About five grim people, mostly clad in black—including the old lady—sat in the room and stared at us as we ate. We could not avoid this disconcerting gaze—look where we would we either caught a human eye or else, what was worse, we were fascinated by a long procession of eyes passing away into the dim mysteries of reflection and re-reflection of the mirrors. We had to choose between the gaze of one real old lady or of twenty-five reflected old ladies, of one callow youth or of twenty-five youths diminishing towards the infinite. The audience stared at us as we ate our omelet, watched the fruit—apricots, cherries and hard pears—with which we finished the meal, and noted each sip of coffee. At last, unable to bear any longer the embarrassment of this mechanically intensified curiosity, we took refuge in our bedroom and lay down. We then noted that the bed was too small, all the rest of the furniture, on the contrary, being much too big.
We rested till lunch. The omelet and the fruit had but filled some of the minor vacancies within us and we were ready again on the stroke of two. Once more we faced the Spanish stare and all the reflected repetitions of it. A fair number of persons lunched at the hotel. As they came in the women sat themselves directly at the table, but the men without exception went to the far corner where, suspended against the wall, was a small tin reservoir with a minute tap and beneath it a tiny basin. Each man rinsed his hands in the infinitesimal trickle, before he sat down to dinner. Why the men and women made this distinction we could not guess. It seemed to be a custom and not to be dependent upon whether the hands were dirty or not. Even if the hands had been dirty the small amount of water used would not have cleaned them.
In the centre of the dining table were white, porous vessels containing drinking water. The water oozes through the porous clay and appears on the outside of the vessel as a faint sweat. This layer of moisture evaporates and keeps all the water in the vessel at several degrees cooler than the surrounding atmosphere.
Between mouthfuls of soup and wedges of beef the diners were watching us. As soon as the meal was over we fled into the streets of Irun. One cannot call Irun Spanish. It is abominably French, though France is pleasant in its own place. The café in the little plaza is French, with a French terrasse, French side screens of ugly ironwork and glass, and faces a square full of shady trees between which one sees modern fortifications of French appearance. So we sat sipping coffee and we said to ourselves: "Forget that you are in Spain. Put off your excitement. Don't waste your sensations with false sentiment"
Nor did the fact that all the wording on the shops was Spanish, nor even the sight of a building of pure modern Spanish architecture rouse us from our cloudy resignation. The building which towered into some six stories by the side of the railway was of a maroon brick. The lower story, including the entrance door, was decorated with appliqué in the design which the French used to call "l'art nouveau," and which now is confined almost exclusively to the iron work on boulevard cafés. It is marked by exaggerated curves. The whole bottom story of this building was sculptured in this fantastic fashion; in order to fit in with the decorations the front door was wider at the top than it was at the bottom, while the windows were of every variety of shape, squashed curves, dilated hearts, indented circles and so on. Above this story the building rose gravely brick save for the corners, which were decorated with bathroom tiles of bad glaze upon which flowers had been painted; roses, violets and pansies: the top story, however, was part Gothic, part Egyptian, with a unifying intermixture of more bathroom tiles.
A munition millionaire went to an art dealer saying he wanted a picture, but he didn't mind what sort of a picture it was provided it looked expensive. We imagined that the architect of this house had received a similar order. Later on we were undeceived.
A yellow tram went by bearing the name "Fuentarabia." Having heard eulogies of this place, we decided to go. We reached the terminus of the tramway and the conductor told us we were there. Since then we have met so many people who were in ecstasies about the beauties of Fuentarabia, about its pure Spanish character, etc., etc., that we are still wondering if we went to Fuentarabia after all
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cheap.
CHAPTER IV
MEDINA DEL CAMPO
If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could pass through and circumambulate a foreign country yet never come into closer contact with the inhabitants than that transmitted through a Cook's interpreter. So that if you want to learn anything about a country, either you must put a sprag into the wheels of this civilization or you must let Opportunity do it for you. Opportunity is a very complaisant goddess: give her an inch and the ell at least is offered to you. She smiled upon us when we decided to stay the night at Irun; once more she smiled when the porter told us that the train to Avila left about eight o'clock, so we humped the two rucksacks and the suit-case from the inn to the station, got our trunk and hold-all from the baggage office and went to buy our tickets. Then we realized what Opportunity had been up to. The ticket clerk refused to give us tickets to Avila.
"Why not?
"The train does not go through Avila, it goes to Madrid by the other branch through Segovia. The train by Avila goes at four."
"Where, then, does it branch off?"
"At Medina del Campo."
"Then give us tickets to Avila and we will wait at Medina del Campo."
But the authorities did not approve of this novel idea. It seemed that the through-ticket system had not become the custom in Spain. We must then take tickets to Medina or wait in Irun till the proper, respectable Avila train should go, so to the astonishment of the booking clerk we said:
"All right, give us tickets for Medina."
I do not believe that any pleasure traveller had stopped at Medina before we did. That is the impression we received, both from the behaviour of the porters at Irun and of those at Medina itself.
The scenery from the railway was, as scenery always is, fascinating because of one's elevation and the scope of one's view, tiring because of its continuous movement. We passed through mountains worthy of Scotland, very Scotch in colour, and at last came out upon the big plain of Valladolid.
While we were streaming across this and the mountains were fading slowly into a distant blue the luncheon-car waiter announced his joyful news. We had heard that living in Spain was going to be dear, so, with some trepidation, we decided to take that train luncheon—for our financial position did not encourage extravagance. The whole trip was, in theory, to come within the limits of Jan's war gratuity—about £120. We had calculated the railway travelling as £50 in all; this gave us £70 for all other expenses, including the purchase of the musical instruments upon which we had set our minds, and we hoped to stay for four or five months. Yet in spite of the need for economy luncheon called us if only as an experience.
