Spanish Vistas
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Title: Spanish Vistas
Author: George Parsons Lathrop
Illustrator: Charles Stanley Reinhart
Release date: August 18, 2012 [eBook #40528]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPANISH VISTAS ***
[Illustration: A MANDURRA SOLO.]
SPANISH VISTAS
BY
GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP
_ILLUSTRATED_
BY
CHARLES S. REINHART
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1883
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
* * * * *
_All rights reserved._
TO
FRANCES M. LATHROP
WHOSE TASTE FOR TRAVEL AND OBSERVATION EARLY PROMPTED HIS OWN
These Sketches are Dedicated
BY HER SON
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE.
The two great Mediterranean peninsulas which, in opposite quarters, jut
southward where--as George Eliot says, in her "Spanish Gypsy"--
"Europe spreads her lands
Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep,"
may not inaptly be likened to a brother and sister, instead of taking
their places under the usual similitude of "sister countries." They have
points of marked resemblance, in their picturesqueness, their treasures
of art, their associations of history and romance; but, just as the
physical aspect of Spain and its shape upon the map are broader, more
thick-set and rugged than the slender form and flowing curves of Italy,
so the Spanish language--with its Arabic gutturals interspersed among
melodious linguals and vowel sounds--has been called the masculine
development of that Southern speech of which the Italian presents the
feminine side. The people of both countries exhibit a similar excitable,
ardent quality in their characters; but the national temperament of the
Spaniards is, perhaps, somewhat hardier, more virile, and sturdier in
its passionateness.
It seems to be true that, while the Greek spirit transferred itself to
Italy in the days of Augustus, renewing its influence at the period of
the Renaissance, and leaving upon people and manners an impress never
since quite effaced--an influence tending toward a certain feminine
refinement--the spirit of Rome also transferred itself to the subject
country, Hispania, and imbued that region with the strong, austere, or
wilful characteristics of purely Latin civilization, which are still
traceable there.
But, however we may account for the phenomena, it is likely that the
mingled contrasts and resemblances of Italy and Spain will more and more
induce travellers to visit the Iberian Peninsula. Italy has now been so
thoroughly depicted in all its larger phases, from the foreigner's point
of view, that investigation must hereafter chiefly be concerned with the
study of special and local features. Spain, on the other hand, offers
itself to the general observer and to the tourist as a field scarcely
more explored than Italy was forty or fifty years ago; and the evidence
is abundant that the current of travel is setting vigorously in this
direction. With the extension of a railroad system and the incursion of
sight-seeing strangers in larger number, we must of course expect that
many of the most interesting peculiarities of the people will undergo
modification and at length disappear. This, however, cannot be helped;
and the following chapters, at the same time that they may encourage and
aid those who are destined to bring about such changes, may also serve
to arrest and preserve for future reference the actual appearance of
Spain to-day.
Much might be written, with the certainty of an eager audience,
concerning the present political condition of the country, by any one
who had had opportunities for examining it; and Mr. John Hay, a few
years ago, gave some glimpses of it in his charming volume, "Castilian
Days." My own brief sojourn afforded no adequate opportunity for such
observation. But it may be not inadmissible to record here one of the
casual remarks which came to my notice in this connection. On a
Mediterranean steamer I met with an exceedingly bright and healthy man
of the middle class, fairly well educated--one of those specimens of
solid, temperate, active manhood fortunately very common in Spain, on
whom the future of the country really depends--and, noticing from my
lame speech that I was not a native, he asked me, guardedly, if I was an
Englishman.
"No," I said; "I am an American of the North, of the United States."
His manner changed at once; he thawed: more than that, his face lighted
with hope, as if he had found a powerful friend, and he gazed at me with
a certain delighted awe, attributing to my humble person a glory for
which I was in no way responsible. "You are a republican, then!" he
exclaimed.
"Yes."
He gave me another long, silent look, and then confessed that he, too,
was a firm believer in republicanism.
"Are there many Spaniards now of that party?" I inquired.
His reply showed that he appreciated the difficulties of the national
problem. "Party!" he cried. "Listen: in Spain there is a separate
political party for every man." After a slight pause he added, bitterly,
"Sometimes, _two_!"
It may still be said with a good deal of accuracy, though not of course
with the literalness and the sweeping application that Paul de Saint
Victor gave the words, in speaking of the French Charles II.'s reign,
that "Spain no more changes than the arid zone that encircles a volcano.
Kings pass, dynasties are renewed, events succeed each other, but the
foundation remains immobile, and Philip II. still rules."
I have not attempted to review political matters; and neither have I
tried to give an exhaustive account of the country in any other respect.
The pictures which I have given I have endeavored to make vivid and
faithful; and, if I have succeeded, they will present the essential
characteristics of Spain. What has thus been the object of the text has
certainly been attained in the drawings by Mr. Reinhart, which supply
much the greater part of the illustrations in this volume. Made after
sketches from life, which were prepared with unflagging zeal, and often
under great difficulties, they frequently tell more than language can
convey. Their graphic touch, their variety and humor, their technical
merit, give them the best of recommendations; but a word of distinct
recognition is due here to the artist for the fidelity and spirit with
which he has reproduced so many scenes peculiar to the country.
It is hoped that the concluding chapter of "Hints to Travellers" will
prove useful, as supplying certain information not always accessible in
guide-books, and also as condensing the practical particulars of the
subject in a convenient form.
THE WAYSIDE, _Concord_, _April 1, 1883._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
_FROM BURGOS TO THE GATE OF THE SUN_ 1
_THE LOST CITY_ 34
_CORDOVAN PILGRIMS_ 70
_ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA_ 103
_MEDITERRANEAN PORTS AND GARDENS_ 152
_HINTS TO TRAVELLERS_ 186
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
A MANDURRA SOLO _Frontispiece_
INITIAL LETTER 1
TWO ASSASSINS IN LONG CLOAKS 2
THE NIGHT-WATCH 4
DANCING BOYS 6
THE ARCH OF ST. MARY 8
PEASANTS IN THE MARKET-PLACE 11
IN THE MIRADOR 13
LANDSCAPE BETWEEN BURGOS AND MADRID 17
THE PLAZA MAYOR 21
WATER-DEALER 23
OLD ARTILLERY PARK 24
THE ESCORIAL 25
ON THE ROAD TO THE BULL-FIGHT 27
PLAN OF THE BULL-RING 28
A STREET SCENE 32
TAIL-PIECE 33
INITIAL LETTER 34
ENTRANCE TO TOLEDO 35
THE NARROW WAY 36
SPANISH PEASANT (from a Drawing By William M. Chase) 37
SINGING GIRL 41
CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN OF THE KINGS 42
A BIT OF CHARACTER 43
SPANISH SOLDIERS PLAYING DOMINOS 44
A NARROW STREET 45
WOMAN WITH BUNDLE 46
THE SERENADERS 47
A PLENTIFUL SUPPLY OF PLATES 50
THE TOILET--A SUNDAY SCENE 51
A TOLEDO PRIEST 53
TOLEDO SERVITORS AT THE FOUNTAIN 55
A PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR 57
A GROUP OF MENDICANTS 58
A PATIO IN TOLEDO 59
THE HOME OF "SOLITUDE" 61
"MEN AND BOYS SLUMBER OUT-OF-DOORS EVEN IN THE HOT SUN"67
A STRANGE FUNERAL 68
TAIL-PIECE 69
INITIAL LETTER 70
WHETSTONE 71
COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO 72
PRIMITIVE THRASHING 74
WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT MASS 75
WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA 77
THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA 79
THE MEZQUITA 80
RELIC PEDDLERS 81
THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR 83
PRIEST AND PURVEYOR 85
FLOWERS FOR THE MARKET 85
TRAVELLERS TO CORDOVA 87
"ARRÉ, BURR-R-RICO!" 89
THE FRUIT OF THE DESIERTA 94
MEMENTO MORI 97
DIFFICULT FOR FOREIGNERS 101
THE JASMINE GIRL 101
INITIAL LETTER 103
MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLA
(from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 105
THE GIRALDA TOWER
(from a Photograph By J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 107
THE "UNDERGROUND" MAIL 109
A STREET CORNER 115
FIGARO 118
"STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE" 121
IN "THE SERPENT" 123
"ALL THE DAY I AM HAPPY" 127
GRANADA UNDERTAKER 130
THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA 131
A WATER-CARRIER 133
BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA
(from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 137
THE TOILET TOWER
(from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 139
BOUDOIR OF LINDARAXA 141
GYPSIES 150
INITIAL LETTER 152
GYPSY DANCE 154
A SPANISH MONK 158
TRANSPORTATION OF POTTERY 160
GARLIC VENDER 161
DIVING FOR COPPERS 164
A MODERN SANCHO PANZA 167
STREET BARBER 168
BIBLES _VERSUS_ MELONS 169
CUSTOMS OFFICERS 171
POST INN, ALICANTE 172
ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER 173
METHOD OF IRRIGATION NEAR VALENCIA 175
CHURCH OF SANTA CATALINA, VALENCIA 176
A VALENCIA CAB 178
BARCELONA FISHERMEN 180
TAIL-PIECE 185
INITIAL LETTER 186
ST. JOHN AT BURGOS--CHERUBS IN ADORATION 210
SPANISH VISTAS.
_FROM BURGOS TO THE GATE OF THE SUN._
I.
[Illustration: W]
We took our places, for the performance was about to begin. The scene
represented a street in Burgos, the long-dead capital of old Castile.
Time: night.
Ancient houses on either side the stage narrow back to an archway in the
centre, opening through to a pillared walk and a dimly moonlit space
beyond. Muffled figures occasionally pass the aperture.
Suddenly enters Don Ramiro--or Alvar Nuñez, I really don't know
which--and advances toward the front. To our surprise he does not open
the play with a set speech or any explanation, but continues to advance
until he disappears somewhere under our private box, as if he were going
from this street of the play into some other adjoining street, just as
in actual life. A singular freak of realism! He is closely pursued,
however, by two assassins in long cloaks, who, like all the other
figures we have seen, move noiselessly in soft shoes or canvas sandals.
Presently a shriek resounds from the quarter toward which Don Ramiro
betook himself. Have they succeeded in catching him, and is that the
sound of his mortal agony? We have just concluded that this is the
meaning of the clamor, when, after a second or two, the shriek resolves
itself into laughter. Then we begin to recall that we didn't pay
anything on entering; and, as we glance up toward the folded curtain
above the scene, discover that its place is occupied by the starry sky.
The houses, too, have a singularly solid look, and do not appear to be
painted. While all this has been dawning upon us, we become conscious
that the mixed sound of agony or mirth just heard was merely the signal
of amusement caused to certain wandering Spaniards by some convulsingly
funny episode; and the next moment their party comes upon the scene at
about the point where the foot-lights ought to be. They exchange a
good-night; some go off, and others thunder at sundry doors with ancient
knockers, awaking mediæval echoes in the dingy thoroughfares, without
causing any great surprise to the neighborhood.
[Illustration: TWO ASSASSINS IN LONG CLOAKS.]
In truth, we had simply been looking from the window of an inn at which
we had just arrived; but everything had grouped itself in such a way
that it was hard to comprehend that we were not at the theatre. That day
we had been hurled over the Pyrenees, and landed in the dark at our
first Peninsular station; then, facing a crowd of fierce, uncouth faces
at the depôt door, we had somehow got conveyed to the Inn of the North
through narrow, cavernous streets, brightened only by the feeble light
of a few lost lanterns, and so found ourselves staring out upon our
first picturesque night in Spain. The street or plazuela below us,
though now deserted, went on conducting itself in a most melodramatic
manner. Big white curtains hung in front of the iron balconies, flapping
voluminously, or were drawn back to admit the cool night air. Crickets
chirped loudly from hidden crevices of masonry, and a well-contrived bat
sailed blindly over the roofs in the penumbral air, through which the
moon was slowly rising. Lights went in and out; some one was seen
cooking a late supper in one dwelling; windows were opened and shut, and
a general appearance of haunting ghosts was kept up. Now and then a
woman came to the balcony and chatted with unseen neighbors across the
way about the festival of the morrow. By-and-by one side of the street
blew its lamps out and prepared for bed; but the wakeful side insisted
on talking to the sleepy one for some time longer, until warned by the
cry of the night-watch that midnight had come. Anything more desolate
and peculiar than this cry I have never heard. It was a long-drawn,
melancholy sounding of the hour, with a final "All's well!" terminating
in a minor cadence which seemed to drop the voice back at once into the
Middle Ages. This same chant may have resounded from the days of Lain
Calvo and the old judges of Castile unaltered, and for a time it made me
fancy that the little Gothic town had returned to its musty youth. We
were walled into a sleepy feudal stronghold once more, and perhaps at
that very moment the Cid was celebrating his nuptials with Ximena,
daughter of the count he had murdered for an insult, in the old ruined
citadel up there on the hill, above the cathedral spires. But the
watchman came and went, and the present resumed its sway. He passed
with slow step, in a big cloak and queer cap, carrying a long bladed
staff, and a lantern which cast swaying squares of light around his
feet; silent as a black ghost, and seeming to have been called into life
only with the lighting of his lamp-wick. But, after he had disappeared,
the lonely quaver of his cry returned to us from farther and farther
away, penetrating into the comfortless apartment to which we now retired
for sleep.
[Illustration: THE NIGHT-WATCH.]
The Inn of the North was dirty and unkempt; a frightful odor from the
donkey-stable and other sources streamed up into our window between
shutters heavy as church doors; and the descant of the watch, relieved
by violent cock-crows, disturbed us all night. Nevertheless, we awoke
with a good deal of eagerness when the alert young woman with dark pink
cheeks and snapping eyes who served us came to the door with chocolate
and bread, water and _azucarillos_, betimes next morning. It was the
festival of Corpus Christi; but although every one was going to see the
procession, no one could tell us anything about it. Unless he be
extraordinarily shrewd, a foreigner can hardly help arriving in Spain on
some kind of a feast-day. When the people cannot get up a whole holiday,
they will have a fractional one. You go about the streets cheerfully,
thinking you will buy something at leisure in the afternoon; but when
you approach the shop commerce has vanished, and is out taking a walk,
or drinking barley-water in honor of some obscure saint. You engage a
guide and carriage to visit some public building, and both guide and
carriage are silent as to the religious character of the day until you
arrive and find the place shut, when full price, or at least half, is
confidently demanded. Church feasts are a matter of course, but you are
expected to know about them, and questions are considered out of place.
In this case we had kept Corpus Christi in mind, and as Burgos is a
small place, the "function" could not by any possibility escape us.
The garrison turned out, and military music played in the procession,
but otherwise it was a quaint reproduction of the antique. The quiet
streets, innocent of traffic, were filled with peasants whose garments,
odoriferous with age and dirt, made a dazzle of color, especially the
bright yellow flannel skirts of the women, and the gay handkerchief
which men and women alike employ here. Sometimes it is worn around the
shoulders, sometimes around the head, and sometimes both: but everywhere
and always handkerchiefs are brought into play as essentials. From
almost every balcony, too, hung bedquilts, or sheets scalloped with red
and blue, in emulation of the tapestries and banners that once graced
these occasions. Amid a tumultuous tumbling of bells up amid the carven
gray stone-work of the cathedral, the candles and images and tonsured
priests, clad in resplendent copes, moved forth, attended by civil
functionaries in swallow-tailed coats or old crimson robes of the
twelfth century. But the prettiest sight, and a much more striking one
than the gilt effigies of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and the rest,
under toy canopies and wreathed with false flowers, was that of two
little boys, nude except for the snowy lamb-skins they wore, who
personated Christ and St. John. The Christ rode on a lamb, and kept his
head very steady under a big curled wig made after the old masters. We
saw him afterward in his father's arms, still holding his hands
prayerfully, as he had been drilled, with a look of sweet, childish awe
in his face.
[Illustration: DANCING BOYS.]
When the procession was about to return, we were amazed, in gazing at
the small street from which it should emerge, to behold eight huge
figures, looking half as high as the houses, in long robes, and with
placidly unreal expressions on their gigantic faces, advancing with that
peculiar unconscious gait due to human leg-power when concealed under
papier-maché monsters. It took but a glance, as they filed out and
aligned themselves on the small sunny square, to recognize in them the
Kings of the Earth, come in person to do homage before the Christ. One
bore a crown and ermine as insignia of the Castilian line; others were
Moors; and even China was represented. After them danced a dozen boys,
in pink tunics and bell-crowned hats of drab felt quaintly beribboned,
throwing themselves about fantastically, with snapping fingers and
castanets. They formed in two ranks, just under the grand shadowy
entrance arch, to receive the pageant. A drummer and two _flautistas_ in
festive attire accompanied them; and whenever a monstrance or holy image
was borne past, the flutes mingled with the drum eccentric bagpipe
discords, at which the boys broke into a prancing jig and rattled their
castanets to express their devout joy. Two other men in harlequin dress,
wearing tall, pointed hats, stood on the edge of the eager crowd, and
belabored those who pressed too close with horse-hair switches attached
by a long cord to slender sticks. This part of the performance was
conducted with great energy and seriousness, and seemed to be received
with due reverence by the thick heads which got hit. A more heathenish
rite than this jig at the sanctuary gate could hardly be imagined.
"Are these things possible, and is this the nineteenth century?"
exclaimed my friend and companion, who, however, had been guilty of an
indigestion that day.
I confess that for myself I enjoyed the dance, and could not help being
struck by the contrast of this boyish gayety with the heavy gorgeousness
of the priests and the immobile frown of the sculptured figures on the
massive ogee arch.[1] Then when the Host was carried by in the
_custodia_, and the motley crowd kneeled and bared their heads, we sunk
to the pavement with them, our knees being assisted possibly by the
statement we had heard that, a few years since, blows or knives were the
prompt reward of non-conformity. Afterward, when secular amusements
ensued, our boys went about, stopping now and then in open places to
execute strange dances, with hoops and ribbons and wooden swords, for
the general enjoyment. A gleeful sight they made against backgrounds of
old archways, or perhaps the mighty Arch of Santa Maria, one of the
local glories, peopled with statues of ancient counts and knights and
rulers.
[Illustration: THE ARCH OF ST. MARY.]
No Spanish town is without its paseo--its public promenade; and in
Burgos this is supplied by The Spur--a broad esplanade skirting the
shrunken river, with borders of chubby shade trees and shrubbery. On
Corpus Christi the citizens also turned out in the arcades of the Main
Plaza. Here, and later in the dusty dusk of The Spur, they crowded and
chatted, in accordance with native ideas of enjoyment; and except that
their mantillas and shoulder-veils[2] made a difference, the señoras and
señoritas might have passed for Americans, so delicate were their
features, so trim their daintily-attired figures, though perhaps they
hadn't a coin in their pockets. The men had the universal Iberian habit
of carrying their light overcoats folded over the left shoulder; but
their quick nervous expression and spare faces would have been quite in
place on Wall Street. Spanish ladies are allowed far more liberty than
the French or English in public; but though they walked without male
escort, they showed remarkable skill in avoiding any direct look at men
from their own lustrous eyes. During the accredited hours of the paseo,
however, gallants and friends are suffered to walk close behind them--so
close that the entire procession often comes to a stand-still--and to
whisper complimentary speeches into their ears; no one, not even
relatives of the damsels, resenting this freedom.
At Las Huelgas, a famous convent near the town, much resorted to by nuns
of aristocratic family (even the Empress Eugénie it was thought would
retire thither after her son's death), the fête was renewed next day;
and it was here that we saw beggars in perfection. A huge stork's nest
was perched high on one end of the chapel, as on many churches of Spain.
