Part 5

The skill these thrummers of the guitar display is delicious, especially in the treble part, which is executed on a smaller species of the instrument, called a _mandura_. Our treble-player was blind in one eye, and with the carelessness of genius allowed his mouth to stay open, but managed always to keep a cigarette miraculously hanging in it; while his comrade, with a disconsolate expression, disdained to look at the strings on which his proud Castilian fingers were condemned to play a mere accompaniment. For two or three hours they rippled out those peculiar native airs which go so well with the muffled vibrations and mournful Oriental monotony of the guitar; but the bagman varied the concert by executing operatic pieces on a hair-comb covered with thin paper--a contrivance in which he took unfeigned delight. Some remonstrance against this uproar being made by other inmates of the hotel, our host silenced the complainants by cordially inviting them in. One large black-bearded guest, the exact reproduction of a stately ancient Roman, accepted the hospitality, and listened to that ridiculous piping of the comb with profound gravity and unmoved muscles, expressing neither approval nor dissatisfaction. But the white-aproned waiter, who, though unasked, hung spellbound on the threshold, was, beyond question, deeply impressed. The relations of servants with employers are on a very democratic footing in Spain. We had an admirable butler at Madrid who used to join in the conversation at table whenever it interested him, and was always answered with good grace by the conversationists, who admitted him to their intellectual repast at the same moment that he was proffering them physical nutriment. These Toledan servitors of the Fonda de Lino were still more informal. They used to take naps regularly twice a day in the hall, and could not get through serving dinner without an occasional cigarette between the courses. To save labor, they would place a pile of plates in front of each person, enough to hold the entire list of viands. That last phrase is a euphemism, however, for the meal each day consisted of the same meat served in three separate relays without vegetables, followed by fowl, an allowance of beans, and dessert. Even this they were not particular to give us on the hour. Famished beyond endurance, one evening at eight o'clock, we went down-stairs and found that not the first movement toward dinner had been made. The _mozos_ (waiters) were smoking and gossiping in the street, and rather frowned upon our vulgar desire for food, but we finally persuaded them to yield to it. After we had bought some tomatoes, and made a salad at dinner, the management was put on its mettle, and improved slightly. Fish in this country is always brought on somewhere in the middle of dinner, like the German pudding, and our landlord astonished us by following the three courses of stewed veal with sardines, fried in oil and ambuscaded in a mass of boiled green peppers. After that we forbore to stimulate his ambition any farther.

The hotel guest, however, is on the whole regarded as a necessary evil--a nuisance tolerated only because some few of the finest race in the world can make money out of him. The landlord lived with his family on the ground-floor, and furnished little domestic tableaux as we passed in and out; but he never paid any attention to us, and even looked rather hurt at the intrusion of so many strangers into his hostelry. Nor did the high-born sewing-women who sat on the public stairs, and left only a narrow space for other people to ascend or descend by, consider it necessary to stir in the least for our convenience. The fonda had more of the old tavern or posada style about it than most hotels patronized by foreigners. The entrance door led immediately into a double court, where two or three yellow equipages stood; and from this the kitchen, storerooms, and stable all branched off in some clandestine way. Above, at the eaves, these courts were covered with canvas awnings wrinkled in regular folds on iron rods--sheltering covers which remained drawn from the first flood of the morning sun until after five in the afternoon. Early and late I used to look down into the inner court, observing the men and women of the household as they dressed fish and silently wrung the necks of chickens, or sat talking a running stream of nothingness by the hour, for love of their own glib but uncouth voices. People of this province intone rather than talk: their sentences are set to distinct drawling tunes, such as I never before encountered in ordinary speech, and their thick lisping of all sibilants, combined with the usual contralto of their voices, gives the language a sonorous burr, for which one soon acquires a liking. Sunday is the great hair-combing day in Toledo, if I may judge from the manner in which women carried on that soothing operation in their door-ways and _patios_; and in this inner court below my window one of the servants, sitting on a stone slab, enjoyed the double profit of sewing and of letting a companion manipulate her yard-long locks of jet, while others sat near, fanning themselves and chattering. Another time a little girl, dark as an Indian, came there in the morning to wash a kerchief at the stone tank, always brimming with dirty water; after which she executed, unsuspicious of my gaze, a singularly weird _pas seul_, a sort of shadow dance, on the pavement, and then vanished.

