The clouds caressed me with great gestures
and the wide love of misty spaces
clove to me, placid.
I felt the delightfulness of springs
born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers;
and in the ample quietude of horizons
I felt the reposeful sleep of storms.
And when the sky opened about me
and the sun laughed on my green planes
people, far off, stood still all day
staring at my sovereign beauty.
But I, full of the lust
that makes furious the sea and mountains
lifted myself up strongly through the sky
lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails...
At sunset time
drinking at the spring's edge
I drank down the secrets
of mysterious earth.
The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and
fishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise
towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all
living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up
suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of
old soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence of
poems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are from
the climax.
All the voices of the earth
acclaim count Arnold
because from the dark trial
he has come back triumphant.
"Son of the earth, son of the earth,
count Arnold,
now ask, now ask
what cannot you do?"
"Live, live, live forever,
I would never die:
to be like a wheel revolving;
to live with wine and a sword."
"Wheels roll, roll,
but they count the years."
"Then I would be a rock
immobile to suns or storms."
"Rock lives without life
forever impenetrable."
"Then the ever-moving sea
that opens a path for all things."
"The sea is alone, alone,
you go accompanied."
"Then be the air when it flames
in the light of the deathless sun."
"But air and sun are loveless,
ignorant of eternity."
"Then to be man more than man
to be earth palpitant."
"You shall be wheel and rock,
you shall be the mist-veiled sea
you shall be the air in flame,
you shall be the whirling stars,
you shall be man more than man
for you have the will for it.
You shall run the plains and hills,
all the earth that is so wide,
mounted on a horse of flame
you shall be tireless, terrible
as the tramp of the storms
All the voices of earth
will cry out whirling about you.
They will call you spirit in torment
call you forever damned."
Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa
asleep at the feet of naked Christ.
Arnold goes pacing a dark path;
there is silence among the mountains;
in front of him the rustling lisp of a river,
a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless.
Arnold stands under the sheer portal.
He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa
and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone
at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil
without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless,
without any defense, there, sleeping....
She had a great head of turbulent hair.
"How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.
She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little
a flush spreads over all her face
as if a dream had crept through her gently
until she laughs aloud very softly
with a tremulous flutter of the lips.
"What amorous lips, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.
A great sigh swells through her, sleeping,
like a seawave, and fades to stillness.
"What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa,"
thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently.
But when she opens her eyes he, awake,
tingling, carries her off in his arms.
When they burst out into the open fields
it is day.
But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of
sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes:
And when the terror-haunted moment comes
to close these earthly eyes of mine,
open for me, Lord, other greater eyes
to look upon the immensity of your face.
But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily
terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy
freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary
generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as
if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been
hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes
and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in
the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets
to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved
off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining
a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats
at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness
of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my
speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into
intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that
the eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant
changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a
hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the
various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the
beckoning flames of hell.
The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of
another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a
Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We
sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of
the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind
us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at
one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and
peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore,
hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was
marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and
the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a
family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on
which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that
proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement,
"By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall":
Canta esposa, fila i canta
que el pati em faras suau
Quan l'esposa canta i fila
el casal s'adorm en pau.
It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer
and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon
countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new
cohesions were in the making.
"I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of
thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But
I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine."
Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in
soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face
flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco
madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin.
Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the
sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were
sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting
beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a
sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the
family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's
lyricizing of wifehood,
When the wife sits singing as she spins
all the house can sleep in peace.
From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of
fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the
chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city
park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when
the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail
folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown
face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was
not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that
beach, beside that sea, there was no time.
When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass
olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What
could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the
art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am
I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have
always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to
bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of
the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_.
And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels,
the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with
bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and
Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond
the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there
is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships
drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful
well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous
demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea
lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet.
In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for
flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain,
of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous
so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy
and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we
should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the
Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre
Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding
new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid.
To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the
oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the
earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall.
_XIII: Talk by the Road_
On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in his
hands moaning "_!Ay de mi!_" over and over again.
"I beg pardon," he said stiffly, trying to slip by.
"Did you see the function this evening, sir?" asked the man looking up
at Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow face
with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustache
that had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of it
in his mouth.
"What function?"
"In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor." He got to his feet and
tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out
his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain
clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him.
They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told
how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be
expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And
the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd.
He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too
artistic for these pigs of provincials.
"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally.
"How ruined?" asked Telemachus.
