THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR
Granada was sleeping a fitful Sunday siesta when I repacked my knapsack
in the Casa Robledo. In the streets were only the fruit-sellers from
the surrounding country, still faintly chanting over the half-empty
baskets on the backs of their lolling asses. I paused to spend two
"perros gordos" for as many pounds of cherries--for he who has once
tasted the cherries of Granada has no second choice--and trudged away
through the northern suburb leaving a trail of pits behind me.
The highway surmounted the last crest and swung down to the level of the
plain. Like a sea of heat mist diked by the encircling mountains
stretched the vega, looking across which one saw at a glance no fewer
than a score of villages half concealed by an inundation of sunshine so
physically visible that one observed with astonishment that the snow lay
still unmelted on the peak of Mulhacen behind.
Yet for all the heat I would not have been elsewhere nor doing else than
striking across the steaming vega of Granada. In such situations, I
confess, I like my own company best. With the finest companion in the
world a ten-mile tramp through this heat and dust would have been a
labor like the digging of a ditch. Alone, with the imagination free to
take color from the landscape, each petty inconvenience seemed but to
put me the more in touch with the real Spain.
Just here lies the advantage of traveling in this half-tramp fashion.
The "personally conducted" traveler, too, sees the Alhambra; yet how
slight is that compared with sharing the actual life of the Spanish
people, which the tourist catches if at all in vagrant, posing
fragments? To move through a foreign country shut up in a moving room,
carrying with one the modern luxuries of home, is not travel; we call it
so by courtesy and for lack of an exact term. "Il faut payer de sa
personne." He who will gather the real honey of travel must be on the
scene, a "super" at least on the stage itself, not gossiping with his
fellows in a box.
With all its aridity the vega was richly productive. Olive-trees hung
heavy, on either hand spread broad fields of grain in which peasants
were toiling swelteringly as if they had never heard of the common sense
institution of Sunday. When sun and tree-tops met, the highway began to
wind, leaving the vega behind and wandering through low hills among
which appeared no villages, only an occasional rough-hewn house by the
way. Toward twilight there opened a more verdant valley, and a stream,
rising somewhere near at hand, fell in with the carretera and capered
prattling along with it into the night.
It was ten perhaps when I came upon a lonely little venta by the
wayside, a one-story building older than the modern world, serving both
for dwelling and stable. The master of the house and her husband were
both of that light-hearted gentry to whom life means nothing more than
to be permitted good health and a place to eat an occasional _puchero_.
With these and a pair of mountain arrieros I gossiped until my eyelids
grew heavy, and turned in on a husk mattress spread, like that of my
hosts, on the kitchen floor.
At the first hint of dawn I was off and had set the sun a handicap of
three miles or more before he began to ruddy the jagged chain to the
eastward. The family was already at work, the arrieros wending on their
southward way singing savage fragments of song; for like the Arab the
rural andaluz sleeps full-dressed and springs instantly from bed to
labor.
A country lightly populated continued. At high noon I reached a
bath-inviting irrigating stream that wound through a grove of willows
offering protection enough from the sun for a brief siesta. Soon after,
the landscape grew savage and untenanted, and the carretera more and
more constricted until it passed, like a thread through the eye of a
needle, through a short tunnel, built, said the inscription, by Isabel
II--an example of exaggerated Spanish courtesy evidently, for history
shouts assurance that the activities of that lady were rather
exclusively confined to less enduring works. Once released, the gorge
expanded to a rambling valley with many orchards of apricots and plums,
still walled, however, by hills so lofty that the sun deserted it early
and gave the unusual sight of a lingering twilight.
From sunset until well into the night I kept sharp lookout for a public
hostelry; but only a few peasants' hovels appeared, and with fifty-six
kilometers in my legs I gave up the search and made my bed of a bundle
of straw on a little nose of meadow above the highway. All through the
night the tramp of asses and the cursing or singing of their drivers
passing below drifted into my dreams. The weather was not cold, yet in
the most silent hour a chilliness half-arousing crept over me, and it
was with a sense of relief that I awoke at last entirely and wandered
on.
By daylight the hills receded somewhat, flattening themselves out to
rolling uplands; the stream grew broad and noisy in its strength. Then
suddenly at the turning of an abrupt hill Jaen rose before me, a city
pitched on a rocky summit like the capping over a haycock, in the center
the vast cathedral; the whole radiant with the flush of morning and
surrounded by a soil as red as if the blood of all the Moorish wars were
gathered here and mixed with the clay. The highway, catching sight of
its goal, abandoned unceremoniously the guidance of the river and
climbed with great strides up the red hillside into the town.