Bombs were fired above the crowd from the high square tower that rose
into the hot air not far from the inner shrine; and in the chapel below
the nuns were at their devotions, caged behind heavy iron lattices that
barely disclosed their picturesque head-dress. Meanwhile peasants and
burghers wandered aimlessly about, looking at pictures, relics, and
inscriptions in an outer arcade; after which the holiday of the people
began. Holiday here means either walking or sleeping. In a sultry, dusty
little square by the convent, covered with trees, the people went to
sleep, or sat talking, and occasionally eating or drinking with much
frugality. The first object that had greeted us by daylight in Burgos
was a marvellous mendicant clad in an immense cloak, one mass of
patches--in fact, a monument of indigence--carrying on his head a mangy
fur cap, with a wallet at his waist to contain alms. The beggars
assembled at Las Huelgas were quite as bad, except that they mostly had
the good taste to remain asleep. In any attitude, face down or up, on
stone benches or on the grass, they dozed at a moment's notice, reposing
piously. One sat for a long time torpid near us, but finally mustered
energy to come and entreat us. He received a copper, whereupon he kissed
the coin, murmured a blessing, and again retreated to his shadow.
Another, having acquired something from some other source, halted near
us to find his pocket. He searched long among his rags, and plunged
fiercely into a big cavity which exposed his dirty linen; but this
proved to be only a tear in his trousers, and he was at last obliged to
tie his treasure to a voluminous string around his waist, letting it
hang down thence into some interior vacancy of rags.
It may not be generally known that beggars are licensed in Spain.
Veteran soldiers, instead of receiving a pension, are generously endowed
with official permission to seek charity; the Church gives doles to the
poor, and citizens consider it a virtue to relieve the miserable objects
who petition for pence at every turn. As we came from Las Huelgas we saw
the maimed and blind and certain more robust paupers creeping up to the
door of a church, where priests were giving out food. A little farther
on an emaciated crone at a bridge-head, with eyes shut fast in sleep,
lifted her hand mechanically and repeated her formula. We were convinced
that, since she could do this in her slumbers, she must have been
satisfied with merely dreaming of that charity we did not bestow.
It was a favorable season for the beggars, and many of them sunned their
bodies, warped and scarred by hereditary disease, on the cathedral
steps. But professional enterprise with them was constantly hindered by
the tendency to nap. One old fellow I saw who, feeling a brotherhood
between himself and the broken-nosed statues, had mounted into a
beautiful niche there and coiled himself in sleep, first hauling his
wooden leg up after him like a drawbridge.
Meanwhile the peasants kept on swarming into the town, decorating it
with their blue and red and yellow kerchiefs and kirtles, as with a mass
of small moving banners. The men wore vivid sashes, leather leggings,
and laced sandals. It was partly for enjoyment they came, and partly to
sell produce. All alike were to be met with at noon, squatting down in
any sheltered coigne of street or square, every group with a bowl in its
midst containing the common dinner. There were also little
eating-houses, in which they regaled themselves on bread and sardines,
with a special cupful of oil thrown in, or on salt meat. A lively trade
in various small articles was carried on in the Main Plaza; among them
loaves of tasteless white bread, hard as tiles, and delicious cherries,
recalling the farms of New York. Another product was offered, the
presence of which in large quantity was like a sarcasm. This was Castile
soap. It must have taken an immense effort of imagination on the part of
these people to think of manufacturing an article for which they have so
little use. I am bound to add that I did not see an ounce of it sold;
and I have my suspicions that the business is merely a traditional
one--the same big cheese-like chunks being probably brought out at every
fair and fête, as a time-honored symbol of Castilian prosperity. But,
after all, so devout a community must be convinced that it possesses
godliness; and having that, what do they need of the proximate virtue?
This is the region where the inhabitants refer to themselves as "old and
rancid Castilians;" and the expression is appropriate.
[Illustration: PEASANTS IN THE MARKET-PLACE.]
The most intolerable odor pervaded the whole place. It was a singular
mixture, arising from the trustful local habit of allowing every kind
of garbage and ordure to disperse itself without drainage, and
complicated with fumes of oil, garlic, general mustiness, and a whiff or
two of old incense. The potency of olive-oil, especially when somewhat
rank, none can know who have not been in Spain. That first steak--how
tempting it looked among its potatoes, but how abominably it tasted! We
never approached meat with the same courage afterward, until our senses
were subdued to the level of fried oil. Combine this with the odor of
corruption, and you have the insinuating quality which we soon noticed
even in the wine--perhaps from the custom of transporting it in badly
dressed pig-skins, which impart an animal flavor. This astonishing local
atmosphere saluted us everywhere; it was in our food and drink; we
breathed it and dreamed of it. Yet the Burgalese flourished in calm
unconsciousness thereof. The splendidly blooming peasant women showed
their perfect teeth at us; and the men, in broad-brimmed, pointed caps
and embroidered jackets, whose feet were brown and earthy as tree-roots,
laughed outright, strong in the knowledge of their traditionary soap, at
our ignorant foreign clothes and over-washed hands! Among the humbler
class were some who were prepared to sell labor--an article not much in
demand--and they were even more calmly squalid than the beggars. They
sat in ranks on the curb-stones of the plaza, a matchless array of
tatters; and if they could have been conveyed without alteration to
Paris or New York, there would have been sharp competition for them
between the artists and paper-makers.
So my companion, the artist, assured me--whom, by-the-way, in order to
give him local color, I had rechristened Velazquez. But as he shrank
from the large implication of this name, I softened him down to
Velveteen.
We had been twenty-four hours in Burgos before we saw a carriage,
excepting only the hotel coach, which stood most of the time without
horses in front of the door, and was used by the porter as a private
gambling den and loafing place for himself and his friends. When wheels
did roll along the pavements they awoke a roar as of musketry. Perhaps
the most important event which took place during our stay--it was
certainly regarded with a more feverish interest by the inhabitants than
the Corpus Christi ceremonies--was the bold act of our landlady, who
went out to drive in a barouche, while her less daring spouse hung out
of the window weakly staring at her. The house-fronts were filled with
well-dressed feminine heads, witnessing the departure; a grave old
gentleman opposite left his book and glared out intently. When the
wheels could no longer even be heard, he turned to gaze wistfully in the
opposite direction, dimly hoping that life might vouchsafe him a
carriage.
[Illustration: IN THE MIRADOR.]
Although, as I have said, women avoid meeting male glances when on the
sidewalk, they enjoy full license to stand at their high windows, which
are called _miradores_, or "lookers," and contemplate with entire
freedom all things or persons that pass; which, in view of the complete
listlessness of their lives, is a fortunate dispensation. Existence in
Burgos is essentially life from the window point of view. It proceeds
idly, and as a sort of accidental spectacle. Yet there is for strangers
a dull fascination in wandering about the narrow, silent streets, and
contemplating ancient buildings, the chiselled ornaments and armorial
bearings of which recall the wealth and nobility that once inhabited
them during the great days of the town. Where have all the dominant
families gone? Are they keeping store, or tending the railroad station?
Their descendants are sometimes only too happy if they can get some
petty government office at five hundred dollars a year. I strolled one
afternoon into the Calle de la Calera, and through a shabby archway
penetrated to a stately old ruined court, around which ran an
inscription in stone, declaring this palace to have been reared by an
abbot of aristocratic line a century or two since. It is used now as an
oil factory. A pretty girl was looking out over a flower-pot in an upper
window, and, as I strayed up the noble staircase, I met a sad-looking
gentleman coming down, who I afterward learned was a widower, formerly
resident in Paris, but now returned with his daughter to this strange
domicile in his native place. Some of the lower rooms, again, were
devoted to plebeians and donkeys.
The humble ass, by-the-way, begins to thrust himself meekly upon you as
soon as you set foot in the Peninsula, and you must look sharp if you
wish to keep out of his way. His cheap labor has ruined and driven out
the haughtier equine stock of Arabia that once pawed this devoted soil.
Even the Cid, however, did not boast a barb of the desert in the earlier
days of his prowess; for when King Alfonso bade him quit the land, "then
the Cid clapped spurs to the mule upon which he rode, and vaulted into a
piece of ground which was his own inheritance, and answered, 'Sire, I am
not in your land, but in my own.'" This little incident occurred near
Burgos, and the drowsy city still keeps some dim memory of that great
Warrior Lord the Cid Campeador, Rodrigo de Bivar, whose quaint story,
full of hardihood, robbery, and cruelty, gallant deeds and grim pathos,
trails along the track of his adventures through half of Spain. But
there is a curious cheapness and indifference in the memorials of him
preserved. In the Town-hall, for the sum of ten cents, you are admitted
to view the modern walnut receptacle wherein all that is left of him is
economically stored. Those puissant bones, which went through so many
hard fights against the Moors, are seen lying here, dusty and loose,
with those of Ximena, under the glass cover. Among them reposes a portly
corked bottle, in which minor fragments of the warrior lord were placed
after the moving of his remains from the Convent of San Pedro in chains,
where for many years he occupied a more seemly tomb. Imagine George
Washington, partially bottled and wholly disjointed, on exhibition under
glass! The Spaniards, in no way disconcerted by the incongruity, have
graven on the brass plate of the case a high-sounding inscription; but
a tribute as genuine and not less valuable, though humbler, was the big,
spruce-looking modern wagon I saw in the market-place one day, driven by
an energetic farmer, and bearing on its side the title _El Cid_.
One would look to see the conqueror's dust richly inurned within the
cathedral--a noble outgrowth of the thirteenth century, enriched by
accretions of later work until its whitish stone and wrought marble
connect the Early Pointed style with that of the Renaissance in its
flower. But perhaps this temple has enough without the Cid. Strangely
placed on the side of a hill, with houses attached to one corner, as if
it had sprung from the homes and hearts of the people, it seems to hold
down the swelling ground with its massive weight; yet the spires,
through the open-work of which the stars may be seen at night, rise with
such lightness you would think the heavy bells might make them tremble
and fall. I passed an hour of peace and fresh air above the fetid
streets, looking down from the citadel hill on these pinnacles, while
around and below them lay the town--an irregular mass of gray and mauve
pierced with deep shadows--in the midst of bare, rolling uplands. Before
the fair high altar hangs the victorious banner of Ferdinand VII.,
recalling to the people the great battle of Tolosa Plains. And when one
sees peasants--rough spots of color in the sombre choir--studying the
dark, fruit-like wood-carvings through which the Bible story wreathes
itself in panel after panel, one feels the teaching power of these old
churches for the unlettered. In one of the corner chapels appears
another less favorable phase of such teaching, in the shape of a
miracle-working Christ, amid deep shadows and dim lantern-light,
stretched on the cross, and draped with a satin crinoline. This doubtful
reverence of putting a short skirt on the figure of the Saviour, often
practiced in Spain, may perhaps mark an influence unconsciously received
from the Moorish dislike for nudity. The cathedral bells were
continually clanging the summons to mass or vespers, and their loud
voices, though cracked and inharmonious, seemed still to assert the
supremacy of ecclesiastical power. But while a priest occasionally
darkened the sidewalks, many others, on account of the growing prejudice
against them, went about in frock-coats and ordinary tall hats. And
under all its crowning beauty the old minster, motionless in the centre
of the stagnant town--its chief entrance walled up, and a notice painted
on its Late Roman façade warning boys not to play ball against the
tempting masonry--wore the look of some neglected and half-blind thing,
once glorious, symbol of a power abruptly stayed in its prodigious
career.
Meanwhile the daily history of Burgos went on its wonted way, sleepy but
picturesque--a sort of illuminated prose. Women chaffered in the
blue-tiled fish-market; the _bourgeoisie_ patronized the sweetmeat
shops, of which there were ten on the limited chief square; the
tambourine-maker varied this ornamental industry with the construction
of the more practical sieve; a peasant passed with a bundle of
purple-flowering vetches on his head for fodder, and another drove six
milch goats through the streets, seeking a purchaser. To this last one
the proprietor of the principal book-store came running out to see if he
could strike a bargain. One morning I met an uncouth countryman and his
stout wife on the red-tiled landing of the inn stairs (they bowed and
courtesied to me) with chickens and eggs for sale. In this simple manner
our hotel was supplied. All the bread was got, a few pieces at a time,
from a small bakery across the plazuela, in a dark cellar just under the
niche of a neglected stone saint--a new arrival causing our maid to run
hurriedly thither for a couple of rolls; and the water also came from
some neighbor's well in earthen jars. The barber even exercises his
primitive function in Burgos: he is called a "bleeder," and announces on
his shop sign that "teeth and molars" are extracted there. Democratic
and provincial the atmosphere was, and not unpleasantly so; yet during
our stay Italian opera from Madrid was performing in the theatre, and
large yellow posters promised "Bulls in Burgos" at an early date.
II.
To pass from this ancient city to Madrid is to experience one of those
astonishing contrasts in which the country abounds.
We dropped asleep in the rough, time-worn regions of Old Castile, and in
the morning found ourselves amid the glare and bustle of reconstructed
Spain, as it displays itself on the great square called the Gate of the
Sun--a spot with no hint of poetry about it other than its name. Madrid
adopts largely the Parisian style of street architecture, and has in
portions a resemblance to Boston. The sense of remoteness aroused in the
north here suddenly fades, though the traits that mark a foreign land
soon re-assemble and take shape in a new framework. Perhaps, too, our
first rather flat impression was due to an exhausting night journey and
some accompanying incidents.
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE BETWEEN BURGOS AND MADRID.]
"The Spaniards are a nation of robbers!" a cheerful French gentleman of
Bordeaux had told us;[3] and he threw out warnings of certain little
coin tricks in which they were adepts. When two Civil Guards, armed with
swords and guns, inspected our train at the frontier, we recalled his
statement. These guards persistently popped up at every succeeding
station. No matter how fast the train went, there they were always
waiting; always two of them, always with the same mustached faces, and
the same white havelocks fluttering on their bunchy cocked hats of the
French Revolution, and making their swarthy cheeks and black eyes
fiercer by contrast. In fact, they were obviously the same men. Every
time they marched up and down the platform, scanning the cars in a
determined manner, and scowling at our compartment in a way that fully
persuaded us some one must be guilty. Indeed, before long we became
convinced that we ourselves were suspicious; but it would have been a
relief if they had taken us in hand at once. Why should they go on
glaring at us and swinging their guns, as if it were a good deal easier
to shoot us than not, unless it was that we were too rich a "find" to be
disposed of immediately--squandered, as it were? Perhaps the torture of
suspense suited the enormity of our case, but it was certainly cruel.
There was some satisfaction, however, in finding that when we left the
depôt they allowed us a restricted liberty, and kept out of our way. If
it had been otherwise, I don't know what they would have done to us at
Burgos, for it was there that the landlady forced upon us a gold piece
that would not pass, in exchange for a good one which we had given her.
This very simple device was one of which the French gentleman had told
us. But we were too confiding. The money to pay the bill was sent away
by a servant, and once out of sight was easily replaced with inferior
coin. Disturbed by this episode, we went to our train, which started
with the watchman's first hail at eleven, and stumbled hastily into an
empty compartment, which we soon converted into a sleeping-carriage by
making our bundles pillows, drawing curtains, and pulling the silk
screen over the lamp. Our nap was broken only by a halt at the next
station. There was a long, drowsy pause, during which the train seemed
to be pretending it hadn't been asleep. It was nearly time to go on,
when feminine voices drew near our carriage; the door was thrown open,
and two ladies quickly entered. There was no time for retreat; the usual
fish-horn and dinner-bell accompaniment announced our departure, and the
wheels moved. Then it was that one of the new-comers uttered a half
scream, and we saw that she was a nun!
Had it been a cooler night our blood might have frozen; but as it failed
us, we did what we could by feeling greatly embarrassed. The nun and her
travelling companion had been speaking Spanish as they approached, and
we tried in that language to impress on them our harmless devotion to
their convenience.
"But he said it was reserved for ladies," murmured the sister, in good
English.
The terrible truth was now clear. My eye caught, at the same instant, a
card in the window which proved beyond question that we had got into the
carriage for señoras.
The result of this adventure was that we found the nun to be an English
Catholic, employed in teaching at a religious establishment, and her
friend another Englishwoman protecting her on her journey. Pleasant
conversation ensued, and we had almost forgotten that we were criminals,
when the speed of the engine slackened again, and the thought of the
Civil Guards returned to haunt us. We did not dare remain, yet we were
sure that our military pursuers would confront us again on the platform.
There indeed they were, when we tumbled out into the obscurity, with
their white-hooded heads looming above their muskets in startling
disconnectedness. Telling Velazquez, with all the firmness I possessed,
to bare his breast to the avenging sword, I hastened to get into a
coupé, preferring to die comfortably. He, however, ignominiously
followed me. It is true, we were not molested; but the shock of that
narrow escape kept us wakeful.
Not even our own prairies, I think, could present so dreary and
monotonous an outlook as the wide, endless, treeless Castilian plains
while morning slowly felt its way across them. Brown and cold they were,
skirted by white roads, and all shorn of their barley crops, though it
was but middle June. Now and then a village was seen huddled against
some low slope--a church lifting its tall, square campanario above the
humble roofs against the pearling sky. Interior Spain is a desolate
land, but the Church thrives there and draws its tax from the
poverty-stricken inhabitants--a crowned beggar ruling over beggars.
If the first man were now to be created from the clay of this region, he
would doubtless turn out the very type of a lean hidalgo. The human
product of such soil must perforce be meagre and melancholy; and the
pensiveness which we see in most Spanish faces seems a reflection of the
landscape which surrounds them.
The Madrileños offer not a flat, but rather an extremely round
contradiction to this general and accepted idea of the national
appearance. Slenderness is the exception with them. Their city is a
forced flower in the midst of mountain lands, and the men themselves
rejoice in a rotund and puffy look of success, which also partakes of
the hot-house character. They are people of leisure, and, after their
manner, of pleasure. How they swarm in the cafés in the Gate of the
Sun--where they keep up the Moorish custom of calling waiters by two
claps of the hands--or on the one great thoroughfare, Calle de Alcalá,
or in the bull-ring of a Sunday! They are never at rest, yet never
altogether active. They never sleep, or, if they do, others take their
places in the public resorts. The clamor of the streets, and even the
snarling cry of the news-venders--"_La Correspondencia_," or "_El
Demó-crata-a_"--is kept up until the small hours; and at five or six the
restless stir begins again with the silver tinkling of fleet mule-bells.
There are no night-howling watchmen in Madrid; but the custom of
street-hawking is rampant in Spain; and here, in addition to the
newsmen, we have the wail of the water-criers, ministering to an
unquenchable popular thirst, the lottery-ticket sellers, the wax-match
peddlers, and a dozen others. The favorite bird of the country is a kind
of lark called _alondra_, much hung in cages outside the windows, whence
they utter--with that monotonous recurrence which seems a fixed
principle of all things Spanish--a hard, piercing triple note impossible
to ignore. This loud, persistent "twit, twit-twit," resembling at a
distance the click of castanets, begins with daybreak, and gives a most
discouraging notion of the Spanish musical ear.
But the watchmen are merciful. They are called, as elsewhere,
_serenos_, which may mean either "quiet," or "night-dews," but their
function in Madrid is peculiar. Early in the evening they come out by
squads, with staves of office, and at their girdles bright lanterns and
an immense bunch of keys. These are the night-keys of all the houses on
each man's beat, the residents not being allowed to have any. When a
person returns home late--and who does not, in Madrid--he is obliged to
find his sereno, and if that officer is not in sight, calls him by
name--"Frascuelo," or "Pepino." Whereupon Frascuelo, or Pepino, or
Santiago, if he hears, will come along and unlock the door. This curious
system should at least encourage good habits; for, unless a man be
sober, his watchman may have unpleasant tales to tell of him.