"The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_
have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of
the _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a
tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a
great singer of _zarzuela_.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now
look at me!"
Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anaemic
wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark,
strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace of
red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron
spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic.
The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke and
generations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over the
fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where the
soup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on the
fire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangled
with stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure of
the _padron_, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watching
the coffee-pot.
"It was an elegant life, full of voyages," went on the actor. "South
America, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners,
receptions, ceremonial dress.... Ladies of high society came to
congratulate us.... I played all the child roles.... When I was
fourteen a duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged,
dying of hunger--not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of a
village. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want is
foreign importations, Viennese musical comedies, smutty farces from
Paris...."
"With cognac or rum?" the _padron_ roared out suddenly in his deep
voice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire.
"Cognac," said the actor. "What rotten coffee!" He gave little petulant
sniffs as he poured sugar into his glass.
The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of the dark end of the kitchen.
The actor took two handfuls of his hair and yanked at them.
"_Ay_ my nerves!" he shrieked. The baby wailed louder in spasm after
spasm of yelling. The actor jumped to his feet, "!Dolores, Dolores,
_ven aca_!"
After he had called several times a girl came into the room padding
softly on bare feet and stood before him tottering sleepily in the
firelight. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A strand of black hair
curled round her full throat and spread raggedly over her breasts. She
had pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through a rent in her
coarse nightgown the fire threw a patch of red glow curved like a rose
petal about one brown thigh.
"_!Que desvergonza'a!_... How shameless!" muttered the _padron_.
The actor was scolding her in a shrill endless whine. The girl stood
still without answering, her teeth clenched to keep them from
chattering. Then she turned without a word and brought the baby from
the packing box in which he lay at the end of the room, and drawing the
blanket about both her and the child crouched on her heels very close
to the flame with her bare feet in the ashes. When the crying had
ceased she turned to the actor with a full-lipped smile and said,
"There's nothing the matter with him, Paco. He's not even hungry. You
woke him up, the poor little angel, talking so loud."
She got to her feet again, and with slow unspeakable dignity walked
back and forth across the end of the room with the child at her breast.
Each time she turned she swung the trailing blanket round with a sudden
twist of her body from the hips.
Telemachus watched her furtively, sniffing the hot aroma of coffee and
cognac from his glass, and whenever she turned the muscles of his body
drew into tight knots from joy.
"_Es buena chica...._ She's a nice kid, from Malaga. I picked her up
there. A little stupid.... But these days...." the actor was saying
with much shrugging of the shoulders. "She dances well, but the public
doesn't like her. _No tiene cara de parisiana._ She hasn't the Parisian
air.... But these days, _vamos_, one can't be too fastidious. This
taste for French plays, French women, French cuisine, it's ruined the
Spanish theatre."
The fire flared crackling. Telemachus sat sipping his coffee waiting
for the unbearable delight of the swing of the girl's body as she
turned to pace back towards him across the room.
_XIV: Benavente's Madrid_
All the gravel paths of the Plaza Santa Ana were encumbered with wicker
chairs. At one corner seven blind musicians all in a row, with violins,
a cello, guitars and a mournful cornet, toodled and wheezed and
twiddled through the "Blue Danube." At another a crumpled old man, with
a monkey dressed in red silk drawers on his shoulder, ground out "_la
Paloma_" from a hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a fountain
sparkled in the yellow light that streamed horizontally from the cafes
fuming with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square, and ragged
guttersnipes dipped their legs in the slimy basin round about it,
splashing one another, rolling like little colts in the grass. From the
cafes and the wicker chairs and tables, clink of glasses and dominoes,
patter of voices, scuttle of waiters with laden trays, shouts of men
selling shrimps, prawns, fried potatoes, watermelon, nuts in little
cornucopias of red, green, or yellow paper. Light gleamed on the
buff-colored disk of a table in front of me, on the rims of two
beer-mugs, in the eyes of a bearded man with an aquiline nose very
slender at the bridge who leaned towards me talking in a deep even
voice, telling me in swift lisping Castilian stories of Madrid. First
of the Madrid of Felipe Cuarto: _corridas_ in the Plaza Mayor, _auto da
fe_, pictures by Velasquez on view under the arcade where now there is
a doughnut and coffee shop, pompous coaches painted vermilion, cobalt,
gilded, stuffed with ladies in vast bulge of damask and brocade, plumed
cavaliers, pert ogling pages, lurching and swaying through the
foot-deep stinking mud of the streets; plays of Calderon and Lope
presented in gardens tinkling with jewels and sword-chains where ladies
of the court flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced lovers.
Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, _majas_ leaning from
balconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged
guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffnecked
grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dying
the _dos de Mayo_ with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under the
brick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of the
Sardine; naked backs of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding under
the hoop skirts of the queen. Then the romantic Madrid of the thirties,
Larra, Becquer, Espronceda, Byronic gestures, vigils in graveyards,
duels, struttings among the box-alleys of the Retiro, pale young men in
white stocks shooting themselves in attics along the Calle Mayor. "And
now," the voice became suddenly gruff with anger, "look at Madrid. They
closed the Cafe Suizo, they are building a subway, the Castellana looks
more like the Champs Elysees every day.... It's only on the stage that
you get any remnant of the real Madrid. Benavente is the last
_madrileno_. _Tiene el sentido de lo castizo._ He has the sense of the
..." all the end of the evening went to the discussion of the meaning
of the famous word "_castizo_."
The very existence of such a word in a language argues an acute sense
of style, of the manner of doing things. Like all words of real import
its meaning is a gamut, a section of a spectrum rather than something
fixed and irrevocable. The first implication seems to be "according to
Hoyle," following tradition: a neatly turned phrase, an essentially
Castilian cadence, is _castizo_; a piece of pastry or a poem in the old
tradition are _castizo_, or a compliment daintily turned, or a cloak of
the proper fullness with the proper red velvet-bordered lining
gracefully flung about the ears outside of a cafe. _Lo castizo_ is the
essence of the local, of the regional, the last stronghold of Castilian
arrogance, refers not to the empty shell of traditional observances but
to the very core and gesture of them. Ultimately _lo castizo_ means all
that is salty, savourous of the red and yellow hills and the bare
plains and the deep _arroyos_ and the dust-colored towns full of
palaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-colored cloaks and the
mule-drivers with blankets over their shoulders, and the discursive
lean-faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafes and casinos, and the
stout dowagers with mantillas over their gleaming black hair walking to
church in the morning with missals clasped in fat hands, all that is
acutely indigenous, Iberian, in the life of Castile.
In the flood of industrialism that for the last twenty years has
swelled to obliterate landmarks, to bring all the world to the same
level of nickel-plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been the
refuge of _lo castizo_. It has been a theatre of manners and local
types and customs, of observation and natural history, where a rather
specialized well-trained audience accustomed to satire as the tone of
daily conversation was tickled by any portrayal of its quips and
cranks. A tradition of character-acting grew up nearer that of the
Yiddish theatre than of any other stage we know in America. Benavente
and the brothers Quintero have been the playwrights who most typified
the school that has been in vogue since the going out of the _drame
passionel_ style of Echegaray. At present Benavente as director of the
_Teatro Nacional_ is unquestionably the leading figure. Therefore it is
very fitting that Benavente should be in life and works of all
_madrilenos_ the most _castizo_.
Later, as we sat drinking milk in la Granja after a couple of hours of
a shabby third-generation Viennese musical show at the Apollo, my
friend discoursed to me of the manner of life of the _madrileno_ in
general and of Don Jacinto Benavente in particular. Round eleven or
twelve one got up, took a cup of thick chocolate, strolled on the
Castellana under the chestnut trees or looked in at one's office in the
theatre. At two one lunched. At three or so one sat a while drinking
coffee or anis in the Gato Negro, where the waiters have the air of
cabinet ministers and listen to every word of the rather languid
discussions on art and letters that while away the afternoon hours.
Then as it got towards five one drifted to a matinee, if there chanced
to be a new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in the new
Frenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Dinner came along round nine; from
there one went straight to the theatre to see that all went well with
the evening performance. At one the day culminated in a famous
_tertulia_ at the Cafe de Lisboa, where all the world met and argued
and quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epigrams at tables
stacked with coffee glasses amid spiral reek of cigarette smoke.
"But when were the plays written?" I asked.
My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons," he said, "and _en route_,
and in bed, and while being shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedy
between biscuits at breakfast.... And now that the Metro's open, it's a
great help. I know a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy,
sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos!"
"But Madrid's being spoiled," he went on sadly, "at least from the
point of view of _lo castizo_. In the last generation all one saw of
daylight were sunset and dawn, people used to go out to fight duels
where the Residencia de Estudiantes is now, and they had real
_tertulias_, _tertulias_ where conversation swaggered and parried and
lunged, sparing nothing, laughing at everything, for all the world like
our unique Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio.
