CHAPTER IX
THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST
The people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo. The first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string. I got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding how aged is the world.
Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a sturdy town of countrymen, in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne. There, at a still different point of the compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a country hunch-backed with hills. It was siesta-time when I arrived, the sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and misshapen hovels that made up the place. There were no inhabitants abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards. They leered at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive laughter.
"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."
I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers through rocky _barrancas_ and across sandy patches, gained as the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.
A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.
I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and the swelter of humanity.
As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side. He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking. At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights across the Tajo, cried out:
"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children are starving!
"Senor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."
He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned before I continued my way.
"Senor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to cover it?"
It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the Alkantara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.
Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour or more before I was directed to a casa de huespedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the street a blank, windowless wall.
It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker. As he lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his workbench for something over three hours. His home and shop consisted of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a daughter of six who devised more amusement with a few scraps of leather than many another might with all the toys of Nuernberg. The shoemaker was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit waiting for. He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand. When he had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal to forty cents.
In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well illustrated the two types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the next service. He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of man will who drifts through life without training himself to do anything. The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.
While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.
Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous cathedral surnamed "la Rica." "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry. We of the United States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up within the churches of Spain by the superstitions of her people and the rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here.
"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women." If one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the stone flagging. The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history. But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous stained-glass windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."
As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is not unlikely to be assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic. There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated assertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius solely for pure art's sake. Would they then have prostituted their years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superstitions and servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain Syrian surroundings. Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her assumed motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.
Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel, centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary. Yielding to which characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself, many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and breasts lopped off and lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping knives with fiendish merriment. These horrors, too, are set up in public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men on occasion. It is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar martyrdoms. How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far less repulsive.
There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is successful in running them down in her jungle of streets. Each such chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover, that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower of arrows. The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back into the relief of one of the radiating calles.
As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to time over his cigarette:
"Una limosnita, senores; que Dios se lo pagara."
There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:
"A little alms, senores, and may God repay you."
Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere could not remake into the semblance of a man.
Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively. High or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look, not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those things that stand next above. Nowhere can one escape the cloth. Every half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes, pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout passer-by. Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city swarms. Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the termination of a musical comedy.
I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back through fully a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day straggles where she does in the procession of nations.
I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces. It was again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that, crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a vega fertile with wheat. Before long it swung sharply to the right and, laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.
The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging. I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither man nor habitation appeared. Toward eleven I gave up the search and, stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of space unencumbered with rocks and lay down until the dawn.
The sun rose murky. In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera passed only two squalid wineshops. Then rounding in mid-morning a slight eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon. It was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the universe.