The feline race being too often homeless, and having a proverbial taste
for nocturnal wanderings, the average male citizen of the capital
feelingly nicknames himself a "Madrid cat." This shows a frankness of
self-characterization, to say the least, unusual. Of course there is
home life, and there is family affection, in Madrid, but the stranger
naturally does not see a great deal of these; and then it may be doubted
whether they really exist to the same extent as in most other civilized
capitals. It becomes wearisome to make sallies upon the town, and day
after day find so much of the population trying to divert itself, or
killing time in the cafés and clubs. The feeling deepens that they
resort to these for want of a sufficiently close interest in their
homes. More than that, they do not seem really to be amused. Even their
language fails to express the amusement idea; the most that anything can
be for them, in the vernacular, is "entertaining." Still the choice of
light diversion is varied enough. Opera flourishes in winter; in spring
and summer the bull-fight; theatres are always in blast; cocking-mains
are kept up. Hitherto gambling has been another favorite pastime until
checked by the authorities. Not content with all this, the Madrileños
seek in lottery shops that excitement which Americans derive from
drinking-saloons. The brightly lighted lottery agency occurs as
frequently as that other indication of disease, the apothecary's window,
or the stock-market "ticker," in American cities. People of all classes
hover about them both by day and by night. Posters confront you with
announcements of the Child Jesus Lottery, the lottery to aid the Asylum
of Our Lady of the Assumption, or the National, which is drawn thrice a
month, with a chief prize of thirty-two thousand dollars, and some four
hundred other premiums. There are many small drawings besides constantly
going on: not a day passes, in fact, without your being solicited by
wandering dealers in these alluring chances at least half a dozen times.
[Illustration: THE PLAZA MAYOR.]
Altogether, looking from my balcony upon the characteristic crowd in the
great square, leading this life so busy yet so apathetic, as if in a
slow fever, Madrid struck me as only one more great human ant-hill,
where the ants were trying to believe themselves in Paris. The Parisian
resemblance, however, is confined to strips through the middle and on
the edges of the city, and as soon as one's steps are bent away from
those, the narrow ways and older architecture of Spain re-appear. Only a
few rods from the Puerta del Sol lies the Plaza Mayor, which once
enjoyed all the honors of bull-fights and heretic burnings--occasions on
which householders were obliged by their leases to give up all the front
rooms and balconies to be used as boxes for the audience. From the Plaza
Mayor again an arch leads into Toledo Street--old meandering mart full
of mantles and sashes, blankets and guitars, flannel dyed in the
national colors of red and yellow, basket-work and wood-work, including
the carved sticks known as _molinillos_ (little mills), with which
chocolate is mixed by a dexterous spinning motion. The donkey feels
himself at home once more in these narrow thoroughfares; the evil sewage
smell, which oozes through even the most pretentious edifices in the new
quarters, diffuses itself again in full vigor, and the cafés become
dingy and unconventional. On the Alcalá, or San Geronimo, the
carefully-dressed men sip beer and cordials, or possibly indulge in
sparkling sherry--a new and expensive wine like dry champagne; but here
the rougher element is satisfied with _aguardiente_ (the liquor
distilled from anise-seed), and quite as often confines itself to water.
The lower orders are temperate. Peasants and porters and petty traders
will sit down contentedly for a whole evening to a glass of water in
which is dissolved a long meringue (called _asucarillo_, literally
"sugarette"), or to a snow lemonade. Another esteemed cooling beverage
is the _horchata de chufas_, a kind of cream made from pounded cypress
root and then half frozen. The height of luxury is to order with this,
at an added cost of some two cents, a few tubular wafers, fancifully
named _barquillos_ (or little boats), through which the semi-liquid may
be sucked. This barquillo is considered so desirable that boys carry it
on the street in large metal cylinders, the top of which is a disk
inscribed with numbers. You pay a fee, and he revolves on the disk a
pivotal needle, the number at which it stops deciding how many wafers
fall to your lot. In this way the excruciating pleasure of barquillos to
eat is combined with the national delight in gaming.
European costume has fallen on the Madrid people like a pall, blotting
out picturesqueness; but peasants of all provinces are still seen, and
now and then a turbaned figure from Barbary moves across the street. Nor
is the fascinating mantilla quite extinct among women, in spite of their
more than Parisian grace and splendor of modern robing. There are humble
old women squatted on the sidewalk at street corners, who sell water and
liquors and shrub from bottles kept in a singular little stand with
brass knobs like an exaggerated pair of casters; and when one sees the
varied types of peasant, soldier, citizen, or priest, with perhaps a
veiled woman of the middle class, gathered around one of these, the
Spanish quality of the town re-asserts itself distinctly. So it does,
too, when a carriage containing the princesses of the royal household
rattles down the Prado Park, drawn by mules in barbaric red-tasselled
harness, and preceded by a courier who wears a sort of gold-braided
nightcap.
[Illustration: WATER-DEALER.]
[Illustration: OLD ARTILLERY PARK.]
There is no cathedral at Madrid, but the churches, smeared as usual with
gold and stucco and paint in tasteless extravagance, are numerous
enough; and on many a balcony I saw withered straw-like plumes, long as
a man, hung up in commemoration of the last Palm-Sunday. The morning
papers have a "religious bulletin" in the amusement column, giving the
saints and services of the day; besides which special masses for the
souls of departed capitalists are constantly announced, with a request
that friends shall attend. These paid rites doubtless offer a pleasant
exception to the routine of commonplace church-going. Thus, while the
men are absorbed by their cafés and politics, their countless cigarettes
and lottery tickets, with a minimum of business and a maximum of
dominoes, the women fill up their time with matins and vespers,
confessions and intrigues. It would be merely repeating the frank
assertion of the Spanish men themselves to say that feminine morals here
are in a lamentable state; but at least appearances are always carefully
guarded, and if judged by externals only, Madrid is far more virtuous
than London or Paris. As for local society, it exists so much on
appearances that the substance suffers. It is true, the ladies are
beautiful and of noble stature; and their costumes, governed by the
happiest taste, surpass in luxury those seen in public in almost any
other city. The cavaliers are, without exception, the best-dressed
gentlemen in the world; and the mass of sumptuous equipages, with
polished grooms and surpassingly fine horses, which crowds the broad
Castilian Fountain drive, or the Park road on the east of the Buen
Retiro gardens, during fashionable hours, is amazing. Great wealth is
gathered in the hands of a few nobles, who often draw heavy salaries
from government for long-obsolete services; but the most of this
costuming and grooming is attained by semi-starvation at home. By
consequence, dinners and dancing-parties are rarely given even in the
season, and royalty itself provides no more than a couple of balls, with
two or three state dinners, a year.
[Illustration: THE ESCORIAL.]
To be sure, no capital is better provided with sundry of the higher
means to cultivation, as its Royal Armory, its Archæological Museum, and
its glorious Picture-gallery--in some respects the noblest of
Europe--remind one. Moreover, in the neighboring Escorial, that dark
jewel in the head of Philip II., travellers find a rich monument of art,
albeit to many eyes unseen inscriptions perhaps record there more than
enough of Spain's misfortunes. In the Madrid gallery the stately,
severe, and robust royal portraits by Velazquez, or his magnificently
healthy "Drunkards," reveal in their way, as do the Virgins of Murillo,
floating divinely in translucent air, that deep and deathless power of
Spanish temperament and genius over which slumber has reigned so long.
The pictures of Ribera, hanging together, are like loose pages torn from
Spanish ecclesiastical history and legend: a collection of monks,
ascetics, martyrs--scenes of torture depicted with relentless and savage
vigor. Goya, again, scarcely known out of Spain, left at the beginning
of this century portraits of wonderful vitality and finish, fresh
glimpses of popular life, and wild figure compositions marked by the
fierce, half insane energy of a Latinized William Blake. His imagination
and manner were both original. Though falling short, like all other
Spanish painters, in ideality, he had that faculty of fertile
improvisation so refreshing in Murillo's naturalistic "Madonna of the
Birdling," or in his "St. Elizabeth," and "Roman Patrician's Dream," at
the Academy of Fine Arts. But it is not with these past splendors, still
full of hopes for new futures, that the Castilian gentlemen and ladies
of our varnished period concern themselves. The opera, the circus, and
the _Corrida de Toros_--the irrepressible bull-fight--are to them of far
more consequence.
In every crowd and café you see the tall, shapely, dark-faced, silent
men, with a cool, professionally murderous look like that of our border
desperadoes, whose enormously wide black hats, short jackets, tight
trousers, and pigtails of braided hair proclaim them _chulos_, or
members of the noble ring. Intrepid, with muscles of steel, and finely
formed, they are very illiterate: we saw one of them gently taking his
brandy at the Café de Paris after a hard combat, while his friend read
from an evening paper a report of the games in which he had just
fought--the man's own education not enabling him to decipher print. But
the higher class of these professionals are the idols, the demi-gods, of
the people. Songs are made about them, their deeds are painted on fans,
and popular chromos illustrate their loves and woes; people crowd around
to see them in hotels or on the street as if they were heroes or star
tragedians. Pet dogs are named for the well-known ones; and it was even
rumored that one of the chief swordsmen had secured the affections of a
patrician lady, and would have married her but for the interference of
her friends. Certain it is that a whole class of young bucks of the
lower order--"'Arrys" is the British term--get themselves up in the
closest allowable imitation of bull-fighters, down to the tuft of hair
left growing in front of the ear. The _espadas_ or _matadores_
(killers), who give the mortal blow, hire each one his _cuadrilla_--a
corps of assistants, including _picadores_, _banderilleros_, and
_punterillo_. For every fight they receive five hundred dollars, and
sometimes they lay up large fortunes. To see the sport well from a seat
in the shade, one must pay well. Tickets are monopolized by speculators,
who, no less than the fighters, have their "ring," and gore buyers as
the bull does horses. We gave two dollars apiece for places. The route
to the Place of Bulls is lined for a mile with omnibuses, tartanas,
broken-down diligences, and wheezy cabs, to convey intending spectators
to the fight on Sunday afternoons. A stream of pedestrians file in the
same direction, and the showy turnouts of the rich add dignity to what
soon becomes a wild rush for the scene of action. The mule-bells ring
like a rain of metal, whips crack, the drivers shout wildly, and at full
gallop we dash by windows full of on-lookers, by the foaming fountains
of the Prado, and up the road to the grim Colosseum of stone and brick,
in the midst of scorched and arid fields, with the faint peaks of the
snow-capped Guadarrama range seen, miles to the north, through dazzling
white sunshine.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO THE BULL-FIGHT.]
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE BULL-RING.]
Within is the wide ring, sunk in a circular pit of terraced granite
crowned by galleries. The whole great round, peopled by at least ten
thousand beings, is divided exactly by the sun and the shadow--_sol y
sombra_; and from our cool place we look at the vivid orange sand of the
half arena in sunlight, and the tiers of seats beyond, where swarms of
paper fans (red, yellow, purple, and green) are wielded to shelter the
eyes of those in the cheaper section, or bring air to their lungs. No
connected account of a bull tourney can impart the vividness, the rapid
changes, the suspense, the skill, the picturesqueness, or horror of the
actual thing. All occurs in rapid glimpses, in fierce, dramatic,
brilliant, and often ghastly pictures, which fade and re-form in new
phases on the instant. The music is sounding, the fans are fluttering,
amateurs strolling between the wooden barriers of the ring and the
lowest seats, hatless men are hawking fruit and aguardiente, when
trumpets announce the grand entry. It is a superb sight: the picadores
with gorgeous jackets and long lances on horseback, in wide Mexican
hats, their armor-cased legs in buckskin trousers; the swordsmen and
others on foot, shining with gold and silver embroidery on scarlet and
blue, bright green, saffron, or puce-colored garments, carrying cloaks
of crimson, violet, and canary. At the head is the mounted _alguazil_ in
ominous black, who carries the key of the bull-gate. Everything is
punctual, orderly, ceremonious.
Then the white handkerchief, as signal, from the president of the games
in his box; the trumpet-blare again; and the bull rushing from his lair!
There is a wild moment when, if he be of good breed, he launches himself
impetuous as the ball from a thousand-ton gun directly upon his foes,
and sweeping around half the circle, puts them to flight over the
barrier or into mid-ring, leaving a horse or two felled in his track. I
have seen one fierce Andalusian bull within ten minutes kill five horses
while making two circuits of the ring. The first onset against a horse
is horrible to witness. The poor steed, usually lean and decrepit, is
halted until the bull will charge him, when instantly the picador in the
saddle aims a well-poised blow with his lance, driving the point into
the bull's back only about an inch, as an irritant. You hear the horns
tear through the horse's hide; you _feel_ them go through _yourself_.
Ribs crack; there's a clatter of hoofs, harness, and the rider's armor;
a sudden heave and fall--disaster!--and then the bull rushes away in
pursuit of a yellow mantle flourished to distract him.
The banderilleros come, each holding two ornamental barbed sticks, which
he waves to attract the bull. At the brute's advance he runs to meet
him, and in the moment when the huge head is lowered for a lunge, he
plants them deftly, one on each shoulder, and springs aside. Perhaps,
getting too near, he fails, and turns to fly; the bull after, within a
few inches. He flees to the barrier, drops his cloak on the sand, and
vaults over; the bull springs over too into the narrow alley; whereupon
the fighter, being close pressed, leaps back into the ring light as a
bird, but saved by a mere hair's-breadth from a tossing or a trampling
to death. The crowd follow every turn with shouts and loud comments and
cheers: "Go, bad little bull!" "Let the picadores charge!" "More horses!
more horses!" "Well done, Gallito!" "Time for the death!--the
matadores!" and so on. Humor mingles with some of their remarks, and
there is generally one volunteer buffoon who, choosing a lull in the
combat, shrieks out rude witticisms that bring the laugh from a thousand
throats.
But if the management of the sport be not to their liking, then the
multitude grow instantly stormy: rising on the benches, they bellow
their opinions to the president, whistle, stamp, scream, gesticulate.
It is the tumult of a mob, appeasable only by speedier bloodshed. And
what bloodshed they get! A horse or two, say, lies lifeless and crumpled
on the earth; the others, with bandaged eyes, and sides hideously
pierced and red-splashed, are spurred and whacked with long sticks to
make them go. But it is time for the banderilleros, and after that for
the swordsman. He advances, glittering, with a proud, athletic step, the
traditional chignon fastened to his pigtail, and holding out his bare
sword, makes a brief speech to the president: "I go to slay this bull
for the honor of the people of Madrid and the most excellent president
of this tourney." Then throwing his hat away, he proceeds to his task of
skill and danger. It is here that the chief gallantry of the sport
begins. With a scarlet cloak in one hand he attracts the bull, waves him
to one side or the other, baffles him, re-invites him--in fine, plays
with and controls him as if he were a kitten, though always with eye
alert and often in peril. At last, having got him "in position," he
lifts the blade, aims, and with a forward spring plunges it to the hilt
at a point near the top of the spine. Perhaps the bull recoils, reels,
and dies with that thrust; but more often he is infuriated, and several
strokes are required to finish him. Always, however, the blood gushes
freely, the sand is stained with it, and the serried crowd, intoxicated
by it, roar savagely. Still, the "many-headed beast" is fastidious. If
the bull be struck in such a way as to make him spout his life out at
the nostrils, becoming a trifle _too_ sanguinary, marks of disapproval
are freely bestowed. One bull done for, the music recommences, and mules
in showy trappings are driven in. They are harnessed to the carcasses,
and the dead bulks of the victims are hauled bravely off at a gallop,
furrowing the dirt. The grooms run at topmost speed, snapping their long
whips; the dust rises in a cloud, enveloping the strange cavalcade. They
disappear through the gate flying, and you wake from a dream of ancient
Rome and her barbarous games come true again. But soon the trumpets
flourish; another bull comes; the same finished science and sure death
ensue, varied by ever-new chances and escapes, until afternoon wanes,
the sun becomes shadow, and ten thousand satisfied people--mostly men in
felt sombreros, with some women, fewer ladies, and a sprinkling of
children and babies--throng homeward.
What impresses is the cold blood of the thing. People bring their
goat-skins of wine, called "little drunkards," and pass them around to
friends, between bulls; others pop off lemonade bottles, and nearly all
smoke. Even a combatant sometimes lights a cigar while the bull is
occupied at the other side of the ring. During the hottest encounters
grooms come in to strip the harness from dying horses or stab an
incapacitated one; to carry off baskets of entrails, and rake fresh sand
over the blood-pools, quite calmly, at the risk of sharp interruption
from the vagarious horned enemy. In the midst of a dangerous flurry,
while performers are escaping, an orange-vender in the lane outside the
barrier pitches some fruit to a buyer half-way up the _gradas_, counting
aloud, "One, two, three," to twenty-four. All are caught, and he neatly
catches his money in return. Afterward, when a bull leaps the barrier,
this intrepid merchant has to fly for life, leaving his basket on the
ground, where the bewildered animal upsets it, rolling the contents
everywhere in golden confusion. Another time we saw a horse and rider
lifted bodily on the horns, and so tossed that the horseman flew out of
his saddle, hurtled through the air directly over the bull, and landed
solidly on his back, senseless. Six grooms bore him off, white and
rigid. But the populace never heeded him; they were madly cheering the
bull's prowess. A surgeon, by-the-way, always attends in an anteroom;
prayers are said before the fight; and a priest is in readiness with the
consecrated wafer to give the last sacrament in case of any fatal
accident. The utter simple-mindedness with which Spaniards regard the
brutalities of the sport may be judged from the fact that a bull-fight
was once given to benefit the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals!
On occasion, the drawing of a charitable lottery is held at the _Corrida
de Toros_, and then there are gala features. The Queen and various
high-born ladies present magnificent rosettes of silk or satin and gold
and silver tinsel, with long streamers, to be attached by little barbs
to the bulls before their entrance, each having his colors indicated in
this way; and these ornaments are displayed in shop windows for days
before the event. The language of the ring is another peculiarity. There
are many fine points of merit, distinguished by as many canting terms.
There is the "pair regular," the "relance," the "cuartos," and the darts
are playfully termed "shuttlecocks;" the swordsman deals in "pinches"
and "thrusts," and so on--all of which is recorded in press reports,
amusing enough in their airy and supercilious half-literary treatment.
These are among the most polished products of Spanish journalism. Fines
are imposed on the performers for any achievement not "regular;" and, on
the other hand, good strokes are rewarded by the public with cigars, or,
as the dainty reporters say, they "merit palms." The three chief
swordsmen are Lagartijo, Frascuelo, and Currito; "Broad Face," "Little
Fatty," and the like, being lesser lights. Frascuelo is so renowned for
hardihood that I once saw him receive, in obedience to popular will, the
ear of the bull he had just slain--a supreme mark of favor.[4]
[Illustration: A STREET SCENE.]
Madrid is now the head-quarters of the national game, as it is of
everything else. It is outwardly flourishing, it is adorned with
statues, its parks are green, and its fountains spout gayly.
Nevertheless, the impression it makes is melancholy. Beggary is
importunate on its public ways. Palaces and poverty, great wealth and
wretched penury, are huddled close together. Its assumption of splendor
is in startling contrast with the desolate and uncared-for districts
that surround it from the very edge of the city outward. The natural
result of extremes in the distribution of property, with a country
impoverished, is public bankruptcy; and public bankruptcy stares surely
enough through the city's gay mask. There is another unhappy result from
the undue concentration of resources at this artificial capital. Madrid
prides itself on being the spot at which all the avenues of the land
converge equally, the exact centre of Spain being close beyond the
city's confines, and marked--how appropriately--by a church! But Madrid
is, notwithstanding, a national centre only in name. It enjoys a false
luxury, while too many outlying provinces sustain a starveling
existence. And, seeing the alien, imitative manners adopted here, one
feels sharply the difficult contrasts that exist between the metropolis
and the provinces: no hearty bond of national unity appears. We looked
back over the ground we had traversed, and thought of the gray bones of
Burgos cathedral, lying like some stranded mammoth of another age, far
in the north. Oh, bells of Burgos, mumbling in your towers, what message
have you for these sophisticated ears? And what intelligible response
does the heart of the country send back to you?
"Come," said I to Velveteen. "It is useless to resist longer. Let's
surrender to these two white-capped guards who have dogged us so, and be
carried away."
[Illustration]
THE LOST CITY.
I.
[Illustration: I]
It was of Spain's past and present that we were speaking, and "What," I
asked, "have we given her in return for her discovery of our New World?"
"The sleeping-car and the street tramway," answered Velveteen, with
justifiable pride.
