Part 16

The girl put her lips to his lips and kissed him. Maquetas felt the kiss melt and flow through all his body, and so sweet it was that it seemed as if all the sky poured itself down over him. His senses swooned. He dreamed that he was falling endlessly down into the bottomless abyss....

When he awoke and opened his eyes he saw above him the sky of evening.

“O lass, how late it is! Now I shall not have time to reach the castle. Let me go, let me go.”

“Go then, and God guide and companion you. And don’t forget me, Maquetas.”

“Give me one kiss more.”

“Take it, and may it strengthen you.”

With the kiss Maquetas felt that his strength was increased a hundredfold and he began to run along the road, the lilt of his song keeping time with his strides. And he ran and ran, leaving the other pilgrims behind him. One of them shouted to him as he passed:

“You’ll stop, Maquetas.”

Then he saw that the sun was beginning to set behind the towers of the castle and Maquetas felt a chill strike his heart. The fires of the sunset lasted but for a moment. He heard the grating of the chains of the drawbridge. And Maquetas said to himself:

“They are shutting the castle-gate.”

Night began to fall, an impenetrable night. Very soon Maquetas had to halt, for he could see nothing, absolutely nothing. Blackness enveloped everything. Maquetas stood still, silent, and in the impenetrability of the darkness he heard only the murmur of the waters of the torrent in the abyss. The cold grew denser.

Maquetas stooped down, felt the road with his numb hands, and began to creep along on all fours, warily, like a fox. He kept edging away from the abyss.

He went forward like this for a long, long time. And he said to himself:

“Ah, that lass deceived me! Why did I heed her?”

The cold became horrible. It penetrated everywhere, like a thousand-edged sword. Maquetas no longer felt the touch of the ground, he no longer felt his own hands; he was benumbed. He stopped still. Or rather he scarcely knew whether he was stopping or crawling.

Maquetas felt himself suspended in the midst of the darkness, black night all around him. He heard nothing but the ceaseless murmur of the waters of the abyss.

“I will call out,” Maquetas said to himself, and he made an effort to shout. But no sound was heard; his voice did not come forth out of his chest. It was as if it were frozen within him.

Then Maquetas thought:

“Can I be dead?”

And as this thought took hold of him, it seemed as if the darkness and the cold fused together and eternalized themselves round about him.

“Can this be death?” Maquetas went on thinking. “Shall I have to live henceforward like this, in pure thought, in memory? And the castle? And the abyss? What do the waters say? What a dream, what an appalling dream! And not to be able to sleep!... To die like this, dreaming, dying little by little, and not to be able to sleep!... And now what am I going to do? What shall I do to-morrow?

“To-morrow? What is to-morrow? What does to-morrow mean? What is this idea of to-morrow that seems to come to me out of the depth of the darkness, where the waters are singing? To-morrow? For me there is now no to-morrow. Everything is now, everything is blackness and cold. Even this song of the eternal waters seems like a song of ice--just one prolonged note.

“But can I really have died? How long the dawn is in coming! But I don’t even know how long it is since the sun set behind the towers of the castle....

“Once upon a time,” he went on thinking, “there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle, where a good dinner awaited him and a warm fire and a good bed to rest in, and in the bed a good bedmate. And there in the castle he was going to live days without end, listening to stories that went on for ever, joying in his sweet companion, a life of perpetual youth. And those days would be all alike and all peaceful. And as they passed, oblivion would fall on them. And all those days would be thus one eternal day, one same day eternally renewed, a perpetual to-day overflowing with a whole infinity of yesterdays and with a whole infinity of to-morrows.

“And Maquetas believed that that was life, and set out on his journey. And he journeyed on, stopping at inns where he slept, and when the sun rose he went on his way again. And once, as he was leaving an inn, he met an aged beggar who was sitting on the trunk of a tree by the door, and the beggar said to him: ‘Maquetas, what meaning have things?’ And that Maquetas answered him, shrugging his shoulders: ‘What does that matter to me?’ And the aged beggar asked him again: ‘Maquetas, what does this road mean?’ And that Maquetas, now somewhat irritated, answered him: ‘Why do you ask me what the road means? How should I know? Does anybody know? Does the road mean anything? Leave me in peace, and God be with you.’ And the aged beggar knitted his brows and smiled sadly, gazing on the ground.

