Part 3

The Madrileños offer not a flat, but rather an extremely round contradiction to this general and accepted idea of the national appearance. Slenderness is the exception with them. Their city is a forced flower in the midst of mountain lands, and the men themselves rejoice in a rotund and puffy look of success, which also partakes of the hot-house character. They are people of leisure, and, after their manner, of pleasure. How they swarm in the cafés in the Gate of the Sun--where they keep up the Moorish custom of calling waiters by two claps of the hands--or on the one great thoroughfare, Calle de Alcalá, or in the bull-ring of a Sunday! They are never at rest, yet never altogether active. They never sleep, or, if they do, others take their places in the public resorts. The clamor of the streets, and even the snarling cry of the news-venders--"_La Correspondencia_," or "_El Demó-crata-a_"--is kept up until the small hours; and at five or six the restless stir begins again with the silver tinkling of fleet mule-bells. There are no night-howling watchmen in Madrid; but the custom of street-hawking is rampant in Spain; and here, in addition to the newsmen, we have the wail of the water-criers, ministering to an unquenchable popular thirst, the lottery-ticket sellers, the wax-match peddlers, and a dozen others. The favorite bird of the country is a kind of lark called _alondra_, much hung in cages outside the windows, whence they utter--with that monotonous recurrence which seems a fixed principle of all things Spanish--a hard, piercing triple note impossible to ignore. This loud, persistent "twit, twit-twit," resembling at a distance the click of castanets, begins with daybreak, and gives a most discouraging notion of the Spanish musical ear.

But the watchmen are merciful. They are called, as elsewhere, _serenos_, which may mean either "quiet," or "night-dews," but their function in Madrid is peculiar. Early in the evening they come out by squads, with staves of office, and at their girdles bright lanterns and an immense bunch of keys. These are the night-keys of all the houses on each man's beat, the residents not being allowed to have any. When a person returns home late--and who does not, in Madrid--he is obliged to find his sereno, and if that officer is not in sight, calls him by name--"Frascuelo," or "Pepino." Whereupon Frascuelo, or Pepino, or Santiago, if he hears, will come along and unlock the door. This curious system should at least encourage good habits; for, unless a man be sober, his watchman may have unpleasant tales to tell of him.

The feline race being too often homeless, and having a proverbial taste for nocturnal wanderings, the average male citizen of the capital feelingly nicknames himself a "Madrid cat." This shows a frankness of self-characterization, to say the least, unusual. Of course there is home life, and there is family affection, in Madrid, but the stranger naturally does not see a great deal of these; and then it may be doubted whether they really exist to the same extent as in most other civilized capitals. It becomes wearisome to make sallies upon the town, and day after day find so much of the population trying to divert itself, or killing time in the cafés and clubs. The feeling deepens that they resort to these for want of a sufficiently close interest in their homes. More than that, they do not seem really to be amused. Even their language fails to express the amusement idea; the most that anything can be for them, in the vernacular, is "entertaining." Still the choice of light diversion is varied enough. Opera flourishes in winter; in spring and summer the bull-fight; theatres are always in blast; cocking-mains are kept up. Hitherto gambling has been another favorite pastime until checked by the authorities. Not content with all this, the Madrileños seek in lottery shops that excitement which Americans derive from drinking-saloons. The brightly lighted lottery agency occurs as frequently as that other indication of disease, the apothecary's window, or the stock-market "ticker," in American cities. People of all classes hover about them both by day and by night. Posters confront you with announcements of the Child Jesus Lottery, the lottery to aid the Asylum of Our Lady of the Assumption, or the National, which is drawn thrice a month, with a chief prize of thirty-two thousand dollars, and some four hundred other premiums. There are many small drawings besides constantly going on: not a day passes, in fact, without your being solicited by wandering dealers in these alluring chances at least half a dozen times.

