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MH3AS CITY, MO PUBLIC LIBRARY
D DOD1 01H1DDS 7
ROMA'NTE
JOHN
Booh' by -jftifttf ' Dos 'Pduolt
Tfcw
ESSAW:
Roswtote to the Road Agdn
POEMS:
i Pushcart At the Curb
(In Preparation)
ROSI^ANTE
TO THE RO14D AGAIN
By
JOHN DOS PASSOS
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1922,
By George H, Doran Company
Printed In the United States of America
SOUTHEAST
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I : A Gesture and a. Quest, g
II : The Donkey Boy, 24
III: The Baker of Almorox, 47
IV: Talk by the Road, 71
V: A Novelist of Revolution, 80
VI: Talk by the Road, 101
VII : Cordova No Longer of the Caliphs, 104
VIII: Talk by the Road, 115
IX: A n Inverted Midas, I2O
X: Talk by the Road, 133
XI: Antonio Machado;. Poet of Castile, 140
XII: A Catalan Poet, 159
XIII: Talk by the Road, 176
XIV: Benavente's Madrid, 182
XV: Talk by the Road, 196
XVI: A Funeral in Madrid, 2O2
XVII: Toledo, 230
ROSINANTE
ID
ROSINANTE
TO THE ROAD AGAIN
/; A Gesture and a Quest
TELEMACHUS had wandered so far in
search of his father he had quite forgotten
what he was looking for. He sat on a yellow
plush bench in the cafe El Oro del Rhin, Plaza
Santa Ana, Madrid, swabbing up with a bit of
bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a
plate of which the edges were piled with the dis-
membered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite Ms
plate was a similar plate his companion had
already polished. Telemachus put the last piece
of bread into his mouth, drank down a glass of
beer at one spasmodic gulp, sighed, leaned across
the table and said:
"I wonder why I'm here."
"Why anywhere else than here?" said Lyaeus,
[9]
Rosinante to the Road Again
a young man with hollow cheeks and slow-moving
hands, about whose mouth a faint pained smile
was continually hovering, and he too drank down
his beer.
At the end of a perspective of white marble
tables, faces thrust forward over yellow plush
cushions under twining veils of tobacco smoke,
four German women on a little dais were playing
TawiJiamer. Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps,
roast pigeon.
"Do you know Jorge Manrique? That's one
reason, Tel," the other man continued slowly.
With one hand he gestured to the waiter for
more beer, the other he waved across his face as
if to brush away the music ; then he recited, pro-
nouncing the words haltingly:
*Recuerde el alma dormida,
Avive el seso y despierte
Contemplando
Como se pasa la vida,
Como se viene la muerte
Tan callando:
Cuan presto se va el placer,
Coma despues de acordado
[10]
"A Gesture and a Quest
Da dolor,
Como a nuestro parecer
Cualquier tlempo pasado
Fue mejor.*
"It's always death," said Telemachus, "but we
must go on."
It had been raining. Lights rippled red and
orange and yellow and green on the clean paving-
stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled
through clattering streets. As they walked, the
other man was telling how this Castilian noble-
man, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up
when his father, the Master of Santiago, died and
had written this poem, created this tremendous
rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the
world. He had never written anything else.
They thought of him in the court of his great
dust-colored mansion at Ocana, where the broad
eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the
wide halls had dark rafters painted with ara-
besques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet,
writing at a table under a lemon tree. Down
the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral that was
building in those days, full of a smell of scaffold-
en]
Rosinante to the Road Again
ing and stone dust, there must have stood a tre-
mendous catafalque where lay with his arms
around him the Master of Santiago ; in the carved
seats of the choirs the stout canons intoned an
endless growling litany; at the sacristy door, the
flare of the candles flashing occasionally on the
jewels of his mitre, the bishop fingered his crosier
restlessly, asking his favorite choir-boy from time
to time why Don Jorge had not arrived. And
messengers must have come running to Don
Jorge, telling him the service was on the point
of beginning, and he must have waved them
away with a grave gesture of a long white hand,
while in his mind the distant sound of chanting,
the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse
stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined
Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing
with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson
damask into conquered towns, of court ladies
dancing, and the noise of pigeons in the eaves,
drew together like strings plucked in succession
on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which
his life was sucked away into this one poem in
praise of death.
[12]
A Gesture and a Quest
Nuestras vidas son los rios
Que van a dar en la mar,
Que es el morir. . . .
Telemachus was saying the words over softly
to himself as they went into the theatre. The
^orchestra was playing a Sevillana; as they found
their seats they caught glimpses beyond people's
heads and shoulders of a huge woman with a
comb that pushed the tip of her mantilla a foot
and a half above her head, dancing with ponder-
ous dignity. Her dress was pink flounced with
lace; under it the bulge of breasts and belly and
three chins quaked with every thump of her tiny
heels on the stage. As they sat down she re-
treated bowing like a full-rigged ship in a squall.
The curtain fell, the theatre became very still;
next was Pastora.
Strumming of a guitar, whirring fast, dry like
locusts in a hedge on a summer day. Pauses that
catch your blood and freeze it suddenly still like
the rustling of a branch in silent woods at night.
A gipsy in a red sash is playing, slouched into a
cheap cane chair, behind him a faded crimson
curtain. Off stage heels beaten on the floor catch
[13]
Rosinante to the Road Again
up the rhythm with tentative interest, drowsily;
then suddenly added, sharp click of fingers
snapped in time; the rhythm slows, hovers like
a bee over a clover flower. A little taut sound
of air sucked in suddenly goes down the rows of
seats. With faintest tapping of heels, faintest
snapping of the fingers of a brown hand held
over her head, erect, wrapped tight in yellow
shawl where the embroidered flowers make a
splotch of maroon over one breast, a flecking of
green and purple over shoulders and thighs,
Pastora Imperio comes across the stage, quietly,
unhurriedly.
In the mind of Telemachus the words return:
Como se viene la muerte
Tan callando.
Her face is brown, with a pointed chin ; her eye-
brows that nearly meet over her nose rise in a
flattened "A" towards the fervid black gleam
of her hair; her lips are pursed in a half -smile
as if she were stifling a secret. She walks round
the stage slowly, one hand at her waist, the shawl
tight over her elbow, her thighs lithe and restless,
[14]
A Gesture and a Quest
a panther in a cage. At the back of the stage she
turns suddenly, advances; the snapping of her
fingers gets loud, insistent; a thrill whirrs
through the guitar like a covey of partridges
scared in a field. Red heels tap threateningly.
Decidme: la hermosura,
La gentil frescura y tez
De la cara
El color y la blancura,
Cuando viene l,a viejez
Cual se para ?
She is right at the footlights ; her face, brows
drawn together into a frown, has gone into
shadow; the shawl flames, the maroon flower
over her breast glows like a coal. The guitar is
silent, her fingers go on snapping at intervals
with dreadful foreboding. Then she draws her-
self up with a deep breath, the muscles of her
belly go taut under the tight silk wrinkles of
the shawl, and she is off again, light, joyful, turn-
ing indulgent glances towards the audience, as a
nurse might look in the eyes of a child she has
unintentionally frightened with a too dreadful
fairy story.
[15]
Rosinante to the Road Again
The rhythm of the guitar has changed again;
her shawl is loose about her, the long fringe flut-
ters; she walks with slow steps, in pomp, a ship
decked out for a festival, a queen in plumes and
brocade. . . .
iQue se hicieron las damas,
Sus tocados, sus vestidos,
Sus olores?
iQue se hicieron las llamas
De los fuegos encendidos
De amadores?
And she has gone, and the gipsy guitar-player
is scratching his neck with a hand the color of
tobacco, while the guitar rests against his legs.
He shows all his teeth in a world-engulfing yawn.
When they came out of the theatre, the streets
were dry and the stars blinked in the cold wind
above the houses. At the curb old women sold
chestnuts and little ragged boys shouted the news-
papers.
"And now do you wonder, Tel, why you are
here?"
They went into a cafe and mechanically or-
dered beer. The seats were red plush this time
[16]
A Gesture and a Quest
and much worn. All about them groups of whis-
kered men leaning over tables, astride chairs,
talking.
"It's the gesture that's so overpowering; don't
you feel it in your arms? Something sudden
and tremendously muscular."
"When Belmonte turned his back suddenly
on the bull and walked away dragging the red
cloak on the ground behind him I felt it," said
Lyaeus.
"That gesture, a yellow flame against maroon
and purple cadences ... an instant swagger
of defiance in the midst of a litany to death the
all-powerful. That is Spain. . . . Castile at
any rate."
"Is 'swagger' the right word?"
"Find a better."
"For the gesture a medieval knight made when
he threw his mailed glove at his enemy's feet or
a rose in his lady's window, that a mule-driver
makes when he tosses off a glass of aguardiente,
that Pastora Imperio makes dancing. . . .
Word ! Rubbish !" Apd Lyaeus burst out laugh-
[17]
Rosinante to the Road Again
ing. He laughed deep in Ms throat with his head
thrown back.
Telemachus was inclined to be offended.
"Did you notice how extraordinarily near she
kept to the rhythm of Jorge Manrique?" he
asked coldly.
"Of course. Of course/' shouted Lyaeus, still
laughing.
The waiter came with two mugs of beer.
"Take it away/' shouted Lyaeus. "Who
ordered beer? Bring something strong, cham-
pagne. Drink the beer yourself,"
The waiter was scrawny and yellow, with bil-
ious eyes, but he could not resist the laughter of
Lyaeus. He made a pretense of drinking the
beer.
Telemachus was now very angry. Though
he had forgotten his quest and the maxims of
Penelope, there hovered in his mind a disquiet-
ing thought of an eventual accounting for his
actions before a dimly imagined group of women
with inquisitive eyes. This Lyaeus, he thought
to himself, was too free and easy. Then there
came suddenly to his mind the dancer standing
[18]
A Gesture and a Quest
tense as a caryatid before the footlights, her face
in shadow, her shawl flaming yellow; the strong
modulations of her torso seemed burned in his
flesh. He drew a deep breath. His body tight-
ened like a catapult.
"Oh to recapture that gesture," he muttered.
The vague inquisitorial woman-figures had sunk
fathoms deep in his mind.
Lyaeus handed him a shallow tinkling glass.
"There are all gestures," he said.
Outside the plate-glass window a countryman
passed singing. His voice dwelt on a deep
trembling note, rose high, faltered, skidded down
the scale, then rose suddenly, frighteningly like a
skyrocket, into a new burst of singing.
"There it is again," Telemachus cried. He
jumped up and ran out on the street. The broad
pavement was empty. A bitter wind shrilled
among arc-lights white like dead eyes,
"Idiot," Lyaeus said between gusts of laughter
when Telemachus sat down again. "Idiot Tel.
Here you'll find it." And despite Telemachus's
protestations he filled up the glasses. A great
change had come over Lyaeus. His face looked
[19]
Rosinante to the Road Again
fuller and flushed. His lips were moist and very
red. There was an occasional crisp curl in the
black hair about his temples.
And so they sat drinking a long while.
At last Telemachus got unsteadily to his feet.
"I can't help it. ... I must catch that
gesture, formulate it, do it. It is tremendously,
inconceivably, unendingly important to me."
"Now you know why you're here/' said
Lyaeus quietly.
"Why are you here?"
"To drink/' said Lyaeus.
"Let's go."
"Why?"
"To catch that gesture, Lyaeus/' said Tele-
machus in an over-solemn voice.
"Like a comedy professor with a butterfly-
net/' roared Lyaeus. His laughter so filled the
cafe that people at far-away tables smiled with-
out knowing it.
"It's burned into my blood. It must be formu-
lated, made permanent."
"Killed," said Lyaeus with sudden serious-
ness; "better drink it with your wine."
F20]
A Gesture and a Quest
Silent they strode down an arcaded street,
Cupolas, voluted baroque f a9ades, a square tower,
the bulge of a market building, tile roofs, chim-
neypots, ate into the star-dusted sky to the right
and left of them, until in a great gust of wind
they came out on an empty square, where were
few gas-lamps; in front of them was a heavy
arch full of stars, and Orion sprawling above it.
Under the arch a pile of rags asked for alms
whiningly. The jingle of money was crisp in the
cold air.
"Where does this road go?"
"Toledo," said the beggar, and got to his feet,
He was an old man, bearded, evil-smelling.
"Thank you. . . . We have just seen Pas-
tora," said Lyaeus jauntily.
"Ah, Pastoral . , . The last of the great
dancers/' said the beggar, and for some reason
he crossed himself.
The road was frosty and crunched silkily
underfoot.
Lyaeus walked along shouting lines from the
poem of Jorge Manrique.
[21]
Rosinante to the Road Again
*C6mo se pasa la vida
Como se viene la muerte
Tan callando:
Cua*n presto se va el placer
Como despues de acordado
Da dolor,
Como a nuestro parecer
Cualquier tiempo pasado
Fue mejor.*
"I bet you, Tel, they have good wine in
Toledo."
The road hunched over a hill. They turned
and saw Madrid cut out of darkness against the
starlight. Before them sown plains, gulches full
of mist, and the tremulous lights on many carts
that jogged along, each behind three jingling
slow mules. A cock crowed. All at once a voice
burst suddenly in swaggering tremolo out of the
darkness of the road beneath them, rising, rising,
then fading off, then flaring up hotly like a red
scarf waved on a windy day, like the swoop of
a hawk, like a rocket intruding among the stars.
"Butterfly net, you old fool!" Lyaeus's laugh-
ter volleyed across the frozen fields.
Telemachus answered in a low voice;
"Let's walk faster/'
[22]
A Gesture and a Quest
He walked with his eyes on the road. He could
see in the darkness, Pastora, wrapped in the yel-
low shawl with the splotch of maroon-colored
embroidery moulding one breast, stand tremu-
lous with foreboding before the footlights, sud-
denly draw in her breath, and turn with a great
exultant gesture back into the rhythm of her
dance. Only the victorious culminating instant
of the gesture was blurred to him. He walked
with long strides along the crackling road, his
muscles aching for memory of it.
[23]
//; The Donkey Boy
(Where the husbandman's toil and strife
Little varies to strife and toil:
But the milky kernel of life,
With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!
path zigzagged down through the olive
A trees between thin chortling glitter of irriga-
tion ditches that occasionally widened into green
pools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled
scrub oleanders. Through the shimmer of olive
leaves all about I could see the great ruddy heave
of the mountains streaked with the emerald of
millet-fields, and above, snowy shoulders against
a vault of indigo, patches of wood cut out hard
as metal in the streaming noon light. Tinkle of
a donkey-bell below me, then at the turn of a
path the donkey's hindquarters, mauve-grey,
neatly clipped in a pattern of diamonds and
lozenges, and a tail meditatively swishing as he
picked his way among the stones, the head as
[24]
The Donkey Boy
yet hidden by the osier baskets of the pack. At
the next turn I skipped ahead of the donkey
and walked with the arriero, a dark boy in tight
blue pants and short grey tunic cut to the waist,
who had the strong cheek-bones, hawk nose and
slender hips of an Arab, who spoke an aspirated
Andalusian that sounded like Arabic.
We greeted each other cordially as travellers
do in mountainous places where the paths are
narrow. We talked about the weather and the
wind and the sugar mills at Motril and women
and travel and the vintage, struggling all the
while like drowning men to understand each
other's lingo. When it came out that I was an
American and had been in the war, he became
suddenly interested ; of course, I was a deserter,
he said, clever to get away. There'd been two
deserters in his town a year ago, Alemanes; per-
haps friends of mine. It was pointed out that I
and the Alemanes had been at different ends of
the gunbarrel. He laughed. What did that
matter? Then he said several times, "Que burro
la guerra, que burro la guerra." I remonstrated,
pointing to the donkey that was following us with
[25]
Rosinante to the Road Again
dainty steps, looking at us with a quizzical air
from under Ms long eyelashes. Could anything
be wiser than a hurro?
He laughed again, twitching back his full lips
to show the brilliance of tightly serried teeth,
stopped in his tracks, and turned to look at the
mountains* He swept a long brown hand across
them. "Look," he said, "up there is the Alpujar-
ras, the last refuge of the kings of the Moors;
there are bandits up there sometimes. You have
come to the right place; here we are free men."
The donkey scuttled past us with a derisive
glance out of the corner of an eye and started
skipping from side to side of the path, cropping
here and there a bit of dry grass. We followed,
the arriero telling how his brother would have
been conscripted if the family had not got to-
gether a thousand pesetas to buy him out. That
was no life for a man. He spat on a red stone.
They'd never catch him, he was sure of that.
The army was no life for a man.
In the bottom of the valley was a wide stream,
which we forded after some dispute as to who
should ride the donkey, the donkey all the while
[26]
The Donkey Boy
wrinkling his nose with disgust at the coldness
of the speeding water and the sliminess of the
stones. When we came out on the broad moraine
of pebbles the other side of the stream we met
a lean blackish man with yellow horse-teeth, who
was much excited when he heard I was an Amer-
ican.
"America is the world of the future," he cried
and gave me such a slap on the back I nearly
tumbled off the donkey on whose rump I was
at that moment astride.
"En America no se divierte" muttered the
arriero, kicking his feet that were cold from the
ford into the burning saffron dust of the road.
The donkey ran ahead kicking at pebbles,
bucking, trying to shake off the big pear-shaped
baskets of osier he had either side of his pack
saddle, delighted with smooth dryness after so
much water and such tenuous stony roads. The
three of us followed arguing, the sunlight beat-
ing wings of white flame about us.
"In America there is freedom," said the black-
ish man, "there are no rural guards; roadmenders
work eight hours and wear silk shirts and earn
[27]
Rosinante to the Road Again
un dineral." The blackish man stopped,
quite out of breath from his grappling with in-
finity. Then he went on: "Your children are
educated free, no priests, and at forty every man-
jack owns an automobile."
"Ca" said the arriero.
"Si> hombre" said the blackish man.
For a long while the arriero walked along in
silence, watching his toes bury themselves in
dust at each step. Then he burst out, spacing
his words with conviction: ff Ca> en America no
se hose na a que trabahar $ de'cansar. , . .
Not on your life, in America they don't do any-
thing except work and rest so's to get ready to
work again. That's no life for a man. People
don't enjoy themselves there. An old sailor
from Malaga who used to fish for sponges told
me, and he knew. It's not gold people need, but
bread and wine and . . . life. They don't do
anything there except work and rest so they'll
be ready to work again. . . ."
Two thoughts jostled in my mind as he spoke;
I seemed to see red-faced gentlemen in knee
breeches, dog's-ear wigs askew over broad fore-
[28]
The Donkey Boy
heads, reading out loud with unction the phrases,
"inalienable rights . . . pursuit of happiness,"
and to hear the cadence out of Meredith's The
Day of the Daughter of Hades;
Where the husbandman's toil and strife
Little varies to strife and toil:
But the milky kernel of life,
With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!
The donkey stopped in front of a little wine-
shop under a trellis where dusty gourd-leaves
shut out the blue and gold dazzle of sun and
sky.
"He wants to say, 'Have a little drink, gentle-
men/ " said the blackish man.
In the greenish shadow of the wineshop a
smell of anise and a sound of water dripping.
When he had smacked his lips over a small cup
of thick yellow wine he pointed at the arriero.
"He says people don't enjoy life in America."
"But in America people are very rich," shouted
the barkeeper, a beet-faced man whose huge girth
was bound in a red cotton sash, and he made a
gesture suggestive of coins, rubbing thumb and
forefinger together.
[29]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Everybody roared derision at the arriero. But
he persisted and went out shaking his head and
muttering "That's no life for a man."
As we left the wineshop where the blackish
man was painting with broad strokes the legend
of the West, the arriero explained to me almost
tearfully that he had not meant to speak ill of
my country, but to explain why he did not want
to emigrate. While he was speaking we passed
a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us
in jingle of mulebells and in dizzying sweetness
of bubbling ferment. A sombre man with beetling
brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart,
brown feet firmly planted in the steaming slush
of grapes, flushed face tilted towards the feroci-
ous white sun, a small child with a black curly
pate rode in triumph, shouting, teeth flashing as
if to bite into the sun.
"What you mean is," said I to the arriero,
"that this is the life for a man."
He tossed his head back in a laugh of approval.
"Something that's neither work nor getting
ready to work?"
[30]
The Donkey Boy
"That's it/' he answered, and cried, ff arrh Ttff*
to the donkey.
We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bel-
lied suddenly in the back as a cool wind frisked
about us at the corner of the road.
"Ah, it smells of the sea/' said the arriero,
"Well see the sea from the next MIL"
That night as I stumbled out of the inn door
in Motril, overfull of food and drink, the full
moon bulged through the arches of the cupola of
the pink and saffron church. Everywhere steel-
green shadows striped with tangible moonlight.
As I sat beside my knapsack in the plaza, grop-
ing for a thought in the bewildering dazzle of
the night, three disconnected mules, egged on by
a hoarse shouting, jingled out " of the shadow.
When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-
glare beside the fountain, it became evident that
they were attached to a coach, a spidery coach
tilted forward as if it were perpetually going
down hill; from inside smothered voices like the
strangled clucking of fowls being shipped to
market in a coop.
On the driver's seat one's feet were on the
Rosinante to the Road Again
shafts and one had a view of every rag and shoe-
lace the harness was patched with. Creaking,
groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of
inside passengers, cracking of whip and long
strings of oaths from the driver, the coach lurched
out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle
of irrigation ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto
rustle of broad leaves of the sugar cane. Occa-
sionally the gleam of the soaring moon on
banana leaves and a broad silver path on the sea.
Landwards the hills like piles of ash in the moon-
light, and far away a cloudy inkling of moun-
tains.
Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees
at the leading mule, Cordovan hat on the back
of his head, from under which sprouted a lock
of black hair that hung between his eyes over his
nose and made him look like a goblin, the driver
bounced and squirmed and kicked at the flanks
of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side
to side of the uneven road. Down into a gulch,
across a shingle, up over a plank bridge, then
down again into the bed of the river I had forded
that morning with my friend the arriero, along
32]
The Donkey Boy
a beach with fishing boats and little huts where
the fishermen slept; then "barking of dogs, an-
other bridge and we roared and crackled up a
steep village street to come to a stop suddenly,
catastrophically, in front of a tavern in the main
square.
"We are late," said the goblin driver, turaiiig
to me suddenly, "I have not slept for four nights,
dancing, every night dancing."
He sucked the air in through his teeth and
stretched out his arms and legs in the moonlight.
"Ah, women . . . women," he added philo-
sophically. "Have you a cigarette?"
"Ah, la jwentiut" said the old man who had
brought the mailbag He looked up at us scratch-
ing his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a mo-
mentitO; and it's gone ! Old men work in the day
time, but young men work at night. . . . Ay
de mi" and he burst into a peal of laughter.
And as if some one were whispering them, the
words of Jorge Manrique sifted out of the
night:
<;Que se hizo el Rey Don Juan?
Los infantes de Aragon
[33]
Rosinante to the Road Again
iQue se Hcieron?
Que fue de tanto galan,
Que fue de tanta invencion s
Como truxeron?
Everybody went into the tavern, from which
came a sound of singing and of clapping in time,
and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging on
tables as might have come out of the Mermaid
in the days of the Virgin Queen. Outside the
moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish blotch
on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl
on an altar. The broken lion's head of the foun-
tain dribbled one tinkling stream of quicksilver.
On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage
and thyme burning in hearths and jessamine
flowers. Down the street geraniums in a win-
dow smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark
above them the merest contour of a face, once
the gleam of two eyes ; opposite against the white
wall standing very quiet a man looking up with
dilated nostrils el amor.
As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady
way out of town, our ears still throbbed with the
rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown hands
[34]
The Donkey Boy
clapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors.
From the last house of the village a man hallooed.
With its noise of cupboards of china overturned
the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-
faced man with a little waxed moustache like the
springs of a mousetrap climbed on the front seat,
while burly people heaved quantities of corded
trunks on behind.
"How late, two hours late/ 5 the man splut-
tered, jerking his checked cap from side to side.
"Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiled
eggs. . . . Think of that. iQue inculturaf
iQue pueblo indecente! All day only two boiled
"I had business in Motril, Don Antonio/' said
the goblin driver grinning.
"Business!" cried Don Antonio;^ laughing
squeakily, "and after all what a night!"
Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio
the story of King Mycerinus of Egypt that
Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he
would only live ten years, the king called for
torches and would not sleep, so crammed twenty
years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened
[35]
Rosinante to the Road Again
in intervals between his hoarse investigations of
the private life of the grandmother of the leading
mule.
Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cig-
arette and cried, "In Andalusia we all do that,
don't we, Paco?"
"Yes, sir," said the gohlin driver, nodding his
head vigorously.
"That is lo flamenco" cried Don Antonio.
"The life of Andalusia is lo flamenco"
The moon has begun to lose foothold in the
black slippery zenith. We are hurtling along a
road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of
unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the
silk dress of a dancer. The goblin driver rolls
from side to side asleep. The check cap is down
over the little man's face so that not even his
moustaches are to be seen. All at once the lead-
ing mule, taken with suicidal mania, makes a side-
wise leap for the cliff -edge. Crumbling of gravel,
snap of traces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one
has managed to yank the mule back on Jier
hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a
coach totters at the edge of the cliff's shadow.
[36]
The Donkey Boy
fC Hija de puta" cries the goblin driver, jump-
Ing to the ground.
Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins
to explain querulously that he has had nothing to
eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of
the goblin driver flash white flame as he hangs
wreath upon wreath of profanity about the
trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rat-
tling jerk the coach sways to the safe side of the
road. From inside angry heads are poked out
like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop.
Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of
triumph: ff iQue flamenco J eh?"
When we got to Almunecar Don Antonio, the
goblin driver, and I sat at a little table outside the
empty Casino. A waiter appeared from some-
where with wine and coffee and tough purple
ham and stale bread and cigarettes. Over our
heads dusty palni-fronds trembled in occasional
faint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don
Antonio's thin fingers glistened in the light of
the one tired electric light bulb that shone among
palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to
me the significance of lo flamenco.
[37]
Rosinante to the Road Again
The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering
song well sung, the couplet neatly capped, the
back turned to the charging bull, the mantilla
draped with exquisite provocativeness : all that
was lo flamenco. "On this coast, senor ingles^ we
don't work much, we are dirty and uninstructed,
but by God we live. Why the poor people of the
towns, d'you know what they do in summer?
They hire a fig-tree and go and live under it with
their dogs and their cats and their babies, and
they eat the figs as they ripen and drink the cold
water from the mountains, and man-alive they
are happy. They fear no one and they are de-
pendent on no one; when they are young they
make love and sing to the guitar, and when they
are old they tell stories and bring up their chil-
dren. You have travelled much ; I have travelled
little Madrid, never further, but I swear to
you that nowhere in the world are the women
lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more
perfect than in this vega of Almunecar. . .
If only the wine weren't quite so heavy. . . ."
"Then you don't want to go to America?"
[38]
The Donkey Boy
** ' I H ombre por dio$! Sing us a song, Paco.
. . . He's a Galician, you see."
The goblin driver grinned and threw back his
head.
"Go to the end of the world, you'll find a
Gallego," he said. Then he drank down his
wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand,
and started droningly:
'Si quieres qu'el carro cante
mo j ale j dejePen no
que despues de buen moja'o
canta com'un silbi'o.* 1
(If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it
in the river, for when it's well soaked it'll sing
like a locust.)
"Hola,". cried Don Antonio, "go on/'
6 A mi me gusta el bianco,
jviva lo bianco! jmuera lo negro!
porque el negro es muy triste,
Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero/
r (I like white; hooray for white, death to
black. Because black is very sad, and I am
happy, I don't like it. )
[39]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"That's it," cried Don Antonio excitedly*
"You people from the north, English, Amer-
icans, Germans, whatnot, you like black* You
like to be sad. I don't."
" *Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero/ "
The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and
swollen. The east was beginning to bleach be-
fore the oncoming sun. Birds started chirping
above our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed,
I could hear the hoarse voice of the goblin driver
roaring out:
'A mi me gust a el bianco,
i viva lo bianco ! j muera lo negro P
At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on
a red jutting cliff over the beach where brown
children were bathing, there was talk again of
lo flamenco.
"In Spain," my friend Don Diego was say-
ing, "we live from the belly and loins, or else
from the head and heart: between Don Quixote
the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there
is no middle ground. The lowest Panza is lo
flamenco"
[40]
The Donkey Boy
"But you do live."
"In dirt, disease, lack of education, oestiality,
. . Half of us are always dying of excess
of food or the lack of it."
"What do you want?"
"Education, organization, energy, the modern
world."
I told him what the donkey-boy had said of
America on the road down from the Alpuj arras,
that in America they did nothing but work and
rest so as to be able to work again. And Amer-
ica was the modern world.
And Zo flamenco is neither work nor getting
ready to work.
That evening San Miguel went out to fetch
the Virgin of Sorrows from a roadside oratory
and brought her back into town in procession
with candles and skyrockets and much chanting,
and as the swaying cone-shaped figure carried on
the shoulders of six sweating men stood poised
at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls
wore jessamine flowers in the blackness of their
hair, all waved their hats and cried, "fViva
la Virgen de las Atigustiasr And the Virgin
[41]
Ronnante to the Road Again
and San Miguel both had to bow their heads to
get in the church door, and the people followed
them into the church crying ff j Vwaf* so that the
old vaults shivered in the tremulous candlelight
and the shouting. Some people cried for water,
as rain was about due and everything was very
dry, and when they came out of the church they
saw a thin cloud like a mantilla of white lace over
the moon, so they went home happy.
Wherever they went through the narrow well-
swept streets, lit by an occasional path of orange
light from a window, the women left behind them
long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flow-
ers in their hair.
Don Diego and I walked a long while on the
seashore talking of America and the Virgin and
a certain soup called ajo bianco and Don Quixote
and lo flamenco. We were trying to decide what
was the peculiar quality of the life of the people
in that rich plain (vega they call it) between the
mountains of the sea. Walking about the country
elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irri-
gation ditches, the owners of the fields we crossed
used, simply because we were strangers, to offer
[42]
The Donkey Boy
us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I
had explained to my friend that in his modern
world of America these same people would come
out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt.
He answered that even so, the old order was
changing, and that as there was nothing else but
to follow the procession of industrialism it he-
hooved Spaniards to see that their country forged
ahead instead of being, as heretofore, dragged at
the tail of the parade.
"And do you think it's leading anywhere, this
endless complicating of life?"
"Of course," he answered.
"Where?"
"Where does anything lead? At least it leads
further than lo flamenco"
"But couldn't the point be to make the way
significant?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Work," he said.
We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where
fishing boats were drawn up with folded wings
like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path
up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our
hands were torn by thorny aromatic shrubs.
[43]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the
mountains, full of the laughter of falling water
and the rustle of sappy foliage. Seven stilted
arches of an aqueduct showed white through the
canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about
us; the smell of dry thyme-grown uplands, of
rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and helio-
trope, and of water cold from the snowfields run-
ning fast in ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey
was braying. Then, as the last groan of the
donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out
of the dark fields, soaring, yearning on taut
throat-cords, then slipped down through notes,
like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave,
then unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the
night and ceased suddenly in an upward cadence
as a guttering candle flares to extinction.
"Something that's neither work nor getting
ready to work," and I thought of the arriero on
whose donkey I had forded the stream on the way
down from the Alpuj arras, and his saying: ff Ca,
en America no se hose nafa que trdbdhar y
de'camarf*
I had left him at his home village, a little
[44]
The Donkey Boy
cluster of red and yellow roofs about a fat tower
the Moors had built and a gaunt church that
hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust.
We had rested awhile before going into town,
under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas
shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves
had rustled in the wind, and the smell of the fruit
that hung purple bursting to crimson against
the intense sky had been like warm stroking vel-
vet all about us. And the arriero had discoursed
on the merits of his donkey and the joys of going
from town to town with merchandise, up into
the mountains for chestnuts and firewood, down
to the sea for fish, to Malaga for tinware, to
Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of
dancing and guitar-playing at vintage-time,
fiestas of the Virgin, where older, realer gods
were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous
Mother of the pale Christ, the toros, blood and
embroidered silks aflame in the sunlight, words
whispered through barred windows at night, long
days of travel on stony roads in the mountains.
, . . And I had lain back with my eyes closed
and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and
Rosinante to the Road Again
wished that my life were his life. After a
while we had jumped to our feet and I had
shouldered my knapsack with its books and
pencils and silly pads of paper and trudged off
up an unshaded road, and had thought with a
sort of bitter merriment of that prig Christian
and his damned burden.
"Something that is neither work nor getting
ready to work, to make the road so significant
that one needs no destination, that is lo flamenco"
said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen
looking at the seven white arches of the aqueduct.
He nodded unconvinced.
[46]
///; The Baker of Almorox
senores were from Madrid? Indeed!
-I The man's voice was full of an awe of great
distances. He was the village baker of Almorox,
where we had gone on a Sunday excursion from
Madrid; and we were standing on the scrubbed
tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving
wine and figs from his wife. The father of the
friend who accompanied me had once lived in
the same village as the baker's father, and bought
bread of him; hence the entertainment. This
baker of Almorox was a tall man, with a soft
moustache very black against his ash-pale face,
who stood with his large head thrust far forward.
He was smiling with pleasure at the presence of
strangers in his house, while in a tone of shy
deprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's
family. Don Fernando and Dona Ana and the
[47]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Senorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos
was no longer little, answered my friend, and
Dona Ana was dead.
The baker's wife had stood in the shadow look-
ing from one face to another with a sort of
wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this she
came forward suddenly into the pale greenish-
gold light that streamed through the door, hold-
ing a dark wine-bottle before her. There were
tears in her eyes. No ; she had never known any
of them, she explained hastily she had never
been away from Almorox but she had heard so
much of their kindness and was sorry. . . .
It was terrible to lose a father or a mother. The
tall baker shifted his feet uneasily, embarrassed
by the sadness that seemed slipping over his
guests, and suggested that we walk up the hill
to the Hermitage ; he would show the way.
"But your work?" we asked. Ah, it did not
matter. Strangers did not come every day to
Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping
a woolen muffler about his bare strongly moulded
throat, and we followed him up the devious street
of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses
[48]
The Baker of Almorox
through wide doors of dark tiled rooms with great
black rafters overhead and courtyards where
chickens pecked at the manure lodged between
smooth worn flagstones. Still between white-
washed walls we struck out of the village into
the deep black mud of the high road, and at last
burst suddenly into the open country, where
patches of sprouting grass shone vivid green
against the gray and russet of broad rolling
lands. At the top of the first hill stood the Her-
mitage a small whitewashed chapel with a
square three-storied tower; over the door was a
relief of the Virgin, crowned, in worn lichened
stone. The interior was very plain with a single
heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted
statue, stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful
grace again of the Virgin. The figure was
dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills and
ruffles, grey with dust and age.
ff La Virgen de la Cima" said the baker, point-
ing reverently with his thumb, after he had bent
his knee before the altar. And as I glanced at
the image a sudden resemblance struck me: the
gown gave the Virgin a curiously conical look
[49]
Rosinante to the Road Again
that somehow made me think of that conical black
stone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought
from Asia Minor. Here again was a good god-
dess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin,
despite her prudish frills. . . . But the man
was ushering us out.
"And there is no finer view than this in all
Spain." With a broad sweep of his arm he took
in the village below, with its waves of roofs that
merged from green to maroon and deep crimson,
broken suddenly by the open square in front of
the church ; and the gray towering church, scowl-
ing with strong lights and shadows on buttresses
and pointed windows; and the brown fields
faintly sheened with green, which gave place to
the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards,
and the shining silver where the wind ruffled the
olive-orchards ; and beyond, the rolling hills that
grew gradually flatter until they sank into the
yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the ges-
ture his fingers were stretched wide as if to grasp
all this land he was showing. His flaccid cheeks
were flushed as he turned to us; but we should
see it in May, he was saying, in May when the
[50]
The Baker of Almorox
wheat was thick in the fields, and there were
flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beau-
tiful and rich, in May. And he went on to tell
us of the local feast, and the great processions of
the Virgin. This year there were to be four days
of the toros. So many bullfights were unusual
in such a small village, he assured us. But they
were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best in
Castile. Four days of toros, he said again; and
all the people of the country around would come
to the fiestas, and there would be a great pil-
grimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin. . . ,
As he talked in his slow deferential way, a little
conscious of his volubility before strangers, there
began to grow in my mind a picture of his view
of the world.
First came his family, the wife whose body lay
beside his at night, who bore him children, the old
withered parents who sat in the sun at his door,
his memories of them when they had had strong
rounded limbs like his, and of their parents sit-
ting old and withered in the sun. Then his work,
the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking,
the faces of neighbors who came to buy; and, out-
[51]
Rosinante to the Road Again
side, in the dim penumbra of things half real, of
travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king
lived and where politicians wrote in the news-
papers, and Francia and all that was not
Alinorox ... In him I seemed to see the
generations wax and wane, like the years, strung
on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and
strain of muscles against the earth. It was all
so mellow, so strangely aloof from the modern
world of feverish change, this life of the peasants
of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the
infinite past. For before the Revolution, before
the Moors, before the Romans, before the dark
furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much
the same, these Iberian village communities.
Far away things changed, cities were founded,
hard roads built, armies marched and fought and
passed away; but in Almorox the foundations of
life remained unchanged up to the present. New
names and new languages had come. The Virgin
had taken over the festivals and rituals of the
old earth goddesses, and the deep mystical fervor
of devotion. But always remained the love for
the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the
[52]
The Baker of Almorox
Individual man, the walking, consciously or not,
of the way beaten by generations of men who
had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing
sun with no feeling of a reality outside of them-
selves, outside of the bare encompassing hills of
their commune, except the God which was the
synthesis of their souls and of their lives.
Here lies the strength and the weakness of
Spain, This intense individualism, born of a
history whose fundamentals lie in isolated village
communities pueblos, as the Spaniards call
them over the changeless face of which, like
grass over a field, events spring and mature and
die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolu-
tion has been strong enough to shake it. Invasion
after invasion, of Goths, of Moors, of Christian
ideas, of the fads and convictions of the Renais-
sance, have swept over the country, changing
surface customs and modes of thought and
speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping
with the changeless Iberian mind.
And predominant in the Iberian mind is the
thought La vida es sueno: "Life is a dream."
[53]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Only the individual, or that part of life which is
in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The
supreme expression of this lies in the two great
figures that typify Spain for all time: Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the
individualist who believed in the power of man's
soul over all things, whose desire included the
whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist
to whom all the world was food for his belly. On
the one hand we have the ecstatic figures for
whom the power of the individual soul has no
limits, in whose minds the universe is but one man
standing before his reflection, God. These are
the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid
ascetics like Juan de la Cruz, the originals of
the glowing tortured faces in the portraits of
El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial
materialists like the Archpriest of Hita, culmin-
ating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of such
an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through
all Spanish history and art the threads of these
two complementary characters can be traced,
changing, combining, branching out, but ever in
[54]
The Baker of Almorox
substance the same. Of this warp and woof have
all the strange patterns of Spanish life been
woven.
II
In trying to hammer some sort of unified im-
pression out of the scattered pictures of Spain
in my mind, one of the first things I realize is
that there are many Spains. Indeed, every vil-
lage hidden in the folds of the great barren hills,
or shadowed by its massive church in the middle
of one of the upland plains, every fertile Jiuerta
of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the
strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a
modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very
unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the
desolating resultlessness of a century of revolu-
tion, may very well be due in large measure to the
artificial imposition of centralized government on
a land essentially centrifugal.
In the first place, there is the matter of lan-
guage. Roughly, four distinct languages are at
present spoken in Spain: Castilian, the language
of Madrid and the central uplands, the official
[55]
Rosinante to the Road Again
language, spoken in the south in its Andalusian
form; Gallego-Portuguese, spoken on the wesi:
coast; Basque, which does not even share the
Latin descent of the others ; and Catalan, a form
of Provenal which, with its dialect, Valencian,
is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and
in the Balearic Isles. Of course, under the in-
fluence of rail communication and a conscious
effort to spread Castilian, the other languages,
with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan,
have lost vitality and died out in the larger towns ;
but the problem remains far different from that
of the Italian dialects, since the Spanish lan-
guages have all, except Basque, a strong literary
tradition.
Added to the variety of language, there is an
immense variety of topography in the different
parts of Spain. The central plateaux, dominant
in modern history (history being taken to mean
the births and breedings of kings and queens and
the doings of generals in armor) probably approx-
imate the warmer Russian steppes in climate and
vegetation. The west coast is in most respects
a warmer and more fertile Wales. The southern
[56] ,
The Baker of Almorox
huertas (arable river valleys) have rather the
aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia
up is a continuation of the Mediterranean coast
of France. It follows that, in this country where
an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian
snow into African desert, unity of population is
hardly to be expected.
Here is probably the root of the tendency in
Spanish art and thought to emphasize the differ-
ences between things. In painting, where the
mind of a people is often more tangibly repre-
sented than anywhere else, we find one supreme
example. El Greco, almost the caricature in
his art of the Don Quixote type of mind, who,
though a Greek by birth and a Venetian by train-
ing, became more Spanish than the Spaniards
during his long life at Toledo, strove constantly
to express the difference between the world of
flesh and the world of spirit, between the body
and the soul of man. More recently, the extreme
characterization of Goya's sketches and portraits,
the intensifying of national types found in
Zuloaga and the other painters who have been
exploiting with such success the peculiarities
[57]
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the picturesqueness of Spanish faces and land-
scapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense
of the separateness of things.
In another way you can express this constant
attempt to diif erentiate one individual from an-
other as caricature. Spanish art is constantly on
the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fer-
tility of the Spanish mind and its intense individ-
ualism, a constant slipping over into the gro-
tesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that
the conscious or unconscious aim of their art is
rather self-expression than beauty. Their image
of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted. Bur-
lesque and satire are never far away in their
most serious moments. Not even the calmest and
best ordered of Spanish minds can resist a ten-
dency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration,
to grotesquerie, to deadening mannerism. All
that is greatest in their art, indeed, lies on the
borderland of the extravagant, where sublime
things skim the thin ice of absurdity. The great
epic, Don Quixote, such plays as Calderon's La
Vi&a es Sueno, such paintings as El Greco's
Resurrection and Velasquez's dwarfs, such build-
[58]
The Baker of Almorox
ings as the Escorial and the Alhambra all
among the universal masterpieces are far in-
deed from the middle term of reasonable beauty.
Hence their supreme strength. And for our gen-
eration, to which excess is a synonym for beauty,
is added argumentative significance to the long
tradition of Spanish art.
Another characteristic, springing from the
same fervid abundance, that links the Spanish
tradition to ours of the present day is the
strangely impromptu character of much Spanish
art production. The slightly ridiculous proverb
that genius consists of an infinite capacity for
taking pains is well controverted. The creative
flow of Spanish -artists has always been so strong,
so full of vitality, that there has been no time for
taking pains. Lope de Vega, with his two
thousand-odd plays or was it twelve thousand?
is by no means an isolated instance. Perhaps
the strong sense of individual validity, which
makes Spain the most democratic country in
Europe, sanctions the constant improvisation,
and accounts for the confident planlessness as
[59]
Rosinante to the Road Again
common in Spanish architecture as in Spanish
political thought.
Here we meet the old stock characteristic,
Spanish pride. This is a very real thing, and
is merely the external shell of the fundamental
trust in the individual and in nothing outside of
him. Again El Greco is an example. As his
painting progressed, grew more and more per-
sonal, he drew away from tangible reality, and,
with all the dogmatic conviction of one whose
faith in his own reality can sweep away the
mountains of the visible world, expressed his own
restless, almost sensual, spirituality in forms that
flickered like white flames toward God. For the
Spaniard, moreover, God is always, in essence,
the proudest sublimation of man's soul. The
same spirit runs through the preachers of the
early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a
disguise of the frantic desire to express the self,
the self, changeless and eternal, at all costs. From
this comes the hard cruelty that flares forth
luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de
Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Trdgico de la Fida,
expresses this fierce clinging to separateness from
[60]
The Baker of Almorox
the universe by the phrase el Jiambre de inmor-
talidad, the hunger of immortality. This is the
core of the individualism that lurks in all Spanish
ideas, the conviction that only the individual soul
is real.
in
In the Spain of to-day these things are seen
as through a glass, darkly. Since the famous and
much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinand and
Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has
been that of an attempt to fit a square peg in a
round hole. In the great flare of the golden age,
the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even
greater worth, the disease worked beneath the
surface. Since then the conflict has corroded
into futility all the buoyant energies of the
country. I mean the persistent attempt to cen-
tralize in thought, in art, in government, in re-
ligion, a nation whose every energy lies in the
other direction. The result has been a dead-
lock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all
life and thought, so that a century of revolution
seems to have brought Spain no nearer a solution
[61]
Rosinante to the Road Again
of Its problems. At the present day, when all Is
ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy,
a sort of despairing inaction causes the Spaniards
to remain under a government of unbelievably
corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems
no solution to the problem of a nation in which
the centralized power and the separate communi-
ties work only to nullify each other.
Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather
in the position of the archaeologists before the
problem of Iberian sculpture. For near the
Cerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the
ruins of a sanctuary has been dug an endless
series of native sculptures of men and women,
goddesses and gods, there lived a little watch-
maker. The first statues to be dug up were
thought by the pious country people to be saints,
and saints they were, according to an earlier
dispensation than that of Rome; with the result
that much Kudos accompanied the discovery of
those draped women with high head-dresses and
fixed solemn eyes and those fragmentary bull-
necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone ; they
were freed from the caked clay of two thousand
[62]
The Baker of Almorox
years and reverently set up In the churches. So
probably the motives that started the watchmaker
on his career of sculpturing and falsifying were
pious and reverential.
However it began, when it was discovered that
the saints were mere horrid heathen he-gods and
she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen with
spectacles who appeared from all the ends of
Europe to investigate, would pay money for
them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a
mighty man in his village and generation. He
began to study archaeology and the style of his
cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a
number of years the statues from the Cerro de
los Santos were swallowed whole by all learned
Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination
began to get the better of him; forms became
more and more fantastic, Egyptian, Assyrian,
art-nouveau influences began to be noted by the
discerning,, until at last someone whispered for-
gery and all the scientists scuttled to cover shout-
ing that there had never been any native Iberian
sculpture after all.
The little watchmaker succumbed before his
[63]
Rosinante to the Road Again
imagining of heathen gods and died in a mad-
house. To this day when you stand in the mid-
dle of the room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos
in the Madrid, and see the statues of Iberian
goddesses clustered about you in their high head-
dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell
which were made by the watchmaker in 1880, and
which by the image-maker of the hill-sanctuary
at a time when the first red-eyed ships of the
Phoenician traders were founding trading posts
among the barbarians of the coast of Valencia.
And there they stand on their shelves, the real
and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at
the enigma with stone eyes.
So with the traditions : the tradition of Catholic
Spain, the tradition of military grandeur, the
tradition of fighting the Moors, of suspecting
the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of
sobriety, of chivalry, of Don Quixote and
Tenorio.
The Spanish-American war, to the United
States merely an opportunity for a patriotic-
capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering,
heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain
[64]
The Baker of Almorox
the first whispered word that many among the
traditions were false. The young men of that
time called themselves the generation of ninety-
eight. According to temperament they rejected
all or part of the museum of traditions they had
been taught to believe was the real Spain; each
took up a separate road in search of a Spain
which should suit his yearnings for beauty, gen-
tleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, mod-
ernity.
The problem of our day is whether Spaniards
evolving locally, anarchically, without centraliza-
tion in anything but repression, will work out new
ways of life for themselves, or whether they will
be drawn into the festering tumult of a Europe
where the system that is dying is only strong
enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth
in which there was hope for the future. The
Pyrenees are high.