'Yo a las cabanas baje,
yo a los palacios subi,
y los claustros escale,
y en todas partes deje
memorias amargas de mi.'
"Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of Carlist duchesses, and
God knows the crows and the cloisters weren't let off scot free. And
like good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if laughter did leave
bitter memories, and were willing to wait till their deathbeds to
reconcile themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our generation,
they all went solemn in their cradles.... Except for the theatre
people, always except for the theatre people! We of the theatres will
be _castizo_ to the death."
As we left the cafe, I to go home to bed, my friend to go on to another
_tertulia_, he stood for a moment looking back among the tables and
glasses.
"What the Agora was to the Athenians," he said, and finished the
sentence with an expressive wave of the hand.
It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as suspicious of neighbors as
if they still lived in the boggy forests of Finland, city-dwellers for
a paltry thirty generations, to understand the publicity, the communal
quality of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thought
when one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talking
of, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighbors
about the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, can
hardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is the
courtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at the
marketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the cafe and the
casino. The modern theatre is as directly the offshoot of the cafe as
the old theatre was of the marketplace where people gathered in front
of the church porch to see an interlude or mystery acted by travelling
players in a wagon. The people who write the plays, the people who act
them and the people who see them spend their spare time smoking about
marbletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those too poor to buy a
drink stand outside in groups the sunny side of squares. Constant talk
about everything that may happen or had happened or will happen manages
to butter the bread of life pretty evenly with passion and thought and
significance, but one loses the chunks of intensity. There is little
chance for the burst dams that suddenly flood the dry watercourse of
emotion among more inhibited, less civilized people. Generations upon
generations of townsmen have made of life a well-dredged canal,
easy-flowing, somewhat shallow.
It follows that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative,
witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at
its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost
never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually
go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real
intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous
quality of adventurous progression. The Quinteros write domestic
comedies full of whim and sparkle and tenderness. But expression always
seems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utter
self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays on
the nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings of
emotion in which all of life is drawn taut.
At present in Madrid even cafe life is receding before the exigencies
of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English and
American manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to
the rest of Europe, to Latin America, in its own internal structure.
Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city is
fast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought of
Spanish-speaking people. The _madrileno_, lean, cynical, unscrupulous,
nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becoming
extinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be
ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices of
seats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually; the artisans, apprentice
boys, loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the backbone of the
audiences can no longer afford the theatre and have taken to the movies
instead. Managers spend money on scenery and costumes as a way of
attracting fashionables. It has become quite proper for women to go to
the theatre. Benavente's plays thus acquire double significance as the
summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its
hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed,
the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the
vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated
humorous mordant conversation about cafe tables: _lo castizo_.
The first play of his I ever saw, "_Gente Conocida_," impressed me, I
remember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had to
content myself with following the general modulation of things, as
carrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people,
intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. After
the first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in the
seat beside me sighing comfortably "_Que castizo es este Benavente_,"
and then went into a volley of approving chirpings. The full import of
her enthusiasm did not come to me until much later when I read the play
in the comparative light of a surer knowledge of Castilian, and found
that it was a most vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of that
very dowager's own circle, a showing up of the predatory spite of
"people of consequence." Here was this society woman, who in any other
country would have been indignant, enjoying the annihilation of her
kind. On such willingness to play the game of wit, even of abuse,
without too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of social
intercourse, is founded all the popularity of Benavente's writing.
Somewhere in Hugo's Spanish grammar (God save the mark!) is a proverb
to the effect that the wind of Madrid is so subtle that it will kill a
man without putting out a candle. The same, at their best, can be said
of Benavente's satiric comedies:
El viento de Madrid es tan sutil
que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil.
From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken stream
usually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow the
undergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almost
entire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again;
clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards the
dome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating skyline with
cupolas and baroque belfries jutting among the sudden lights and darks
of the clouds. Then perhaps the sun will light up with a spreading
shaft of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a biscuit
manufacturer's warehouse, a row of white blocks of apartments along the
edge of town to the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal Madrid,
it will be a type city in Europe in the industrial era that shines in
the sun beyond the blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes on
the lines. So will it be in a few years with modernized Madrid, with
the life of cafes and _paseos_ and theatres. There will be moments when
in American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms, shiny restaurants
built in copy of those of Buenos Aires, someone who has read his
Benavente will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old intonations,
of witty parries, of noisy bombastic harangues and feel for one
pentecostal moment the full and by that time forgotten import of _lo
castizo_.