The meal cost us about three and fourpence apiece: it was a complicated affair of many courses—even in a Soho restaurant the same would have come to about ten shillings, so that the spirit of economy in us was cheered and inspirited. Of our fellow passengers we remember nobody save a gigantic priest who waddled slowly along the corridors, carrying, suspended on a plump finger, a very small cage in which, like a mediæval captive in a "little ease," was a canary almost as large as its prison.
Medina station looked like an exaggerated cart-shed on a farm; two long walls and a roof of corrugated iron—there were no platforms, only one broad pavement along one of the walls. A small bookstall was against the wall and further along the pavement a booth of jewellery. This booth had glass windows and "Precio Fijo"[2]—"No bargaining," in other words—was painted across the glass in white letters.
Why Spaniards, en route, should have mad desires to purchase jewellery, we have not learned, but these jewellery booths are common on Spanish stations. The jewellers seem to detest bargaining, for these words always appear on the windows. I suppose the fact that the purchaser of jewellery
has got to catch a train may give him some occult advantage over the seller. One may imagine him slamming his last offer down on the counter and sprinting off with the coveted trinket to the train, while the defrauded merchant is struggling with the door-handle of his booth—so "No Bargaining" is painted up, very white and very positive.
As we had nine hours to wait, there was no need to hurry, so we allowed the crowd to drift out of the platform before we began to see about the disposal of our luggage. Stumbling about in Hugo Spanish we discovered that, owing to the receipt that had been given us at Irun, our big trunk would look after itself until claimed, but that there was no luggage office or other facility for getting rid of our smaller baggage. We, however, insinuated understanding into the head of a porter, who thereupon led us to a door amongst other doors in the wall labelled "Fonda." We came into a huge hall. Across one end stretched a majestic bar four feet high, of elaborately carved wood, upon the top of which were vases of fruits, tiers of bottles and glittering machines for the manufacture of drink. Three long tables were in the room, two spread simply with coffee-cups. The third table occupied the full length of the middle of the room. It seemed spread for some Lord Mayor's banquet. Snowy napery was covered along the centre with huge cut-glass dishes, stacked with fruit, alternated with palms flanked by champagne bottles and white and red wine bottles. Fully fifty places were laid, each place having seven or eight plates stacked upon it while the cutlery sparkled on either hand. A cadaverous, unshaven waiter lounged about amongst this magnificence and lazily flicked at the flies with his napkin.
This huge, deserted room, expectant of so many guests, made one think of the introduction to a fairy story: one could have sat the mad hatter, the dormouse and the March hare down there, but one could never imagine that fifty passengers could in sober earnestness crowd to have supper at Medina del Campo upon the same day. No, rather here was one flutter of the dying pomp and majesty of Spain.
We placed our bags in a corner of the pretentious room and went from the station to look for the town. It was nowhere to be seen. A white road deep in dust gleamed beneath the afternoon sun and led away across the ochreous plain, but, of town, not a sign. Yet the white road was the only road; Medina must be somewhere, so off we walked. The plain was not quite flat, it flowed away in undulations which appeared shallow, but which proved sufficiently deep to swallow up all signs of Medina del Campo at the distance of a mile.
First we came to a line of little brightly coloured hovels, square boxes, many of only one room, then to a church, an ancient Spanish-Gothic church surrounded by gloomy trees. Suddenly the road turned a corner and we were almost in the middle of the town. Medina was Spanish enough. Here was the plaza at the end of which towered a high cathedral decorated with colour and with carving. The plaza lay broad and shining beneath the sunlight; loungers sprawled in the shadows beneath the small, vivid green trees, and in the deep stone arcades which edged the open square the afternoon coffee-drinkers, clad in cool white, lolled at the café tables.
In the centre of the plaza was a fountain running with water, and about it came and went a continual procession of women bearing large, white amphoras upon their hips, children carrying smaller drinking vessels, and men wheeling long, barrow-like frameworks into which many amphoras were placed. The shops and cafés were painted in gay colours which were brilliant in the sun and which contrasted pleasantly with the crude—as though painted—green of the trees and the clear, soothing hue of the sky.
I know that historical things have happened at Medina del Campo, but we are not going to retail second-hand history. To us, as living beings, it is far more important that we bought our first oily, almondy Spanish cakes here than that Santa Teresa (who started off at the age of ten years to be martyred by the Moors) founded a convent in the town.
Medina is a dead place and must be typical of Spain. It has a market, a plaza and a few ragged fringes of streets more than half full of collapsing houses, and in this gay-looking remnant of past glory are at least three enormous churches with monasteries in attendance. But even the churches are falling into ruin and the storks' nests are clustered flat on the belfries, while Hymen's debt collectors, clapping their beaks, gaze down from aloft into the empty roadways.
Sunset had played out a colour symphony in orange major by the time we had arrived back at the station where we asked for a meal; but the cadaverous, blue-jowled waiter had not laid covers for fifty in order that intrusive strangers might push in and demand food at whatever hour they chose.
"Supper," he said with some dignity and disgust at our ignorance, "is at eight."
