WILDEST SPAIN
Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient
kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of
Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's
"last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula
retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror
swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the
Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians,
these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on
by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for
behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the
fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial
amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those
who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred
life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their
heels even earlier in the proceedings.
Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father
Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had
covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that
remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way
into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the
gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have
appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a
crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his
friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He
conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his
perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built
in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or
grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."
To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a
thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name.
Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the
Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The
racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like
all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to
mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage,
slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire
of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native
dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even
the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the
domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.
From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and
Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high,
of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a
circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of
the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the
place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants,
moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in
garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are
least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the
colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been
noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a
hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.
So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and
vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among
them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built
medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within. While
outwardly it is unsurpassed. From the wall-top promenade the eye
commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of
munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable
Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.
In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights";
which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls
within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an
atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary,
though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like
many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone
lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some
Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the
plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with
housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube
some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their
receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more
than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change
in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly
home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer.
Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I
was forced to take refuge in bed.
I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo,
capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly
"off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded.
Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to
lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous
notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a
day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense
sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own
that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from
Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by
tourists.
Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of
Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my
journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by
scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so
inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying
down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless,
siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the
good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a
dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was
Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same
country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy
stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha.
The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the
Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.
When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where
payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I
ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly
threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had
not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank
into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the
wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face
care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons
the aerial little sprite men name _Wanderlust_. For the joy of travel is
not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters
little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the
supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man
wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end
little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of
indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may
know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a
vagabond.
In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country
as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony
Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and
landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is
not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as
the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the
point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the
country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving
peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such
conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The
cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled
"Buenos."
In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people
well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and
old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of
them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich
green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except
those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and
fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the
thoughts quickly back to Japan. At nearer sight, however, something of
the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general
avoidance of the bath and washtub.
Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages
neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built
without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is
chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped
away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character
of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave
good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest
population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The
former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in
Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A
species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most
common of the vegetables.
All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated,
precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male
and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of
sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I
had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either
hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came
plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony
channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and
clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of
their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was
carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured
spotless and shining as a Hindu's _lota_.
But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of
all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian
peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had
certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter
with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There
is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the
French _bourdonner_--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I
heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those
insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a
thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a
peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much
like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their
heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy
edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than
two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle,
the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of
axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen
see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads
to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it passed, my ears literally
ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But
there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of
a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some
valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.
Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more
precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its
way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early
afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I
kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a
patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge
of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to
brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down
the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find
I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.
The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at
last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at
what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which,
marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and
unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple
in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth
out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible
multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on
their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to
their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers,
offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday
celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour
stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.
Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The
peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody,
was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them
when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in
which the far-famed _bacalao_--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels
like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial
appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like
man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he
knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village.
Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction
it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too
literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious
nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where
in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but
shattered my head on the roof in question.
In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through
the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was
falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions
of the dubious village. According to these, when I had passed the
"Meson de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road,
which was bending toward Gijon on the north coast, and fell into a
descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All
the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain
slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much
wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail,
slight hints that could not be explained, but without the
half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times
astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the
range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an
enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and
swarming with huge white dogs.
At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was
at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible
imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came
out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I
had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far
down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like
embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path
lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a
jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal,
was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face
of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.
Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A
mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a
break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four
thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods
between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out
with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome
climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind,
pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of
the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily
crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness
was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air
and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and
darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of
eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied
"Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.
Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch
in what passed for the principal street, I asked:
"Is there a posada in town?"
"No se, senor," she answered.
"Don't know! When your town has only nine houses?"
But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my
inquiry elsewhere. With no better result, however, for each one I asked
returned the same laconic, "I don't know." I had sat down on a boulder
in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a
strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with
few words to the house of the head man. The latter was in bed with a
broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days
before. I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and,
after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.
Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain
inviting. For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and
equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature
unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason
why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals. The wife of
the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen. I knew it
was that, for she said so. The place was absolutely dark. Since
leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort
appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Ranadoiro. There
was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the
slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking
for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the
way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered. Smoker
though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained
in the room.