“And then Maquetas came to a very rugged country and had to cross a wild mountain ridge by a precipitous footpath hewn out of the rock, high up over an abyss, in the depths of which sang the waters of an invisible torrent. And thence he discerned afar the castle that he had to reach before the sun set, and when he discerned it his heart leaped for joy in his breast, and he quickened his steps. But a lass, sweet as a vision, compelled him to stop and rest awhile on a bank of turf, and that Maquetas rested his head on her lap and stopped. And when he left her the lass gave him a kiss, the kiss of death, and as soon as the sun set behind the towers of the castle the cold and the darkness closed in all round him and the darkness and the cold grew denser and merged into one. And there fell a silence from which only that song of the eternal waters emerged. Yonder, in life, sounds, songs, murmurs, used to issue out of a vague murmurous background, out of a kind of mist of sound; but here this song emerged out of the profound silence, the silence of darkness and cold, the silence of death.

“Of death? Yes, of death, for that Maquetas, that valiant wayfarer, died....

“How sweet the story is, and how sad! It is sweeter, far sweeter, sadder, far sadder, than that old song my grandmother taught me. Let me see, how does it go? I will repeat it over again.

“Once upon a time there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle....”

And Maquetas repeated to himself again and again and again and again the story of that other Maquetas, and he continues repeating it and so he will go on repeating it as long as the waters of the invisible torrent go on singing, and the waters will sing for ever, ever, ever, without a yesterday and without a to-morrow, for ever, ever, ever....

THE TOWER OF MONTERREY

It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief.

For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil, which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil--or, if you like, to citizenize--is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is concerned, to be everything; but civility embraces more than humanity; it is more than all, for it is the future in never-ending process of realization--it is the ideal. The all is that which is and that which is permanent; but the more than all is that which, over and above all that has been and is, will be. The all is the past that is condensed in the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past, the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all that is thinkable and goes beyond them.

The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect pillared towers also are landscape. And its lines are like the lines of the country. Baroque lines they are said to be. But not all.

The escarpments which slope down from the vast tableland of La Armuña to the banks of the Tormes are like the buttresses of a gigantic cathedral; they are architectonic. There are villages which seem as if they were sculptured out of the earth of the bleak upland plains, out of the rock itself. And if you look long enough at some dark poplar standing near the spire of a village church, you begin to wonder which is the tree and which the spire. And the skeleton trees, all swart naked bone, look like the pillars of a ruined temple the roof of which has fallen in.

In travelling through this barren rocky Iberian land, have you never sometimes fancied that you discerned in some distant craggy hill the outline of a Baroque cathedral?

And conversely, here in the city, one might imagine oneself to be in the midst of some vast geological formation. Men, like coral insects, have built up these masses of grey and golden coral, gleaming in the naked winter sun.

Every one of these fabrics of stone might be said to be an immense architectonic phrase, an aphorism in lines. In a phrase culminates and is condensed a whole system of ideas, of thoughts. In the title--_La Vida es Sueño_--of Calderón’s drama, the immortal fellow of “Don Quixote,” is condensed (as Farinelli rightly says in his work _La Vita é un Sogno_, which I have just been reading) “the substance of all earthly philosophies.” It was by a phrase that each of the seven wise men of Greece won a lasting place in the memory of their race; for these seven wise men eternalized themselves in the thought of their people as being the authors of seven single sentences. And a phrase, a civil sentence, civil rather than human, is an edifice of thought in which economy of material and of brute force has achieved its supreme triumph. The Pyramids are phrases of stone which rise up from the sands of the desert; and like an immense phrase, like one of the periods of Demosthenes, or rather of Pericles, which Thucydides has bequeathed to us for ever, stands the Parthenon. And these towers are phrases too, civil phrases, phrases of civility now made one with Nature.