So out we went on to the pavement platform, found a lattice seat and ate the cakes we had bought. They were like treacly macaroons, so oily that the paper in which they had been wrapped was soaked through, but it was with pure almond oil and the cakes were delicious. Lunch had been eaten at twelve and in trains one never eats quite at one's ease; hunger had gripped us when eight o'clock struck by the station clock. We took our seats at the long table before those piles of plates. A quarter-past eight went by, half-past eight was approaching. One by one about six or seven persons sauntered into the room and seated themselves, distant from each other in comparison with the size of the table as are the planets in the solar system. Nearest to us, our Mars, as it were, was a very fat commercial man, his face showing the hue of the ruddy planet. Our Venus was represented by a pale young priest, his long wrists projecting far from the sleeves of his cassock. Mercury looked appropriately enough like one who was always travelling; Saturn was covered with rings—he must have been one of the customers of the "precio fijo" booths—the other planets were lost amongst cumulus of fruit and cirrus of palm.
The waiter became active. Balancing a large soup tureen, he ladled a thin, greenish soup into the upper plate. We then understood that we would have to eat our way down through the pile of plates, each plate a course. Mars rushed at his soup in such a wild manner that we felt it was a good thing indeed that the soup-plate was thus raised so near to his mouth or fully the half of the soup would have drenched his waistcoat.
Alice again was recalled to my mind. I remembered her dismay during her regal banquet when the dishes once introduced to her were whisked away from under her nose, for every time I laid down my knife and fork to speak to Jan my plate was seized and carried off by the cadaverous waiter. No sooner was I introduced to a new Spanish dish than it was wrested from me. Twice this had occurred. On the third occasion I lay in wait: as the waiter swooped for my plate I seized it. There was a momentary struggle, but I had two hands to his one; he retired with a look of astonishment on his face. Gradually I became aware of the fact that Mars never loosed his knife and fork until he had cleared his plate. He held both firmly in his two red hands. If he drank—which he did with gusto, throwing his head back, washing the wine, which had a queer tarry taste, about the inside of his mouth, almost cleaning his teeth with it—he held his fork sceptre-wise as if to say to the waiter, "Touch that last corner of beefsteak at your peril." When he had quite finished the course, when he had mopped up all the remnants with a piece of bread, then and then only did he lay down both knife and fork. Unconsciously I had been giving a signal to the waiter.
After the beefsteak we had a surprise. One has been so long accustomed to the French custom in gastronomy, that one almost forgets that courses are not arranged in an immutable order. Once indeed I did make a bet in Paris that I would eat a meal in the inverse direction, beginning with the coffee and sweets and ending with the soup—which, by the way, proved very hard to swallow—but the mere fact that one could bet about it proves how fixed one imagines the laws of food progression to be. At Medina del Campo, after the beefsteak, which was about the third item on the menu, the waiter brought us fried fish, thereby proving that gastronomic progression is not so unalterable as is usually imagined. The fish looked like very small plaice, but they had a strange flavour which we had never before tasted. That the fish had been packed for several days in rotting hay seemed the nearest description and explanation, and we would have clung to this idea if the salad had not also had a perceptible tang of this unpleasant taste. We asked the waiter what the flavour was, but our Spanish broke down under the strain, and the waiter said "Claro"[3] and went away.
For some weeks afterwards the word "Claro" became our bugbear. The Spaniard gets little amusement from hearing his language spoken by foreigners. If the unfortunate foreigner does not get pronunciation, accent and intonation perfect the Spaniard says "Claro," in reality meaning "I can't make head or tail of what you are talking about." Both laziness and courtesy make the Spaniard say "Claro," and often the poor foreigner is quite delighted with his progress in the language—the people tell him that everything he says is perfectly clear, hooray; he thinks that he must have an unsuspected gift for languages—until one day he asks the way to somewhere and receives the usual answer, "Claro."
The Redonda Mesa,[4] which would I think be the Spanish for a "square meal," cost us again four pesetas, and it was an even better three and eightpenn'orth than we had been given on the train. The meal finished, the planets held a public tooth-picking competition for a while, then one by one they resumed their normal orbits and passed from our sight.
We, with the processes of digestion heavy upon us, went back to the seat in the ill-lit station. Three more hours we had to wait for the train to Avila, so we sat in the mild night watching the only engine at Medina—an engine which looked like an immediate descendant of Stevenson's Rocket—push trucks very slowly to and fro. This engine, though it made a lot of spasmodic noise, did not destroy, it only interrupted, the intense silence which lay over the country-side. The platform was quite deserted. Presently two small boys came along. One had a red tin of tobacco which he offered to Jan; Jan shook his head but did not answer. They then tried to talk to us, but we knew better than to expose our imperfect Castilian to two small boys—so we kept silence. At last they said we were "misteriosos" and went away.
A luggage train steamed in. At the tail end of the train were three third-class carriages, and from these carriages, as well as from the waggons, poured out a mob of wild-looking men. They were dark brown, unshaven, covered with broad tattered straw hats, clothed in rough and ragged fustian and carried blankets of many coloured stripes. Huge bundles, sacks and strange implements were slung upon their backs. As they crowded in beneath the dim lamp at the station exit one could almost have sworn that all the figures from Millet's pictures had come to life. A smell of the soil and of labour and of sweat went up from them. These men were peasants from Galicia; they had come in third-class carriages, in goods waggons, travelling probably for two or three days, attached to luggage trains, across the country to the harvesting. One by one they passed out, their voices trailed away into the night towards Medina, and once more the silence came back.
Time wears itself out in the end. The train to Avila, when it came, was fairly empty, so we could lay ourselves out at full length and rest, disturbed, however, by the continual fear that we might overshoot our destination.