IV
It was after a lecture at an exhibition of
Basque painters in Madrid, where we had heard
Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from
[65]
Rosmante to the Road Again
under shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce In
bitter stinging irony what he called the Euro-
peanization of Spain. What they called progress,
he had said, was merely an aping of the stupid
commercialism of modern Europe. Better no
education for the masses than education that
would turn healthy peasants into crafty putty-
skinned merchants; better a Spain swooning in
her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to
the brutal soulless trade-war of modern life.
. . , I was walking with a young student of
philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy
board of a Spanish pension, discussing the ex-
hibition we had just seen as a strangely meek
setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had
remarked on the very "primitive" look much
of the work of these young Basque painters had,
shown by some in the almost affectionate tech-
nique, in the dainty caressing brush-work, in
others by that inadequacy of the means at the
painter's disposal to express his idea, which made
of so many of the pictures rather gloriously im-
pressive failures. My friend was insisting, how-
ever, that the primitiveness, rather than the birth-
[66]
The Baker of Almorox
pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing
but "the last affectation of an over-civilized tra-
dition/ 5
"Spain/' he said, "is the most civilized country
in Europe. The growth of our civilization has
never been interrupted by outside influence. The
Phoenicians, the Romans Spain's influence on
Rome was, I imagine, fully as great as Rome's
on Spain; think of the five Spanish emperors;
the Goths, the Moors; all incidents, absorbed
by the changeless Iberian spirit. . . . Even
Spanish Christianity," he continued, smiling, "is
far more Spanish than it is Christian. Our life
is one vast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that
is all. And so are the bull-fights that so shock
the English and Americans, are they any more
brutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-
fights? And how full of tradition are they, our
fiestas de toros; their ceremony reaches back to
the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-
worship of the Cretans and of so many of the
Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games. Can
civilization go farther than to ritualize death as
[67]
Rosinante to the Road Again
we have done? But our culture is too perfect, too
stable. Life is choked by it."
We stood still a moment in the shade of a
yellowed lime tree. My friend had stopped talk-
ing and was looking with his usual bitter smile at
a group of little ,boys with brown, bare dusty legs
who were intently playing bull-fight with sticks
for swords and a piece of newspaper for the
toreador's scarlet cape.
"It is you in America," he went on suddenly,
"to whom the future belongs ; you are so vigorous
and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become
once more the primal fight for bread. Of course
the dollar is a complicated form of the food the
cave man killed for and slunk after, and the
means of combat are different, but it is as brutal.
From that crude animal brutality comes all the
vigor of life. We have none of it; we are too
tired to have any thoughts ; we have lived so much
so long ago that now we are content with the
very simple things, the warmth of the sun and
the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and
wine. All the rest is automatic, ritual."
"But what about the strike?" I asked, re-
[68]
The Baker of Almorox
ferring to the one-day's general strike that had
just been carried out with fair success through-
out Spain, as a protest against the government's
apathy regarding the dangerous rise in the prices
of food and fuel.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"That, and more," he said, "is new Spain, a
prophecy, rather than a fact. Old Spain is still
all-powerful."
Later in the day I was walking through the
main street of one of the clustered adobe villages
that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain not
far from Madrid. The lamps were just being
lit in the little shops where the people lived and
worked and sold their goods, and women with
beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads
were coming home with water from the well.
Suddenly I came out on an open plaza with trees
from which the last leaves were falling through
the greenish sunset light. The place was filled
with the lilting music of a grind-organ and with
a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced.
There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-
cheeked apprentice-boys with their sweethearts,
[69]
'Rosinante to the Road Again
and respectable shop-keepers, and their wives
with mantillas over their gleaming black hair*
All were dancing in and out among the slim tree-
trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and
little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment.
Here was the gospel of Sancho Panza, I thought,
the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy
in food and color and the softness of women's
hair. But as I walked out of the village across
the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet
under the deepening night, the memory came to
me of the knight of the sorrowful countenance,
Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould
the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own
ideal. And in these two Spain seemed to be
manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless
industrial world of joyless enforced labor and
incessant goading war. And I wondered to what
purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again
saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of
Almorox would say to his wife when he looked
up from his kneading trough, holding out hands
white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by
on his lean steed upon a new quest
[70]
IF: Talk by the
TELEMACHUS and Lyaens had walked
all night. The sky to the east of them was
rosy when ;they came out of a village at the crest
of a hill Cocks crowed behind stucco walls.
The road dropped from their feet through an
avenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost.
Far away into the brown west stretched reach
upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there
a few trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned
lands. They stood still breathing hard.
"It's the Tagus overflowed its banks/' said
Telemachus.
Lyaeus shook his head.
"It's mist."
They stood with thumping hearts on the hill-
top looking over inexplicable shimmering plains
of mist hemmed by mountains jagged like coals
that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn.
[71]
Rosinante to the Road Again
The light all about was lemon yellow. The walls
of the village behind them were fervid primrose
color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt.
Above the houses uncurled green spirals of wood-
smoke.
Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and
shouted and ran like mad down the hill. A little
voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear that he
must save his strength, so he followed sedately.
When he caught up to Lyaeus they were walk-
ing among twining wraiths of mist rose-shot from
a rim of the sun that^poked up behind hills of
bright madder purple. A sudden cold wind-gust
whined across the plain, making the mist writhe
in a delirium of crumbling shapes. Ahead of
them casting gigantic blue shadows over the fur-
rowed fields rode a man on a donkey and a man
on a horse. It was a grey sway-backed horse
that joggled in a little trot with much switching
of a ragged tail; its rider wore a curious peaked
cap and sat straight and lean in the saddle. Over
one shoulder rested a long bamboo pole that in
the exaggerating sunlight cast a shadow like the
shadow of a lance. The man on the donkey was
[72]
Talk by the Road
shaped like a dumpling and rode with his toes
turned out.
Telemachus and Lyaeus walked behind them
a long while without catching up, staring curi-
ously after these two silent riders.
Eventually getting as far as the tails of the
horse and the donkey, they called out: "Buenos
There turned to greet them a red, round face,
full of little lines like an over-ripe tomato and a
long bloodless face drawn into a point at the
chin by a grizzled beard.
"How early you are, gentlemen," said the tall
man on the grey horse. His voice was deep and
sepulchral, with an occasional flutter of tender-
ness like a glint of light in a black river.
"Late," said Lyaeus. "We come from Madrid
on foot."
The dumpling man crossed himself.
"They are mad," he said to his companion.
"That," said the man on the grey horse, "is
always the answer of ignorance when confronted
with the unusual. These gentlemen undoubtedly
have very good reason for doing as they do ; and
[73]
Rosinante to the Road Again
besides the night is the time for long strides and
deep thoughts, is it not, gentlemen? The habit
of yigil is one we sorely need in this distracted
modern world. If more men walked and thought
the night through there would be less miseries
under the sun."
"But, such a cold night!" exclaimed the
dumpling man.
"On colder nights than this I have seen chil-
dren asleep in doorways in the streets of
Madrid."
"Is there much poverty in these parts?" asked
Telemachus stiffly, wanting to show that he too
had the social consciousness.
"There are people thousands who from the
day they are born till the day they die never have
enough to eat."
"They have wine," said Lyaeus.
"One little cup on Sundays, and they are so
starved that it makes them as drunk as if it were
a hogshead."
"I have heard," said Lyaeus, "that the sensa-
tions of starving are very interesting people
have visions more vivid than life."
[74]
Talk by the Road
"One needs very few sensations to lead life
humbly and beautifully/' said the man on the
grey horse in a gentle tone of reproof.
Lyaeus frowned.
"Perhaps/' said the man on the grey horse
turning towards Telemachus his lean face, where
under scraggly eyebrows glowered eyes of soft
dark green, "it is that I have brooded too much
on the injustice done in the world all society
one great wrong. Many years ago I should have
set out to right wrong for no one but a man, an
individual alone, can right a wrong; organiza-
tion merely substitutes one wrong for another
but now. ... I am too old. You see, I go
fishing instead."
"Why, it's a fishing pole," cried Lyaeus.
"When I first saw it I thought it was a lance."
And he let out his roaring laugh.
"And such trout," cried the dumpling man.
"The trout there are in that little stream above
Illescas! That's why we got up so early, to fish
for trout."
"I like to see the dawn," said the man on the
grey horse.
[75]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"Is that Illescas?" asked Telemachus, and
pointed to a dun brown tower topped by a cap
of blue slate that stood guard over a cluster of
roofs ahead of them. Telemachus had a map
torn from Baedecker In his pocket that he had
been peeping at secretly.
"That, gentlemen, is Illescas," said the man
on the grey horse. "And if you will allow me to
offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be most pleased.
You must excuse me, for I never take anything
before midday. I am a recluse, have been for
many years and rarely stir abroad. I do not
intend to return to the world unless I can bring
something with me worth having." A wistful
smile twisted a little the corners of his mouth.
"I could guzzle a hogshead of coffee accom-
panied by vast processions of toasted rolls in
columns of four," shouted Lyaeus.
"We are on our way to Toledo," Telemachus
broke in, not wanting to give the impression that
food was their only thought.
"You will see the paintings of Dominico Theo-
cotopoulos, the only one who ever depicted the
soul of Castile."
[76]
Talk by the Road
"This man/' said Lyaeus, with a slap at
Telemachus's shoulder, "is looking for a gesture."
"The gesture of Castile."
The man on the grey horse rode along silently
for some time. The sun had already burnt up
the hoar-frost along the sides of the road; only an
occasional streak remained glistening in the
shadow of a ditch. A few larks sang in the sky.
Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on their
shoulders passed on their way to the fields.
"Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?
. . . I am from La Mancha myself." The man
on the grey horse started speaking gravely
while with a bony hand, very white, he stroked his
beard. "Something cold and haughty and aloof
. . . men concentrated, converging breathlessly
on the single flame of their spirit. . . . Torque-
mada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortes, Santa
Teresa. . . . Rapacity, cruelty, straightfor-
wardness. . . . Every man's life a lonely ruth-
less quest."
Lyaeus broke in:
"Remember the infinite gentleness of the
[77]
Rosinante to the Road Again
saints lowering the Conde de Orgaz into the
grave in the picture in San Tomas, . . ."
"Ah, that is what I was trying to think of,
. . . These generations, my generation, my son's
generation, are working to bury with infinite ten-
derness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old
Spain. * . , Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to
say so, but we have set out once more with lance
and helmet of knight-errantry to free the en-
slaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed."
They had come into town. In the high square
tower church-bells were ringing for morning
mass. Down the broad main street scampered
a flock of goats herded by a lean man with fangs
like a dog who strode along in a snuff -colored
cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head.
"How do you do, Don Alonso?" he cried;
"Good luck to you, gentlemen," And he swept
the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as
might a courtier of the Hey Don Juan.
The hot smell of the goats was all about them
as they sat before the cafe in the sun under a bare
acacia tree, looking at the tightly proportioned
brick arcades of the mudejar apse of the church
[78]
Talk by the Road
opposite. Don Alonso was in the cafe ordering;
the dumpling-man had disappeared. Telemachus
got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs.
"Ouf," he said, "I'm tired." Then he walked
over to the grey horse that stood with hanging
head and drooping knees hitched to one of the
acacias.
"I wonder what his name is." He stroked the
horse's scrawny face. "Is it Rosinante?"
The horse twitched his ears, straightened his
back and legs and pulled back black lips to show
yellow teeth.
"Of course it's Rosinante!"
The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his
head and whinnied shrilly, exultantly.
[79]
V: A Novelist of Revolution
MUCH as G. B. S. refuses to be called an
Englishman, Pio Baroja refuses to be
called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly
he admits having been born in San Sebastian,
outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous coast
of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of
mountaineers and fishermen, whose prominent
noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square jowls
are gradually becoming known to the world
through the paintings of the Zubiaurre, clings to
its ancient un- Aryan language and its ancient
song and customs with the hard-headedness of
hill people the world over.
From the first Spanish discoveries in America
till the time of our own New England clipper
ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of
Spanish trade, The three provinces were the
[80]
A Novelist of Revolution
only ones which kept their privileges and their
municipal liberties all through the process of the
centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross
and faggot, which historians call the great period
of Spain. The rocky inlets in the mountains were
full of shipyards that turned out privateers and
merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered
men with hard red-beaked faces and huge hands
coarsened by generations of straining on heavy
oars and halyards, men who feared only God
and the sea-spirits of their strange mythology
and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and
bigots.
It was not till the Nineteenth century that the
Carlist wars and the passing of sailing ships
broke the prosperous independence of the Basque
provinces and threw them once for all into the
main current of Spanish life. Now papermills
take the place of shipyards, and instead of the
great fleet that went off every year to fish the
Newfoundland and Iceland banks, a few steam
trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay of Biscay.
The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa
one of the industrial centers of Spain, even re-
[81]
Rosinante to the Road Again
storing In some measure the ancient prosperity
of its shipping.
Pfo Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy
coast between green mountains and green sea.
There were old aunts who filled his ears up with
legends of former mercantile glory 5 with talk of
sea captains and slavers and shipwrecks. Born in
the late seventies, Baroja left the mist-filled inlets
of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid,
febrile capital full of the artificial scurry of gov-
ernment, on the dry upland plateau of New
Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough,
in a town near Valencia, where he must have
acquired his distaste for the Mediterranean and
the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province
at Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who
baked the sacramental wafers for the parish
church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of racial
solidarity glow within him for the first time.
But he was too timid in the face of pain and too
sceptical of science as of everything else to ac-
quire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor.
He gave up medicine and returned to Madrid,
where he became a baker. In Jwoentud-Egola-
[82]
A Novelist of Revolution
tria ("Youth-Self worship") a book of delight-
fully shameless self -revelations, he says that he
ran a bakery for six years before starting to
write. And he still runs a bakery.
You can see it any day, walking towards the
Royal Theatre from the great focus of Madrid
life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing
window. On one side are hams and red saus-
ages and purple sausages and white sausages,
some plump to the bursting like Rubens's
"Graces," others as weazened and smoked as
saints by Bibera. In the middle are oblong plates
with pates and sliced bologna and things in jelly;
then come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruit-
cakes, everything from obscene jam-rolls to celes-
tial cornucopias of white cream. Through the
door you see a counter with round loaves of bread
on it, and a basketful of brown rolls. If someone
comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread and
pastry swirls about the sidewalk.
So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own
field, he has freed himself from, any compromise
with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet,
his novels may be as bitter as he likes.
[83]
Rosinante to the Road Again
ii
The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue
sky where a few stars glisten faint as mica.
Shadow fills half the street, etching a silhouette
of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the
cobblestones, leaving the rest very white with
moonlight. The facades of the houses, with their
blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In
the dark of a doorway a woman sits hunched
under a brown shawl. Her head nods, but still
she j erks a tune that sways and dances through
the silent street out of the accordion on her lap.
A little saucer for pennies is on the step beside
her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are
huddled together asleep. The moonlight points
out with mocking interest their skinny dirt-
crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy
pavement, and the filthy rags that barely cover
their bodies. Two men stumble out of a wine-
shop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who
walk along unsteadily in their worn canvas shoes,
making grandiloquent gestures of pity, tearing
down the cold hard facades with drunken gen-
[84]
A 'Novelist of Revolution
erous phrases, buoyed up by the warmth of the
wine in their veins.
That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the
streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy
on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any
in Europe. No one has ever described better the
shaggy badlands and cabbage-patches round the
edges of a city, where the debris of civilization
piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and
scheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots
where men and women live fantastically in shel-
ters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cans
and bits of chairs and tables that have stood for
years in bright pleasant rooms. Grassy patches
behind crumbling walls where on sunny days
starving children spread their fleshless limbs and
run about in the sun. Miserable wineshops where
the wind whines through broken panes to chill
men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about
gambling and finding furious drunkenness in a
sip of aguardiente. Courtyards of barracks
where painters who have not a cent in the world
mix with beggars and guttersnipes to cajole a
[85]
Rosinante to the Road Again
little hot food out of soft-hearted soldiers at mess-
time. Convent doors where ragged lines shiver
for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the
bare Castilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw
out bread for them to fight over like dogs. And
through it all moves the great crowd of the out-
cast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every
description, rich beggars and poor devils who
have given up the struggle to exist, homeless
children, prostitutes, people who live a half -hon-
est existence selling knicknacks, penniless stu-
dents, inventors who while away the time they are
dying of starvation telling all they meet of the
riches they might have had; all who have failed
on the daily treadmill of bread-making, or who
have never had a chance even to enjoy the privi-
lege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia
there has never been a novelist so taken up with
all that society and respectability reject.
Not that the interest in outcasts is anything
new in Spanish literature. Spain is the home of
that type of novel which the pigeonhole-makers
have named picaresque. These loafers and wan-
derers of Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque
[86]
A Novelist of Revolution
dreamers and fanatics, all are the descendants of
the people in the Quijote and the Novelas Ejem-
plates, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo
de Tormes, who through Gil Bias invaded France
and England, where they rollicked through the
novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot
packed them off to the reform school. But the
rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly
rogues. They always had their tongues in their
cheeks, and success rewarded their ingenious
audacities. The moulds of society had not hard-
ened as they have now ; there was less pressure of
hungry generations. Or, more probably, pity
had not come in to undermine the foundations.
The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the
steel girders of our civilization even before the
work of building was completed, has brought
about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek
thought calls the failure of nerve. In the seven-
teenth century men still had the courage of their
egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the
best of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain
with the conductors of life everlasting. By the
end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting
[87]
Rosinante to the Road Again
had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had
filled men up with extravagant hopes of the per-
fectibility of this world, humanitarianism had in-
stilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain, to
one's own pain, and to the pain of one's neigh-
bors. Baroja's outcasts are no longer jolly
knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and
go on their road singing "Over the hills and far
away"; they are men who have not had the will-
power to continue in the fight for bread, they are
men whose nerve has failed, who live furtively on
the outskirts, snatching a little joy here and there,
drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages.
One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja,
mainly because of the contrast. Instead of the
tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that
drones behind every page of the Russian, there
is the cold despair of an old race, of a race that
lived long under a formula of life to which it
has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end
that the formula does not hold.
These are the last paragraphs of Mala Hlerba
("Wild Grass"), the middle volume of Baroja's
trilogy on the life of the very poor in Madrid.
[88]
A Novelist of Revolution
"They talked. Manuel felt irritation against
the whole world, hatred, up to that moment pent
up within him against society, against man. . . .
" 'Honestly/ he ended hy saying, C I wish it
would rain dynamite for a week, and that the
Eternal Father would come tumbling down in
cinders/
"He invoked crazily all the destructive powers
to reduce to ashes this miserable society.
"Jesus listened with attention.
" "You are an anarchist/ he told him.
"Yes. So ami/
" 'Since when?'
" 'Since I have seen the infamies committed in
the world; since I have seen how coldly they give
to death a bit of human flesh ; since I have seen
how men die abandoned in the streets and hos-
pitals/ answered Jesus with a certain solemnity.
"Manuel was silent. The friends walked with-
out speaking round the Honda de Segovia, and
sat down on a bench in the little gardens of the
Virgen del Puerto.
"The sky was superb, crowded with stars; the
T89]
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Milky Way crossed its immense blue concavity.
The geometric figure of the Great Bear glittered
very high. Arcturus and Vega shone softly in
that ocean of stars.
"In the distance the dark fields, scratched with
lines of lights, seemed the sea in a harbor and the
strings of lights the illumination of a wharf.
"The damp warm air came laden with odors of
woodland plants wilted by the heat.
" 'How many stars/ said Manuel. 'What can
they be?'
" 'They are worlds, endless worlds/
" 'I don't know why it doesn't make me feel
better to see this sky so beautiful, Jesus* Do you
think there are men in those worlds?' asked
Manuel.
"Terhaps; why not?'
" 'And are there prisons too, and judges and
gambling dens and police? . . . Do you think
so?'
"Jesus did not answer. After a while he be-
gan talking with a calm voice of his dream of an
idyllic humanity, a sweet pitiful dream, noble
and childish.
[90]
A Novelist of Revolution
"In his dream, man, led by a new idea, reached
a higher state.
"No more hatreds, no more rancours. Neither
judges, nor police, nor soldiers, nor authority,
In the wide fields of the earth free men worked in
the sunlight. The law of love had taken the
place of the law of duty, and the horizons of hu-
manity grew every moment wider, wider and
more azure.
"And Jesus continued talking of a vague ideal
of love and justice, of energy and pity; and those
words of his, chaotic, incoherent, fell like balm
on Manuel's ulcerated spirit. Then they were
both silent, lost in their thoughts, looking at the
night.
"An august joy shone in the sky, and the vague
sensation of space, of the infinity of those im-
ponderable worlds, filled their spirits with a de-
licious calm."
in
Spain is the classic home of the anarchist. A
bleak upland country mostly, with a climate giv-
ing all varieties of temperature, from moist Af ri-
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Rosinante to the Road Again
can heat to dry Siberian cold, where people have
lived until very recently, and do still, in vil-
lages hidden away among the bare ribs of the
mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where
every region is cut off from every other by high
passes and defiles of the mountains, flaming hot
in summer and freezing cold in winter, where the
Iberian race has grown up centerless. The
pueblo, the village community, is the only form
of social cohesion that really has roots in the past.
On these free towns empires have time and again
been imposed by force. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the Catholic monarchy
wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect
that communal feeling was killed and the Span-
ish genius forced to ingrow into the mystical
realm where every ego expanded itself into the
solitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced
God to an abstraction, and the nineteenth
brought pity and the mad hope of righting the
wrongs of society. The Spaniard, like his own
Don Quixote, mounted the warhorse of his ideal-
ism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As a
logical conclusion we have the anarchist who
[92]
A Novelist of Revolution
threw a bomb into the Lyceum Theatre in Barce-
lona during a performance, wanting to make the
ultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a
senseless mangling of human lives.
But that was the reduction to an absurdity of
an immensely valuable mental position. The
anarchism of Pio Baroja is of another sort. He
says in one of his books that the only part a man
of the middle classes can play in the reorganiza-
tion of society is destructive. He has not under-
gone the discipline, which can only come from
common slavery in the industrial machine, neces-
sary for a builder. His slavery has been an
isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever
from becoming truly part of a community. He
can use the vast power of knowledge which train-
ing has given him only in one way. His great
mission is to put the acid test to existing institu-
tions, and to strip the veils off them. I don't
want to imply that Baroja writes with his social
conscience. He is too much of a novelist for that,
too deeply interested in people as such. But it is
certain that a profound sense of the evil of exist-
ing institutions lies behind every page he has
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Rosinante to the Road Again
written, and that occasionally, only occasionally,
he allows himself to hope that something better
may coine out of the turmoil of our age of transi-
tion.
Only a man who had felt all this very deeply
could be so sensitive to the new spirit if the word
were not threadbare one would call it religious
which is shaking the foundations of the world's
social pyramid, perhaps only another example of
the failure of nerve, perhaps the triumphant ex-
pression of a new will among mankind.
In Aurora Roja ("Red Dawn"), the last of
the Madrid trilogy, about the same Manuel who
is the central figure of Mala Hierba,, he writes :
"At first it bored him, but later, little by little,
he felt himself carried away by what he was read-
ing. First he was enthusiastic about Mirabeau;
then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Con-
dorcet; then about Danton; then he began to
think that Robespierre was the true revolution-
ary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was
the gigantic figure of Danton that thrilled him
most. . . .
[94]
A Novelist of Revolution
"Manuel felt great satisfaction at having read
that history. Often he said to himself:
" 'What does it matter now if I am a loafer,
and good-for-nothing? I've read the history of
the French Revolution; I believe I shall know
how to be worthy. . . /
"After Miehelet, he read a book about '48 ; then
another on the Commune, by Louise Michel, and
all this produced in him a great admiration for
French Revolutionists. What men! After the
colossal figures of the Convention: Babeuf,
Proudhon, Blanqui, Bandin, Deleschize, Roche-
fort, Felix Pyat, Vallu. . . . What people!
