MEDINA DEL CAMPO
If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could
pass through and circumambulate a foreign country yet never come into
closer contact with the inhabitants than that transmitted through a
Cook's interpreter. So that if you want to learn anything about a
country, either you must put a sprag into the wheels of this
civilization or you must let Opportunity do it for you. Opportunity is a
very complaisant goddess: give her an inch and the ell at least is
offered to you. She smiled upon us when we decided to stay the night at
Irun; once more she smiled when the porter told us that the train to
Avila left about eight o'clock, so we humped the two rucksacks and the
suit-case from the inn to the station, got our trunk and hold-all from
the baggage office and went to buy our tickets. Then we realized what
Opportunity had been up to. The ticket clerk refused to give us tickets
to Avila.
"Why not?
"The train does not go through Avila, it goes to Madrid by the other
branch through Segovia. The train by Avila goes at four."
"Where, then, does it branch off?"
"At Medina del Campo."
"Then give us tickets to Avila and we will wait at Medina del Campo."
But the authorities did not approve of this novel idea. It seemed that
the through-ticket system had not become the custom in Spain. We must
then take tickets to Medina or wait in Irun till the proper,
respectable Avila train should go, so to the astonishment of the booking
clerk we said:
"All right, give us tickets for Medina."
[Illustration]
I do not believe that any pleasure traveller had stopped at Medina
before we did. That is the impression we received, both from the
behaviour of the porters at Irun and of those at Medina itself.
The scenery from the railway was, as scenery always is, fascinating
because of one's elevation and the scope of one's view, tiring because
of its continuous movement. We passed through mountains worthy of
Scotland, very Scotch in colour, and at last came out upon the big plain
of Valladolid.
While we were streaming across this and the mountains were fading slowly
into a distant blue the luncheon-car waiter announced his joyful news.
We had heard that living in Spain was going to be dear, so, with some
trepidation, we decided to take that train luncheon--for our financial
position did not encourage extravagance. The whole trip was, in theory,
to come within the limits of Jan's war gratuity--about £120. We had
calculated the railway travelling as £50 in all; this gave us £70 for
all other expenses, including the purchase of the musical instruments
upon which we had set our minds, and we hoped to stay for four or five
months. Yet in spite of the need for economy luncheon called us if only
as an experience.
The meal cost us about three and fourpence apiece: it was a complicated
affair of many courses--even in a Soho restaurant the same would have
come to about ten shillings, so that the spirit of economy in us was
cheered and inspirited. Of our fellow passengers we remember nobody save
a gigantic priest who waddled slowly along the corridors, carrying,
suspended on a plump finger, a very small cage in which, like a mediæval
captive in a "little ease," was a canary almost as large as its prison.
Medina station looked like an exaggerated cart-shed on a farm; two long
walls and a roof of corrugated iron--there were no platforms, only one
broad pavement along one of the walls. A small bookstall was against the
wall and further along the pavement a booth of jewellery. This booth had
glass windows and "Precio Fijo"[2]--"No bargaining," in other words--was
painted across the glass in white letters.
Why Spaniards, _en route_, should have mad desires to purchase
jewellery, we have not learned, but these jewellery booths are common on
Spanish stations. The jewellers seem to detest bargaining, for these
words always appear on the windows. I suppose the fact that the
purchaser of jewellery has got to catch a train may give him some occult
advantage over the seller. One may imagine him slamming his last offer
down on the counter and sprinting off with the coveted trinket to the
train, while the defrauded merchant is struggling with the door-handle
of his booth--so "No Bargaining" is painted up, very white and very
positive.
As we had nine hours to wait, there was no need to hurry, so we allowed
the crowd to drift out of the platform before we began to see about the
disposal of our luggage. Stumbling about in Hugo Spanish we discovered
that, owing to the receipt that had been given us at Irun, our big trunk
would look after itself until claimed, but that there was no luggage
office or other facility for getting rid of our smaller baggage. We,
however, insinuated understanding into the head of a porter, who
thereupon led us to a door amongst other doors in the wall labelled
"Fonda." We came into a huge hall. Across one end stretched a majestic
bar four feet high, of elaborately carved wood, upon the top of which
were vases of fruits, tiers of bottles and glittering machines for the
manufacture of drink. Three long tables were in the room, two spread
simply with coffee-cups. The third table occupied the full length of the
middle of the room. It seemed spread for some Lord Mayor's banquet.