I had been so long up that the day seemed already far advanced. But
Jaen was still half abed. I drifted into what was outwardly a little
_cantina_, with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically the home
of an amiable couple. The _cantinero_, lolling in the customary
fat-man's attitude behind the bar, woke with a start from the first of
that day's siestas when I requested breakfast, while his spouse ceased
her sweeping to cry out, "Como! Tan temprano! Why, it is scarcely
eight o'clock!" The lady, however, gave evidence of an un-Spanish
adaptability by rising to the occasion. While Senor Corpulence was
still shaking his head condolingly, she called to the driver of a
passing flock of goats, one of which, under her watchful eye, yielded up
a foaming cupful that tided me over until I sat down in the family
dining-room to a breakfast such as is rarely forthcoming in Spain before
high noon.
The cantina was no more a lodging-house than a restaurant. But so
charming a couple was not to be lost sight of, and before the meal was
ended I expressed a hope of making my home with them during my stay.
The landlord was taking breath to express his regrets when the matron,
after a moment of hesitation, admitted that even that might be possible,
adding however, with an air of mystery, that she could not be certain
until toward night. I left my bundle and sauntered out into the city.
Jaen is a town of the Arab, a steep town with those narrow, sun-dodging
streets that to the utilitarian are inexcusable but to all others give
evidence of the wisdom of the Moor. Content, perhaps, with its past
history, it is to-day a slow, serenely peaceful place riding at anchor
in the stream of time and singularly free from that dread disease of
doing something always. Unusually full it seemed of ingenuous,
unhurrying old men engaged only in watching life glide by under the blue
sky. I spent half the day chatting with these in the thirsting,
dust-blown park in the center of the town. Their language was still a
dialect of Andalusia, a bit more Castilian perhaps than on the southern
coast, at any rate now grown as familiar as my own.
Each conversation was punctuated with cigarette smoke. Nothing in Spain
is more nearly incessant than the rolling and burning of what Borrow
dubbed in the days before the French word had won a place in our
language "paper cigars." We of America are inclined to look upon
indulgence in this form of the weed as a failing of youth, undignified
at least in old men. Not so the Spaniard. Whatever his age or station
in life--the policeman on his beat, the engineer at his throttle, the
boy at his father's heels, the priest in his gown, puff eternally at
their cigarillo. The express-check cashed in a Spanish bank is
swallowed up in a cloud of smoke as thick as the fog that hovers over
the Grand Banks; the directors who should attempt to forbid smoking in
their establishment would in all probability be invited to hump over
their own ledgers. The Spaniard is strikingly the antithesis of the
American in this, that his "pleasures," his addictions come first and
his work second. Let the two conflict and his work must be postponed or
left undone. In contrast to his ceaseless smoking the Spaniard never
chews tobacco; his language has no word for that habit.
To the foreigner who smokes Spain is no Promised Land. The ready-made
cigarettes are an abomination, the tobacco a stringy shag that grows
endurable only with long enduring. Matches, like tobacco, are a
fabrication--and a snare--of the government monopoly. Luckily, fire was
long before matches were. These old men of Jaen one and all carried
flint and steel and in lieu of tinder a coil of fibrous rope fitted with
a nickled ring as extinguisher. Few peoples equal the Spaniard in
eagerness and ability to "beat" the government.
I returned at evening to the wineshop to be greeted as a member of the
household.
"You wondered," laughed the senora, "why I could not answer you this
morning. It is because the spare room is rented to Don Luis, here, who
works at night on the railroad. Meet Don Luis, who has just risen and
given permission that you sleep in his bed, which I go now to spread
with clean sheets."
The railway man was one of nature's satisfactions, a short solid fellow
of thirty-five, overflowing with contagious cheerfulness. The libation
incidental to our introduction being drained, the landlord led the way,
chair in hand, to the bit of level flagging before the shop. As we sat
"al fresco" drinking into our lungs the refreshing air of evening, we
were joined by a well-dressed man whom I recalled having seen somewhere
during the day. He was a lawyer, speaking a pure Castilian with
scarcely a trace of the local patois, in short, one whom the caste rules
of any other land of Europe would have forbidden to spend an evening in
company with a tavern-keeper, a switchman, and a wandering unknown.
"How does it happen, senor," I asked, when our acquaintance had advanced
somewhat, "that I saw you in the cathedral this morning?"
"The domain of women, priests and tourists?" he laughed. "Because,
senor, it is the one place in town where I can get cool."
Truly the heat of a summer day in Jaen calls for some such drastic
measure, for it grows estival, gigantic, weighing down alike on mind and
body until one feels imperative necessity of escaping from it somehow,
of running away from it somewhere; and there is no surer refuge than the
cavernous cathedral.
This as well as the fact that the edifice contains considerable that is
artistic led me back to it the next morning. But this time it was in
the turmoil of a personally conducted party. When I had taken refuge in
a shaded seat across the way, the flock poured out upon the broad stone
steps and, falling upon a beggar, checked their flight long enough to
bestow upon him a shower of pity and copper coins.