All the houses are roofed with heavy curved tiles, which fit together so as to let the air circulate under their hollow grooves; and a species of many-seeded grass sprouts out of these baked earth coverings, out of the ledges of old towers and belfries, and from the crevices of the great cathedral itself, like the downy hair on an old woman's cheek.

The view along almost any one of the ancient streets, which are always tilted by the hilly site, is wonderfully quaint in its irregularities. Every window is heavily grated with iron, from the top to the bottom story, even the openings high up in the cathedral spire being similarly guarded, until the whole place looks like a metropolis of prisons. In the stout doors, too, there are small openings or peep-holes, such as we had seen still in actual use at Madrid--the relics of an epoch when even to open to an unknown visitor might be dangerous. White, white, white the sunshine!--and the walls of pink or yellow-brown, of pale green and blue, are sown with deep shadows and broken by big archways, often surmounted by rich knightly escutcheons. Balconies with tiled floors turning their colors down toward the sidewalk stud the fronts, and long curtains stream over them like cloaks fluttering in the breeze. At one point a peak-roofed tower rises above the rest of its house with sides open to the air and cool shadow within, where perhaps a woman sits and works behind a row of bright flowering plants. Doves inhabited the fonda roof unmolested by the spiritless cats that, flat as paper, slept in the undulations of the tiles; for the Toledan cats and dogs are the most wretched of their kind. They get even less to eat than their human neighbors, which is saying a great deal. And beyond the territory of the doves my view extended to a slender bell-spire at the end of the cathedral, poised in the bright air like a flower-stalk, with one bell seen through an interstice as if it were a blossom. At another point the main spire rose out of what might be called a rich thicket of Gothic work. Its tall thin shaft is encircled near the point with sharp radiating spikes of iron, doubtless intended to recall the crown of thorns: in this sign of the Passion, held forever aloft, three hundred feet above the ground, there is a penetrating pathos, a solemn beauty.

III.

The cathedral of Toledo, long the seat of the Spanish primate, stands in the first rank of cathedrals, and is invested with a ponderous gloom that has something almost savage about it. For six centuries art, ecclesiasticism, and royal power lavished their resources upon it; and its dusky chapels are loaded with precious gems and metals, tawdry though the style of their ornamentation often is. The huge pillars that divide its five naves rise with a peculiar inward curve, which gives them an elastic look of growth. They are the giant roots from which the rest has spread. Under the golden gratings and jasper steps of the high altar Cardinal Mendoza lies buried, with a number of the older kings of Spain, in a grewsome sunless vault; but at the back of the altar there is contrived with theatrical effect a burst of white light from a window in the arched ceiling, around the pale radiance of which are assembled painted figures, gradually giving place to others in veritable relief--all sprawling, flying, falling down the wall enclosing the altar, as if one were suddenly permitted to see a swarm of saints and angels careering in a beam of real supernatural illumination. A private covered gallery leads above the street from the archbishop's palace into one side of the mighty edifice; and this, with the rambling, varied aspect of the exterior, in portions resembling a fortress, with a stone sentry-box on the roof, recalls the days of prelates who put themselves at the head of armies, leading in war as in everything else. A spacious adjoining cloister, full of climbing ivy and figs, Spanish cypress, the smooth-trunked laurel-tree, and many other growths, all bathed in opulent sunshine, marks the site of an old Jewish market, which Archbishop Tenorio in 1389 incited a mob to burn in order that he might have room for this sacred garden. But the voices of children now ring out from the upper rooms of the cloister building, where the widows and orphans of cathedral servants are given free homes. Through this "cloister of the great church" it was that Cervantes says he hurried with the MS. of Cid Hamete Benengeli, containing Don Quixote's history, after he had bought it for half a real--just two cents and a half.

A temple of the barbaric and the barbarous, the cathedral dates from the thirteenth century: but it was preceded by one which was built to the Virgin in her lifetime, tradition says, and she came down from heaven to visit her shrine. The identical slab on which she alighted is still preserved in one of the chapels. A former inscription said to believers, "Use yourselves to kiss it for your much consolation," and their obedient lips have in time greatly worn down the stone. Later on, the church was used as a mosque by the infidel conquerors, and when they were driven out it was pulled down to be replaced by the present huge and solemn structure. But, by a compromise with the subjugated Moors, a Muzarabic mass (a seeming mixture of Mohammedan ritual with Christian worship) was ordained to be said in a particular chapel; and there it is recited still, every morning in the year. I attended this weird, half-Eastern ceremony, which was conducted with an extraordinary incessant babble of rapid prayer from the priests in the stalls, precisely like the inarticulate hum one imagines in a mosque. On the floor below and in front of the altar-steps was placed a richly-draped chest, perhaps meant to represent the tomb of Mohammed in the Caaba, and around it stood lighted candles. During the long and involved mass one of the younger priests, in appearance almost an imbecile, had the prayer he was to read pointed out for him by an altar-boy with what looked like a long knife-blade, used for the purpose. Soon after an incense-bearing acolyte nudged him energetically to let him know that his turn had now come. This was the only evidence I could discover of any progress in knowledge or goodness resulting from the Muzarabic mass.

