O, ORIENTAL, ROMANTIC CITY!
On the following day, Quentin awoke very early. An unusual sensation of
heat and dryness penetrated his senses. He looked through the balcony
window. The delicate, keen, somewhat lustreless light of morning glowed
in the street. In the clear, pale sky, a few white clouds were drifting
slowly.
Quentin dressed himself rapidly, left the house in which all were still
sleeping, turned down the street, went through a narrow alley, crossed a
plaza, followed a street, and then another and another, and soon found
himself without knowledge as to his whereabouts.
“This is amusing,” he murmured.
He was completely at sea. He did not even know on which side of the city
he was.
This made him feel very gay; happily, and with a light heart, thinking
of nothing in particular, but enjoying the soft, fresh air of the winter
morning, he continued with real pleasure to lose himself in that
labyrinth of alleys and passages--veritable crevices, shadow-filled....
The streets narrowed before him, and then widened until they formed
little plazas: they were full of sinuous twists; they traced broken
lines through the city. Water-spouts, terminating in wide-open dragon
mouths, threatened each other from opposite eaves, and the two lines of
tiled roofs, broken now and then by projecting bay-windows, and azoteas
(flat roofs or terraces upon the house-tops), were so close together
that the sky was reduced between them to a ribbon of blue--of a very
pure blue.
When one narrow, white street came to an end, on either side there
opened out others equally narrow, white, and silent.
Quentin never imagined that there could be so much solitude, so much
light, so much mystery and silence. His eyes, accustomed to the filtered
and opaque light of the North, were blinded by the reverberation of the
walls. The air buzzed in his ears like a huge, sonorous sea-shell.
How different everything was! What a difference between this clear and
limpid atmosphere, and that grey northern air: between the refulgent sun
of Cordova, and the turbid light of the misty, blackened towns of
England!
“This is a real sun,” thought Quentin, “and not that thing in England
that looks like a wafer stuck on brown paper.”
In the plazoletas, white houses with green blinds, with their eaves
shaded by tracings of blue paint, their intersecting angles twisted, and
splashed with lime, sparkled and shone. And from the side of one of
these sunbaked plazas, there started a narrow, damp, and sinuous alley,
full of violet shadows.
Sometimes Quentin paused before sumptuous façades of old manorial
houses. At the furthest end of the broad entrance, the wrought-iron
flowers of the grating stood out against the brilliant clarity of a
resplendent patio. That drowsy spot was surrounded by rows of arches,
and jardinières were hung from the roofs of the corridors; while from a
marble basin in the centre, a fountain of crystalline water plashed in
the air.
In the houses of the rich, great plantain trees spread their enormous
leaves, and cactus plants in green wooden pots, decorated the entrance.
In some of the poorer houses, the patios could be seen overflowing with
light at the end of very long and shadowy corridors.
The day was advancing: from time to time a figure wrapped in a cloak, or
an old woman with a basket, or a girl with her hair down her back and an
Andújar pitcher on her well-rounded hip, would pass quickly by, and
suddenly, instantaneously, one or the other of them would disappear in
the turn of an alley. An old woman was setting up a small table, on top
of which, and upon some bits of paper, she was arranging coloured taffy.
Without realizing where he was going, Quentin came to the Mosque, and
found himself before the wall facing an altar with a wooden shed, and a
grating decorated with pots of flowers. On the altar was this sign:
_Si quieres que tu dolor
se convierta en alegría,
no pasarás, pecador,
sin alabar a María._
(If you wish your grief to be changed to joy, you will not pass by, O
sinner, without first praising the Virgin Mary.)
* * * * *
Near the altar was an open gate, and through it, Quentin passed into the
Patio de los Naranjos.
Above the archway of the entrance, the cathedral tower, broad, strong,
and resplendent in the sun, raised itself toward heaven, standing out in
clear and sharp silhouette in the pure and diaphanous morning air.
Now and then a woman crossed the patio. A prebendary, with cap and
crimson mozetta, was walking slowly up and down in the sun, smoking,
with his hands clasped behind his back. In the shelter of the Puerta del
Perdón, two men were piling oranges. As Quentin neared the fountain, a
little old man asked him solicitously:
“Do you wish to see the Mosque?”
“No, sir,” replied Quentin pleasantly.
“The Alcázar?”
“No.”
“The Tower?”
“No.”
“Very well, Señorito, pardon me if I have molested you.”
“Not at all.”
When Quentin left the Patio de los Naranjos, he met the French couple of
the train near the Triunfo column. M. Matignon hastened to greet him.
“Oh, what a town! What a town!” he cried. “Oh, my friend, what an
extraordinary affair!”
“Why, what has happened to you?”
“A thousand things.”
“Good or bad?”
“Both. Just fancy: last night as I was coming out of a house, and was
about to enter my hotel, a man with a lantern in his hand, and a short
pike, commenced to pursue me. I went into the hotel and locked myself in
my room; but the man came into the hotel; I’m sure of it, I’m sure of
it.”
