THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST
The people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an
arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could
cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined
to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo. The
first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I
was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be
its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string. I
got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even
though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across
a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding
how aged is the world.
Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a sturdy town of countrymen,
in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off
in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne. There,
at a still different point of the compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop
ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El
Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a
country hunch-backed with hills. It was siesta-time when I arrived, the
sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and
misshapen hovels that made up the place. There were no inhabitants
abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only
public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards. They leered
at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive
laughter.
"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to
Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."
I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little
used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty
kilometers through rocky _barrancas_ and across sandy patches, gained as
the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A
few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out
unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a
sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.
A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles
beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away
and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue
with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an
indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian
painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud
with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my
feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the
culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and
precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in
its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and
minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to
transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won;
before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.
I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost
beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the
religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the
gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no
degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this
one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills,
even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell
a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day
and the swelter of humanity.
As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a
voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered
the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side.
He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking.
At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling
lights across the Tajo, cried out:
"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock
and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your
children are starving!
"Senor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let
me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."
He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been
following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a
bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned
before I continued my way.
"Senor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies,
as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a
hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you
think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated
booty to cover it?"
It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo
and, crossing the Alkantara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into
Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the
Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some
new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was
an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern
fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving
for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them,
and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a
haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.
Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of
an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little
progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones,
glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful
indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the
Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in
that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour
or more before I was directed to a casa de huespedes in the calle de la
Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of
buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would
have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and
found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown
patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by
day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened,
like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the
street a blank, windowless wall.
It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky
miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker. As he
lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less
than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man
would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his
workbench for something over three hours. His home and shop consisted
of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly
that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a
daughter of six who devised more amusement with a few scraps of leather
than many another might with all the toys of Nuernberg. The shoemaker
was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in
their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit
waiting for. He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but
unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the
sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to
the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an
orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand. When he
had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were
to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal
to forty cents.
In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well illustrated the two
types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the
next service. He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl
at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the
task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he
had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of
man will who drifts through life without training himself to do
anything. The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only
the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work
honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of
the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.
While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and
gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this
clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous
Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.
Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous
cathedral surnamed "la Rica." "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to
dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and
top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling
almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry. We of the United
States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up
within the churches of Spain by the superstitions of her people and the
rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up
their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here.
"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer
frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women." If
one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are
chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two
kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin
and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the
stone flagging. The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the
peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a
summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history.
But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous
stained-glass windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."
As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great
religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is
not unlikely to be assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic.
There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated
assertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius
solely for pure art's sake. Would they then have prostituted their
years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the
wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on
the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was
fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden
with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his
countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they
thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superstitions and
servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their
creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain
Syrian surroundings. Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask
us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who
were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into
whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the
poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her assumed
motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.
Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is,
incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things
materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the
pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel,
centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction
against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make
his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary. Yielding to which
characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself,
many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome
detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and breasts lopped off and
lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping
knives with fiendish merriment. These horrors, too, are set up in
public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men
on occasion. It is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to
imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar
martyrdoms. How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the
morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far
less repulsive.
There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is
successful in running them down in her jungle of streets. Each such
chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover,
that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower
of arrows. The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at
once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him
instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to
build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the
depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back
into the relief of one of the radiating calles.
As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow
of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the
dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to
time over his cigarette:
"Una limosnita, senores; que Dios se lo pagara."
There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average
gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with
anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had
been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this
hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's
Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:
"A little alms, senores, and may God repay you."
Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let
go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of
living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere
could not remake into the semblance of a man.
Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of
Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively. High
or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented
air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of
addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look,
not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those
things that stand next above. Nowhere can one escape the cloth. Every
half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a
fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes,
pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout
passer-by. Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious
mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of
priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat
set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a
stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city
swarms. Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those
creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the
termination of a musical comedy.
I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly
surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the
western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back through fully
a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de
Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the
recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a
factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the
wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the
outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day
straggles where she does in the procession of nations.
I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded
station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern
checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces. It was
again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that,
crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a
vega fertile with wheat. Before long it swung sharply to the right and,
laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central
tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn
landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.
The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and
wine, but no lodging. I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more
hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither
man nor habitation appeared. Toward eleven I gave up the search and,
stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of space unencumbered
with rocks and lay down until the dawn.
The sun rose murky. In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera passed
only two squalid wineshops. Then rounding in mid-morning a slight
eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast
city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon. It
was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway
wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable
outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack
since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills
of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it
fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged
pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on
across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that
goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as
different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the
mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the
Spaniard, of the universe.