_XV: Talk by the Road_
The sun next morning was tingling warm. Telemachus strode along with a
taste of a milky bowl of coffee and crisp _churros_ in his mouth and a
fresh wind in his hair; his feet rasped pleasantly on the gravel of the
road. Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain,
roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of the
beetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against the
steamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to the
north. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the dark
figures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On the
telegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlight
glinting, when they stirred, on the white patches on their wings.
Telemachus felt well-rested and content with himself.
"After all mother knows best," he was thinking. "That foolish Lyaeus
will come dragging himself into Toledo a week from now."
Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso he had seen the day before
in Illescas. Don Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a long
red sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and a small leather bottle of
wine on the sward in front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark of
which he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey horse.
"_Hola_, my friend," cried Don Alonso, "still bent on Toledo?"
"How soon can I get there?"
"Soon enough to see the castle of San Servando against the sunset. We
will go together. You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the honor
of eating something, you must be hungry." Thereupon Don Alonso handed
Telemachus the sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with.
"How early you must have started."
They sat together munching bread and sausage to which the sweet pepper
mashed into it gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head thrown
back, let a little wine squirt into their mouths from the bottle.
Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of sausage held between bread by
tips of long grey fingers.
"You are now, my friend, in the heart of Castile. Look, nothing but
live-oaks along the gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under a
tremendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In Madrid there is not so
much sky, is there? In your country there is not so much sky? Look at
the huge volutes of those clouds. This is a setting for thoughts as
mighty in contour as the white cumulus over the Sierra, such as come
into the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-striding...." Don Alonso
put a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a
potential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid,
robust.... I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizing
it, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker.... But the day
will come when in this gruff land we shall have flower and fruit."
Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head thrown back against the
twisted trunk of the olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet,
and after rummaging a moment in the little knapsack that hung over his
shoulder, produced absent-mindedly a handful of small white candies the
shape of millstones which he stared at in a puzzled way for some
seconds.
"After all," he went on, "they make famous sweets in these old
Castilian towns. These are _melindres_. Have one.... When people, d'you
know, are kind to children, there are things to be expected."
"Certainly children are indulgently treated in Spain," said Telemachus,
his mouth full of almond paste. "They actually seem to like children!"
A cart drawn by four mules tandem led by a very minute donkey with
three strings of blue beads round his neck was jingling past along the
road. As the canvas curtains of the cover were closed the only evidence
of the driver was a sleepy song in monotone that trailed with the dust
cloud after the cart. While they stood by the roadside watching the
joggle of it away from them down the road, a flushed face was poked out
from between the curtains and a voice cried "Hello, Tel!"
"It's Lyaeus," cried Telemachus and ran after the cart bubbling with
curiosity to hear his companion's adventures.
With a angle of mulebells and a hoarse shout from the driver the cart
stopped, and Lyaeus tumbled out. His hair was mussed and there were
wisps of hay on his clothes. He immediately stuck his head back in
through the curtains. By the time Telemachus reached him the cart was
tinkling its way down the road again and Lyaeus stood grinning,
blinking sleepy eyes in the middle of the road, in one hand a skin of
wine, in the other a canvas bag.
"What ho!" cried Telemachus.
"Figs and wine," said Lyaeus. Then, as Don Alonso came up leading his
grey horse, he added in an explanatory tone, "I was asleep in the
cart."
"Well?" said Telemachus.
"O it's such a long story," said Lyaeus.
Walking beside them, Don Alonso was reciting into his horse's ear:
'Sigue la vana sombra, el bien fingido.
El hombre esta entregado
al sueno, de su suerte no cuidando,
y con paso callado
el cielo vueltas dando
las horas del vivir le va hurtando.'
"Whose is that?" said Lyaeus.
"The revolving sky goes stealing his hours of life.... But I don't
know," said Don Alonso, "perhaps like you, this Spain of ours makes
ground sleeping as well as awake. What does a day matter? The driver
snores but the good mules jog on down the appointed road."
Then without another word he jumped on his horse and with a smile and a
wave of the hand trotted off ahead of them.
_XVI: A Funeral in Madrid_
_Doce dias son pasados
despues que el Cid acabara
aderezanse las gentes
para salir a batalla
con Bucar ese rey moro
y contra la su canalla.
