ground. Into this is introduced a team of mules. .h.i.tched to a sled, which amble hour by hour around the enclosure, sometimes for days, the boy driver squatting on the cross-piece singing a never-ceasing Oriental drone of a few tones. From each such threshing-floor the chaff, sweeping in great clouds across the carretera, covered me from head to foot as I pa.s.sed.

It was some distance beyond the town of Guarraman and at nightfall that I entered a village of a few houses like dug-out rocks tossed helter-skelter on either side of the way. The dejected little shop furnished me bread, wine, and dried fish and the information that another of the hovels pa.s.sed for a posada. This was a single stone room, half floored with cobbles. The back, unfloored section housed several munching a.s.ses. The human portion was occupied by a stray arriero, the shuffling, crabbed old woman who kept the place, and by a hearty, frank-faced blind man in the early thirties, attended by a frolicsome boy of ten. It was furnished with exactly four cooking utensils, a tumbled bundle of burlap blankets in one corner, a smouldering cl.u.s.ter of f.a.gots in another, and one stool besides that on which the blind man was seated.

This I took, reflecting that he who will see Spain must not expect luxury. The real Spaniard lives roughly and shows himself only to those who are willing to rough it with him. As I sat down, the blind man addressed me:

"Hot days these on the road, senor."

"Verdad es," I answered.

"You are a foreigner from the north," he remarked casually, as if to himself.

"Yes; but how do you know that?"

"Oh, a simple matter," he replied. "That you are a foreigner, by your speech. That you are from the north, because you only half p.r.o.nounce the letter R. You said 'burro' in speaking of our four-legged companion there, whereas the word is 'bur-r-r-ro.' You have walked many leagues."

"What tells you that?"

"Carajo! Nothing simpler. Your step is tired, you sit down heavily, you brush your trousers and a thick dust arises."

Blindness, I had hitherto fancied, was an advantage only during certain histrionic moments at the opera, but here was a man who evidently made it a positive blessing.

"Your are about twenty-five," he continued.

"Twenty-six. You will be good enough, perhaps, to tell me how you guessed that."

"What could be easier? The tone of your voice; the pace at which your words fall. It is strange that you, a foreigner, should be such an amateur of bulls."

"Caramba!" I gasped. "You certainly do not learn that from the tone of my voice!"

"Ah! We cannot tell all our secrets," he chuckled; "we who must make a living by them."

Then in the night that had settled down he fell to telling stories, not intentionally, one would have said, but unconsciously, fascinating tales as those of the "Arabian Nights," full of the color and the extravagance of the East, the twinkle of his cigarette gleaming forth from time to time and outlining the boy seated wide-eyed on the floor at his feet with his head against his master's knee. He was as truly a minstrel as any troubadour that wandered in the days of chivalry, a born story-teller all but unconscious of his gift. When after a long time he left off, we drifted again into conversation. He was wholly illiterate and in compensation more filled with true knowledge and wisdom than a houseful of schoolmen. His calling for five and twenty years had been just this of roaming about Spain telling his colorful stories.

"Were you born so?" I asked late in the evening.

"Even so, senor."

"A sad misfortune."

"You know best, senor," he answered, with a hearty laugh. "I have no notion how useful this feeling you call sight may be, but with those I have I live with what enjoyment is reasonable and find no need for another."

The crippled old crone, who seemed neither to have known any other life than this nor ever to have been attired in anything than the piece-meal rags that now covered her, dragged the heap of burlap from the corner and spread it in three sections on the stone floor. On one she threw herself down with many sighs and the creaking of rusty joints, the second fell to my lot, and the blind man and his boy curled up on the third. The arriero carried his own blanket and had long since fallen to snoring with his head on the saddle of his a.s.s and his _alforjas_ close beside him.

There is one Spanish sentence that expresses the most with the least breath, perhaps, of any single word on earth. It is "Madrugais?" and means nothing less than "Is it your intention to get up early to-morrow morning?" In these wayside fondas it calls always for an affirmative answer, for the bedroom is certain to be turned into the living room and public hall and stable exit at the first glimmer of dawn.

I was on the road again by four-thirty. Three hours of plodding across a rising country brought me to La Carolina, a town as pleasing in comparison with its neighbors as its name. Its customs, however, were truly Spanish, even though many of the ancestors of its light-haired populace were Swiss, and my untimely quest for breakfast did nothing more than arouse vast astonishment in its half-dozen cafes, wrecked and riotous places in charge of disheveled, heavy-eyed "skittles." In the open market I found fresh figs even cheaper than in Seville and, asking no better fare, turned back toward the highway.

I had pa.s.sed through half the town when suddenly I heard in a side street a familiar voice, singing to the accompaniment of a guitar. I turned thither and found the blind singer I had first encountered in Jaen, just on the point of drawing out his bundle of handbills. While his wife canva.s.sed the group of early risers, I accosted him with the information that I had bought one of his sheets in Jaen a month before.

"Ah! You too tramp la carretera?" he replied, turning upon me a glance so sharp that for the moment I forgot he could not see.

"Si, senor. Do you not also sell the music of your songs?"

"How can music be put on paper?" he laughed. "It comes as you sing. Are you going far?"

"To Madrid."

"Vaya!" he cried, once more posing his guitar. "Well, there is much to be enjoyed on the road--when the sun is not too high. Vaya V. con Dios, young man."

Beyond Las Navas de Tolosa the face of the landscape changed, the carretera mounting ever higher through a soilless stretch of angular hills of dull-gray, slate-colored rock. Above Santa Elena these broke up into deep gorges and mountain foothills, an utterly unpeopled country as silent as the grave. I halted to gaze across it, and all at once, reflecting on the stillness as of desolation that hangs over all rural Spain, there came upon me the recollection that in all the land I had not once heard the note of a wild bird.

In the utter quiet I reached a deep slit in the flanking mountain, and even the stream, that descended along its bottom was as noiseless as some phantom river. It offered all the facilities for a bath, however, and moreover under an overhanging ma.s.s of rock that warded off the sun had watered to un-Spanish greenness a patch of gra.s.s of a few feet each way. There I spent half the afternoon in slumber. The highway shortly after plunged headlong down into the very depths of the earth, squirmed for a time in the abyss, then clambered painfully upward between precipitous walls of gloomy slate to a new level. When suddenly, unexpectedly, almost physically there rose before my eyes the picture of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, ambling past, close followed by thickset, hale-cheeked Sancho on his a.s.s. For I had traversed the pa.s.s of Despenaperros; languid Andalusia lay behind me, and ahead as far as the eye could reach spread the yet twice more barren and rocky tableland of La Mancha.