Chapter 1
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ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN
by
JOHN DOS PASSOS
* * * * *
Books by John Dos Passos
_NOVELS:_ _Three Soldiers_ _One Man's Initiation_
_ESSAYS:_ _Rosinante to the Road Again_
_POEMS:_ _A Pushcart at the Curb_ (_In Preparation_)
* * * * *
ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD 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
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I: _A Gesture and a Quest_, 9 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: _An Inverted Midas_, 120 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_, 202 XVII: _Toledo_, 230
ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN
_I: 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 dismembered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite his 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, 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 _Tannhauser_. 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, pronouncing 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, Como despues de acordado Da dolor, Como a nuestro parecer Cualquier tiempo 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 nobleman, 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 arabesques 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 scaffolding and stone dust, there must have stood a tremendous 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.
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 ponderous 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 retreated 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 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 eyebrows 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, 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 la 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 herself 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, turning 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.
The rhythm of the guitar has changed again; her shawl is loose about her, the long fringe flutters; she walks with slow steps, in pomp, a ship decked out for a festival, a queen in plumes and brocade....
?Que se hicieron las damas, Sus tocados, sus vestidos, Sus olores? ?Que 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 newspapers.
"And now do you wonder, Tel, why you are here?"
They went into a cafe and mechanically ordered beer. The seats were red plush this time and much worn. All about them groups of whiskered 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!" And Lyaeus burst out laughing. He laughed deep in his 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, champagne. Drink the beer yourself."
The waiter was scrawny and yellow, with bilious 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 disquieting 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 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 tightened 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 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 Telemachus 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 without knowing it.
"It's burned into my blood. It must be formulated, made permanent."
"Killed," said Lyaeus with sudden seriousness; "better drink it with your wine."
Silent they strode down an arcaded street. Cupolas, voluted baroque facades, a square tower, the bulge of a market building, tile roofs, chimneypots, 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 Pastora," said Lyaeus jauntily.
"Ah, Pastora!... 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.
'Como se pasa la vida Como se viene la muerte Tan callando: Cuan 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 laughter volleyed across the frozen fields.
Telemachus answered in a low voice:
"Let's walk faster."
He walked with his eyes on the road. He could see in the darkness, Pastora, wrapped in the yellow shawl with the splotch of maroon-colored embroidery moulding one breast, stand tremulous with foreboding before the footlights, suddenly 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.
_II: 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!_
The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortling glitter of irrigation 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 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_; perhaps 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 dainty steps, looking at us with a quizzical air from under his long eyelashes. Could anything be wiser than a burro?
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 Alpujarras, 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 together 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 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 American.
"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 beating wings of white flame about us.
"In America there is freedom," said the blackish man, "there are no rural guards; roadmenders work eight hours and wear silk shirts and earn ... un dineral." The blackish man stopped, quite out of breath from his grappling with infinity. 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: "_Ca, en America no se hase na' a que trabahar y de'cansar...._ Not on your life, in America they don't do anything 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 foreheads, 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 wineshop 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, gentlemen,'" 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.
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 ferocious 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?"
"That's it," he answered, and cried, "_arrh he_" to the donkey.
We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bellied 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_. "We'll see the sea from the next hill."
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, groping 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.