At one time Toledo had, besides the cathedral, a hundred and ten churches. Traces of many of them are still seen in small arches rising from the midst of house-tops, with a bell swung in the opening; but the most have fallen into disuse, and the greatest era of the hierarchy has passed. The great priests have also passed, and those who now dwell here offer to the most unprejudiced eye a dreary succession of bloated bodies and brutish faces. Sermons are never read in the gorgeous cathedral pulpits, and the Church, as even an ardent Catholic assured me, seems, at least locally, dead. The priests and the prosperous shop-keepers are almost the only beings in Toledo who look portly; the rest are thin, brown, wiry, and tall, with fine creases in their hard faces that appear to have been drilled there by the sand-blast process.

The women, however, even in the humbler class, preserve a fine, fresh animal health, which makes you wonder how they ever grow old, until you see some tottering creature who is little more than a mass of sinews and wrinkles held together by a skirt and a neckerchief--the _pañuclo_ universal with her sex. At noon and evening the serving-women came out to the fountains, distributed here and there under groups of miniature locust-trees, to fetch water for their houses. They carried huge earthen jars, or _cantarones_, which they would lug off easily under one arm, in attitudes of inimitable grace.

If religious sway over temporal things has declined, Toledo still impresses one as little more than a big church founded on the rock, with room made for the money-changers' benches, and an unimaginable jumble of palaces once thronged with powerful courtiers and abundant in wealth, but at this day chiefly inhabited by persons of humble quality. Nightly there glows in the second story of a building on the Zocodover, where _autos-da-fé_ used to be held, a large arched shrine of the Virgin hung with mellow lamps, so that not even with departing daylight shall religious duty be put aside by the commonplace crowd shuffling through the plaza beneath. Everywhere in angles and turnings and archways one comes upon images and pictures fixed to the wall under a pointed roof made with two short boards, to draw a passing genuflection or incidental _ave_ from any one who may be going by on an errand of business or--as more often occurs--laziness. Feast-days, too, are still ardently observed. With all this, somehow, the fact connects itself that the populace are instinctive, free-born, insatiable beggars. The magnificently chased door-ways of the cathedral festered with revolting specimens of human disease and degeneration, appealing for alms. Other more prosperous mendicants were regularly on hand for business every day at the "old stand" in some particular thoroughfare. I remember one, especially, whose whole capital was invested in a superior article of nervous complaint, which enabled him to balance himself between the wall and a crutch, and there oscillate spasmodically by the hour. In this he was entirely beyond competition, and cast into the shade those merely routine professionals who took the common line of bad eyes or uninterestingly motionless deformities. It used to depress them when he came on to the ground. Bright little children, even, in perfect health, would desist from their amusements and assail us, struck with the happy thought that they might possibly wheedle the "strangers" into some untimely generosity. There was one pretty girl of about ten years, who laughed outright at the thought of her own impudence, but stopped none the less for half an hour on her way to market (carrying a basket on her arm) in order to pester poor Velveteen while he was sketching, and begged him for money, first to get bread, and then shoes, and then anything she could think of.

A hand opened to receive money would be a highly suitable device for the municipal coat of arms.