He was right; for we had seen the first on the railroad, and the second
skimming the streets of Madrid. Still, the reward did not appear great,
measured by the much that Spain's ventures in the Western hemisphere had
cost her, and by the comparative desolation of her present. The devoted
labors of Irving and Prescott, which Spaniards warmly appreciate, are
more in the nature of an adequate return.
"It strikes me, also," I ventured to add, "that we are rendering a
service in kind. She discovered us, and now we are discovering her."
If one reflects how some of the once great and powerful places of the
Peninsula, such as Toledo and Cordova, have sunk out of sight and
perished to the modern world, this fancy applies with some truth to
every sympathetic explorer of them. It had been all very well to
imagine ourselves conversant with the country when we were in Madrid,
and even an occasional slip in the language did not disturb that
supposition. When I accidentally asked the chamber-maid to swallow a cup
of chocolate instead of "bringing" it, owing to an unnecessary
resemblance of two distinct words, and when my comrade, in attending to
details of the laundry, was led by an imperfect dictionary to describe
one article of wear as a _pintura de noche_, or "night scene," our
confidence suffered only a momentary shock. But, after all, it was not
until we reached Toledo that we really passed into a kind of forgotten
existence, and knew what it was to be far beyond reach of any familiar
word.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO TOLEDO.]
With the first plunge southward from the capital the reign of ruin
begins--ruin and flies. The heat becomes intense; the air itself seems
to be cooked through and through; the flies rejoice with a malicious
joy, and the dry sandy hills, bearing nothing but tufts of blackened
weeds, resemble large mounds of pepper and salt. Here and there in the
valley is the skeleton of a stone or brick farm-house withering away,
and perhaps near by a small round defensive hut, recalling times of
disorder. Between the hills, however, are fields still prolific in rye,
though wholly destitute of trees. Verdure re-asserts itself wherever
there is the smallest water-course; and a curve of the river Tagus is
sure to infold fruit orchards and melon vines, while the parched soil
briefly revives and puts forth delightful shade-trees. But although the
river-fed lands around Toledo are rich in vegetation, the ancient city
itself, with the Tagus slung around its base like a loop, rises on a
sterile rock, and amid hills of bronze. So much are the brown and
sun-imbued houses and the old fortified walls in keeping with the massy
natural foundation that all seem reared together, the huge form of the
Alcazar, or castle--where the Spanish national military academy is
housed--towering like a second cliff in one corner of the round,
irregularly clustered city. Our omnibus scaled the height by a road
perfectly adapted for conducting to some dragon stronghold of misty
fable, and landed us in the Zocodover, the sole open space of any
magnitude in that tangle of thread-like streetlets, along which the
houses range themselves with a semblance of order purely superficial.
Most of Toledo is traversable only for pedestrians and donkeys. These
latter carry immense double baskets across their backs, in which are
transported provisions, bricks, coal, fowls, water, bread,
crockery--everything, in short, down to the dirt occasionally scraped
from the thoroughfares. I saw one peasant, rather advanced in years,
helping himself up the steep rise of a street on the hill-side by means
of a stout cane in one hand and the tail of his heavy-laden donkey
grasped in the other. To make room for these useful beasts and their
broad panniers, some of the houses are hollowed out at the corners; in
one case the side wall being actually grooved a foot deep for a number
of yards along an anxious turning. Otherwise the panniers would touch
both sides of the way, and cause a blockade as obstinate as the animal
itself.
[Illustration: THE NARROW WAY.]
[Illustration: SPANISH PEASANT.
From a Drawing by William M. Chase.]
Coming from the outer world into so strange a labyrinth, where there is
no echo of rolling wheels, no rumble of traffic or manufacture, you
find yourself in a city which may be said to be without a voice. Through
a hush like this, history and tradition speak all the more powerfully.
Toledo has been a favorite with the novelists. The Zocodover was the
haunt of that typical rogue Lazarillo de Tormes; and Cervantes, oddly as
it happens, connects the scene of _La ilustre Fregonde_ with a shattered
castle across the river, which by a coincidence has had its original
name of San Servando corrupted into San Cervantes.
Never shall I forget our walk around the city walls that first afternoon
in Toledo. A broad thoroughfare skirts the disused defences on the south
and west, running at first along the sheer descent to the river, and a
beetling height against which houses, shops, and churches are crammed
confusedly. I noticed one smithy with a wide dark mouth revealing the
naked rock on which walls and roof abutted, and other houses into the
faces of which had been wrought large granite projections of the hill.
After this the way led through a gate of peculiar strength and
shapeliness, carrying up arches of granite and red brick to a
considerable height--a stout relic of the proud Moorish dominion so long
maintained here; and then, when we had rambled about a church of
Santiago lower down, passing through some streets irregular as
foot-paths, where over a neglected door stood a unique announcement of
the owner's name--"I am Don Sanchez. 1792"--we came to the Visagra, the
country gate. This menacing, double-towered portal is mediæval; so that
a few steps had carried us from Mohammedan Alimaymon to the Emperor
Charles V. Just outside of it again is the Alameda, the modern garden
promenade, where the beauty and idleness of Toledo congregate on Sunday
evenings to the soft compulsion of strains from the military academical
band. Thin runnels of water murmur along through the hedges and
embowered trees, explaining by their presence how this refreshing
pleasure-ground was conjured into being; for on the slope, a few feet
below the green hedges, you still see the sun-parched soil just as it
once spread over the whole area. The contrast suggests Eden blossoming
on a crater-side.
At the open-air soirées of the Alameda may be seen excellent examples of
Spanish beauty. The national type of woman appears here in good
preservation, and not too much hampered by foreign airs. Doubtless one
finds it too in Burgos and Madrid, and in fact everywhere; and the grace
of the women in other places is rather fonder of setting itself off by a
fan used for parasol purposes in the street than in Toledo. But on the
_pasco_ and _alameda_ all Spanish ladies carry fans, and it is
something marvellous to see how they manage them. Not for a moment is
the subtle instrument at rest: it flutters, wavers idly, is opened and
shut in the space of a second, falls to the side, and again rises to
take its part in the conversation almost like a third person--all
without effort--with merely a turn of the supple fingers or wrist, and
contributing an added charm to the bearer. The type of face which beams
with more or less similarity above every fan in Spain is difficult to
describe, and at first difficult even to apprehend. One has heard so
much about its beauty that in the beginning it seems to fall short; but
gradually its spell seizes on the mind, becoming stronger and stronger.
The tint varies from tawny rose or olive to white: ladies of higher
caste, from their night life and rare exposure to the sun, acquire a
deathly pallor, which is unfortunately too often imitated with powder.
Chestnut or lighter hair is seen a good deal in the south and east, but
deep black is the prevalent hue. And the eyes!--it is impossible to more
than suggest the luminous, dreamy medium in which they swim, so large,
dark, and vivid. But, above all, there is combined with a certain
child-like frankness a freedom and force, a quick mobility in the lines
of the face, equalled only in American women. To these elements you must
add a strong arching eyebrow and a pervading richness and fire of nature
in the features, which it would be hard to parallel at all, especially
when the whole is framed in the seductive folds of the black mantilla,
like a drifting night-cloud enhancing the sparkle of a star.
As we continued along the Camin de Marchan we looked down on one side
over the fertile plain. The pale tones of the ripe harvest and dense
green of trees contrasted with the rich brown and gray of the city, and
dashes of red clay here and there. In a long field rose detached
fragments of masonry, showing at different points the vast ground-plan
of the Roman Circus Maximus, with a burst of bright ochre sand in the
midst of the stubble, while on the left hand we had an old Arab gate
pierced with slits for arrows, and on the crest above that a
nunnery--St. Sunday the Royal--followed by a line of palaces and
convents half ruined in the Napoleonic campaign of 1812. Out in the
plain was the roof of the sword factory where "Toledo blades" are still
forged and tempered for the Spanish army; although in the finer details
of damascening and design nothing is produced beyond a small stock of
show weapons and tiny ornamental trinkets for sale to tourists. Nor was
this all; for a little farther on, at the edge of the river, close to
the Bridge of St. Martin and the Gate of Twelve Stones, the broken
remains of an old Gothic palace sprawled the steep, lying open to heaven
and vacant as the dull eye-socket in some unsepulchred skull. Our stroll
of a mile had carried us back to the second century before Christ, the
path being strewn with relics of the Roman conquest, the Visigothic
inroad, the Moorish ascendency, and the returning tide of Christian
power. But the Jews, seeking refuge after the fall of Jerusalem,
preceded all these, making a still deeper substratum in the marvellous
chronicles of Toledo; and some of their later synagogues, exquisitely
wrought in the Moorish manner, still stand in the Jewish quarter for the
wonderment of pilgrim connoisseurs.
[Illustration: SINGING GIRL.]
It was from a terrace of this old Gothic palace near the bridge that,
according to legend, Don Roderick, the last of the Goths in Spain, saw
Florinda, daughter of one Count Julian, bathing in the yellow Tagus
under a four-arched tower which still invades the flood, and goes by the
name of the Bath of Florinda. From his passion for her, and their mutual
error, the popular tale, with vigorous disregard of chronology, deduces
the fall of Spain before the Berber armies; and as most old stories here
receive an ecclesiastical tinge, this one relates how Florinda's sinful
ghost continued to haunt the spot where we now stood, until laid by a
good friar with cross and benediction. The sharp fall of the bank at
first glance looked to consist of ordinary earth and stones, but on
closer scrutiny turned out to contain quantities of brick bits from the
old forts and towers which one generation after another had built on the
heights, and which had slowly mouldered into nullity. Even so the firm
lines of history have fallen away and crumbled into romance, which sifts
through the crannies of the whole withered old city. As a lady of my
acquaintance graphically said, it seems as if ashes had been thrown over
this ancient capital, covering it with a film of oblivion. The rocks,
towers, churches, ruins, are just so much corporeal mythology--object,
lessons in fable. A little girl, becomingly neckerchiefed, wandered by
us while we leaned dreaming above the river; and she was singing one of
the wild little songs of the country, full of melancholy melody:
"Fair Malaga, adios!
Ah, land where I was born,
Thou hadst mother-love for all,
But for me step-mother's scorn!"
[Illustration: CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN OF THE KINGS.]
All unconscious of the monuments around her, she stopped when she saw
that we had turned and were listening. Then we resumed our way, passing,
I may literally say, as if in a trance up into the town again, where we
presently found ourselves in front of St. John of the Kings, a venerable
church, formerly connected with a Franciscan monastery which the French
burnt. On the outer wall high up hangs a stern fringe of chains, placed
there as votive tokens by released Christian captives from Granada, in
1492; and there they have remained since America was discovered!
To this church is attached a most beautiful cloister, calm with the
solitude of nearly four hundred years. Around three sides the rich
clustered columns, each with its figures of holy men supported under
pointed canopies, mark the delicate Gothic arches, through which the
sunlight slants upon the pavement, falling between the leaves of
aspiring vines that twine upward from the garden in the middle. There
the rose-laurel blooms, and a rude fountain perpetually gurgles, hidden
in thick greenery; and on the fourth side the wall is dismantled as the
French bombardment left it. Seventy years have passed, and though the
sculptured blocks for restoration have been got together, the vines grow
over them, and no work has been done. We mounted the bell-tower part way
with the custodian, and gained a gallery looking into the chapel,
strangely adorned with regal shields and huge eagles in stone. On our
way, under one part of the tower roof, we found a hen calmly strutting
with her brood. "It was meant for celibacy," said the custodian, "but
times change, and you see that family life has established itself here
after all."
[Illustration: A BIT OF CHARACTER.]
I don't know whether there is anything particularly sacred about the
hens of this district, but after seeing this one in the church-tower I
began to think there might be, especially as on the way home we
discovered another imprisoned fowl disconsolately looking down at us
from the topmost window of a venerable patrician residence.
II.
[Illustration: SPANISH SOLDIERS PLAYING DOMINOS.]
Its antiquities are not the queerest thing about Toledo. The sights of
the day, the isolated existence of the inhabitants, are things peculiar.
The very sports of the children reflect the prevailing influences. A
favorite diversion with them is to parade in some dark hall-way with
slow step and droning chants, in imitation of church festivals; and in
the street we found boys playing at _toros_. Some took off their coats
to wave as mantles before the bull, who hid around the corner until the
proper time for his entry. The bull in this game, I noticed, had a nice
sense of fair play, and would stop to argue points with his
antagonists--something I should have been glad to see in the real arena.
Once the old rock town accommodated two hundred thousand residents. Its
contingent has now shrunk to twenty thousand, yet it swarms with
citizens, cadets, loafers, and beggars. Its tortuous wynds are full of
wine-shops, vegetables, and children, all mixed up together. Superb old
palaces, nevertheless, open off from them, frequently with spacious
courts inside, shaded by trellised vines, and with pillars at the
entrance topped by heavy stone balls, or doors studded with nails and
moulded in rectangular patterns like inlay-work. One day we wandered
through a sculptured gate-way and entered a paved opening with a carved
wood gallery running around the walls above. Orange-trees in tubs stood
about, and a brewery was established in these palatial quarters. We
ordered a bottle, but I noticed that the brewer stood regarding us
anxiously. At last he drew nearer, and asked, "Do you come from Madrid?"
"Yes."
"Ah, then," said he, in a disheartened tone, "you won't like our beer."
[Illustration: A NARROW STREET.]
We encouraged him, however, and at last he disappeared, sending us the
beverage diplomatically by another hand. He was too faint-spirited to
witness the trial himself. Though called "The Delicious," the thin,
sweet, gaseous liquid was certainly detestable; but in deference to the
brewer's delicate conscientiousness we drank as much as possible, and
then left with his wife some money and a weakly complimentary remark
about the beer, which evidently came just in time to convince her that
we were, after all, discriminating judges.
[Illustration: WOMAN WITH BUNDLE.]
The people generally were very simple and good-natured, and in
particular a young commercial traveller from Barcelona whom we met
exerted himself to entertain us. The chief street was lined with awnings
reaching to the curb-stone in front of the shops, and every public
door-way was screened by a striped curtain. Pushing aside one of these,
our new acquaintance introduced us to what seemed a dingy bar, but, by a
series of turnings, opened out into a spacious concealed café--that of
the Two Brothers--where we frequently repaired with him to sip chiccory
and cognac or play dominos. On these occasions he kept the tally in
pencil on the marble table, marking the side of himself and a friend
with their initials, and heading ours "The Strangers." All travellers in
Spain are described by natives as "Strangers" or "French," and the
reputation for a pure Parisian accent which we acquired under these
circumstances, though brief, was glorious. To the Two Brothers resorted
many soldiers, shop-keepers, and well-to-do housewives during fixed
hours of the afternoon and evening, but at other times it was as
forsaken as Don Roderick's palace. Another place of amusement was the
Grand Summer Theatre, lodged within the ragged walls of a large building
which had been half torn down. Here we sat under the stars, luxuriating
in the most expensive seats (at eight cents per head), surrounded by a
full audience of exceedingly good aspect, including some Toledan ladies
of great beauty, and listened to a _zarzuela_, or popular comic opera,
in which the prompter took an almost too energetic part. The ticket
collector came in among the chairs to receive everybody's coupons with
very much the air of being one of the family; for while performing
his stern duty he smoked a short brier pipe, giving to the act an
indescribable dignity which threw the whole business of the tickets into
a proper subordination. In returning to our inn about midnight we were
attracted by the free cool sound of a guitar duet issuing from a dark
street that rambled off somewhere like a worm track in old wood, and,
pursuing the sound, we discovered by the aid of a match lighted for a
cigarette two men standing in the obscure alley, and serenading a couple
of ladies in a balcony, who positively laughed with pride at the
attention. The men, it proved, had been hired by some admirer, and so
our friend engaged them to perform for us at the hotel the following
night.
[Illustration: THE SERENADERS.]
The skill these thrummers of the guitar display is delicious, especially
in the treble part, which is executed on a smaller species of the
instrument, called a _mandura_. Our treble-player was blind in one eye,
and with the carelessness of genius allowed his mouth to stay open, but
managed always to keep a cigarette miraculously hanging in it; while his
comrade, with a disconsolate expression, disdained to look at the
strings on which his proud Castilian fingers were condemned to play a
mere accompaniment. For two or three hours they rippled out those
peculiar native airs which go so well with the muffled vibrations and
mournful Oriental monotony of the guitar; but the bagman varied the
concert by executing operatic pieces on a hair-comb covered with thin
paper--a contrivance in which he took unfeigned delight. Some
remonstrance against this uproar being made by other inmates of the
hotel, our host silenced the complainants by cordially inviting them in.
One large black-bearded guest, the exact reproduction of a stately
ancient Roman, accepted the hospitality, and listened to that ridiculous
piping of the comb with profound gravity and unmoved muscles, expressing
neither approval nor dissatisfaction. But the white-aproned waiter, who,
though unasked, hung spellbound on the threshold, was, beyond question,
deeply impressed. The relations of servants with employers are on a very
democratic footing in Spain. We had an admirable butler at Madrid who
used to join in the conversation at table whenever it interested him,
and was always answered with good grace by the conversationists, who
admitted him to their intellectual repast at the same moment that he was
proffering them physical nutriment. These Toledan servitors of the Fonda
de Lino were still more informal. They used to take naps regularly twice
a day in the hall, and could not get through serving dinner without an
occasional cigarette between the courses. To save labor, they would
place a pile of plates in front of each person, enough to hold the
entire list of viands. That last phrase is a euphemism, however, for the
meal each day consisted of the same meat served in three separate relays
without vegetables, followed by fowl, an allowance of beans, and
dessert. Even this they were not particular to give us on the hour.
Famished beyond endurance, one evening at eight o'clock, we went
down-stairs and found that not the first movement toward dinner had been
made. The _mozos_ (waiters) were smoking and gossiping in the street,
and rather frowned upon our vulgar desire for food, but we finally
persuaded them to yield to it. After we had bought some tomatoes, and
made a salad at dinner, the management was put on its mettle, and
improved slightly. Fish in this country is always brought on somewhere
in the middle of dinner, like the German pudding, and our landlord
astonished us by following the three courses of stewed veal with
sardines, fried in oil and ambuscaded in a mass of boiled green peppers.
After that we forbore to stimulate his ambition any farther.
[Illustration: A PLENTIFUL SUPPLY OF PLATES.]
The hotel guest, however, is on the whole regarded as a necessary
evil--a nuisance tolerated only because some few of the finest race in
the world can make money out of him. The landlord lived with his family
on the ground-floor, and furnished little domestic tableaux as we passed
in and out; but he never paid any attention to us, and even looked
rather hurt at the intrusion of so many strangers into his hostelry. Nor
did the high-born sewing-women who sat on the public stairs, and left
only a narrow space for other people to ascend or descend by, consider
it necessary to stir in the least for our convenience. The fonda had
more of the old tavern or posada style about it than most hotels
patronized by foreigners. The entrance door led immediately into a
double court, where two or three yellow equipages stood; and from this
the kitchen, storerooms, and stable all branched off in some clandestine
way. Above, at the eaves, these courts were covered with canvas awnings
wrinkled in regular folds on iron rods--sheltering covers which remained
drawn from the first flood of the morning sun until after five in the
afternoon. Early and late I used to look down into the inner court,
observing the men and women of the household as they dressed fish and
silently wrung the necks of chickens, or sat talking a running stream of
nothingness by the hour, for love of their own glib but uncouth voices.
People of this province intone rather than talk: their sentences are set
to distinct drawling tunes, such as I never before encountered in
ordinary speech, and their thick lisping of all sibilants, combined with
the usual contralto of their voices, gives the language a sonorous burr,
for which one soon acquires a liking. Sunday is the great hair-combing
day in Toledo, if I may judge from the manner in which women carried on
that soothing operation in their door-ways and _patios_; and in this
inner court below my window one of the servants, sitting on a stone
slab, enjoyed the double profit of sewing and of letting a companion
manipulate her yard-long locks of jet, while others sat near, fanning
themselves and chattering. Another time a little girl, dark as an
Indian, came there in the morning to wash a kerchief at the stone tank,
always brimming with dirty water; after which she executed, unsuspicious
of my gaze, a singularly weird _pas seul_, a sort of shadow dance, on
the pavement, and then vanished.