It was pitchy night when we clambered down from the train at Avila. The large barn of a station was lit by but three minute lamps and the glow from the fonda door. In the semi-darkness the passengers moved about like ghosts, each intent on his own business. It was two o'clock in the morning, so before exploring we again put our baggage in a corner of the fonda; where also we found the one waiter presiding over a banquet laid for fifty non-existent guests. Speaking as little of the language as we did, it seemed impossible to go exploring a foreign town in the dead of night for a hotel which would probably be shut when we found it. So, feeling somewhat like Leon Berthelini and his wife in Stevenson's story, we sat down on a seat in the station to await the dawn.
The temperature of the night was almost perfect; there was a hint of chill in our faces which, however, did not penetrate through the clothing. For awhile porters moved about arranging luggage, then one by one the three lights were extinguished and the station was left to darkness. One porter clambered into a carriage which was standing on a siding; as he did not come out again nor pass down on the other side we imagine he went to bed in it. We were tempted to follow his example, but feared the train might move off unexpectedly and carry us to some remote part of Spain before we could wake up. One can tempt opportunity too far.
But the seat was hard. If, like Berthelini, we had had a guitar we might have performed miracles with it similar to his, but we had left our guitars in England. So Jan went exploring. Outside the station he found a small omnibus, its horses eating hay out of nose-bags. Hearing faint voices he discovered a sort of dimly lit underground bar annexed to the fonda, in which the driver of the omnibus and a friend were drinking spirits, while the tired waiter lounged yawning behind the counter. Our ignorance of Spanish prevented us from thrusting ourselves into their company: but we waited for the driver to attend to his horses and in halting Hugo we asked him at what hour the omnibus went to the hotel. He replied "In the morning" and went back to his drinking.
The eau-de-nil of dawn found us on the edge of shivering, but the day warmed rapidly. A train thundered into the station pouring out its cascade of passengers. Gathering up our packages and tipping the waiter fifty centimes, we found a new omnibus which was labelled "Hotel Jardin" and took our seats inside. Dawn was over by the time we reached the hotel, though it was but four o'clock. We had a confused impression of great buff battlements overhanging the buildings, of a few stunted bushes, of one or two girls in black, of a huge room which was to be our bedroom and then—bed—sleep
CHAPTER V
AVILA
Borrow has a description of an inn in Galicia in which a whole family occupies but one bedroom while the servant sleeps across the door. Our bedroom in the Hôtel del Jardin was quite large enough for any family other than, perhaps, a French Canadian, which sometimes runs, we have heard, into twenties and thirties. The walls were painted a pinky-mauve stucco, decorated with a broad olive-green ribbon of colour making a complete oblong or frame on each wall about eighteen inches within the edges of the wall, top, bottom and sides.
This method of making, as it were, a separate frame of each wall, was novel and rather pleasant. It is a common practice in Spanish wall decoration and is probably Moorish in origin. The hotel was full of dark corridors leading to huge bedrooms: it had a broad veranda upstairs full of large wicker chairs, bottoms up, while downstairs was a dining room with square tables and a small entrance hall in which sat the three old ladies.
With one of the old ladies we had bargained in a sleepy way upon our arrival. She had conceded us the room with full pension (no extraordinarios) for eight pesetas a day, but in general the three old ladies sat in the entrada together, giving a sense of black-frocked repose and of quiet dignity to the place. One was thin-faced, dried-up but energetically capable; one was large and motherly, while the third had no characteristics whatever and was ignored by every one.
I do not think we realized that these three old ladies were the proprietresses until the second or third day at lunch-time. We had been given our seats at a table by the waiter; suddenly we found the three old ladies had surrounded us and were glowering down at us. We were rising to our feet but they peremptorily commanded us to stay where we were, breaking the rising tide of their wrath upon the waiter. Then, for the first time, we realized how completely we were married in Spain. In France, for instance, married people are "les époux," plural, separate; in England they are a "married couple," which still recognizes a duality though perhaps less definitely than does France; but in Spain we were "un matrimonio," indissolubly wedded into one in the language, and into a masculine one at that. Somehow I always felt that we ought to be wheeled in on casters: it was improper that so stately a thing as a matrimonio like the Queen of Spain should use legs. From the old ladies' annoyance we understood that the matrimonio had done something which was not correct, but they talked so fast, and they all talked together, so that the matrimonio could not make head or tail of what they were saying. Nor indeed did we ever discover our misdemeanour.
For our six and eightpence a day we had breakfast in a little side room. This meal was of café au lait in a huge bowl, rolls and butter. Sometimes we had companions for this meal. On the second day I was some minutes earlier than Jan. At the table was a young peasant priest. He ignored my tentative bow but began muttering to himself protective prayers in Latin. However, once I looked up suddenly and surprised him in the act of staring at me. He quickly crossed himself and redoubled the urgency of his protestations to God.
The other meals were excellently cooked and with four or five courses to each, but the diningroom bore on its walls a placard saying that owing to the rise of prices the management regretted that it was unable to provide wine at the pension. So there was an extraordinario after all—and a very good extraordinario it was too—red Rioja wine with the faint, strange exotic taste in it of the tar with which the wine barrels are caulked.
You know the queer old drawings one finds in ancient books: towns like bandboxes with the walls round a perfect circle, and peaked houses all comfortably packed inside, and soldiers' heads sticking out of the battlemented towers? Well, Avila is like that. You may stand on the opposite hillside and see the full circle of her walls with never a breach in it, with towers at every two hundred yards or so, and you can gaze down into her houses, fitted neatly within the bandbox, and wonder if the old manuscripts were quite as exaggerated as one often supposed. From this hillside one might imagine that Avila has never changed from the days when the monks drew their primitive pictures. The walls top the hill-side and one sees nothing of the modern Avila which has spread beyond those great frowning gateways facing the plaza, but even the modern part of Avila which has oozed out beyond the walls is not overwhelmingly modern. There are none of the exquisite specimens of Spanish bad taste like that we found in Irun. The plaza is surrounded by coloured houses and arcades much as is that of Medina; the sun-blinds of the two large cafés are tattered and weather-beaten; the peasants stare at strangers with an unspoilt curiosity.