My friend's irrepressible pencil, by-the-way, made him the centre of a crowd wherever he went. Grave business men came out of their shops to see what he was drawing; loungers made long and ingenious detours in order to obtain a good view of his labors; ragamuffins elbowed him, undismayed by energetic remarks in several languages, until finally he was moved to get up and display the contents of his pockets, inviting them even to read some letters he had with him. To this gentle satire they would sometimes yield. We fell a prey, however, to one silent youth of whom we once unguardedly asked a question. After that he considered himself permanently engaged to pilot us about. He would linger for hours near the fonda dinnerless, and, what was even more terrible, sleepless, so that he might fasten upon us the moment we should emerge. If he discovered our destination, he would stride off mutely in advance, to impress on us the fact that we were under obligation to him; and when we found the place we wanted, he waited patiently until we had rewarded him with a half-cent. If we gratified him by asking him the way, he responded by silently stretching forth his arm and one long forefinger with a lordly gesture, still striding on; and he had a very superior Castilian sneering smile, which he put on when he looked around to see if we were following. He gradually became for us a sort of symbolic shadow of the town's vanished greatness; and from his mysterious way of coming into sight, and haunting us in the most unexpected places, we gave him the name of "Ghost." Nevertheless, we baffled him at last. In the Street of the Christ of Light there is a small but exceedingly curious mosque, now converted into a church, so ancient in origin that some of the capitals in it are thought to show Visigothic work, so that it must have been a Christian church even before the Moorish invasion. Close by this we chanced upon a charming old _patio_, or court-yard, entered through a wooden gate, and by dexterously gliding in here and shutting the gate we exorcised "Ghost" for some time.

The broad red tiles of this _patio_ contrasted well with its white-washed arcade pillars, on which were embossed the royal arms of Castile; and the jutting roof of the house was supported on elaborate beams of old Spanish cedar cracked with age. It was sadly neglected. Flowers bloomed in the centre, but a pile of lumber littered one side; and the house was occupied by an old woman who was washing in the arcade, her tub being the half of a big terra-cotta jar laid on its side. She spread her linen out on the hot pavement to dry; and a sprightly neighbor coming in with a basket of clothes and a "Health to thee!" was invited to dry _her_ wash on a low tile roof adjoining.

"Solitude" served at once as her name and to describe her surroundings. We made friends with her, the more easily because she was much interested in the sketch momently growing under my companion's touch.

"And _you_ don't draw?" she inquired of me.

I answered, apologetically, "No."

Having seen me glancing over a book, she added, as if to console me, and with emphasis, "But you can read!" To her mind that was a sister art and an equal one.

She went on to tell how her granddaughter had spent ten years in school, and at the end of that time was able to read. "But now she is forgetting it all. She goes out and plays too much with the _muchachas_" (young girls).

This amiable grandmother also took us in to see her domicile, which proved to be a part of the old city wall, and had a fine view from its iron-barred window. She declared vaguely that "a count" had formerly lived there; but it had more probably been the gate-captain's house, for close by was one of the fortified ports of the inner defences. A store-room, in fact, which she kept full of pigeons and incredibly miscellaneous old iron, stood directly over the arched entrance, and there we saw the heavy beam and windlass which in by-gone ages had hoisted or let fall the spiked portcullis. I induced "Solitude" to tell me a legend about one of the churches; for there is generally some story to every square rod of ground hereabout, and indeed a little basilica below the town sustains four different narratives all explaining a single miracle. Serving as an appropriate foundation for local wonder-mongering, a great cave in the rock underlies some portion of the city, and is said to have been hollowed out by Hercules, who, in addition to his other labors, has received the credit of founding Toledo. I am convinced that no muscles but his could ever have stood the strain of first climbing its site. The cave I refer to has been for the most part of the last two hundred years closed and walled up. About thirty years since it was timidly explored by a society formed for the purpose, and some Roman remains were found in it; but after that, terror fell upon the explorers, and the cavern was again closed, remaining even yet a reservoir of mystery. There are equally mysterious things above ground, however, as will shortly be demonstrated by the tale of the "Christ of Compassion." Let me, before giving that, recall here a more poetic tradition, preserved by Señor Eugenio Olavarria, a young author of Madrid. We saw just outside the mosque-church of the Christ of Light an old Moorish well, of a kind common in Spain, with a low thick wall surrounding the deep sunken shaft, to rest the bucket-chain on when it is let down and drawn up by sheer muscular force. The edges were worn into one continuous pattern of grooves by the incessant chafing of the chains for ages, and we conjured up a dozen romances about the people who of old slaked their thirst there. It is about another water-source of the same kind, on a small street still called Descent to the Bitter Well, that the story here outlined is told:

THE WELL OF BITTERNESS.

"In the time of one of the Moorish kings there lived at Toledo, under the mild toleration of that epoch, a rich Jew, strictly and passionately devoted to the laws of his religion and to one only other object: that one was his daughter Raquel, motherless, but able to solace his widowed heart with her devoted affection. Sixteen Aprils had wrought their beautiful changes into her exquisite form and lovely mind, till at last, of all things which they had waked to life, she appeared the fairest.