Altogether, looking from my balcony upon the characteristic crowd in the great square, leading this life so busy yet so apathetic, as if in a slow fever, Madrid struck me as only one more great human ant-hill, where the ants were trying to believe themselves in Paris. The Parisian resemblance, however, is confined to strips through the middle and on the edges of the city, and as soon as one's steps are bent away from those, the narrow ways and older architecture of Spain re-appear. Only a few rods from the Puerta del Sol lies the Plaza Mayor, which once enjoyed all the honors of bull-fights and heretic burnings--occasions on which householders were obliged by their leases to give up all the front rooms and balconies to be used as boxes for the audience. From the Plaza Mayor again an arch leads into Toledo Street--old meandering mart full of mantles and sashes, blankets and guitars, flannel dyed in the national colors of red and yellow, basket-work and wood-work, including the carved sticks known as _molinillos_ (little mills), with which chocolate is mixed by a dexterous spinning motion. The donkey feels himself at home once more in these narrow thoroughfares; the evil sewage smell, which oozes through even the most pretentious edifices in the new quarters, diffuses itself again in full vigor, and the cafés become dingy and unconventional. On the Alcalá, or San Geronimo, the carefully-dressed men sip beer and cordials, or possibly indulge in sparkling sherry--a new and expensive wine like dry champagne; but here the rougher element is satisfied with _aguardiente_ (the liquor distilled from anise-seed), and quite as often confines itself to water. The lower orders are temperate. Peasants and porters and petty traders will sit down contentedly for a whole evening to a glass of water in which is dissolved a long meringue (called _asucarillo_, literally "sugarette"), or to a snow lemonade. Another esteemed cooling beverage is the _horchata de chufas_, a kind of cream made from pounded cypress root and then half frozen. The height of luxury is to order with this, at an added cost of some two cents, a few tubular wafers, fancifully named _barquillos_ (or little boats), through which the semi-liquid may be sucked. This barquillo is considered so desirable that boys carry it on the street in large metal cylinders, the top of which is a disk inscribed with numbers. You pay a fee, and he revolves on the disk a pivotal needle, the number at which it stops deciding how many wafers fall to your lot. In this way the excruciating pleasure of barquillos to eat is combined with the national delight in gaming.

European costume has fallen on the Madrid people like a pall, blotting out picturesqueness; but peasants of all provinces are still seen, and now and then a turbaned figure from Barbary moves across the street. Nor is the fascinating mantilla quite extinct among women, in spite of their more than Parisian grace and splendor of modern robing. There are humble old women squatted on the sidewalk at street corners, who sell water and liquors and shrub from bottles kept in a singular little stand with brass knobs like an exaggerated pair of casters; and when one sees the varied types of peasant, soldier, citizen, or priest, with perhaps a veiled woman of the middle class, gathered around one of these, the Spanish quality of the town re-asserts itself distinctly. So it does, too, when a carriage containing the princesses of the royal household rattles down the Prado Park, drawn by mules in barbaric red-tasselled harness, and preceded by a courier who wears a sort of gold-braided nightcap.

There is no cathedral at Madrid, but the churches, smeared as usual with gold and stucco and paint in tasteless extravagance, are numerous enough; and on many a balcony I saw withered straw-like plumes, long as a man, hung up in commemoration of the last Palm-Sunday. The morning papers have a "religious bulletin" in the amusement column, giving the saints and services of the day; besides which special masses for the souls of departed capitalists are constantly announced, with a request that friends shall attend. These paid rites doubtless offer a pleasant exception to the routine of commonplace church-going. Thus, while the men are absorbed by their cafés and politics, their countless cigarettes and lottery tickets, with a minimum of business and a maximum of dominoes, the women fill up their time with matins and vespers, confessions and intrigues. It would be merely repeating the frank assertion of the Spanish men themselves to say that feminine morals here are in a lamentable state; but at least appearances are always carefully guarded, and if judged by externals only, Madrid is far more virtuous than London or Paris. As for local society, it exists so much on appearances that the substance suffers. It is true, the ladies are beautiful and of noble stature; and their costumes, governed by the happiest taste, surpass in luxury those seen in public in almost any other city. The cavaliers are, without exception, the best-dressed gentlemen in the world; and the mass of sumptuous equipages, with polished grooms and surpassingly fine horses, which crowds the broad Castilian Fountain drive, or the Park road on the east of the Buen Retiro gardens, during fashionable hours, is amazing. Great wealth is gathered in the hands of a few nobles, who often draw heavy salaries from government for long-obsolete services; but the most of this costuming and grooming is attained by semi-starvation at home. By consequence, dinners and dancing-parties are rarely given even in the season, and royalty itself provides no more than a couple of balls, with two or three state dinners, a year.

To be sure, no capital is better provided with sundry of the higher means to cultivation, as its Royal Armory, its Archæological Museum, and its glorious Picture-gallery--in some respects the noblest of Europe--remind one. Moreover, in the neighboring Escorial, that dark jewel in the head of Philip II., travellers find a rich monument of art, albeit to many eyes unseen inscriptions perhaps record there more than enough of Spain's misfortunes. In the Madrid gallery the stately, severe, and robust royal portraits by Velazquez, or his magnificently healthy "Drunkards," reveal in their way, as do the Virgins of Murillo, floating divinely in translucent air, that deep and deathless power of Spanish temperament and genius over which slumber has reigned so long. The pictures of Ribera, hanging together, are like loose pages torn from Spanish ecclesiastical history and legend: a collection of monks, ascetics, martyrs--scenes of torture depicted with relentless and savage vigor. Goya, again, scarcely known out of Spain, left at the beginning of this century portraits of wonderful vitality and finish, fresh glimpses of popular life, and wild figure compositions marked by the fierce, half insane energy of a Latinized William Blake. His imagination and manner were both original. Though falling short, like all other Spanish painters, in ideality, he had that faculty of fertile improvisation so refreshing in Murillo's naturalistic "Madonna of the Birdling," or in his "St. Elizabeth," and "Roman Patrician's Dream," at the Academy of Fine Arts. But it is not with these past splendors, still full of hopes for new futures, that the Castilian gentlemen and ladies of our varnished period concern themselves. The opera, the circus, and the _Corrida de Toros_--the irrepressible bull-fight--are to them of far more consequence.