Cuando fuera media noche
el cuerpo asi coma estaba
le ponen sobre Babieca
y al caballo lo ataban._
I
And when the army sailed out of Valencia the Moors of King Bucar fled
before the dead body of the Cid and ten thousand of them were drowned
trying to scramble into their ships, among them twenty kings, and the
Christians got so much booty of gold and silver among the tents that
the poorest of them became a rich man. Then the army continued, the
dead Cid riding each day's journey on his horse, across the dry
mountains to Sant Pedro de Cardena in Castile where the king Don
Alfonso had come from Toledo, and he seeing the Cid's face still so
beautiful and his beard so long and his eyes so flaming ordered that
instead of closing the body in a coffin with gold nails they should set
it upright in a chair beside the altar, with the sword Tizona in its
hand. And there the Cid stayed more than ten years.
Mando que no se enterrase
sino que el cuerpo arreado
se ponga junto al altar
y a Tizona en la su mano;
asi estuvo mucho tiempo
que fueron mas de diez anos.
In the pass above people were skiing. On the hard snow of the road
there were orange-skins. A victoria had just driven by in which sat a
bored inflated couple much swathed in furs.
"Where on earth are they going?"
"To the Puerta de Navecerrada," my friend answered.
"But they look as if they'd be happier having tea at Molinero's than
paddling about up there in the snow."
"They would be, but it's the style ... winter sports ... and all
because a lithe little brown man who died two years ago liked the
mountains. Before him no _madrileno_ ever knew the Sierra existed."
"Who was that?"
"Don Francisco Giner."
That afternoon when it was already getting dark we were scrambling wet,
chilled, our faces lashed by the snow, down through drifts from a
shoulder of Siete Picos with the mist all about us and nothing but the
track of a flock of sheep for a guide. The light from a hut pushed a
long gleaming orange finger up the mountainside. Once inside we pulled
off our shoes and stockings and toasted our feet at a great fireplace
round which were flushed faces, glint of teeth in laughter, schoolboys
and people from the university shouting and declaiming, a smell of tea
and wet woolens. Everybody was noisy with the rather hysterical
excitement that warmth brings after exertion in cold mountain air.
Cheeks were purple and tingling. A young man with fuzzy yellow hair
told me a story in French about the Emperor of Morocco, and produced a
tin of potted blackbirds which it came out were from the said
personage's private stores. Unending fountains of tea seethed in two
smoke-blackened pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut among
leaping shadows were piles of skis and the door, which occasionally
opened to let in a new wet snowy figure and shut again on skimming
snow-gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous jollity. Train time came
suddenly and we ran and stumbled and slid the miles to the station
through the dark, down the rocky path.
In the third-class carriage people sang songs as the train jounced its
way towards the plain and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked me
if I knew it was Don Francisco who had had that hut built for the
children of the Institucion Libre de Insenanza. Little by little he
told me the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner de los Rios
and the revolution of 1873, a story like enough to many others in the
annals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in its
overtones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as the
explanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me an
inkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I had
noticed in people I knew about Madrid.
Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz
del Rio, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government
scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed
the failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration of Fernando
Septimo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last flame of romantic
revolt, had shot himself for love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg,
Sanz del Rio found dying Krause, the first archpriest who stood
interpreting between Kant and the world. When he returned to Spain he
refused to take up his chair at the university saying he must have time
to think out his problems, and retired to a tiny room--a room so dark
that they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder under the
window in the town of Illescas, where was another student, Greco's San
Ildefonso. There he lived several years in seclusion. When he did
return to the university it was to refuse to make the profession of
political and religious faith required by a certain prime minister
named Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his disciples. At the
same time Francisco Giner de los Rios, then a young man who had just
gained an appointment with great difficulty because of his liberal
ideas, resigned out of solidarity with the rest. In 1868 came the
liberal revolution which was the political expression of this whole
movement, and all these professors were reinstated. Until the
restoration of the Bourbons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization,
Europeanization.
Returned to power Orovio lost no time in republishing his decrees of a
profession of faith. Giner, Ascarate, Salmeron and several others were
arrested and exiled to distant fortresses when they protested; their
friends declared themselves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and many
other professors resigned, so that the university was at one blow
denuded of its best men. From this came the idea of founding a free
university which should be supported entirely by private subscription.
From that moment the life of Giner de los Rios was completely entwined
with the growth of the Institucion Libre de Insenanza, which developed
in the course of a few years into a coeducational primary school. And
directly or indirectly there is not a single outstanding figure in
Spanish life to-day whose development was not largely influenced by
this dark slender baldheaded old man with a white beard whose picture
one finds on people's writing desks.