The habit of rushing about towns, of penetrating into every gloomy interior, ecclesiastical or otherwise, which seems to be decently penetrable, is a modern convention to which we do not subscribe. There are two aspects to every place, the living and the dead, and we prefer the former. There is this advantage in our attitude, that one does not have to seek out the living, it flows quite easily and naturally by, and one does not remain an open-mouthed spectator with a jackdaw brain, but incorporates oneself with it. We did not go into the cathedral, nor into any convent, nor did we climb up the towers or into the walls: we sat at the café drinking in both coffee and Spain.
Of costume, as Spain is so often painted, there was little; the peasant men wore tall, flat-brimmed hats and broad, blue sashes about their stomachs; the women shawls and woven leggings; the mules and donkeys had trappings of bright-coloured woolwork and often saddlebags with fine woven coloured patterns on them. String-soled sandals were the footwear of the men and of the soldiers: string-soled shoes, alpagatas, were worn by the women and children. The town was moderately alive until eleven o'clock. Very early in the morning the peasants came into the market with their mules or donkeys, then gradually a quiet settled down, a quiet which lasted till the evening. After six o'clock Avila awoke, the business men left their shops, the officers their cantonments. The cadets and youths gathered in the plaza to flirt with the girls who, dressed in gay cottons, paraded to and fro in small giggling and swaying groups. Booths selling cool drinks and ices opened at the corners of the plaza, while wandering sweetmeat merchants sold fried almonds and sugared nuts. There was no woman with a lace mantilla and a high comb, nor any one with a flat hat, embroidered shawl and cigarette; so the cigar boxes are liars.
As one sits at the café table in Spain, life is, perhaps, presented to one in an aspect almost too crude. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gates exhibiting his sores, and the Spanish beggar follows his example. Spain needs no Charles Lamb to write of the decay of beggars. Decayed indeed they are, but not in that sense of which Lamb wrote: in tattered and unspeakable rags they pursue their trade from the Asturias to Cadiz. No dishonour attaches to beggary in Spain. A Spaniard was horrified when Jan told him that begging was not permitted in England.
"What, then, can those do who are unable or unwilling to work?" he asked.
A humble though probably verminous official refuge is provided for the beggar in each town, and, as he tells his clients, "God repays" his small extortions. The Spaniard is accustomed to his beggars, he does not nag at his conscience about them, but it harrows the unaccustomed heart of the Englishman who, taking his modest coffee or Blanco y negro after supper, finds a procession of misery thrusting importunate hands into his moment of quiet luxury. The Spanish beggar has no tenderness for one's sensibility. Each has the motto, "If you have tears prepare to shed them now." Naturally we were their quarry. They presented us with a series of specimens worthy of a hospital museum. We hardened our hearts, as we were afraid of consequences, but after two days, when the beggars, disappointed with us, relaxed their exertions, we gave or withheld alms with the outward serenity of a Spaniard, but feeling inwardly brutal whenever we refused to give a dole.
Dirty, half-naked children dodged about the café pillars, hiding from the waiter's eyes. They stared wistfully at the small, square packets of beet sugar which the waiter brought with the coffee, and if a lump were left over they would creep up and in a cringing whine ask for it. Boys slightly older usually begged for a perra chica or for a cigarette. Their voices would be pathetic enough almost to break one's heart—they would say they had not eaten for three days—but if the refusal was decisive they would suddenly change their tones and shout out gaily to a comrade or run away whistling, or turn a few cartwheels down the gutter.
In Avila, too, we encountered the money problem. We had been told that the Spaniard calculates his cash in pesetas and centimos, the peseta being worth normally tenpence in English money and the ten-centimo piece about one penny. So far this had worked fairly well, we had been on the travellers' route and the peculiarity of travellers had been catered for; but here we found a new system of coinage.
"How much is that?" I asked a woman in the market, pointing to some object.
"That," she replied, "is worth six 'little bitches.'"
"Six what?" I exclaimed.
"Well, three 'fat dogs,' if you prefer."
"Three 'fat dogs'?"
"Yes, or one 'royal' and one 'little bitch.'"
"But I cannot understand. What is a 'royal'?"
"Oh, don't you know? Why, twenty 'royals' make a 'hard one.'"
At last we worried it out. The little bitch (perra chica) is five centimos, or one halfpenny. The fat dog (perro gordo) is the ten-centimo piece; these are both so called because of the lion on the back, though why the sex should be changed we do not know. The royal (real) is twenty-five centimos or twopence-halfpenny, the "hard one" (duro) is a five-peseta piece. The peseta is ignored. Nobody except an ignorant foreigner calculates in pesetas. The Spaniard, who often cannot write, does staggering sums in mental arithmetic, reducing thirty-two "little bitches" or seventeen "royals" almost instantly into the equivalent in minted coin.