[Illustration: THE TOILET--A SUNDAY SCENE.]
All the houses are roofed with heavy curved tiles, which fit together so
as to let the air circulate under their hollow grooves; and a species of
many-seeded grass sprouts out of these baked earth coverings, out of the
ledges of old towers and belfries, and from the crevices of the great
cathedral itself, like the downy hair on an old woman's cheek.
The view along almost any one of the ancient streets, which are always
tilted by the hilly site, is wonderfully quaint in its irregularities.
Every window is heavily grated with iron, from the top to the bottom
story, even the openings high up in the cathedral spire being similarly
guarded, until the whole place looks like a metropolis of prisons. In
the stout doors, too, there are small openings or peep-holes, such as we
had seen still in actual use at Madrid--the relics of an epoch when even
to open to an unknown visitor might be dangerous. White, white, white
the sunshine!--and the walls of pink or yellow-brown, of pale green and
blue, are sown with deep shadows and broken by big archways, often
surmounted by rich knightly escutcheons. Balconies with tiled floors
turning their colors down toward the sidewalk stud the fronts, and long
curtains stream over them like cloaks fluttering in the breeze. At one
point a peak-roofed tower rises above the rest of its house with sides
open to the air and cool shadow within, where perhaps a woman sits and
works behind a row of bright flowering plants. Doves inhabited the fonda
roof unmolested by the spiritless cats that, flat as paper, slept in the
undulations of the tiles; for the Toledan cats and dogs are the most
wretched of their kind. They get even less to eat than their human
neighbors, which is saying a great deal. And beyond the territory of the
doves my view extended to a slender bell-spire at the end of the
cathedral, poised in the bright air like a flower-stalk, with one bell
seen through an interstice as if it were a blossom. At another point the
main spire rose out of what might be called a rich thicket of Gothic
work. Its tall thin shaft is encircled near the point with sharp
radiating spikes of iron, doubtless intended to recall the crown of
thorns: in this sign of the Passion, held forever aloft, three hundred
feet above the ground, there is a penetrating pathos, a solemn beauty.
III.
The cathedral of Toledo, long the seat of the Spanish primate, stands in
the first rank of cathedrals, and is invested with a ponderous gloom
that has something almost savage about it. For six centuries art,
ecclesiasticism, and royal power lavished their resources upon it; and
its dusky chapels are loaded with precious gems and metals, tawdry
though the style of their ornamentation often is. The huge pillars that
divide its five naves rise with a peculiar inward curve, which gives
them an elastic look of growth. They are the giant roots from which the
rest has spread. Under the golden gratings and jasper steps of the high
altar Cardinal Mendoza lies buried, with a number of the older kings of
Spain, in a grewsome sunless vault; but at the back of the altar there
is contrived with theatrical effect a burst of white light from a window
in the arched ceiling, around the pale radiance of which are assembled
painted figures, gradually giving place to others in veritable
relief--all sprawling, flying, falling down the wall enclosing the
altar, as if one were suddenly permitted to see a swarm of saints and
angels careering in a beam of real supernatural illumination. A private
covered gallery leads above the street from the archbishop's palace into
one side of the mighty edifice; and this, with the rambling, varied
aspect of the exterior, in portions resembling a fortress, with a stone
sentry-box on the roof, recalls the days of prelates who put themselves
at the head of armies, leading in war as in everything else. A spacious
adjoining cloister, full of climbing ivy and figs, Spanish cypress, the
smooth-trunked laurel-tree, and many other growths, all bathed in
opulent sunshine, marks the site of an old Jewish market, which
Archbishop Tenorio in 1389 incited a mob to burn in order that he might
have room for this sacred garden. But the voices of children now ring
out from the upper rooms of the cloister building, where the widows and
orphans of cathedral servants are given free homes. Through this
"cloister of the great church" it was that Cervantes says he hurried
with the MS. of Cid Hamete Benengeli, containing Don Quixote's history,
after he had bought it for half a real--just two cents and a half.
[Illustration: A TOLEDO PRIEST.]
A temple of the barbaric and the barbarous, the cathedral dates from the
thirteenth century: but it was preceded by one which was built to the
Virgin in her lifetime, tradition says, and she came down from heaven to
visit her shrine. The identical slab on which she alighted is still
preserved in one of the chapels. A former inscription said to believers,
"Use yourselves to kiss it for your much consolation," and their
obedient lips have in time greatly worn down the stone. Later on, the
church was used as a mosque by the infidel conquerors, and when they
were driven out it was pulled down to be replaced by the present huge
and solemn structure. But, by a compromise with the subjugated Moors, a
Muzarabic mass (a seeming mixture of Mohammedan ritual with Christian
worship) was ordained to be said in a particular chapel; and there it is
recited still, every morning in the year. I attended this weird,
half-Eastern ceremony, which was conducted with an extraordinary
incessant babble of rapid prayer from the priests in the stalls,
precisely like the inarticulate hum one imagines in a mosque. On the
floor below and in front of the altar-steps was placed a richly-draped
chest, perhaps meant to represent the tomb of Mohammed in the Caaba, and
around it stood lighted candles. During the long and involved mass one
of the younger priests, in appearance almost an imbecile, had the prayer
he was to read pointed out for him by an altar-boy with what looked like
a long knife-blade, used for the purpose. Soon after an incense-bearing
acolyte nudged him energetically to let him know that his turn had now
come. This was the only evidence I could discover of any progress in
knowledge or goodness resulting from the Muzarabic mass.
At one time Toledo had, besides the cathedral, a hundred and ten
churches. Traces of many of them are still seen in small arches rising
from the midst of house-tops, with a bell swung in the opening; but the
most have fallen into disuse, and the greatest era of the hierarchy has
passed. The great priests have also passed, and those who now dwell here
offer to the most unprejudiced eye a dreary succession of bloated bodies
and brutish faces. Sermons are never read in the gorgeous cathedral
pulpits, and the Church, as even an ardent Catholic assured me, seems,
at least locally, dead. The priests and the prosperous shop-keepers are
almost the only beings in Toledo who look portly; the rest are thin,
brown, wiry, and tall, with fine creases in their hard faces that appear
to have been drilled there by the sand-blast process.
The women, however, even in the humbler class, preserve a fine, fresh
animal health, which makes you wonder how they ever grow old, until you
see some tottering creature who is little more than a mass of sinews and
wrinkles held together by a skirt and a neckerchief--the _pañuclo_
universal with her sex. At noon and evening the serving-women came out
to the fountains, distributed here and there under groups of miniature
locust-trees, to fetch water for their houses. They carried huge earthen
jars, or _cantarones_, which they would lug off easily under one arm, in
attitudes of inimitable grace.
[Illustration: TOLEDO SERVITORS AT THE FOUNTAIN.]
[Illustration: A PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR.]
If religious sway over temporal things has declined, Toledo still
impresses one as little more than a big church founded on the rock, with
room made for the money-changers' benches, and an unimaginable jumble of
palaces once thronged with powerful courtiers and abundant in wealth,
but at this day chiefly inhabited by persons of humble quality. Nightly
there glows in the second story of a building on the Zocodover, where
_autos-da-fé_ used to be held, a large arched shrine of the Virgin hung
with mellow lamps, so that not even with departing daylight shall
religious duty be put aside by the commonplace crowd shuffling through
the plaza beneath. Everywhere in angles and turnings and archways one
comes upon images and pictures fixed to the wall under a pointed roof
made with two short boards, to draw a passing genuflection or incidental
_ave_ from any one who may be going by on an errand of business or--as
more often occurs--laziness. Feast-days, too, are still ardently
observed. With all this, somehow, the fact connects itself that the
populace are instinctive, free-born, insatiable beggars. The
magnificently chased door-ways of the cathedral festered with revolting
specimens of human disease and degeneration, appealing for alms. Other
more prosperous mendicants were regularly on hand for business every day
at the "old stand" in some particular thoroughfare. I remember one,
especially, whose whole capital was invested in a superior article of
nervous complaint, which enabled him to balance himself between the
wall and a crutch, and there oscillate spasmodically by the hour. In
this he was entirely beyond competition, and cast into the shade those
merely routine professionals who took the common line of bad eyes or
uninterestingly motionless deformities. It used to depress them when he
came on to the ground. Bright little children, even, in perfect health,
would desist from their amusements and assail us, struck with the happy
thought that they might possibly wheedle the "strangers" into some
untimely generosity. There was one pretty girl of about ten years, who
laughed outright at the thought of her own impudence, but stopped none
the less for half an hour on her way to market (carrying a basket on her
arm) in order to pester poor Velveteen while he was sketching, and
begged him for money, first to get bread, and then shoes, and then
anything she could think of.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF MENDICANTS.]
A hand opened to receive money would be a highly suitable device for the
municipal coat of arms.
[Illustration: A PATIO IN TOLEDO.]
My friend's irrepressible pencil, by-the-way, made him the centre of a
crowd wherever he went. Grave business men came out of their shops to
see what he was drawing; loungers made long and ingenious detours in
order to obtain a good view of his labors; ragamuffins elbowed him,
undismayed by energetic remarks in several languages, until finally he
was moved to get up and display the contents of his pockets, inviting
them even to read some letters he had with him. To this gentle satire
they would sometimes yield. We fell a prey, however, to one silent youth
of whom we once unguardedly asked a question. After that he considered
himself permanently engaged to pilot us about. He would linger for hours
near the fonda dinnerless, and, what was even more terrible, sleepless,
so that he might fasten upon us the moment we should emerge. If he
discovered our destination, he would stride off mutely in advance, to
impress on us the fact that we were under obligation to him; and when we
found the place we wanted, he waited patiently until we had rewarded him
with a half-cent. If we gratified him by asking him the way, he
responded by silently stretching forth his arm and one long forefinger
with a lordly gesture, still striding on; and he had a very superior
Castilian sneering smile, which he put on when he looked around to see
if we were following. He gradually became for us a sort of symbolic
shadow of the town's vanished greatness; and from his mysterious way of
coming into sight, and haunting us in the most unexpected places, we
gave him the name of "Ghost." Nevertheless, we baffled him at last. In
the Street of the Christ of Light there is a small but exceedingly
curious mosque, now converted into a church, so ancient in origin that
some of the capitals in it are thought to show Visigothic work, so that
it must have been a Christian church even before the Moorish invasion.
Close by this we chanced upon a charming old _patio_, or court-yard,
entered through a wooden gate, and by dexterously gliding in here and
shutting the gate we exorcised "Ghost" for some time.
The broad red tiles of this _patio_ contrasted well with its
white-washed arcade pillars, on which were embossed the royal arms of
Castile; and the jutting roof of the house was supported on elaborate
beams of old Spanish cedar cracked with age. It was sadly neglected.
Flowers bloomed in the centre, but a pile of lumber littered one side;
and the house was occupied by an old woman who was washing in the
arcade, her tub being the half of a big terra-cotta jar laid on its
side. She spread her linen out on the hot pavement to dry; and a
sprightly neighbor coming in with a basket of clothes and a "Health to
thee!" was invited to dry _her_ wash on a low tile roof adjoining.
"Solitude" served at once as her name and to describe her surroundings.
We made friends with her, the more easily because she was much
interested in the sketch momently growing under my companion's touch.
"And _you_ don't draw?" she inquired of me.
I answered, apologetically, "No."
Having seen me glancing over a book, she added, as if to console me, and
with emphasis, "But you can read!" To her mind that was a sister art and
an equal one.
She went on to tell how her granddaughter had spent ten years in school,
and at the end of that time was able to read. "But now she is forgetting
it all. She goes out and plays too much with the _muchachas_" (young
girls).
[Illustration: THE HOME OF "SOLITUDE."]
This amiable grandmother also took us in to see her domicile, which
proved to be a part of the old city wall, and had a fine view from
its iron-barred window. She declared vaguely that "a count" had
formerly lived there; but it had more probably been the gate-captain's
house, for close by was one of the fortified ports of the inner
defences. A store-room, in fact, which she kept full of pigeons and
incredibly miscellaneous old iron, stood directly over the arched
entrance, and there we saw the heavy beam and windlass which in by-gone
ages had hoisted or let fall the spiked portcullis. I induced "Solitude"
to tell me a legend about one of the churches; for there is generally
some story to every square rod of ground hereabout, and indeed a little
basilica below the town sustains four different narratives all
explaining a single miracle. Serving as an appropriate foundation for
local wonder-mongering, a great cave in the rock underlies some portion
of the city, and is said to have been hollowed out by Hercules, who, in
addition to his other labors, has received the credit of founding
Toledo. I am convinced that no muscles but his could ever have stood the
strain of first climbing its site. The cave I refer to has been for the
most part of the last two hundred years closed and walled up. About
thirty years since it was timidly explored by a society formed for the
purpose, and some Roman remains were found in it; but after that, terror
fell upon the explorers, and the cavern was again closed, remaining even
yet a reservoir of mystery. There are equally mysterious things above
ground, however, as will shortly be demonstrated by the tale of the
"Christ of Compassion." Let me, before giving that, recall here a more
poetic tradition, preserved by Señor Eugenio Olavarria, a young author
of Madrid. We saw just outside the mosque-church of the Christ of Light
an old Moorish well, of a kind common in Spain, with a low thick wall
surrounding the deep sunken shaft, to rest the bucket-chain on when it
is let down and drawn up by sheer muscular force. The edges were worn
into one continuous pattern of grooves by the incessant chafing of the
chains for ages, and we conjured up a dozen romances about the people
who of old slaked their thirst there. It is about another water-source
of the same kind, on a small street still called Descent to the Bitter
Well, that the story here outlined is told:
THE WELL OF BITTERNESS.
"In the time of one of the Moorish kings there lived at Toledo,
under the mild toleration of that epoch, a rich Jew, strictly and
passionately devoted to the laws of his religion and to one only
other object: that one was his daughter Raquel, motherless, but
able to solace his widowed heart with her devoted affection.
Sixteen Aprils had wrought their beautiful changes into her
exquisite form and lovely mind, till at last, of all things which
they had waked to life, she appeared the fairest.
"Reuben had gradually made her the chief end of his existence, and
she certainly merited this absolute concentration of her father's
love. But, notwithstanding that at this time Jews and Christians
dwelt together unmolested by the Mohammedan rule, the inborn
hostility between these two orders underwent no abatement.
Intercourse between them was sedulously avoided by each, and the
springing up of any shy flower of love between man and maid of such
hostile races was sure to be followed by deadly blight and ruin.
Nevertheless--and how it happened who can say?--Raquel, already
ripened by the rich sun of her native land into a perfected
womanhood, fell in love with a young Christian cavalier, who had
himself surrendered to her silent and distant beauty as it shone
upon him, while passing, from her grated window in Reuben's stately
mansion. He learned her name, and spoke it to her from the
street--'Raquel!'--at twilight. So trembling and brimming with
mutual love were they, that this one word, like the last
o'erflowing drop of precious liquid from a vase, was enough to
reveal to her what filled his heart. As she heard it she blushed as
though it had been a kiss that he had reverently impressed upon her
cheek; and this was answer enough--their secret and perilous
courtship had begun. Thereafter they met often at night in the
great garden attached to the house, making their rendezvous at the
low-walled well that stood in a thicket of fragrant greenery. At
last, through the prying of an aged friend, his daughter's passion
came to the knowledge of old Reuben, who had never till then even
conceived of such disgrace as her being enamoured of a Christian.
His course was prompt and terrible. Concealing himself one evening
behind a tree-trunk close to the well, he awaited the coming of the
daring cavalier, sprung upon him, and after a short, noiseless
struggle bore him down with a poniard in his breast!
"The stealthy opening of a door into the garden warned him of
Raquel's approach. He hastened again into concealment. She arrived,
saw her fallen lover, dropped at his side in agonies of terror, and
sought to revive him. Then she saw and by the moonlight recognized
her father's dagger in the breathless bosom of the young man, and
knew what had happened. Moved by sudden remorse, Reuben came out
with words of consolation ready. But she knew him not, she heard
him not; from that instant madness was in her eyes and brain. Many
months she haunted the spot at night, calm but hopelessly insane,
and weeping silently at the margin of the well, into whose waters
her salt tears descended. At length there came a night when she did
not return to the house. She had thrown herself into the well and
was found there--dead!
"Never again could any one drink its waters, which had been famous
for their quality. Raquel's tears of sorrow had turned them
bitter."
The other legend is still more marvellous: "In the reign of Enrique IV.
of Spain there was fierce rivalry between two Toledan families, the
Silvas and the Ayalas, which in 1467 led to open warfare. The Silvas
threw themselves into the castle, and the Ayalas held the cathedral--the
blood shed in their combats staining the very feet of its altars. During
this struggle of hatred there was also a struggle of love going on
between two younger members of the embroiled families. Diego de Ayala,
setting at naught the pride of his house, had given his heart to Isabel,
the daughter of a poor hidalgo; but it so happened that his enemy, Don
Lope de Silva, had resolved to win the same maiden, though receiving no
encouragement from her. One night when the combatants were resting on
their arms, and the whole city was in disorder, Don Lope succeeded in
entering Isabel's house with several of his followers and carried her
off--trusting to the general confusion to prevent interruption. As they
were bearing her away across a little square in front of the Church of
San Justo, Don Diego, on his way to see Isabel, encountered them.
"'Leave that woman, ye cowards, and go your way!' he commanded, with
drawn sword. And at that instant, by the light of the lamp which burned
before the pictured Christ of Compassion on the church wall, he
recognized Isabel and Don Lope.
"Making a bold dash, he succeeded in freeing Isabel and getting her into
the shelter of an angle in the wall, just below the holy figure. But
being there hemmed in by his adversaries, he felt himself, after a sharp
fight in which he dealt numerous wounds, fainting from the severe
thrusts he had himself received. Fearing that he was mortally hurt, he
raised his eyes to the shrine and prayed: 'O God, not for me, but for
her, manifest thy pity! I am willing to die, but save her!'
"Then a marvellous brilliance streamed out from the thorn-crowned head,
and instantly, propelled by some unseen force, Diego found himself and
Isabel pushed through the solid wall behind them, which opened to
receive them into the sanctuary, and closed again to keep out the
assassins. Don Lope rushed forward in pursuit, and in his rage hacked
the stones with his sword as if to cut his way through. The marks made
in the stone by his weapon are still to be seen there." The
compassionate face still looks down from the shrine, and little
sign-boards announce indulgences to those who pray there: "Señor Don
Luis Maria de Borbon, most Illustrious Señor Bishop of Carista, grants
forty days' indulgence to all who with grief for their sins say, 'Lord
have mercy on me!' or make the acts of Faith, Charity, and Hope before
this image, praying for the necessities of the Church."
Altogether I computed that a good Catholic could by a half-hour's
industry secure immunity for two hundred and twenty days, or nearly
two-thirds of a year. It is to be feared that the Toledans are too lazy
to profit even by this splendid chance.
The majority of people here who can command a daily income of ten cents
will do no work. Numbers of the inhabitants are always standing or
leaning around drowsily, like animals who have been hired to personate
men, and are getting tired of the job. Every act approaching labor must
be done with long-drawn leisure. Men and boys slumber out-of-doors even
in the hot sun, like dogs; after sitting meditatively against a wall for
a while, one of them will tumble over on his nose--as if he were a
statue undermined by time--and remain in motionless repose wherever he
happens to strike. Business with the trading class itself is an
incident, and resting is the essence of the mundane career.
