Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 9

CHAPTER VII

SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS

In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color.

Within the building were scattered a score of mules, borricos and machos. Several tough-clothed muleteers, with what had been bright handkerchiefs wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard or sat eating with their great razor-edged navajas their lean suppers of brown bread and a knuckle of ham. Even the ma.s.sive wooden pump in the yard among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was there to complete the picture. Indeed, this was none other than the Venta de Cardenas, reputed the very same in which Don Greaves pa.s.sed his vigilant night, where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master Nicholas, the barber, bearded himself with a cow's tail.

The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in the arrieros a suggestion of wonder and even an occasional question. But in general their interest was as meager as their knowledge of the world outside the national boundaries. Not once did they display the eagerness to learn that is so characteristic of the Italian. For the Spaniard considers it beneath his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show any marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign land, which cannot but be vastly inferior to his own. Four centuries of national misfortune and shrinkage have by no means eradicated his firm conviction, implanted in his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the days of conquest, that he is the salt of the earth, superior in all things to the rest of the human race.

Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the civilized world, yet also one of the best educated, unless education be merely that ma.s.s of undigested and commonly misapplied information absorbed within four walls. Few men have a more exact knowledge, a more solid footing on the everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the muleteer of Spain.

One does not marvel merely at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound basic wisdom that stands forth in their every sentence. If their illiteracy denies them the advantage of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal, in compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful simplicity of diction that raises them many degrees above the corresponding cla.s.s in more "advanced" lands.

It is of the "lower" cla.s.ses that I am speaking, the common sense and backbone of Spain. The so-called upper cla.s.s is one of the most truly ignorant and uneducated on earth--though among its members, be it noted, is no illiteracy. The maltreated Miguel was adamantinely right in choosing his hero from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the ma.s.ses could be so far led astray from reason as to become a Quixote.

It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring cla.s.s has almost none of that subservience born in the blood in the rest of Europe. Not only does each man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes and expects the world to take for granted that this is the case, and never feels called upon to demonstrate that equality to himself and the rest of the world by insolence and rowdyism. Dissipation he knows not, except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a guitar. Nowhere in Christian lands is drunkenness more rare. Like the Arab the hardy lower-cla.s.s Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet; he can sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the creature comforts is supremely indifferent. One can hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the serving of more than two dishes of meat at a meal or the wearing of "slashed" silks. Yet the Spain of to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that within its borders frugality is universal and held in honor rather than contempt.

When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests lay down on the bare cobble-stones of the venta, making pillows of the furniture of their mules, and were soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously. For me, soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was spread a muleteer's thick blanket in the embrasure of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the munching of a.s.ses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish stable I, too, drifted into slumber.

From dawn until early afternoon I marched on across the rocky vastness of Spain, where fields have no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous country and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck of sand that binds Gibraltar to the continent. It is in these haggard, unpeopled plateaus of the interior that one begins to believe that the population of the peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.

At length, across a valley that was like a lake of heat waves, appeared Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless town where I was forced to be content with the usual bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the surrounding countryside. In the further outskirts of the place I found a potter at work in a large open hovel and halted to pa.s.s the most heated hour with him. In one end of the building was a great trough of clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading up and down. Now and again he caught up a lump of the dough and deposited it on a board before the potter. This the latter took by the handful and, placing it on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a vessel of a shape not unlike a soup-bowl. I inquired what these sold for and with a sigh he replied:

"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing at the kiln--"y cuantos--how many break in the glazing! It is no joyful trade, senor."

Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer me a cigarette and a drink from his leather bota, but soon drifted back to his task with the restless, hara.s.sed look of the piece-worker the world over. As I sat watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there came suddenly back to memory the almost forgotten days when I, too, had toiled thus in the gloomy, sweltering depths of a factory. Truer slavery there never was than that of the piece-worker under our modern division of labor.

Stroll through a factory to find a man seated at a machine stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist, and his task seems easy, almost a pastime in its simplicity. But go away for a year, travel through half the countries of the globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian isles, and then come back to find him sitting on the self-same stool, in the self-same att.i.tude, stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist.

Three blazing hours pa.s.sed by, and I found myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepenas. The vines were low shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon the railway. A half-hour along it brought me face to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap. He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally interesting in its absurdity. But he pa.s.sed me with the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant railroad.

I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker. In the gra.s.sless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a roadster. Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his prostrate form.

"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest of us. Vaya como duerme!"

I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him.

He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set off by a broad red faja around his waist. In one bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.

There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company.

He was a Sevillian named Jesus, bound northward in general and wherever else the G.o.ds might lead him.

"For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief. "This half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring and on the Alameda. But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less to buy. I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gaspare would not leave his amiga. Gasparo is a stone-polisher and had work.

"Then one day I am taken by the police for I know not what. When after two weeks I come out, Gasparo is gone. But he has come north and somewhere I shall run across him."

Jesus had just pa.s.sed through a marvelous experience, which he proceeded to relate in all his Latin wealth of language--though not in the phraseology, of a graduate roadster:

"Mira V., hombre! Two nights ago, when my feet are worn away with more than ten leguas of walking on the railroad, I come to Baeza. It is dark, and I wander along the track to find a soft bank to sleep. On the short railroad that is at each station there is waiting a train of merchandise. Suddenly a great idea comes to me. 'Sh! Jesus,' I whisper, 'what if you should hide yourself away somewhere on this train of merchandise? It would perhaps bring you to the next station.'

"With great quiet I climb a wagon and hide myself between bales of cork.

Screech! Brrr! Rboom! The train is off, and all night I am riding--without a ticket. But at Vilches the man that goes with the train with a lantern comes by and it is my curse to be making some noise, moving to roll a cigarette. 'Ya te 'pia!' (I spy you!) he cries.