" 'What does it matter now if I am a loafer?
... I believe I shall know how to be worthy/ "
In those two phrases lies all the power of revo-
lutionary faith. And how like phrases out of the
gospels, those older expressions of the hope and
misery of another society in decay. That is the
spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring through-
out Europe to-day, among the poor and the
hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new
affirmation of the rights and duties of men.
Baroja has felt this profoundly, and has pre-
[95]
Rosinante to the Road Again
sented It, but without abandoning the function of
the novelist, which is to tell stories about people.
He is never a propagandist.
IV
"I have never hidden my admirations in litera-
ture. They have been and are Dickens, Balzac,
Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal . . ."
writes Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition
of La Dama Err ante ( "The Wandering Lady" ) .
He follows particularly in the footprints of Bal-
zac in that he is primarily a historian of morals,
who has made a fairly consistent attempt to cover
the world he lived in. With DostoievsM there is
a kinship in the passionate hatred of cruelty and
stupidity that crops out everywhere in his work.
I have never found any trace of influence of the
other three. To be sure there are a few early
sketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to
form he is much more in the purely chaotic tradi-
tion of the picaresque novel he despises than in
that of the American theorist.
Baroja's most important work lies in the four
[96]
A Novelist of Revolution
series of novels of the Spanish life he lived, in
Madrid, in the provincial towns where he prac-
ticed medicine, and in the Basque country where
he had been brought up. The foundation of
these was laid by El Arbol de la Ciencia ("The
Tree of Knowledge") , a novel half autobiograph-
ical describing the life and death of a doctor, giv-
ing a picture of existence in Madrid and then in
two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously
vivid painting of inertia and the deadening under
its weight of intellectual effort made a very pro-
found impression in Spain. Two novels about
the anarchist movement followed it, LaDamaEr-
rante, which describes the state of mind of for-
ward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous
anarchist attempt on the lives of the king and
queen the day of their marriage, and La Ciudad
de la Niebla, about the Spanish colony in Lon-
don. Then came the series called La Busca
("The Search"), which to me is Baroja's best
work, and one of the most interesting things pub-
lished in Europe in the last decade. It deals with
the lowest and most miserable life in Madrid and
is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant
[97]
Rosinante to the Road Again
would have envied and is permeated by a human
vividness that I do not think Maupassant could
have achieved. All three novels, La Busca, Mala
Hierba, and Aurora Joja, deal with the drifting
of a typical uneducated Spanish boy, son of a
maid of all work in a boarding house, through
different strata of Madrid life. They give a
sense of unadorned reality very rare in any litera-
ture, and besides their power as novels are im-
mensely interesting as sheer natural history.
The type of the golfo is a literary discovery com-
parable with that of Sancho Panza by Cervantes,
Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite
on the same level. The series El Pasado ("The
Past") gives interesting pictures of provincial
life. Las Inquietudes de STianti Andia ("The
Anxieties of Shanti Andia"), a story of Basque
seamen which contains a charming picture of a
childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, de-
lightful as it is to read, is too muddled in romantic
claptrap to add much to his fame. El Mwndo
es Am ("The World is Like That") expresses,
rather lamely it seems to me, the meditations of a
disenchanted revolutionist. The latest series,
[98]
A Novelist of Revolution
Memorias de un H ombre de Acdon, a series of
yarns about the revolutionary period in Spain at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, though
entertaining, is more an attempt to escape in a
jolly romantic past the realities of the morose
present than anything else. Cesar a Nada, trans-
lated into English under the title of "Aut Caesar
ant Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than
his earlier novels. That is probably why it was
chosen for translation into English. We know
how anxious our publishers are to furnish food
easily digestible by weak American stomachs.
It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from
the point of view of form. Improvisation is the
very soul of Spanish writing. In thinking back
over books of Baroja's one has read, one remem-
bers more descriptions of places and people than
anything else. In the end it is rather natural
history than dramatic creation. But a natural
history that gives you the pictures etched with
vitriol of Spanish life in the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth century
which you get in these novels of Baroja's is very
near the highest sort of creation. If we could
[99]
Rosinante to the Road Again
inject some of the virus of his intense sense of
reality into American writers it would be worth
giving up all these stale conquests of form we in-
herited from Poe and O. Henry. The follow-
ing, again from the preface of La Dama Errant e>
is Baroja's own statement of his aims. And cer-
tainly he has realized them.
"Probably a book like la Dama Errante is
not of the sort that lives very long; it is not a
painting with aspirations towards the museum
but an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work
it has too much asperity, is too hard, not serene
enough.
"This ephemeral character of my work does
not displease me. We are men of the day, people
in love with the passing moment, with all that is
fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of
our work preoccupies us little, so little that it can
hardly be said to preoccupy us at all."
'[100]'
VI: Talk by the Road
SPAIN/' said Don Alonso, as he and Tele-
machus walked out of Illescas, followed at
a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-
man, "has never been swept clean. There have
been the Romans and the Visigoths and the
Moors and the French armed men jingling over
mountain roads. Conquest has warped and
sterilised our Iberian mind without changing an
atom of it. An example: we missed the Revolu-
tion and suffered from Napoleon. We virtually
had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition was
stronger with us than anywhere/'
"Do you think it will have to be swept clean?"
asked Telemachus.
"He does." Don Alonso pointed with a sweep
of an arm towards a man working in the field
beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse;
he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy
triangular hoe f Sometimes he raised it only a
[101]
Rosinante to the Road Again
foot above the ground to poise for a blow, some-
times he swung it from over his shoulder. Face,
clothes, hands, hoe were brown against the brown
hillside where a purple shadow mocked each
heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the
morning silence the blows of the hoe beat upon
the air with muffled insistence.
"And he is the man who will do the building,"
went on Don Alonso; "It is only fair that we
should clear the road,"
"But you are the thinkers," said Telemachus;
his mother Penelope's maxims on the subject of
constructive criticism popped up suddenly in his
mind like tickets from a cash register.
"Thought is the acid that destroys," answered
Don Alonso.
Telemachus turned to look once more at the
man working in the field. The hoe rose and fell,
rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke a
flash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw
all at once the whole earth, plowed fields full of
earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back, bent
forward, muscles of arms swelling and slacken-
ing, hoes flashing at the same moment against the
[102]
Talk by the Road
sky, at the same moment burled with a thud in
clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels,
hearing the continuous hiss and squudge of well
oiled engines out at sea*
[103]
VII: Cordova no Longer of the
Caliphs
II THEN we stepped out of the bookshop the
V V narrow street steamed with the dust of
many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling
wheels gaudily dressed men and women sat mo-
tionless in attitudes. Over the backs of the car-
riages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red
and purple and yellow,
"Bread and circuses/' muttered the man who
was with me, "but not enough bread."
It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were
coming back from the tows, We turned into a
narrow lane, where the dust was yellow between
high green and lavender-washed walls. From the
street we had left came a sound of cheers and
hand-clapping. My friend stopped still and put
his hand on my arm.
"There goes Belmonte," he said ; "half the men
who are cheering him have never had enough to
[104]
Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs
eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better;
to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.
Those fools " he jerked his head backwards
with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the
high combs and the hair gleaming black under
lace and the wasp-waists of the young men and
the insolence of black eyes above the flashing
wheels of the carriages, " those fools give only
circuses. Do you people in the outside world
realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have
starved for generations, that those black bulls for
the circuses may graze over good wheatland . . .
to make Spain picturesque! The only time we
see meat is in the bullring. Those people who
argue all the time as to why Spain's backward
and write books about it, I could tell them in one
word: malnutrition." He laughed despairingly
and started walking fast again. "We have
solved the problem of the cost of living. We live
on air and dust and bad smells."
I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes
before to ask an address, and had been taken into
the back room with the wonderful enthusiastic
courtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the
[105]
Rosinante to the Road Again
bookseller, a carpenter and the bookseller's er-
rand-boy had all talked at once, explaining the
last strike of farm-laborers, when the region had
been for months under martial law, and they, and
every one else of socialist or republican sym-
pathies, had been packed for weeks into over-
crowded prisons. They all regretted they could
not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, they
explained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupy-
ing It at that moment. It ended by the book-
seller's coming out with me to show me the way
to Azorin's.
Azorm was an architect who had supported the
strikers; he had just come back to Cordova from
the obscure village where he had been imprisoned
through the care of the military governor who had
paid him the compliment of thinking that even
in prison he would be dangerous in Cordova. He
had recently been elected municipal councillor,
and when we reached his office was busy designing
a schoolhouse. On the stairs the bookseller had
whispered to me that every workman in Cordova
would die for Azorfn. He was a sallow little
man with a vaguely sarcastic voice and an amused
[106]
Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs
air as if he would burst out laughing at any mo-
ment. He put aside his plans and we all went on
to see the editor of Andalusia, a regionalist pro-
labor weekly.
In that dark little office, over three cups of
coffee that appeared miraculously from some-
where, with the pungent smell of ink and fresh
paper in our nostrils, we talked about the past
and future of Cordova, and of all the wide region
of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated plains,
dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky water-
less mountains where the mines are. In Azorin's
crisp phrases and in the long ornate periods of the
editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic
hope of these peasants and miners and artisans
became vivid to me for the first time. Occasion-
ally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a
brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in
the door and shout: "It's true what they say, but
they don't say enough, they don't say enough."
The problem in the south of Spain is almost
wholly agrarian. From the Tagus to the Medi-
terranean stretches a mountainous region of low
rainfall, intersected by several series of broad
[107]
Rosinante to the Road Again
river-valleys which, under irrigation, are enor-
mously productive of rice, oranges, and, in the
higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow
grapes, olives and almonds. A country on the
whole much like southern California. Under the
Moors this region was the richest and most civi-
lized in Europe.
When the Christian nobles from the north
reconquered it, the ecclesiastics laid hold of the
towns and extinguished industry through the
Inquisition, while the land was distributed in
huge estates to the magnates of the court of the
Catholic Kings. The agricultural workers be-
came virtually serfs, and the communal village
system of working the land gradually gave way,
Now the province of Jaen, certainly as large as
the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by
six families. This process was helped by the fact
that all through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed
overseas to explore and plunder America or went
into the church, so that the tilling of the land was
left to the humblest and least vigorous. And
[108]
Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs
immigration to America has continued the safety
valve of the social order.
It is only comparatively recently that the con-
sciousness has begun to form among the workers
of the soil that it is possible for them to change
their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the
beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tense-
ness has come over the lives of the frugal sinewy
peasants who, through centuries of oppression
and starvation, have kept, in spite of almost com-
plete illiteracy, a curiously vivid sense of per-
sonal independence. In the backs of taverns
revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy
who has had a couple of years of school to a crowd
of men who listen or repeat the words after him
with the fervor of people going through a reli-
gious mystery. Unspeakable faith possesses them
in what they call ff la nueva ley 93 ("the new law") ,
by which the good things a man wrings by his
sweat from the earth shall be his and not the
property of a distant seiior in Madrid,
It is this hopefulness that marks the difference
between the present agrarian agitation and the
violent and desperate peasant risings of the past.
[109]
Rosinante to the Road Again
As early as October, 1918, a congress of agricul-
tural workers was held to decide on strike meth-
ods, and, more important, to formulate a demand
for the expropriation of the land. In two months
the unions, ("sociedades de resistencia" )had been
welded at least in the province of Cordova
into a unified system with more or less central
leadership. The strike which followed was so
complete that in many cases even domestic serv-
ants went out. After savage repression and the
military occupation of the whole province, the
strike petered out into compromises which re-
sulted in considerable betterment of working con-
ditions but left the important issues untouched.
The rise in the cost of living and the growing
unrest brought matters to a head again in the
summer of 1919. The military was used with
even more brutality than the previous year. At-
tempts at compromise, at parcelling out unculti-
vated land have proved as unavailing as the
Mausers of the Civil Guard to quell the tumult.
The peasants have kept their organizations and
their demands intact. They are even willing to
wait; but they are determined that the land upon
[110]
Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs
which they have worn out generations and gen-
erations shall be theirs without question.
All this time the landlords brandish a redoubt-
able weapon: starvation. Already thousands of
acres that might be richly fertile lie idle or are
pasture for herds of wild bulls for the arena.
The great land-owning families hold estates all
over Spain; if in a given region the workers be-
come too exigent, they decide to leave the land
in fallow for a year or two. In the villages it be-
comes a question of starve or emigrate. To emi-
grate many certificates are needed. Many offi-
cials have to be placated. For all that money is
needed. Men taking to the roads in search of
work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil
guards. Arson becomes the last retort of despair.
At night the standing grain burns mysteriously
or the country house of an absent landlord, and
from the parched hills where gnarled almond-
trees grow, groups of half starved men watch the
flames with grim exultation.
Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the
incultura of the Andalusian peasants. The prob-
lem of civilization, after all, is often one of food
Rosinante to the Road Again
calories. Fernando de los Rfos, socialist deputy
for Granada, recently published the result of an
investigation of the food of the agricultural pop-
ulations of Spain in which he showed that only in
the Balkans out of all Europe was the work-
ing man so under-nourished. The calories which
the diet of the average Cordova workman repre-
sented was something like a fourth of those of the
British workman's diet. Even so the foremen of
the big estates complain that as a result of all this
social agitation their workmen have taken to eat-
ing more than they did in the good old times.
How long it will be before the final explosion
comes no one can conjecture. The spring of
1920, when great things were expected, was com-
pletely calm. On the other hand, in the last
municipal elections when six hundred socialist
councillors were* elected in all Spain in con-
trast to sixty-two in 1915 the vote polled in
Andalusia was unprecedented. Up to this elec-
tion many of the peasants had never dared vote,
and those that had had been completely under the
thumb of the caciques, the bosses that control
Spanish local politics. However, in spite of
[112]
Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs
socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian
problem will always remain separate from any-
thing else in the minds of the peasants. This
does not mean that they are opposed to commun-
ism or cling as violently as most of the European
peasantry to the habit of private property.
All over Spain one comes upon traces of the
old communist village institutions, by which flocks
and mills and bakeries and often land were held
in, common. As in all arid countries, where
everything depends upon irrigation, ditches are
everywhere built and repaired in common. And
the idea of private property is of necessity feeble
where there is no rain; for what good is land to a
man without water? Still, until there grows up
a much stronger community of interest than now
exists between the peasants and the industrial
workers, the struggle for the land and the strug-
gle for the control of industry will be, in Spain,
as I think everywhere, parallel rather than uni-
fied. One thing is certain, however long the fire
smoulders before it flares high to make a clean
sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudal-
ism together, Cordova, hoary city of the caliphs,
[113]
Rosinante to the Road Again
where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the zig-
zag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment
comes, be the center of organization of the agrar-
ian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I
rode with some young men who were emigrating
to America, to make their fortunes, they said.
When I told them I had been to Cordova, their
faces became suddenly bright with admiration,
"Ah, Cordova," one of them cried; "they've got
the guts in Cordova."
[114]
VIII: Talk by the Road
AT the first crossroads beyond Illescas the
dumpling-man and Don Alonso turned off
in quest of the trout stream. Don Alonso waved
solemnly to Lyaeus and Telemaehus,
"Perhaps we shall meet in Toledo/' he said.
"Catch a lot of fish," shouted Lyaeus.
"And perhaps a thought," was the last word
they heard from Don Alonso.
The sun already high in the sky poured tingling
heat on their heads and shoulders. There was
sand in their shoes, an occasional sharp pain in
their shins, in their bellies bitter emptiness*
"At the next village, Tel, I'm going to bed.
You can do what you like," said Lyaeus in a
tearful voice.
"I'll like that all right^
"Buenos dias, senores viajeros" came a cheer-
ful voice. They found they were walking in the
company of a man who wore a tight-waisted over-
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Roslnante to the Road Again
coat of a light blue color, a cream-colored felt
hat from under which protruded long black mous-
taches with gimlet points, and shoes with lemon-
yellow uppers. They passed the time of day
with what cheerfulness they could muster.
"Ah, Toledo/' said the man. "You are going
to Toledo, my birthplace. There I was born in
the shadow of the cathedral, there I shall die. I
am a traveller of commerce." He produced two
cards as large as postcards on which was written:
ANTONIO SILVA Y YEPES
UNIVERSAL AGENT
IMPORT EXPORT NATIONAL PRODUCTS
"At your service, gentlemen/ 5 he said and
handed each of them a card. "I deal in tinware,
ironware, pottery, lead pipes, enameled ware,
kitchen utensils, American toilet articles, French
perfumery, cutlery, linen, sewing machines, sad-
dles, bridles, seeds, fancy poultry, fighting ban-
tams and objects de vertu. . . . You are foreign-
ers, are yon not? How barbarous Spain, what
people, what dirt, what lack of culture, what im-
politeness, what lack of energy !"
[116]
Talk by the Road
The universal agent choked, coughed, spat,
produced a handkerchief of crimson silk with
which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his
moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of
words, turning on Telemachus from time to time
little red-rimmed eyes full of moist pathos like
a dog's.
"Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too
much to bear, when I rejoice to think that it's all
up with my lungs and that I shan't live long any-
way. ... In America I should have been a
Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Morgan. I know it,
for I am a man of genius. It is true. I am a
man of genius. . . . And look at me here walk-
ing from one of these cursed tumbledown villages
to another because I have not money enough to
hire a cab. . . . And ill too, dying of consump-
tion! O Spain, Spain, how do you crush your
great men 1 What you must think of us, you who
come from civilized countries, where life is organ-
ized, where commerce is a gentlemanly, even a
noble occupation. . . ."
"But you savor life more. . ."
"Ca, CGL" interrupted the universal agent with
[117]
Rosinante to the Road Again
a downward gesture of the hand. "To think that
they call by the same name living here in a pen
like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York,
Biarritz, Trouville . . . luxurious beds, coif-
fures, toilettes, theatrical functions, sumptuous
automobiles, elegant ladies glittering with dia-
monds . . . the world of light and enchantment!
Oh to think of it ! And Spain could be the richest
country in Europe, if we had energy, organiza-
tion, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal,
copper, silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food
products, woolens, cotton cloth, sugarcane, raw
cotton , . . couplets, dancers, gipsy girls. . . ."
The universal agent had quite lost his breath.
He coughed for a long time into his crimson hand-
kerchief, then looked about him over the rolling
dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting
gave a sheen of vivid green like the patina on a
Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged Ms shoul-
ders.
"lQu vida! What a life!"
For some time a spire had been poking up into
the sky at the road's end; now yellow-tiled roofs
were just visible humped out of the wheatland,
[118]
Talk by the Road
with the church standing guard over them, it's
buttresses as bowed as the legs of a bulldog. At
the sight of the village a certain spring came back
to Teleinachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed
with envy that Lyaeus took little skips as he
walked.
"If we properly exploited our exports we
should be the richest people in Europe/' the uni-
versal agent kept shouting with far-flung ges-
tures of despair. And the last they heard from
him as they left him to turn into the manure-
littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada
de la Luna was, "/ Qu& pueblo indecente! . . .
What a beastly town . . . yet if they exploited
with energy, with modern energy, their ex-
ports.
[119]
IX: An Inverted Midas
EVERY age mnst have had choice spirits
whose golden fingers turned everything they
touched to commonplace. Since we know our
own literature best it seems unreasonably well
equipped with these inverted Midases though
the fact that all Anglo-American writing dur-
ing the last century has been so exclusively of
the middle classes, by the middle classes and for
the middle classes must count for something.
Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we
may be sure that platitudes would have obscured
the slanting sides of the pyramids had stone-cut-
ting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously
easy as is printing to-day. The addition of the
typewriter to the printing-press has given a new
and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked
thought. The labor of graving on stone or of
baking tablets of brick or even of scrawling let-
ters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb on
[120]
An Inverted Midas
the dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He
now lolls in a Morris chair, sipping iced tea, dic-
tating to four blonde and two dark-haired stenog-
raphers ; three novels, a couple of books of travel
and a short story written at once are nothing to a
really enterprising universal genius. Poor Julius
Caesar with his letters!
We complain that we have no supermen nowa-
days, that we can't live as much or as widely or
as fervently or get through so much work as
could Pico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Poli-
tian, that the race drifts towards mental and phy-
sical anasmia. I deny it. With the typewriter
all these things shall be added unto us. This age
too has its great universal geniuses. They over-
run the seven continents and their respective
seas. Accompanied by monadic bands of sten-
ographers, and a music of typewriters deliriously
clicking, they go about the world, catching all
the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the
plums, tunneling mountains, bridging seas,
smoothing the facets off ideas so that they may
be swallowed harmlessly like pills. With true
Anglo-Saxon conceit we had thought that our
[121]
Rosinante to the Road Again
own Mr. Wells was the most universal of these
universal geniuses. He has so diligently brought
science, ethics, sex, marriage, sociology, God, and
everything else properly deodorized, of course
to the desk of the ordinary man, that he may
lean back in his swivel-chair and receive faint
susuration from the sense of progress and the
complexity of life, without even having to go
to the .window to look at the sparrows sitting in
rows on the telephone-wires, so that really it
seemed inconceivable that anyone should be more
universal. It was rumored that there lay the
ultimate proof of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy.
What other race had produced a great universal
genius?
But all that was before the discovery of
Blasco Ibanez.
On the backs of certain of Blasco Ibanez's
novels published by the Casa Prometeo in Val-
encia is this significant advertisement: Obras de
Vulgarization Popular (" Works of Popular
Vulgarization"). Under it is an astounding list
of volumes, all either translated or edited or ar-
ranged, if not written from cover to cover, by
[122]
An Inverted Midas
one tireless pen, I mean typewriter. Ten vol-
umes of universal history, three volumes of the
French Revolution translated from Michelet, a
universal geography, a social history, works on
science, cookery and house-cleaning, nine vol-
umes of Blasco Ibafiez's own history of the Eu-
ropean war, and a translation of the Arabian
Nights, a thousand and one of them without an
hour missing. "Works of Popular Vulgariza-
tion." I admit that in Spanish the word vulgari-
zacion has not yet sunk to its inevitable meaning,
but can it long stand such a strain? Add to
that list a round two dozen novels and some books
of travel, and who can deny that Blasco Ibanez
is a great universal genius? Read his novels and
you will find that he has looked at the stars and
knows Lord Kelvin's theory of vortices and the
nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean cur-
rents and the qualities of kelp and the direction
the codfish go in Iceland waters when the north-
east wind blows; that he knows about Gothic
architecture and Byzantine painting, the social
movement in Jerez and the exports of Pata-
gonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses
[123]
Rosinante to the Road Again
and the red paste with which countesses polish
their fingernails in Monte Carlo.
The very pattern of a modern major-general.
And, like the great universal geniuses of the
Renaissance, he has lived as well as thought
and written. He is said to have heen thirty times
in prison, six times deputy; he has been a cow-
hoy in the pampas of Argentina; he has founded
a city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of
Cervantes in the middle of it; he has rounded the
Horn on a sailing-ship ha a hurricane, and it is
whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters
with the shells on. He hobnobs with the uni-
verse.
One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibanez's
universe is a bulkier, burlier universe than Mr.
Wells's. One is strangely certain that the axle of
Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of
London, say Putney, where each house has a bit
of garden where waddles an asthmatic pet dog,
where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, be-
fore a gas-log, where every bookcase makes a
futile effort to impinge on infinity through the
encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going
[124]
An Inverted Midas
and coining, swathed in clothes that must above
all be respectable, to business and from business.
But who can say where Blasco Ibanez's uni-
verse centers? It is in constant progression.
Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped
Paumonauk, from the fierce green fertility of
Valencia, city of another great Spanish con-
queror, the Cid, he had marched on the world
in battle array. The whole history comes out
in the series of novels at this moment being trans-
lated in such feverish haste for the edification
of the American public. The beginnings are
stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round
about Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of
El Grao, the port, a sturdy violent people living
amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled
in Europe. His method is inspired to a certain
extent by Zola, taking from him a little of the
newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevita-
ble murder and sudden death in the last chapters.