Quentin laughed, realizing that the man with the lantern and the short
pike was a night watchman.
“Pay no attention to the man with the pike,” said he. “If he sees you
again and starts to follow you, look him straight in the eye, and say to
him firmly: ‘I have the key.’ It is the magic word. As soon as he hears
it, he will go away.”
“Why?”
“Ah! That is a secret.”
“How strange! One says to him, ‘I have the key,’ and he goes?”
“Yes.”
“It is marvellous. Something else happened to me.”
“What?”
“Last night we went to a café, and I left my stick upon a chair. When I
went back after it, it was no longer there.”
“Naturally! Some one carried it off.”
“But that is not moral!” declared M. Matignon indignantly.
“No. We Spaniards have no morals,” replied Quentin somewhat dejectedly.
“One cannot live without morality!”
“But we _do_ live without it. With us, stealing a stick, or stabbing a
friend are things of small importance.”
“You cannot have order in that way.”
“Of course not.”
“Nor discipline.”
“True.”
“Nor society.”
“Assuredly not: but here we live without those things.”
M. Matignon shook his head sadly.
“Are you going to continue your walk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“We shall go with you if we won’t be in your way.”
“Come by all means.”
Together the trio began to wander through that puzzling entanglement of
alleys. The barrio, or district into which they penetrated (the vicinity
of El Potro), was beginning to come to life. A few old women with
sour-looking faces, some with mantles of Antequera baize, others with
black mantillas, were on their way to mass, carrying folding chairs
under their arms.
“Dueñas, eh?” said the Frenchman, pointing his finger at the old women.
“But their ladies, where are they now?”
“Probably snoring at their ease,” replied Quentin.
“But, do they snore?”
“Some of them, yes.”
“Snore? What is that?” Madame Matignon inquired of her husband in
French.
“_Ronfler_, my dear,” said Matignon, “_ronfler_.”
His wife made a disdainful little grimace.
When the gossips in the streets caught sight of the trio, they exchanged
a jest or two from door to door. Servant girls were scrubbing the floors
of the patios with mops, and singing gipsy songs; balcony windows flew
open with a bang, as women came out to shake their rugs and carpets.
Grimy-looking men passed them, pushing carts and shouting: “Fish!”
Vendors of medicinal herbs languidly cried their wares; and a muleteer,
mounted upon the hindmost donkey of his herd, rode along singing to the
tune of the tinkling bells on his decorated asses.
Once, behind a window-grating, they caught sight of a pallid, anæmic
face with large, sad, black eyes, and a white flower stuck in the ebony
hair.
“Oh! Oh!” cried Matignon, and immediately ran to the window.
The maiden, offended by his curiosity, pulled down the curtain, and went
on embroidering or sewing, waiting for the handsome gallant, who perhaps
never came.
“They are odalisques,” declared the Frenchman rather spitefully.
In the doorways on some of the streets, they saw men working at turning
lathes in the Moorish fashion, using a sort of bow, and helping
themselves in their tasks with their feet.
Quentin, who was already tired of the walk and of the observations and
comments of the Frenchman, announced his intention of leaving them.
“I would like to ask you a question first,” said Matignon.
“Proceed.”
“I wish to see an undertaking establishment.” “An und_air_tak_ing_
estableesh_ment_,” the good man called it.
“There are none here,” replied Quentin. “They are all far away; but if
you should see a shop where they sell guitars, you may be pretty sure
that that is where they make coffins, too.”
“Can it be possible?”
“Yes. It’s a Cordovese custom.”
M. Matignon’s mouth fell open in surprise.
“It is extraordinary!” he exclaimed when he had recovered from his
astonishment, and he drew a memorandum book and a pencil from his
pocket. “Where did this custom come from?”
“Oh! It is very ancient. The casket-makers here declared that they were
loath to confine their efforts to sad things, so from the same wood out
of which they make a coffin, they take a piece for a guitar.”
“Admirable! Admirable! And they do not know that in France! What a
philosophy is that of the casket-maker! O, Cordova, Cordova! How little
thou art known in the world!”
At that moment, a tattered, bushy-haired vendor of sacred images crossed
a very small plaza which contained a very large sign-post. Upon his
white, matted hair he wore a greasy and dirty hat as large as a portico.
His loose-fitting, long-sleeved cloak was worn wrong side to: the back
across his breast, and the sleeves, knotted and bulky at the ends,
falling down his back. Under his right arm he carried the saint, and in
his belt was a cash-box with a slot for pennies.
“Pst! Silence!” said Quentin. “You are about to behold a most
interesting spectacle.”
“What is it?”
“Do you see that man?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll wager you cannot guess who he is?”
“No.”
“The Bishop of Cordova!”
“The Bishop!”
“Yes, sir.”
“But he hasn’t the appearance of a bishop, nor even of a cleanly
person.”
“That doesn’t matter. If you follow him cautiously, you will be able to
see something very strange.”
After he had said this, Quentin bowed to the couple, and walked rapidly
away in the direction of his home.