Nevertheless, the place has fits of activity. When the mid-day siesta is
over there is a sudden show of doing something. Men begin to trot about
with a springy, cat-like motion, acquired from always walking up and
down hill, which, taken with their short loose blouses, dark skins, and
roomy canvas slippers, gives them an astonishing likeness to
Chinamen.[5] The slip and scramble of mule hoofs and donkey hoofs are
heard on the steep pavements, and two or three loud-voiced, lusty men,
with bare arms, carrying a capacious tin can and a dipper, go roaring
through the torrid streets, "Hor-cha-ta!" Then the cathedral begins
wildly pounding its bells, all out of tune, for vespers. The energy
which has broken loose for a couple of hours is discovered to be a
mistake, and another interval of relaxation sets in, lasting through the
night, and until the glare of fiery daybreak, greeted by the shrill
whistling of the remorseless pet quail, sets the insect-like stir going
again for a short time in the forenoon. Because of such apathy, and of a
more than the usual Latin disregard for public decency, the streets and
houses are allowed to become pestilential, and drainage is unknown.
Enervating luxury of that sort did well enough for the Romans and Moors,
but is literally below the level of Castilian ideas. In the midst of the
most sublime emotion aroused by the associations or grim beauty of
Toledo, you are sure to be stopped short by some intolerable odor.
[Illustration: "MEN AND BOYS SLUMBER OUT-OF-DOORS EVEN IN THE HOT SUN."]
The primate city was endowed with enough of color and quaintness almost
to compensate for this. We never tired of the graceful women walking the
streets vestured in garments of barbaric tint and endlessly varied
ornamentation, nor of the men in short breeches split at the bottom,
who seemed to have splashed pots of vari-colored paint at hap-hazard
over their clothes, and insisted upon balancing on their heads
broad-brimmed, pointed hats, like a combination of sieve and inverted
funnel. There was a spark of excitement, again, in the random entry of a
"guard of the country," mounted on his emblazoned donkey-saddle, with a
small arsenal in his waist sash, and a couple of guns slung behind on
the beast's flanks, ready for marauders. Even now in remembrance the
blots on Toledo fade, and I see its walls and towers throned grandly
amid those hills that were mingled of white powder and fire at
noon-tide, but near evening cooled themselves down to olive and russet
citron, with burning rosy shadows resting in the depressions.
[Illustration: A STRANGE FUNERAL.]
One of the first spectacles that presented itself to us will remain also
one of the latest recollections. Between San Juan de los Reyes and the
palace of Roderick we met unexpectedly a crowd of boys and girls,
followed by a few men, all carrying lighted candles that glowed
spectrally, for the sun was still half an hour high in the west. A
stout priest, with white hair and a vinous complexion, had just gone
down the street, and this motley group was following the same direction.
Somewhat in advance walked a boy with a small black and white coffin,
held in place on his head by his upraised arm, as if it were a toy; and
in the midst of the candle-bearers moved a light bier like a
basket-cradle, carried by girls, and containing the small waxen form of
a dead child three or four years old, on whose impassive, colorless face
the orange glow of approaching sunset fell, producing an effect natural
yet incongruous. A scampering dog accompanied the mourners, if one may
call them such, for they gave no token of being more impressed, more
touched by emotion, than he. The cradle-bier swayed from side to side as
if with a futile rockaby motion, until the bearers noticed how
carelessly they were conveying it down the paved slope; and the members
of the procession talked to each other with a singular indifference, or
looked at anything which caught their random attention. As the little
rabble disappeared through the Puerta del Cambron, with their long
candles dimly flaming, and the solemn, childish face in their midst,
followed by the poor unconscious dog, it seemed to me that I beheld in
allegory the departure from Toledo of that spirit of youth whose absence
leaves it so old and worn.
[Illustration]
_CORDOVAN PILGRIMS._
I.
[Illustration: T]
The House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called,
used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for
Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but
other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all
quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne--hallowed,
perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in
shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to
which it has been dedicated and re-dedicated under conflicting beliefs.
It was with peculiar eagerness, therefore, that we set out on our way.
An American who was following the same route had joined us--a man with
ruddy, bronzed cheeks and iron-gray hair, whom I at first should have
taken for the great-grandson of a Spanish Inquisitor, if such a thing
were possible. His iron persistence and the intensity of his prejudices
were in keeping with that character--the only trouble being that the
prejudices were all on the wrong side. Whetstone (as he was called)
shared our eagerness in respect of Cordova, though from different
motives. He hailed each new point in his journey with satisfaction,
because it would get him so much nearer the end; for the reason he had
come to Spain was, apparently, to get out of it again. "I don't see what
I came to Spain for," Whetstone would observe to us, dismally; and, for
that matter, we could not see either. "If there ever _was_ a
God-forsaken country--Why, look at the way a whole parcel of these men
at the dinner-table get out their cigarettes and smoke right there,
without ever asking a lady's leave! I'd like to see 'em try it on at
home! Wouldn't they be just snaked out of that room pretty quick?" He
had under his care a young lady of great sensibility, a relative by
marriage, accompanied by her maid; and the maid was a colored woman of
the most pronounced pattern. Altogether our pilgrim party embraced a
good deal of variety. The young American girl, being a Catholic, was
really a palmer faring from shrine to shrine. Rarely a convent or a
chapel escaped her; she sipped them all as if they had been flower-cups
and she a humming-bird, and managed to extract some unknown honey of
comfort from their bitterness. It was like having a novice with us.
[Illustration: WHETSTONE.]
The night journeys by rail, so much in vogue in Spain, have their
advantages and their drawbacks. At Castillejo, a junction on the way to
Cordova, we had to wait four hours in the evening at a distance of
twenty miles from the nearest restaurant. The country around was
absolutely desolate except for tufts of the _retamé_--a sort of broom
with slim green and silvered leaves, which grows wild, and, after
drying, is used by the peasants as a substitute for rye or wheat flour.
Only two or three houses were in sight. The tracks with cars standing on
them, and the unfinished look of the whole place, made us feel as if we
had by mistake been carried off to some insignificant railroad station
in Illinois or Missouri. The only resource available for dinner was a
_cantineria_, or drinking-room, where a few blocks of tough bread lent
respectability to a lot of loaferish wine-bottles, and some uninviting
sausages were hung in gloomy festoons, with a suspicious air of being a
permanent architectural fixture intended as a perch for flies. The
Spaniards invent little rhymed proverbs about many of their villages,
and of one insignificant Andalusian hamlet, Brenes, the saying is,
"If to Brenes thou goest,
Take with thee thy roast."
But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We
recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread,
meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of
eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we passed their house
in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they
had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed!
However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman
who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her
if she could have coffee prepared. "If there is enough in the house,"
she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a
table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat _al fresco_.
[Illustration: COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO.]
When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on
the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all
the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting
conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked
as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock
caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and
pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper
around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An
ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a
fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our
coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray
tresses, and wailing out doleful _peteneras_, the popular songs of
Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so
stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault
overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the
hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due.
The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen
before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the
Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish
mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a
looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and
by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry grass and moss,
and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air
and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow,
olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater
distances.
These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote
achieved some of his most noteworthy feats--the liberation of the
galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of
Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of
these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of
woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don
Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion
to relieve the monotony of existence.
[Illustration: PRIMITIVE THRASHING.]
A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in
full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the
hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the
fields the time-honored method of threshing out grain by driving a sort
of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by
tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in
active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could
see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green
tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them--one grove after another: we
travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations,
until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our
eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river,
which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and
sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an
enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford
vividly puts it, "eats its dull way through loamy banks." At last
Cordova, seated in an ample plain--Cordova, in vanished ages the home of
Seneca, Lucan, Averroës, and the poet Juan de Mena--Cordova, white in
the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story
houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita
Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens,
abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing,
moreover, clean streets of perceptible width.
[Illustration: WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT MASS.]
After the "interpreter," or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order
in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind
of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome
charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our
baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door,
concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the
sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate
politeness and piety. "Pardon me, brother, for God's sake!" was the
deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to
recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes
to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the
beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of
tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for
they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his
analytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage,
recognized his rivals, and drove them off.
At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors
waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed
hat-covers and capes. "Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall
upon us unawares?" I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived,
however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through
more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I
know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the
change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as
they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to shine again. On our
arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once;
they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of
the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were
within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to
deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. "One more
escape!" sighed Velveteen, fervently.
Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the
kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical latitude by great
activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to
the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small
manufacture--shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy
and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung
or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner.
[Illustration: WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA.]
"Cordovan leather" still holds it own, on a petty scale, and the small
cups hammered out of old silver dollars constitute, with filigree
silver-work, a characteristic local product. The faces of the people
betrayed their gypsy blood oftentimes, and there was one street chiefly
occupied by the Romany folk. Traces of blond or light chestnut hair
showed that the Moorish stock had likewise left some offshoots that do
not die out. The whole aspect of Cordova presents at once a reflex of
the refined and enlightened spirit of the ancient caliphate. Everybody,
including most of the beggars, has a fresh and cleanly appearance; the
very priests undergo a change, being frequently more refined in feature
and of a more tolerant expression than those of the North. The women set
off their rosy brown complexions and black hair with clusters of rayed
jasmine blossoms, flattened and ingeniously fixed in rosette form on
long pins. The men, discarding those hot felt hats so obstinately worn
in the central provinces, make a comfortable and festive appearance
in their curling Panamas. On the Street of the Great Captain--the chief
open-air resort, commemorating Gonsalvo of Cordova, who led so ably in
the triumphant Christian campaigns--the people laugh and chat as if they
really enjoyed life. There is a great deal of wealth in the place, and
the lingering atmosphere of its past greatness is not depressing, as
that of Toledo is, for it was never the home of bigotry and ignorance.
Its prosperous epoch under Abdur-rahman and his Ommeyad successors was
one of brilliant civilization. It was then a nursery of science and the
arts; its inhabitants numbered a million. It had mosques by the hundred,
and nearly a thousand baths--for the Spanish Moors well knew the
civilizing virtue of water, and kept life-giving streams of it running
at the roots of their institutions. The houses of the modern city are
very plain on the exterior, and their common coat of whitewash imparts
to them a democratic equality, though aristocracy is still a living
thing there, instead of having sunk into pitfalls of squalor and
idleness, as in the sombre city by the Tagus.
"But now the Cross is sparkling on the mosque,
And bells make Catholic the trembling air."
[Illustration: THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA.]
Gloomy little churches crop out in every quarter, and a few convents of
nuns remain, where you may hear the faint, sad litany of the unseen
sisters murmured behind the grating, while a priest chants service for
them in the lonely chapel. The bells of these churches and of the
mosque-cathedral are hardly ever silent; the brazen jargon of their
tongues echoes over the roofs at all hours, and the hollow, metallic
tinkle of mule-bells from the otherwise silent streets at times strikes
one as making response to them. The beauty of the cathedral--still
called the Mezquita (mosque)--lies almost solely in the preservation of
its original Moorish architecture.
[Illustration: THE MEZQUITA.]
The site was first occupied as a place of worship by the Roman Temple of
Janus, and this in turn became a basilica of the Gothic Christians.
Abdur-rahman, after the Christians had long been allowed by the caliphs
to continue their worship in one half of the basilica, reared the
supremely wonderful House of Purification as it now stands; and then,
after the conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, in the reign of Charles
V., the cumbrous high altar and choir, which choke up so much of the
interior, transformed it once more into a stronghold of Christian
ceremonial. But when you enter at the Gate of Pardon the long, wide
Court of Oranges, you find yourself transported instantly to Mohammedan
surroundings; you are under the dominion of the Ommeyades.
[Illustration: RELIC PEDDLERS.]
High walls hem in this open-air vestibule, where rows of orange-trees
rustle their dense foliage in the warm wind. Their trunks are corpulent
with age, for some of them date back to the last Moorish dynasty, and at
one end stands the tank where followers of the Prophet washed themselves
before entering in to pray. The Gate of Pardon, under the high-spired
bell-tower, takes its name from the custom which obtained of giving
criminals refuge by its portal. The murderer who could fly hither and
gain the central aisle of the temple, directly opposite the gate across
the court, was safe for shelter by the Mihrab, or inner shrine, at the
farther end of the aisle. All the nineteen aisles formerly opened from
the fragrant garden, though Catholic rule gives access by only three;
but inside one sees at a glance the vast consecrated space which was so
freely open to the Mussulmans--an interior covering several acres, not
very lofty, yet imposing from its exquisite proportions. A wilderness, a
cool, dark labyrinth of pillars from which light horseshoe arches rise,
broken midway for the curve of another arch surmounting each of these,
spreads itself out under the roof on every hand--grove of stone in a
cave of stone stretching so far that the eye cannot follow its intricate
regularity, its rare harmony of confusion. The rash Christian renovators
who, overruling the protest of the city, undertook to remodel so
exceptional a monument, covered the arches with whitewash; but many of
them have been restored to the natural hues of their red and white
marble. Imagine below them the pillars, smooth-shafted and with fretted
capitals. Of old there were _twelve hundred_ of them supporting the
gilded beams and incorruptible larch of the roof, and a thousand still
stand. Each is shaped from a single block, and many quarries contributed
them. Jasper and porphyry, black, white, and red, emerald and rose
marble, are all represented among them; though with their diversity they
have this in common, that from the pavement up to about the average
human height they have been worn dark, and even smoother than the
workmen left them, by the constant touching and rubbing and leaning of
generations who have loitered and worshipped in the solemn twilight that
broods around them. A large number were appropriated from the old Roman
temple which stood on the spot; others were plundered from temples at
ancient Carthage; still others were brought entire from Constantinople.
They typify the different powers that have been concerned in the making
and unmaking of Spain, and one could almost imagine that in every column
is concealed some petrified warrior of those conflicting races, waiting
for the spell that shall bring him to life again.
[Illustration: THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR.]
On the surface of one of these marble cylinders is scratched a rude and
feeble image of Christ on the cross, hardly noticeable until pointed
out. It is said to have been traced there by the finger-nail of a
Christian captive who was chained to the pillar when it formed part of a
dungeon somewhere else. He had ten years for the work, and enjoyed the
advantage of a tool that would renew itself without expense whenever it
began to wear out. I must say that we were touched by this dim record of
the dead-and-gone prisoner's silent suffering and faith. The shock of
doubt struck us only when, in another part of the mosque, we came upon
another pillar against the wall, bearing an exact reproduction of the
finger-nail sculpture, and furthermore provided with a holy-water basin
and a lamp burning under the effigy of the captive, who appears to have
been canonized. "How is this?" I asked the guide. "Here is the same
thing over again!" He scrutinized me carefully, taking an exact measure
of my credulousness, before he replied, "Ah, but the other is the real
one!" It all seems to depend on which pillar gets the start.
[Illustration: PRIEST AND PURVEYOR.]
[Illustration: FLOWERS FOR THE MARKET.]
But there is no deception whatever connected with the inner Mihrab,
where there is a marvellous alcove marking the direction of Mecca, on
the east. Its ceiling, in the shape of a quarter-globe, is cut from a
single great piece of marble, which is grooved like a shell. And when
the light from candles is thrown into this Arab chapel it glances upon
elaborate enamelling on the surface, the vitreous glaze of minute and
almost miraculous mosaic making it flash and sparkle with rays of the
ruby, the emerald, the topaz, and diamond. There in the dusk the
glittering splendor scintillates as brilliantly as it did eight hundred
years ago, and shoots its beams upon the unwary eye as if it were a
cimeter of the defeated race suddenly unsheathed for vengeance. In this
place was kept the wondrous Koran stand of Al-Hakem II., which cost a
sum equal now to about five million dollars. It disappeared a while
ago--mislaid, it should seem, by some sacristan of orderly habits who
was clearing up the rubbish, for no one appears to know where it went
to. The sacred book within it was incased in gold tissue embroidered
with pearls and rubies, and around the spot where it was enshrined the
solid white marble floor is unevenly worn into a circular hollow, where
the servants of the Prophet used to crawl seven times in succession on
their hands and knees. This homage was paid by the brother of the
Emperor of Morocco only a few years since, when he visited Spain, and
indulged the luxurious woe of weeping over the fair empire his people
had lost. The bewildering arabesques, the lines of which pursue and lose
each other so mysteriously about the shrine, managing to form pious
inscriptions in their intricate convolutions--by an exception to all
other Hispano-Arabic decoration, which employs only stucco--are wrought
in marble, frigid and stern as death, but embossed into a living grace
as of vine tendrils.
Whetstone had been remarkably silent after entering the Mezquita. I
fancied that he did not wholly approve of it. But after we had looked
long at this epitome of the beautiful which I have just tried to sketch,
he observed, impartially, in turning away, "I tell you, those fellows
knew how to chisel some!" He had merely been trying to reduce the facts
to their lowest terms.
Priests and boys were marching with crucifixes from the choir as we came
away: the incense rolled up against the lofty smoke-dimmed altar; and
the mild-faced celibate who played the organ sent harmonies of unusually
rich music (performed at our guide's special request) reverberating
among the thousand-columned maze of low arches. But my fancy went back
to the time when gold and silver lamps had shed from their perfumed oils
the only illumination there, and when the jewelled walls, smouldering in
the faint light, had looked down upon the prostrate forms of robed and
turbaned zealots. Then we passed out through the Court of Oranges into
the street, with those forty towers of the cathedral wall again seen
standing guard around it, and found ourselves once more in modern
Cordova.
[Illustration: TRAVELLERS TO CORDOVA.]
The breath of the South, the meridional aroma, welcomed us. The scent of
the air in the neighboring Alcazar garden would of itself have been
enough to tell us, in the dark, that we had entered Andalusia. That was
beyond question a most delectable spot. A sort of fortress-prison
bordered it, and immediately on the other side of the prison-wall
blossomed the garden, where lemons and oranges and bergamot clambered
rankly against the bricks, perfuming the whole atmosphere, and overblown
roses dropped from their vines on to the paths. There were hedges of
rosemary, and trees of pimento, and angular ribs of prickly cactus,
carefully trained. From a balustraded terrace higher up descended a
stone flight of steps, the massive stone guard of which on each side was
scooped out so as to make a mossy bed for two streams of water
perpetually flowing down and losing themselves in the secret courses
that ministered to little scattered fountains, or laved the roots of the
verdant tangle. Now and again a lizard darted from point to point, like
an evil thought surprised in the heart of so much sweetness and
freshness. Everywhere there was a cool gush and ripple of water, and
some wide-spreading fig-trees made a pleasant bower in a bastion of the
low garden-wall overlooking the famous river. From this post of vantage
one can see the thick brown current slowly oozing by, and the ancient
bridge which spans it, fortified at both ends, connecting the Cordova of
to-day with the opposite bank, where the ancient city extended for two
or three miles. With its great arched gate, Roman made and finely
sculptured, this mellow light brown structure forms an effective link in
the landscape, and below its piers stand several Moorish mills, disused,
but as yet unbroken by age or floods.
We drove across the venerable viaduct afterward, and found that by an
extraordinary dispensation some very fresh and shining silver coins of
ancient Rome had lately been dug up from one of the shoals in the river
(a peculiar place, by-the-way, to bury them in), and that our guide had
some in his pocket. We forbore to deprive him of such treasures,
however, even at the very trifling price which he put upon them, and
contented ourselves with being swindled by him in a subsequent purchase
of some other articles.
II.
FROM Cordova may be made, by those who are especially favored, one of
the most interesting expeditions possible to the Hermitage, or, as the
Church authorities name it, the _Desierta_ (desert) of solitary monks,
genuine anchorites, a few miles distant in the Sierra Morena. There are
obstacles more formidable than the purely physical ones in the way of
this excursion, the bishop of the diocese being averse to granting
permission for the visit to any one who is not a good Catholic. Two
Englishmen who came before us, relying on the potent gold piece, had
made the toilsome ascent only to find that their sterling sovereigns
were of no avail. I think the presence of the Novice helped our party;
but it would be unwise to reveal the stratagem by which we all gained
admittance. Let it be enough to say that we went to the bishop's palace
after the usual hours of business, and by humble apologies obtained an
audience with the secretary. While we were waiting we sat down under a
frivolously gorgeous rococo ceiling, on a great double staircase of
marble leading up from the _patio_, which was well planted with shrubs,
and had walks paved with smooth round stones of various hue, set
edgewise in extensive patterns. The vaulted ceiling resounded powerfully
with every remark we made, which had the result of subduing our
conversation to whispers, for an attendant soon came to warn us that the
bishop was asleep, and that we must not speak loud on account of the
echo. Profiting by the great man's siesta, we extracted the desired
permission from his severe-faced but courteous secretary, who marked the
document "Especial."