I know not how I am to translate to you in sounding words--words that are winged, yet captive, words that fly and soar, yet abide--that which this harmonious phrase of hewn stone, this tower of Monterrey, says to me, says to us all, in the fine cutting light of these benumbing winter mornings, when the frost sleeps idly on its lofty pinnacles; but I know that it is a phrase when I see it clear-cut against the blue of heaven. And if men pass away and yet abide, these stones will abide to tell Nature that once there was Humanity, once there was thought; they will abide to tell of plan, and of order, and of proportion, to the Universe.

And why should not the planets which journey through space in obedience to the laws which they themselves communicated to Kepler, understand geometry and mathematics? Is not the whole vast structure of the Universe a great city, the city of God, its supreme Architect and Inhabiter?

All this is a dream. True! But this dream of stone, in the clarified frosty light, tells us that dream is what abides, the lasting, the permanent, the substantial, and that on the surface of the dream, like waves on the surface of the sea, roll our sorrows and our joys, our hates and our loves, our memories and our hopes. The waves are of the sea; but the waves pass and the sea abides; the sorrows and the joys, the hates and the loves, the memories and the hopes, are of the dream, the dream of life; but they--sorrows, joys, hates, loves, memories, hopes--pass away and the dream abides. And it abides thus, converted into stone, stone of the earth, but civilized, civil or spiritual stone, a phrase minted for ever, _monumentum ære perennius_, more enduring than bronze.

This dream of stone enters into the soul and sinks into it, into the innermost depths of it, into the soul’s soul, into what is innermost in the soul itself, and it bears our soul along with it into the underlying substance of all souls, fugitive waves submerged in the sea of souls. Is it a sea? Is it liquid? Is it not rather a rocky floor, a plain, a stony stratum of many mansions for civil human thought to dwell in? And is not each one of our souls a stone which life hews--hews with hammer-strokes of sorrow and joy, of hate and love, of memory and hope--so that it may fit into the great civil, human cathedral, in the temple of our civil and human God?

It was but yesterday, but a moment ago, that is to say it was five and twenty years ago--the third of a full lifetime--that I first saw you, tower of Monterrey, and you carry me beyond, far beyond, those twenty-five years, back to when, before ever I was born, I beheld you--where?--and in beholding you, you carry me from the midst of these twenty-five years, beyond, far beyond, to when, after I am dead and dead indeed, I shall go on beholding you--this vision of you which in the clarified frosty light is imprinted on my soul will abide with me, at rest and buried deep in the sea of souls. Dream abides. It is the only thing that abides; vision abides.

Spirit, when it suffers or rejoices, when it hates or loves, when it remembers or hopes, becomes earth, becomes water, becomes fire or becomes air; and stone, when it thinks and thinks civilly, becomes abiding spirit, congealed, crystallized, substantivated. This tower is a diamond of spirit.

And what does it say? It says nothing that is not itself; it says itself, it proclaims itself immortal, it affirms itself. No matter if an earthquake or a bombardment--which is another earthquake--or any other accident that the hate of Nature or of man may bring about, throws you to the ground and scatters your stones in confusion, tower of Monterrey, for the vision of you will remain. It will remain fused in the souls which behold you.

And to the soul that beholds you, tower of Monterrey, you say that he says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who expresses his person, who strips his spirit naked in the icy-clear light of the civil world, standing statue-like before the world of men. The greatest thing that men can see is another man, and if they but once saw him utterly and completely, they would carry him with them for ever.

And this tower and other towers fill our soul with the tormenting longing to say the unsayable, to leave in words that are borne on wings of sound and pass away and are lost, something that does not pass away and is never lost. To say what one sees and to say it so that it is seen in being heard; to see what is heard: that is the whole secret of Art. Art makes the blind to see--and many are blind whose eyes reflect the images of what they see upon the mind--and it makes them see with the word; Art makes the deaf to hear--and many are deaf whose ears vibrate with the sounds they hear round about them--and it makes them hear with the vision. A poem gives sight to the blind; a picture gives hearing to the deaf. Art fuses the senses, descending to that which unites them in a common root and ascending to that which also unites them in a common crown.