Yet he expresses that life vividly, although even
then more given to grand vague ideas than to a
careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at
home in the strong communal feeling, in the in-
[125]
Rosinante to the Road Again
dividual anarchism, in the passionate worship of
the water that runs through the fields to give life
and of the blades of wheat that give bread and of
the wine that gives joy, which is the moral make-
up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerely
indignant about the agrarian system, about
social inequality, and is full of the revolutionary
bravado of his race.
A typical novel of this period is La Barraca, a
story of a peasant family that takes up land
which has lain vacant for years under the curse
of the community, since the eviction of the ten-
ants, who had held it for generations, by a land-
lord who was murdered as a result, on a lonely
road by the father of the family he had turned
out. The struggle of these peasants against their
neighbours is told with a good deal of feeling,
and the culmination in a rifle fight in an irriga-
tion ditch is a splendid bit of blood and thunder.
There are many descriptions of local customs,
such as the Tribunal of Water that sits once a
week under one of the portals of Valencia cathe-
dral to settle conflicts of irrigation rights, a lit-
tle dragged in by the heels, to be sure, but still
[126]
An Inverted Midas
worth reading. Yet even in these early novels
one feels over and over again the force of that
phrase "popular vulgarization." Valencia is be-
ing vulgarized for the benefit of the universe.
The proletariat is being vulgarized for the benefit
of the people who buy novels.
From Valencia raids seem to have been made
on other parts of Spain. Somtica la Cortesana
gives you antique Saguntum and the usual
"Aves," wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap
of costume novels. In La Catedral you have
Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern
world in the shadow of Gothic spires. La Bodega
takes you into the genial air of the wine vaults of
Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers, proces-
sions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt
in the background. Up to now they have been
Spanish novels written for Spaniards; it is only
with Sangre y Arena that the virus of a Eu-
ropean reputation shows results.
In Sangre y Arena, to be sure, you learn that
toreros use scent, have a home life, and are se-
duced by passionate Baudelairian ladies of the
smart set who plant white teeth in their brown
[127]
Rosinante to the Road Again
sinewy arms and teach them to smoke opium cig-
arettes. You see toreros taking the sacraments
before going into the ring and you see them tossed
by the bull while the crowd, which a moment be-
fore had been crying "hola" as if it didn't know
that something was going wrong,, gets very pale
and chilly and begins to think what dreadful
things corridas are anyway, until the arrival
of the next bull makes them forget it. All of
which is good fun when not obscured by grand,
vague ideas, and incidentally sells like hot
cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo be-
comes an exporting house dealing in the good
Spanish products of violence and sunshine, blood,
voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizes
put it.
Next comes the expedition to South America
and The Argonauts appears. The Atlantic is
bridged, there open up rich veins of pictur-
esqueness and new grand vague ideas, all in
full swing when the war breaks out. Blasco
Ibanez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon,
with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
which captures the Allied world and proves again
[128]
An Inverted Midas
the mot about prophets. So without honor in
its own country is the Four Horsemen that the
English translation rights are sold for a paltry
three thousand pesetas. But the great success
In England and America soon shows that we
can appreciate the acumen of a neutral who came
in and rooted for our side; so early In the race
too ! While the iron is still hot another four hun-
dred pages of well-sugared pro-Ally propaganda
appears, Mare Nostrum, which mingles Ulysses
and scientific information about ocean currents,
Amphitrite and submarines, Circe and a vamp-
ing Theda Bara who was really a German Spy,
in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-
Jumbo of nationalism.
~LoB Enemigos de la Mujer, the latest produc-
tion, abandons Spain entirely and plants itself
in the midst of princes and countesses, all elab-
orately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten
the proletarian tastes of his youth, the local color
he loved to lay on so thickly, the Habanera at-
mosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in
the cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin
fluency.
[129]
Rosinante to the Road Again
And now the United States, the home of the
blonde stenographer and the typewriter and the
press agent. What are we to expect from the
combination of Blasco Ibanez and Broadway?
At any rate the movies will profit.
Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibanez
had not learnt the typewriter trick so early.
Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace
over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibanez
need not have been an inverted Midas. His is
a superbly Mediterranean type, with something
of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something
of Tartarin of Tarascon. Blustering, sensual, en-
thusiastic, living at bottom in a real world
which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vul-
garizers even if it is a real world obscured by
grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibaftez's mere energy
would have produced interesting things if it had
not found such easy and immediate vent in the
typewriter. Bottle .up a man like that for a life-
time without means of expression and he'll pro-
duce memoirs equal to Marco Polo and Casano-
va, but let his energies flow out evenly without
[130]
An Inverted Midas
resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters
and all you have is one more popular novelist.
It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibaiiez and
the United States should have discovered each
other at this moment. They will do each other
no good. We have an abundance both of vague
grand ideas and of popular novelists, and we are
the favorite breeding place of the inverted Midas.
We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp
edges on it, yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose
that the combination of the ideals of the man in
the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has
made of our national consciousness. Of course
Blasco Ibanez in America will only be a seven
days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that.
But why need we pretend each time that our
seven days' marvels are the great eternal things ?
Then, too, if the American public is bound
to take up Spain it might as well take up the
worth-while things instead of the works of popu-
lar vulgarization. They have enough of those in
their bookcases as it is. And in Spain there is
a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno
[131]
Rosmante to the Road Again
and Azorin, poets like Valle Inclan and Antonio
Machado, . . . but I suppose they will shine
with the reflected glory of the author of the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
[132]
X: Talk by the Road
WHEN they woke up it was dark. They
were cold. Their legs were stiff. They
lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide
bed, between them a tangle of narrow sheets and
blankets. Teleinachus raised himself to a sitting
position and put his feet, that were still swollen,
gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again
with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering
hunched on the edge of the bed, Lyaeus bur-
rowed into the blankets and went back to sleep.
For a long while Telemachus could not thaw his
frozen wits enough to discover what noise had
waked him up. Then it came upon him suddenly
that huge rhythms were pounding about him,
sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes
and beaten dish-pans and roaring voices. Some-
one was singing in shrill tremolo above the din a
song of which each verse seemed to end with the
phrase, **y mamna Carmvol."
[133]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," lie cried
out to Lyaeus, and pulled on Ms trousers,
Lyaeus sat up and rubbed Ms eyes,
"I smell wine/ 5 he said.
Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and
aching feet and the thought of what his mother
Penelope would say about these goings on, if
they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous ela-
tion flare through Mm.
"Come on, they're dancing/' he cried dragging
Lyaeus out on the gallery that overhung the end
of the court.
"Don't forget the butterfly net, TeL"
"What for?"
"To catch your gesture, what do you think?"
Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders
and shook him. As they wrestled they caught
glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing
up and down in a jota. In the doorway stood two
guitar players and beside them a table with pitch-
ers and glasses and a glint of spilt wine. Fee-
ble light came from an occasional little constel-
lation of olive-oil lamps. When the two of them
pitched down stairs together and shot out reeling
[134]
Talk by the Road
among the dancers everybody cried out: "Hola"
and shouted thait the foreigners must sing a
song.
"After dinner/' cried Lyaeus as he straight-
ened his necktie. "We haven't eaten for a year
and a half!"
The padron, a red thick-necked individual with
a week's white bristle on his face, came up to
them holding out hands as big as hams.
"You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O
how lucky the young are, travelling all over the
world." He turned to the company with a ges-
ture; "I was like that when I was young."
They followed him into the kitchen, where they
ensconced themselves on either side of a cave of a
fireplace in which burned a fire all too small.
The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned
leather who was tending the numerous steaming
pots that stood about the hearth, noticing that
they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that
crackled and burst into flame and gave out a
warm spicy tang.
"To-morrow's Carnival," she said. "We
mustn't stint ourselves." Then she handed them
[135]
Rosinante to the Road Again
each a plate of soup full of bread in which
poached eggs floated, and the padron drew the
table near the fire and sat down opposite them,
peering with interest into their faces while they
ate.
After a while he began talking. From outside
the hand-clapping and the sound of castanettes
continued interrupted by intervals of shouting
and laughter and an occasional snatch from the
song that ended every verse with "y nuitfiana Car-
naval"
"I travelled when I was your age/' he said.
"I have been to America . . . Nueva York,
Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Fran-
cisco . . . Selling those little nuts . . . Yes,
peanuts. What a country! How many laws
there are there, how many policemen. When I
was young I did not like it, but now that I am old
and own an inn and daughters and all that, vamos,
I understand. You see in Spain we all do just
as we like; then, if we are the sort that goes to
church we repent afterwards and fix it up with
God. In European, civilized, modern countries
[136]
Talk by the Road
everybody learns what he's got to do and what
he must not do ... That's why they have so
many laws . . Here the police are just to help
the government plunder and steal all it wants
. . . But that's not so in America . . ."
"The difference is/' broke in Telemachus,
"as Butler put it, between living under the law
and living under grace. I should rather live
under gra ..." But he thought of the max-
ims of Penelope and was silent.
"But after all we know how to sing," said the
Padron. "Will you have coffee with cognac?
. . . And poets, man alive, what poets!"
The padron stuck out his chest, put one hand
m the black sash that held up his trousers and
recited, emphasizing the rhythm with the cognac
bottle:
*Aqui esta Don Juan Tenorio;
no hay hombre para el . .
Biisquenle los reiiidores,
cerquenle los jugadores,
quien se precie que le ataje,
a ver si hay quien le aventaje
en jiaego, en lid o en amores.*
[137]
Rosinante to the Road Again
He finished with a flourish and poured more
cognac Into the coffee cups.
"jQue bomto! How pretty!" cried the old
hunchbacked woman who sat on her heels in the
fireplace.
"That's what we do/' said the padron. "We
brawl and gamble and seduce women, and we
sing and we dance, and then we repent and the
priest fixes it up with God. In America they
live according to law/'
Feeling well-toasted by the fire and well-
warmed with food and drink, Lyaeus and Tele-
machus went to the inn door and looked out on
the broad main street of the village where every-
thing was snowy white under the cold stare of
the moon. The dancing had stopped in the court-
yard. A group of men and boys was moving
slowly up the street, each one with a musical
instrument. There were the two guitars, frying
pans, castanettes, cymbals, and a goatskin bot-
tle of wine that kept being passed from hand to
hand. Each time the bottle made a round a new
song started. And so they moved slowly up the
street in the moonlight.
[138]
Talk by the Road
"Let's join them," said Lyaeus.
"No, I want to get up early so as . . ."
"To see the gesture by daylight!" cried Ly-
aeus jeeringly. Then he went on: "Tel, you
live under the law. Under the law there can
be no gestures, only machine movements."
Then he ran off and joined the group of men
and boys who were singing and drinking. Tele-
machus went back to bed. On his way upstairs
he cursed the maxims of his mother Penelope.
But at any rate to-morrow, in Carnival-time, he
would feel the gesture.
[139]
XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
I SPENT fifty thousand pesetas In a year at
the military school , , . J'dmelechic"md
the young artillery officer of whom I had asked
the way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled
hill that led to the irregular main street of Segov-
ia. A moment before we had passed under the
aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon
arch into the crimson sky. He had snapped
tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's
that good for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all
for a puff of gasoline from a Hispano-Suizo
* . . D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look
at this rotten town! There's not a street in it I
can speed on in a motorcycle without running
down some fool old woman or a squalling brat or
other . , . Who's this gentleman you are going
to see?"
"He's a poet," I said.
"I like poetry too. I write it . . . light, ele-
[140]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
gant, about light elegant women." He laughed
and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out
from each side of his moustache.
He left me at the end of the street I was look-
ing for, and after an elaborate salute walked off
saying:
"To think that you should come here from
New York to look for an address in such a shabby
street, and I so want to go to New York. If I
was a poet I wouldn't live here."
The name on the street corner was Ccdle de
los Desemparados . . . "Street of Abandoned
Children."
We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling
spoons in coffee-glasses while a wax-pink fat
man played billiards in front of us, being pon-
derously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail
with yellow face and walrus whiskers that emit-
ted a rasping Bueno after every play. There
was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of
verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall,
questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us
was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz? of the
[141]
Rosinante to the Road Again
poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries
ago high and dry on the beach of history. The
group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not
come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned
their Basque coast towns, seduced by the bronze-
colored people and the saffron hills of the prov-
ince of Segovia. Sorolla was dying, another had
gone mad. At last someone said, "It's stifling
here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night."
There was no sound in the streets but the ir-
regular clatter of our footsteps. The slanting
moonlight cut the street into two triangular sec-
tions, one enormously black, the other bright, en-
graved like a silver plate with the lines of doors,
roofs, windows, ornaments. Overhead the sky
was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness
cut across our path, then there was dazzling light
through an arch beyond. Outside the gate we
sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in which
you could still feel a trace of the warmth of the
sun. To one side was the lime-washed wall of a
house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken door where
the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails
and the knocker, and above the door red geran-
[142]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
lums hanging out of a pot, their color insanely
bright in the silver-white glare. The other side
a deep glen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees
and the sound of a stream. In the dark above the
arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up
the green feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody
was talking about El Buscon, a story of Que-
vedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, a
wandering story of thieves and escapes by night
through the back doors of brothels, of rope lad-
ders dangling from the windows of great ladies,
of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts
under bridges, and fingers touching significantly
in the holy-water fonts of tall cathedrals. A
ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate.
The man next me shivered.
"The dead are stronger than the living," he
said. "How little we have; and they. . ."
In the quaver of his voice was a remembering
of long muletrains jingling through the gate,
queens in litters hung with patchwork curtains
from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with
the clay of deep roads, stained with the blood of
ambuscades, bales of silks from Valencia, travel-
[143]
Rosinante to the Road Again
ling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed
Templars on their way to the Sepulchre, wander-
ing minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds, rowdy strings
of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with
wine-skins at their saddlebows to cross the passes
towards the debatable lands of Extremadura,
where there were infidels to kill and cattle to
drive off and village girls to rape, all when the
gate was as new and crisply cut out of clean
stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in
the valley a donkey brayed long and dismally.
"They too have their nostalgias," said some-
one sentimentally.
"What they of the old time did not have/'
came a deep voice from under a bowler hat, "was
the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of putrefac-
tion, the long remembering of palely colored
moods; they had the sun, we have the colors of
its setting. Who shall say which is worth more?"
The man next to me had got to his feet. "A
night like this with a moon like this," he said,
"we should go to the ancient quarter of the
witches."
Gravel crunched under our feet down the road
[144]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
that led out of moonlight into the darkness of the
glen to San Milldn de las bmjas.
You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day
without thinking now and then of Ruben Dario,
that prodigious INTicaraguan who collected into
his verse all the tendencies of poetry in France
and America and the Orient and poured them in
a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into
the thought of the new generation in Spain.
Overflowing with beauty and banality, patched
out with images and ornaments from Greece and
Egypt and France and Japan and his own Cen-
tral America, symbolist and romantic and Par-
nassian all at once, Ruben Dario's verse is like
those doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where
French and Moorish and Italian motives jostle in
headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest routine
stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and
forms of rare beauty and significance. Here and
there among the turgid muddle, out of the impact
of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real
poetry. And that spark can be said as truly as
anything of the sort can be said to be the mo-
[145]
Rosinante to the Road Again
tive force of the whole movement of renovation
in Spanish poetry. Of course the poets have not
been content to be influenced by the outside world
only through Dario. Baudelaire and Verlaine
had a very large direct influence, once the way
was opened, and their influence succeeded in curb-
ing the lush impromptu manner of romantic
Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work
and he is beginning to be generally considered
the central figure there is a restraint and terse-
ness of phrase rare in any poetry.
I do not mean to imply that Machado can be
called in any real sense a pupil of either Dario
or Verlaine ; rather one would say that in a gen-
eration occupied largely in more or less unsuc-
cessful imitation of these poets, Machado's poe-
try stands out as particularly original and per-
sonal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan
Ramon Jimenez, it would be in America and
England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and
Amy Lowell, that one would find analogous aims
and methods. The influence of the symbolists
and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicara-
guan broke down the bombastic romantic style
[146]
Antonio Machadot Poet of Castile
current in Spain, as it was broken down every-
where else in the middle nineteenth century. In
Machado's work a new method is being built up,
that harks back more to early ballads and the
verse of the first moments of the Renaissance
than to anything foreign, but which shows the
same enthusiasm for the rhythms of ordinary
speech and for the simple pictorial expression of
undoctored emotion that we find in the renova-
tors of poetry the world over. Campos de Cas-
tillo,, his first volume to be widely read, marks an
epoch in Spanish poetry.
Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with
places. It is obsessed with the old Spanish towns
where he has lived, with the mellow sadness of
tortuous streets and of old houses that have
soaked up the lives of generations upon genera-
tions of men, crumbling in the flaming silence of
summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains
in winter. Though born in Andalusia, the bitter
strength of the Castilian plain, where half-de-
serted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken
into their walls, still dreaming of the ages of
faith and conquest, has subjected his imagina-
[147]
Rosinante to the Road Again
tion, and the purity of Castilian speech has dom-
inated his writing, until his poems seem as Cas-
tilian as Don Quixote.
"My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville,
and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening.
My youth : twenty years in the land of Castile.
My history: a few events I do not care to remember."
So Machado writes of himself. He was born in
the eighties, has been a teacher of French in gov-
ernment schools in Soria and Baeza and at pres-
ent in Segovia all old Spanish cities very mel-
low and very stately and has made the migra-
tion to Paris customary with Spanish writers and
artists. He says in the Poema de un Dm:
Here I am, already a teacher
of modern languages, who yesterday
was a master of the gai scavoir
and the nightingale's apprentice.
He has published three volumes of verse, Sole-
dades ("Solitudes"), Campos de Castilla
("Fields of Castile"), and Soledades y Galenas
("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a gov-
ernment institution, the Residencia de Estudian-
[148]
Antonio Machddo: Poet of Castile
tes, has published his complete works up to date.
The following translations are necessarily in-
adequate, as the poems depend very much on
modulations of rhythm and on the expressive
fitting together of words impossible to render in
a foreign language. He uses rhyme compara-
tively little, often substituting assonance in ac-
cordance with the peculiar traditions of Spanish
prosody. I have made no attempt to imitate his
form exactly.
Yes, come away with me fields of Soria,
quiet evenings, violet mountains,
aspens of the river, green dreams
of the grey earth,
bitter melancholy
of the crumbling city
perhaps it is that you have become
the background of my life.
Men of the high Nnmantine plain,
who keep God like old Christians,
may the sun of Spain fill you
with joy and light and abundance!
[149]
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II
A frail sound o a tunic trailing
across the infertile earth,
and the sonorous weeping
of the old bells.
The dying embers
of the horizon smoke.
White ancestral ghosts
go lighting the stars.
Open the balcony-window. The hour
of illusion draws near - , .
The afternoon has gone to sleep
and the bells dream.
Ill
Figures in the fields against the sky!
Two slow oxen plough
on a hillside early in autumn,
and between the black heads bent down
under the weight of the yoke,
hangs and sways a basket of reeds,
a child*s cradle;
And behind the yoke stride
a man who' leans towards the earth
and a woman who, into the open furrows,
[150]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
throws the seed-
Under a cloud of carmine and flame,
in the liquid green gold of the setting,
their shadows grow monstrous.
IV
Naked is the earth
and the soul howls to the wan horizon
like a hungry she-wolf.
What do you seek*
poet, in the sunset?
Bitter going, for the path
weighs one down, the frozen wind,
and the coming night and the bitterness
of distance . . . On the white path
the trunks of frustrate trees show black,
on the distant mountains
there is gold and blood. The sun dies . . .
What do you seek,
poet, in the sunset?
Silver hills and grey ploughed lands,
violet outcroppings of rock
[151]
Rosinante to the Road Again
through which the Duero traces
its curve like a cross-bow
about Soria,
dark oak-wood, wild cliffs,
bald peaks,
and the white roads and the aspens of the river.
Afternoons of Soria, mystic and warlike,
to-day I am very sad for you,
sadness of love,
Fields of Soria,
where it seems that the rocks dream,
come with me! Violet rocky outcroppings,
silver hills and grey ploughed lands.
VI
We think to create festivals
of love out of our love,
to burn new incense
on untrodden mountains;
and to keep the secret
of our pale faces,
and why in the bacchanals of life
we carry empty glasses,
while with tinkling echoes and laughing
foams the gold must of the grape. . .
[152]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
A liidden bird among- the branches
of the solitary park
whistles mockery. . . . We feel
the shadow of a dream in our wine-glass,
and something that is earth in our flesh
feels the dampness of the garden like a caress.
VII
I have been back to see the golden aspens,
aspens of the road along the Duero
between San Polo and San Saturio,
beyond the old stiff walls
of Soria, barbican
towards Aragon of the Castilian lands.
These poplars of the river, that chime
when the wind blows their dry leaves
to the sound of the water,
have in their bark the names of lovers,
initials and dates.
Aspens of love where yesterday
the branches were full of nightingales,
aspens that to-morrow will sing
under the scented wind of the springtime,
aspens of love by the water
that speeds and goes by dreaming,
aspens of the bank of the Duero,
come away with me.
[153]
Rosinante to the Road Again
VIII
Cold Soria, clear Soria,
key of the outlands,
with the warrior castle
in ruins beside the Duero,
and the stiff old walls,
and the blackened houses.
Dead city of barons
and soldiers and huntsmen,
whose portals bear the shields
of a hundred hidalgos ;
city of hungry greyhounds,
of lean greyhounds
that swarm
among the dirty lanes
and howl at midnight
when the crows caw
Cold Soria! The clock
of the Lawcourts has struck one*
Soria, city of Castile,
so beautiful under the moon.
IX
AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL
They put him away in the earth
a horrible July afternoon
under a sun of fire.
[154]
intonio Machado: Poet of Castile
A step from the open grave
grew roses with rotting petals
among geraniums of bitter fragrance,
red-flowered. The sky
a pale blue. A wind
hard and dry.
Hanging on the thick ropes*
the two gravediggers
let the coffin heavily
down into the grave.
It struck the bottom with a sharp sound,
solemnly, in the silence.
The sound of a coffin striking the earth
is something unutterably solemn.
The heavy clods broke into dust
over the black coffin.
A white mist of dust rose in the air
out of the deep grave.
And you, without a shadow now, sleep.
Long peace to your bones.
For aU time
you sleep a tranquil and a, real sleep.
[155]
Rosinante to the Road Again
x
THE IBERIAN GOD
Like the cross-bowman,
the gambler in the song,
the Iberian had an arrow for his god
when he shattered the grain with hail
and ruined the fruits of autumn;
and a gloria when he fattened
the barley and the oats
that were to make bread to-morrow.
"God of ruin,
I worship because I wait and because I fear.
I bend in prayer to the earth
a blasphemous heart.
"Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain,
I know your strength, I know my slavery.
Lord of the clouds in the east
that trample the country-side,
of dry autumns and late frosts
and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests !
"Lord of the iris in the green meadows
where the sheep graze,
Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw
and of the hut the whirlwind shatters,
your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth*
[156]
Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile
your warmth ripens the tawny grain,
and your holy hand, St. John's eve,
hardens the stone of the green olive.
"Lord of riches and poverty,
Of fortune and mishap,
who gives to the rich luck and idleness,
and pain and hope to the poor!
"Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel
of the year I have sown my sowing
that has an equal chance with the coins
of a gambler sown on the gambling-table!
"Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yes-
terday's blood,
two-faced of love and vengeance,
to you, dice cast into the wind,
goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise P
This man who insults God in his altars,
without more care of the frown of fate,
also dreamed of paths across the seas
and said : "It is God who walks upon the waters.**
Is it not he who put God above war,
beyond fate,
beyond the earth,
beyond the sea and death?
[157]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Did lie not give the greenest bough
of the dark-green Iberian oak
for God's holy bonfire,
and for love flame one with God?
But to-day . . . What does a day matter?
for the new household gods
there are plains in forest shade
and green boughs in the old oak-woods.