[Illustration: "ARRÉ, BURR-R-RICO!"]
Our brief cavalcade of donkeys started the next morning at five, after
we had taken a preternaturally early cup of chocolate. The donkeys
appeared to know just where we were going, and would not obey the rein:
the driver, walking behind, governed them by a system of negatives,
informing them with a casual exclamation when they showed signs of
turning where he didn't want them to. "Advance there, Baker!" he would
cry. "Don't you know better than that? What a wretched little beast! Do
as I tell you." The animal in question was named Bread-dealer, or Baker,
and the one that I rode rejoiced in the eccentric though eminently
literary appellation of "College."
"To the right, College!" our muleteer would shout, exercising a despotic
power over my four-footed institution of learning. "Get up, little mule.
_Arré burr-r-rico!_" Firing off a volley of _r_'s with a tremendous
rising and falling intonation, which invariably moved the brute to take
one or two rapid steps before dropping back into his customary slow
walk. As the heat increased, and the way grew steeper, he sighed out his
"arré"--gee up--in a long, melancholy drawl, which seemed to express
profound despair concerning the mulish race generally. Muleteers in
Spain are termed generically, from this surviving Arabic word,
_arrieros_, or, as we may translate it, "gee-uppers."
In this manner we made our way along the dusty road among olive
orchards, and a sort of oak called _japarros_, until we began to mount
by a rough, stony path which sometimes divided itself like the branches
of a torrent, though we more than once succeeded in prodding the donkeys
into a lively canter. The white façades of villas--_quintas_ or
_carmens_ they are denominated hereabout--twinkled out from nooks of the
hills; but at that early hour everything was very still. We could almost
_see_ the silence around us. Higher up, unknown birds began to sing in
the sparse boscage that clothed the mountain flank or clustered in its
narrow dells. Midway of the ascent, furthermore, Baker, on whom
Velveteen was seated in solemn stride, with a blanket in place of
saddle, paused ominously, and then began a nasal performance which shook
our very souls. Why a donkey should bray in such a place it is hard to
determine, but _how_ he did it will forever remain impressed on our
tympana. There was something peculiarly terrible and unnerving in the
sound; and just as it ceased, our guide, Manuel, observed that this had
once been a great place for robbers. "A few years ago," said he, "no one
would have dared to come up along this road as we are doing." He added
that the marauders used to conceal themselves in the numerous caves in
the region, and pointed out one fissure in the rocks which his liberal
imagination converted into the entrance of a subterranean retreat
running for several miles into the heart of the mountains. At the same
instant, looking down across a gorge below our track, I saw a man with a
gun moving through a patch of steep olives, as if to head us off at a
point farther along; and on a jutting rock-rib above us a memorial cross
rose warningly. Crosses were formerly put up in the most impossible
places among these hills, to mark the spot where anybody fell a victim
to bandits or assassins; a fact of which the elder Dumas makes telling
use in one of his short stories.[6] Brigands were themselves punctilious
in setting up these reminders, which were held to exert an expiatory
influence. If any one would understand how hopelessly the Spanish mind
at one time perverted the relations of crime and religion, he may read
Calderon's "Devotion of the Cross," wherein the hero, Eusebio, a
terrible renegade who murders right and left, born at the foot of one of
these way-side crosses, is saved by his reverence for the holy symbol.
He is enabled, by virtue of this pious sentiment, to rise up after he is
dead, walk about, and confess his sins to a friar; after which he is
caught up into heaven!
The whole conjunction was somewhat alarming, but Manuel explained away
our man with a gun by saying that he was merely one of the armed
watchmen usually attached to country estates to protect crops and stock
from depreciation. As for the bandits, they had now been quite
dispersed, he declared, by the Civil Guard. That name, it is true,
called up new fears for Velveteen and myself as we thought of the two
relentless men who were on our trail: but we knew that for the moment,
at least, we were beyond their reach.
At last we gained the very summit, and drew up under a porch at the
walled gate of the Desert, while a shower began to fall in large
scattered drops, like the lingering contents of some gigantic
watering-pot, but soon spent itself. Our second pull at the
mournful-sounding bell was answered by a sad young monk, who opened a
square loop-hole in the wall, and asked our errand in a voice enfeebled
by voluntary privations. After inspecting our pass, he told us, with a
wan but friendly smile, that we must wait a little. It was Friday, and
we had to wait rather long, for the hermits were just at that time
undergoing the weekly flagellation to which they subject themselves. But
finally we were let in--donkeys, guide, _arriero_, and the colored maid
"Fan" sharing the hospitality. An avenue of tall, sombre, cypresses
opened before us, leading to the main building and offices. The Desert,
in fact, was green enough; well supplied with olives and pomegranates;
and hedges of the prickly-pear, with its thick, stiff leaves shaped like
a fire-shovel, and heavy as wax-work, cinctured the isolated huts in
which the brothers dwell each by himself. Precisely as we came to a
triangular plot in front of the entrance we were confronted by a skull
set up prominently in a sort of pyramidal monument, giving force by its
dusty grin to an inscription in Spanish, which read:
"AS THOU LOOKEST, SO ONCE LOOKED I:
AS I LOOK NOW, SO WILT THOU APPEAR HEREAFTER.
PONDER UPON THIS, AND SIN NOT."
Shortly beyond stood a catacomb above-ground, in which a number of
defunct hermits had been sealed up. It also bore a legend, but in Latin:
"THE DAY OF DEATH IS BETTER THAN THAT OF BIRTH."
In the vestibule of the house these drastic reminders of mortality were
supplemented by two allegorical pictures--hanging among some portraits
of evanished worthies who had ended their penitential days there--two
crude paintings which exhibited "The Soul Tortured by Doubt," and "The
Soul Blessed by Faith." It was not altogether in keeping with the
unworldly and ascetic atmosphere of this spiritual refuge, that a tablet
in the wall should record, with fulsome abasement of phrase, how her
most Gracious Majesty Isabella II. had, some few years ago, deigned to
visit the Desert, and how this stone had been placed there as a humble
monument of her condescension. Certainly, considering the ex-Queen's
character (if it may claim consideration), it is hard to see what honor
the anchorites should find in her visiting their abode.
A gray-haired brother, robed in the coarse and weighty brown serge which
he is obliged to wear in winter and summer alike, received us kindly and
showed us the expensively adorned plateresque chapel. He knelt and bowed
nearly to the threshold before unlocking the door, crossed himself, and
knelt again on the pavement within; then, advancing farther, he dropped
down once more on both knees, and bent over as if he had some intention
of using his good-natured, simple old head as a mop to polish the black
and white marble squares, but ended by another cross, and moving his
lips in noiseless prayer. The national manner of making the cross is
peculiar: after the usual touching of forehead and breast, the Spanish
Catholic concludes by suddenly attempting to swallow his thumb, and then
as hastily pulling it out of his mouth again, to save it up for some
other time. This movement, I suppose, emblemizes the eating of the
consecrated wafer, but it makes a grotesque impression that is anything
but solemn. At times you will also see him execute a unique triple
cross, with strange passes and dabs in the air which might easily be
mistaken for preliminary strategy directed against some erring mosquito
engaged in guerilla warfare on his eyebrow. We were obliged, in
conformity, to do as our Catholic companions did--receiving the
holy-water and making a simple cross--an act which, without being of
their faith, one may perform with unsectarian reverence. Brother Esteban
was on the watch to see that proper devotion was shown in this
peculiarly sacred chapel, and in the midst of his adoration he turned
quickly upon Manuel, asking, "Why don't you go down on _both_ your knees
in the accustomed manner?"
[Illustration: THE FRUIT OF THE DESIERTA.]
Manuel, being a master of ready deception, answered, without an
instant's delay, "Ah, that is my misfortune! I lately had an accident to
that leg" (indicating the one which had not sunk far enough), "and that
is why it is not easy to get down on both knees." However, he spread his
handkerchief wider, and painfully brought the offending member into
place.
Esteban frankly apologized, and then the praying went on again.
When we got out into the corridor, and our monkish friend was well in
advance, black Fan's repressed heresy broke into a startling reaction.
She dipped her hand again and again into the basin of holy-water,
wastefully dropping some of it on the floor, and began outlining
unlimited crosses from her sable forehead downward--covering her breast
with an imaginary armor of them--enough to keep her supplied for a
month, and proof against every possible misfortune. Her broad grin of
delight, exposing her vermilion lips and white teeth like a slice of
unripe watermelon, added to the horror of the situation, and I protested
against such uncouth profanity.
"Might's well keep goin' now I begun," she chuckled in reply. "I's
'fraid I'll forgit how!" She was making another plunge for the font,
when our pale, gentle-featured Novice stopped her in mid-career.
Fortunately good Esteban had not observed this small orgy going on. He
was as pleasant as ever when we went with him into a little room to buy
rosaries and deposit some silver pieces for charity; and there he made
farther and profuse apologies to Manuel. "Of course you see it was
impossible I should know there was anything the matter with your leg,"
he said, quite plaintively. And Manuel accepted his contrition with
double pleasure because he knew it to be wholly undeserved.
The hermits, as I have said, have their separate cottages scattered
about the grounds, each with a small patch of land to be cultivated.
There they raise fruit, which their rules forbid them to eat, and so it
is carried down as a present to some wealthy Cordovan families who
support the hermitage by their largesses. Every day poor folk toil up
from the plain, some five miles, to this airy perch, and are fed by the
monks; but they themselves eat little, abstaining from meat, wine,
coffee, tea--everything, indeed, except some few ounces of daily bread,
a pint of _garbanzos_ (the tasteless, round yellow bean which is the
universal food of the poor in Spain), and a soup made of bread, water,
oil, and garlic. They live on nothing and prayer. They rise at three in
the morning, and thrice a week they fast from that hour until noon.
Their step is slow, and their voices have a strange, inert, sickly
sound; but they appeared cheerful enough, and joked with each other. I
asked Esteban the name of a tiny yellow flower growing by the path, and
he couldn't tell me; but he plucked it tenderly, and began discoursing
to Manuel on its beauty. "_Tan chiquita_," he said, in his poor soft
voice. "So _little, little_, and yet so precious and so finely made!"
Another brother was deeply absorbed in snipping off bits of coiled brass
wire with a pair of pincers. "These are for the 'Our Fathers,'" he
explained, meaning the large beads in the rosary, separated from the
smaller "Ave Maria" ones by links of wire. The cottages or huts,
surrounded by an outer wall, contain a cell, sometimes cut out of a
bowlder lying on the spot, where there is a rude cot, a shelf for holy
books and the crucifix, and a grated window, across which waves,
perhaps, the broad-leaved bough of a fig-tree. An anteroom, provided
with a few utensils and the disciplinary scourge hanging mildly against
the wall, completes the strange interior. The lives of the hermits of
the Sierra are reduced to the ghastly simplicity of a skeleton; a part
of their time is spent in contemplating skulls, and they have a habit of
digging their own graves, in order to keep more plainly before their
minds the end of all earthly careers. Mistaken as all this seems to many
of us, there was a peacefulness about the Hermitage for which many a
storm-tossed soul sighs in vain; and I am glad that some few creatures
can find here the repose they desire while waiting for death. Some of
the hermits are men of rank, who have retired hither disheartened with
the world; others are low-born--men afflicted by some form of misfortune
or misdemeanor of their own, who wish to hide from life; but all
assemble in a pure democracy of sorrow and penitential piety, apparently
contented.
We breakfasted at ten in a room hospitably put at our disposal, the
windows of which admitted a delicious breeze and opened upon a
magnificent view of the plain far below, where the distant city rested
like a white mist--an impalpable thing. Brother José brought some
olives, to add to the refection which our sumpter-mule had carried to
this height. They had a ripe, acid, oily flavor, which made one think of
homely things and of patient housewives in remote American hills, who
lead lives as monotonous, as self-denying and unnoticed as those which
pass on this ridge of the Sierra in Andalusia. Our Novice thought the
olives had "a holy flavor;" and I could understand her feeling. Find me
a site more fitted for meditation on the volatility of mundane things
than this eyry on the mountain-head overlooking the historic valley!
There lies Cordova, a mere spot in the reach of soft citron and
straw-tinted fields; and the Guadalquivir, winding like a neglected
skein of tawny silk thrown down on the mapped landscape. The plain is
calm as oblivion. It is oblivion's self; for there the earth has
absorbed Cordova the Old, so that not a vestige remains where compressed
masses of human dwellings once stood. They are crumbled to an
indistinguishable powder. That soft autumnal soil has swallowed up the
bones of unnumbered generations, and no trace of them is left. We
imagined the glittering legions of Cæsar as they moved slowly through
the country, flashing the sun from their compact steel, at that time
when they put to the sword twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the city,
which had sided with Pompey. We saw the Moors once more envelop it with
arms and banners and the fluttering of snowy garments. But all these
vanished again like a moving cloud, or a smoke from burning stubble; and
the sun still pours its uninterrupted flood of splendor over the land,
bringing life and bringing death, with impartial ray.
[Illustration: MEMENTO MORI.]
The Spanish word for "crowded" or "populated" is still used to signify
"dense" in any ordinary connection, as the phrase _barba poblada_, for a
thick beard, testifies. The implication is that, when there is any
population at all, it must be crowded; a direct transmission,
apparently, from periods when inhabitants clustered in immense numbers
around the centres of civil power for safety. And the word holds good
to-day; for one finds, in the present shrunken human force of the
Peninsula, closely packed assemblages of people in the towns and cities,
with wide domains of comparatively untenanted country around.
When night closed above us again in the city; when mellow lamps glowed,
and a tropical fragrance flowed in from the gardens; when in the long
dusky pauses of warm nocturnal silence the watchman's weary and pathetic
cry resounded, or hollow-toned church-bells rung the hour, the romance
of Cordova seemed to concentrate itself, and fell upon me, as I
listened, in chords that took this form:
FLOWER OF SPAIN.
Like a throb of the heart of midnight
I hear a guitar faintly humming,
And through the Alcazar garden
A wandering footstep coming.
A shape by the orange bower's shadow--
Whose shape? Is it mine in a dream?
For my senses are lost in the perfumes
That out of the dark thicket stream.
'Mid the tinkle of Moorish waters,
And the rush of the Guadalquivir,
The rosemary breathes to the jasmine,
That trembles with joyous fear.
And their breath goes silently upward,
Far up to the white burning stars,
With a message of sweetness, half sorrow,
Unknown but to souls that bear scars.
Here, midway between stars and flowers,
I know not which draw me the most:
Shall my years yield earthly sweetness?
Shall I shine from the sky like a ghost?
A spirit I cannot quiet
Bids me bow to the unseen rod;
I dream of a lily transplanted,
To bloom in the garden of God.
Yet the footsteps come nearer and nearer;
Still moans the soft-troubled strain
Of the strings in the dusk. Well I know it:
'Twas called for me "Flower of Spain."
Ah, yes! my lover he made it,
And called it by my pet name:
I hear it, and--I'm but a woman--
It sweeps through my heart like a flame.
The night's heart and mine flow together;
The music is beating for each.
The moon's gone, the nightingale silent;
Light and song are both in his speech.
As the musky shadows that mingle,
As star-shine and flower-scent made one,
Our spirits in gladness and anguish
Have met: their waiting is done.
But over the leaves and the waters
What echoes the strange clanging bells
Send afloat from the dim-arched Mezquita!
How mournful the cadence that swells
From the lonely roof of the convent
Where pale nuns rest! On the hill,
Far off, the hermits in vigil
Are bowed at the crucifix still;
And the brown plain slumbers around us....
O land of remembrance and grief,
If I am truly the flower,
How withered are you, the leaf!
[Illustration: DIFFICULT FOR FOREIGNERS.]
[Illustration: THE JASMINE GIRL.]
There was a good deal of discussion among our group of pilgrims as to
the propriety of a foundation like the Hermitage of the Sierra
continuing to exist in an age like the present one. Whetstone, who had
declined to visit it, was of opinion that men who led such idle lives
should be suppressed by law, and even went so far as to talk about
hanging them. So singular a theory, emanating from a citizen of a free
republic, met with some opposition; but this was not pushed too far,
because we understood that Whetstone kept a hotel at home, and dreaded
lest some day we should be at his mercy. As for the rest of us, it was
not easy to pronounce that we were of much more value than the hermits;
and assuredly those earnest ascetics compared favorably with our
mule-driver, who was remarkable only for an expression of incipient
humor that was never able to attain the height of actual expression. I
was sure that, as he sighed out his final "Arré" in this world, he would
pass into the next with that vacant smile on his face, and the joke
which he might have perpetrated under fortunate circumstances still
unuttered. Nor did the average life of Cordova strike us as signally
indispensable to the world's progress. It was doubtless a very pleasant,
lazy life so far as it went, and we did not decide to hang the
inhabitants! They have a charming fashion there of building houses with
pleasant interior courts, in which the _sclinda_, a vine with pale
lavender clusters of blossoms suggesting the wistaria, droops amid
matted foliage, and lends its grace alike to crumbling architecture or
modern masonry. In these courts, separated from the street by gates of
iron grating beautifully designed, you will see pleasant little domestic
groups, and possibly a whole dinner-party going on in the fresh air. It
was likewise agreeable to repair to a certain restaurant--restored in
the Moorish manner--and there, while clapping hands echoed through the
light arcades, drink iced beer and lemon--a refreshing beverage, which
might reasonably take the place of fiery punches (in America) for hot
weather. "Neither will I deny," said Velveteen, "that it is a wonderful
sensation to stray into the Plaza de Geron Paez and come up suddenly
against that glorious old Roman gate--growing up as naturally as the
trees in front of it, but so much more wonderful than they--with its
fine crumbling yellow traceries. How nicely it would tell in a sketch,
eh, with some of the royal grooms--the _remontistas_--walking through
the foreground in their quaint costumes!"
The men to whom he referred wear, in the best sense, a thoroughly
theatrical garb of scarlet and black, finished off by boots of Cordovan
leather in the style of sixteenth-century Spain, turned down at the top,
laced, tasselled, and slashed open by a curve that runs from the side
down to the back of the heel. This shows the white stocking under short
trousers, giving to the masculine calf and ankle a grace for which they
are usually denied all credit.
For the rest, dwellers in modern Cordova attend mass and vespers, stroll
around to the confectioners' of an afternoon to eat sweetmeats,
especially sugared _higochumbos_ (the unripe prickly-pear boiled in
syrup), or the famed and fragrant preserve of budding orange-blossoms
known as _dulces de alzahar_; and the remainder of the time they while
away pleasantly in loitering on the Street of the Great Captain, or in
peering from their windows at whatever passes beneath. Throughout the
kingdom, it should be said, a most extraordinary persistence will be
observed in dawdling, strolling, and general contemplation. The Spaniard
appears to be born with his legs in a walking position, and with loaded
eyes that compel him to look out of the window whether he wants to or
not.
One of the more remarkable observations, finally, that I collected in
Cordova came from Manuel. It was his reflection as he gazed down from
the Desierta into the plain: "Ah, that was where John Dove (Juan Palom)
did such splendid things!" he sighed. "You don't know about John Dove?
Well, he was one of the _very greatest_ men Spain ever had; he was a
robber--and oh, what a beautiful robber!"
_ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA._
I.
[Illustration: S]
Seville--why should we not keep the proper and more euphonious form,
Sevilla?--the home of that Don Juan on whom Byron and Mozart have shed a
lustre more enviable than his reputation, has been made familiar to
every one by melodious Figaro as well; and more lately Mérimée's Carmen,
veiled in the music of Bizet, has brought it into the foreign
consciousness again.