Tower of Monterrey, not the tower which I see with my eyes when I go forth from my house on these benumbing mornings of clarified light to read the divine Plato with my pupils--O noble word degraded to so ignoble use!--my tower of Monterrey, the tower that I carry in the crystal of my mind, as if it were a vision which by some enchantment had remained frozen for ever upon the frozen surface of a lake, this tower of mine tells me that he who says himself remains for ever too. It matters not, my soul, what you say if you say yourself. For what art thou but a phrase in the thought of God?

The thought of God is History: human history, civil history, the history of this civil humanity in which God became man and dwelt among men, and proclaimed that His kingdom, the kingdom of God, that is, the kingdom of Man, the kingdom of God-Man, is not of this world of sorrows and joys, of hates and loves, of memories and hopes. For the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Man, is of thought, which is above sorrow and joy, above hate and love, above memory and hope, although it is made of these, as the towers that abide in History are made of stones. The thought of God is History; History is what God thinks, what He goes on thinking. And he who lives in History, more or less audible and visible, whatever the fashion of his life, however far beneath the surface, lives in the thought of God, and, abiding in God’s thought, he abides in God. And everyone who, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, helps to make History, lives in History; everyone, however obscurely and hesitatingly he lives, who has civil consciousness. Absolute death is unconsciousness.

And this my tower of Monterrey speaks to me of our Renaissance, of the Spanish renaissance, of the eternal essence of Spain, and tells me to say my Spanish self and to affirm that if life is dream, dream is the only thing that abides, and that the rest, all that is not dream, is nothing but a process of digestion that passes away, as sorrow and joy, hate and love, memory and hope, pass away. Yes, life without dream is nothing but digestion and respiration, breath that vanishes. Breath, air, _pneuma_, _anima_, _spiritus_, such are the names that have been given to the life that animates the body but is not dream; and the breath passes away, but the dream abides.

“Life is dream!” affirmed the man, the Spaniard, who believed in the eternal and the substantial, and those who do not believe in it say in the foolishness of their hearts: “Life is breath!” And the tower of Monterrey, my tower of Monterrey, my tower of the Spanish renaissance, of renaissant Spanishness, tells me that life is not breath that passes away and is lost, but dream that abides and triumphs.

When I go forth in the morning and the tower says to me: “Here am I!” I, beholding it, say to it: “Here am I!”

APPENDIX

The foregoing essays are derived from the following works.

“The Spirit of Castile”--_En Torno al Casticismo_, 1895, _Ensayos_, Vol. I.

“Spanish Individualism”--_El Individualismo Español_ (_A propósito del libro_ de Martin A. S. Hume, “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence,” London, 1901), 1902, _Ensayos_, Vol. IV.

“Some Arbitrary Reflections upon Europeanization”--_Sobre la Europeizacion_ (_Arbitrariedades_), 1906, _Ensayos_, Vol. VII.

“The Spanish Christ”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ (_El Cristo Español_), 1910.

“The Sepulchre of Don Quixote”--Introduction to 2nd edition of _La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, 1913. (Originally published in _La España Moderna_, February, 1906.)

“The Helmet of Mambrino”--_La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, Part I, Chap. XLV.

“Don Quixote’s Niece”--_La Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, Part II, Chap. LXXIV.

“The Religion of Quixotism”--_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_ (_Don Quijote en la Tragi-Comedia Europea Contemporánea_), 1912.

“Large and Small Towns”--_Por Tierras de Portugal y de España_ (_Grandes y Pequeñas Ciudades_), 1908.

“To My Readers”--_Soliloquios y Conversaciones_ (_A Mis Lectores_), 1911.

“Soliloquies”--_Soliloquios y Conversaciones_ (_Soliloquios_ and _Desahogo Lirico_), 1911.

“My Religion”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_, 1910.

“Solitude”--_Soledad_, 1905, _Ensayos_, Vol. VI.

“Intellectuality and Spirituality”--_Intellectualidad y Espiritualidad_, 1904, _Ensayos_, Vol. IV.