Vaca que soy! So of course I must get down. But mira, hombre! There I have traveled more than twelve miles without paying a perrito!"

I had not the heart to disillusion him with a yarn or two from the land of the "hobo."

In the telling we had come within sight of Valdepenas. It was a "valley of rocks" indeed, though a city of good size and considerable evidence of industry, abounding with great _bodegas_, or wine warehouses. As we trudged through the long straight street that had swallowed up the highway, we pa.s.sed the _taller_ of a marble-cutter.

"It is in a place like this that Gasparo works," sighed Jesus, wandering languidly in at the open door. I was strolling slowly on when a whoop as of a man suddenly beset by a band of savages brought me running back into the establishment. Jesus was shaking wildly by both hands a stockily-built young fellow in shirt sleeves and white canvas ap.r.o.n, who was rivaling him in volubility of greeting. Gasparo was found.

Still shouting incoherently, the two left the shop and squatted in the shade along the outside wall.

"Hombre!" panted Jesus, when his excitement had somewhat died down. "I have told myself that by to-morrow we should be tramping the carretera together."

But Gasparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively.

"No, amigo. Jamas! Nunca! Never do I take to the road again. I have here a good job, the finest of patrons. No. I shall stay, and send for the amiga--or find another here."

With the dignity of a caballero, Jesus accepted the decree without protest, and wished his erstwhile comrade luck and prosperity. Then that they might part in full knowledge, he launched forth in the story of his journey from Seville. Gasparo listened absently, shaking his head sadly from time to time. When the episode of the amateur hoboing began, he sat up with renewed interest; before it was ended he was staring at the speaker with clenched fists, his eyes bulging, the cigarette between his lips stone-dead. From that great epic Jesus jumped without intermission to a hasty survey of the antic.i.p.ated joys that lay between him and Madrid. Suddenly Gasparo sprang into the air with an explosive howl, landing on his feet.

"By the blood of your namesake!" he shouted. "How can a man stay always in one place? This daily drudgery will kill me! I will throw the job in the patron's face, and get my wages this very minute, amaguito, and we will go to Madrid together. Jesus Maria! Who knows but we can hide ourselves on another freight train!"--and crying over his shoulder some rendezvous, he disappeared within the establishment.

We sauntered on to the central plaza. It was utterly treeless and paved with cobble-stones; nor could we find a patch of gra.s.s or a shaded bench in all the neighborhood.

"Look here, senor!" cried Jesus, suddenly rushing toward a policeman who was loitering in the shade of a bodega. "Don't you have any parks or Alamedas in this val de penas of yours? You call this a city!"

"Senor," replied the officer in the most apologetic of voices, "we are not a rich city, and the rain so seldom falls in La Mancha. I am very sorry," and touching a finger respectfully to his cap, he strolled slowly on.

Though the sun was low it was still wiltingly hot in the stony streets.

Jesus, as I knew, was penniless. I suggested therefore that I would willingly pay the score of two for the privilege of retreating to the coolness of a wineshop.

"Bueno!" cried the Sevillian. "The wine of Valdepenas is without equal, and of the cheapest--if you know where to buy. Vamonos, hombre!"

He led the way down the street and by some Castilian instinct into a tiny underground shop that was ostensibly given over to the sale of charcoal. The smudged old keeper motioned us to the short rickety bench on which he had been dreaming away the afternoon and, descending still lower by a dark hole in the floor, soon set before us a brown glazed pitcher holding a _quarto_--about a quart--of wine, for which I paid him approximately three and a half cents.

In all western Europe I have drunk the common table wine in whatever quant.i.ty it has pleased me, and suffered from it always the same effect as from so much clear water. It may be that the long tramp under a scorching sun and the distance from my last meal-place altered conditions. Certainly there was no need of the seller's a.s.surance that this was genuine "valdepenas" and that what had been sold us elsewhere as such was atrociously adulterated. Before the pitcher was half empty, I noted with wonder that I was taking an extraordinary interest in the old man's phillipic against the government and its exorbitant tax on wine. Jesus, too, grew in animation, and when the subterranean Demosthenes ended with a thundering, "Si, senores! If it wasn't for the cursed government you and I could drink just such wine as this pure valdepenas anywhere as if it was water!" I was startled to hear us both applaud loud and long. A scant four-cents' worth had seemed so parsimonious a treat for two full-thirsted men that I had intended to order in due time a second pitcherful. But this strange mirth seemed worthy of investigation. I sipped the last of my portion and made no movement to suggest a replenishing. A few minutes later the old man had bade us go with the Almighty, and we were strolling away arm in arm.

The sun was setting when we reached the plaza. We sat down on the cathedral steps. The Sevillian had suddenly an unaccountable desire to sing. He struck up one of the Moorish-descended ballads of his native city. To my increasing astonishment I found myself joining in. Not only that, but for the first and last time of my existence I caught the real Andalusian rhythm. An appreciative audience of urchins gathered.

Then the sacristan stepped out and politely invited us to choose some other stage.

Across the square was a casa de comidas. We entered and ordered dinner.

The senora served us about one-third of what the bill-of-fare promised, and demanded full price--something that had never before happened in all my Spanish experience. I protested vociferously--another wholly unprecedented proceeding. The policeman who had apologized for the absence of parks sauntered in, and I laid the case before him. The senora restated it still more noisily. I declared I would not pay more than one peseta. The lady took oath that I would pay two. The policeman requested me to comply with her demand. I refused to the extent of commanding him to take his hand off the hilt of his sword. He apologized and suggested that we split the difference. This seemed reasonable. I paid it, and we left. Dark night had settled down. We marched aimlessly away into it. Somewhere Gasparo fell in with us.

Somewhere else, on the edge of the city, we came upon a heap of bright clean straw on a threshing floor, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA