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diff --git a/29073-8.txt b/29073-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d72b539 --- /dev/null +++ b/29073-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5312 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rosinante to the Road Again, by John Dos +Passos + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Rosinante to the Road Again + + +Author: John Dos Passos + + + +Release Date: June 8, 2009 [eBook #29073] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN*** + + +E-text prepared by V. L. Simpson and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from digital material +generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) + + + +Note: Images of the original pages are available through + Internet Archive. See + http://www.archive.org/details/rosinantetothero010672mbp + + + + + +ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN + +by + +JOHN DOS PASSOS + + * * * * * + +Books by John Dos Passos + +_NOVELS:_ + _Three Soldiers_ + _One Man's Initiation_ + +_ESSAYS:_ + _Rosinante to the Road Again_ + +_POEMS:_ + _A Pushcart at the Curb_ + (_In Preparation_) + + * * * * * + + +ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN + +by + +JOHN DOS PASSOS + + + + + + + +George H. Doran Company +Publishers New York + +Copyright, 1922, +By George H. Doran Company + +Printed in the United States of America + + + + +CONTENTS + + +CHAPTER + + I: _A Gesture and a Quest_, 9 + II: _The Donkey Boy_, 24 + III: _The Baker of Almorox_, 47 + IV: _Talk by the Road_, 71 + V: _A Novelist of Revolution_, 80 + VI: _Talk by the Road_, 101 + VII: _Cordova No Longer of the Caliphs_, 104 +VIII: _Talk by the Road_, 115 + IX: _An Inverted Midas_, 120 + X: _Talk by the Road_, 133 + XI: _Antonio Machado; Poet of Castile_, 140 + XII: _A Catalan Poet_, 159 +XIII: _Talk by the Road_, 176 + XIV: _Benavente's Madrid_, 182 + XV: _Talk by the Road_, 196 + XVI: _A Funeral in Madrid_, 202 +XVII: _Toledo_, 230 + + + + +ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN + + + + +_I: A Gesture and a Quest_ + + +Telemachus had wandered so far in search of his father he had quite +forgotten what he was looking for. He sat on a yellow plush bench in +the café El Oro del Rhin, Plaza Santa Ana, Madrid, swabbing up with a +bit of bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a plate of which the +edges were piled with the dismembered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite +his plate was a similar plate his companion had already polished. +Telemachus put the last piece of bread into his mouth, drank down a +glass of beer at one spasmodic gulp, sighed, leaned across the table +and said: + +"I wonder why I'm here." + +"Why anywhere else than here?" said Lyaeus, a young man with hollow +cheeks and slow-moving hands, about whose mouth a faint pained smile +was continually hovering, and he too drank down his beer. + +At the end of a perspective of white marble tables, faces thrust +forward over yellow plush cushions under twining veils of tobacco +smoke, four German women on a little dais were playing _Tannhauser_. +Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps, roast pigeon. + +"Do you know Jorge Manrique? That's one reason, Tel," the other man +continued slowly. With one hand he gestured to the waiter for more +beer, the other he waved across his face as if to brush away the music; +then he recited, pronouncing the words haltingly: + + 'Recuerde el alma dormida, + Avive el seso y despierte + Contemplando + Cómo se pasa la vida, + Cómo se viene la muerte + Tan callando: + Cuán presto se va el placer, + Cómo después de acordado + Da dolor, + Cómo a nuestro parecer + Cualquier tiempo pasado + Fué mejor.' + +"It's always death," said Telemachus, "but we must go on." + +It had been raining. Lights rippled red and orange and yellow and green +on the clean paving-stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled through +clattering streets. As they walked, the other man was telling how this +Castilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his +father, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, created +this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He +had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of +his great dust-colored mansion at Ocaña, where the broad eaves were +full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted +with arabesques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at a +table under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral +that was building in those days, full of a smell of scaffolding and +stone dust, there must have stood a tremendous catafalque where lay +with his arms around him the Master of Santiago; in the carved seats of +the choirs the stout canons intoned an endless growling litany; at the +sacristy door, the flare of the candles flashing occasionally on the +jewels of his mitre, the bishop fingered his crosier restlessly, asking +his favorite choir-boy from time to time why Don Jorge had not arrived. +And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him the +service was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them away +with a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind the +distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan +horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, +memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of +crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and the +noise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked in +succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life +was sucked away into this one poem in praise of death. + + Nuestras vidas son los ríos + Que van a dar en la mar, + Que es el morir.... + +Telemachus was saying the words over softly to himself as they went +into the theatre. The orchestra was playing a Sevillana; as they found +their seats they caught glimpses beyond people's heads and shoulders of +a huge woman with a comb that pushed the tip of her mantilla a foot and +a half above her head, dancing with ponderous dignity. Her dress was +pink flounced with lace; under it the bulge of breasts and belly and +three chins quaked with every thump of her tiny heels on the stage. As +they sat down she retreated bowing like a full-rigged ship in a squall. +The curtain fell, the theatre became very still; next was Pastora. + +Strumming of a guitar, whirring fast, dry like locusts in a hedge on a +summer day. Pauses that catch your blood and freeze it suddenly still +like the rustling of a branch in silent woods at night. A gipsy in a +red sash is playing, slouched into a cheap cane chair, behind him a +faded crimson curtain. Off stage heels beaten on the floor catch up the +rhythm with tentative interest, drowsily; then suddenly added, sharp +click of fingers snapped in time; the rhythm slows, hovers like a bee +over a clover flower. A little taut sound of air sucked in suddenly +goes down the rows of seats. With faintest tapping of heels, faintest +snapping of the fingers of a brown hand held over her head, erect, +wrapped tight in yellow shawl where the embroidered flowers make a +splotch of maroon over one breast, a flecking of green and purple over +shoulders and thighs, Pastora Imperio comes across the stage, quietly, +unhurriedly. + +In the mind of Telemachus the words return: + + Cómo se viene la muerte + Tan callando. + +Her face is brown, with a pointed chin; her eyebrows that nearly meet +over her nose rise in a flattened "A" towards the fervid black gleam of +her hair; her lips are pursed in a half-smile as if she were stifling a +secret. She walks round the stage slowly, one hand at her waist, the +shawl tight over her elbow, her thighs lithe and restless, a panther in +a cage. At the back of the stage she turns suddenly, advances; the +snapping of her fingers gets loud, insistent; a thrill whirrs through +the guitar like a covey of partridges scared in a field. Red heels tap +threateningly. + + Decidme: la hermosura, + La gentil frescura y tez + De la cara + El color y la blancura, + Cuando viene la viejez + Cuál se para? + +She is right at the footlights; her face, brows drawn together into a +frown, has gone into shadow; the shawl flames, the maroon flower over +her breast glows like a coal. The guitar is silent, her fingers go on +snapping at intervals with dreadful foreboding. Then she draws herself +up with a deep breath, the muscles of her belly go taut under the tight +silk wrinkles of the shawl, and she is off again, light, joyful, +turning indulgent glances towards the audience, as a nurse might look +in the eyes of a child she has unintentionally frightened with a too +dreadful fairy story. + +The rhythm of the guitar has changed again; her shawl is loose about +her, the long fringe flutters; she walks with slow steps, in pomp, a +ship decked out for a festival, a queen in plumes and brocade.... + + ¿Qué se hicieron las damas, + Sus tocados, sus vestidos, + Sus olores? + ¿Qué se hicieron las llamas + De los fuegos encendidos + De amadores? + +And she has gone, and the gipsy guitar-player is scratching his neck +with a hand the color of tobacco, while the guitar rests against his +legs. He shows all his teeth in a world-engulfing yawn. + +When they came out of the theatre, the streets were dry and the stars +blinked in the cold wind above the houses. At the curb old women sold +chestnuts and little ragged boys shouted the newspapers. + +"And now do you wonder, Tel, why you are here?" + +They went into a café and mechanically ordered beer. The seats were red +plush this time and much worn. All about them groups of whiskered men +leaning over tables, astride chairs, talking. + +"It's the gesture that's so overpowering; don't you feel it in your +arms? Something sudden and tremendously muscular." + +"When Belmonte turned his back suddenly on the bull and walked away +dragging the red cloak on the ground behind him I felt it," said +Lyaeus. + +"That gesture, a yellow flame against maroon and purple cadences ... an +instant swagger of defiance in the midst of a litany to death the +all-powerful. That is Spain.... Castile at any rate." + +"Is 'swagger' the right word?" + +"Find a better." + +"For the gesture a medieval knight made when he threw his mailed glove +at his enemy's feet or a rose in his lady's window, that a mule-driver +makes when he tosses off a glass of aguardiente, that Pastora Imperio +makes dancing.... Word! Rubbish!" And Lyaeus burst out laughing. He +laughed deep in his throat with his head thrown back. + +Telemachus was inclined to be offended. + +"Did you notice how extraordinarily near she kept to the rhythm of +Jorge Manrique?" he asked coldly. + +"Of course. Of course," shouted Lyaeus, still laughing. + +The waiter came with two mugs of beer. + +"Take it away," shouted Lyaeus. "Who ordered beer? Bring something +strong, champagne. Drink the beer yourself." + +The waiter was scrawny and yellow, with bilious eyes, but he could not +resist the laughter of Lyaeus. He made a pretense of drinking the beer. + +Telemachus was now very angry. Though he had forgotten his quest and +the maxims of Penelope, there hovered in his mind a disquieting thought +of an eventual accounting for his actions before a dimly imagined group +of women with inquisitive eyes. This Lyaeus, he thought to himself, was +too free and easy. Then there came suddenly to his mind the dancer +standing tense as a caryatid before the footlights, her face in shadow, +her shawl flaming yellow; the strong modulations of her torso seemed +burned in his flesh. He drew a deep breath. His body tightened like a +catapult. + +"Oh to recapture that gesture," he muttered. The vague inquisitorial +woman-figures had sunk fathoms deep in his mind. + +Lyaeus handed him a shallow tinkling glass. + +"There are all gestures," he said. + +Outside the plate-glass window a countryman passed singing. His voice +dwelt on a deep trembling note, rose high, faltered, skidded down the +scale, then rose suddenly, frighteningly like a skyrocket, into a new +burst of singing. + +"There it is again," Telemachus cried. He jumped up and ran out on the +street. The broad pavement was empty. A bitter wind shrilled among +arc-lights white like dead eyes. + +"Idiot," Lyaeus said between gusts of laughter when Telemachus sat down +again. "Idiot Tel. Here you'll find it." And despite Telemachus's +protestations he filled up the glasses. A great change had come over +Lyaeus. His face looked fuller and flushed. His lips were moist and +very red. There was an occasional crisp curl in the black hair about +his temples. + +And so they sat drinking a long while. + +At last Telemachus got unsteadily to his feet. + +"I can't help it.... I must catch that gesture, formulate it, do it. It +is tremendously, inconceivably, unendingly important to me." + +"Now you know why you're here," said Lyaeus quietly. + +"Why are you here?" + +"To drink," said Lyaeus. + +"Let's go." + +"Why?" + +"To catch that gesture, Lyaeus," said Telemachus in an over-solemn +voice. + +"Like a comedy professor with a butterfly-net," roared Lyaeus. His +laughter so filled the café that people at far-away tables smiled +without knowing it. + +"It's burned into my blood. It must be formulated, made permanent." + +"Killed," said Lyaeus with sudden seriousness; "better drink it with +your wine." + +Silent they strode down an arcaded street. Cupolas, voluted baroque +façades, a square tower, the bulge of a market building, tile roofs, +chimneypots, ate into the star-dusted sky to the right and left of +them, until in a great gust of wind they came out on an empty square, +where were few gas-lamps; in front of them was a heavy arch full of +stars, and Orion sprawling above it. Under the arch a pile of rags +asked for alms whiningly. The jingle of money was crisp in the cold +air. + +"Where does this road go?" + +"Toledo," said the beggar, and got to his feet. He was an old man, +bearded, evil-smelling. + +"Thank you.... We have just seen Pastora," said Lyaeus jauntily. + +"Ah, Pastora!... The last of the great dancers," said the beggar, and +for some reason he crossed himself. + +The road was frosty and crunched silkily underfoot. + +Lyaeus walked along shouting lines from the poem of Jorge Manrique. + + 'Cómo se pasa la vida + Cómo se viene la muerte + Tan callando: + Cuán presto se va el placer + Cómo después de acordado + Da dolor, + Cómo a nuestro parecer + Cualquier tiempo pasado + Fué mejor.' + +"I bet you, Tel, they have good wine in Toledo." + +The road hunched over a hill. They turned and saw Madrid cut out of +darkness against the starlight. Before them sown plains, gulches full +of mist, and the tremulous lights on many carts that jogged along, each +behind three jingling slow mules. A cock crowed. All at once a voice +burst suddenly in swaggering tremolo out of the darkness of the road +beneath them, rising, rising, then fading off, then flaring up hotly +like a red scarf waved on a windy day, like the swoop of a hawk, like a +rocket intruding among the stars. + +"Butterfly net, you old fool!" Lyaeus's laughter volleyed across the +frozen fields. + +Telemachus answered in a low voice: + +"Let's walk faster." + +He walked with his eyes on the road. He could see in the darkness, +Pastora, wrapped in the yellow shawl with the splotch of maroon-colored +embroidery moulding one breast, stand tremulous with foreboding before +the footlights, suddenly draw in her breath, and turn with a great +exultant gesture back into the rhythm of her dance. Only the victorious +culminating instant of the gesture was blurred to him. He walked with +long strides along the crackling road, his muscles aching for memory of +it. + + + + +_II: The Donkey Boy_ + + _Where the husbandman's toil and strife_ + _Little varies to strife and toil:_ + _But the milky kernel of life,_ + _With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!_ + + +The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortling +glitter of irrigation ditches that occasionally widened into green +pools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled scrub oleanders. +Through the shimmer of olive leaves all about I could see the great +ruddy heave of the mountains streaked with the emerald of +millet-fields, and above, snowy shoulders against a vault of indigo, +patches of wood cut out hard as metal in the streaming noon light. +Tinkle of a donkey-bell below me, then at the turn of a path the +donkey's hindquarters, mauve-grey, neatly clipped in a pattern of +diamonds and lozenges, and a tail meditatively swishing as he picked +his way among the stones, the head as yet hidden by the osier baskets +of the pack. At the next turn I skipped ahead of the donkey and walked +with the _arriero_, a dark boy in tight blue pants and short grey tunic +cut to the waist, who had the strong cheek-bones, hawk nose and slender +hips of an Arab, who spoke an aspirated Andalusian that sounded like +Arabic. + +We greeted each other cordially as travellers do in mountainous places +where the paths are narrow. We talked about the weather and the wind +and the sugar mills at Motril and women and travel and the vintage, +struggling all the while like drowning men to understand each other's +lingo. When it came out that I was an American and had been in the war, +he became suddenly interested; of course, I was a deserter, he said, +clever to get away. There'd been two deserters in his town a year ago, +_Alemanes_; perhaps friends of mine. It was pointed out that I and +the _Alemanes_ had been at different ends of the gunbarrel. He +laughed. What did that matter? Then he said several times, "Qué burro +la guerra, qué burro la guerra." I remonstrated, pointing to the donkey +that was following us with dainty steps, looking at us with a quizzical +air from under his long eyelashes. Could anything be wiser than a +burro? + +He laughed again, twitching back his full lips to show the brilliance +of tightly serried teeth, stopped in his tracks, and turned to look at +the mountains. He swept a long brown hand across them. "Look," he said, +"up there is the Alpujarras, the last refuge of the kings of the Moors; +there are bandits up there sometimes. You have come to the right place; +here we are free men." + +The donkey scuttled past us with a derisive glance out of the corner of +an eye and started skipping from side to side of the path, cropping +here and there a bit of dry grass. We followed, the _arriero_ telling +how his brother would have been conscripted if the family had not got +together a thousand pesetas to buy him out. That was no life for a man. +He spat on a red stone. They'd never catch him, he was sure of that. +The army was no life for a man. + +In the bottom of the valley was a wide stream, which we forded after +some dispute as to who should ride the donkey, the donkey all the while +wrinkling his nose with disgust at the coldness of the speeding water +and the sliminess of the stones. When we came out on the broad moraine +of pebbles the other side of the stream we met a lean blackish man with +yellow horse-teeth, who was much excited when he heard I was an +American. + +"America is the world of the future," he cried and gave me such a slap +on the back I nearly tumbled off the donkey on whose rump I was at that +moment astride. + +"_En América no se divierte_," muttered the _arriero_, kicking his feet +that were cold from the ford into the burning saffron dust of the road. + +The donkey ran ahead kicking at pebbles, bucking, trying to shake off +the big pear-shaped baskets of osier he had either side of his pack +saddle, delighted with smooth dryness after so much water and such +tenuous stony roads. The three of us followed arguing, the sunlight +beating wings of white flame about us. + +"In America there is freedom," said the blackish man, "there are no +rural guards; roadmenders work eight hours and wear silk shirts and +earn ... un dineral." The blackish man stopped, quite out of breath +from his grappling with infinity. Then he went on: "Your children are +educated free, no priests, and at forty every man-jack owns an +automobile." + +"_Ca_," said the _arriero_. + +"_Sí, hombre_," said the blackish man. + +For a long while the _arriero_ walked along in silence, watching his +toes bury themselves in dust at each step. Then he burst out, spacing +his words with conviction: "_Ca, en América no se hase na' a que +trabahar y de'cansar...._ Not on your life, in America they don't do +anything except work and rest so's to get ready to work again. That's +no life for a man. People don't enjoy themselves there. An old sailor +from Malaga who used to fish for sponges told me, and he knew. It's not +gold people need, but bread and wine and ... life. They don't do +anything there except work and rest so they'll be ready to work +again...." + +Two thoughts jostled in my mind as he spoke; I seemed to see red-faced +gentlemen in knee breeches, dog's-ear wigs askew over broad foreheads, +reading out loud with unction the phrases, "inalienable rights ... +pursuit of happiness," and to hear the cadence out of Meredith's _The +Day of the Daughter of Hades_: + + Where the husbandman's toil and strife + Little varies to strife and toil: + But the milky kernel of life, + With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil! + +The donkey stopped in front of a little wineshop under a trellis where +dusty gourd-leaves shut out the blue and gold dazzle of sun and sky. + +"He wants to say, 'Have a little drink, gentlemen,'" said the blackish +man. + +In the greenish shadow of the wineshop a smell of anise and a sound of +water dripping. When he had smacked his lips over a small cup of thick +yellow wine he pointed at the _arriero_. "He says people don't enjoy +life in America." + +"But in America people are very rich," shouted the barkeeper, a +beet-faced man whose huge girth was bound in a red cotton sash, and he +made a gesture suggestive of coins, rubbing thumb and forefinger +together. + +Everybody roared derision at the _arriero_. But he persisted and went +out shaking his head and muttering "That's no life for a man." + +As we left the wineshop where the blackish man was painting with broad +strokes the legend of the West, the _arriero_ explained to me almost +tearfully that he had not meant to speak ill of my country, but to +explain why he did not want to emigrate. While he was speaking we +passed a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us in jingle of +mulebells and in dizzying sweetness of bubbling ferment. A sombre man +with beetling brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart, brown feet +firmly planted in the steaming slush of grapes, flushed face tilted +towards the ferocious white sun, a small child with a black curly pate +rode in triumph, shouting, teeth flashing as if to bite into the sun. + +"What you mean is," said I to the _arriero_, "that this is the life for +a man." + +He tossed his head back in a laugh of approval. + +"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work?" + +"That's it," he answered, and cried, "_arrh he_" to the donkey. + +We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bellied suddenly in the back as +a cool wind frisked about us at the corner of the road. + +"Ah, it smells of the sea," said the _arriero_. "We'll see the sea from +the next hill." + +That night as I stumbled out of the inn door in Motril, overfull of +food and drink, the full moon bulged through the arches of the cupola +of the pink and saffron church. Everywhere steel-green shadows striped +with tangible moonlight. As I sat beside my knapsack in the plaza, +groping for a thought in the bewildering dazzle of the night, three +disconnected mules, egged on by a hoarse shouting, jingled out of the +shadow. When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-glare beside the +fountain, it became evident that they were attached to a coach, a +spidery coach tilted forward as if it were perpetually going down hill; +from inside smothered voices like the strangled clucking of fowls being +shipped to market in a coop. + +On the driver's seat one's feet were on the shafts and one had a view +of every rag and shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking, +groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers, +cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach +lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation +ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the +sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves +and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of +ash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy inkling of mountains. + +Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees at the leading mule, +Cordovan hat on the back of his head, from under which sprouted a lock +of black hair that hung between his eyes over his nose and made him +look like a goblin, the driver bounced and squirmed and kicked at the +flanks of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side to side of the +uneven road. Down into a gulch, across a shingle, up over a plank +bridge, then down again into the bed of the river I had forded that +morning with my friend the _arriero_, along a beach with fishing boats +and little huts where the fishermen slept; then barking of dogs, +another bridge and we roared and crackled up a steep village street to +come to a stop suddenly, catastrophically, in front of a tavern in the +main square. + +"We are late," said the goblin driver, turning to me suddenly, "I have +not slept for four nights, dancing, every night dancing." + +He sucked the air in through his teeth and stretched out his arms and +legs in the moonlight. "Ah, women ... women," he added philosophically. +"Have you a cigarette?" + +"_Ah, la juventud_," said the old man who had brought the mailbag. He +looked up at us scratching his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a +_momentito_, and it's gone! Old men work in the day time, but young men +work at night.... _Ay de mí_," and he burst into a peal of laughter. + +And as if some one were whispering them, the words of Jorge Manrique +sifted out of the night: + + ¿Qué se hizo el Rey Don Juan? + Los infantes de Aragón + ¿Qué se hicieron? + Qué fué de tanto galán, + Qué fué de tanta invención, + Cómo truxeron? + +Everybody went into the tavern, from which came a sound of singing and +of clapping in time, and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging on +tables as might have come out of the _Mermaid_ in the days of the +Virgin Queen. Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish +blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar. +The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of +quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme +burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in +a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest +contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the +white wall standing very quiet a man looking up with dilated +nostrils--_el amor_. + +As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady way out of town, our ears +still throbbed with the rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown hands +clapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors. From the last house +of the village a man hallooed. With its noise of cupboards of china +overturned the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-faced man with +a little waxed moustache like the springs of a mousetrap climbed on the +front seat, while burly people heaved quantities of corded trunks on +behind. + +"How late, two hours late," the man spluttered, jerking his checked cap +from side to side. "Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiled +eggs.... Think of that. _¡Qué incultura! ¡Qué pueblo indecente!_ All +day only two boiled eggs." + +"I had business in Motril, Don Antonio," said the goblin driver +grinning. + +"Business!" cried Don Antonio, laughing squeakily, "and after all what +a night!" + +Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio the story of King Mycerinus +of Egypt that Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he would only +live ten years, the king called for torches and would not sleep, so +crammed twenty years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened in +intervals between his hoarse investigations of the private life of the +grandmother of the leading mule. + +Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cigarette and cried, "In +Andalusia we all do that, don't we, Paco?" + +"Yes, sir," said the goblin driver, nodding his head vigorously. + +"That is _lo flamenco_," cried Don Antonio. "The life of Andalusia is +_lo flamenco_." + +The moon has begun to lose foothold in the black slippery zenith. We +are hurtling along a road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of +unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of a +dancer. The goblin driver rolls from side to side asleep. The check cap +is down over the little man's face so that not even his moustaches are +to be seen. All at once the leading mule, taken with suicidal mania, +makes a sidewise leap for the cliff-edge. Crumbling of gravel, snap of +traces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one has managed to yank the mule +back on her hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a coach +totters at the edge of the cliff's shadow. + +"_Hija de puta_," cries the goblin driver, jumping to the ground. + +Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins to explain querulously that +he has had nothing to eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of the +goblin driver flash white flame as he hangs wreath upon wreath of +profanity about the trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rattling +jerk the coach sways to the safe side of the road. From inside angry +heads are poked out like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop. +Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of triumph: "_¿Qué +flamenco, eh?_" + +When we got to Almuñecar Don Antonio, the goblin driver, and I sat at a +little table outside the empty Casino. A waiter appeared from somewhere +with wine and coffee and tough purple ham and stale bread and +cigarettes. Over our heads dusty palm-fronds trembled in occasional +faint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don Antonio's thin fingers +glistened in the light of the one tired electric light bulb that shone +among palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to me the +significance of _lo flamenco_. + +The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering song well sung, the couplet +neatly capped, the back turned to the charging bull, the mantilla +draped with exquisite provocativeness; all that was _lo flamenco_. +"On this coast, _señor inglés_, we don't work much, we are dirty and +uninstructed, but by God we live. Why the poor people of the towns, +d'you know what they do in summer? They hire a fig-tree and go and live +under it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eat +the figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains, +and man-alive they are happy. They fear no one and they are dependent +on no one; when they are young they make love and sing to the guitar, +and when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children. +You have travelled much; I have travelled little--Madrid, never +further,--but I swear to you that nowhere in the world are the women +lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in this +vega of Almuñecar.... If only the wine weren't quite so heavy...." + +"Then you don't want to go to America?" + +"_¡Hombre por dios!_ Sing us a song, Paco.... He's a Galician, you +see." + +The goblin driver grinned and threw back his head. + +"Go to the end of the world, you'll find a Gallego," he said. Then he +drank down his wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand, and +started droningly: + + 'Si quieres qu'el carro cante + mójale y dejel'en río + que después de buen moja'o + canta com'un silbi'o.' + + (If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it in the river, for + when it's well soaked it'll sing like a locust.) + +"Hola," cried Don Antonio, "go on." + + 'A mí me gusta el blanco, + ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro! + porque el negro es muy triste. + Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.' + + (I like white; hooray for white, death to black. Because black is + very sad, and I am happy, I don't like it.) + +"That's it," cried Don Antonio excitedly. "You people from the north, +English, Americans, Germans, whatnot, you like black. You like to be +sad. I don't." + +"'Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'" + +The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and swollen. The east was +beginning to bleach before the oncoming sun. Birds started chirping +above our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed, I could hear the +hoarse voice of the goblin driver roaring out: + + 'A mí me gusta el blanco, + ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro!' + +At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on a red jutting cliff over the +beach where brown children were bathing, there was talk again of _lo +flamenco_. + +"In Spain," my friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and +loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic +and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest +Panza is _lo flamenco_." + +"But you do live." + +"In dirt, disease, lack of education, bestiality.... Half of us are +always dying of excess of food or the lack of it." + +"What do you want?" + +"Education, organization, energy, the modern world." + +I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road down +from the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and rest +so as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world. + +And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work. + +That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from a +roadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession with +candles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swaying +cone-shaped figure carried on the shoulders of six sweating men stood +poised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamine +flowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried, +"_¡Viva la Vírgen de las Angustias!_" And the Virgin and San Miguel +both had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the people +followed them into the church crying "_¡Viva!_" so that the old vaults +shivered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some people +cried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, and +when they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantilla +of white lace over the moon, so they went home happy. + +Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by an +occasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behind +them long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair. + +Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of America +and the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixote +and _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar +quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ they +call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country +elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the +owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers, +to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explained +to my friend that in his modern world of America these same people +would come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He +answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there +was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it +behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of +being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade. + +"And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating of +life?" + +"Of course," he answered. + +"Where?" + +"Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _lo +flamenco_." + +"But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?" + +He shrugged his shoulders. "Work," he said. + +We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fishing boats were +drawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path +up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by thorny +aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the +mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of +sappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through +the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry +thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and +heliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast in +ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the last +groan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the dark +fields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped down +through notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, then +unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenly +in an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction. + +"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work," and I +thought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on the +way down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: "_Ca, en América no se +hose na'a que trabahar y dé'cansar._" + +I had left him at his home village, a little cluster of red and yellow +roofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church that +hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhile +before going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas +shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind, +and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson against +the intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. And +the _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joys +of going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains for +chestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga for +tinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing and +guitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older, +realer gods were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of the +pale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in the +sunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days of +travel on stony roads in the mountains.... And I had lain back with my +eyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished that +my life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and I +had shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads of +paper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sort +of bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his damned burden. + +"Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make the +road so significant that one needs no destination, that is _lo +flamenco_," said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen looking at the +seven white arches of the aqueduct. + +He nodded unconvinced. + + + + +_III: The Baker of Almorox_ + + +I + +The _señores_ were from Madrid? Indeed! The man's voice was full of an +awe of great distances. He was the village baker of Almorox, where we +had gone on a Sunday excursion from Madrid; and we were standing on the +scrubbed tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving wine and figs +from his wife. The father of the friend who accompanied me had once +lived in the same village as the baker's father, and bought bread of +him; hence the entertainment. This baker of Almorox was a tall man, +with a soft moustache very black against his ash-pale face, who stood +with his large head thrust far forward. He was smiling with pleasure at +the presence of strangers in his house, while in a tone of shy +deprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's family. Don Fernando +and Doña Ana and the Señorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos was +no longer little, answered my friend, and Doña Ana was dead. + +The baker's wife had stood in the shadow looking from one face to +another with a sort of wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this she +came forward suddenly into the pale greenish-gold light that streamed +through the door, holding a dark wine-bottle before her. There were +tears in her eyes. No; she had never known any of them, she explained +hastily--she had never been away from Almorox--but she had heard so +much of their kindness and was sorry.... It was terrible to lose a +father or a mother. The tall baker shifted his feet uneasily, +embarrassed by the sadness that seemed slipping over his guests, and +suggested that we walk up the hill to the Hermitage; he would show the +way. + +"But your work?" we asked. Ah, it did not matter. Strangers did not +come every day to Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping a woolen +muffler about his bare strongly moulded throat, and we followed him up +the devious street of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses through +wide doors of dark tiled rooms with great black rafters overhead and +courtyards where chickens pecked at the manure lodged between smooth +worn flagstones. Still between white-washed walls we struck out of the +village into the deep black mud of the high road, and at last burst +suddenly into the open country, where patches of sprouting grass shone +vivid green against the gray and russet of broad rolling lands. At the +top of the first hill stood the Hermitage--a small whitewashed chapel +with a square three-storied tower; over the door was a relief of the +Virgin, crowned, in worn lichened stone. The interior was very plain +with a single heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted statue, +stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful grace--again of the +Virgin. The figure was dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills and +ruffles, grey with dust and age. + +"_La Vírgen de la Cima_," said the baker, pointing reverently with his +thumb, after he had bent his knee before the altar. And as I glanced at +the image a sudden resemblance struck me: the gown gave the Virgin a +curiously conical look that somehow made me think of that conical black +stone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought from Asia Minor. Here +again was a good goddess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin, +despite her prudish frills.... But the man was ushering us out. + +"And there is no finer view than this in all Spain." With a broad sweep +of his arm he took in the village below, with its waves of roofs that +merged from green to maroon and deep crimson, broken suddenly by the +open square in front of the church; and the gray towering church, +scowling with strong lights and shadows on buttresses and pointed +windows; and the brown fields faintly sheened with green, which gave +place to the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards, and the +shining silver where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond, +the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into the +yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers were +stretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccid +cheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, he +was saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and there +were flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, in +May. And he went on to tell us of the local feast, and the great +processions of the Virgin. This year there were to be four days of the +_toros_. So many bullfights were unusual in such a small village, he +assured us. But they were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best in +Castile. Four days of _toros_, he said again; and all the people of the +country around would come to the _fiestas_, and there would be a great +pilgrimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin.... As he talked in his slow +deferential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers, +there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world. + +First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who +bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his +door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like +his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then his +work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of +neighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of things +half real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived and +where politicians wrote in the newspapers,--and _Francia_--and all that +was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and +wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat +and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so +strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of +the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite +past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans, +before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much the +same, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed, +cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought and +passed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged +up to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin had +taken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth goddesses, and +the deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love for +the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the +walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men +who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling +of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassing +hills of their commune, except the God which was the synthesis of their +souls and of their lives. + +Here lies the strength and the weakness of Spain. This intense +individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated +village communities--_pueblos_, as the Spaniards call them--over the +changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and +mature and die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolution has +been strong enough to shake it. Invasion after invasion, of Goths, of +Moors, of Christian ideas, of the fads and convictions of the +Renaissance, have swept over the country, changing surface customs and +modes of thought and speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping with +the changeless Iberian mind. + +And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought _La vida es sueño_: +"Life is a dream." Only the individual, or that part of life which is +in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of +this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don +Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed +in the power of man's soul over all things, whose desire included the +whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world +was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures +for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose minds +the universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. These +are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de +la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits +of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the +Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of +such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history +and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be +traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the +same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish +life been woven. + + +II + +In trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of the +scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I +realize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden in +the folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive church +in the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile _huerta_ of +the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian +characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an +illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the +desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be +due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized +government on a land essentially centrifugal. + +In the first place, there is the matter of language. Roughly, four +distinct languages are at present spoken in Spain: Castilian, the +language of Madrid and the central uplands, the official language, +spoken in the south in its Andalusian form; Gallego-Portuguese, spoken +on the west coast; Basque, which does not even share the Latin descent +of the others; and Catalan, a form of Provençal which, with its +dialect, Valencian, is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and in +the Balearic Isles. Of course, under the influence of rail +communication and a conscious effort to spread Castilian, the other +languages, with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan, have lost +vitality and died out in the larger towns; but the problem remains far +different from that of the Italian dialects, since the Spanish +languages have all, except Basque, a strong literary tradition. + +Added to the variety of language, there is an immense variety of +topography in the different parts of Spain. The central plateaux, +dominant in modern history (history being taken to mean the births and +breedings of kings and queens and the doings of generals in armor) +probably approximate the warmer Russian steppes in climate and +vegetation. The west coast is in most respects a warmer and more +fertile Wales. The southern _huertas_ (arable river valleys) have +rather the aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia up is a +continuation of the Mediterranean coast of France. It follows that, in +this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian +snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected. + +Here is probably the root of the tendency in Spanish art and thought to +emphasize the differences between things. In painting, where the mind +of a people is often more tangibly represented than anywhere else, we +find one supreme example. El Greco, almost the caricature in his art of +the Don Quixote type of mind, who, though a Greek by birth and a +Venetian by training, became more Spanish than the Spaniards during his +long life at Toledo, strove constantly to express the difference +between the world of flesh and the world of spirit, between the body +and the soul of man. More recently, the extreme characterization of +Goya's sketches and portraits, the intensifying of national types found +in Zuloaga and the other painters who have been exploiting with such +success the peculiarities--the picturesqueness--of Spanish faces and +landscapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense of the separateness +of things. + +In another way you can express this constant attempt to differentiate +one individual from another as caricature. Spanish art is constantly +on the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of the +Spanish mind and its intense individualism, a constant slipping over +into the grotesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that the +conscious or unconscious aim of their art is rather self-expression +than beauty. Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted. +Burlesque and satire are never far away in their most serious moments. +Not even the calmest and best ordered of Spanish minds can resist a +tendency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration, to grotesquerie, +to deadening mannerism. All that is greatest in their art, indeed, +lies on the borderland of the extravagant, where sublime things skim +the thin ice of absurdity. The great epic, _Don Quixote_, such plays +as Calderon's _La Vida es Sueño_, such paintings as El Greco's +_Resurrección_ and Velasquez's dwarfs, such buildings as the Escorial +and the Alhambra--all among the universal masterpieces--are far indeed +from the middle term of reasonable beauty. Hence their supreme +strength. And for our generation, to which excess is a synonym for +beauty, is added argumentative significance to the long tradition of +Spanish art. + +Another characteristic, springing from the same fervid abundance, that +links the Spanish tradition to ours of the present day is the strangely +impromptu character of much Spanish art production. The slightly +ridiculous proverb that genius consists of an infinite capacity for +taking pains is well controverted. The creative flow of Spanish artists +has always been so strong, so full of vitality, that there has been no +time for taking pains. Lope de Vega, with his two thousand-odd +plays--or was it twelve thousand?--is by no means an isolated instance. +Perhaps the strong sense of individual validity, which makes Spain the +most democratic country in Europe, sanctions the constant +improvisation, and accounts for the confident planlessness as common in +Spanish architecture as in Spanish political thought. + +Here we meet the old stock characteristic, Spanish pride. This is a +very real thing, and is merely the external shell of the fundamental +trust in the individual and in nothing outside of him. Again El Greco +is an example. As his painting progressed, grew more and more personal, +he drew away from tangible reality, and, with all the dogmatic +conviction of one whose faith in his own reality can sweep away the +mountains of the visible world, expressed his own restless, almost +sensual, spirituality in forms that flickered like white flames toward +God. For the Spaniard, moreover, God is always, in essence, the +proudest sublimation of man's soul. The same spirit runs through the +preachers of the early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a disguise +of the frantic desire to express the self, the self, changeless and +eternal, at all costs. From this comes the hard cruelty that flares +forth luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de Unamuno, _Del +Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, expresses this fierce clinging to +separateness from the universe by the phrase _el hambre de +inmortalidad_, the hunger of immortality. This is the core of the +individualism that lurks in all Spanish ideas, the conviction that only +the individual soul is real. + + +III + +In the Spain of to-day these things are seen as through a glass, +darkly. Since the famous and much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinand +and Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has been that of an +attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. In the great flare of the +golden age, the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even greater worth, +the disease worked beneath the surface. Since then the conflict has +corroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I mean +the persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government, +in religion, a nation whose every energy lies in the other direction. +The result has been a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all +life and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have brought +Spain no nearer a solution of its problems. At the present day, when +all is ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy, a sort of +despairing inaction causes the Spaniards to remain under a government +of unbelievably corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems no +solution to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power and +the separate communities work only to nullify each other. + +Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather in the position of the +archæologists before the problem of Iberian sculpture. For near the +Cerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the ruins of a sanctuary has +been dug an endless series of native sculptures of men and women, +goddesses and gods, there lived a little watchmaker. The first statues +to be dug up were thought by the pious country people to be saints, and +saints they were, according to an earlier dispensation than that of +Rome; with the result that much Kudos accompanied the discovery of +those draped women with high head-dresses and fixed solemn eyes and +those fragmentary bull-necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone; they +were freed from the caked clay of two thousand years and reverently set +up in the churches. So probably the motives that started the watchmaker +on his career of sculpturing and falsifying were pious and reverential. + +However it began, when it was discovered that the saints were mere +horrid heathen he-gods and she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen with +spectacles who appeared from all the ends of Europe to investigate, +would pay money for them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a mighty +man in his village and generation. He began to study archaeology and +the style of his cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a number of +years the statues from the Cerro de los Santos were swallowed whole by +all learned Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination began to get the +better of him; forms became more and more fantastic, Egyptian, +Assyrian, _art-nouveau_ influences began to be noted by the discerning, +until at last someone whispered forgery and all the scientists scuttled +to cover shouting that there had never been any native Iberian +sculpture after all. + +The little watchmaker succumbed before his imagining of heathen gods +and died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of the +room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see the +statues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their high +head-dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell which were made by +the watchmaker in 1880, and which by the image-maker of the +hill-sanctuary at a time when the first red-eyed ships of the +Phoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians of +the coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the real +and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with stone +eyes. + +So with the traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition +of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of +suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety, +of chivalry, of Don Quixote and Tenorio. + +The Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunity +for a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering, +heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered word +that many among the traditions were false. The young men of that time +called themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According to +temperament they rejected all or part of the museum of traditions they +had been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separate +road in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty, +gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity. + +The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally, +anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, will +work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn +into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is +only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which +there was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high. + + +IV + +It was after a lecture at an exhibition of Basque painters in Madrid, +where we had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from under +shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what he +called the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he had +said, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe. +Better no education for the masses than education that would turn +healthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spain +swooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutal +soulless trade-war of modern life.... I was walking with a young +student of philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy board of a +Spanish _pensión_, discussing the exhibition we had just seen as a +strangely meek setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had remarked +on the very "primitive" look much of the work of these young Basque +painters had, shown by some in the almost affectionate technique, in +the dainty caressing brush-work, in others by that inadequacy of the +means at the painter's disposal to express his idea, which made of so +many of the pictures rather gloriously impressive failures. My friend +was insisting, however, that the primitiveness, rather than the +birth-pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing but "the last +affectation of an over-civilized tradition." + +"Spain," he said, "is the most civilized country in Europe. The growth +of our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence. +The Phoenicians, the Romans--Spain's influence on Rome was, I imagine, +fully as great as Rome's on Spain; think of the five Spanish +emperors;--the Goths, the Moors;--all incidents, absorbed by the +changeless Iberian spirit.... Even Spanish Christianity," he continued, +smiling, "is far more Spanish than it is Christian. Our life is one +vast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that is all. And so are the +bull-fights that so shock the English and Americans,--are they any more +brutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-fights? And how full of +tradition are they, our _fiestas de toros_; their ceremony reaches +back to the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-worship of the +Cretans and of so many of the Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games. +Can civilization go farther than to ritualize death as we have done? +But our culture is too perfect, too stable. Life is choked by it." + +We stood still a moment in the shade of a yellowed lime tree. My friend +had stopped talking and was looking with his usual bitter smile at a +group of little boys with brown, bare dusty legs who were intently +playing bull-fight with sticks for swords and a piece of newspaper for +the toreador's scarlet cape. + +"It is you in America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future +belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become +once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a +complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after, +and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that +crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it; +we are too tired to have any thoughts; we have lived so much so long +ago that now we are content with the very simple things,--the warmth of +the sun and the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and wine. +All the rest is automatic, ritual." + +"But what about the strike?" I asked, referring to the one-day's +general strike that had just been carried out with fair success +throughout Spain, as a protest against the government's apathy +regarding the dangerous rise in the prices of food and fuel. + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"That, and more," he said, "is new Spain, a prophecy, rather than a +fact. Old Spain is still all-powerful." + +Later in the day I was walking through the main street of one of the +clustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain +not far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shops +where the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women with +beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were coming home with +water from the well. Suddenly I came out on an open _plaza_ with +trees from which the last leaves were falling through the greenish +sunset light. The place was filled with the lilting music of a +grind-organ and with a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced. +There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-cheeked apprentice-boys +with their sweethearts, and respectable shop-keepers, and their wives +with mantillas over their gleaming black hair. All were dancing in and +out among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and +little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel of +Sancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy +in food and color and the softness of women's hair. But as I walked out +of the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet +under the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the +sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the +world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two +Spain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless +industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war. +And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again +saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his +wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands +white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steed +upon a new quest. + + + + +_IV: Talk by the Road_ + + +Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. The sky to the east of them +was rosy when they came out of a village at the crest of a hill. Cocks +crowed behind stucco walls. The road dropped from their feet through an +avenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost. Far away into the brown +west stretched reach upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there a +few trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned lands. They stood still +breathing hard. + +"It's the Tagus overflowed its banks," said Telemachus. + +Lyaeus shook his head. + +"It's mist." + +They stood with thumping hearts on the hilltop looking over +inexplicable shimmering plains of mist hemmed by mountains jagged like +coals that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn. The light all +about was lemon yellow. The walls of the village behind them were +fervid primrose color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt. Above the +houses uncurled green spirals of wood-smoke. + +Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and shouted and ran like mad +down the hill. A little voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear that +he must save his strength, so he followed sedately. + +When he caught up to Lyaeus they were walking among twining wraiths of +mist rose-shot from a rim of the sun that poked up behind hills of +bright madder purple. A sudden cold wind-gust whined across the plain, +making the mist writhe in a delirium of crumbling shapes. Ahead of them +casting gigantic blue shadows over the furrowed fields rode a man on a +donkey and a man on a horse. It was a grey sway-backed horse that +joggled in a little trot with much switching of a ragged tail; its +rider wore a curious peaked cap and sat straight and lean in the +saddle. Over one shoulder rested a long bamboo pole that in the +exaggerating sunlight cast a shadow like the shadow of a lance. The man +on the donkey was shaped like a dumpling and rode with his toes turned +out. + +Telemachus and Lyaeus walked behind them a long while without catching +up, staring curiously after these two silent riders. + +Eventually getting as far as the tails of the horse and the donkey, +they called out: "_Buenos días_." + +There turned to greet them a red, round face, full of little lines like +an over-ripe tomato and a long bloodless face drawn into a point at the +chin by a grizzled beard. + +"How early you are, gentlemen," said the tall man on the grey horse. +His voice was deep and sepulchral, with an occasional flutter of +tenderness like a glint of light in a black river. + +"Late," said Lyaeus. "We come from Madrid on foot." + +The dumpling man crossed himself. + +"They are mad," he said to his companion. + +"That," said the man on the grey horse, "is always the answer of +ignorance when confronted with the unusual. These gentlemen undoubtedly +have very good reason for doing as they do; and besides the night is +the time for long strides and deep thoughts, is it not, gentlemen? The +habit of vigil is one we sorely need in this distracted modern world. +If more men walked and thought the night through there would be less +miseries under the sun." + +"But, such a cold night!" exclaimed the dumpling man. + +"On colder nights than this I have seen children asleep in doorways in +the streets of Madrid." + +"Is there much poverty in these parts? asked Telemachus stiffly, +wanting to show that he too had the social consciousness. + +"There are people--thousands--who from the day they are born till the +day they die never have enough to eat." + +"They have wine," said Lyaeus. + +"One little cup on Sundays, and they are so starved that it makes them +as drunk as if it were a hogshead." + +"I have heard," said Lyaeus, "that the sensations of starving are very +interesting--people have visions more vivid than life." + +"One needs very few sensations to lead life humbly and beautifully," +said the man on the grey horse in a gentle tone of reproof. + +Lyaeus frowned. + +"Perhaps," said the man on the grey horse turning towards Telemachus +his lean face, where under scraggly eyebrows glowered eyes of soft dark +green, "it is that I have brooded too much on the injustice done in the +world--all society one great wrong. Many years ago I should have set +out to right wrong--for no one but a man, an individual alone, can +right a wrong; organization merely substitutes one wrong for +another--but now ... I am too old. You see, I go fishing instead." + +"Why, it's a fishing pole," cried Lyaeus. "When I first saw it I +thought it was a lance." And he let out his roaring laugh. + +"And such trout," cried the dumpling man. "The trout there are in that +little stream above Illescas! That's why we got up so early, to fish +for trout." + +"I like to see the dawn," said the man on the grey horse. + +"Is that Illescas?" asked Telemachus, and pointed to a dun brown tower +topped by a cap of blue slate that stood guard over a cluster of roofs +ahead of them. Telemachus had a map torn from Baedecker in his pocket +that he had been peeping at secretly. + +"That, gentlemen, is Illescas," said the man on the grey horse. "And if +you will allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be most +pleased. You must excuse me, for I never take anything before midday. I +am a recluse, have been for many years and rarely stir abroad. I do not +intend to return to the world unless I can bring something with me +worth having." A wistful smile twisted a little the corners of his +mouth. + +"I could guzzle a hogshead of coffee accompanied by vast processions of +toasted rolls in columns of four," shouted Lyaeus. + +"We are on our way to Toledo," Telemachus broke in, not wanting to give +the impression that food was their only thought. + +"You will see the paintings of Dominico Theotocopoulos, the only one +who ever depicted the soul of Castile." + +"This man," said Lyaeus, with a slap at Telemachus's shoulder, "is +looking for a gesture." + +"The gesture of Castile." + +The man on the grey horse rode along silently for some time. The sun +had already burnt up the hoar-frost along the sides of the road; only +an occasional streak remained glistening in the shadow of a ditch. A +few larks sang in the sky. Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on their +shoulders passed on their way to the fields. + +"Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?... I am from La Mancha +myself." The man on the grey horse started speaking gravely while with +a bony hand, very white, he stroked his beard. "Something cold and +haughty and aloof ... men concentrated, converging breathlessly on the +single flame of their spirit.... Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, +Cortés, Santa Teresa.... Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness.... +Every man's life a lonely ruthless quest." + +Lyaeus broke in: + +"Remember the infinite gentleness of the saints lowering the Conde de +Orgaz into the grave in the picture in San Tomás...." + +"Ah, that is what I was trying to think of.... These generations, my +generation, my son's generation, are working to bury with infinite +tenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain.... +Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set out +once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the +enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed." + +They had come into town. In the high square tower church-bells were +ringing for morning mass. Down the broad main street scampered a flock +of goats herded by a lean man with fangs like a dog who strode along in +a snuff-colored cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head. + +"How do you do, Don Alonso?" he cried; "Good luck to you, gentlemen." +And he swept the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as might a +courtier of the Rey Don Juan. + +The hot smell of the goats was all about them as they sat before the +café in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightly +proportioned brick arcades of the mudéjar apse of the church opposite. +Don Alonso was in the café ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared. +Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. "Ouf," he +said, "I'm tired." Then he walked over to the grey horse that stood +with hanging head and drooping knees hitched to one of the acacias. + +"I wonder what his name is." He stroked the horse's scrawny face. "Is +it Rosinante?" + +The horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulled +back black lips to show yellow teeth. + +"Of course it's Rosinante!" + +The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his head and whinnied shrilly, +exultantly. + + + + +_V: A Novelist of Revolution_ + + +I + +Much as G. B. S. refuses to be called an Englishman, Pío Baroja refuses +to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits having +been born in San Sebastián, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous +coast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers and +fishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square +jowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintings +of the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and its +ancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people the +world over. + +From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our own +New England clipper ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanish +trade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept their +privileges and their municipal liberties all through the process of the +centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and faggot, which +historians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in the +mountains were full of shipyards that turned out privateers and +merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked +faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy +oars and halyards,--men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of +their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and +bigots. + +It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and the +passing of sailing ships broke the prosperous independence of the +Basque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current of +Spanish life. Now papermills take the place of shipyards, and instead +of the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundland +and Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay +of Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of the +industrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancient +prosperity of its shipping. + +Pío Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between green +mountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears up +with legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains and +slavers and shipwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left the +mist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrile +capital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry upland +plateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in a +town near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for the +Mediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province at +Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental +wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of +racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too +timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything +else to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up +medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In +_Juventud-Egolatria_ ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfully +shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years +before starting to write. And he still runs a bakery. + +You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from the +great focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing +window. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages and +white sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's "Graces," +others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle are +oblong plates with patés and sliced bologna and things in jelly; then +come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscene +jam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door you +see a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful of +brown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread +and pastry swirls about the sidewalk. + +So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own field, he has freed himself +from any compromise with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet, his +novels may be as bitter as he likes. + + +II + +The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue sky where a few stars +glisten faint as mica. Shadow fills half the street, etching a +silhouette of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the cobblestones, +leaving the rest very white with moonlight. The façades of the houses, +with their blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In the dark of a +doorway a woman sits hunched under a brown shawl. Her head nods, but +still she jerks a tune that sways and dances through the silent street +out of the accordion on her lap. A little saucer for pennies is on the +step beside her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are huddled +together asleep. The moonlight points out with mocking interest their +skinny dirt-crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy pavement, +and the filthy rags that barely cover their bodies. Two men stumble out +of a wineshop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who walk along +unsteadily in their worn canvas shoes, making grandiloquent gestures of +pity, tearing down the cold hard façades with drunken generous phrases, +buoyed up by the warmth of the wine in their veins. + +That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where +industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to +it as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggy +badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the +debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and +scheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots where men and women live +fantastically in shelters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cans +and bits of chairs and tables that have stood for years in bright +pleasant rooms. Grassy patches behind crumbling walls where on sunny +days starving children spread their fleshless limbs and run about in +the sun. Miserable wineshops where the wind whines through broken panes +to chill men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about gambling and +finding furious drunkenness in a sip of _aguardiente_. Courtyards +of barracks where painters who have not a cent in the world mix with +beggars and guttersnipes to cajole a little hot food out of +soft-hearted soldiers at mess-time. Convent doors where ragged lines +shiver for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the bare +Castilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw out bread for them to +fight over like dogs. And through it all moves the great crowd of the +outcast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every description,--rich +beggars and poor devils who have given up the struggle to +exist,--homeless children, prostitutes, people who live a half-honest +existence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who while +away the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of the +riches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmill +of bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy the +privilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never been +a novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject. + +Not that the interest in outcasts is anything new in Spanish +literature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which the +pigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers of +Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all are +the descendants of the people in the _Quijote_ and the _Novelas +Ejemplares_, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, who +through _Gil Blas_ invaded France and England, where they rollicked +through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to +the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly +rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success +rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had not +hardened as they have now; there was less pressure of hungry +generations. Or, more probably, pity had not come in to undermine the +foundations. + +The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the steel girders of our +civilization even before the work of building was completed, has +brought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought calls +the failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had the +courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best +of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life +everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting +had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up with +extravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianism +had instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain,--to one's own pain, +and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts are no longer +jolly knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and go on their road +singing "Over the hills and far away"; they are men who have not had +the willpower to continue in the fight for bread, they are men whose +nerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching a +little joy here and there, drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages. + +One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of the +contrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that +drones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair of +an old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to which +it has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formula +does not hold. + +These are the last paragraphs of _Mala Hierba_ ("Wild Grass"), the +middle volume of Baroja's trilogy on the life of the very poor in +Madrid. + +"They talked. Manuel felt irritation against the whole world, hatred, +up to that moment pent up within him against society, against man.... + +"'Honestly,' he ended by saying, 'I wish it would rain dynamite for a +week, and that the Eternal Father would come tumbling down in cinders.' + +"He invoked crazily all the destructive powers to reduce to ashes this +miserable society. + +"Jesús listened with attention. + +"'You are an anarchist,' he told him. + +"'I?' + +"'Yes. So am I.' + +"'Since when?' + +"'Since I have seen the infamies committed in the world; since I have +seen how coldly they give to death a bit of human flesh; since I have +seen how men die abandoned in the streets and hospitals,' answered +Jesús with a certain solemnity. + +"Manuel was silent. The friends walked without speaking round the Ronda +de Segovia, and sat down on a bench in the little gardens of the Vírgen +del Puerto. + +"The sky was superb, crowded with stars; the Milky Way crossed its +immense blue concavity. The geometric figure of the Great Bear +glittered very high. Arcturus and Vega shone softly in that ocean of +stars. + +"In the distance the dark fields, scratched with lines of lights, +seemed the sea in a harbor and the strings of lights the illumination +of a wharf. + +"The damp warm air came laden with odors of woodland plants wilted by +the heat. + +"'How many stars,' said Manuel. 'What can they be?' + +"'They are worlds, endless worlds.' + +"'I don't know why it doesn't make me feel better to see this sky so +beautiful, Jesús. Do you think there are men in those worlds?' asked +Manuel. + +"'Perhaps; why not?' + +"'And are there prisons too, and judges and gambling dens and +police?... Do you think so?' + +"Jesús did not answer. After a while he began talking with a calm voice +of his dream of an idyllic humanity, a sweet pitiful dream, noble and +childish. + +"In his dream, man, led by a new idea, reached a higher state. + +"No more hatreds, no more rancours. Neither judges, nor police, nor +soldiers, nor authority. In the wide fields of the earth free men +worked in the sunlight. The law of love had taken the place of the law +of duty, and the horizons of humanity grew every moment wider, wider +and more azure. + +"And Jesús continued talking of a vague ideal of love and justice, of +energy and pity; and those words of his, chaotic, incoherent, fell like +balm on Manuel's ulcerated spirit. Then they were both silent, lost in +their thoughts, looking at the night. + +"An august joy shone in the sky, and the vague sensation of space, of +the infinity of those imponderable worlds, filled their spirits with a +delicious calm." + + +III + +Spain is the classic home of the anarchist. A bleak upland country +mostly, with a climate giving all varieties of temperature, from moist +African heat to dry Siberian cold, where people have lived until very +recently,--and do still,--in villages hidden away among the bare ribs +of the mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where every region +is cut off from every other by high passes and defiles of the +mountains, flaming hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, where the +Iberian race has grown up centerless. The pueblo, the village +community, is the only form of social cohesion that really has roots in +the past. On these free towns empires have time and again been imposed +by force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic +monarchy wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect that +communal feeling was killed and the Spanish genius forced to ingrow +into the mystical realm where every ego expanded itself into the +solitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced God to an abstraction, +and the nineteenth brought pity and the mad hope of righting the wrongs +of society. The Spaniard, like his own Don Quixote, mounted the +warhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As a +logical conclusion we have the anarchist who threw a bomb into the +Lyceum Theatre in Barcelona during a performance, wanting to make the +ultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a senseless mangling of +human lives. + +But that was the reduction to an absurdity of an immensely valuable +mental position. The anarchism of Pío Baroja is of another sort. He +says in one of his books that the only part a man of the middle classes +can play in the reorganization of society is destructive. He has not +undergone the discipline, which can only come from common slavery in +the industrial machine, necessary for a builder. His slavery has been +an isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming truly +part of a community. He can use the vast power of knowledge which +training has given him only in one way. His great mission is to put the +acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them. I +don't want to imply that Baroja writes with his social conscience. He +is too much of a novelist for that, too deeply interested in people as +such. But it is certain that a profound sense of the evil of existing +institutions lies behind every page he has written, and that +occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to hope that +something better may come out of the turmoil of our age of transition. + +Only a man who had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive to +the new spirit--if the word were not threadbare one would call it +religious--which is shaking the foundations of the world's social +pyramid, perhaps only another example of the failure of nerve, perhaps +the triumphant expression of a new will among mankind. + +In _Aurora Roja_ ("Red Dawn"), the last of the Madrid trilogy, about +the same Manuel who is the central figure of _Mala Hierba_, he writes: + +"At first it bored him, but later, little by little, he felt himself +carried away by what he was reading. First he was enthusiastic about +Mirabeau; then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Condorcet; then +about Danton; then he began to think that Robespierre was the true +revolutionary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was the +gigantic figure of Danton that thrilled him most.... + +"Manuel felt great satisfaction at having read that history. Often he +said to himself: + +"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer, and good-for-nothing? I've +read the history of the French Revolution; I believe I shall know how +to be worthy....' + +"After Michelet, he read a book about '48; then another on the Commune, +by Louise Michel, and all this produced in him a great admiration for +French Revolutionists. What men! After the colossal figures of the +Convention: Babeuf, Proudhon, Blanqui, Bandin, Deleschize, Rochefort, +Félix Pyat, Vallu.... What people! + +"'What does it matter now if I am a loafer?... I believe I shall know +how to be worthy.'" + +In those two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And how +like phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hope +and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for +good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and +the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the +rights and duties of men. Baroja has felt this profoundly, and has +presented it, but without abandoning the function of the novelist, +which is to tell stories about people. He is never a propagandist. + + +IV + +"I have never hidden my admirations in literature. They have been and +are Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal...." writes +Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of _La Dama Errante_ +("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints of +Balzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, who has made a +fairly consistent attempt to cover the world he lived in. With +Dostoievski there is a kinship in the passionate hatred of cruelty and +stupidity that crops out everywhere in his work. I have never found any +trace of influence of the other three. To be sure there are a few early +sketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to form he is much more +in the purely chaotic tradition of the picaresque novel he despises +than in that of the American theorist. + +Baroja's most important work lies in the four series of novels of the +Spanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where he +practiced medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been brought +up. The foundation of these was laid by _El Arbol de la Ciencia_ ("The +Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life +and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then +in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of +inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made +a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist +movement followed it, _La Dama Errante_, which describes the state of +mind of forward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous anarchist +attempt on the lives of the king and queen the day of their marriage, +and _La Ciudad de la Niebla_, about the Spanish colony in London. Then +came the series called _La Busca_ ("The Search"), which to me is +Baroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published in +Europe in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserable +life in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant +would have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do not +think Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, _La Busca_, +_Mala Hierba_, and _Aurora Roja_, deal with the drifting of a typical +uneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house, +through different strata of Madrid life. They give a sense of unadorned +reality very rare in any literature, and besides their power as novels +are immensely interesting as sheer natural history. The type of the +_golfo_ is a literary discovery comparable with that of Sancho Panza by +Cervántes. + +Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite on the same level. The +series _El Pasado_ ("The Past") gives interesting pictures of +provincial life. _Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia_ ("The Anxieties of +Shanti Andia"), a story of Basque seamen which contains a charming +picture of a childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, delightful as +it is to read, is too muddled in romantic claptrap to add much to his +fame. _El Mundo es Así_ ("The World is Like That") expresses, rather +lamely it seems to me, the meditations of a disenchanted revolutionist. +The latest series, _Memorias de un Hombre de Acción_, a series of yarns +about the revolutionary period in Spain at the beginning of the +nineteenth century, though entertaining, is more an attempt to escape +in a jolly romantic past the realities of the morose present than +anything else. _César o Nada_, translated into English under the title +of "Aut Cæsar aut Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than his +earlier novels. That is probably why it was chosen for translation into +English. We know how anxious our publishers are to furnish food easily +digestible by weak American stomachs. + +It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from the point of view of +form. Improvisation is the very soul of Spanish writing. In thinking +back over books of Baroja's one has read, one remembers more +descriptions of places and people than anything else. In the end it is +rather natural history than dramatic creation. But a natural history +that gives you the pictures etched with vitriol of Spanish life in the +end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century which +you get in these novels of Baroja's is very near the highest sort of +creation. If we could inject some of the virus of his intense sense of +reality into American writers it would be worth giving up all these +stale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry. The +following, again from the preface of _La Dama Errante_, is Baroja's own +statement of his aims. And certainly he has realized them. + +"Probably a book like _la Dama Errante_ is not of the sort that lives +very long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum but +an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, is +too hard, not serene enough. + +"This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men +of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is +fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies +us little, so little that it can hardly be said to preoccupy us at +all." + + + + +_VI: Talk by the Road_ + + +"Spain," said Don Alonso, as he and Telemachus walked out of Illescas, +followed at a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-man, "has +never been swept clean. There have been the Romans and the Visigoths +and the Moors and the French--armed men jingling over mountain roads. +Conquest has warped and sterilised our Iberian mind without changing an +atom of it. An example: we missed the Revolution and suffered from +Napoleon. We virtually had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition was +stronger with us than anywhere." + +"Do you think it will have to be swept clean?" asked Telemachus. + +"He does." Don Alonso pointed with a sweep of an arm towards a man +working in the field beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse; +he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy triangular hoe. +Sometimes he raised it only a foot above the ground to poise for a +blow, sometimes he swung it from over his shoulder. Face, clothes, +hands, hoe were brown against the brown hillside where a purple shadow +mocked each heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the morning +silence the blows of the hoe beat upon the air with muffled insistence. + +"And he is the man who will do the building," went on Don Alonso; "It +is only fair that we should clear the road." + +"But you are the thinkers," said Telemachus; his mother Penelope's +maxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly in +his mind like tickets from a cash register. + +"Thought is the acid that destroys," answered Don Alonso. + +Telemachus turned to look once more at the man working in the field. +The hoe rose and fell, rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke a +flash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw all at once the whole +earth, plowed fields full of earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back, +bent forward, muscles of arms swelling and slackening, hoes flashing at +the same moment against the sky, at the same moment buried with a thud +in clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels, hearing the +continuous hiss and squudge of well oiled engines out at sea. + + + + +_VII: Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs_ + + +When we stepped out of the bookshop the narrow street steamed with the +dust of many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling wheels gaudily +dressed men and women sat motionless in attitudes. Over the backs of +the carriages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red and purple and +yellow. + +"Bread and circuses," muttered the man who was with me, "but not enough +bread." + +It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were coming back from the +_toros_. We turned into a narrow lane, where the dust was yellow +between high green and lavender-washed walls. From the street we had +left came a sound of cheers and hand-clapping. My friend stopped still +and put his hand on my arm. + +"There goes Belmonte," he said; "half the men who are cheering him have +never had enough to eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better; to +keep people quiet they filled their bellies. Those fools--" he jerked +his head backwards with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the high +combs and the hair gleaming black under lace and the wasp-waists of the +young men and the insolence of black eyes above the flashing wheels of +the carriages, "--those fools give only circuses. Do you people in the +outside world realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have starved +for generations, that those black bulls for the circuses may graze over +good wheatland ... to make Spain picturesque! The only time we see meat +is in the bullring. Those people who argue all the time as to why +Spain's backward and write books about it, I could tell them in one +word: malnutrition." He laughed despairingly and started walking fast +again. "We have solved the problem of the cost of living. We live on +air and dust and bad smells." + +I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes before to ask an address, +and had been taken into the back room with the wonderful enthusiastic +courtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the bookseller, a carpenter +and the bookseller's errand-boy had all talked at once, explaining the +last strike of farm-laborers, when the region had been for months under +martial law, and they, and every one else of socialist or republican +sympathies, had been packed for weeks into overcrowded prisons. They +all regretted they could not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, they +explained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupying it at that moment. It +ended by the bookseller's coming out with me to show me the way to +Azorín's. + +Azorín was an architect who had supported the strikers; he had just +come back to Cordova from the obscure village where he had been +imprisoned through the care of the military governor who had paid him +the compliment of thinking that even in prison he would be dangerous in +Cordova. He had recently been elected municipal councillor, and when we +reached his office was busy designing a schoolhouse. On the stairs the +bookseller had whispered to me that every workman in Cordova would die +for Azorín. He was a sallow little man with a vaguely sarcastic voice +and an amused air as if he would burst out laughing at any moment. He +put aside his plans and we all went on to see the editor of +_Andalusia_, a regionalist pro-labor weekly. + +In that dark little office, over three cups of coffee that appeared +miraculously from somewhere with the pungent smell of ink and fresh +paper in our nostrils, we talked about the past and future of Cordova, +and of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated +plains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountains +where the mines are. In Azorín's crisp phrases and in the long ornate +periods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hope +of these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for the +first time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a +brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout: +"It's true what they say, but they don't say enough, they don't say +enough." + +The problem in the south of Spain is almost wholly agrarian. From the +Tagus to the Mediterranean stretches a mountainous region of low +rainfall, intersected by several series of broad river-valleys which, +under irrigation, are enormously productive of rice, oranges, and, in +the higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow grapes, olives +and almonds. A country on the whole much like southern California. +Under the Moors this region was the richest and most civilised in +Europe. + +When the Christian nobles from the north reconquered it, the +ecclesiastics laid hold of the towns and extinguished industry through +the Inquisition, while the land was distributed in huge estates to the +magnates of the court of the Catholic Kings. The agricultural workers +became virtually serfs, and the communal village system of working the +land gradually gave way, Now the province of Jaen, certainly as large +as the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by six families. This +process was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth and +seventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed +overseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, so +that the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and least +vigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve of +the social order. + +It is only comparatively recently that the consciousness has begun to +form among the workers of the soil that it is possible for them to +change their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare. +Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the +frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and +starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a +curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns +revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple +of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words +after him with the fervor of people going through a religious mystery. +Unspeakable faith possesses them in what they call "_la nueva +ley_" ("the new law"), by which the good things a man wrings by his +sweat from the earth shall be his and not the property of a distant +señor in Madrid. + +It is this hopefulness that marks the difference between the present +agrarian agitation and the violent and desperate peasant risings of the +past. As early as October, 1918, a congress of agricultural workers was +held to decide on strike methods and, more important, to formulate a +demand for the expropriation of the land. In two months the unions, +("_sociedades de resistencia_") had been welded--at least in the +province of Cordova--into a unified system with more or less central +leadership. The strike which followed was so complete that in many +cases even domestic servants went out. After savage repression and the +military occupation of the whole province, the strike petered out into +compromises which resulted in considerable betterment of working +conditions but left the important issues untouched. + +The rise in the cost of living and the growing unrest brought matters +to a head again in the summer of 1919. The military was used with even +more brutality than the previous year. Attempts at compromise, at +parcelling out uncultivated land have proved as unavailing as the +Mausers of the Civil Guard to quell the tumult. The peasants have kept +their organizations and their demands intact. They are even willing to +wait; but they are determined that the land upon which they have worn +out generations and generations shall be theirs without question. + +All this time the landlords brandish a redoubtable weapon: starvation. +Already thousands of acres that might be richly fertile lie idle or are +pasture for herds of wild bulls for the arena. The great land-owning +families hold estates all over Spain; if in a given region the workers +become too exigent, they decide to leave the land in fallow for a year +or two. In the villages it becomes a question of starve or emigrate. To +emigrate many certificates are needed. Many officials have to be +placated. For all that money is needed. Men taking to the roads in +search of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arson +becomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burns +mysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from the +parched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starved +men watch the flames with grim exultation. + +Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the _incultura_ of the Andalusian +peasants. The problem of civilization, after all, is often one of food +calories. Fernando de los Ríos, socialist deputy for Granada, recently +published the result of an investigation of the food of the +agricultural populations of Spain in which he showed that only in the +Balkans--out of all Europe--was the working man so under-nourished. The +calories which the diet of the average Cordova workman represented was +something like a fourth of those of the British workman's diet. Even so +the foremen of the big estates complain that as a result of all this +social agitation their workmen have taken to eating more than they did +in the good old times. + +How long it will be before the final explosion comes no one can +conjecture. The spring of 1920, when great things were expected, was +completely calm. On the other hand, in the last municipal elections +when six hundred socialist councillors were elected in all Spain--in +contrast to sixty-two in 1915--the vote polled in Andalusia was +unprecedented. Up to this election many of the peasants had never dared +vote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the +_caciques_, the bosses that control Spanish local politics. However, in +spite of socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian problem +will always remain separate from anything else in the minds of the +peasants. This does not mean that they are opposed to communism or +cling as violently as most of the European peasantry to the habit of +private property. + +All over Spain one comes upon traces of the old communist village +institutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often land +were held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything depends +upon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common. +And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there is +no rain; for what good is land to a man without water? Still, until +there grows up a much stronger community of interest than now exists +between the peasants and the industrial workers, the struggle for the +land and the struggle for the control of industry will be, in Spain, as +I think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain, +however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a clean +sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova, +hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the +zigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the center +of organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I +rode with some young men who were emigrating to America, to make their +fortunes, they said. When I told them I had been to Cordova, their +faces became suddenly bright with admiration. + +"Ah, Cordova," one of them cried; "they've got the guts in Cordova." + + + + +_VIII: Talk by the Road_ + + +At the first crossroads beyond Illescas the dumpling-man and Don Alonso +turned off in quest of the trout stream. Don Alonso waved solemnly to +Lyaeus and Telemachus. + +"Perhaps we shall meet in Toledo," he said. + +"Catch a lot of fish," shouted Lyaeus. + +"And perhaps a thought," was the last word they heard from Don Alonso. + +The sun already high in the sky poured tingling heat on their heads and +shoulders. There was sand in their shoes, an occasional sharp pain in +their shins, in their bellies bitter emptiness. + +"At the next village, Tel, I'm going to bed. You can do what you like," +said Lyaeus in a tearful voice. + +"I'll like that all right." + +"_Buenos días, señores viajeros_," came a cheerful voice. They found +they were walking in the company of a man who wore a tight-waisted +overcoat of a light blue color, a cream-colored felt hat from under +which protruded long black moustaches with gimlet points, and shoes +with lemon-yellow uppers. They passed the time of day with what +cheerfulness they could muster. + +"Ah, Toledo," said the man. "You are going to Toledo, my birthplace. +There I was born in the shadow of the cathedral, there I shall die. I +am a traveller of commerce." He produced two cards as large as +postcards on which was written: + + ANTONIO SILVA Y YEPES + UNIVERSAL AGENT + IMPORT EXPORT NATIONAL PRODUCTS + +"At your service, gentlemen," he said and handed each of them a card. +"I deal in tinware, ironware, pottery, lead pipes, enameled ware, +kitchen utensils, American toilet articles, French perfumery, cutlery, +linen, sewing machines, saddles, bridles, seeds, fancy poultry, +fighting bantams and objects _de vertu_.... You are foreigners, are you +not? How barbarous Spain, what people, what dirt, what lack of culture, +what impoliteness, what lack of energy!" + +The universal agent choked, coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief of +crimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his +moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning on +Telemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moist +pathos like a dog's. + +"Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too much to bear, when I +rejoice to think that it's all up with my lungs and that I shan't live +long anyway.... In America I should have been a Rockefeller, a +Carnegie, a Morgan. I know it, for I am a man of genius. It is true. I +am a man of genius.... And look at me here walking from one of these +cursed tumbledown villages to another because I have not money enough +to hire a cab.... And ill too, dying of consumption! O Spain, Spain, +how do you crush your great men! What you must think of us, you who +come from civilized countries, where life is organized, where commerce +is a gentlemanly, even a noble occupation...." + +"But you savor life more...." + +"_Ca, ca_," interrupted the universal agent with a downward gesture of +the hand. "To think that they call by the same name living here in a +pen like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York, Biarritz, +Trouville ... luxurious beds, coiffures, toilettes, theatrical +functions, sumptuous automobiles, elegant ladies glittering with +diamonds ... the world of light and enchantment! Oh to think of it! And +Spain could be the richest country in Europe, if we had energy, +organization, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal, copper, +silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food products, woolens, cotton +cloth, sugarcane, raw cotton ... couplets, dancers, gipsy girls...." + +The universal agent had quite lost his breath. He coughed for a long +time into his crimson handkerchief, then looked about him over the +rolling dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting gave a sheen of +vivid green like the patina on a Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged his +shoulders. + +"_¡Qué vida!_ What a life!" + +For some time a spire had been poking up into the sky at the road's +end; now yellow-tiled roofs were just visible humped out of the +wheatland, with the church standing guard over them, it's buttresses as +bowed as the legs of a bulldog. At the sight of the village a certain +spring came back to Telemachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed with +envy that Lyaeus took little skips as he walked. + +"If we properly exploited our exports we should be the richest people +in Europe," the universal agent kept shouting with far-flung gestures +of despair. And the last they heard from him as they left him to turn +into the manure-littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada de la +Luna was, "_¡Qué pueblo indecente!_... What a beastly town ... yet if +they exploited with energy, with modern energy, their exports...." + + + + +_IX: An Inverted Midas_ + + +Every age must have had choice spirits whose golden fingers turned +everything they touched to commonplace. Since we know our own +literature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these inverted +Midases--though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during the +last century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by the +middle classes and for the middle classes must count for something. +Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudes +would have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids had +stone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as is +printing to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press +has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked +thought. The labor of graving on stone or of baking tablets of brick or +even of scrawling letters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb on +the dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He now lolls in a Morris +chair, sipping iced tea, dictating to four blonde and two dark-haired +stenographers; three novels, a couple of books of travel and a short +story written at once are nothing to a really enterprising universal +genius. Poor Julius Caesar with his letters! + +We complain that we have no supermen nowadays, that we can't live as +much or as widely or as fervently or get through so much work as could +Pico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Politian, that the race drifts +towards mental and physical anæmia. I deny it. With the typewriter all +these things shall be added unto us. This age too has its great +universal geniuses. They overrun the seven continents and their +respective seas. Accompanied by mænadic bands of stenographers, and a +music of typewriters deliriously clicking, they go about the world, +catching all the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the plums, +tunneling mountains, bridging seas, smoothing the facets off ideas so +that they may be swallowed harmlessly like pills. With true Anglo-Saxon +conceit we had thought that our own Mr. Wells was the most universal of +these universal geniuses. He has so diligently brought science, ethics, +sex, marriage, sociology, God, and everything else--properly +deodorized, of course--to the desk of the ordinary man, that he may +lean back in his swivel-chair and receive faint susuration from the +sense of progress and the complexity of life, without even having to go +to the window to look at the sparrows sitting in rows on the +telephone-wires, so that really it seemed inconceivable that anyone +should be more universal. It was rumored that there lay the ultimate +proof of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. What other race had produced a great +universal genius? + +But all that was before the discovery of Blasco Ibáñez. + +On the backs of certain of Blasco Ibáñez's novels published by the Casa +Prometeo in Valencia is this significant advertisement: _Obras de +Vulgarización Popular_ ("Works of Popular Vulgarization"). Under it is +an astounding list of volumes, all either translated or edited or +arranged, if not written from cover to cover, by one tireless pen,--I +mean typewriter. Ten volumes of universal history, three volumes of the +French Revolution translated from Michelet, a universal geography, a +social history, works on science, cookery and house-cleaning, nine +volumes of Blasco Ibáñez's own history of the European war, and a +translation of the Arabian Nights, a thousand and one of them without +an hour missing. "Works of Popular Vulgarization." I admit that in +Spanish the word _vulgarización_ has not yet sunk to its inevitable +meaning, but can it long stand such a strain? Add to that list a round +two dozen novels and some books of travel, and who can deny that Blasco +Ibáñez is a great universal genius? Read his novels and you will find +that he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of +vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents +and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland +waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic +architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and +the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and +the red paste with which countesses polish their fingernails in Monte +Carlo. + +The very pattern of a modern major-general. And, like the great +universal geniuses of the Renaissance, he has lived as well as thought +and written. He is said to have been thirty times in prison, six times +deputy; he has been a cowboy in the pampas of Argentina; he has founded +a city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of Cervantes in the +middle of it; he has rounded the Horn on a sailing-ship in a hurricane, +and it is whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters with the +shells on. He hobnobs with the universe. + +One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibáñez's universe is a bulkier, +burlier universe than Mr. Wells's. One is strangely certain that the +axle of Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of London, say +Putney, where each house has a bit of garden where waddles an asthmatic +pet dog, where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, before a +gas-log, where every bookcase makes a futile effort to impinge on +infinity through the encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going and +coming, swathed in clothes that must above all be respectable, to +business and from business. But who can say where Blasco Ibáñez's +universe centers? It is in constant progression. + +Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fierce +green fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror, +the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole history +comes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated in +such feverish haste for the edification of the American public. The +beginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round about +Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy +violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in +Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from +him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable +murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that +life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas than +to a careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at home in the strong +communal feeling, in the individual anarchism, in the passionate +worship of the water that runs through the fields to give life and of +the blades of wheat that give bread and of the wine that gives joy, +which is the moral make-up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerely +indignant about the agrarian system, about social inequality, and is +full of the revolutionary bravado of his race. + +A typical novel of this period is _La Barraca_, a story of a peasant +family that takes up land which has lain vacant for years under the +curse of the community, since the eviction of the tenants, who had held +it for generations, by a landlord who was murdered as a result, on a +lonely road by the father of the family he had turned out. The struggle +of these peasants against their neighbours is told with a good deal of +feeling, and the culmination in a rifle fight in an irrigation ditch is +a splendid bit of blood and thunder. There are many descriptions of +local customs, such as the Tribunal of Water that sits once a week +under one of the portals of Valencia cathedral to settle conflicts of +irrigation rights, a little dragged in by the heels, to be sure, but +still worth reading. Yet even in these early novels one feels over and +over again the force of that phrase "popular vulgarization." Valencia +is being vulgarized for the benefit of the universe. The proletariat is +being vulgarized for the benefit of the people who buy novels. + +From Valencia raids seem to have been made on other parts of Spain. +_Sonnica la Cortesana_ gives you antique Saguntum and the usual "Aves," +wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap of costume novels. In _La +Catedral_ you have Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern world +in the shadow of Gothic spires. _La Bodega_ takes you into the genial +air of the wine vaults of Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers, +processions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt in the +background. Up to now they have been Spanish novels written for +Spaniards; it is only with _Sangre y Arena_ that the virus of a +European reputation shows results. + +In _Sangre y Arena_, to be sure, you learn that _toreros_ use scent, +have a home life, and are seduced by passionate Baudelairian ladies of +the smart set who plant white teeth in their brown sinewy arms and +teach them to smoke opium cigarettes. You see _toreros_ taking the +sacraments before going into the ring and you see them tossed by the +bull while the crowd, which a moment before had been crying "hola" as +if it didn't know that something was going wrong, gets very pale and +chilly and begins to think what dreadful things _corridas_ are anyway, +until the arrival of the next bull makes them forget it. All of which +is good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally +sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an +exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and +sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizer put +it. + +Next comes the expedition to South America and _The Argonauts_ appears. +The Atlantic is bridged,--there open up rich veins of picturesqueness +and new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out. +Blasco Ibáñez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with _The Four +Horsemen of the Apocalypse_, which captures the Allied world and +proves again the mot about prophets. So without honor in its own +country is the _Four Horsemen_ that the English translation rights +are sold for a paltry three thousand pesetas. But the great success in +England and America soon shows that we can appreciate the acumen of a +neutral who came in and rooted for our side; so early in the race too! +While the iron is still hot another four hundred pages of well-sugared +pro-Ally propaganda appears, _Mare Nostrum_, which mingles Ulysses +and scientific information about ocean currents, Amphitrite and +submarines, Circe and a vamping Theda Bara who was really a German Spy, +in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-Jumbo of nationalism. + +_Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spain +entirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, all +elaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastes +of his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, the +Habañera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in the +cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency. + +And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and the +typewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from the +combination of Blasco Ibáñez and Broadway? + +At any rate the movies will profit. + +Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibáñez had not learnt the +typewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of the +commonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibáñez need not +have been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, with +something of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin of +Tarascon. Blustering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a real +world--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if it +is a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibáñez's mere +energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such +easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that +for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs +equal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly +without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you +have is one more popular novelist. + +It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibáñez and the United States should +have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no +good. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popular +novelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the inverted +Midas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it, +yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the ideals +of the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of our +national consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibáñez in America will only be +a seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need we +pretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternal +things? + +Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might as +well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular +vulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is. +And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno +and Azorín, poets like Valle Inclán and Antonio Machado, ... but I +suppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the +_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_. + + + + +_X: Talk by the Road_ + + +When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff. +They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a +tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a +sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to +the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth +chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the +blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not +thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up. +Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about +him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans +and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din +a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "_y mañana +Carnaval_." + +"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on +his trousers. + +Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes. + +"I smell wine," he said. + +Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the +thought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, if +they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare through +him. + +"Come on, they're dancing," he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallery +that overhung the end of the court. + +"Don't forget the butterfly net, Tel." + +"What for?" + +"To catch your gesture, what do you think?" + +Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As they +wrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing +up and down in a _jota_. In the doorway stood two guitar players and +beside them a table with pitchers and glasses and a glint of spilt +wine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation of +olive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together and +shot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: "_Hola_," and +shouted that the foreigners must sing a song. + +"After dinner," cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. "We +haven't eaten for a year and a half!" + +The _padrón_, a red thick-necked individual with a week's white +bristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams. + +"You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are, +travelling all over the world." He turned to the company with a +gesture; "I was like that when I was young." + +They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves on +either side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all too +small. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who was +tending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth, +noticing that they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackled +and burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang. + +"To-morrow's Carnival," she said. "We mustn't stint ourselves." Then +she handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poached +eggs floated, and the _padrón_ drew the table near the fire and sat +down opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while they +ate. + +After a while he began talking. From outside the hand-clapping and the +sound of castanettes continued interrupted by intervals of shouting and +laughter and an occasional snatch from the song that ended every verse +with "_y mañana Carnaval_." + +"I travelled when I was your age," he said. "I have been to America ... +Nueva York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco.... Selling +those little nuts.... Yes, peanuts. What a country! How many laws there +are there, how many policemen. When I was young I did not like it, but +now that I am old and own an inn and daughters and all that, _vamos_, I +understand. You see in Spain we all do just as we like; then, if we are +the sort that goes to church we repent afterwards and fix it up with +God. In European, civilized, modern countries everybody learns what +he's got to do and what he must not do.... That's why they have so many +laws.... Here the police are just to help the government plunder and +steal all it wants.... But that's not so in America...." + +"The difference is," broke in Telemachus, "as Butler put it, between +living under the law and living under grace. I should rather live under +gra...." But he thought of the maxims of Penelope and was silent. + +"But after all we know how to sing," said the _Padrón_. "Will you have +coffee with cognac?... And poets, man alive, what poets!" + +The _padrón_ stuck out his chest, put one hand in the black sash that +held up his trousers and recited, emphasizing the rhythm with the +cognac bottle: + + 'Aquí está Don Juan Tenorio; + no hay hombre para él ... + Búsquenle los reñidores, + cérquenle los jugadores, + quien se précie que le ataje, + a ver si hay quien le aventaje + en juego, en lid o en amores.' + +He finished with a flourish and poured more cognac into the coffee +cups. + +"_¡Que bonito!_ How pretty!" cried the old hunchbacked woman who sat on +her heels in the fireplace. + +"That's what we do," said the _padrón_. "We brawl and gamble and +seduce women, and we sing and we dance, and then we repent and the +priest fixes it up with God. In America they live according to law." + +Feeling well-toasted by the fire and well-warmed with food and drink, +Lyaeus and Telemachus went to the inn door and looked out on the broad +main street of the village where everything was snowy white under the +cold stare of the moon. The dancing had stopped in the courtyard. A +group of men and boys was moving slowly up the street, each one with a +musical instrument. There were the two guitars, frying pans, +castanettes, cymbals, and a goatskin bottle of wine that kept being +passed from hand to hand. Each time the bottle made a round a new song +started. And so they moved slowly up the street in the moonlight. + +"Let's join them," said Lyaeus. + +"No, I want to get up early so as...." + +"To see the gesture by daylight!" cried Lyaeus jeeringly. Then he went +on: "Tel, you live under the law. Under the law there can be no +gestures, only machine movements." + +Then he ran off and joined the group of men and boys who were singing +and drinking. Telemachus went back to bed. On his way upstairs he +cursed the maxims of his mother Penelope. But at any rate to-morrow, in +Carnival-time, he would feel the gesture. + + + + +_XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile_ + + +"I spent fifty thousand pesetas in a year at the military school.... +_J'aime le chic_," said the young artillery officer of whom I had asked +the way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled hill that led to the +irregular main street of Segovia. A moment before we had passed under +the aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon arch into the crimson +sky. He had snapped tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's that +good for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all for a puff of gasoline from +a Hispano-Suizo.... D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look at this +rotten town! There's not a street in it I can speed on in a motorcycle +without running down some fool old woman or a squalling +brat or other.... Who's this gentleman you are going to see?" + +"He's a poet," I said. + +"I like poetry too. I write it ... light, elegant, about light elegant +women." He laughed and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out from +each side of his moustache. + +He left me at the end of the street I was looking for, and after an +elaborate salute walked off saying: + +"To think that you should come here from New York to look for an +address in such a shabby street, and I so want to go to New York. If I +was a poet I wouldn't live here." + +The name on the street corner was _Calle de los Desemparados_.... +"Street of Abandoned Children." + + * * * * * + +We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling spoons in coffee-glasses +while a wax-pink fat man played billiards in front of us, being +ponderously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail with yellow face and +walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping _Bueno_ after every play. There +was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt +Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a +smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old +towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The +group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre +brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the +bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia. +Sorolla was dying, another had gone mad. At last someone said, "It's +stifling here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night." + +There was no sound in the streets but the irregular clatter of our +footsteps. The slanting moonlight cut the street into two triangular +sections, one enormously black, the other bright, engraved like a +silver plate with the lines of doors, roofs, windows, ornaments. +Overhead the sky was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness cut +across our path, then there was dazzling light through an arch beyond. +Outside the gate we sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in which +you could still feel a trace of the warmth of the sun. To one side was +the lime-washed wall of a house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken door +where the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails and the +knocker, and above the door red geraniums hanging out of a pot, their +color insanely bright in the silver-white glare. The other side a deep +glen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees and the sound of a stream. In +the dark above the arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up the +green feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody was talking about _El +Buscón_, a story of Quevedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, a +wandering story of thieves and escapes by night through the back doors +of brothels, of rope ladders dangling from the windows of great ladies, +of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts under bridges, and +fingers touching significantly in the holy-water fonts of tall +cathedrals. A ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate. The man +next me shivered. + +"The dead are stronger than the living," he said. "How little we have; +and they...." + +In the quaver of his voice was a remembering of long muletrains +jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork +curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep +roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from +Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on +their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds, +rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skins +at their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands of +Extremadura, where there were infidels to kill and cattle to drive off +and village girls to rape, all when the gate was as new and crisply cut +out of clean stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in the valley +a donkey brayed long and dismally. + +"They too have their nostalgias," said someone sentimentally. + +"What they of the old time did not have," came a deep voice from under +a bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of +putrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they had +the sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which is +worth more?" + +The man next to me had got to his feet. "A night like this with a moon +like this," he said, "we should go to the ancient quarter of the +witches." + +Gravel crunched under our feet down the road that led out of moonlight +into the darkness of the glen--to _San Millán de las brujas_. + + * * * * * + +You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now and +then of Rubén Darío, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into his +verse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orient +and poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into +the thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty and +banality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egypt +and France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist and +romantic and Parnassian all at once, Rubén Darío's verse is like those +doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish and +Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest +routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare +beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of +the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And +that spark can be said--as truly as anything of the sort can be +said--to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in +Spanish poetry. Of course the poets have not been content to be +influenced by the outside world only through Darío. Baudelaire and +Verlaine had a very large direct influence, once the way was opened, +and their influence succeeded in curbing the lush impromptu manner of +romantic Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work--and he is beginning +to be generally considered the central figure--there is a restraint and +terseness of phrase rare in any poetry. + +I do not mean to imply that Machado can be called in any real sense a +pupil of either Darío or Verlaine; rather one would say that in a +generation occupied largely in more or less unsuccessful imitation of +these poets, Machado's poetry stands out as particularly original and +personal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramón Jiménez, it would +be in America and England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and Amy +Lowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods. The influence +of the symbolists and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicaraguan +broke down the bombastic romantic style current in Spain, as it was +broken down everywhere else in the middle nineteenth century. In +Machado's work a new method is being built up, that harks back more to +early ballads and the verse of the first moments of the Renaissance +than to anything foreign, but which shows the same enthusiasm for the +rhythms of ordinary speech and for the simple pictorial expression of +undoctored emotion that we find in the renovators of poetry the world +over. _Campos de Castilla_, his first volume to be widely read, marks +an epoch in Spanish poetry. + +Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with places. It is obsessed with +the old Spanish towns where he has lived, with the mellow sadness of +tortuous streets and of old houses that have soaked up the lives of +generations upon generations of men, crumbling in the flaming silence +of summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains in winter. Though +born in Andalusia, the bitter strength of the Castilian plain, where +half-deserted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken into their +walls, still dreaming of the ages of faith and conquest, has subjected +his imagination, and the purity of Castilian speech has dominated his +writing, until his poems seem as Castilian as Don Quixote. + + "My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville, + and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening. + My youth: twenty years in the land of Castile. + My history: a few events I do not care to remember." + +So Machado writes of himself. He was born in the eighties, has been a +teacher of French in government schools in Soria and Baeza and at +present in Segovia--all old Spanish cities very mellow and very +stately--and has made the migration to Paris customary with Spanish +writers and artists. He says in the _Poema de un Día_: + + Here I am, already a teacher + of modern languages, who yesterday + was a master of the gai scavoir + and the nightingale's apprentice. + +He has published three volumes of verse, _Soledades_ ("Solitudes"), +_Campos de Castilla_ ("Fields of Castile"), and _Soledades y Galerías_ +("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a government institution, the +Residencia de Estudiantes, has published his complete works up to date. + +The following translations are necessarily inadequate, as the poems +depend very much on modulations of rhythm and on the expressive fitting +together of words impossible to render in a foreign language. He uses +rhyme comparatively little, often substituting assonance in accordance +with the peculiar traditions of Spanish prosody. I have made no attempt +to imitate his form exactly. + + +I + + Yes, come away with me--fields of Soria, + quiet evenings, violet mountains, + aspens of the river, green dreams + of the grey earth, + bitter melancholy + of the crumbling city-- + perhaps it is that you have become + the background of my life. + + Men of the high Numantine plain, + who keep God like old--Christians, + may the sun of Spain fill you + with joy and light and abundance! + + +II + + A frail sound of a tunic trailing + across the infertile earth, + and the sonorous weeping + of the old bells. + The dying embers + of the horizon smoke. + White ancestral ghosts + go lighting the stars. + + --Open the balcony-window. The hour + of illusion draws near... + The afternoon has gone to sleep + and the bells dream. + + +III + + Figures in the fields against the sky! + Two slow oxen plough + on a hillside early in autumn, + and between the black heads bent down + under the weight of the yoke, + hangs and sways a basket of reeds, + a child's cradle; + And behind the yoke stride + a man who leans towards the earth + and a woman who, into the open furrows, + throws the seed. + Under a cloud of carmine and flame, + in the liquid green gold of the setting, + their shadows grow monstrous. + + +IV + + Naked is the earth + and the soul howls to the wan horizon + like a hungry she-wolf. + What do you seek, + poet, in the sunset? + Bitter going, for the path + weighs one down, the frozen wind, + and the coming night and the bitterness + of distance.... On the white path + the trunks of frustrate trees show black, + on the distant mountains + there is gold and blood. The sun dies.... + + What do you seek, + poet, in the sunset? + + +V + + Silver hills and grey ploughed lands, + violet outcroppings of rock + through which the Duero traces + its curve like a cross-bow + about Soria, + dark oak-wood, wild cliffs, + bald peaks, + and the white roads and the aspens of the river. + + Afternoons of Soria, mystic and warlike, + to-day I am very sad for you, + sadness of love, + Fields of Soria, + where it seems that the rocks dream, + come with me! Violet rocky outcroppings, + silver hills and grey ploughed lands. + + +VI + + We think to create festivals + of love out of our love, + to burn new incense + on untrodden mountains; + and to keep the secret + of our pale faces, + and why in the bacchanals of life + we carry empty glasses, + while with tinkling echoes and laughing + foams the gold must of the grape.... + + A hidden bird among the branches + of the solitary park + whistles mockery.... We feel + the shadow of a dream in our wine-glass, + and something that is earth in our flesh + feels the dampness of the garden like a caress. + + +VII + + I have been back to see the golden aspens, + aspens of the road along the Duero + between San Polo and San Saturio, + beyond the old stiff walls + of Soria, barbican + towards Aragon of the Castilian lands. + + These poplars of the river, that chime + when the wind blows their dry leaves + to the sound of the water, + have in their bark the names of lovers, + initials and dates. + Aspens of love where yesterday + the branches were full of nightingales, + aspens that to-morrow will sing + under the scented wind of the springtime, + aspens of love by the water + that speeds and goes by dreaming, + aspens of the bank of the Duero, + come away with me. + + +VIII + + Cold Soria, clear Soria, + key of the outlands, + with the warrior castle + in ruins beside the Duero, + and the stiff old walls, + and the blackened houses. + + Dead city of barons + and soldiers and huntsmen, + whose portals bear the shields + of a hundred hidalgos; + city of hungry greyhounds, + of lean greyhounds + that swarm + among the dirty lanes + and howl at midnight + when the crows caw. + + Cold Soria! The clock + of the Lawcourts has struck one. + Soria, city of Castile, + so beautiful under the moon. + + +IX + +AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL + + They put him away in the earth + a horrible July afternoon + under a sun of fire. + + A step from the open grave + grew roses with rotting petals + among geraniums of bitter fragrance, + red-flowered. The sky + a pale blue. A wind + hard and dry. + + Hanging on the thick ropes, + the two gravediggers + let the coffin heavily + down into the grave. + + It struck the bottom with a sharp sound, + solemnly, in the silence. + + The sound of a coffin striking the earth + is something unutterably solemn. + + The heavy clods broke into dust + over the black coffin. + + A white mist of dust rose in the air + out of the deep grave. + + And you, without a shadow now, sleep. + Long peace to your bones. + For all time + you sleep a tranquil and a real sleep. + + +X + +THE IBERIAN GOD + + Like the cross-bowman, + the gambler in the song, + the Iberian had an arrow for his god + when he shattered the grain with hail + and ruined the fruits of autumn; + and a gloria when he fattened + the barley and the oats + that were to make bread to-morrow. + "God of ruin, + I worship because I wait and because I fear. + I bend in prayer to the earth + a blasphemous heart. + + "Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain, + I know your strength, I know my slavery. + Lord of the clouds in the east + that trample the country-side, + of dry autumns and late frosts + and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests! + + "Lord of the iris in the green meadows + where the sheep graze, + Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw + and of the hut the whirlwind shatters, + your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth, + your warmth ripens the tawny grain, + and your holy hand, St. John's eve, + hardens the stone of the green olive. + + "Lord of riches and poverty, + Of fortune and mishap, + who gives to the rich luck and idleness, + and pain and hope to the poor! + + "Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel + of the year I have sown my sowing + that has an equal chance with the coins + of a gambler sown on the gambling-table! + + "Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood, + two-faced of love and vengeance, + to you, dice cast into the wind, + goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!" + + This man who insults God in his altars, + without more care of the frown of fate, + also dreamed of paths across the seas + and said: "It is God who walks upon the waters." + + Is it not he who put God above war, + beyond fate, + beyond the earth, + beyond the sea and death? + + Did he not give the greenest bough + of the dark-green Iberian oak + for God's holy bonfire, + and for love flame one with God? + + But to-day ... What does a day matter? + for the new household gods + there are plains in forest shade + and green boughs in the old oak-woods. + + Though long the land waits + for the curved plough to open the first furrow, + there is sowing for God's grain + under thistles and burdocks and nettles. + + What does a day matter? Yesterday waits + for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity; + men of Spain, neither is the past dead, + nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written. + + Who has seen the face of the Iberian God? + I wait + for the Iberian man who with strong hands + will carve out of Castilian oak + The parched God of the grey land. + + + + +_XII: A Catalan Poet_ + + _It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the + mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is + silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose + the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos + the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner + of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._) + + +Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the +farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of +oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped +sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's +boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering +slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In +the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic +scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea +kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the +arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and +Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that +when Catalonia begins to reëmerge as a nucleus of national +consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile, +poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the +mountains and of the sea. + +Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies +towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing +about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance +the descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragon +and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who +was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of +Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled.) +This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the +reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the +Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the +resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language. + +Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures +that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They +had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of +ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during +centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the +symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the +dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance +will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of +the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men +conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make +permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the +mist-capped mountains and the changing sea. + +Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years +after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in +Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a +completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain +amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of +Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un +maître_" the French would have called him. + +Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, a +poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment +before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many +moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly +and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her +breasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with +cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his +eyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a saint +had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramón Lull +lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he +sought the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of the +sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with +the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the +tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona +journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could +only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In +Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the +peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionate +metaphor of Lull. + +Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems: + + At sunset time + drinking at the spring's edge + I drank down the secrets + of mysterious earth. + + Deep in the runnel + I saw the stainless water + born out of darkness + for the delight of my mouth, + + and it poured into my throat + and with its clear spurting + there filled me entirely + mellowness of wisdom. + + When I stood straight and looked, + mountains and woods and meadows + seemed to me otherwise, + everything altered. + + Above the great sunset + there already shone through the glowing + carmine contours of the clouds + the white sliver of the new moon. + + It was a world in flower + and the soul of it was I. + + I the fragrant soul of the meadows + that expands at flower-time and reaping-time. + + I the peaceful soul of the herds + that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass. + + I the soul of the forest that sways in waves + like the sea, and has as far horizons. + + And also I was the soul of the willow tree + that gives every spring its shade. + + I the sheer soul of the cliffs + where the mist creeps up and scatters. + + And the unquiet soul of the stream + that shrieks in shining waterfalls. + + I was the blue soul of the pond + that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer. + + I the soul of the all-moving wind + and the humble soul of opening flowers. + + I was the height of the high peaks... + + The clouds caressed me with great gestures + and the wide love of misty spaces + clove to me, placid. + + I felt the delightfulness of springs + born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers; + and in the ample quietude of horizons + I felt the reposeful sleep of storms. + + And when the sky opened about me + and the sun laughed on my green planes + people, far off, stood still all day + staring at my sovereign beauty. + + But I, full of the lust + that makes furious the sea and mountains + lifted myself up strongly through the sky + lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails... + + At sunset time + drinking at the spring's edge + I drank down the secrets + of mysterious earth. + +The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and +fishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise +towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all +living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up +suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of +old soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence of +poems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are from +the climax. + + All the voices of the earth + acclaim count Arnold + because from the dark trial + he has come back triumphant. + + "Son of the earth, son of the earth, + count Arnold, + now ask, now ask + what cannot you do?" + + "Live, live, live forever, + I would never die: + to be like a wheel revolving; + to live with wine and a sword." + + "Wheels roll, roll, + but they count the years." + + "Then I would be a rock + immobile to suns or storms." + + "Rock lives without life + forever impenetrable." + + "Then the ever-moving sea + that opens a path for all things." + + "The sea is alone, alone, + you go accompanied." + + "Then be the air when it flames + in the light of the deathless sun." + + "But air and sun are loveless, + ignorant of eternity." + + "Then to be man more than man + to be earth palpitant." + + "You shall be wheel and rock, + you shall be the mist-veiled sea + you shall be the air in flame, + you shall be the whirling stars, + you shall be man more than man + for you have the will for it. + You shall run the plains and hills, + all the earth that is so wide, + mounted on a horse of flame + you shall be tireless, terrible + as the tramp of the storms + All the voices of earth + will cry out whirling about you. + They will call you spirit in torment + call you forever damned." + + Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa + asleep at the feet of naked Christ. + Arnold goes pacing a dark path; + there is silence among the mountains; + in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, + a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless. + Arnold stands under the sheer portal. + + He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa + and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone + at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil + without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless, + without any defense, there, sleeping.... + + She had a great head of turbulent hair. + + "How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa," + thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. + She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little + a flush spreads over all her face + as if a dream had crept through her gently + until she laughs aloud very softly + with a tremulous flutter of the lips. + + "What amorous lips, Adalaisa," + thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. + + A great sigh swells through her, sleeping, + like a seawave, and fades to stillness. + + "What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa," + thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently. + + But when she opens her eyes he, awake, + tingling, carries her off in his arms. + + When they burst out into the open fields + it is day. + +But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of +sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes: + + And when the terror-haunted moment comes + to close these earthly eyes of mine, + open for me, Lord, other greater eyes + to look upon the immensity of your face. + +But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily +terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy +freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary +generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as +if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been +hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes +and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in +the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets +to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved +off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining +a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats +at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness +of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my +speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into +intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that +the eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant +changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a +hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the +various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the +beckoning flames of hell. + +The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of +another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a +Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We +sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of +the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind +us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at +one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and +peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore, +hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was +marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and +the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a +family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on +which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that +proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement, +"By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall": + + Canta esposa, fila i canta + que el patí em faras suau + Quan l'esposa canta i fila + el casal s'adorm en pau. + +It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer +and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon +countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new +cohesions were in the making. + +"I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of +thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But +I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine." + +Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in +soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face +flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco +madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. +Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the +sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were +sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting +beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a +sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the +family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's +lyricizing of wifehood, + + When the wife sits singing as she spins + all the house can sleep in peace. + +From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of +fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the +chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city +park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when +the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail +folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown +face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was +not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that +beach, beside that sea, there was no time. + +When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass +olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What +could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the +art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am +I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have +always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to +bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of +the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_. + +And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, +the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with +bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and +Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond +the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there +is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships +drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful +well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous +demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea +lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet. + +In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for +flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, +of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous +so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy +and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we +should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the +Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre +Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding +new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid. + +To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the +oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the +earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall. + + + + +_XIII: Talk by the Road_ + + +On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in his +hands moaning "_¡Ay de mí!_" over and over again. + +"I beg pardon," he said stiffly, trying to slip by. + +"Did you see the function this evening, sir?" asked the man looking up +at Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow face +with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustache +that had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of it +in his mouth. + +"What function?" + +"In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor." He got to his feet and +tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out +his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain +clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him. + +They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told +how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be +expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And +the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd. +He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too +artistic for these pigs of provincials. + +"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally. + +"How ruined?" asked Telemachus. + +"The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_ +have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of +the _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a +tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a +great singer of _zarzuela_.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now +look at me!" + +Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anæmic +wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark, +strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace of +red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron +spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic. +The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke and +generations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over the +fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where the +soup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on the +fire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangled +with stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure of +the _padrón_, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watching +the coffee-pot. + +"It was an elegant life, full of voyages," went on the actor. "South +America, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners, +receptions, ceremonial dress.... Ladies of high society came to +congratulate us.... I played all the child rôles.... When I was +fourteen a duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged, +dying of hunger--not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of a +village. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want is +foreign importations, Viennese musical comedies, smutty farces from +Paris...." + +"With cognac or rum?" the _padrón_ roared out suddenly in his deep +voice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire. + +"Cognac," said the actor. "What rotten coffee!" He gave little petulant +sniffs as he poured sugar into his glass. + +The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of the dark end of the kitchen. + +The actor took two handfuls of his hair and yanked at them. + +"_Ay_ my nerves!" he shrieked. The baby wailed louder in spasm after +spasm of yelling. The actor jumped to his feet, "¡Dolóres, Dolóres, +_ven acá_!" + +After he had called several times a girl came into the room padding +softly on bare feet and stood before him tottering sleepily in the +firelight. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A strand of black hair +curled round her full throat and spread raggedly over her breasts. She +had pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through a rent in her +coarse nightgown the fire threw a patch of red glow curved like a rose +petal about one brown thigh. + +"_¡Qué desvergonza'a!_... How shameless!" muttered the _padrón_. + +The actor was scolding her in a shrill endless whine. The girl stood +still without answering, her teeth clenched to keep them from +chattering. Then she turned without a word and brought the baby from +the packing box in which he lay at the end of the room, and drawing the +blanket about both her and the child crouched on her heels very close +to the flame with her bare feet in the ashes. When the crying had +ceased she turned to the actor with a full-lipped smile and said, +"There's nothing the matter with him, Paco. He's not even hungry. You +woke him up, the poor little angel, talking so loud." + +She got to her feet again, and with slow unspeakable dignity walked +back and forth across the end of the room with the child at her breast. +Each time she turned she swung the trailing blanket round with a sudden +twist of her body from the hips. + +Telemachus watched her furtively, sniffing the hot aroma of coffee and +cognac from his glass, and whenever she turned the muscles of his body +drew into tight knots from joy. + +"_Es buena chica...._ She's a nice kid, from Malaga. I picked her up +there. A little stupid.... But these days...." the actor was saying +with much shrugging of the shoulders. "She dances well, but the public +doesn't like her. _No tiene cara de parisiana._ She hasn't the Parisian +air.... But these days, _vamos_, one can't be too fastidious. This +taste for French plays, French women, French cuisine, it's ruined the +Spanish theatre." + +The fire flared crackling. Telemachus sat sipping his coffee waiting +for the unbearable delight of the swing of the girl's body as she +turned to pace back towards him across the room. + + + + +_XIV: Benavente's Madrid_ + + +All the gravel paths of the Plaza Santa Ana were encumbered with wicker +chairs. At one corner seven blind musicians all in a row, with violins, +a cello, guitars and a mournful cornet, toodled and wheezed and +twiddled through the "Blue Danube." At another a crumpled old man, with +a monkey dressed in red silk drawers on his shoulder, ground out "_la +Paloma_" from a hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a fountain +sparkled in the yellow light that streamed horizontally from the cafés +fuming with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square, and ragged +guttersnipes dipped their legs in the slimy basin round about it, +splashing one another, rolling like little colts in the grass. From the +cafés and the wicker chairs and tables, clink of glasses and dominoes, +patter of voices, scuttle of waiters with laden trays, shouts of men +selling shrimps, prawns, fried potatoes, watermelon, nuts in little +cornucopias of red, green, or yellow paper. Light gleamed on the +buff-colored disk of a table in front of me, on the rims of two +beer-mugs, in the eyes of a bearded man with an aquiline nose very +slender at the bridge who leaned towards me talking in a deep even +voice, telling me in swift lisping Castilian stories of Madrid. First +of the Madrid of Felipe Cuarto: _corridas_ in the Plaza Mayor, _auto da +fé_, pictures by Velasquez on view under the arcade where now there is +a doughnut and coffee shop, pompous coaches painted vermilion, cobalt, +gilded, stuffed with ladies in vast bulge of damask and brocade, plumed +cavaliers, pert ogling pages, lurching and swaying through the +foot-deep stinking mud of the streets; plays of Calderon and Lope +presented in gardens tinkling with jewels and sword-chains where ladies +of the court flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced lovers. +Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, _majas_ leaning from +balconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged +guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffnecked +grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dying +the _dos de Mayo_ with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under the +brick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of the +Sardine; naked backs of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding under +the hoop skirts of the queen. Then the romantic Madrid of the thirties, +Larra, Becquer, Espronceda, Byronic gestures, vigils in graveyards, +duels, struttings among the box-alleys of the Retiro, pale young men in +white stocks shooting themselves in attics along the Calle Mayor. "And +now," the voice became suddenly gruff with anger, "look at Madrid. They +closed the Café Suizo, they are building a subway, the Castellana looks +more like the Champs Elysées every day.... It's only on the stage that +you get any remnant of the real Madrid. Benavente is the last +_madrileño_. _Tiene el sentido de lo castizo._ He has the sense of the +..." all the end of the evening went to the discussion of the meaning +of the famous word "_castizo_." + +The very existence of such a word in a language argues an acute sense +of style, of the manner of doing things. Like all words of real import +its meaning is a gamut, a section of a spectrum rather than something +fixed and irrevocable. The first implication seems to be "according to +Hoyle," following tradition: a neatly turned phrase, an essentially +Castilian cadence, is _castizo_; a piece of pastry or a poem in the old +tradition are _castizo_, or a compliment daintily turned, or a cloak of +the proper fullness with the proper red velvet-bordered lining +gracefully flung about the ears outside of a café. _Lo castizo_ is the +essence of the local, of the regional, the last stronghold of Castilian +arrogance, refers not to the empty shell of traditional observances but +to the very core and gesture of them. Ultimately _lo castizo_ means all +that is salty, savourous of the red and yellow hills and the bare +plains and the deep _arroyos_ and the dust-colored towns full of +palaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-colored cloaks and the +mule-drivers with blankets over their shoulders, and the discursive +lean-faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafés and casinos, and the +stout dowagers with mantillas over their gleaming black hair walking to +church in the morning with missals clasped in fat hands, all that is +acutely indigenous, Iberian, in the life of Castile. + +In the flood of industrialism that for the last twenty years has +swelled to obliterate landmarks, to bring all the world to the same +level of nickel-plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been the +refuge of _lo castizo_. It has been a theatre of manners and local +types and customs, of observation and natural history, where a rather +specialized well-trained audience accustomed to satire as the tone of +daily conversation was tickled by any portrayal of its quips and +cranks. A tradition of character-acting grew up nearer that of the +Yiddish theatre than of any other stage we know in America. Benavente +and the brothers Quintero have been the playwrights who most typified +the school that has been in vogue since the going out of the _drame +passionel_ style of Echegaray. At present Benavente as director of the +_Teatro Nacional_ is unquestionably the leading figure. Therefore it is +very fitting that Benavente should be in life and works of all +_madrileños_ the most _castizo_. + +Later, as we sat drinking milk in la Granja after a couple of hours of +a shabby third-generation Viennese musical show at the Apollo, my +friend discoursed to me of the manner of life of the _madrileño_ in +general and of Don Jacinto Benavente in particular. Round eleven or +twelve one got up, took a cup of thick chocolate, strolled on the +Castellana under the chestnut trees or looked in at one's office in the +theatre. At two one lunched. At three or so one sat a while drinking +coffee or anis in the Gato Negro, where the waiters have the air of +cabinet ministers and listen to every word of the rather languid +discussions on art and letters that while away the afternoon hours. +Then as it got towards five one drifted to a matinee, if there chanced +to be a new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in the new +Frenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Dinner came along round nine; from +there one went straight to the theatre to see that all went well with +the evening performance. At one the day culminated in a famous +_tertulia_ at the Café de Lisboa, where all the world met and argued +and quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epigrams at tables +stacked with coffee glasses amid spiral reek of cigarette smoke. + +"But when were the plays written?" I asked. + +My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons," he said, "and _en route_, +and in bed, and while being shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedy +between biscuits at breakfast.... And now that the Metro's open, it's a +great help. I know a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy, +sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos!" + +"But Madrid's being spoiled," he went on sadly, "at least from the +point of view of _lo castizo_. In the last generation all one saw of +daylight were sunset and dawn, people used to go out to fight duels +where the Residencia de Estudiantes is now, and they had real +_tertulias_, _tertulias_ where conversation swaggered and parried and +lunged, sparing nothing, laughing at everything, for all the world like +our unique Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio. + + 'Yo a las cabañas baje, + yo a los palacios subí, + y los claustros escalé, + y en todas partes dejé + memorias amargas de mí.' + +"Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of Carlist duchesses, and +God knows the crows and the cloisters weren't let off scot free. And +like good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if laughter did leave +bitter memories, and were willing to wait till their deathbeds to +reconcile themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our generation, +they all went solemn in their cradles.... Except for the theatre +people, always except for the theatre people! We of the theatres will +be _castizo_ to the death." + +As we left the café, I to go home to bed, my friend to go on to another +_tertulia_, he stood for a moment looking back among the tables and +glasses. + +"What the Agora was to the Athenians," he said, and finished the +sentence with an expressive wave of the hand. + +It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as suspicious of neighbors as +if they still lived in the boggy forests of Finland, city-dwellers for +a paltry thirty generations, to understand the publicity, the communal +quality of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thought +when one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talking +of, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighbors +about the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, can +hardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is the +courtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at the +marketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the café and the +casino. The modern theatre is as directly the offshoot of the café as +the old theatre was of the marketplace where people gathered in front +of the church porch to see an interlude or mystery acted by travelling +players in a wagon. The people who write the plays, the people who act +them and the people who see them spend their spare time smoking about +marbletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those too poor to buy a +drink stand outside in groups the sunny side of squares. Constant talk +about everything that may happen or had happened or will happen manages +to butter the bread of life pretty evenly with passion and thought and +significance, but one loses the chunks of intensity. There is little +chance for the burst dams that suddenly flood the dry watercourse of +emotion among more inhibited, less civilized people. Generations upon +generations of townsmen have made of life a well-dredged canal, +easy-flowing, somewhat shallow. + +It follows that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative, +witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at +its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost +never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually +go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real +intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous +quality of adventurous progression. The Quinteros write domestic +comedies full of whim and sparkle and tenderness. But expression always +seems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utter +self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays on +the nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings of +emotion in which all of life is drawn taut. + +At present in Madrid even café life is receding before the exigencies +of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English and +American manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to +the rest of Europe, to Latin America, in its own internal structure. +Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city is +fast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought of +Spanish-speaking people. The _madrileño_, lean, cynical, unscrupulous, +nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becoming +extinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be +ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices of +seats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually; the artisans, apprentice +boys, loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the backbone of the +audiences can no longer afford the theatre and have taken to the movies +instead. Managers spend money on scenery and costumes as a way of +attracting fashionables. It has become quite proper for women to go to +the theatre. Benavente's plays thus acquire double significance as the +summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its +hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, +the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the +vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated +humorous mordant conversation about café tables: _lo castizo_. + +The first play of his I ever saw, "_Gente Conocida_," impressed me, I +remember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had to +content myself with following the general modulation of things, as +carrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people, +intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. After +the first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in the +seat beside me sighing comfortably "_Qué castizo es este Benavente_," +and then went into a volley of approving chirpings. The full import of +her enthusiasm did not come to me until much later when I read the play +in the comparative light of a surer knowledge of Castilian, and found +that it was a most vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of that +very dowager's own circle, a showing up of the predatory spite of +"people of consequence." Here was this society woman, who in any other +country would have been indignant, enjoying the annihilation of her +kind. On such willingness to play the game of wit, even of abuse, +without too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of social +intercourse, is founded all the popularity of Benavente's writing. +Somewhere in Hugo's Spanish grammar (God save the mark!) is a proverb +to the effect that the wind of Madrid is so subtle that it will kill a +man without putting out a candle. The same, at their best, can be said +of Benavente's satiric comedies: + + El viento de Madrid es tan sutil + que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil. + +From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken stream +usually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow the +undergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almost +entire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again; +clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards the +dome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating skyline with +cupolas and baroque belfries jutting among the sudden lights and darks +of the clouds. Then perhaps the sun will light up with a spreading +shaft of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a biscuit +manufacturer's warehouse, a row of white blocks of apartments along the +edge of town to the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal Madrid, +it will be a type city in Europe in the industrial era that shines in +the sun beyond the blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes on +the lines. So will it be in a few years with modernized Madrid, with +the life of cafés and _paseos_ and theatres. There will be moments when +in American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms, shiny restaurants +built in copy of those of Buenos Aires, someone who has read his +Benavente will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old intonations, +of witty parries, of noisy bombastic harangues and feel for one +pentecostal moment the full and by that time forgotten import of _lo +castizo_. + + + + +_XV: Talk by the Road_ + + +The sun next morning was tingling warm. Telemachus strode along with a +taste of a milky bowl of coffee and crisp _churros_ in his mouth and a +fresh wind in his hair; his feet rasped pleasantly on the gravel of the +road. Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain, +roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of the +beetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against the +steamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to the +north. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the dark +figures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On the +telegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlight +glinting, when they stirred, on the white patches on their wings. +Telemachus felt well-rested and content with himself. + +"After all mother knows best," he was thinking. "That foolish Lyaeus +will come dragging himself into Toledo a week from now." + +Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso he had seen the day before +in Illescas. Don Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a long +red sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and a small leather bottle of +wine on the sward in front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark of +which he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey horse. + +"_Hola_, my friend," cried Don Alonso, "still bent on Toledo?" + +"How soon can I get there?" + +"Soon enough to see the castle of San Servando against the sunset. We +will go together. You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the honor +of eating something, you must be hungry." Thereupon Don Alonso handed +Telemachus the sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with. + +"How early you must have started." + +They sat together munching bread and sausage to which the sweet pepper +mashed into it gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head thrown +back, let a little wine squirt into their mouths from the bottle. + +Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of sausage held between bread by +tips of long grey fingers. + +"You are now, my friend, in the heart of Castile. Look, nothing but +live-oaks along the gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under a +tremendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In Madrid there is not so +much sky, is there? In your country there is not so much sky? Look at +the huge volutes of those clouds. This is a setting for thoughts as +mighty in contour as the white cumulus over the Sierra, such as come +into the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-striding...." Don Alonso +put a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a +potential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid, +robust.... I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizing +it, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker.... But the day +will come when in this gruff land we shall have flower and fruit." + +Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head thrown back against the +twisted trunk of the olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet, +and after rummaging a moment in the little knapsack that hung over his +shoulder, produced absent-mindedly a handful of small white candies the +shape of millstones which he stared at in a puzzled way for some +seconds. + +"After all," he went on, "they make famous sweets in these old +Castilian towns. These are _melindres_. Have one.... When people, d'you +know, are kind to children, there are things to be expected." + +"Certainly children are indulgently treated in Spain," said Telemachus, +his mouth full of almond paste. "They actually seem to like children!" + +A cart drawn by four mules tandem led by a very minute donkey with +three strings of blue beads round his neck was jingling past along the +road. As the canvas curtains of the cover were closed the only evidence +of the driver was a sleepy song in monotone that trailed with the dust +cloud after the cart. While they stood by the roadside watching the +joggle of it away from them down the road, a flushed face was poked out +from between the curtains and a voice cried "Hello, Tel!" + +"It's Lyaeus," cried Telemachus and ran after the cart bubbling with +curiosity to hear his companion's adventures. + +With a angle of mulebells and a hoarse shout from the driver the cart +stopped, and Lyaeus tumbled out. His hair was mussed and there were +wisps of hay on his clothes. He immediately stuck his head back in +through the curtains. By the time Telemachus reached him the cart was +tinkling its way down the road again and Lyaeus stood grinning, +blinking sleepy eyes in the middle of the road, in one hand a skin of +wine, in the other a canvas bag. + +"What ho!" cried Telemachus. + +"Figs and wine," said Lyaeus. Then, as Don Alonso came up leading his +grey horse, he added in an explanatory tone, "I was asleep in the +cart." + +"Well?" said Telemachus. + +"O it's such a long story," said Lyaeus. + +Walking beside them, Don Alonso was reciting into his horse's ear: + + 'Sigue la vana sombra, el bien fingido. + El hombre está entregado + al sueño, de su suerte no cuidando, + y con paso callado + el cielo vueltas dando + las horas del vivir le va hurtando.' + +"Whose is that?" said Lyaeus. + +"The revolving sky goes stealing his hours of life.... But I don't +know," said Don Alonso, "perhaps like you, this Spain of ours makes +ground sleeping as well as awake. What does a day matter? The driver +snores but the good mules jog on down the appointed road." + +Then without another word he jumped on his horse and with a smile and a +wave of the hand trotted off ahead of them. + + + + +_XVI: A Funeral in Madrid_ + + _Doce días son pasados + después que el Cid acabára + aderézanse las gentes + para salir a batalla + con Búcar ese rey moro + y contra la su canalla. + Cuando fuera media noche + el cuerpo así coma estaba + le ponen sobre Babieca + y al caballo lo ataban._ + + +I + +And when the army sailed out of Valencia the Moors of King Bucar fled +before the dead body of the Cid and ten thousand of them were drowned +trying to scramble into their ships, among them twenty kings, and the +Christians got so much booty of gold and silver among the tents that +the poorest of them became a rich man. Then the army continued, the +dead Cid riding each day's journey on his horse, across the dry +mountains to Sant Pedro de Cardeña in Castile where the king Don +Alfonso had come from Toledo, and he seeing the Cid's face still so +beautiful and his beard so long and his eyes so flaming ordered that +instead of closing the body in a coffin with gold nails they should set +it upright in a chair beside the altar, with the sword Tizona in its +hand. And there the Cid stayed more than ten years. + + Mandó que no se enterrase + sino que el cuerpo arreado + se ponga junto al altar + y a Tizona en la su mano; + así estuvo mucho tiempo + que fueron más de diez años. + +In the pass above people were skiing. On the hard snow of the road +there were orange-skins. A victoria had just driven by in which sat a +bored inflated couple much swathed in furs. + +"Where on earth are they going?" + +"To the Puerta de Navecerrada," my friend answered. + +"But they look as if they'd be happier having tea at Molinero's than +paddling about up there in the snow." + +"They would be, but it's the style ... winter sports ... and all +because a lithe little brown man who died two years ago liked the +mountains. Before him no _madrileño_ ever knew the Sierra existed." + +"Who was that?" + +"Don Francisco Giner." + +That afternoon when it was already getting dark we were scrambling wet, +chilled, our faces lashed by the snow, down through drifts from a +shoulder of Siete Picos with the mist all about us and nothing but the +track of a flock of sheep for a guide. The light from a hut pushed a +long gleaming orange finger up the mountainside. Once inside we pulled +off our shoes and stockings and toasted our feet at a great fireplace +round which were flushed faces, glint of teeth in laughter, schoolboys +and people from the university shouting and declaiming, a smell of tea +and wet woolens. Everybody was noisy with the rather hysterical +excitement that warmth brings after exertion in cold mountain air. +Cheeks were purple and tingling. A young man with fuzzy yellow hair +told me a story in French about the Emperor of Morocco, and produced a +tin of potted blackbirds which it came out were from the said +personage's private stores. Unending fountains of tea seethed in two +smoke-blackened pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut among +leaping shadows were piles of skis and the door, which occasionally +opened to let in a new wet snowy figure and shut again on skimming +snow-gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous jollity. Train time came +suddenly and we ran and stumbled and slid the miles to the station +through the dark, down the rocky path. + +In the third-class carriage people sang songs as the train jounced its +way towards the plain and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked me +if I knew it was Don Francisco who had had that hut built for the +children of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza. Little by little he +told me the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner de los Ríos +and the revolution of 1873, a story like enough to many others in the +annals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in its +overtones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as the +explanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me an +inkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I had +noticed in people I knew about Madrid. + +Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz +del Río, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government +scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed +the failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration of Fernando +Septimo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last flame of romantic +revolt, had shot himself for love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg, +Sanz del Río found dying Krause, the first archpriest who stood +interpreting between Kant and the world. When he returned to Spain he +refused to take up his chair at the university saying he must have time +to think out his problems, and retired to a tiny room--a room so dark +that they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder under the +window in the town of Illescas, where was another student, Greco's San +Ildefonso. There he lived several years in seclusion. When he did +return to the university it was to refuse to make the profession of +political and religious faith required by a certain prime minister +named Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his disciples. At the +same time Francisco Giner de los Ríos, then a young man who had just +gained an appointment with great difficulty because of his liberal +ideas, resigned out of solidarity with the rest. In 1868 came the +liberal revolution which was the political expression of this whole +movement, and all these professors were reinstated. Until the +restoration of the Bourbons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization, +Europeanization. + +Returned to power Orovio lost no time in republishing his decrees of a +profession of faith. Giner, Ascárate, Salmerón and several others were +arrested and exiled to distant fortresses when they protested; their +friends declared themselves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and many +other professors resigned, so that the university was at one blow +denuded of its best men. From this came the idea of founding a free +university which should be supported entirely by private subscription. +From that moment the life of Giner de los Ríos was completely entwined +with the growth of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza, which developed +in the course of a few years into a coeducational primary school. And +directly or indirectly there is not a single outstanding figure in +Spanish life to-day whose development was not largely influenced by +this dark slender baldheaded old man with a white beard whose picture +one finds on people's writing desks. + + ... Oh, sí, llevad, amigos, + su cuerpo a la montaña + a los azules montes + del ancho Guadarrama, + +wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado--and I rather think Machado is the +pupil whose name will live the longest--after Don Francisco's death in +1915. + + ... Yes, carry, friends + his body to the hills + to the blue peaks + of the wide Guadarrama. + There are deep gulches + of green pines where the wind sings. + There is rest for his spirit + under a cold live oak + in loam full of thyme, where play + golden butterflies.... + There the master one day + dreamed new flowerings for Spain. + +These are fragments from an elegy by Juan Ramon Jiménez, another +poet-pupil of Don Francisco: + + "Don Francisco.... It seemed that he summed up all that is tender + and keen in life: flowers, flames, birds, peaks, children.... Now, + stretched on his bed, like a frozen river that perhaps still flows + under the ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence.... He + was like a living statue of himself, a statue of earth, of wind, of + water, of fire. He had so freed himself from the husk of every day + that talking to him we might have thought we were talking to his + image. Yes. One would have said he wasn't going to die: that he had + already passed, without anybody's knowing it, beyond death; that he + was with us forever, like a spirit. + + * * * * * + + "In the little door of the bedroom one already feels well-being. A + trail of the smell of thyme and violets that comes and goes with + the breeze from the open window leads like a delicate hand towards + where he lies.... Peace. All death has done has been to infuse the + color of his skin with a deep violet veiling of ashes. + + "What a suave smell, and how excellent death is here! No rasping + essences, none of the exterior of blackness and crêpe. All this is + white and uncluttered, like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like + the whitewashed portal of some garden in the south. All just as it + was. Only he who was there has gone. + + * * * * * + + "The day is fading, with a little wind that has a premonition of + spring. In the window panes is a confused mirroring of rosy clouds. + The blackbird, the blackbird that he must have heard for thirty + years, that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead, has come + to see if he's listening. Peace. The bedroom and the garden strive + quietly light against light: the brightness of the bedroom is + stronger and glows out into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up + into the sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of a tree + and sits there twittering. In the shadow below the blackbird + whistles once more. Now and then one seems to hear the voice that + is silenced forever. + + "How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a spring, + reading under a tree, like letting the stream of a lyric river + carry one away.... And one feels like never moving: like plucking + to infinity, as one might tear roses to pieces, these white full + hours; like clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal + twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty. + + * * * * * + + "'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that one may know, + opposite that other sign 'Catholic Cemetery,' so that one may also + know. + + "He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so opposed to the + smiling savourous poetry of his spirit. But it had to be. He'll + still hear the blackbirds of the familiar garden. 'After all,' says + Cossio, 'I don't think he'll be sorry to spend a little while with + Don Julián....' + + "Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the earth with thyme; + on the coffin they have thrown roses, narcissus, violets. There + comes, lost, an aroma of last evening, a bit of the bedroom from + which they took so much away.... + + "Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full of wind drag + frozen shadows across us, and through them flying low, black + grackles. In the distance Guadarrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts + crystals of cubed white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second + in the sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish, then + lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies away.... + + "Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and forgetfulness.... + Silence. In the silence, the voice of a child walking through the + fields, the sound of a sob hidden among the tombstones, the wind, + the broad wind of these days.... + + "I've seen occasionally a fire put out with earth. Innumerable + little tongues spurted from every side. A pupil of his who was a + mason made for this extinguished fire its palace of mud on a piece + of earth two friends kept free. He has at the head a euonymus, + young and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts with + coming spring, an acacia...." + +Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas, are scattered sparsely, +tight round heads of blue green, over hills that in summer are yellow +like the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo was one of Don +Francisco's favorite walks, out past the jail, where over the gate is +written an echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity the +criminal," past the palace of Moncloa with its stately abandoned +gardens, and out along the Manzanares by a road through the royal +domain where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs of "Beware the +mantraps," then up a low hill from which one sees the Sierra Guadarrama +piled up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-peaks above long +blue foothills and all the foreground rolling land full of clumps of +encinas, and at last into the little village with its barracks and its +dilapidated convent and its planetrees in front of the mansion Charles +V built. It was under an encina that I sat all one long morning reading +up in reviews and textbooks on the theory of law, the life and opinions +of Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made the +sticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about me +reek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill of +snow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragrance +of distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish +importunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I was +reading an account of the philosophical concept of monism, cudgelling +my brain with phrases. And his fervent love of nature made the master +evoke occasionally in class this beautiful image of the great poet and +philosopher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the spirit of nature +contemplates itself"; and then having qualified with a phrase +Schelling's expression, he would turn on those who see in nature +manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer for +meditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as +natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in the +Idea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonic +substantialism has been interpreted...." + +In the grass under my book were bright fronds of moss, among which very +small red ants performed prodigies of mountaineering, while along +tramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly, glinting when the +light struck them. The smell of cistus was intense, hot, full of spices +as the narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In the distance the +mountains piled up in zones olive green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine, +white. A cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book. Thought and +passion, reflection and instinct, affections, emotions, impulses +collaborate in the rule of custom, which is revealed not in words +declared and promulgated in view of future conduct, but in the act +itself, tacit, taken for granted, or, according to the energetic +expression of the Digest: _rebus et factis_. Over "factis," sat a +little green and purple fly with the body curved under at the table. I +wondered vaguely if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it was +clear to me that these books, these dusty philosophical phrases, these +mortuary articles by official personages were dimming the legend in my +mind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarily +personal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set him +up in the church with his sword in his hand, for all men to see. What +sort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his +theory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds? +And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leave +behind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans that +one remembers Francis of Assisi. + +And the curious thing about the legend of a personality is that it may +reach the highest fervor without being formulated. It is something by +itself that stands behind anecdotes, death-notices, elegies. + +In Madrid at the funeral of another of the great figures of nineteenth +century Spain, Pérez Galdós, I stood on the curb beside a large-mouthed +youth with a flattened toadlike face, who was balancing a great +white-metal jar of milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and the +carriages full of flowers had just passed. The street in front of us +was a slow stream of people very silent, their feet shuffling, +shuffling, feet in patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toed +shoes, pointed-toed shoes, _alpargatas_, canvas sandals; people along +the sides seemed unable to resist the suction of it, joined in +unostentatiously to follow if only a few moments the procession of the +legend of Don Benito. The boy with the milk turned to me and said how +lucky it was they were burying Galdós, he'd have an excuse for being +late for the milk. Then suddenly he pulled his cap off and became +enormously excited and began offering cigarettes to everyone round +about. He scratched his head and said in the voice of a Saul stricken +on the road to Damascus: "How many books he must have written, that +gentleman! _¡Cáspita!_... It makes a fellow sorry when a gentleman like +that dies," and shouldering his pail, his blue tunic fluttering in the +wind, he joined the procession. + +Like the milk boy I found myself joining the procession of the legend +of Giner de los Ríos. That morning under the encina I closed up the +volumes on the theory of law and the bulletins with their death-notices +and got to my feet and looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo and +thought of the little lithe baldheaded man with a white beard like the +beard in El Greco's portrait of Covarrubias, who had taught a +generation to love the tremendous contours of their country, to climb +mountains and bathe in cold torrents, who was the first, it almost +seems, to feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a lifetime of +courageous unobtrusive work managed to stamp all the men and women +whose lives remotely touched his with the seal of his personality. Born +in Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia of a family that came from +Vélez-Málaga, a white town near the sea in the rich fringes of the +Sierra Nevada, he had the mental agility and the sceptical tolerance +and the uproarious good nature of the people of that region, the +sobriety and sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism became a +definite part of the creed of the hopeful discontented generations that +are gradually, for better or for worse, remoulding Spain. His nostalgia +of the north, of fjords where fir trees hang over black tidal waters, +of blonde people cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled towns, +became the gospel of Europeanization, of wholesale destruction of all +that was individual, savage, African in the Spanish tradition. _Rebus +et factis._ And yet none of the things and acts do much to explain the +peculiar radiance of his memory, the jovial tenderness with which +people tell one about him. The immanence of the man is such that even +an outsider, one who like the milk boy at the funeral of Galdós meets +the procession accidentally with another errand in his head, is drawn +in almost without knowing it. It's impossible to think of him buried in +a box in unconsecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In Madrid, in +the little garden of the Institución where he used to teach the +children, in front of a certain open fire in a certain house at El +Pardo where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used to half expect to +meet him, that some friend would take me to see him as they took people +to see Cid in San Pedro de Cardeña. + + Cara tiene de hermosura + muy hermosa y colorada; + los ojos igual abiertos + muy apuesta la su barba + Non parece que está muerto + antes vivo semejaba. + + +II + +Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently condemned to fifteen years' +imprisonment for _lèse majesté_ for some remark made in an article +published in a Valencia paper, no attempt has been made either to make +him serve the term or to remove him from the chair of Greek at the +University of Salamanca. Which proves something about the efficiency of +the stand Giner de los Ríos and his friends made fifty years before. +Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary attempt of August, 1917, +the removal of Bestiero from his chair caused so many of the faculty to +resign and such universal protest that he was reinstated although an +actual member of the revolutionary committee and at that time under +sentence for life. In 1875 after the fall of the republic it had been +in the face of universal popular reaction that the Krausistas founded +their free university. The lump is leavened. + +But Unamuno. A Basque from the country of Loyola, living in Salamanca +in the highest coldest part of the plateau of old Castile, in many +senses the opposite of Giner de los Ríos, who was austere as a man on a +long pleasant walk doesn't overeat or overdrink so that the walk may be +longer and pleasanter, while Unamuno is austere religiously, mystically. +Giner de los Ríos was the champion of life, Unamuno is the champion of +death. Here is his creed, one of his creeds, from the preface of the +_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_: + + "There is no future: there is never a future. This thing they call + the future is one of the greatest lies. To-day is the real future. + What will we be to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What about us + to-day, now; that is the only question. + + "And as for to-day, all these nincompoops are thoroughly satisfied + because they exist to-day, mere existence is enough for them. + Existence, ordinary naked existence fills their whole soul. They + feel nothing beyond existence. + + "But do they exist? Really exist? I think not, because if they did + exist, if they really existed, existence would be suffering for + them and they wouldn't content themselves with it. If they really + and truly existed in time and space they would suffer not being of + eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this passion, what is it + but the passion of God in us? God who suffers in us from our + temporariness and finitude, that divine suffering will burst all + the puny bonds of logic with which they try to tie down their puny + memories and their puny hopes, the illusion of their past and the + illusion of their future. + + * * * * * + + "Your Quixotic madness has made you more than once speak to me of + Quixotism as the new religion. And I tell you that this new + religion you propose to me, if it hatched, would have two singular + merits. One that its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not + Cervantes--probably wasn't a real man of flesh and blood at all, + indeed we suspect that he was pure fiction. And the other merit + would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, people's butt + and laughing stock. + + "What we need most is the valor to face ridicule. Ridicule is the + arm of all the miserable barbers, bachelors, parish priests, canons + and dukes who keep hidden the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness, + Knight who made all the world laugh but never cracked a joke. He + had too great a soul to bring forth jokes. They laughed at his + seriousness. + + "Begin then, friend, to do the Peter the Hermit and call people to + join you, to join us, and let us all go win back the sepulchre even + if we don't know where it is. The crusade itself will reveal to us + the sacred place. + + * * * * * + + "Start marching! Where are you going? The star will tell you: to + the sepulchre! What shall we do on the road while we march? What? + Fight! Fight, and how? + + "How? If you find a man lying? Shout in his face: 'lie!' and + forward! If you find a man stealing, shout: 'thief!' and forward! + If you find a man babbling asininities, to whom the crowd listens + open-mouthed, shout at them all: 'idiots!' and forward, always + forward! + + * * * * * + + "To the march then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those + who begin to study the step and its length and its rhythm. Above + everything, throw out all those who fuss about this business of + rhythm. They'll turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march + into a dance. Away with them! Let them go off somewhere else to + sing the flesh. + + "Those who try to turn the squadron on the march into a dancing + quadrille call themselves and each other poets. But they're not. + They're something else. They only go to the sepulchre out of + curiosity, to see what it's like, looking for a new sensation, and + to amuse themselves along the road. Away with them! + + "It's these that with their indulgence of Bohemians contribute to + maintain cowardice and lies and all the weaknesses that flood us. + When they preach liberty they only think of one: that of disposing + of their neighbor's wife. All is sensuality with them. They even + fall in love sensually with ideas, with great ideas. They are + incapable of marrying a great and pure idea and breeding a family + with it; they only flirt with ideas. They want them as mistresses, + sometimes just for the night. Away with them! + + "If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along the path that + smiles from the fringe of grass, let him pluck it, but without + breaking ranks, without dropping out of the squadron of which the + leader must always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But + if he put the little flower in the strap above his cuirass, not to + look at it himself, but for others to look at, away with him! Let + him go with his flower in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else. + + "Look, friend, if you want to accomplish your mission and serve + your country you must make yourself unpleasant to the sensitive + boys who only see the world through the eyes of their sweethearts. + Or through something worse. Let your words be strident and rasping + in their ears. + + "The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood or under the lee + of a mountain. There they will pitch their tents and the crusaders + will wash their feet, and sup off what their women have prepared, + then they will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep to + begin the march again the following day. And when someone dies they + will leave him on the edge of the road with his armor on him, at + the mercy of the crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the + dead." + +Instead of the rationalists and humanists of the North, Unamuno's idols +are the mystics and saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwart +men who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada, Pizarro, Narváez, who +governed with whips and thumbscrews and drank death down greedily like +heady wine. He is excited by the amorous madness of the mysticism of +Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical, +unreasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearning other-worldliness. +His style, it follows perforce, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full of +tremendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous angry insistence about +his dogmas that makes his essays unforgettable, even if one objects as +violently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship. There is an +anarchic fury about his crying in the wilderness that will win many a +man from the fleshpots and chain gangs. + +In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the Last +Judgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo +on a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishes +a sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the _Dies Irae_ and +huddled clusters of plump little naked people fall away into space from +under his feet. There are moments in "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la +Vida_" and in the "_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_" when in the +rolling earthy Castilian phrases one can feel the brandishing of the +sword of that very angel. Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust +and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills +that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like +piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, +ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the +lash of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow into the hereafter, +where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying +angel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Unamuno is constantly attacking +sturdily those who clamor for the modernization, Europeanization of +Spanish life and Spanish thought: he is the counterpoise to the +northward-yearning apostles of Giner de los Ríos. + +In an essay in one of the volumes published by the _Residencia de +Estudiantes_ he wrote: + + "As can be seen I proceed by what they call arbitrary affirmations, + without documentation, without proof, outside of a modern European + logic, disdainful of its methods. + + "Perhaps. I want no other method than that of passion, and when my + breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let + the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come + as they come. + + "We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with + rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less + ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with + scholastic souls, casuists and all that. + + "I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, + soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, + twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. + Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same + time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the + most natural forms of passion and vehemence. + + "The great African, the great ancient African! Here is an + expression--ancient African--that one can oppose to modern + European, and that's worth as much at least. African and ancient + were Saint Augustine and Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: 'We + must make ourselves ancient African-style' or else 'We must make + ourselves African ancient-style.'" + +The typical tree of Castile is the encina, a kind of live-oak that +grows low with dense bluish foliage and a ribbed, knotted and contorted +trunk; it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the roads one meets +lean men with knotted hands and brown sun-wizened faces that seem +brothers to the encinas of their country. The thought of Unamuno, +emphatic, lonely, contorted, hammered into homely violent phrases, +oak-tough, oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads and to the +encinas on the hills of Castile. + +This from the end of "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_": + + "And in this critical century, Don Quixote has also contaminated + himself with criticism, and he must charge against himself, victim + of intellectualism and sentimentalism, who when he is most sincere + appears most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the + irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of + the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the + greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he + enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke + out of the cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener of + sleeping souls, '_dormitantium animorum excubitor_,' as the + ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote: 'Heroic love is proper + to superior natures called insane--_insane_, not because they do + not know--_non sanno_--but because they know too + much--_soprasanno_--.' + + "But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines, or at least at + the foot of his statue on the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the + Vatican, they have put that it is offered by the century he had + divined--'_il secolo da lui divinato_.' But our Don Quixote, + the resurrected, internal Don Quixote, does not believe that his + doctrines will triumph in the world, because they are not his. And + it is better that they should not triumph. If they wanted to make + Don Quixote king he would retire alone to the hilltop, fleeing the + crowds of king-makers and king-killers, as did Christ when, after + the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they wanted to proclaim him + king. He left the title of king to be put above the cross. + + "What is, then, the new mission of Don Quixote in this world? To + cry, to cry in the wilderness. For the wilderness hears although + men do not hear, and one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and + that solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will + sprout into a gigantic cedar that will sing with a hundred thousand + tongues an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and death." + + + + +_XVII: Toledo_ + + +"Lyaeus, you've found it." + +"Her, you mean." + +"No, the essence, the gesture." + +"I carry no butterfly net." + +The sun blazed in a halo of heat about their heads. Both sides of the +straight road olive trees contorted gouty trunks as they walked past. +On a bank beside a quietly grazing donkey a man was asleep wrapped in a +brown blanket. Occasionally a little grey bird twittered encouragingly +from the telegraph wires. When the wind came there was a chill of +winter and wisps of cloud drifted across the sun and a shiver of silver +ran along the olive groves. + +"Tel," cried Lyaeus after a pause, "maybe I have found it. Maybe you +are right. You should have been with me last night." + +"What happened last night?" As a wave of bitter envy swept over him +Telemachus saw for a moment the face of his mother Penelope, brows +contracted with warning, white hand raised in admonition. For a +fleeting second the memory of his quest brushed through the back of his +mind. But Lyaeus was talking. + +"Nothing much happened. There were a few things.... O this is +wonderful." He waved a clenched fist about his head. "The finest +people, Tel! You never saw such people, Tel. They gave me a tambourine. +Here it is; wait a minute." He placed the bag he carried on his +shoulder on top of a milestone and untied its mouth. When he pulled the +tambourine out it was full of figs. "Look, pocket these. I taught her +to write her name on the back; see, 'Pilar,' She didn't know how to +write." + +Telemachus involuntarily cleared his throat. + +"It was the finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and +there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women, +but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with +enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink +puppy in her lap." + +"But I meant something in line, movement, eternal, not that." + +"There are very few gestures," said Lyaeus. + +They walked along in silence. + +"I am tired," said Lyaeus; "at least let's stop in here. I see a bush +over the door." + +"Why stop? We are nearly there." + +"Why go on?" + +"We want to get to Toledo, don't we?" + +"Why?" + +"Because we started for there." + +"No reason at all," said Lyaeus with a laugh as he went in the door of +the wineshop. + +When they came out they found Don Alonso waiting for them, holding his +horse by the bridle. + +"The Spartans," he said with a smile, "never drank wine on the march." + +"How far are we from Toledo?" asked Telemachus. "It was nice of you to +wait for us." + +"About a league, five kilometers, nothing.... I wanted to see your +faces when you first saw the town. I think you will appreciate it." + +"Let's walk fast," said Telemachus. "There are some things one doesn't +want to wait for." + +"It will be sunset and the whole town will be on the _paseo_ in front +of the hospital of San Juan Bautista.... This is Sunday of Carnival; +people will be dressed up in masks and very noisy. It's a day on which +they play tricks on strangers." + +"Here's the trick they played me at the last town," said Lyaeus +agitating his bag of figs. "Let's eat some. I'm sure the Spartans ate +figs on the road. Will Rosinante,--I mean will your horse eat them?" He +put his hand with some figs on it under the horse's mouth. The horse +sniffed noisily out of black nostrils dappled with pink and then +reached for the figs. Lyaeus wiped his hand on the seat of his pants +and they proceeded. + +"Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain," began Don Alonso after a +few moments of silent walking. "By that I mean that through the many +Spains you have seen and will see is everywhere an undercurrent of +fantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Moráles, +Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human life +rising in a sudden pæan out of desolate abandoned dun-colored spaces. +To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce.... And +the apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.... How +strange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in such +Venetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue, +scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds of revelry and +unabashed music that came from it at meal-times, making pert sayings +under the nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living solitary in a +country where he remained to his death misunderstood and alien and +where two centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote as a +madman,--how strange that it should be he who should express most +flamingly all that was imperturbable in Toledo.... I have often +wondered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we feel in El +Greco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I see +occasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious only +because it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves of +European banality. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states of +life only became conscious once their intensity was waning." + +"But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus, +"seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed +to think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines." + +"They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machine +enterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves in +Paris ... but let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road, +round that little hill, we shall see Toledo." + +Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled the +speed of their stride. + +First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowed +field they saw a weathercock, then under it the slate cap of a tower. +"The Alcázar," said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive trees +hid the weathercock. At the next bend the towers were four, strongly +buttressing a square building where on the western windows glinted +reflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, and +domes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of a +pickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again, +passed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from the +inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigs +burning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted with +almond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built of +rough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appeared +occasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which here +and there a cluster of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At the +summit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and below +the Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo. + +Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were +piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on +many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers +and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile +roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped +outside the walls towards the river and the piers from which sprang the +enormous arch of the bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet. A +pale cobalt haze of supperfires hung over the quarters near the river. +As they started down the hill towards the heavy pile of San Juan +Bautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome outside the nearest +gate, a great volley of bell-ringing swung about their ears. A donkey +brayed; there was a sound of shouting from the town. + +"Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-morrow at the _fonda_," +shouted Don Alonso. He took off his hat and galloped towards the gate, +leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the roadside looking out over +the city. + + * * * * * + +Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room with Nile-green walls into +which light still filtered through three little round arches high up on +one side. In a corner were some hogsheads of wine, in another small +tables with three-legged stools. From outside came the distant braying +of a brass band and racket of a street full of people, laughter, and +the occasional shivering jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had dropped +onto a stool and spread his feet out before him on the tiled floor. + +"Never walked so far in my life," he said, "my toes are pulverized, +pulverized!" He leaned over and pulled off his shoes. There were holes +in his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and started wiggling his toes +meditatively. His ankles were grimed with dust. + +"Well...." began Telemachus. + +The _padrón_, a lean man with moustaches and a fancy yellow vest which +he wore unbuttoned over a lavender shirt, brought two glasses of dense +black wine. + +"You have walked a long way?" he asked, looking with interest at +Lyaeus' feet. + +"From Madrid." + +"_¡Carai!_" + +"Not all in one day." + +"You are sailors going to rejoin your ship in Sevilla." The _padrón_ +looked from one to another with a knowing expression, twisting his +mouth so that one of the points of his moustache slanted towards the +ceiling and the other towards the floor. + +"Not exactly...." + +Another man drew up his chair to their table, first taking off his wide +cap and saying gravely: "_Con permiso de ustedes._" His broad, slightly +flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his sparse blonde eyelashes +were large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to +draw their heads together and said in a whisper: + +"You aren't deserters, are you?" + +"No." + +"I hoped you were. I might have helped you. I escaped from prison in +Barcelona a week ago. I am a syndicalist." + +"Have a drink," cried Lyaeus. "Another glass.... And we can let you +have some money if you need it, too, if you want to get out of the +country." + +The _padrón_ brought the wine and retired discreetly to a chair beside +the bar from which he beamed at them with almost religious approbation. + +"You are comrades?" + +"Of those who break out," said Lyaeus flushing. "What about the +progress of events? When do you think the pot will boil over?" + +"Soon or never," said the syndicalist.... "That is never in our +lifetime. We are being buried under industrialism like the rest of +Europe. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeois +mentality. There is danger that we shall lose everything we have fought +for.... You see, if we could only have captured the means of production +when the system was young and weak, we could have developed it slowly +for our benefit, made the machine the slave of man. Every day we wait +makes it more difficult. It is a race as to whether this peninsula will +be captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor the +other, in its soul." He thumped his clenched fist against his chest. + +"How long were you in prison?" + +"Only a month this time, but if they catch me it will be bad. They +won't catch me." + +He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally rolling an unlit +cigarette between his brown fingers. + +"Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite dark?" said Telemachus. + +"When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to the syndicalist. + +"Oh, we'll meet if you stay in Toledo a few days...." + +Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by the arm. + +"Look, let me give you some money; won't you be wanting to go to +Portugal?" + +The man flushed and shook his head. + +"If our opinions coincided...." + +"I agree with all those who break out," said Lyaeus. + +"That's not the same, my friend." + +They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus went out of the tavern. + +Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered shawls, full of dominos and +pierrots and harlequins who threw handfuls of confetti at people along +the sidewalks, clattered into town through the dark arches of the gate. +Telemachus got some confetti in his mouth. A crowd of little children +danced about him jeering as he stood spluttering on the curbstone. +Lyaeus took him by the arm and drew him along the street after the +carriages, bent double with laughter. This irritated Telemachus who +tore his arm away suddenly and made off with long strides up a dark +street. + + * * * * * + +A half-waned moon shone through the perforations in a round terra-cotta +chimney into the street's angular greenish shadow. From somewhere came +the seethe of water over a dam. Telemachus was leaning against a damp +wall, tired and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a woman's face +half surmised behind the bars of an upper window, when he heard a +clatter of unsteady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared, reeling a +little, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised in an expression of drunken +jollity. + +"Lyaeus, I am very happy," cried Telemachus stepping forward to meet +his friend. "Walking about here in these empty zigzag streets I have +suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if I +had soaked up some essence out of it." + +"Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly.... Awake all you +need." Lyaeus stood on a little worn stone that kept wheels off the +corner of the house where the street turned and waved his arms. "Awake! +_Dormitant animorum excubitor._... That's not right. Latin's no good. +Means a fellow who says: 'wake up, you son of a gun.'" + +"Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important than that. It's like +learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant +and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming +like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was +that woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing...." + +"Tel, there are things too good to talk about.... Look, I'm like St. +Simeon Stylites." Lyaeus lifted one leg, then the other, waving his +arms like a tight-rope walker. + +"When I left you I walked out over the other bridge, the bridge of St. +Martin and climbed...." + +"Shut up, I think I hear a girl giggling up in the window there." + +Lyaeus stood up very straight on his column and threw a kiss up into +the darkness. The giggling turned to a shrill laughter; a head craned +out from a window opposite. Lyaeus beckoned with both hands. + +"Never mind about them.... Look out, somebody threw something.... Oh, +it's an orange.... I want to tell you how I felt the gesture. I had +climbed up on one of the hills of the Cigarrales and was looking at the +silhouette of the town so black against the stormy marbled sky. The +moon hadn't risen yet.... Let's move away from here." + +"_Ven, flor de mi corazón_," shouted Lyaeus towards the upper window. + +"A flock of goats was passing on the road below, and from somewhere +came the tremendous lilt of...." + +"Heads!" cried Lyaeus throwing himself round an angle in the wall. + +Telemachus looked up, his mind full of his mother Penelope's voice +saying reproachfully: + +"You might have been murdered in that dark alley." A girl was leaning +from the window, shaken with laughter, taking aim with a bucket she +swung with both hands. + +"Stop," cried Telemachus, "it's the other...." + +As he spoke a column of cold water struck his head, knocked his breath +out, drenched him. + +"Speaking of gestures...." whispered Lyaeus breathlessly from the +doorway where he was crouching, and the street was filled with +uncontrollable shrieking laughter. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN*** + + +******* This file should be named 29073-8.txt or 29073-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/9/0/7/29073 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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