Snowy napery was covered along the centre with huge cut-glass dishes,
stacked with fruit, alternated with palms flanked by champagne bottles
and white and red wine bottles. Fully fifty places were laid, each place
having seven or eight plates stacked upon it while the cutlery sparkled
on either hand. A cadaverous, unshaven waiter lounged about amongst this
magnificence and lazily flicked at the flies with his napkin.
This huge, deserted room, expectant of so many guests, made one think of
the introduction to a fairy story: one could have sat the mad hatter,
the dormouse and the March hare down there, but one could never imagine
that fifty passengers could in sober earnestness crowd to have supper at
Medina del Campo upon the same day. No, rather here was one flutter of
the dying pomp and majesty of Spain.
We placed our bags in a corner of the pretentious room and went from the
station to look for the town. It was nowhere to be seen. A white road
deep in dust gleamed beneath the afternoon sun and led away across the
ochreous plain, but, of town, not a sign. Yet the white road was the
only road; Medina must be somewhere, so off we walked. The plain was not
quite flat, it flowed away in undulations which appeared shallow, but
which proved sufficiently deep to swallow up all signs of Medina del
Campo at the distance of a mile.
First we came to a line of little brightly coloured hovels, square
boxes, many of only one room, then to a church, an ancient
Spanish-Gothic church surrounded by gloomy trees. Suddenly the road
turned a corner and we were almost in the middle of the town. Medina was
Spanish enough. Here was the plaza at the end of which towered a high
cathedral decorated with colour and with carving. The plaza lay broad
and shining beneath the sunlight; loungers sprawled in the shadows
beneath the small, vivid green trees, and in the deep stone arcades
which edged the open square the afternoon coffee-drinkers, clad in cool
white, lolled at the café tables.
In the centre of the plaza was a fountain running with water, and about
it came and went a continual procession of women bearing large, white
amphoras upon their hips, children carrying smaller drinking vessels,
and men wheeling long, barrow-like frameworks into which many amphoras
were placed. The shops and cafés were painted in gay colours which were
brilliant in the sun and which contrasted pleasantly with the crude--as
though painted--green of the trees and the clear, soothing hue of the
sky.
I know that historical things have happened at Medina del Campo, but we
are not going to retail second-hand history. To us, as living beings, it
is far more important that we bought our first oily, almondy Spanish
cakes here than that Santa Teresa (who started off at the age of ten
years to be martyred by the Moors) founded a convent in the town.
Medina is a dead place and must be typical of Spain. It has a market, a
plaza and a few ragged fringes of streets more than half full of
collapsing houses, and in this gay-looking remnant of past glory are at
least three enormous churches with monasteries in attendance. But even
the churches are falling into ruin and the storks' nests are clustered
flat on the belfries, while Hymen's debt collectors, clapping their
beaks, gaze down from aloft into the empty roadways.
Sunset had played out a colour symphony in orange major by the time we
had arrived back at the station where we asked for a meal; but the
cadaverous, blue-jowled waiter had not laid covers for fifty in order
that intrusive strangers might push in and demand food at whatever hour
they chose.
"Supper," he said with some dignity and disgust at our ignorance, "is at
eight."
So out we went on to the pavement platform, found a lattice seat and ate
the cakes we had bought. They were like treacly macaroons, so oily that
the paper in which they had been wrapped was soaked through, but it was
with pure almond oil and the cakes were delicious. Lunch had been eaten
at twelve and in trains one never eats quite at one's ease; hunger had
gripped us when eight o'clock struck by the station clock. We took our
seats at the long table before those piles of plates. A quarter-past
eight went by, half-past eight was approaching. One by one about six or
seven persons sauntered into the room and seated themselves, distant
from each other in comparison with the size of the table as are the
planets in the solar system. Nearest to us, our Mars, as it were, was a
very fat commercial man, his face showing the hue of the ruddy planet.