The mendicant was blind and crippled, outwardly a personification of
gratitude and humility, and attended by a gaunt-bellied urchin to whom
might fittingly have been applied the Spanish appellation "child of
misery." Long after the hubbub of the passing tourists had died away in
the tortuous city his meekly cadenced voice drifted on after them:
"Benditos sean, caballeros. Que Dios se lo pagara mil veces al cielo!"
A curiosity to know whether such gentleness were genuine held me for a
time in my place across the way. Silence had settled down. Only a
shopkeeper wandering by to a day of drowsing passed now and then; within
the great cathedral stillness reigned. The urchin ran after each
passerby, wailing the familiar formula, only to be as often ordered off.
At length he ascended the steps stealthily and, creeping within a few
feet of his master, lay down and was instantly lost in sleep, a luxury
he had evidently not tasted for a fortnight.
The beggar rocked to and fro on his worthless stumps, now and again
uttering as mournful a wail as if his soul had lost not one but all save
a scattered half-dozen of its strings. Gradually the surrounding
silence drew his attention. He thrust a hand behind one of his unhuman
ears and listened intently. Not a sound stirred. He groped with his
left hand along the stones, then with the right and, suddenly touching
the sleeping child, a tremor of rage shivered through his misshapen
carcass. Feeling with his finger tips until he had located the boy's
face, he raised his fist, which was massive as that of a horseshoer,
high above his head and brought it down three times in quick succession.
They were blows to have shattered the panel of a door; but the boy
uttered only a little stifled whine and, springing to his feet, took up
again his task, now and then wiping away with a sleeve the blood that
dripped from his face down along his tattered knees.
Before the sun had reached its full strength, I struck off to explore
the barren bluff that overlooks Jaen on the south and east. Barely had
I gained the first crest, however, before the inexorable leaden heat was
again upon me, and the rest of the day was a perspiring labor. Only the
reflection that real travel and sight-seeing is as truly work as any
life's vocation lent starch to my wilted spirits.
At intervals of two or three hundred yards along the precipitous cliff
that half circles the city stood the shelter of an octroi guard, built
of anything that might deflect a ray of sunlight. In the shade of each
crouched a ragged, ennui-eyed man staring away into the limitless
expanse of sunshine. Their fellows may be found forming a circle around
every city in the kingdom of Spain, the whole body numbering many
thousands. The impracticable, the quixotic character of official Spain
stands forth nowhere more clearly than in this custom of sentencing an
army of her sons to camp in sloth about her cities on the bare chance of
intercepting ten-cent's worth of smuggling, when the same band working
even moderately might produce tenfold the octroi revenues of the land.
I halted with one of the tattered fellows, whose gladness for the
unusual boon of companionship was tempered by a diffidence that was
almost bashfulness, so rarely did he come in contact with his
fellow-man. For a long hour we sat together in the shadow of the hut,
our eyes drifting away over the gray-roofed, closely-packed city below.
When our conversation touched on the loneliness of his situation the
guard grew vehement in bewailing its dreariness and desolation. But
when I hinted that the octroi might perhaps be abolished to advantage,
he sprang to his feet crying almost in terror:
"For los clavos de Cristo, senor! What then would become of nosotros?
I have no other trade whatever than to be guard to the octroi."
A sorry craft indeed, this squatting out a lifetime under a grass hut.
The bluish haze of a summer evening was gathering over Jaen when,
returning through a winding street to my lodging, there fell on my ear
the thrum of a solitary guitar and the rich and mellow voice of a street
singer. The musician was a blind man of fifty, of burly build and a
countenance brimming with good cheer and contentment, accompanied by a
woman of the same age. As I joined the little knot of peasants and
townsmen gathered about him, his song ended and he drew out a packet of
hand bills.
"On this sheet, senores," he announced, holding one up, "are all the
songs I have sung for you. And they are all yours for a perro gordo."
I was among the first to buy, glad to have paid many times this mere
copper to be able to carry home even one of those languorous ballads so
filled with the serene melancholy of the Moor and the fire of Andalusia.
But the sheet bore nothing but printed words.
"Every word is there, senores," continued the minstrel, as if in
response to my disappointment. "As for the music, anyone can remember
that or make it up for himself."
To illustrate how simple this might be he threw a hand carelessly across
his guitar and struck up another of the droning, luring melodies, that
rose and fell and drifted away through the passages of the dimming city.
Easy, indeed! One could as easily remember or make up for one's self
the carol of the meadow lark in spring or the lullaby of the nightingale
in the darkened tree-tops.
That I might catch the five-thirty train my host awoke me next morning
at three-twenty. I turned over for a nap and descending in the dawn by
the dust-blanketed Alameda to the station two miles distant, found this
already peopled with a gathering of all the types of southern Spain.