To me it is memorable as the place where I saw the jars in which the
Forty Thieves were smothered. Worried by a painfully profuse odor that
filled the whole street, one day I sought the cause, and found it in an
olive-oil merchant's _tienda_, where there were some terra-cotta jars of
the exact form given in the story-books, and afflicted with
elephantiasis to such a degree that one or two men could easily have
hidden in each. I am sure they were the same into which Morgiana poured
the boiling oil, though why it should have been heated is inexplicable:
the smell alone ought to have been fatal.
A prouder distinction is that Sevilla is the capital of Andalusia, that
gayest and most diversified province of Spain; the native ground of the
bull-fight and breeder of the best bulls; a region abounding in racy
customs and characteristics. The sea-going Phoenicians, who bear down on
us from so many points of the historical compass, found in Andalusia an
important trading field. Its mountains are still stored with silver,
copper, gold, lead, which have yielded steady tribute for thousands of
years. In its breadths of sun-bathed plain and orange-mantled slope the
ancients placed their Elysian Fields. Goth and Roman, Moor and Spaniard,
struggled for the mastery of so rich a possession; and meanwhile
Sevilla, the favorite of Cæsar--his "little Rome"--lay at the core of
the fruitful land, herself careless in the main as to everything except
an easy life, with plenty of singing and love-making. From climate and
history, nevertheless, from art and the mingling of antipodal races,
Sevilla received those influences which have shaped her into the bizarre
and eminently Spanish creation that she is--a visible memory of the
past, and a sparkling embodiment of the present. Society, amusement, and
religious awe are the controlling aims of the people, blended with
revolutionary politics, and great liveliness in their increasing
commerce. The songs of Andalusia pervade the whole kingdom; its
dances--_cidarillos_, _manchegas_, _boleros_, the _cachuca_, and the
wildly graceful _Sevillanas_--enjoy an equal renown.
To accept Sevilla without disappointment, however, a robust appreciation
is needed. Its squalors and splendors are impartially distributed.
Luxurious mansions are dropped down indiscriminately among mean abodes
and the homes of dirt. Poverty and showiness, supreme beauty and
grotesque ugliness, jostle each other at close quarters. It is a sort of
_olla podrida_ among cities; but the total result is exceedingly
curious, and piques the observation.
[Illustration: MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLA
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
[Illustration: THE GIRALDA TOWER.
From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.]
The first of it that met our eyes was the Giralda tower of the
cathedral, rising in unique majesty above the unseen town, and as if
inspired with a fresher grace by its own fame. If the bronze female
figure of Faith on the summit could have spoken, it might have said: "In
all the range of view from this pinnacle there is nothing so fair as
Sevilla." The very next object of notice was a woman in the street, who
began begging from below the instant we set foot on the balcony for a
general survey. She gave us our money's worth of misery, but the supply
afterward proved too great for our demand. The mendicants of Sevilla are
much more daring and pertinacious than their craft elsewhere. They
call your attention with a sharp "tst, tst," as if you were hired to go
through life casually, stopping the instant they summon you. There was
in particular one energetic man who never failed to pounce upon us from
his lair, and place some few inches in front of us the red and twisted
stump from which his hand had been severed. He had seemingly persuaded
himself that our journey of several thousand miles was undertaken
principally to inspect this anatomical specimen. The amount of execution
he did with that mutilated member was enough to shame any able-bodied,
self-supporting person. With a single wave of it he could put us to
flight. The effect would not have been more instantaneous if he had
suddenly unmasked a mitrailleuse a yard from our noses. To assume
unconsciousness was futile, for, whichever way we turned, he was always
(it would hardly be correct to say "on hand," but) on time with his
fingerless deformity--he always placed it, with the instinct of a
finished artist, in the best light and most effective pose--getting it
adroitly between us and anything we pretended to look at.
I imagined the noble cathedral might afford a refuge from such attacks,
but every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that
entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double
purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually
stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly draped lace
veils--losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or
emerging from confession into the daylight glare again--are careful to
drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait.
Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into
the hand that passes him a silver piece a tightly-folded note from some
clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid
the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions
of this kind.
[Illustration: THE "UNDERGROUND" MAIL.]
Nothing can surpass in grandeur, in solemn and restful beauty, the
hollow mountain of embellished stone which constitutes this cathedral.
It does not present the usual cross shape, but is based upon the oblong
form of an old mosque, originally formed somewhat like that at Cordova,
but now wholly gone, excepting for the unequalled Giralda, and a few
other minor muezzin towers. The Court of Oranges is another relic of the
mosque-builders, where clumps of polished leafage contrast their own
vivid strength with the energetic lines of flying-buttresses in the
background--a florid yet melancholy height of trellised stone. The
enclosing walls of the Orange Court, made of firmly cohering mud, or
_tapia_, are tipped with flame-pointed battlements. At their eastern end
rises the tall, square Giralda, with a serenity in its simple lines
expressing, like Greek temples, the satisfied senses controlled by an
elevated mind. The lower portion bears other impress of its Moorish
origin in variously patterned courses of sunken brick; but the whole
tower terminates in a filigree Christian spire of the sixteenth century,
with a row of queer rusty iron ornaments, imitating vases filled with
flowers, placed on the ledge above the belfry at the spire's base. Then,
as you continue the circuit on the east, you arrive opposite the apse
curve marking the chancel of the Chapel Royal; and here the wall is
moulded to the taste of Charles V.'s time, which affected Roman
simplicity and weight, adding to it a trace of feudal pomp in
high-relief coats of arms. On the third and south side a crumbling
frieze of deer's heads and flower garlands skirts the cornice above a
long plain front, the straight-ness of which our friend Whetstone,
clambering up on a low coping so as to squint along the side, and see if
the lines were perfectly true, admired more than anything else.
Afterward one reaches a corner where the work remains unfinished, and
the blackened trunks of incomplete pinnacles in graded ranks suggest the
charred fragments of a faith once all afire, now darkened and cold.
There is no all-dominating dome; but there are two or three bulbous
upheavals in the roof, some spindling turrets on the north, and a square
elevation in the middle revealing the form of the transept. The whole
top is ribbed with stone, serrated with ornate crockets, crowded with
bosses and small spires, or edged with a double balustrade mimicking in
its flame-points a thousand altar lights. Petrified rosettes and spiral
wreathings project from the sides in unchangeable efflorescence, and
great arches, furrowed around by concentric ripples of carving, and
sometimes overpeered by quaint terra-cotta heads, give entrance to the
interior of the gigantic marvel. And over all towers the Giralda to a
height of three hundred and fifty feet, surmounted by the Giraldillo
vane--a woman's form, which turns its twenty-five hundred-weight of
bronze from point to point at the slightest veering of the wind. But the
consummate wonder of this great fabric, under which prostrate ages seem
to crouch while lifting it to heaven, is the union of diverse styles and
spirits in its construction. The different schools conglomerated in such
an exterior give the cathedral a great and mysterious power of variety;
yet, decided though their contrasts are, the effect is not harsh. It
bears witness to the truth that the spirit of man when attuned to the
mood of sincere worship, however unlike its expression may be at
different epochs and through different races, will always make a certain
grand inclusive harmony with itself.
The coolness of the lofty and umbrageous aisles within is not penetrated
by the fiercest summer heats; but their religious twilight, though
inciting to a devout and prayerful sentiment, wraps in obscurity the
crowded works of art, the emblazoned _retablos_, the paintings of
Murillo, Campaña, and Morales, and the costly ornaments bestowed upon
the high altar, as well as those of some thirty side-chapels. In the
central nave, before a shrine at the choir-back, lies the tomb of
Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus. The colossal form of another
Christopher, the saint, lifts itself up the wall to a height of
thirty-two feet, near the Gate of the Exchange. Whoever looks upon St.
Christopher, to him no harm shall come during that day; hence this
worthy is a common object in Spanish cathedrals, and always painted so
large that no one who diligently attends mass can possibly miss seeing
him. A curious relic on the Chapel Royal altar is the Battle Virgin, a
small ivory image which King Ferdinand the Sainted always carried in war
firmly fixed on his saddle-bow. There, too, the King himself, embalmed,
is preserved in a chiselled silver case, to be uncovered and shown three
times a year with great pomp of military music. A life-size Virgin with
movable joints and spun-gold hair watches over him, but did not prevent
his crown from being stolen a few years ago. Not far away Murillo's San
Antonio hangs, the chief figure in which was also stolen, being cut out
in 1874, as many who read this will remember, and carried to New York,
where it was recovered. Innumerable other works and wonders there are,
and the sacristies contain great value of goldsmiths' products; but,
unless it be made a subject of long artistic study, the fundamental
charm of the cathedral consists in its general aspects, its mysterious
perspectives, its proportions so simple and grandiose; the isolated
pictures formed at almost any point by jewelled and candle-lit chapels
sparkling dimly through a permanent dusk, rainbowed here and there by
the light from old stained windows.
From the Giralda, which is mounted by inclined planes in place of
stairs, one looks down upon the glorious building as if it were
something belonging to a lower and different world. All around, beyond,
the mazy city flattens itself out in a confusion of white walls and
tiled roofs, that look like the armored backs of scaly monsters huddled
sluggishly in the powerful sunshine, with impossible streets among them
reduced to mere thin lines of shadow. The tawny river touches it;
palaces and gardens and abandoned monasteries fringe it. Quite near you
see the Tower of Gold--a surviving outwork of the Moorish
defences--which was formerly coated with orange-colored tiles on the
outside, while the inside furnished a repository for treasure brought
from the New World. A crenellated Moorish fortification rises up
dreamily at one point, but finding itself out of date, abruptly subsides
again. Farther out are the seven suburbs, including the gypsy and sailor
quarter, the Triana; and then the plains stretch into an immense area of
olive, gold, and white, reaching to mountains on the north and east. A
multitude of doves inhabit the spire, and there is almost always a hawk
sailing above it, higher than anything else under the cloudless sky. At
the base lives the bell-ringer, through whose stone-paved dining-room
and nursery, filled with his family, we had to pass in order to ascend.
Once, as we stood toward sunset in the high gallery where the bells are
hung in rectangular or arched apertures, we heard the _repique_ sounding
the Angelus. It was a furious explosion of metallic resonance.
Twenty bells on swinging beams, that throw the echoing mouths outward
through the openings, and two fixed in place within, of which Santa
Maria--profanely called The Fat One--is the largest: such is the battery
at command. They are not all used at once, however, for the Angelus. The
ringer and his two sons were satisfied with touching up Santa Catalina
(of a tone peculiarly deep and acceptable), St. John the Baptist, San
José, and one or two others. The whole brazen family have been duly
baptized, among them being San Laureano and San Isidoro, named after the
special patrons of Sevilla. One after another their tongues rolled forth
a deafening roar, in a systematic disorder of thunderous tones, while
the chief ringer went about unconcernedly with a smouldering cigarette
in his lips. One of his sons, after uncoiling the twisted rope around
the beam of San Laureano, thus getting it into violent motion, watched
his chance, sprung on to the beam, agile as a cat, and stood there while
it rocked, the bell under him swinging out at each turn, over the open
square below. It was three hundred feet, down to the pavement, and the
least slip would have sent him down to it like a handful of dirt. His
conception of what would please us, nevertheless, led him thoroughly to
unnerve us by repeating the performance several times.
"Why don't the high-priest, or whatever he is, go on and finish up this
church?" asked Whetstone of the guide. "Seems to me it's about time."
"The priest? He don't want to," was Vincent's answer, given with a
movement of the fingers meant to imply the receiving of money. "It make
too good excuse."
Our conductor, who I am sure was a sceptic, went on to declare that
within the last ten years ninety thousand dollars had been left by will
for carrying on the unfinished portion of the cathedral, but as yet no
movement to begin the work had been made. "Where all that money go?" he
asked, innocent curiosity overspreading his features, while his eye
gleamed with hidden intelligence.
"What do the people think of the priests?" one of us asked.
"The chimneys[7] will find out some time," he replied; adding, in the
proverbial strain common with Spaniards: "When the river comes down from
the mountains, it brings stones."
"By the river, you mean revolution? But you've had that before."
The conclusive answer to this was a maxim borrowed from the ring: "The
fifth bull is never a bad one" (meaning, "Success comes to those who
wait").
Our guide's English was put to a severe strain in the Alcazar, a palace
largely Oriental, with interiors that outshine the Alhambra in
resplendent color and gilding. There is, in particular, one round-domed
ceiling constructed with an intricacy of interdependent supports, cones,
truncations, dropping cusps, which is counterpoint made plastic; and in
its inverted cup-like cysts the burnished gold glows like clotted honey.
But, for all that, it does not equal the matchless Alhambra in
arrangement, variety, or poetic surroundings. The memory of King Pedro
the Cruel is closely connected with this Alcazar. From it he used to
make night sallies into the town, by means of what Vincent termed a
"soup-tureen passage," which brought him up through a trap-door
somewhere in the thick of his subjects. Pedro, who lived in the
fourteenth century, was a monarch of a severely playful disposition. He
used to have the heads of people that were obnoxious to him cut off, and
hung up over the lintel of his dressing-room door, where he could look
at them while he was putting in his shirt-studs, or whenever he felt
bored. In the extensive gardens, half Eastern and half mediæval, behind
the palace, among the box and myrtle planted in forms of heraldic
devices, among the palms and terraces and fountains, there run long
paths, secretly perforated in places for fine jets of water. These are
the traces of a still more ingenious amusement invented by Pedro. From a
place of concealment he would watch until the ladies of the court, when
promenading, had got directly over one of his underground--I mean
"soup-tureen"--fountains, then he would turn a faucet, and drench them
with a shower-bath from below.
There are other palaces in Sevilla, of which the Duke of Montpensier's
San Telmo is the chief, and a model of uninteresting magnificence, aside
from the valuable collection of old Spanish masters which it contains.
These pictures were sent to Boston for a loan exhibition during the last
revolution in Spain, in 1874; and although their aggregate worth is
easily surpassed by the pictures preserved at the public gallery of
Sevilla and at the Caridad Hospital, the Duke of Montpensier's
possessions embrace a masterly portrait of Velazquez, by himself
(repeated in the Museo at Valencia), and a charming "Madonna of the
Swaddling Clothes," by Murillo. San Telmo was formerly a nautical
college, having been founded by the son of Christopher Columbus.
[Illustration: A STREET CORNER.]
But the long succession of apartments through which the visitor is
ushered suggests no association with the former maritime prowess of
Spain; it is haunted rather by the failures and disappointments of its
owner, who, missing the throne on which his foot had almost rested,
lived to see his daughter, Queen Mercedes, die, and another daughter
mysteriously follow Mercedes into the grave after being plighted to the
reigning King. The grounds attached to the palace are very large, and
filled with palms, orange-trees, and other less tropical growths; and
they may be inspected, under the guidance of a forester armed with an
innocuous gun, by anybody who, after getting permission, is willing to
pay a small fee and tire himself out by an aimless ramble.
Sevilla, where Murillo was born and spent so many years of artistic
activity in the height of his powers, is the next best place after
Madrid for a study of the sweetest among Spanish painters. His house
still stands in the Jews' Quarter, and a few of his best works are kept
in the picture-gallery; among them the one which he was wont to call "my
picture"--"St. Thomas of Villanueva Giving Alms." Like the "Saint
Elizabeth" at Madrid, it is a grand study of beggary--vagabondism as you
may see it to-day throughout Spain, but here elevated by excellent
design, charming sympathy with nature, and the resources of a delightful
colorist, into something possessing dignity and permanent
interest--qualities which the original phenomenon lacks. Murillo is
pure, sincere, simple, but never profound; though to this he perhaps
approaches more nearly in his "St. Francis Embracing the Crucified
Saviour" than in any other of his productions. Like others of his
pictures in Sevilla, however, it is painted in his latest style, called
"vaporoso," which, to my thinking, marks by its meretricious softness of
hazy atmosphere, and its too free coloring, a distinct decadence. In the
church connected with the Caridad are hung two colossal canvases, one
depicting the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the other, Moses
striking the rock. This last is better known by its popular title, "The
Thirst," which pays tribute to its masterly portrayal of that animal
desire. In the suffering revealed by the faces of the Israelites, as
well as the eager joy of the crowd (and even of their beasts of burden)
on receiving relief, there is a dramatic contention of pain and
pleasure, for the rendering of which the naturalistic genius of the
artist was eminently suited--and he has made the most of his
opportunity. The representation is terribly true; and its range of
observation culminates in the figure of the mother drinking first,
though her babe begs for water; for this is exactly what one would
expect in Spanish mothers of her class, whose faces are lined with a
sombre harshness, a want of human kindness singularly repellent. Such a
picture is hardly agreeable; and it must be owned that, excepting in his
gentle, honest "Conceptions," and a few other pieces, Murillo shares the
earthiness of his national school, the effect of which, despite much
magnificence in treatment, is on the whole depressing.
[Illustration: FIGARO.]
The House of Pilate, owned by the Duke of Medina Celi, is quite another
sort of thing from San Telmo; a roomy, irregular edifice, dating from
the sixteenth century, but almost wholly Saracenic. The walls are
_repoussés_ in fine arabesques, and sheathed at the base with old
color-veined tiles that throw back the light in flashes from their
surface. These also enamel the grand staircase, which makes a square
turn beneath a roof described as a _media naranja_--natural Spanish
music for our plain "half-orange"--the vault of which is fretted cedar
cased in stucco. At the top landing is posted a cock in effigy,
representing the one that crowed witness to Peter's denial. Again, a
balcony is shown which stands for that at which Pilate washed his hands
before the people; and in fine, the whole place is net-worked with
fancies of this kind, identifying it with the scene of Christ's trial.
For it was the whim of the lordly founder to make his house the
starting-point for a Via Crucis, marking the path of Jesus on his way to
crucifixion, and these devices were adopted to heighten the
verisimilitude of the scene. In Passion-week pilgrims come to pray at
the several "stations" along the route to the figurative Calvary at the
end of the Via.
Into the Duke of Montpensier's garden stare the plebeian,
commercial--let us hope unenvious--windows of the government tobacco
factory; an enormous building, guarded like a fort to prevent the
smuggling out of tobacco. Indeed, every one of the three thousand women
employed is carefully watched for the same purpose as she passes forth
at the general evening dismissal. Mounting the broad stairs of stone, I
heard a peculiar medley of light sounds in the distance. If a lot of
steam-looms were endowed with the faculty of throwing out falsetto and
soprano notes instead of their usual inhuman click, the effect could not
be more uninterrupted than this subdued merry buzzing. It was the
chatter of the working-girls in the cigarette room. As we stepped over
the threshold these sounds continued with _crescendo_ effect, ourselves
being taken for the theme. At least one hundred girls fixed their
attention on us, delivering a volley of salutations, jokes, and general
remarks.
"What do you seek, little señor? You will get no _papelitos_ here!"
exclaimed one, pretty enough to venture on sauciness.
"French, French! don't you see?" another said; and her companions, in
airy tones, begged us to disburse a few _cuartos_, which are
cent-and-a-quarter pieces.
There was one young person of a satirical turn who affected to approve a
very small beard which one of us had raised incidentally in travelling.
She stroked her own smooth cheek, and carolled out, "What a pretty
barbule!"
They certainly were not enslaved to conventionality, though they may be
to necessity. They seemed to enjoy themselves, too. Their eyes flashed;
they broke into laughter; they bent their heads to give effect to the
regulation flat curls on their temples, and all the time their nimble
fingers never stopped filling cigarettes, rolling the papers, whisking
them into bundles, and seizing fresh pinches of tobacco. In all there
were three or four hundred of them, and some of them had a spendthrift,
common sort of beauty, which, owing to their Southern vivacity and fine
physique, had the air of being more than it really was. At first glance
there appeared to be a couple of hundred other girls hung up against the
walls and pil
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