_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.
On the driver's seat one's feet were on the shafts and one had a view
of every rag and shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking,
groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers,
cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach
lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation
ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the
sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves
and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of
ash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy inkling of mountains.
Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees at the leading mule,
Cordovan hat on the back of his head, from under which sprouted a lock
of black hair that hung between his eyes over his nose and made him
look like a goblin, the driver bounced and squirmed and kicked at the
flanks of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side to side of the
uneven road. Down into a gulch, across a shingle, up over a plank
bridge, then down again into the bed of the river I had forded that
morning with my friend the _arriero_, along a beach with fishing boats
and little huts where the fishermen slept; then barking of dogs,
another bridge and we roared and crackled up a steep village street to
come to a stop suddenly, catastrophically, in front of a tavern in the
main square.
"We are late," said the goblin driver, turning to me suddenly, "I have
not slept for four nights, dancing, every night dancing."
He sucked the air in through his teeth and stretched out his arms and
legs in the moonlight. "Ah, women ... women," he added philosophically.
"Have you a cigarette?"
"_Ah, la juventud_," said the old man who had brought the mailbag. He
looked up at us scratching his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a
_momentito_, and it's gone! Old men work in the day time, but young men
work at night.... _Ay de mi_," and he burst into a peal of laughter.
And as if some one were whispering them, the words of Jorge Manrique
sifted out of the night:
?Que se hizo el Rey Don Juan?
Los infantes de Aragon
?Que se hicieron?
Que fue de tanto galan,
Que fue de tanta invencion,
Como truxeron?
Everybody went into the tavern, from which came a sound of singing and
of clapping in time, and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging on
tables as might have come out of the _Mermaid_ in the days of the
Virgin Queen. Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish
blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar.
The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of
quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme
burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in
a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest
contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the
white wall standing very quiet a man looking up with dilated
nostrils--_el amor_.
As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady way out of town, our ears
still throbbed with the rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown hands
clapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors. From the last house
of the village a man hallooed. With its noise of cupboards of china
overturned the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-faced man with
a little waxed moustache like the springs of a mousetrap climbed on the
front seat, while burly people heaved quantities of corded trunks on
behind.
"How late, two hours late," the man spluttered, jerking his checked cap
from side to side. "Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiled
eggs.... Think of that. _!Que incultura! !Que pueblo indecente!_ All
day only two boiled eggs."
"I had business in Motril, Don Antonio," said the goblin driver
grinning.
"Business!" cried Don Antonio, laughing squeakily, "and after all what
a night!"
Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio the story of King Mycerinus
of Egypt that Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he would only
live ten years, the king called for torches and would not sleep, so
crammed twenty years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened in
intervals between his hoarse investigations of the private life of the
grandmother of the leading mule.
Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cigarette and cried, "In
Andalusia we all do that, don't we, Paco?"
"Yes, sir," said the goblin driver, nodding his head vigorously.
"That is _lo flamenco_," cried Don Antonio. "The life of Andalusia is
_lo flamenco_."
The moon has begun to lose foothold in the black slippery zenith. We
are hurtling along a road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of
unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of a
dancer. The goblin driver rolls from side to side asleep. The check cap
is down over the little man's face so that not even his moustaches are
to be seen. All at once the leading mule, taken with suicidal mania,
makes a sidewise leap for the cliff-edge. Crumbling of gravel, snap of
traces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one has managed to yank the mule
back on her hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a coach
totters at the edge of the cliff's shadow.
"_Hija de puta_," cries the goblin driver, jumping to the ground.
Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins to explain querulously that
he has had nothing to eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of the
goblin driver flash white flame as he hangs wreath upon wreath of
profanity about the trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rattling
jerk the coach sways to the safe side of the road. From inside angry
heads are poked out like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop.
Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of triumph: "_?Que
flamenco, eh?_"
When we got to Almunecar Don Antonio, the goblin driver, and I sat at a
little table outside the empty Casino. A waiter appeared from somewhere
with wine and coffee and tough purple ham and stale bread and
cigarettes. Over our heads dusty palm-fronds trembled in occasional
faint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don Antonio's thin fingers
glistened in the light of the one tired electric light bulb that shone
among palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to me the
significance of _lo flamenco_.