The train was due in twenty minutes, wherefore the ticket-office, of
course, was already closed. After some search I discovered the agent,
in the person of a creature compared with whom Caliban would have been a
beauty, exchanging stories with a company of fellow-bandits on the
crowded platform. He informed me in no pleasant manner that it was too
late to buy a ticket. When I protested that the legal closing hour was
but five minutes before train time, he shrugged his shoulders and
squinted away down the track as if he fancied the train was already in
sight. I decoyed him into the station at last, but even then he refused
to sell a ticket beyond Espeluy.
We reached that junction soon after and I set off westward along the
main line. The landscape was rich and rolling, broad stretches of
golden grain alternating with close-shaven plains seething in the sun.
Giant cacti again bordered the way. Once, in the forenoon, I came upon
a refreshing forest, but shadows were rare along the route. The line
was even more traveled than that below Honda. Field-laborers passed
often, while sear-brown peasant women, on dwarf donkeys jogged by in
almost continual procession on their way to or from market.
Not once during all my tramps on the railways of Spain had a train
passed of which the engineer did not give me greeting. Sometimes it was
merely the short, crisp "Vaya!" more often the complete expression "Vaya
V. con Dios!" not infrequently accompanied by a few words of good cheer.
Here on the main line I had occasion to test still further the
politeness of the man at the throttle. I had rolled a cigarette only to
find that I had burned my last match. At that moment the Madrid-bound
express swung out of a shallow cutting in the hills ahead. I caught the
eye of the engineer and held up the cigarette in sign of distress. He
saw and understood, and with a kindly smile and a "Vaya!" as he passed,
dropped two matches at my very feet.
It was not far beyond that I caught my first glimpse of the
Guadalquivir. Shades of the Mississippi! The conquering Moor had the
audacity to name this sluggish, dull-brown stream the "Wad-al-Gkebir,"
the "Great River!" Yet, after all, things are great or small merely by
comparison. To a people accustomed only to such trickles of water as
had thus far crossed my path in the peninsula no doubt this over-grown
brook, bursting suddenly on their desert eyes, had seemed worthy the
appellation. But many streams wandering by behind the barn of an
American farmer and furnishing the old swimming-hole are far greater
than the Guadalquivir.
I crossed it toward three of the afternoon by an ancient stone bridge of
many arches that seemed fitted to its work as a giant would be in
embroidering doilies. Beyond lay Andujar, a hard-baked, crumbling town
of long ago, swirling with sand; famous through all Spain for its porous
clay jars. In every street sounded the soft slap of the potter; I peeped
into a score of cobble-paved courts where the newly baked _jarras_ were
heaped high or were being wound with straw for shipment.
A long search failed to disclose a casa de comidas in all the town. The
open market overflowed with fruit, however, stocked with which I
strolled back across the river to await the midnight train. It was
packed with all the tribes of Spain, in every sleeping attitude. Not
until we had passed Cordoba at the break of day did I find space to sit
down and drowse for an hour before we rumbled into Seville.
I had exhibited my dust-swathed person in at least half a dozen hotels
and fled at announcement of their charges, when I drifted into the
narrow calle Rosario and entered the "Fonda de las Quatro Naciones."
There ensued a scene which was often to be repeated during the summer.
The landlord greeted me in the orange-scented patio, noted my foreign
accent, and jumped instantly to the conclusion, as Spaniards will, that
I knew no Castilian, in spite of the fact that I was even then
addressing him with unhesitating glibness. Motioning to me to be
seated, he raced away into the depths of the fonda calling for
"Pasquale." That youth soon appeared, in tuxedo and dazzling expanse of
shirt-front, extolling as he came the uncounted virtues of his house, in
a flowing, unblushing imitation of French. Among those things that I had
not come to Spain to hear was Spanish mutilation of the Gaelic tongue.
For a long minute I gazed at the speaker with every possible evidence of
astonishment. Then turning to the landlord I inquired in most solemn
Castilian.
"Esta loco, senor? Is he insane that he jabbers such a jargon?"
"Como, senor!" gasped Pasquale in his own tongue. "You are not then a
Frenchman?"
"Frenchman, indeed!" I retorted. "Yo, senor, soy americano."
"Senor!" cried the landlord, bowing profoundly, "I ask your pardon on
bended knee. In your Castilian was that which led me to believe it was
not your native tongue. Now, of course, I note that it has merely the
little pequenisimos peculiarities that make so charming the
pronunciation of our people across the ocean."
A half-hour later I was installed in a third-story room looking down
upon the quiet little calle Rosario, and destined to be my home for a
fortnight to come. During all that time Pasquale served me at table
without once inflicting upon me a non-Spanish word. Nor did he once
suspect what a hoax I had played on the "Four Nations" by announcing my
nationality without prefixing the qualification "norte."