“The Materialism of the Masses”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_, (_Materialismo Popular_, 1909).

“The Man of Flesh and Bone,” “The Problem of Immortality,” “Creative Faith”--_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, 1912.

“The Song of the Eternal Waters”--_Mi Religión y Otros Ensayos_ (_El Canto de las Aguas Eternas_, 1909).

“The Tower of Monterrey”--_Andanzas y Visiones Españolas_ (_La Torre de Monterrey_, 1916).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_PAZ EN LA GUERRA_ (Peace in War. Novel). Fernando Fé, Madrid, 1897.

_DE LA ENSEÑANZA SUPERIOR EN ESPAÑA_ (Secondary Education in Spain). _Revista Nueva_, Madrid, 1899.

_TRES ENSAYOS_ (Three Essays). B. Rodriguez Serra, Madrid, 1900.

_AMOR Y PEDAGOGIA_ (Love and Pedagogy. Novel). Heinrich y Cia. Barcelona, 1902.

_PAISAJES_ (Landscapes). Colon, Salamanca, 1902.

_DE MI PAIS_ (About My Country). Fernando Fé, Madrid, 1903.

_VIDA DE DON QUIJOTE Y SANCHO_ según Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra explicada y comentada por Miguel de Unamuno (Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, with explanation and commentary by Miguel de Unamuno). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1905. Second edition, with introductory article, _El Sepulcro de Don Quijote_, 1913.

_POESIAS._ Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1907.

_RECUERDOS DE NIÑEZ Y DE MOCEDAD_ (Recollections of Childhood and Youth). Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1908.

_MI RELIGION Y OTROS ENSAYOS BREVES_ (My Religion and other short essays). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1910.

_POR TIERRAS DE PORTUGAL Y DE ESPAÑA_ (Travels in Portugal and Spain). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1911.

_ROSARIO DE SONETOS LIRICOS_ (Rosary of Lyrical Sonnets). Fernando Fé y Victoriano Suarez, Madrid, 1911.

_SOLILOQUIOS Y CONVERSACIONES_ (Soliloquies and Conversations). Biblioteca Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

_CONTRA ESTO Y AQUELLO_ (Against This and That). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

_EL PORVENIR DE ESPAÑA_ (The Future of Spain. A series of open letters exchanged between Miguel de Unamuno and Angel Ganivet, reprinted from _El Defensor de Granada_). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1912.

_EL ESPEJO DE LA MUERTE_ (The Mirror of Death. Short Stories). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1913.

_DEL SENTIMIENTO TRÁGICO DE LA VIDA EN LOS HOMBRES Y EN LOS PUEBLOS_ (The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1913.

_NIEBLA_ (Mist. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1914.

_ENSAYOS_ (Essays. Collected Edition, 7 Vols.). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1916-18.

_ABEL SÁNCHEZ, una historia de pasión_ (Abel Sánchez, a story of passion. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1917.

_TRES NOVELAS EJEMPLARES Y UN PRÓLOGO_ (Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue). Calpe, Madrid and Barcelona, 1920.

_EL CRISTO DE VELASQUEZ_ (The Christ of Velasquez. Poem). Calpe, Madrid, 1920.

_LA TIA TULA_ (Aunt Tula. Novel). Renacimiento, Madrid, 1921.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1]

Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido. --CALDERON, _La Vida es Sueño_, Act I, Scene II.

[2] Unamuno describes his “Commentary upon the Life of Don Quixote” as “a free and personal exegesis.” “I do not think I need repeat,” he says in his preface, “that I feel myself to be a Quixotist rather than a Cervantist and that I have allowed myself sometimes even to differ from the way in which Cervantes understood and dealt with his two heroes. The truth is, I believe that these fictitious personages possess a life of their own, with a certain autonomy, within the mind of the author who created them, and that they obey an inner logic of which the author himself is not wholly conscious.” Cervantes did not so much create them, he maintains, as derive them from the spiritual depths of the Spanish people, and therefore it is possible for us to understand them better even than their author. It may be conjectured that Unamuno can never quite forgive the slightly ironical attitude that Cervantes always adopts towards his hero.