The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering song well sung, the couplet
neatly capped, the back turned to the charging bull, the mantilla
draped with exquisite provocativeness; all that was _lo flamenco_.
"On this coast, _senor ingles_, we don't work much, we are dirty and
uninstructed, but by God we live. Why the poor people of the towns,
d'you know what they do in summer? They hire a fig-tree and go and live
under it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eat
the figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains,
and man-alive they are happy. They fear no one and they are dependent
on no one; when they are young they make love and sing to the guitar,
and when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children.
You have travelled much; I have travelled little--Madrid, never
further,--but I swear to you that nowhere in the world are the women
lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in this
vega of Almunecar.... If only the wine weren't quite so heavy...."
"Then you don't want to go to America?"
"_!Hombre por dios!_ Sing us a song, Paco.... He's a Galician, you
see."
The goblin driver grinned and threw back his head.
"Go to the end of the world, you'll find a Gallego," he said. Then he
drank down his wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand, and
started droningly:
'Si quieres qu'el carro cante
mojale y dejel'en rio
que despues de buen moja'o
canta com'un silbi'o.'
(If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it in the river, for
when it's well soaked it'll sing like a locust.)
"Hola," cried Don Antonio, "go on."
'A mi me gusta el blanco,
!viva lo blanco! !muera lo negro!
porque el negro es muy triste.
Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'
(I like white; hooray for white, death to black. Because black is
very sad, and I am happy, I don't like it.)
"That's it," cried Don Antonio excitedly. "You people from the north,
English, Americans, Germans, whatnot, you like black. You like to be
sad. I don't."
"'Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'"
The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and swollen. The east was
beginning to bleach before the oncoming sun. Birds started chirping
above our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed, I could hear the
hoarse voice of the goblin driver roaring out:
'A mi me gusta el blanco,
!viva lo blanco! !muera lo negro!'
At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on a red jutting cliff over the
beach where brown children were bathing, there was talk again of _lo
flamenco_.
"In Spain," my friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and
loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic
and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest
Panza is _lo flamenco_."
"But you do live."
"In dirt, disease, lack of education, bestiality.... Half of us are
always dying of excess of food or the lack of it."
"What do you want?"
"Education, organization, energy, the modern world."
I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road down
from the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and rest
so as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world.
And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work.
That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from a
roadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession with
candles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swaying
cone-shaped figure carried on the shoulders of six sweating men stood
poised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamine
flowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried,
"_!Viva la Virgen de las Angustias!_" And the Virgin and San Miguel
both had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the people
followed them into the church crying "_!Viva!_" so that the old vaults
shivered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some people
cried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, and
when they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantilla
of white lace over the moon, so they went home happy.
Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by an
occasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behind
them long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair.
Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of America
and the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixote
and _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar
quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ they
call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country
elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the
owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers,
to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explained
to my friend that in his modern world of America these same people
would come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He
answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there
was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it
behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of
being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade.
"And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating of
life?"
"Of course," he answered.
"Where?"
"Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _lo
flamenco_."
"But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Work," he said.
We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fishing boats were
drawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path
up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by thorny
aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the
mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of
sappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through
the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry
thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and
heliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast in
ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the last
groan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the dark
fields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped down
through notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, then
unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenly
in an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction.
"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work," and I
thought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on the
way down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: "_Ca, en America no se
hose na'a que trabahar y de'cansar._"
I had left him at his home village, a little cluster of red and yellow
roofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church that
hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhile
before going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas
shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind,
and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson against
the intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. And
the _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joys
of going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains for
chestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga for
tinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing and
guitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older,
realer gods were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of the
pale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in the
sunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days of
travel on stony roads in the mountains.... And I had lain back with my
eyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished that
my life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and I
had shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads of
paper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sort
of bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his damned burden.
"Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make the
road so significant that one needs no destination, that is _lo
flamenco_," said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen looking at the
seven white arches of the aqueduct.
He nodded unconvinced.