We had come to Spain for the several reasons mentioned in Chapter I. We had found the freedom: it was as though some oppressing weight were lifted from off us, as though an attack of mental asthma had been relieved. But on the whole we felt that we had been defrauded in other respects. The weather, except for the afternoon at Medina, had been very cloudy and at times almost cold. We had heard no guitar during our week in Spain. One day a man with a primitive clarinet, accompanied by a man with a side drum, had wandered about the town making a queer music which had given us thrills of unexpected delight. But Jan does not play the clarinet. He had made up his mind about guitars, and guitars he would have. The last night which we were to spend in Avila, he said:
"See here, Jo, we'll go out and we'll walk up and down, through and round this town, till we hear a guitar playing. Then we will walk in and explain. I'm sure the people, whoever they may be, will not mind, but I am going to hear Spanish music."
After supper we set out again. We walked the town from the top to the bottom. Not a whisper of guitar or of any other music. We bisected the town from left to right—still silence except for the dim sounds of normal evening life. We went out into the little garden which was beyond the walls and, leaning on the parapet, stretched our ears over the small suburb beneath. The cries of a wailing child or two, of a scolding woman and the shouts of an angry man answered us; of music not a note. We walked round the walls and were about to return in disappointment to the hotel, when Jan said "Hush!"
We listened. Barely audible, from below on the hill-side, came the faint tinkle of a guitar. We looked out across the dark country. The hill sloped steeply from our feet and rose again in planes of blue blackness to the distant mountains. Almost in the bottom of the valley we saw a square of light from an open door. The sound came from this direction. Cautiously we crept down the hill, which was steep, pebbly and without paths. As we came down, the noise grew louder.
There was a small drinking house or venta by the roadside; near to it, drawn up on a grassy spot beneath some big trees, were gipsy caravans and booths, and as we passed by we could see, dimly white, the blanketed shapes of the gipsies as they lay on the grass asleep under the stars. From the venta came the sounds of music.
After a momentary hesitation we went in. The room, lit by one dim lamp, was crowded with gipsies and workmen. It was long in shape and an alcove almost opposite to the door was partitioned off as a bar. At one end was a table upon which three gipsies with dark, lined Spanish faces were sitting, and the audience had formed itself into rough, concentric semicircles spreading down the length of the room. Most of the men were swarthy with the sun, clad in the roughest of clothes, some with tall hats on, others with striped blankets flung over their shoulders. The inn looked like what the average traveller would describe as a nest of brigands.
We murmured a bashful "buenos noches," bowed to the company and crept into the background. A few returned our greeting, but with delicacy of feeling the majority took no overt notice of our presence.
The man on the table who held the guitar began to thrum on the instrument. A tall gipsy, whose face was drawn into clear, almost prismatic shapes, and who might have stepped out of an etching by Goya, put his stick into a corner, slipped off his blanket and, standing in the open space before the table, began a stamping dance, snapping his fingers in time with the rhythm. A workman standing near to us said:
"That man does not play the guitar very well, the other one plays better."
He went out and in a short while returned with his wife, a laughing woman whom he placed next to me. There was no drinking of wine. The alcarraza, an unglazed, bottle shaped drinking vessel, full of water, was handed about. It has a small spout, and from this the Spaniard pours a fine stream of water into his mouth. But beware, incautious traveller—ten to one you will drench yourself.
Though the audience apparently took no notice of our presence, in reality they were extremely conscious of us. One by one, as if by accident, gipsy women clad in red cottons came into the already crowded room. Soon a girl was urged to dance. She demurred, giggling. At last she was pushed into the open space, and with a gesture of resignation she began to dance. We are not judges of Spanish dancing: we had been looking for atmosphere, and had plunged into the thick of it. This was no café in Madrid or Seville got up for the entertainment of the traveller. This was the true, natural, romantic Spain. Opportunity again had blessed her disciples. One of the women pushed her way out of the door, and in a short while returned, dragging with her a child about nine years old. The little girl's face was frowning and angered, the sleep from which she had been roused still hung heavy on her eyelids.
"Aha!" exclaimed the audience. "She dances well."
The man who was reputed the better player roused himself from the table and sat down on a chair. They put castanets into the child's hands. The man struck a few chords and slowly the music formed itself into the rhythm of a Spanish measure.
Relaxing none of her angry, sleepy expression, the child danced wonderfully. The castanets clashed and fluttered beneath her fingers, her skirts swirled this way and that, her feet beat the floor in time with the pulsation of the guitar. The audience shouted encouragement at her. With a wild series of movements, the dance at last came to an end.
"Brava! Brava!" cried the gipsies.
"One day that girl will be worth much money," said a man, with approval in his voice.
Then the best male dancer took the floor. With true artistic instinct he did not attempt to rival the active dancing of the child, but performed a stately movement, holding his arms above his head, and slowly turning himself about. When he sat down an old man of seventy or so began a series of senile caperings, thumping his stick on the floor. The audience rolled with laughter at the ancient buffoon.
For some while Jan had been wondering whether he should pay for two or three bottles of wine for the company, but we did not know the delicacies of Spanish etiquette, nor had we sufficient language in which to make an inquiry, so, pushing my way to the child who had danced so well, I pressed a few coppers into her hand. She looked up at me in astonishment.
"What do you want me to do, then?" she asked.
Our Spanish failed to shape a proper reply, so I smiled at her as answer.
"Buenos noches," and "Muchos gracias," we said to the crowd, and made our way out again into the night.
We were followed up the hill by a gipsy boy who begged cigarettes, but he had pestered us during the whole of our stay at Avila, and we did not feel kindly towards him. Nor indeed had we any cigarettes to give, because Spain was suffering from a tobacco famine, and those which we had brought with us from France had just come to an end.