... Oh, si, llevad, amigos,
su cuerpo a la montana
a los azules montes
del ancho Guadarrama,
wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado--and I rather think Machado is the
pupil whose name will live the longest--after Don Francisco's death in
1915.
... Yes, carry, friends
his body to the hills
to the blue peaks
of the wide Guadarrama.
There are deep gulches
of green pines where the wind sings.
There is rest for his spirit
under a cold live oak
in loam full of thyme, where play
golden butterflies....
There the master one day
dreamed new flowerings for Spain.
These are fragments from an elegy by Juan Ramon Jimenez, another
poet-pupil of Don Francisco:
"Don Francisco.... It seemed that he summed up all that is tender
and keen in life: flowers, flames, birds, peaks, children.... Now,
stretched on his bed, like a frozen river that perhaps still flows
under the ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence.... He
was like a living statue of himself, a statue of earth, of wind, of
water, of fire. He had so freed himself from the husk of every day
that talking to him we might have thought we were talking to his
image. Yes. One would have said he wasn't going to die: that he had
already passed, without anybody's knowing it, beyond death; that he
was with us forever, like a spirit.
* * * * *
"In the little door of the bedroom one already feels well-being. A
trail of the smell of thyme and violets that comes and goes with
the breeze from the open window leads like a delicate hand towards
where he lies.... Peace. All death has done has been to infuse the
color of his skin with a deep violet veiling of ashes.
"What a suave smell, and how excellent death is here! No rasping
essences, none of the exterior of blackness and crepe. All this is
white and uncluttered, like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like
the whitewashed portal of some garden in the south. All just as it
was. Only he who was there has gone.
* * * * *
"The day is fading, with a little wind that has a premonition of
spring. In the window panes is a confused mirroring of rosy clouds.
The blackbird, the blackbird that he must have heard for thirty
years, that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead, has come
to see if he's listening. Peace. The bedroom and the garden strive
quietly light against light: the brightness of the bedroom is
stronger and glows out into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up
into the sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of a tree
and sits there twittering. In the shadow below the blackbird
whistles once more. Now and then one seems to hear the voice that
is silenced forever.
"How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a spring,
reading under a tree, like letting the stream of a lyric river
carry one away.... And one feels like never moving: like plucking
to infinity, as one might tear roses to pieces, these white full
hours; like clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal
twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty.
* * * * *
"'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that one may know,
opposite that other sign 'Catholic Cemetery,' so that one may also
know.
"He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so opposed to the
smiling savourous poetry of his spirit. But it had to be. He'll
still hear the blackbirds of the familiar garden. 'After all,' says
Cossio, 'I don't think he'll be sorry to spend a little while with
Don Julian....'
"Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the earth with thyme;
on the coffin they have thrown roses, narcissus, violets. There
comes, lost, an aroma of last evening, a bit of the bedroom from
which they took so much away....
"Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full of wind drag
frozen shadows across us, and through them flying low, black
grackles. In the distance Guadarrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts
crystals of cubed white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second
in the sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish, then
lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies away....
"Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and forgetfulness....
Silence. In the silence, the voice of a child walking through the
fields, the sound of a sob hidden among the tombstones, the wind,
the broad wind of these days....
"I've seen occasionally a fire put out with earth. Innumerable
little tongues spurted from every side. A pupil of his who was a
mason made for this extinguished fire its palace of mud on a piece
of earth two friends kept free. He has at the head a euonymus,
young and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts with
coming spring, an acacia...."
Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas, are scattered sparsely,
tight round heads of blue green, over hills that in summer are yellow
like the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo was one of Don
Francisco's favorite walks, out past the jail, where over the gate is
written an echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity the
criminal," past the palace of Moncloa with its stately abandoned
gardens, and out along the Manzanares by a road through the royal
domain where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs of "Beware the
mantraps," then up a low hill from which one sees the Sierra Guadarrama
piled up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-peaks above long
blue foothills and all the foreground rolling land full of clumps of
encinas, and at last into the little village with its barracks and its
dilapidated convent and its planetrees in front of the mansion Charles
V built. It was under an encina that I sat all one long morning reading
up in reviews and textbooks on the theory of law, the life and opinions
of Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made the
sticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about me
reek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill of
snow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragrance
of distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish
importunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I was
reading an account of the philosophical concept of monism, cudgelling
my brain with phrases. And his fervent love of nature made the master
evoke occasionally in class this beautiful image of the great poet and
philosopher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the spirit of nature
contemplates itself"; and then having qualified with a phrase
Schelling's expression, he would turn on those who see in nature
manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer for
meditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as
natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in the
Idea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonic
substantialism has been interpreted...."