Though long the land waits
for the curved plough to open the first furrow,
there is sowing for God's grain
under thistles and burdocks and nettles.
What does a day matter? Yesterday waits
for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity;
men of Spain, neither is the past dead,
nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written.
Who has seen the face of the Iberian God?
I wait
for the Iberian man who with strong hands
will carve out of Castilian oak
The parched God of the grey land.
[158]
XII: A Catalan Poet
It is time -for sailing; tlie swallow has come chattering
and the mellow west wind; the meadows are already in
bloom; the sea is silent and the waves the rough winds pim-
meled. Up anchors and loose the hawsers, sailor, set every
stitch of canvas. This l y Priapos the harbor god, command
you, man, that you may sail for oil manner of lading.
(Leonidas in the Greek Anthology.)
/CATALONIA like Greece is a country of
^^ mountains and harbors, where the farmers
and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morn-
ing the creak of oars and the crackling of cord-
age as the great booms of the wing-shaped
sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts
of the fishermen's boats. Barcelona with its fine
harbor nestling under the towering slopes of
Montjuic has been a trading city since most an-
cient times. In the middle ages the fleets of its
stocky merchants were the economic scaffolding
which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the
great sea kingdom of the Aragonese. To this
day you can find on old buildings the arms of the
[159]
Rosinante to the Road Again
kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in
Mallorca and Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia
and Sicily and Naples. It follows that when
Catalonia begins to reemerge as a nucleus of
national consciousness after nearly four centur-
ies of subjection to Castile, poets speaking Cata-
lan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the moun-
tains and of the sea.
Yet this time the motor force is not the sail-
ing of white argosies towards the east. It is tex-
tile mills, stable, motionless, drawing about them
muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to
new arrogance the descendants of those stubborn
burghers who gave the kings of Aragon and of
Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story
of one king who was so chagrined by the tight-
pursed contrariness of the Cortes of Barcelona
that he died of a broken heart in full parliament
assembled.) This growth of industry during
the last century, coupled with the reawakening
of the whole Mediterranean, took form politi-
cally in the Catalan movement for secession from
Spain, and in literature in the resurrection of
Catalan thought and Catalan language.
[160]
A Catalan Poet
Naturally the first generation was not inter-
ested in the manufactures that were the dynamo
that generated the ferment of their lives. They
had first to state the emotions of the mountains
and the sea and of ancient heroic stories that had
been bottled up in their race during centuries
of inexpressiveness. For another generation per-
haps the symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs,
the whirring of looms, the dragon forms of smoke
spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance
will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sun-
nier, richer life of the huddled mobs of the slaves
of the machines. For the first men conscious of
their status as Catalans the striving was to make
permanent their individual lives in terms of polit-
ical liberty, of the mist-capped mountains and the
changing sea.
Of this first generation was Juan Maragall
who died in 1912, five years after the shooting of
Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in Bar-
celona writing for newspapers, as far as one
can gather, a completely peaceful well-married
existence, punctuated by a certain amount of
political agitation in the cause of the independ-
[161]
Rosinante to the Road Again
ence of Catalonia, the life of a placid and recog-
nized literary figure; fe/ wn mcfatre" the French
would have called him.
Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de
Mallorca, a young nobleman, a poet, a skilled
player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attain-
ment before the high-born and very stately lady
he had courted through many moonlight nights,
when her eye had chilled his quivering love sud-
denly and she had pulled open her bodice with
both hands and shown him her breasts, one white
and firm and the other swollen black and purple
with cancer. The horror of the sight of such
beauty rotting away before his eyes had turned
all his passion inward and would have made him
a saint had his ideas been more orthodox; as it
was the Blessed Ramon Lull lived to write many
mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which
he sought the love of God in the love of Earth
after the manner of the sufi of Persia. Event-
ually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with
the sages in some North African town. Some-
how the spirit of the tortured thirteenth-century
mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona
[162]
A Catalan Poet
journalist, whose life was untroubled by the im-
pact of events as could only be a life comprising
the last half of the nineteenth century. In Mar-
agaU's writings modulated in the lovely homely
language of the peasants and fishermen of Cat-
alonia, there flames again the passionate meta-
phor of Lull,
Here is a rough translation of one of his best
known poems:
At sunset time
drinking at the spring's edge
I drank down the secrets
of mysterious earth.
Deep in the runnel
I saw the stainless water
born out of darkness
for the delight of my mouth,
and it poured into my throat
and with its clear spurting
there filled me entirely
mellowness of wisdom.
When I stood straight and looked,
mountains and woods and meadows
seemed to me otherwise,
everything altered.
[163]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Above the great sunset
there already shone through the glowing
carmine contours of the clouds
the white sliver of the new moon.
It was a world in flower
and the soul of it was I.
I the fragrant soul of the meadows
that expands at flower-time and reaping-time.
I the peaceful soul of the herds
that tinkle half -hidden by the tall grass.
I the soul of the forest that sways in waves
like the sea, and has as far horizons.
And also I was the soul of the willow tree
that gives every spring its shade,
I the sheer soul of the cliffs
where the mist creeps up and scatters*
And the unquiet soul of the stream
that shrieks in shining waterfalls.
I was the blue soul of the pond
that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer.
I the soul of the all-moving wind
and the humble soul of opening flowers.
[164]
A Catalan Poet
I was the height of the high peaks - . .
The clouds caressed me with great gestures
and the wide love of misty spaces
clove to me, placid.
I felt the delightfulness of springs
born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers;
and in the ample quietude of horizons
I felt the reposeful sleep of storms.
And when the sky opened about me
and the sun laughed on my green planes
people, far off, stood still all day
staring at my sovereign beauty*
But I, full of the lust
that makes furious the sea and mountains
lifted myself up strongly through the sky
lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails . .
At sunset time
drinking at the spring's edge
I drank down the secrets
of mysterious earth.
The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and
yellow broom-flowers, and fishing boats with
lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise
[165]
Rosinante to the Road Again
towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the
eyes and the ears in all living perceptions until
the poison of other-worldliness wells up sud-
denly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic
full of echoes of old soul-torturing. In Mara-
galFs most expressive work, a sequence of poems
called El Comte Arnau, all this is synthesized.
These are from the climax.
All the voices of the earth
acclaim count Arnold
because from the dark trial
he has come back triumphant.
"Son of the earth, son of the earth,
count Arnold,
now ask, now ask
what cannot you do? 5 *
"Live, live, live forever,
I would never die:
to be like a wheel revolving;
to live with wine and a sword.**
"Wheels roll, roll,
but they count the years."
"Then I would be a rock
immobile to suns or storms.**
[166]
Catalan Poet
"Hock lives without life
forever impenetrable."
"Then the ever-moving sea
that opens a path for all things."
"The sea is alone? alone*
yon go accompanied."
"Then be the air when it flames
in the light of the deathless sun.**
"But air a.nd sun are loveless,
ignorant of eternity. 5 *
"Then to be man more than man
to be earth palpitant."
"You shall be wheel and rock,
you shall be the mist-veiled sea-
you shall be the air in flame,
you shall be the 'whirling stars,
you shall be man more than man
for you have the will for it.
You shall run the plains and hills,
all the earth that is so wide,
mounted on a horse of flame
you shall be tireless, terrible
a,s the tramp of the storms
[1673
Rosinante to the Road Again
All the voices of earth,
will cry out whirling 1 about yon.
They will call you spirit in torment
call you forever damned.**
Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa
asleep at the feet of naked Christ.
Arnold goes pacing a dark path;
there is silence among the mountains;
in front of him the rustling lisp of a river,
a pool . . . Then it is lost and soundless.
Arnold stands under the sheer portal.
He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa
and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone
at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil
without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless,
without any defense, there, sleeping * .
She had a great head of turbulent hair.
"How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.
She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little
a flush spreads over all her face
as if a dream had crept through her gently
until she laughs aloud very softly
with a tremulous flutter of the lips.
4C What amorous lips, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.
[168]
'A Catalan Poet
A great sigh swells through her, sleeping,
lite a seawave, and fades to stillness.
"What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa/*
thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently.
But when she opens her eyes he, awake,
tingling, carries her off in his arms.
When they burst out into the open fields
it is day.
But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy
the clear wellspring of sensation, and the poet,
beaten to his knees, writes:
And when the terror-haunted moment comes
to close these earthly eyes of mine,
open for me, Lord, other greater eyes
to look upon the immensity of your face.
But before that moment comes, through the me-
dium of an extraordinarily terse and unspoiled
language, a language that has not lost its earthy
freshness by mauling and softening at the hands
of literary generations, what a lilting crystal-
bright vision of things. It is as if the air of the
Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been
[169]
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hammered Into cadences. The verse is leaping
and free, full of echoes and refrains- The images
are sudden and unlabored like the images in the
Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebu-
chadnezzar's spell gets to his feet "like a bear
standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved off
the beach slide into the sea one by one "like vil-
lage girls joining a dance"; on a rough day the
smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats at the
harbor entrance/' There are phrases like "the
great asleepness of the mountains''; "a long sigh
like a seawave through her sleep"; "my speech
of her is like a flight of birds that lead your
glance into intense blue sky" ; "the disquieting un-
quiet sea." Perhaps it is that the eyes are sharp-
ened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant
changing forms of things into some intenser be-
yond. Perhaps it takes a hot intoxicating
draught of divinity to melt into such white fire
the various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly
joy is intenser for the beckoning flames of hell.
The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires
seems strangely out of another age. That came
[170]
'A Catalan Poet
home to me most strongly once, talking to a Cat-
alan after a mountain scramble In the eastern
end of Mallorca. We sat looking at the sea that
was violet with sunset, where the sails of the
homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow
of primroses. Behind us the hills were sharp
pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut
at one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive
oil and tomatoes and peppers and the muffled
sound of eggs being beaten. We were f ootsore,
hungry, and we talked about women and love.
And after all it was marriage that counted, he
told me at last, women's bodies and souls and the
love of them were all very well, but it was the
ordered life of a family, children, that counted;
the family was the immortal chain on which lives
were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying,
in that proud awefilled tone with which Latins
speak of creative achievement, "By our greatest
poet, Juan Maragall" :
Canta esposa, fila i canta
que el pati em faras suau
Quan Fesposa canta i fila
el casal s^adorm en pan,
[171]
Rosinante to the Road Again
It was hard explaining how all our desires lay
towards the coinpleter and completer affirming of
the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries
felt that the family was dead as a social unit,
that new cohesions were in the making.
"I want my liberty/' he broke in, "as much as
as Byron did, liberty of thought and action."
He was silent a moment; then he said simply,
"But I want a wife and children and a family,
mine, mine."
Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of
the window to tell us in soft Mallorquin that sup-
per was ready. She had a full brown face flushed
on the cheekbones and given triangular shape
like an El Greco madonna's face by the bright
blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. Her
breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Vic-
tory's under the sleek grey shawl as she leaned
from the window. In her eyes that were sea-grey
there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of
Penelope sitting beside her loom in a smoky-
raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a sail-
less sea. And for a moment I understood the
Catalan's phrase: the family was the chain on
[172]
A Catalan Poet
which lives were strung, and all of MaragalTs
lyricizing of wif ehood,
When the wife sits singing as she spins
all the house can sleep in peace.
From the fishermen's huts down the beach
came an intense blue smoke of fires; above the
soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the
chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of
sparrows in a city park at dusk. The day dis-
solved slowly in utter timelessness. And when
the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the
tall slanting sail folding suddenly as the wings
of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown face of
the man in the bow was the face of returning
Odysseus. It was not the continuity of men's
lives I felt, but their oneness. On that beach,
beside that sea, there was no time.
When we were eating in the whitewashed room
by the light of three brass olive oil lamps, I found
that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What
could I, who had come out of ragged and bar-
barous outlands, tell of the art of living to a man
who had taught me both system and revolt? So
[173]
Rosinante to the Road Again
am I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore
and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have always seemed
inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced
to bow before the rich cadences with which Juan
Maragall, Catalan, poet of the Mediterranean,
celebrates the familia,
And in Maragall's work it is always the Medi-
terranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and
the men who sailed on it in black ships with
bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Eu-
ripides and Pindar and Theocritus and in that
tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond
the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation
of German texts there is always the rhythm of
sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships
drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall,
beyond the graceful well-kept literary existence,
beyond wife and children and pompous demon-
strations in the cause of abstract freedom, there
is the sea lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,
actual, dangerous, wet.
In this day when we Americans are plunder-
ing the earth far and near for flowers and seeds
and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps
[174]
A Catalan Poet
vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich
and diverse and promiscuous so that the some-
what sickly plants of our own culture may burst
sappy and green through the steel and cement
and inhibitions of our lives, we should not for-
get that northwest corner of the Mediterranean
where the Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as
it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, whose rhythms
of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding
new permanence poetry richly ordered and
lucid.
To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fal-
len the heritage of the oar which the cunning
sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the earth-
shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of
them is Maragall.
[175]
XT//; Talk by the Road
ON the top step Telemachus found a man
sitting with his head in his hands moaning
"I Ay de mi!" over and over again.
"I beg pardon/' he said stiffly, trying to slip
by.
"Did yon see the function this evening, sir?"
asked the man looking up at Telemachus with
tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow
face with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close
and a little waxed moustache that had lost all its
swagger for the moment as he had the ends of
it in his mouth.
"What function?"
"In the theatre ... I am an artist, a^i actor."
He got to his feet and tried to twirl his ragged
moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out
his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the
large watchchain clinked, and invited Telema-
chus to have a cup of coffee with him.
[176]
Talk by the Road
They sat at the black oak table in front of the
fire. The actor told how there had been only
twelve people at his show. How was he to be
expected to make his living if only twelve people
came to see him? And the night before Carni-
val, too, when they usually got such a crowd.
He'd learned a new song especially for the oc-
casion, too good, too artistic for these pigs of
provincials.
"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!"
he cried out finally.
"How ruined?" asked Telemachus.
"The Zarzuela is dead. The days of the great
writers of zarzuela have gone never to return.
O the music, the lightness, the jolEty of the zar-
zuelas of my father's time! My father was a
great singer, a tenor whose voice was an enchant-
ment ... I know the princely life of a great
singer of zarg'wela . . . When a small boy I
lived it ... And now look at me!"
Telemachus thought how strangely out of
place was the actor's anaemic wasplike figure in
this huge kitchen where everything was dark,
strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here
[177]
Rosinante to the Road Again
and there a trace of red daub on them held up the
ceiling and bristled with square iron spikes from
which hung hams and sausages and white strands
of garlic. The table at which they sat was an
oak slab, black from smoke and generations of
spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles.
Over the fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a
glitter of grease on it where the soup had boiled
over. When one leaned to put a bundle of
sticks on the fire one could see up the chimney
an oblong patch of blackness spangled with stars.
On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched
figure of the padron, half asleep, a silk handker-
chief round his head, watching the coffee-pot.
"It was an elegant life, full of voyages," went
on the actor. "South America, Naples, Sicily,
and all over Spain. There were formal dinners,
receptions, ceremonial dress . . . Ladies of high
society came to congratulate us ... I played
all the child roles . . When I was fourteen a
duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at
me, ragged, dying of hunger not even able to
fill a theatre in this hog of a village. In Spain
they have lost all love of the art. All they want
[178]
Talk by the Road
is foreign importations, Viennese musical come-
dies, smutty farces from Paris . . ."
"With cognac or ruin?" the padron roared out
suddenly in his deep voice, swinging the coffee
pot up out of the fire.
"Cognac," said the actor. "What rotten cof-
fee!" He gave little petulant sniffs as he
poured sugar into his glass.
The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of
the dark end of the kitchen.
The actor took two handfuls of his hair and
yanked at them.
fC Ay my nerves!" he shrieked. The baby
wailed louder in spasm after spasm of yelling.
The actor jumped to his feet, "| Dolores,
Dolores, ven acd!"
After he had called several times a girl came
into the room padding softly on bare feet and
stood before him tottering sleepily in the fire-
light. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A
strand of black hair curled round her full throat
and spread raggedly over her breasts. She had
pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through
a rent in her coarse nightgown the fire threw
[179]
Rosinante to the Road Again
a patch of red glow curved like a rose petal about
one brown thigh.
" jQu6 desvergowzofa! . . How shameless!"
muttered the padron.
The actor was scolding her in a shrill endless
whine. The girl stood still without answering,
her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering.
Then she turned without a word and brought
the baby from the packing box in which he lay
at the end of the room, and drawing the blanket
about both her and the child crouched on her
heels very close to the flame with her bare feet
in the ashes. When the crying had ceased she
turned to the actor with a full-lipped smile and
said, "There's nothing the matter with him, Paco.
He's not even hungry. You woke him up,, the
poor little angel, talking so loud."
She got to her feet again, and with slow un-
speakable dignity walked back and forth across
the end of the room with the child at her breast.
Each time she turned she swung the trailing
blanket round with a sudden twist of her body
from the hips.
Telemachus watched her furtively, sniffing the
[180]
Talk by the Road
hot aroma of coffee and cognac from his glass,
and whenever she turned the muscles of his body
drew into tight knots from joy.
ff Es buena cJiica. . . . She's a nice kid, from
Malaga. I picked her up there. A little stupid.
. . . But these days. . ." the actor was saying
with much shrugging of the shoulders. "She
dances well, but the public doesn't like her. No
tiene cara de parisiana. She hasn't the Parisian
air. . . . But these days, vamos, one can't be too
fastidious. This taste for French plays, French
women, French cuisine, it's ruined the Spanish
theatre."
The fire flared crackling. Telemachus sat sip-
ping his coffee waiting for the unbearable delight
of the swing of the girl's body as she turned
to pace back towards him across the room.
[181]
XIV: Benaventes Madrid
ALL the gravel paths of the Plaza Santa
Ana were encumbered with wicker chairs.
At one corner seven blind musicians all in a row,
with violins, a cello, guitars and a mournful cor-
net, toodled and wheezed and twiddled through
the "Blue Danube." At another a crumpled old
man, with a monkey dressed in red silk drawers
on his shoulder, ground out "la Paloma" from a
hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a
fountain sparkled in the yellow light that
streamed horizontally from the cafes fuming
with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square,
and ragged guttersnipes dipped their legs in
the slimy basin round about it, splashing one
another, railing like little colts in the grass.
From the cafes and the wicker chairs and tables,
clink of glasses and dominoes, patter of voices,
scuttle of waiters with laden trays, shouts of men
selling shrimps, prawns, fried potatoes, water-
[182]
Benavente's Madrid
melon, nuts in little cornucopias of red 3 green,
or yellow paper. Light gleamed on the buff-
colored disk of a table in front of me, on the
rims of two beer-mugs, in the eyes of a bearded
man with an aquiline nose very slender at the
bridge who leaned towards me talking in a deep
even voice, telling me in swift lisping Castilian
stories of Madrid. First of the Madrid of Felipe
Cuarto: corridas in the Plaza Mayor, auto da fe,
pictures by Velasquez on view under the arcade
where now there is a doughnut and coffee shop,
pompous coaches painted vermilion, cobalt,
gilded, stuffed with ladies in vast bulge of dam-
ask and brocade, plumed cavaliers, pert ogling
pages, lurching and swaying through the foot-
deep stinking mud of the streets; plays of Cald-
eron and Lope presented in gardens tinkling with
jewels and sword-ehaiiis where ladies of the court
flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced
lovers. Then Goya's Madrid : riots in the Puerta
del Sol, majas leaning from balconies, the fair
of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged
guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots ; tramp of
the stiffnecked grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous
[183]
Rosinante to the Road Again
little men in short-tailed wigs dying the dos de
Mayo with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips
under the brick arch of the arsenal; frantic car-
nivals of the Burial of the Sardine; naked backs
of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding under
the hoop skirts of the queen. Then the romantic
Madrid of the thirties, Larra, Becquer, Espron-
ceda, Byronic gestures, vigils in graveyards,
duels, struttings among the box-alleys of the Re-
tiro, pale young men in white stocks shooting
themselves in attics along the Calle Mayor.
"And now," the voice became suddenly gruff with
anger, "look at Madrid. They closed the Cafe
Suizo, they are building a subway, the Castellana
looks more like the Champs Elysees every day
. , . It's only on the stage that you get any rem-
nant of the real Madrid. Benavente is the last
madrileno. Tiene el sentido de la castizo. He
has the sense of the . . ." all the end of the
evening went to the discussion of the meaning of
the famous word ff ca$tizo"
The very existence of such a word in a lan-
guage argues an acute sense of style, of the man-
ner of doing things. Like all words of real im-
[184]
Benaventes Madrid
port its meaning is a gamut, a section of a spect-
rum rather than something fixed and irrevocable.
The first implication seems to be "according to
Hoyle," following tradition: a neatly turned
phrase, an essentially CastiKan cadence, is
castizo; a piece of pastry or a poem in the old
tradition are castizo, or a compliment daintily
turned, or a cloak of the proper fullness with the
proper red velvet-bordered lining gracefully
flung about the ears outside of a cafe. Lo castizo
is the essence of the local, of the regional, the last
stronghold of Castilian arrogance, refers not to
the empty shell of traditional observances but
to the very core and gesture of them. Ultimately
lo castizo means all that is salty, savourous of the
red and yellow hills and the bare plains and the
deep arroyos and the dust-colored towns full of
palaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-
colored cloaks and the mule-drivers with blank-
ets over their shoulders, and the discursive lean-
faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafes
and casinos, and the stout dowagers with mantil-
las over their gleaming black hair walking to
church in the morning with missals clasped in fat
[185]
Rosinante to the Road Again
hands, all that Is acutely indigenous, Iberian, in
the life of Castile.
In the flood of industrialism that for the last
twenty years has swelled to obliterate landmarks,
to bring all the world to the same level of nickel-
plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been
the refuge of lo castizo. It has been a theatre of
manners and local types and customs, of observa-
tion and natural history, where a rather special-
ized well-trained audience accustomed to satire
as the tone of daily conversation was tickled by
any portrayal of its quips and cranks. A tradi-
tion of character-acting grew up nearer that of
the Yiddish theatre than of any other stage we
know in America. Benavente and the brothers
Quintero have been the playwrights who most
typified the school that has been in vogue since
the going out of the drame passionel style of
Echegaray. At present Benavente as director of
the Teatro National is unquestionably the lead-
ing figure. Therefore it is very fitting that Bena-
vente should be in life and works of all madri-
lenos the most castizo.
Later, as we sat drinking milk in la Gran j a
[186]
Eenaventes Madrid
after a couple of hours of a shabby third-genera-
tion Viennese musical show at the Apollo, my
friend discoursed to me of the manner of life
of the mudrileno in general and of Don Jacinto
Benavente in particular. Round eleven or twelve
one got up, took a cup of thick chocolate, strolled
on the Castellana under the chestnut trees or
looked in at one's office in the theatre. At two
one lunched. At three or so one sat a while drink-
ing coffee or anis in the Gato Negro, where the
waiters have the air of cabinet ministers and
listen to every word of the rather languid dis-
cussions on art and letters that while away the
afternoon hours. Then as it got towards five
one drifted to a matinee, if there chanced to be a
new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in
the new Frenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Din-
ner carne along round nine; from there one went
straight to the theatre to see that all went well
with the evening performance. At one the day
culminated in a famous tertulia at the Cafe de
Lisboa, where all the world met and argued and
quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epi-
[187]
Rosinante to the Road Again
grams at tables stacked with coffee glasses amid
spiral reek of cigarette smoke.
"But when were the plays written?" I asked.
My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons,"
he said, "and en route, and in bed, and while be-
ing shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedy
between biscuits at breakfast . . . And now
that the Metro's open, it's a great help. I know
a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy,
sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del
Sol and Cuatro Caminos!"
"But Madrid's being spoiled," he went on
sadly, "at least from the point of view of lo
castizo. In the last generation all one saw of
daylight were sunset and dawn, people used to
go out to fight duels where the Residencia de
Estudiantes is now, and they had real tertulias^
tertidias where conversation swaggered and par-
ried and lunged, sparing nothing, laughing at
everything, for all the world like our unique
Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio.