Our Venus was represented by a pale young priest, his long wrists
projecting far from the sleeves of his cassock. Mercury looked
appropriately enough like one who was always travelling; Saturn was
covered with rings--he must have been one of the customers of the
"precio fijo" booths--the other planets were lost amongst cumulus of
fruit and cirrus of palm.
The waiter became active. Balancing a large soup tureen, he ladled a
thin, greenish soup into the upper plate. We then understood that we
would have to eat our way down through the pile of plates, each plate a
course. Mars rushed at his soup in such a wild manner that we felt it
was a good thing indeed that the soup-plate was thus raised so near to
his mouth or fully the half of the soup would have drenched his
waistcoat.
Alice again was recalled to my mind. I remembered her dismay during her
regal banquet when the dishes once introduced to her were whisked away
from under her nose, for every time I laid down my knife and fork to
speak to Jan my plate was seized and carried off by the cadaverous
waiter. No sooner was I introduced to a new Spanish dish than it was
wrested from me. Twice this had occurred. On the third occasion I lay in
wait: as the waiter swooped for my plate I seized it. There was a
momentary struggle, but I had two hands to his one; he retired with a
look of astonishment on his face. Gradually I became aware of the fact
that Mars never loosed his knife and fork until he had cleared his
plate. He held both firmly in his two red hands. If he drank--which he
did with gusto, throwing his head back, washing the wine, which had a
queer tarry taste, about the inside of his mouth, almost cleaning his
teeth with it--he held his fork sceptre-wise as if to say to the waiter,
"Touch that last corner of beefsteak at your peril." When he had quite
finished the course, when he had mopped up all the remnants with a piece
of bread, then and then only did he lay down both knife and fork.
Unconsciously I had been giving a signal to the waiter.
After the beefsteak we had a surprise. One has been so long accustomed
to the French custom in gastronomy, that one almost forgets that
courses are not arranged in an immutable order. Once indeed I did make a
bet in Paris that I would eat a meal in the inverse direction, beginning
with the coffee and sweets and ending with the soup--which, by the way,
proved very hard to swallow--but the mere fact that one could bet about
it proves how fixed one imagines the laws of food progression to be. At
Medina del Campo, after the beefsteak, which was about the third item on
the menu, the waiter brought us fried fish, thereby proving that
gastronomic progression is not so unalterable as is usually imagined.
The fish looked like very small plaice, but they had a strange flavour
which we had never before tasted. That the fish had been packed for
several days in rotting hay seemed the nearest description and
explanation, and we would have clung to this idea if the salad had not
also had a perceptible tang of this unpleasant taste. We asked the
waiter what the flavour was, but our Spanish broke down under the
strain, and the waiter said "Claro"[3] and went away.
For some weeks afterwards the word "Claro" became our bugbear. The
Spaniard gets little amusement from hearing his language spoken by
foreigners. If the unfortunate foreigner does not get pronunciation,
accent and intonation perfect the Spaniard says "Claro," in reality
meaning "I can't make head or tail of what you are talking about." Both
laziness and courtesy make the Spaniard say "Claro," and often the poor
foreigner is quite delighted with his progress in the language--the
people tell him that everything he says is perfectly clear, hooray; he
thinks that he must have an unsuspected gift for languages--until one
day he asks the way to somewhere and receives the usual answer, "Claro."
The Redonda Mesa,[4] which would I think be the Spanish for a "square
meal," cost us again four pesetas, and it was an even better three and
eightpenn'orth than we had been given on the train. The meal finished,
the planets held a public tooth-picking competition for a while, then
one by one they resumed their normal orbits and passed from our sight.
