Chapter 6

We were in the mood for simple kindness because of our stiff official reception at the Royal Palace, which we visited in the gratification of our passion for _patios._ It is now used for provincial or municipal offices and guarded by sentries who indeed admitted us to the courtyard, but would not understand our wish (it was not very articulately expressed) to mount to the cloistered galleries which all the guide-books united in pronouncing so noble, with their decorative busts of the Roman Emperors and arms of the Spanish provinces. The sculptures are by the school of Berruguete, for whom we had formed so strong a taste at the museum; but our disappointment was not at the moment further embittered by knowing that Napoleon resided there in 1809. We made what we could of other _patios_ in the vicinity, especially of one in the palace across from San Gregorio, to which the liveried porter welcomed us, though the noble family was in residence, and allowed us to mount the red-carpeted staircase to a closed portal in consideration of the peseta which he correctly foresaw. It was not a very characteristic _patio,_ bare of flower and fountain as it was, and others more fully appointed did not entirely satisfy us. The fact is the _patio_ is to be seen best in Andalusia, its home, where every house is built round it, and in summer cooled and in winter chilled by it. But if we were not willing to wait for Seville, Valladolid did what it could; and if we saw no house with quite the _patio_ we expected we did see the house where Philip II. was born, unless the enterprising boy who led us to it was mistaken; in that case we were, Ophelia-like, the more deceived.

VII

Such things do not really matter; the guide-book’s object of interest is seldom an object of human interest; you may miss it or ignore it without real personal loss; but if we had failed of that mystic progress of the silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have been really if not sensibly poorer. So we should if we had failed of the charming experience which awaited us in our hotel at lunch-time. When we went out in the morning we saw a table spread the length of the long dining-room, and now when we returned we found every chair taken. At once we surmised a wedding breakfast, not more from the gaiety than the gravity of the guests; and the head waiter confirmed our impression: it was indeed a _boda._ The party was just breaking up, and as we sat down at our table the wedding guests rose from theirs. I do not know but in any country the women on such an occasion would look more adequate to it than the men; at any rate, there in Spain they looked altogether superior. It was not only that they were handsomer and better dressed, but that they expressed finer social and intellectual quality.

All the faces had the quiet which the Spanish face has in such degree that the quiet seems national more than personal; but the women’s faces were oval, though rather heavily based, while the men’s were squared, with high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly middle class. Men and women had equally repose of manner, and when the women came to put on their headgear near our corner, it was with a surface calm unbroken by what must have been their inner excitement. They wore hats and mantillas in about the same proportion; but the bride wore a black mantilla and a black dress with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair and on her breast for the only note of white. Her lovely, gentle face was white, of course, from the universal powder, and so were the faces of the others, who talked in low tones around her, with scarcely more animation than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom we decided to be her sister, arranged the bride’s mantilla, and was then helped on with hers by the others, with soft smiles and glances. Two little girls, imaginably sorry the feast was over, suppressed their regret in the tutelage of the maiden aunts and grandmothers who put up cakes in napkins to carry home; and then the party vanished in unbroken decorum. When they were gone we found that in studying the behavior of the bride and her friends we had not only failed to identify the bridegroom, but had altogether forgotten to try.

VIII

The terrible Torquemada dwelt for years in Valla-dolid and must there have excogitated some of the methods of the Holy Office in dealing with heresy. As I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married there and Philip II. was born there; but I think the reader will agree with me that the highest honor of the city is that it was long the home of the gallant gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers and the loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty and neglect, the first part of a romance which remains and must always remain one of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the world. I mean that

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very little house, as small as Ariosto’s in Ferrara, which he said was so apt for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of these a gentleman was stabbed near the author’s house. The alarm brought Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he was promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record, and it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day), was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be sure, his _Don Quixote_ had not yet appeared, though he is said to have finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region; but he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of “Numancia,” and he had held public employs and lived near enough to courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that his literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.

They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a stone terrace dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain) and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street again by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some unmentionable if not unimaginable source.

It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine the house should have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as forgotten in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the house abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of Valladolid for her neglect, and though she might have answered that her burden of memories was more than she could bear, that she could not be forever keeping her celebrity sweet, still I could have retorted, But Cervantes, but Cervantes! There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet in his house wall?--certainly I could have said that this did not excuse her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed most to blame.

IX

Now I look back and am glad I had not consciously with me, as we drove away, the boy who once meant to write the life of Cervantes, and who I knew from my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Spaniards would not have listened to the excuses of Valladolid for a moment. All appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which shone with such allure far across the snows through which he trudged morning and evening with his father to and from the printing-office, and made his dream of that great work the common theme of their talk. Now the boy is as utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited.

It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes’s house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, and it is only fair to own that a psychological change toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since luncheon which Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn against it. One thing: the weather had clouded, and it was colder. But we determined to be just, and after we left the house of Cervantes we drove out to the promenades along the banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of a better mind, for we had read that they were the favorite resort of the citizens in summer, and we did not know but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of their recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and when we came out on the promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of close set mulberry trees, with the dust thick on the paths under them. The leaves hung leaden gray on the boughs and there could never have been a spear of grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was shrunken in its bed, and where its current crept from pool to pool, women were washing some of the rags which already hung so thick on the bushes that it was wonderful there should be any left to wash. Squalid children abounded, and at one point a crowd of people had gathered and stood looking silently and motionlessly over the bank. We looked too and on a sand-bar near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a group of civilians. Between their fixed and absolutely motionless figures lay the body of a drowned man on the sand, poorly clothed in a workman’s dress, and with his poor, dead clay-white hands stretched out from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and staring; from one of the crowded windows of the nearest house a woman hung with a rope of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from their statuesque fixity. His own excitement in comparison seemed indecent.