_III: The Baker of Almorox_
I
The _senores_ were from Madrid? Indeed! The man's voice was full of an
awe of great distances. He was the village baker of Almorox, where we
had gone on a Sunday excursion from Madrid; and we were standing on the
scrubbed tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving wine and figs
from his wife. The father of the friend who accompanied me had once
lived in the same village as the baker's father, and bought bread of
him; hence the entertainment. This baker of Almorox was a tall man,
with a soft moustache very black against his ash-pale face, who stood
with his large head thrust far forward. He was smiling with pleasure at
the presence of strangers in his house, while in a tone of shy
deprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's family. Don Fernando
and Dona Ana and the Senorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos was
no longer little, answered my friend, and Dona Ana was dead.
The baker's wife had stood in the shadow looking from one face to
another with a sort of wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this she
came forward suddenly into the pale greenish-gold light that streamed
through the door, holding a dark wine-bottle before her. There were
tears in her eyes. No; she had never known any of them, she explained
hastily--she had never been away from Almorox--but she had heard so
much of their kindness and was sorry.... It was terrible to lose a
father or a mother. The tall baker shifted his feet uneasily,
embarrassed by the sadness that seemed slipping over his guests, and
suggested that we walk up the hill to the Hermitage; he would show the
way.
"But your work?" we asked. Ah, it did not matter. Strangers did not
come every day to Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping a woolen
muffler about his bare strongly moulded throat, and we followed him up
the devious street of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses through
wide doors of dark tiled rooms with great black rafters overhead and
courtyards where chickens pecked at the manure lodged between smooth
worn flagstones. Still between white-washed walls we struck out of the
village into the deep black mud of the high road, and at last burst
suddenly into the open country, where patches of sprouting grass shone
vivid green against the gray and russet of broad rolling lands. At the
top of the first hill stood the Hermitage--a small whitewashed chapel
with a square three-storied tower; over the door was a relief of the
Virgin, crowned, in worn lichened stone. The interior was very plain
with a single heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted statue,
stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful grace--again of the
Virgin. The figure was dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills and
ruffles, grey with dust and age.
"_La Virgen de la Cima_," said the baker, pointing reverently with his
thumb, after he had bent his knee before the altar. And as I glanced at
the image a sudden resemblance struck me: the gown gave the Virgin a
curiously conical look that somehow made me think of that conical black
stone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought from Asia Minor. Here
again was a good goddess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin,
despite her prudish frills.... But the man was ushering us out.
"And there is no finer view than this in all Spain." With a broad sweep
of his arm he took in the village below, with its waves of roofs that
merged from green to maroon and deep crimson, broken suddenly by the
open square in front of the church; and the gray towering church,
scowling with strong lights and shadows on buttresses and pointed
windows; and the brown fields faintly sheened with green, which gave
place to the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards, and the
shining silver where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond,
the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into the
yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers were
stretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccid
cheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, he
was saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and there
were flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, in
May. And he went on to tell us of the local feast, and the great
processions of the Virgin. This year there were to be four days of the
_toros_. So many bullfights were unusual in such a small village, he
assured us. But they were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best in
Castile. Four days of _toros_, he said again; and all the people of the
country around would come to the _fiestas_, and there would be a great
pilgrimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin.... As he talked in his slow
deferential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers,
there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world.
First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who
bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his
door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like
his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then his
work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of
neighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of things
half real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived and
where politicians wrote in the newspapers,--and _Francia_--and all that
was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and
wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat
and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so
strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of
the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite
past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans,
before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much the
same, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed,
cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought and
passed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged
up to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin had
taken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth goddesses, and
the deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love for
the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the
walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men
who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling
of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassing
hills of their commune, except the God which was the synthesis of their
souls and of their lives.
Here lies the strength and the weakness of Spain. This intense
individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated
village communities--_pueblos_, as the Spaniards call them--over the
changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and
mature and die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolution has
been strong enough to shake it. Invasion after invasion, of Goths, of
Moors, of Christian ideas, of the fads and convictions of the
Renaissance, have swept over the country, changing surface customs and
modes of thought and speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping with
the changeless Iberian mind.
And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought _La vida es sueno_:
"Life is a dream." Only the individual, or that part of life which is
in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of
this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed
in the power of man's soul over all things, whose desire included the
whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world
was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures
for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose minds
the universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. These
are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de
la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits
of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the
Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of
such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history
and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be
traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the
same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish
life been woven.