*Yo a las cabanas baje,
yo a los palacios subi,
y los claustros escale,
[188]
Benaventes Madrid
y en todas paries deje
memorias amargas de mi.*
Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of
Carlist duchesses, and God knows the crows and
the cloisters weren't let off scot free. And like
good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if
laughter did leave bitter memories, and were
willing to wait till their deathbeds to reconcile
themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our
generation, they all went solemn in their cradles
. . . Except for the theatre people, always ex-
cept for the theatre people! We of the theatres
will be castizo to the death."
As we left the cafe, I to go home to bed, my
friend to go on to another tertulia, he stood for a
moment looking back among the tables and
glasses.
"What the Agora was to the Athenians/ 3 he
said, and finished the sentence with an expressive
wave of the hand.
It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as
suspicious of neighbors as if they still lived in the
forests of Finland, city-dwellers for a pal-
[189]
Rosinante to the Road Again
try thirty generations, to understand the pub-
licity, the communal quality of life in the region
of the Mediterranean. The first thought when
one gets up is to go out of doors to see what
people are talking of, the last thing before go-
ing to bed is to chat with the neighbors about the
events of the day. The home, cloistered off, ex-
clusive, can hardly be said to exist. Instead of
the nordic hearth there is the courtyard about
which the women sit while the men are away at
the marketplace. In Spain this social life cen-
ters in the cafe and the casino. The modern
theatre is as directly the offshoot of the cafe as
the old theatre was of the marketplace where peo-
ple gathered in front of the church porch to see
an interlude or mystery acted by travelling play-
ers in a wagon. The people who write the plays,
the people who act them and the people who see
them spend their spare time smoking about mar-
bletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those
too poor to buy a drink stand outside in groups
the sunny side of squares. Constant talk about
everything that may happen or had happened or
will happen manages to butter the bread of life
[190]
Benaventes Madrid
pretty evenly with passion and thought and sig-
nificance, but one loses the chunks of intensity.
There is little chance for the burst dams that
suddenly flood the dry watercourse of emotion
among more inhibited, less civilized people. Gen-
erations upon generations of townsmen have
made of life a well-dredged canal, easy-flowing,
somewhat shallow.
It follows that the theatre under such condi-
tions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift
caricaturing, improvised, unself conscious ; at its
worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate
strain almost never. In Echegaray there are
hecatombs, half the characters habitually go in-
sane in the last act ; tremendous barking but no
bite of real intensity. Benavente has recaptured
some of Lope de Vega's marvellous quality of
adventurous progression. The Quinteros write
domestic comedies full of whim and sparkle and
tenderness. But expression always seems too
easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the
utter self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama.
The Spanish theatre plays on the nerves and intel-
[191]
Rosinante to the Road Again
lect rather than on the great harpstrings of emo-
tion In which all of life is drawn taut.
At present in Madrid even cafe life is reced-
ing before the exigencies of business and the
hardly excusable mania for imitating English and
American manners. Spain is. undergoing great
changes in its relation to the rest of Europe, to
Latin America, in its own internal structure.
Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and
prosperity, the city is fast losing ground as the
nucleus of the life and thought of Spanish-speak-
ing people. The madrileno, lean, cynical, un-
scrupulous, nocturnal, explosive with a curious
sort of febrile wit is becoming extinct. His thea-
tre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be
ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and
stodginess. Prices of seats, up to 1918 very low,
rise continually; the artisans, apprentice boys,
loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the back-
bone of the audiences can no longer afford the
theatre and have taken to the movies instead.
Managers spend money on scenery and costumes
as a way of attracting fashionables. It has be-
come quite proper for women to go to the theatre,
[192]
Benavente's Madrid
Benavente's plays thus acquire double signifi-
cance as the summing up and the chief expression
of a movement that has reached its hey-day, from
which the sap has already been cut off. It is,
indeed, the thing to disparage them for their
very finest quality, the vividness with which they
express the texture of Madrid, the animated
humorous mordant conversation about cafe
tables: lo castizo.
The first play of his I ever saw, "Gente Cono-
cida" impressed me, I remember, at a time when
I understood about one word in ten and had to
content myself with following the general modu-
lation of things, as carrying on to the stage, the
moment the curtain rose, the very people, intona-
tions, phrases, that were stirring in the seats
about me. After the first act a broad-bosomed
lady in black silk leaned back in the seat beside
me sighing comfortably ff Que castizo es este Ben-
avente" and then went into a volley of approving
chirpings. The full import of her enthusiasm did
not come to me until much later when I read the
play in the comparative light of a surer knowl-
edge of Castilian, and found that it was a most
[193]
Rosinante to the Road Again
vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of that
very dowager's own circle, a showing up of the
predatory spite of "people of consequence."
Here was this society woman, who in any other
country would have been indignant, enjoying the
annihilation of her kind. On such willingness
to play the game of wit, even of abuse, without
too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of
social intercourse, is founded all the popularity
of Benavente's writing. Somewhere in Hugo's
Spanish grammar j^God save the mark!) is a
proverb to the effect that the wind of Madrid is
so subtle that it will kill a man without putting
out a candle. The same, at their best, can be said
of Benavente's satiric comedies :
El viento de Madrid es tan sutil
que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil.
From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a
slimy shrunken stream usually that flows almost
hidden under clothes lines where billow the under-
garments of all Madrid, in certain lights you
can recapture almost entire the silhouettte of the
city as Goya has drawn it again and again; clots
[194]
Benavente's Madrid
of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened
hill towards the dome of San Francisco El
Grande, then an undulating skyline with cupo-
las and baroque belfries jutting among the sud-
den lights and darks of the clouds. Then per-
haps the sun will light up with a spreading shaft
of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a
biscuit manufacturer's warehouse, a row of white
blocks of apartments along the edge of town to
the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal
Madrid, it will be a type city in Europe in the
industrial era that shines in the sun beyond the
blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes on
the lines. So will it be in a few years with mod-
ernized Madrid, with the life of cafes and paseos
and theatres. There will be moments when in
American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms,
shiny restaurants built in copy of those of Bue-
nos Aires, someone who has read his Benavente
will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old
intonations, of witty parries, of noisy bombastic
harangues and feel for one pentecostal moment
the full and by that time forgotten import of lo
castizo.
[195]
XV: Talk by the Road
sun next morning was tingling warm.
<* Telemachus strode along with a taste of
a milky bowl of coffee and crisp churros in his
mouth and a fresh wind in his hair ; his feet rasped
pleasantly on the gravel of the road. Behind him
the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain,
roofs clustering, huddling more and more under
the shadow of the beetling church, and the tower
becoming leaner and darker against the steamy
clouds that oraed in billowing tiers over the
mountains to the north. Crows flapped about
the fields where here and there the dark figures
of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long
slope. On the telegraph wires at a bend in the
road two magpies sat, the sunlight glinting, when
they stirred, on the white patches on their wings,
Telemachus felt well-rested and content with
himself.
"After all mother knows best/ 5 he was think-
[196]
Talk by the Road
ing. "That foolish Lyaeus will come dragging
himself into Toledo a week from now."
Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso
he had seen the day before in Illeseas. Don
Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a
long red sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and
a small leather bottle of wine on the sward in
front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark of
which he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey
horse.
"Hola, my friend," cried Don Alonso, "still
bent on Toledo?"
"How soon can I get there?"
"Soon enough to see the castle of San Ser-
vando against the sunset. We will go together.
You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the
honor of eating something, you must be hungry."
Thereupon Don Alonso handed Telemachus the
sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with.
"How early you must have started."
They sat together munching bread and saus-
age to which the sweet pepper mashed into it
gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head
[197]
Rosinante to the Road Again
thrown back, let a little wine squirt into their
mouths from the bottle.
Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of saus-
age held between bread by tips of long grey fin-
gers.
"You are now, my friend, in the heart of
Castile. Look, nothing but live-oaks along the
gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under a tre-
mendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In
Madrid there is not so much sky, is there? In
your country there is not so much sky? Look at
the huge volutes of those clouds. This is a set-
ting for thoughts as mighty in contour as the
white cumulus over the Sierra, such as come into
the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-strid-
ing . . ." Don Alonso put a finger to his high
yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a potential
beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant,
vivid, robust ... I don't say it is in me. My
only merit lies in recognizing it, formulating it,
for I am no more than a thinker ... But the
day will come when in this gruff land we shall
have flower and fruit."
Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head
[198]
Talk Ey the Road
thrown back against the twisted trunk of the
olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet,
and after rummaging a moment in the little knap-
sack that hung over his shoulder, produced ab-
sent-mindedly a handful of small white candies
the shape of millstones which he stared at in a
puzzled way for some seconds.
"After all," he went on, "they make famous
sweets in these old Castilian towns. These are
melindres. Have one . . . When people, d'you
know, are kind to children, there are things to be
expected."
"Certainly children are indulgently treated in
Spain," said Telemachus, his mouth full of al-
mond paste. "They actually seem to like chil-
dren!"
A cart drawn by four mules tandem led by a
very minute donkey with three strings of blue
beads round his neck was jingling past along the
road. As the canvas curtains of the cover were
closed the only evidence of the driver was a sleepy
song in monotone that trailed with the dust
cloud after the cart. While they stood by the
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roadside watching the joggle of it away from
them down the road, a flushed face was poked out
from between the curtains and a voice cried
"Hello, Tel!"
"It's Lyaeus," cried Telemachus and ran after
the cart bubbling with curiosity to hear his com-
panion's adventures.
With a jangle of mulebells and a hoarse shout
from the driver the cart stopped, and Lyaeus
tumbled out. His hair was mussed and there
were wisps of hay on his clothes. He immedi-
ately stuck his head back in through the cur-
tains. By the time Telemachus reached him the
cart was tinkling its way down the road again
and Lyaeus stood grinning, blinking sleepy eyes
in the middle of the road, in one hand a skin of
wine, in the other a canvas bag.
"What ho!" cried Telemachus.
"Figs and wine," said Lyaeus. Then, as Don
Alonso came up leading his grey horse, he added
in an explanatory tone, "I was asleep in the
cart."
"Well?" said Telemachus.
"O it's such a long story," said Lyaeus.
[200]
Talk by the Road
Walking beside them, Don Alonso was recit-
ing into his horse's ear:
*Sigue la vana sombra, el bien fingido.
El hombre esta entregado
al sueiio, de su suerte no cuidando,
y con paso callado
el cielo vueltas dando
las boras del vivir le va hurtando.'
"Whose is that?" said Lyaeus.
"The revolving sky goes stealing his hours of
life. . . , But I don't know," said Don Alonso,
"perhaps like you, this Spain of ours makes
ground sleeping as well as awake. What does a
day matter? The driver snores hut the good
mules jog on down the appointed road."
Then without another word he jumped on his
horse and with a smile and a wave of the hand
trotted off ahead of them.
[201]
XVI: A Funeral in Madrid
Doce dias son pasados
despues que el Cid acdbdra
aderezavise las gentes
para salir a batalla
con Bucar ese rey moro
y contra la su canalla.
Cuando fuera media noche
el cuerpo asi como estaba
le ponen sobre Babieca
y al caballo lo atoban.
AND when the army sailed out of Valencia
the Moors of King Bucar fled before the
dead body of the Cid and W thousand of them
were drowned trying to scramble into their ships,
among them twenty kings, and the Christians
got so much booty of gold and silver among the
tents that the poorest of them became a rich man.
Then the army continued, the dead Cid riding
each day's journey on his horse, across the dry
mountains to Sant Pedro de Cardena in Castile
where the king Don Alfonso had come from To-
[202]
A Funeral in Madrid
ledo, and he seeing the Cid's face still so beauti-
ful and his beard so long and his eyes so flaming
ordered that instead of closing the body in a
coffin with gold nails they should set it upright
in a chair beside the altar, with the sword Tizona
in its hand. And there the C|d stayed more than
ten years.
M,and6 que no se enterrase
sino que el cuerpo arreado
se ponga junto al altar
y a Tizona en la su mano;
asf estuvo mucho tiempo
que fueron mas de diez anos.
In the pass above people were skiing. On the
hard snow of the road there were orange-skins*
A victoria had just driven by in which sat a bored
inflated couple much swathed in furs.
"Where on earth are they going?"
"To the Puerta de Navecerrada/' my friend
answered.
"But they look as if they'd be happier having
tea at Molinero's than paddling about up there
in the snow."
"They would be, but it's the style . . . winter
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sports . . . and all because a lithe little brown
man who died two years ago liked the moun-
tains. Before him no madrileno ever knew the
Sierra existed/'
"Who was that?' 5
"Don Francisco Giner."
That afternoon when it was already getting
dark we were scrambling wet, chilled, our faces
lashed by the snow, down through drifts from a
shoulder of Siete Picos with the mist all about
us and nothing but the track of a flock of sheep
for a guide. The light from a hut pushed a long
gleaming orange finger up the mountainside.
Once inside we pulled off our shoes and stockings
and toasted our feet at a great fireplace round
which were flushed faces, glint of teeth in laugh-
ter, schoolboys and people from the university
shouting and declaiming, a smell of tea and wet
woolens. Everybody was noisy with the rather
hysterical excitement that warmth brings after
exertion in cold mountain air. Cheeks were pur-
ple and tingling. A young man with fuzzy yel-
low hair told m a story in French about the
Emperor of Morocco, and produced a tin of
[204]
A Funeral in Madrid
potted blackbirds which it came out were from
the said personage's private stores. Unending
fountains of tea seethed in two smoke-blackened
pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut among
leaping shadows were piles of skis and the door,
which occasionally opened to let in a new wet
snowy figure and shut again on skimming snow-
gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous
jollity. Train time came suddenly and we ran
and stumbled and slid the miles to the station
through the dark, down the rocky path.
In the third-class carriage people sang songs
as the train jounced its way towards the plain
and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked
me if I knew it was Don Francisco who had had
that hut built for the children of the Institution
Libre de Insenanza. Little by little he told me
the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner
de los Rios and the revolution of 1873, a story
like enough to many others in the annals of the
nineteenth century movement for education, but
in its overtones so intimately Spanish and individ-
ual that it came as the explanation of many
things I had been wondering about and gave me
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Rosinante to the Road Again
an inkling of some of the origins of a rather
special mentality I had noticed in people I knew
about Madrid.
Somewhere in the forties a professor of the
Universidad Central, Sanz del Rio, was sent to
Germany to study philosophy on a government
scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual
coma that had followed the failure of the Cortes
of Cadiz and the restoration of "Fernando Sep-
timo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last
flame of romantic revolt, had shot himself for
love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg,
Sanz del Rio found dying Krause, the first arch-
priest who stood interpreting between Kant and
the world. When he returned to Spain he re-
fused to take up his chair at the university say-
ing he must have time to think out his problems,
and retired to a tiny room a room so dark that
they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder
under the window in the town of Illescas, where
was another student, Greco's San Ildefonso.
There he lived several years in seclusion. When
he did return to the university it was to refuse to
make the profession of political and religious
[206]
A Funeral in Madrid
faith required by a certain prime minister named
Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his
disciples. At the same time Francisco Giner
de los Bios, then a young man who had just
gained an appointment with great difficulty be-
cause of his liberal ideas, resigned out of solidar-
ity with the rest. In .1868 came the liberal rev-
olution which was the political expression of this
whole movement, and all these professors were
reinstated. Until the restoration of the Bour-
bons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization,
Europeanization.
Returned to power Orovio lost no time in re-
publishing his decrees of a profession of faith.
Giner, Ascarate, Salmeron and several others
were arrested and exiled to distant fortresses
when they protested ; their friends declared them-
selves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and many
other professors resigned, so that the university
was at one blow denuded of its best men. From
this came the idea of founding a free university
which should be supported entirely by private
subscription. From that moment the life of
Giner de los Rfos was completely entwined with
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the growth of the Institution Libre de Inse-
nanza, which developed in the course of a few
years into a coeducational primary school. And
directly or indirectly there is not a single out-
standing figure in Spanish life to-day whose de-
velopment was not largely influenced by this
dark slender baldheaded old man with a white
beard whose picture one finds on people's writ-
ing desks.
. . . Oh, si, llevad, amigos,
su cuerpo a la montaiia
a los azules montes
del ancho Guadarrama,
wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado and I rather
think Machado is the pupil whose name will live
the longest after Don Francisco's death in
1915.
. . . Yes, carry, friends
his body to the hills
to the blue peaks
of the wide Guadarrama.
There are deep gulches
of green pines where the wind sings.
There is rest for his spirit
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A Funeral in Madrid
under a cold live oat
in loam full of thyme, where play
golden butterflies . . .
There the master one day
dreamed new flowerings for Spain.
These are fragments from an elegy by Juan
Ramon Jimenez, another poet-pupil of Don
Francisco :
"Don Francisco. ... It seemed that he summed
up all that is tender and keen in life: flowers, flames,
birds, peaks, children. . . . Now, stretched on his bed,
like a frozen river that perhaps still flows under the
ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence. . . .
He was like a living statue of himself, a statue of
earth, of wind, of water, of fire. He had so freed
himself from the husk of every day that talking to
him we might have thought we were talking to his
image. Yes, One would have said he wasn't going
to die: that he had already passed, without anybody's
knowing it, beyond death; that he was with us for-
ever, like a spirit.
.
"In the little door of the bedroom one already feels
well-being. A trail of the smell of thyme and violets
that comes and goes with the breeze from the open
window leads like a delicate hand towards where he
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lies. . . . Peace. All death has done has been to in-
fuse the color of his skin with a deep violet veiling
of ashes.
"What a suave smell, and how excellent death is
here! No rasping essences, none of the exterior of
blackness and crepe. All this is white and uncluttered,
like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like the white-
washed portal of some garden in the south. All just
as it was. Only he who was there has gone.
"The day is fading, with a little wind that has a
premonition of spring. In the window panes is a con-
fused mirroring of rosy clouds. The blackbird, the
blackbird that he must have heard for thirty years,
that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead,
has come to see if he's listening. Peace. The bed-
room and the garden strive quietly light against light :
the brightness of the bedroom is stronger and glows out
into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up into the
sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of
a tree and sits there twittering. In the shadow below
the blackbird whistles once more. Now and then one
seems to hear the voice that is silenced forever.
"How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a
spring, reading under a tree, like letting the stream
of a lyric river carry one away. . . . And one feels
like never moving: like plucking to infinity, as one
might tear roses to pieces, these white full hours ; like
[210]
A Funeral In Madrid
clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal
twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty.
" 'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that
one may know, opposite that other sign 'Catholic
Cemetery/ so that one may also know.
"He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so op-
posed to the smiling savourous poetry of his spirit. But
it had to be. He'll still hear the blackbirds of the famil-
iar garden. 'After all,* says Cossio, 'I don*t think
he'll be sorry to spend a little while with Don Ju-
lian. . . .*
"Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the
earth with thyme ; on the coffin they have thrown roses,
narcissus, violets. There comes, lost, an aroma of
last evening, a bit of the bedroom from which, they
took so much away. . . .
"Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full
of wind drag frozen shadows across us, and through
them flying low, black grackles. In the distance Gua-
darrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts crystals of cubed
white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second in the
sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish,
then lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies
away. . . .
"Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and for-
getfulness. . . . Silence. In the silence, the voice of a
child walking through the fields, the sound of a sob
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hidden among the tombstones, the wind, the broad wind
of these days. . . .
"Pve seen occasionally a fire put out with earth.
Innumerable little tongues spurted from every side. A
pupil of his who was a mason made for this extinguished
fire its palace of mud on a piece of earth two friends
kept free. He has at the head a euonymus, young
-and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts
with coming spring, an acacia. . . ,"
Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas,
are scattered sparsely, tight round heads of blue
green, over hills that in summer are yellow like
the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo
was one of Don Francisco's favorite walks, out
past the jail, .where over the gate is written an
echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity
the criminal," past the palace of Moncloa with
its stately abandoned gardens, and out along the
Manzanares by a road through the royal domain
where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs
of "Beware the mantraps," then up a low hill
from which one sees the Sierra Guadarrama piled
up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-
peaks above long blue foothills and all the fore-
[212]
A Funeral In Madrid
ground rolling land full of clumps of encinas,
and at last into the little village with its barracks
and its dilapidated convent and its planetrees in
front of the mansion Charles V built. It was
under an encina that I sat all one long morning
reading up in reviews and textbooks on the the-
ory of law, the life and opinions of Don Fran-
cisco. In the moments when the sun shone the
heat made the sticky cistus bushes with the glis-
tening white flowers all about me reek with pung-
ence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a
chill of snow-slopes from the mountains and a
passionless indefinite fragrance of distances. At
intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish im-
portunate manner from the boxlike convent on
the hill opposite. I was reading an account of the
philosophical concept of monism, cudgelling my
brain with phrases. And his fervent love of na-
ture made the master evoke occasionally in class
this beautiful image of the great poet and philos-
opher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the
spirit of nature contemplates itself"; and then
having qualified with a phrase Schilling's expres-
sion, he would turn on those who see in nature
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Rosinante to the Road Again
manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinc-
tive, and offer for meditation this saying of
Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as
natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one
Being, all is in the Idea and for the Idea, the lat-
ter being understood in the way Platonic sub-
stantialism has been interpreted ..."
In the grass under my book were bright fronds
of moss, among which very small red ants per-
formed prodigies of mountaineering, while along
tramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly,
glinting when the light struck them. The smell
of cistus was intense, hot, full of spices as the
narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In
the distance the mountains piled up in zones olive
green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine, white. A
cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book.
Thought and passion, reflection and instinct, af-
fections, emotions, impulses collaborate in the
rule of custom, which is revealed not in words de-
clared and promulgated in view of future con-
duct, but in the act itself, tacit, taken for
granted, or, according to the energetic expres-
sion of the Digest: rebus et factis. Over "factis,"
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A Funeral in Madrid
sat a little green and purple fly with the body
curved under at the table. I wondered vaguely
if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it
was clear to me that these books, these dusty
philosophical phrases, these mortuary articles by
official personages were dimming the legend in
my mind, taking the brilliance out of the indi-
rect but extraordinarily personal impact of the
man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set
him up in the church with his sword in his hand,
for all men to see. What sort of legend would
a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his
theory of the angle of machicolations have gen-
erated in men's minds? And what can a saint or
a soldier or a founder of institutions leave behind
him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the
Franciscans that one remembers Francis of
AssisL
And the curious thing about the legend of a
personality is that it may reach the highest fer-
vor without being formulated. It is something
by itself that stands behind anecdotes, death-
notices, elegies.
In Madrid at the funeral of another of the
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great figures of nineteenth century Spain, Perez
Galdos, I stood on the curb beside a large-
mouthed youth with a flattened toadlike face,
who was balancing a great white-metal jar of
milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and
the carriages full of flowers had just passed. The
street in front of us was a slow stream of people
very silent, their feet shuffling, shuffling, feet in
patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toed
shoes, * pointed-toed shoes, alpargatas, canvas
sandals; people along the sides seemed unable to
resist the suction of it, joined in unostentatiously
to follow if only a few moments the procession
of the legend of Don Benito. The boy with the
milk turned to me and said how lucky it was they
were burying Galdos, he'd have an excuse for
being late for the milk. Then suddenly he
pulled his cap off and became enormously excited
and began offering cigarettes to everyone round
about. He scratched his head and said in the
voice of a Saul stricken on the road to Damas-
cus: "How many books he must have written,
that gentleman! /Cdspita! ... It makes a fel-
low sorry when a gentleman like that dies/' and
[216]
A Funeral in Madrid
shouldering Ms pail, his blue tunic fluttering in
the wind, he joined the procession.
Like the milk boy I found myself joining the
procession of the legend of Giner de los Rios.