X

It was now three o’clock and I thought I might be in time to draw some money on my letter of credit, at the bank which we had found standing in a pleasant garden in the course of our stroll through the town the night before. We had said, How charming it would be to draw money in such an environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter at the window, where after a discreet interval I managed to call from their preoccupation some unoccupied persons within. They had not a very financial air, and I thought them the porters they really were, with some fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they joined in reassuring me, and told me that if I would return after five o’clock the proper authorities would be there.

I did not know then what late hours Spain kept in every way; but I concealed my surprise; and I came back at the time suggested, and offered my letter at the window with a request for ten pounds, which I fancied I might need. A clerk took the letter and scrutinized it with a deliberation which I thought it scarcely merited. His self-respect doubtless would not suffer him to betray that he could not read the English of it; and with an air of wishing to consult higher authority he carried it to another clerk at a desk across the room. To this official it seemed to come as something of a blow. Tie made a show of reading it several times over, inside and out, and then from the pigeonhole of his desk he began to accumulate what I supposed corroborative documents, or _pieces justificatives._ When lie had amassed a heap several inches thick, he rose and hurried out through the gate, across the hall where I sat, into a room beyond. He returned without in any wise referring himself to me and sat down at his desk again. The first clerk explained to the anxious face with which I now approached him that the second clerk had taken my letter to the director. I went back to my seat and waited fifteen minutes longer, fifteen having passed already; then I presented my anxious face, now somewhat indignant, to the first clerk again. “What is the director doing with my letter?” The first clerk referred my question to the second clerk, who answered from his place, “He is verifying the signature.” “But what signature?” I wondered to myself, reflecting that he had as yet had none of mine. Could it be the signature of my New York banker or my London one? I repaired once more to the window, after another wait, and said in polite but firm Castilian, “Do me the favor to return me my letter.” A commotion of protest took place within the barrier, followed by the repeated explanation that the director was verifying the signature. I returned to toy place and considered that the suspicious document which I had presented bore record of moneys drawn in London, in Paris, in Tours, in San Sebastian, which ought to have allayed all suspicion; then for the last time I repaired to the window; more in anger now than in sorrow, and gathered nay severest Spanish together for a final demand: “Do me the favor to give me back my letter _without the pounds sterling.”_ The clerks consulted together; one of them decided to go to the director’s room, and after a dignified delay he came back with my letter, and dashed it down before me with the only rudeness I experienced in Spain.

I was glad to get it on any terms; it was only too probable that it would have been returned without the money if I had not demanded it; and I did what I could with the fact that this amusing financial transaction, involving a total of fifty dollars, had taken place in the chief banking-house of one of the commercial and industrial centers of the country. Valladolid is among other works the seat of the locomotive works of the northern railway lines, and as these machines average a speed of twenty-five miles an hour with express trains, it seemed strange to me that something like their rapidity should not have governed the action of that bank director in forcing me to ask back my discredited letter of credit.

XI

That evening the young voices and the young feet began to chirp again under our sun balcony. But there had been no sun in it since noon and presently a cold thin rain was falling and driving the promenaders under the arcades, where they were perhaps not unhappier for being closely massed. We missed the prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did not know that it was the only one of the sort we might hope to see in Spain, where women walk little indoors, and when they go out, drive and increase in the sort of loveliness which may be weighed and measured. Even under the arcades the promenade ceased early and in the adjoining Plaza Mayor, where the _autos da fe_ once took place, the rain still earlier made an end of the municipal music, and the dancing of the lower ranks of the people. But we were fortunate in our Chilian friend’s representation of the dancing; he came to our table at dinner, and did with charming sympathy a mother waltzing with her babe in arms for a partner.

He came to the omnibus at the end of the promenade, when we were starting for the station next morning, not yet shaven, in his friendly zeal to make sure of seeing us off, and we parted with confident prophecies of meeting each other again in Madrid. We had already bidden adieu with effusion to our landlady-sisters-and-mother, and had wished to keep forever our own the adorable _chico_ who, when cautioned against trying to carry a very heavy bag, valiantly jerked it to his shoulder and made off with it to the omnibus, as if it were nothing. I do not believe such a boy breathes out of Spain, where I hope he will grow up to the Oriental calm of so many of his countrymen, and rest from the toils of his nonage. At the last moment after the Chilian had left us, we perceived that one of our trunks had been forgotten, and the _chico_ coursed back to the hotel for it and returned with the delinquent porter bearing it, as if to make sure of his bringing it.

When it was put on top of the omnibus, and we were in probably unparalleled readiness for starting to the station, at an hour when scarcely anybody else in Valladolid was up, a mule composing a portion of our team immediately fell down, as if startled too abruptly from a somnambulic dream. I really do not remember how it was got to its feet again; but I remember the anguish of the delay and the fear that we might not be able to escape from Valladolid after all our pains in trying for the Sud-Express at that hour; and I remember that when we reached the station we found that the Sud-Express was forty minutes behind time and that we were a full hour after that before starting for Madrid.

V. PHASES OF MADRID

I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black wine-skins of Old Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those which began to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs in the south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a difference in the color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands. Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown, corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him, and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going, especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but I think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs of other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the patches of vineyard. He had there the company of tall black goats and rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the art of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating the odors of the house of Cervantes.

I

There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out for tips in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for the first time in Spain not worth the American price asked for it; everywhere else on the Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were excellent and abundant; and the refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the horror of the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself. The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the sins of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same on both sides of the railroad track, but here it was malignly alike on one hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope of an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in masses from the size of a man’s fist to the size of a house. In a wild chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us and held us captive in its desolation.