In every crowd and café you see the tall, shapely, dark-faced, silent men, with a cool, professionally murderous look like that of our border desperadoes, whose enormously wide black hats, short jackets, tight trousers, and pigtails of braided hair proclaim them _chulos_, or members of the noble ring. Intrepid, with muscles of steel, and finely formed, they are very illiterate: we saw one of them gently taking his brandy at the Café de Paris after a hard combat, while his friend read from an evening paper a report of the games in which he had just fought--the man's own education not enabling him to decipher print. But the higher class of these professionals are the idols, the demi-gods, of the people. Songs are made about them, their deeds are painted on fans, and popular chromos illustrate their loves and woes; people crowd around to see them in hotels or on the street as if they were heroes or star tragedians. Pet dogs are named for the well-known ones; and it was even rumored that one of the chief swordsmen had secured the affections of a patrician lady, and would have married her but for the interference of her friends. Certain it is that a whole class of young bucks of the lower order--"'Arrys" is the British term--get themselves up in the closest allowable imitation of bull-fighters, down to the tuft of hair left growing in front of the ear. The _espadas_ or _matadores_ (killers), who give the mortal blow, hire each one his _cuadrilla_--a corps of assistants, including _picadores_, _banderilleros_, and _punterillo_. For every fight they receive five hundred dollars, and sometimes they lay up large fortunes. To see the sport well from a seat in the shade, one must pay well. Tickets are monopolized by speculators, who, no less than the fighters, have their "ring," and gore buyers as the bull does horses. We gave two dollars apiece for places. The route to the Place of Bulls is lined for a mile with omnibuses, tartanas, broken-down diligences, and wheezy cabs, to convey intending spectators to the fight on Sunday afternoons. A stream of pedestrians file in the same direction, and the showy turnouts of the rich add dignity to what soon becomes a wild rush for the scene of action. The mule-bells ring like a rain of metal, whips crack, the drivers shout wildly, and at full gallop we dash by windows full of on-lookers, by the foaming fountains of the Prado, and up the road to the grim Colosseum of stone and brick, in the midst of scorched and arid fields, with the faint peaks of the snow-capped Guadarrama range seen, miles to the north, through dazzling white sunshine.

Within is the wide ring, sunk in a circular pit of terraced granite crowned by galleries. The whole great round, peopled by at least ten thousand beings, is divided exactly by the sun and the shadow--_sol y sombra_; and from our cool place we look at the vivid orange sand of the half arena in sunlight, and the tiers of seats beyond, where swarms of paper fans (red, yellow, purple, and green) are wielded to shelter the eyes of those in the cheaper section, or bring air to their lungs. No connected account of a bull tourney can impart the vividness, the rapid changes, the suspense, the skill, the picturesqueness, or horror of the actual thing. All occurs in rapid glimpses, in fierce, dramatic, brilliant, and often ghastly pictures, which fade and re-form in new phases on the instant. The music is sounding, the fans are fluttering, amateurs strolling between the wooden barriers of the ring and the lowest seats, hatless men are hawking fruit and aguardiente, when trumpets announce the grand entry. It is a superb sight: the picadores with gorgeous jackets and long lances on horseback, in wide Mexican hats, their armor-cased legs in buckskin trousers; the swordsmen and others on foot, shining with gold and silver embroidery on scarlet and blue, bright green, saffron, or puce-colored garments, carrying cloaks of crimson, violet, and canary. At the head is the mounted _alguazil_ in ominous black, who carries the key of the bull-gate. Everything is punctual, orderly, ceremonious.

Then the white handkerchief, as signal, from the president of the games in his box; the trumpet-blare again; and the bull rushing from his lair! There is a wild moment when, if he be of good breed, he launches himself impetuous as the ball from a thousand-ton gun directly upon his foes, and sweeping around half the circle, puts them to flight over the barrier or into mid-ring, leaving a horse or two felled in his track. I have seen one fierce Andalusian bull within ten minutes kill five horses while making two circuits of the ring. The first onset against a horse is horrible to witness. The poor steed, usually lean and decrepit, is halted until the bull will charge him, when instantly the picador in the saddle aims a well-poised blow with his lance, driving the point into the bull's back only about an inch, as an irritant. You hear the horns tear through the horse's hide; you _feel_ them go through _yourself_. Ribs crack; there's a clatter of hoofs, harness, and the rider's armor; a sudden heave and fall--disaster!--and then the bull rushes away in pursuit of a yellow mantle flourished to distract him.