We, with the processes of digestion heavy upon us, went back to the seat
in the ill-lit station. Three more hours we had to wait for the train to
Avila, so we sat in the mild night watching the only engine at
Medina--an engine which looked like an immediate descendant of
Stevenson's Rocket--push trucks very slowly to and fro. This engine,
though it made a lot of spasmodic noise, did not destroy, it only
interrupted, the intense silence which lay over the country-side. The
platform was quite deserted. Presently two small boys came along. One
had a red tin of tobacco which he offered to Jan; Jan shook his head but
did not answer. They then tried to talk to us, but we knew better than
to expose our imperfect Castilian to two small boys--so we kept silence.
At last they said we were "misteriosos" and went away.
A luggage train steamed in. At the tail end of the train were three
third-class carriages, and from these carriages, as well as from the
waggons, poured out a mob of wild-looking men. They were dark brown,
unshaven, covered with broad tattered straw hats, clothed in rough and
ragged fustian and carried blankets of many coloured stripes. Huge
bundles, sacks and strange implements were slung upon their backs. As
they crowded in beneath the dim lamp at the station exit one could
almost have sworn that all the figures from Millet's pictures had come
to life. A smell of the soil and of labour and of sweat went up from
them. These men were peasants from Galicia; they had come in third-class
carriages, in goods waggons, travelling probably for two or three days,
attached to luggage trains, across the country to the harvesting. One by
one they passed out, their voices trailed away into the night towards
Medina, and once more the silence came back.
Time wears itself out in the end. The train to Avila, when it came, was
fairly empty, so we could lay ourselves out at full length and rest,
disturbed, however, by the continual fear that we might overshoot our
destination.
It was pitchy night when we clambered down from the train at Avila. The
large barn of a station was lit by but three minute lamps and the glow
from the fonda door. In the semi-darkness the passengers moved about
like ghosts, each intent on his own business. It was two o'clock in the
morning, so before exploring we again put our baggage in a corner of the
fonda; where also we found the one waiter presiding over a banquet laid
for fifty non-existent guests. Speaking as little of the language as we
did, it seemed impossible to go exploring a foreign town in the dead of
night for a hotel which would probably be shut when we found it. So,
feeling somewhat like Leon Berthelini and his wife in Stevenson's story,
we sat down on a seat in the station to await the dawn.
The temperature of the night was almost perfect; there was a hint of
chill in our faces which, however, did not penetrate through the
clothing. For awhile porters moved about arranging luggage, then one by
one the three lights were extinguished and the station was left to
darkness. One porter clambered into a carriage which was standing on a
siding; as he did not come out again nor pass down on the other side we
imagine he went to bed in it. We were tempted to follow his example, but
feared the train might move off unexpectedly and carry us to some remote
part of Spain before we could wake up. One can tempt opportunity too
far.
But the seat was hard. If, like Berthelini, we had had a guitar we might
have performed miracles with it similar to his, but we had left our
guitars in England. So Jan went exploring. Outside the station he found
a small omnibus, its horses eating hay out of nose-bags. Hearing faint
voices he discovered a sort of dimly lit underground bar annexed to the
fonda, in which the driver of the omnibus and a friend were drinking
spirits, while the tired waiter lounged yawning behind the counter. Our
ignorance of Spanish prevented us from thrusting ourselves into their
company: but we waited for the driver to attend to his horses and in
halting Hugo we asked him at what hour the omnibus went to the hotel. He
replied "In the morning" and went back to his drinking.
The eau-de-nil of dawn found us on the edge of shivering, but the day
warmed rapidly. A train thundered into the station pouring out its
cascade of passengers. Gathering up our packages and tipping the waiter
fifty centimes, we found a new omnibus which was labelled "Hotel Jardin"
and took our seats inside. Dawn was over by the time we reached the
hotel, though it was but four o'clock. We had a confused impression of
great buff battlements overhanging the buildings, of a few stunted
bushes, of one or two girls in black, of a huge room which was to be our
bedroom and then--bed--sleep.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Fixed prices.]
[Footnote 3: "That is clear."]
[Footnote 4: Round table.]