That morning under the encina I closed up the
volumes on the theory of law and the bulletins
with their death-notices and got to my feet and
looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo and
thought of the little lithe baldheaded man with
a white beard like the beard in El Greco's por-
trait of Covarrubias, who had taught a genera-
tion to love the tremendous contours of their
country, to climb mountains and bathe in cold
torrents, who was the first, it almost seems, to
feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a life-
time of courageous unobtrusive work managed
to stamp all the men and women whose lives re-
motely touched his with the seal of his personality.
Born in Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia
of a family that came from Velez-Malaga, a white
town near the sea in the rich fringes of the Sierra
Nevada, he had the mental agility and the scep-
tical tolerance and the uproarious good nature
of the people of that region, the sobriety and
[217]
Rosinante to the Road Again
sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism
became a definite part of the creed of the hopeful
discontented generations that are gradually, for
better or for worse, remoulding Spaiiv His
nostalgia of the north, of fjords where fir trees
hang over black tidal waters, of blonde people
cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled
towns, became the gospel of Europeanization, of
wholesale destruction of all that was individual,
savage, African in the Spanish tradition, Mebus
et factis. And yet none of the things and acts
do much to explain the peculiar radiance of his
memory, the jovial tenderness with which people
tell one about him. The immanence of the man
is such that even an outsider, one who like the
milk boy at the funeral of Galdos meets the pro-
cession accidentally with another errand in his
head, is drawn in almost without knowing it. It's
impossible to think of him buried in a box in un-
consecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In
Madrid, in the little garden of the Institution
where he used to teach the children, in front of
a certain open fire in a certain house at El Pardo
where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used
[218]
A Funeral in Madrid
to half expect to meet him, that some friend
would take me to see him as they took people to
see Cid in San Pedro de Cardena.
Cara tiene de hermosura
muy hermosa y colorada;
los ojos igtial abiertos
muy apuesta la su barba
Non parece que esta muerto
antes vivo semejaba.
II
Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently
condemned to fifteen years' imprisonment for
lese majeste for some remark made in an article
published in a Valencia paper, no attempt has
been made either to make him serve the term or
to remove him from the chair of Greek at the
University of Salamanca. Which proves some-
thing about the efficiency of the stand Giner de
los Rios and his friends made fifty years hefore.
Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary at-
tempt of August, 1917, the removal of Bestiero
from his chair caused so many of the faculty to
resign and such universal protest that he was re-
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Rosinante to the Road Again
instated although an actual member of the revo-
lutionary committee and at that time under sen-
tence for life. In 1875 after the fall of the
republic it had been in the face of universal popu-
lar reaction that the Krausistas founded their
free university. The lump is leavened.
But TJnamuno. A Basque from the country
of Loyola, living in Salamanca in the highest
coldest part of the plateau of old Castile, in
many senses the opposite of Giner de los Rios,
who was austere as a man on a long pleasant walk
doesn't overeat or overdrink so that the walk
may be longer and pleasanter, while Unamuno
is austere religiously, mystically. Giner de los
Rios was the champion of life, Unamuno is the
champion of death. Here is his creed, one of his
creeds, from the preface of the Vida de Don
Qmjote y Sancho:
"There is no future: there is never a future. This
thing they call the future is one of the greatest lies. To-
day is the real future. What will we be to-morrow?
There is no to-morrow. What about us to-day 9 now ;
that is the only question.
"And as for to-day, all these nincompoops are thor-
[220]
A Funeral in Madrid
oughly satisfied because they exist to-day, mere exist-
ence is enough for them. Existence, ordinary naked
existence fills their whole soul. They feel nothing be-
yond existence.
"But do they exist? Really exist? I think not,
because if they did exist, if they really existed, exist-
ence would be suffering for them and they wouldn't
content themselves with it. If they really and truly
existed in time and space they would suffer not being
of eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this pas-
sion, what is it but the passion of God in us? God
who suffers in us from our temporariness and finitude,
that divine suffering will burst all the puny bonds of
logic with which they try to tie down their puny
memories and their puny hopes, the illusion of their
past and the illusion of their future.
O 6
"Your Quixotic madness has made you more than
once speak to me of Quixotism as the new religion.
And I tell you that this new religion you propose to
me, if it hatched, would have two singular merits. One
that its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote not Cer-
vantes probably wasn't a real man of flesh and blood
at all, indeed we suspect that he was pure fiction.
And the other merit would be that this prophet was
a ridiculous prophet, people's butt and laughing stock.
"What we need most is the valor to face ridicule.
Ridicule is the arm of all the miserable barbers, bach-
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elors, parish priests, canons and dukes who keep Mdden
the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness, Knight who
made all the world laugh but never cracked a joke.
He had too great a soul to bring forth jokes. They
laughed at his seriousness.
"Begin then, friend, to do the Peter the Hermit and
call people to join you, to join us, and let us all go
win back the sepulchre even if we don*t know where
it is. The crusade itself will reveal to us the sacred
place.
*
"Start marching! Where are you going? The star
will tell you: to the sepulchre! What shall we do on
the road while we march? What? Fight ! Fight, and
how?
"How? If you find a man lying? Shout in Ms face :
*lieP and forward! If you find a man stealing, shout:
*thiefP and forward! If you find a man babbling
asininities, to whom the crowd listens open-mouthed,
shout at them all: *idiotsP and forward^ always for-
ward!
**
"To the march then! And throw out of the sacred
squadron all those who begin to study the step and
its length and its rhythm. Above everything, throw
out all those who fuss about this business of rhythm.
They'll turn the squadron into a quadrille and the
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A Funeral in Madrid
march into a dance. Away with them! Let them go
off somewhere else to sing the flesh.
"Those who try to turn the squadron on the inarch
into a dancing quadrille call themselves and each other
poets. But they're not. They're something else. They
only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what
it*s Iike 9 looking for a new sensation, and to amuse
themselves along the road. Away with them!
"It's these that with their indulgence of Bohemians
contribute to maintain cowardice and lies and all the
weaknesses that flood us. When they preach liberty
they , only think of one : that of disposing of their
neighbor's wife. All is sensuality with them. They
even fall in love sensually with ideas, with great ideas.
They are incapable of marrying a great and pure idea
and breeding a family with it; they only flirt with
ideas. They want them as mistresses, sometimes just
for the night. Away with them!
"If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along
the path that smiles from the fringe of grass, let
him pluck it, but without breaking ranks, without
dropping out of the squadron of which the leader must
always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But
if he put the little flower in the strap above his
cuirass, not to look at it himself, but for others to
look at, away with him! Let him go with his flower
in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else.
[223]
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"Looks friend, if you want to accomplish your mis-
sion and serve your country you must make yourself
unpleasant to the sensitive boys who only see the world
through the eyes of their sweethearts. Or through
something worse. Let your words be strident and rasp-
ing in their ears.
"The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood
or under the lee of a mountain. There they will pitch
their tents and the crusaders will wash their feet, and
sup off what their women have prepared, then they
will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep
to begin the march again the following day. And
when someone dies they will leave him on the edge of
the road with his armor on him, at the mercy of the
crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the
dead."
Instead of the rationalists and humanists of
the North, Unamuno's idols are the mystics and
saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwart
men who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada,
Pizarro, Narvaez, who governed with whips and
thumbscrews and drank death down greedily like
heady wine. He is excited by the amorous mad-
ness of the mysticism of Santa Teresa and San
Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical, un-
[224]
A Funeral In Madrid
reasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearn-
ing other-worldliness. His style, it follows per-
force, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full of tre-
mendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous
angry insistence about his dogmas that makes his
essays unforgettable, even if one objects as vio-
lently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship.
There is an anarchic fury about his crying in
the wilderness that will win many a man from
the fleshpots and chain gangs,
In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca
is a fresco of the Last Judgment, perhaps by the
Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo on
a black ground a tremendous figure of the aveng-
ing angel brandishes a sword while behind him
unrolls the scroll of the Dies Irae and huddled
clusters of plump little naked people fall away
into space from under his feet. There are mo-
ments in "Del Sentimiento Trdgico de la Vida"
and in the ff Vida de Don Quijote y Sanchti**
when in the rolling earthy Castilian phrases one
can feel the brandishing of the sword of that very
angel. Not for nothing does TJnamuno live in
the rust and saffron-colored town of Salamanca
[225]
Rosinante to the Road Again
in the midst of bare red hills that bulge against
an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like
piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are
so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where bar-
renness and the sweep of cold wind and the lash
of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow
into the hereafter, where the clouds have been
tramped by the angry feet of the destroying
angel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Una-
muno is constantly attacking sturdily those who
clamor for the modernization, Europeanization
of Spanish life and Spanish thought: he is the
counterpoise to the northward-yearning apostles
of Giner de los Bios.
In an essay in one of the volumes published
by the Residencies de Estudiantes he wrote:
"As can be seen I proceed by what they call ar-
bitrary affirmations, without documentation, without
proof, outside of a modern European logic, disdain-
ful of its methods.
"Perhaps. I want no other method than that of
passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, re-
pugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak
the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come
as they come.
[226]
A Funeral in Madrid
Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans,
who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who sub-
tilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who
lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls,
casuists and all that.
"I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the
great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping
waves of rhetoric, twis tings of the phrase, antithesis,
paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a
Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which
makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism
are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence.
"The great African, the great ancient African ! Here
is an expression ancient African that one can op-
pose to modern European, and that*s worth as much at
least. African and ancient were Saint Augustine and
Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: We must
make ourselves ancient African-style' or else 'We must
make ourselves African ancient-style.' "
The typical tree of Castile is the encina, a kind
of live-oak that grows low with dense bluish foli-
age and a ribbed, knotted and contorted trunk;
it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the
roads one meets lean men with knotted hands
and brown sun-wizened faces that seem brothers
to the encinas of their country. The thought of
[227]
Rosinante to the Road Again
Unamuno, emphatic, lonely, contorted, ham-
mered into homely violent phrases, oak-tough,
oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads
and to the encinas on the hills of Castile.
This from the end of "Del Sentimiento Trdgi-
co de la
"And in this critical century, Don Quixote has also
contaminated himself with criticism, and he must
charge against himself, victim of intellectualism and
sentiment alism, who when he is most sincere appears
most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the
irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls
victim of the inevitable despair of a rationalism cen-
tury, of which the greatest victims were Tolstoy and
Nietzsche. Out of despair he enters into the heroic
fury of that Quixote of thought who broke out of the
cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener
of sleeping souls, 'dormitantium (mimoruwi excubtior,*
as the ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote:
'Heroic love is proper to superior natures called in-
sane wisane> not because they do not know non sarmo
but because they know too much soprasanno .'
"But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines,
or at least at the foot of his statue on the Campo
dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, they have put that it
is offered by the century he had divined c il secolo da
[228]
A Funeral in Madrid
lm divinato. 9 But our Don Quixote, the resurrected,
internal Don Quixote, does not believe that his doctrines
will triumph in the world, because they are not his.
And it is better that they should not triumph. If
they wanted to make Don Quixote king he would retire
alone to the hilltop, fleeing the crowds of king-makers
and king-killers, as did Christ when, after the miracle
of the loaves and fishes, they wanted to proclaim him
king. He left the title of king to be put above the
cross.
"What is, then, the new mission of Don Quixote in
this world? To cry, to cry in the wilderness. For
the wilderness hears although men do not hear, and
one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and that
solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will
sprout into a gigantic cedar that will sing with a
hundred thousand tongues an eternal hosanna to the
Lord of life and death,"
[229]
XVII: Toledo
LYAEUS, you've found it."
"Her, you mean."
"No, the essence, the gesture. 5 '
"I carry no butterfly net."
The sun blazed in a halo of heat about their
heads. Both sides of the straight road olive
trees contorted gouty trunks as they walked past,
On a bank beside a quietly grazing donkey a
man was asleep wrapped in a brown blanket. Oc-
casionally a little grey bird twittered encourag-
ingly from the telegraph wires. When the wind
came there was a chill of winter and wisps of
cloud drifted across the sun and a shiver of silver
ran along the olive groves.
"Tel," cried Lyaeus after a pause, "maybe I
have found it. Maybe you are right. You
should have been with me last night."
"What happened last night?" As a wave of
bitter envy swept over him Telemachus saw for a
[230]
Toledo
moment the face of his mother Penelope, brows
contracted with warning, white hand raised in
admonition. For a fleeting second the memory
of his quest brushed through the back of his mind.
But Lyaeus was talking.
"Nothing much happened. There were a few
things. . . . O this is wonderful." He waved
a clenched fist about his head. "The finest peo-
ple, Tel ! You never saw such people, Tel. They
gave me a tambourine. Here it is; wait a min-
ute." He placed the bag he carried on his shoul-
der on top of a milestone and untied its mouth.
When he pulled the tambourine out it was full of
figs. "Look, pocket these. I taught her to write
her name on the back; see, Tilar.' She didn't
know how to write."
Telemachus involuntarily cleared his throat.
"It was the finest dive . . . Part house, part
cave. We all roared in and there was the fun-
niest little girl . . . Lot of other people, fat
women, but my eyes were in a highly selective
state. She was very skinny with enormous black
eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat
pink puppy in her lap,"
[231]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"But I meant something In line, movement,
eternal, not that,"
"There are very few gestures/ 5 said Lyaeus.
They walked along in silence.
"I am tired/' said Lyaeus; "at least let's stop
in here. I see a bush over the door."
"Why stop? We are nearly there/ 5
"Why go on?"
"We want to get to Toledo, don't we?"
"Why?"
"Because we started for there."
"N"o reason at all," said Lyaeus with a laugh
as he went in the door of the wineshop.
When they came out they found Don Alonso
waiting for them, holding his horse by the bridle.
"The Spartans," he said with a smile, "never
drank wine on the march."
"How far are we from Toledo?" asked Tele-
machus. "It was nice of you to wait for us."
"About a league, five kilometers, nothing. . . .
I wanted to see your faces when you first saw the
town. I think you will appreciate it."
"Let's walk fast," said Telemachus. "There
are some things one doesn't want to wait for."
[232]
Toledo
"It will be sunset and the whole town will be on
the paseo in front of the hospital of San Juan
Bautista, . . . This is Sunday of Carnival;
people will be dressed up in masks and very
noisy. It's a day on which they play tricks on
strangers."
"Here's the trick they played me at the last
town/' said Lyaeus agitating his bag of figs.
"Let's eat some. I'm sure the Spartans ate figs
on the road. Will Rosinante, I mean will your
horse eat them?" He puf his hand with some
figs on it under the horse's mouth. The horse
sniffed noisily out of black nostrils dappled with
pink and then reached for the figs. Lyaeus
wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and they
proceeded.
"Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain/'
began Don Alonso after a few moments of si-
lent walking. "By that I mean that through the
many Spains you. have seen and will see is every-
where an undercurrent of fantastic tragedy,
Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Mora-
les, Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid
dust, rags, ulcers, human life rising in a sudden
[233]
Rosinante to the Road Again
psean out of desolate abandoned dun-colored
spaces. To me, Toledo expresses the supreme
beauty of that tragic farce . . . And the apex,
the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.
. . . How strange it is that it should be that
Cypriote who lived in such Venetian state in a
great house near the abandoned synagogue,
scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds
of revelry and unabashed music that came from
it at meal-times, making pert sayings tinder the
nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living
solitary in a country where he remained to his
death misunderstood and alien and where two
centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote
as a madman, how strange that it should be he
who should express most flamingly all that was
imperturbable in Toledo ... I have often won-
dered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we
feel in .El Greco, that we felt in my generation
when I was young, that I see occasionally in the
young men of your time, has become conscious
only because it is about to be smothered in the
great advancing waves of European banality. I
was thinking the other day that perhaps states of
[234]
Toledo
life only became conscious once their intensity
was waning."
"But most of the intellectuals I met in Mad-
rid/' put in Telernachus, "seemed enormously
anxious for subways and mechanical progress,
seemed to think that existence could be made per-
fect by slot-machines."
"They are anxious to hold stock in the sub-
way and slot-machine enterprises that they may
have more money to unSpanish themselves in
Paris . . but let us not talk of that. From the
next turn in the road, round that little hill, we
shall see Toledo/'
Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus
and Telemachus dojibled the speed of their
stride.
First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped
with dark of a plowed field they saw a weather-
cock, then under it the slate cap of a tower. "The
Alcazar," said Don Alonso. The road turned
away and olive trees hid the weathercock. At the
next bend the towers were four, strongly but-
tressing a square building where on the western
windows glinted reflections of sunset. As they
[235]
Rosinante to the Road Again
walked more towers, dust colored, and domes and
the spire of w a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the
tail of a pickerel, jutted to the right of the cita-
del. The road dipped again, passed some white
houses where children sat in the doorways ; from
the inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and
a pungence of cistus-twigs burning. Starting up
the next rise that skirted a slope planted with
almond trees they caught sight of a castle,
rounded towers, built of rough grey stone, joined
by crenellated walls that appeared occasionally
behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on
which here and there a cluster of pink flowers
had already come into bloom. At the summit
was a wineshop with mules tethered against the
walls, and below the Tagus and the great bridge,
and Toledo.
Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre
of the Cigarrales were piled masses of buttressed
wall that caught the orange sunset light on many
tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and
square towers and domes and slate-capped spires
above a litter of yellowish tile roofs that fell away
in terraces from the highest points and sloped
[236]
Toledo
outside the walls fowards the river and the piers
from which sprang the enormous arch of the
bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet.
A pale cobalt haze of snpperfires hung over the
quarters near the river. As they started down
the hill towards the heavy pile of San Juan
Bautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome
outside the nearest gate, a great volley of bell-
ringing swung about their ears. A donkey
brayed; there was a sound of shouting from the
town.
"Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-
morrow at the fonda" shouted Don Alonso. He
took off his hat and galloped towards the gate,
leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the
roadside looking out over the city.
Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room
with Nile-green walls into which light still fil-
tered through three little round arches high up
on one side. In a corner were some hogsheads of
wine, in another small tables with three-legged
stools. From outside came the distant braying
of a brass band and racket of a street full of
[237]
Rosinante to the Road Again
people, laughter, and the occasional shivering
jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had dropped
onto a stool and spread his feet out before him
on the tiled floor.
"Never walked so far in my life," he said,
"my toes are pulverized, pulverized!" He leaned
over and pulled off his shoes. There were holes
in his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and
started wiggling his toes meditatively. His an-
kles were grimed with dust.
"Well . . ." began Telemachus.
The padron, a lean man with moustaches and a
fancy yellow vest which he wore unbuttoned over
a lavender shirt, brought two glasses of dense
black wine,
"You have walked a long way?" he asked,
looking with interest at Lyaeus' feet*
"From Madrid."
"ICarair
"Not all in one day."
"You are sailors going to rejoin your ship in
Sevilla." The padron looked from one to another
with a knowing expression, twisting his mouth
so that one of the points of his moustache slanted
[238]
Toledo
towards the celling and the other towards the
floor.
"Not exactly. . ."
Another man drew up his chair to their table,
first taking off his wide cap and saying gravely:
"Con permiso de mtedesf* His broad, slightly
flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his
sparse blonde eyelashes were large and grey.
He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to
draw their heads together and said in a whis-
per:
"You aren't deserters, are you?"
"No."
"I hoped you were. I might have helped you.
I escaped from prison in Barcelona a week ago.
I am a syndicalist."
"Have a drink/' cried Lyaeus. "Another
glass . . And we can let you have some money
if you need it, too, if you want to get out of the
country."
The padron brought the wine and retired dis-
creetly to a chair beside the bar from which he
beamed at them with almost religious approba-
tion.
[239]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"You are comrades?"
"Of those who break out," said Lyaeus flush-
Ing. "What about the progress of events?
When, do you think the pot will boil over?"
"Soon or never/' said the syndicalist . .
"That is never in our lifetime. We are being
buried under industrialism like the rest of Eu-
rope. Our people, our comrades even, are fast
getting the bourgeois mentality. There is dan-
ger that we shall lose everything we have fought
for ... You see, if we could only have captured
the means of production when the system was
young and weak, we could have developed it
slowly for our benefit, made the machine the
slave of man. Every day we wait makes it more
difficult. It is a race as to whether this penin-
sula will be captured by communism or capital-
ism. It is still neither one nor the other, in its
soul." He thumped his clenched fist against his
chest.
"How long were you in prison?"
"Only a month this time, but if they catch me
it will be bad. They won't catch me."
He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally
[240]
Toledo
rolling an unlit cigarette between Ms brown
fingers.
"Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite
dark?" said Telemachus.
"When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to
the syndicalist.
"Oh, well meet if you stay in Toledo a few
days, . . ."
Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by
the arm.
"Look, let me give you some money; won't you
be wanting to go to Portugal?"
The man flushed and shook his head.
"If our opinions coincided. . . ."
"I agree with all those who break out/' said
Lyaeus.
"That's not the same, my friend."
They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus
went out of the tavern.
Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered
shawls, full of dominos and pierrots and harle-
quins who threw handfuls of confetti at people
along the sidewalks, clattered into town through
the dark arches of the gate, Telemachus got
[241]
Rosinante to the Road Again
some confetti In his mouth. A crowd of little
children danced about him jeering as he stood
spluttering on the curbstone. Lyaeus took him
by the arm and drew him along the street after
the carriages, bent double with laughter. This
irritated Telemaichus who tore his arm away
suddenly and made off with long strides up a dark
street.
A half -waned moon shone through the perfora-
tions in a round terra-cotta chimney into the
street's angular greenish shadow. From some-
where came the seethe of water over a dam, Tele-
machus was leaning against a damp wall, tired
and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a
woman's face half surmised behind the bars of
an upper window, when he heard a clatter of un-
steady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared,
reeling a little, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised
in an expression of drunken jollity.
"Lyaeus, \ am very happy," cried Telemachus
stepping forward to meet his friend. "Walking
about here in these empty zigzag streets I have
suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a
[242]
Toledo
part of me, as if I had soaked up some essence
out of it."
"Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly.
. . . Awake all you need." Lyaeus stood on a
Ettle worn stone that kept wheels off the corner
of the house where the street turned and waved
his arms. "Awake ! Dormitant animorum ewcubi-
tor. . . . That's not right. Latin's no good,
Means a fellow who says : *wake up, you son of a
gun.' "
"Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important
than that. It's like learning to swim. For a long
time you flounder about, it's unpleasant and gets
up your nose and you choke. Then all at once
you are swimming like a duck. That's how I
feel about all this. . . . The challenge was that
woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing. . . .'*
"Tel, there are things too good to talk about.
. . . Look, I'm like St. Simeon Stylites."
Lyaeus lifted one leg, then the other, waving his
arms like a tight-rope walker.
"When I left you I walked out over the other
bridge, the bridge of St. Martin and climbed. . , ."
[243]
Rosinante to the Road Again
"Shut up, I think I hear a girl giggling up in
the window there."
Lyaeus stood up very straight on his column
and threw a kiss up into the darkness. The
giggling turned to a shrill laughter; a head
craned out from a window opposite. Lyaeus
beckoned with both hands.
"Never mind about them. . . . Look out,
somebody threw something. . . Oh, it's an or-
ange. ... I want to tell you how I felt the
gesture. I had climbed up on one of the hills of
the Cigarrales and was looking at the silhouette
of the town so black against the stormy marbled
sky. The moon hadn't risen yet. . . . Let's
move away from here."
"Ven, flor de mi corazon" shouted Lyaeus to-
wards the upper window.
"A flock of goats was passing on the road be-
low, and from somewhere came the tremendous
lilt of. . . ."
"Heads !" cried Lyaeus throwing himself round
an angle in the wall.
Telemachus looked up, his mind full of his
mother Penelope's voice saying reproachfully:
[244]
Toledo
"You might have been murdered in that dark
alley. 35 A girl was leaning from the window,
shaken with laughter, taking aim with a bucket
she swung with both hands.
"Stop," cried Telemachus, "it's the other "
As he spoke a column of cold water struck his
head, knocked his breath out, drenched him.
"Speaking of gestures " whispered Lyaeus
breathlessly from the doorway where he was
crouching, and the street was filled with uncon-
trollable shrieking laughter.
THE END
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