The next morning we left the Hôtel del Jardin, which owes its name to the fact that it possesses in the front a tiny square of earth on which grow five bushes and a small tree. We were bound for Madrid
CHAPTER VI
MADRID
Madrid Station was the usual dark barn into which the trains ran and where they rested, as the diligences rest beneath the barn of the coaching inn. One descended the steps of the carriage into gloom; found a dim porter whom one would never recognize again; made one's way amongst the towering, sniffling black Pargantua of locomotives; was fought for by an excited mob of cabmen, amongst whom one remained passive until a cabman dowered with more character than his fellows had managed to attract one's notice; and finally we were packed into a small, four-square omnibus, our luggage on the top, the driver and his tout on the box. A police official in a grey uniform halted us. He asked our names, our destination and warned us not to pay the driver more than five pesetas for the trip, including the luggage.
To-day was Sunday. We had, indeed, on getting up at Avila imagined it to be Saturday. We were leaving Avila expressly on a Saturday in order to be in Madrid for the great Sunday bullfight, for practically all bullfighting in Spain is reserved as a mild sport for Sunday afternoon, or for other days of Church festival. Unfortunately, we had learned on the train that it was not Saturday but Sunday. Somehow, we had mislaid a day. We had presented ourselves with a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday too many, and now Sunday had gone bang and the bullfight with it.
But in consequence our entry into Madrid had some of the dignity of a royal procession. We plunged, a shabby omnibus, into the flood of carriages which parade the parks of Madrid on bullfight occasions. There were doubtless ladies with high combs placed in their raven hair; with lustrous eyes glowing from the deep caverns of their eye sockets; with a waxy and sensuous flower hanging from their full-blooded lips; clad in mystery-lending mantilla and gorgeous shawl, over which the Orient has burst a splendour of silken blossom. There were, no doubt, such spectacles to see; there must have been; all the artists who paint Spain cannot lie. Yet I confess that we did not see them. Though we are beginning to be suspicious of Spanish painters, we will not assert that no such ladies drove in procession, tempting the lounging Spaniard with glances from eyes of melting jet.
We did not see them because the whole flood of carriages was plunged in a strange golden haze. Dusk had fallen and overhead signs of daylight showed purplish through the fog, but lower down it was quite dark, and through this haze of orange-gold particles, which drifted in the air as golden particles drift in a chemical solution, the lamps of the carriages threw long searchlights, arresting strange silhouettes of the coach-borne crowd, so that we made our first acquaintance with the people of Madrid merely as black shadows against a radiance of gold. It was, indeed, somewhat a prophetic introduction. These black shadows against the gold may stand as a figure for Spain. We think of Spain as the land of the last romance, whereas the Spaniard's real romance is money and the gaining of it. But this is a mixing of secondary and primary impressions. Before our eyes Madrid rolled forward, gloating in an aureate solution, accompanied by the shouts of coachmen and the blaring from aristocratic and impatient motor-cars. We sat looking out of the black windows of the omnibus with much of that childish delight which a shadowgraph theatre gives. In time, however, we began to cough. After a while longer we began to realize that this haze so exquisite in the lamplight was dust—dust.
We rolled along, manufacturing our halo as we went, until, coming out of the press of carriages into cobbled and ill-lit streets, our glory fell away from us and we rocked on, reflecting on this apt illustration of the old French proverb concerning beauty and suffering. Gradually we decided that we could have dispensed with this weird introduction to Madrid in order to have spared our throats.
Our friend Jesus Perez had given us an address appropriately enough in the Place of the Angel. But there were three pensions in the same building and he had not discriminated. So I, leaving Jan to look after the bus, went to explore, and knocking at random was brought face to face with an old lady who had not a trace of the angelic in her constitution. While she was grumpily and wilfully misunderstanding me, insisting that the Señor for whom I was looking did not live there, a crowd of well-fed persons sifted from the dining-room and stood in a circle staring at me with cold-eyed curiosity. As they stared they all picked their teeth. At last I forced understanding on her and she told me in a surly voice that her pension was full. The other two pensions were full also. It was explained to me that Madrid was suffering from congestion, that never had such a season been experienced.
So I retreated from the stairs and we held a council of distress in the street. The driver of the bus, who did not indeed look like a very competent judge, said that he knew of a good pension. By a series of manœuvres, about as complicated as the turning of a large ship in a small river, he got his bus reversed and we set off again the way we had come. But once more we met a refusal, backed by wide-eyed staring and public tooth-picking.
We had the address of an hotel, as a last resource indeed, for it was somewhat beyond our means, costing seventeen pesetas a day en pension. So in despair we made our way to it, wondering whether the congestion had spread from the eight peseta boarding-houses to the seventeen-peseta hotels, and whether our first night in Madrid was to be spent in the bus. We came back into the garishly lit main streets of Madrid and at last the bus halted. There was no hotel front, and we plunged between two shops along a passage from which photographs of the beauties of Madrid showed exquisite sets of teeth from the showcases of a society photographer. A narrow, twisting staircase—the lift was out of order—spiralled us up to a sumptuous hotel decorated with mirrors and white paint arranged with a Permanic taste. Rooms were to be had, and so we resigned ourselves to luxury for a few days.
Luxury indeed it was. For our eight pesetas a day in Avila we had had as much as we wanted. Here it was in proportion. We were expected to eat our seventeen pesetas' worth a day. Course followed course until, more than replete, we had to wave away almost the whole of the second half of this truly Roman repast. The waiters were aghast. What? Not eat seventeen pesetas worth when one had paid for it? Incredible! We gazed about at our fellow diners and saw that we were unique. But then as a rule our fellow diners surpassed us as much in girth as in appetite; they had "excellent accommodations." Your true Spaniard adores his dinner. There is a general superstition that love is the Spaniard's prime passion. But I doubt it. For the once that we have been asked what we think of Spanish beauty, we have been twenty times questioned about our judgment of Spanish cooking.