In the grass under my book were bright fronds of moss, among which very
small red ants performed prodigies of mountaineering, while along
tramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly, glinting when the
light struck them. The smell of cistus was intense, hot, full of spices
as the narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In the distance the
mountains piled up in zones olive green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine,
white. A cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book. Thought and
passion, reflection and instinct, affections, emotions, impulses
collaborate in the rule of custom, which is revealed not in words
declared and promulgated in view of future conduct, but in the act
itself, tacit, taken for granted, or, according to the energetic
expression of the Digest: _rebus et factis_. Over "factis," sat a
little green and purple fly with the body curved under at the table. I
wondered vaguely if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it was
clear to me that these books, these dusty philosophical phrases, these
mortuary articles by official personages were dimming the legend in my
mind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarily
personal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set him
up in the church with his sword in his hand, for all men to see. What
sort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his
theory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds?
And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leave
behind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans that
one remembers Francis of Assisi.
And the curious thing about the legend of a personality is that it may
reach the highest fervor without being formulated. It is something by
itself that stands behind anecdotes, death-notices, elegies.
In Madrid at the funeral of another of the great figures of nineteenth
century Spain, Perez Galdos, I stood on the curb beside a large-mouthed
youth with a flattened toadlike face, who was balancing a great
white-metal jar of milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and the
carriages full of flowers had just passed. The street in front of us
was a slow stream of people very silent, their feet shuffling,
shuffling, feet in patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toed
shoes, pointed-toed shoes, _alpargatas_, canvas sandals; people along
the sides seemed unable to resist the suction of it, joined in
unostentatiously to follow if only a few moments the procession of the
legend of Don Benito. The boy with the milk turned to me and said how
lucky it was they were burying Galdos, he'd have an excuse for being
late for the milk. Then suddenly he pulled his cap off and became
enormously excited and began offering cigarettes to everyone round
about. He scratched his head and said in the voice of a Saul stricken
on the road to Damascus: "How many books he must have written, that
gentleman! _!Caspita!_... It makes a fellow sorry when a gentleman like
that dies," and shouldering his pail, his blue tunic fluttering in the
wind, he joined the procession.
Like the milk boy I found myself joining the procession of the legend
of Giner de los Rios. That morning under the encina I closed up the
volumes on the theory of law and the bulletins with their death-notices
and got to my feet and looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo and
thought of the little lithe baldheaded man with a white beard like the
beard in El Greco's portrait of Covarrubias, who had taught a
generation to love the tremendous contours of their country, to climb
mountains and bathe in cold torrents, who was the first, it almost
seems, to feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a lifetime of
courageous unobtrusive work managed to stamp all the men and women
whose lives remotely touched his with the seal of his personality. Born
in Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia of a family that came from
Velez-Malaga, a white town near the sea in the rich fringes of the
Sierra Nevada, he had the mental agility and the sceptical tolerance
and the uproarious good nature of the people of that region, the
sobriety and sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism became a
definite part of the creed of the hopeful discontented generations that
are gradually, for better or for worse, remoulding Spain. His nostalgia
of the north, of fjords where fir trees hang over black tidal waters,
of blonde people cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled towns,
became the gospel of Europeanization, of wholesale destruction of all
that was individual, savage, African in the Spanish tradition. _Rebus
et factis._ And yet none of the things and acts do much to explain the
peculiar radiance of his memory, the jovial tenderness with which
people tell one about him. The immanence of the man is such that even
an outsider, one who like the milk boy at the funeral of Galdos meets
the procession accidentally with another errand in his head, is drawn
in almost without knowing it. It's impossible to think of him buried in
a box in unconsecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In Madrid, in
the little garden of the Institucion where he used to teach the
children, in front of a certain open fire in a certain house at El
Pardo where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used to half expect to
meet him, that some friend would take me to see him as they took people
to see Cid in San Pedro de Cardena.
Cara tiene de hermosura
muy hermosa y colorada;
los ojos igual abiertos
muy apuesta la su barba
Non parece que esta muerto
antes vivo semejaba.