The banderilleros come, each holding two ornamental barbed sticks, which he waves to attract the bull. At the brute's advance he runs to meet him, and in the moment when the huge head is lowered for a lunge, he plants them deftly, one on each shoulder, and springs aside. Perhaps, getting too near, he fails, and turns to fly; the bull after, within a few inches. He flees to the barrier, drops his cloak on the sand, and vaults over; the bull springs over too into the narrow alley; whereupon the fighter, being close pressed, leaps back into the ring light as a bird, but saved by a mere hair's-breadth from a tossing or a trampling to death. The crowd follow every turn with shouts and loud comments and cheers: "Go, bad little bull!" "Let the picadores charge!" "More horses! more horses!" "Well done, Gallito!" "Time for the death!--the matadores!" and so on. Humor mingles with some of their remarks, and there is generally one volunteer buffoon who, choosing a lull in the combat, shrieks out rude witticisms that bring the laugh from a thousand throats.

But if the management of the sport be not to their liking, then the multitude grow instantly stormy: rising on the benches, they bellow their opinions to the president, whistle, stamp, scream, gesticulate. It is the tumult of a mob, appeasable only by speedier bloodshed. And what bloodshed they get! A horse or two, say, lies lifeless and crumpled on the earth; the others, with bandaged eyes, and sides hideously pierced and red-splashed, are spurred and whacked with long sticks to make them go. But it is time for the banderilleros, and after that for the swordsman. He advances, glittering, with a proud, athletic step, the traditional chignon fastened to his pigtail, and holding out his bare sword, makes a brief speech to the president: "I go to slay this bull for the honor of the people of Madrid and the most excellent president of this tourney." Then throwing his hat away, he proceeds to his task of skill and danger. It is here that the chief gallantry of the sport begins. With a scarlet cloak in one hand he attracts the bull, waves him to one side or the other, baffles him, re-invites him--in fine, plays with and controls him as if he were a kitten, though always with eye alert and often in peril. At last, having got him "in position," he lifts the blade, aims, and with a forward spring plunges it to the hilt at a point near the top of the spine. Perhaps the bull recoils, reels, and dies with that thrust; but more often he is infuriated, and several strokes are required to finish him. Always, however, the blood gushes freely, the sand is stained with it, and the serried crowd, intoxicated by it, roar savagely. Still, the "many-headed beast" is fastidious. If the bull be struck in such a way as to make him spout his life out at the nostrils, becoming a trifle _too_ sanguinary, marks of disapproval are freely bestowed. One bull done for, the music recommences, and mules in showy trappings are driven in. They are harnessed to the carcasses, and the dead bulks of the victims are hauled bravely off at a gallop, furrowing the dirt. The grooms run at topmost speed, snapping their long whips; the dust rises in a cloud, enveloping the strange cavalcade. They disappear through the gate flying, and you wake from a dream of ancient Rome and her barbarous games come true again. But soon the trumpets flourish; another bull comes; the same finished science and sure death ensue, varied by ever-new chances and escapes, until afternoon wanes, the sun becomes shadow, and ten thousand satisfied people--mostly men in felt sombreros, with some women, fewer ladies, and a sprinkling of children and babies--throng homeward.

What impresses is the cold blood of the thing. People bring their goat-skins of wine, called "little drunkards," and pass them around to friends, between bulls; others pop off lemonade bottles, and nearly all smoke. Even a combatant sometimes lights a cigar while the bull is occupied at the other side of the ring. During the hottest encounters grooms come in to strip the harness from dying horses or stab an incapacitated one; to carry off baskets of entrails, and rake fresh sand over the blood-pools, quite calmly, at the risk of sharp interruption from the vagarious horned enemy. In the midst of a dangerous flurry, while performers are escaping, an orange-vender in the lane outside the barrier pitches some fruit to a buyer half-way up the _gradas_, counting aloud, "One, two, three," to twenty-four. All are caught, and he neatly catches his money in return. Afterward, when a bull leaps the barrier, this intrepid merchant has to fly for life, leaving his basket on the ground, where the bewildered animal upsets it, rolling the contents everywhere in golden confusion. Another time we saw a horse and rider lifted bodily on the horns, and so tossed that the horseman flew out of his saddle, hurtled through the air directly over the bull, and landed solidly on his back, senseless. Six grooms bore him off, white and rigid. But the populace never heeded him; they were madly cheering the bull's prowess. A surgeon, by-the-way, always attends in an anteroom; prayers are said before the fight; and a priest is in readiness with the consecrated wafer to give the last sacrament in case of any fatal accident. The utter simple-mindedness with which Spaniards regard the brutalities of the sport may be judged from the fact that a bull-fight was once given to benefit the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!