Madrid at night. How much has one not dreamed of southern romance beneath skies of ultramarine? But Madrid seems just like any other large European city. It is Paris without the wit, Munich without the music. We talk, of course, of first impressions. The first impressions of a town are rarely national. Collective humanity is collective humanity everywhere; has the same needs and devises the same methods of satisfying them. Some needs Madrid supplies more blatantly than is done in other places. The Latin is indifferent to noise and the Spaniard is the most hardened of the Latin races. There seems to be no curb on the cries of the street vendors. The consequence is that each shouts out his wares in competition with his fellows; the louder the yell the more the custom. The peculiar qualities of Spanish singing further stimulate to a point of mordant acidity the Iberian voice. For a person of sensitive hearing Madrid is intolerable: newspaper men, flower-merchants, toothpick-sellers, and above all the lottery ticket vendors, scream their wares with nerve-racking persistency; added to which, to make pandemonium complete, the cab-drivers and their touts bellow and shout, while the horns of the motor-cars are the most discordant that we have ever heard.
As the night progressed from a stifling heat to a comparative coolness the noise seemed to increase. At two o'clock in the morning we thought, surely, it had reached its limit. And to some extent it had. One thanks Heaven sometimes that the human machine runs down; and we, when the "sweet sister of death" laid her hands upon newspaper and lottery ticket sellers, sent a thanksgiving up towards the stars, a thanksgiving the more sincere at the moment because it was silent. The diminution of noise went on steadily until about three, and we imagined that Madrid was going to sleep. It was, however, but a ruse of the subtle city. As is well known, one can become used to a persistent or regularly repeated noise, for Jan used to sleep sweetly close to the stamp battery of a mine, the din of which was so deafening that the voice was inaudible, even at the loudest shout; and dwellers near a railway line are but little disturbed by the nightly trains. Madrid knew that in time we would become accustomed to the human babel, in spite of its strident note; so she substituted a fictitious silence torn into strips by the sudden passage of motors which had taken advantage of the clearness of the streets to put on full speed and also to cut off the silencer. Irregularly these motors went by about one every five minutes. Each silence was about long enough to let us reach the edge over which one tumbles into sleep, and each roaring passage of a car jerked us back into disgusted wakefulness. We arose to a very early breakfast, wishing we had Mr. G. K. Chesterton at hand so that we could enter into an argument with him about the beauties of liberty.
To retrace our steps for a moment, it was just about at the hither side of the noise climax, that is, about 2.20 in the morning, that we got back to our hotel. We found the street door shut and locked, and no bell could we find to pull. We thumped on the door, but only a hollow, drum-like echoing answered us. We were dismayed. We had got up early at Avila, a train journey and discoverings in Madrid had worn us out, and on the other side of this locked door our bed tempted us; for we were not then aware that sleep was forbidden to us whether we got in or stayed in the street. It seemed strange in Madrid, wide awake and noisy, that our hotel should have locked up so early and should have shut us out. Despairingly again we drummed on the door. We awakened sympathy in a passer-by. A few words explained our plight. He whistled, and we presently saw a man with a lantern in his hand and with an official cap on his head coming towards us. Our helper explained and the official unlocked the door, let us in, and locked the door behind us.
This wandering latchkey is the equivalent to our old night-watchman. Amongst his duties is that of chanting out the hours of the night as they pass—for the benefit of the sleepless—to which he adds the condition of the weather. Since fully ninety-five per cent. of the Spanish nocturnes are Whistlerian blue, he has earned the title of El Sereno, or the serene. There is an advantage in this custom—one cannot forget one's latchkey. The worst evil which can happen to one is that one's latchkey may forget itself: but Spain is on the whole a sober country.
A big town reveals its flavour but by degrees. Madrid, whatever its real character may be, had hidden herself behind a veil—a veil of dust. That golden aura which had enveloped our first vision was not a permanent characteristic of the town. The dust hung in the air, rising higher than the houses. From the outskirts, maybe one would have seen Madrid as it were enclosed in a dome of dust. We marvelled that people could live in such at atmosphere.
We had noticed that, in addition to its dustiness, Madrid was suffering from a dreadful shortage of water. It was, of course, July, and one might expect some famine on the high and arid tableland of Spain, but we wondered that so great a city could have arisen with so meagre a water supply. At street corners queues of tired women and children waited for hot hours with buckets, pails, jugs and amphoras. Soldiers with a hose pipe from which trickled a paltry stream of water filled the vessels one by one. There was gaiety and bad temper, giggling and quarrelling amongst the women.
"This," said we, "is a primitive city."
In the public gardens water-carts were standing, and crowds of men were baling water up from the decorative ponds.
"A real famine," said we, "could not be worse than this."
This was in fact the case. Madrid is supplied from the mountains by an ancient aqueduct. The Spaniard has a principle of interfering with nothing until the last moment; the ideals of liberty are carried so far in Spain that they apply to inanimate objects as well as human beings. Thus, if the aqueduct wishes to break, it is allowed to do so. Panic ensues. The government is criticized, but words hurt nobody. The aqueduct had given way a few days before our arrival. Had it not been for the generosity of a nobleman who turned a private water supply into the conduits of Madrid, we would have found not calamity but catastrophe.
Madrid was unsavoury enough. The breakdown of the water-supply entails also the failure of the drainage system. In a land of wine one might dispense with water as a mere drink; but to dispense with flushed drains in a semi-tropical climate is impossible.