The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken
by a continual droning. The floor was stone. In the room were six or
eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices.
Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of
which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the
floor. Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the
wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not
understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl
of the concoction.
It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup
of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed
cabbage indigenous to the region. A spoon was then handed me. It was of
wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder
was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match
seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I
charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of
them being laid in my lap. It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and
proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the
earth. This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing
appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk. From my
unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford
such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk
I never broke bread in.
Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room,
like the croak of a distant ox-cart. Since my entrance, too, I had been
struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the
paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse. When it occurred
to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved. The flies
were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly
back and forth.
But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating. Here was, it is
true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and
partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort
of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary
occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any
windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian
monk. Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a
stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully
as large as a half-bushel measure. It is baked from four to six months
ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a
glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited
period.
As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two
pesetas. He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have,
but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than
in actions, did so laconically. When I offered it again he rose half up
on his elbows and bellowed "No!" His gruffness was in no sense from
anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding
that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a
shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of
manner. I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my
extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was
better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back. But he
roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge
of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."
Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away
down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me
all but headlong downward. In the depths of the third I risked a plunge
into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost
wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon
the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.
To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the rest of the day would
be a thankless task. For miles it wound around and upward, ever upward
on the face of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to heaven.
Then suddenly from each giddy height it dived headlong down into
deep-wooded, fertile valleys; then up again round and round another
mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub. Later in the day it
took to rounding these peaks almost on the level, coming a score of
times so close to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across,
only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some narrow but
apparently bottomless gulley.
Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had crossed the unmarked
boundary between Galicia and the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias,
to-day the province of Oviedo. A new style of architecture gradually
became prevalent. The buildings were of two stories, the lower, of
stone, housing the animals, while the dwelling proper was of wood and
perched a foot or more above the lower story on four cone-shaped
cornerstones, like some great awkward bird ready to take flight.
But for this peculiarity the village in which night overhauled me
differed but little from that of the evening before, except in being
many hundred feet nearer sea level. It was called San Fecundo. As
before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered by a terse "I don't
know." I found the head man in good health, however,--a stalwart fellow
little past thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard. Yet so
local is the dialect of every village in this region that I tried for
some time in vain to make known my wants to him.
"Can't you speak Spanish, senor?" I cried out.
"No, senor," he replied like the report of a gun, and apparently angered
at the allegation. We managed nevertheless by patience and repetition
to establish communication between us, and I found out at last why my
inquiry for a posada had evoked so surprising an answer. Public
hostelries being unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the
question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do you suppose any resident
will furnish me accommodations?"
The head man did in this case, in spite of my unfortunate blunder in
calling him a gallego. So great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian
ranges that a man from one village deeply resents even being taken for a
resident of another a mile distant; while the Asturians, a blending of
the aboriginal Iberian and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was
kept alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and Christianity,
consider themselves free and independent hidalgos infinitely superior to
the submissive gallego. There were in truth some noticeable differences
of character and customs, that were to increase as I advanced.
We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky, fly-buzzing kitchen,
though this time the fireplace gave a bit of blaze and from time to time
the rugged faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at the
invitation of the village leader, flashed visible. I entertained them
with such stories of America as are most customary and popular on such
occasions. This was no light task. Not only were there many words
entirely indigenous to the village, but such Castilian as my hearers
used would scarcely be recognized in Castille. The expression "For
alla" (over there) they reduced to "Pa ca"; "horse" was never "caballo,"
but either "cabalo" or "cabayo." Worst of all, the infinitive of the
verb served indifferently for all persons and tenses. "Yo ir" might
mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I should go" and even "I
would have gone" and "I should be going."
Most taking of all the stories I could produce were those concerning the
high buildings of New York. I had developed this popular subject at
some length when a mountaineer interposed a question that I made out at
length to be a query whether those who live in these great houses spend
all their time in them or take an hour or two every morning to climb the
stairs.
"Hay ascensores, senores," I explained, "elevators; some expresses, some
mixtos, as on your railroads."
A long, unaccountable silence followed. I filled and lighted my pipe,
and still only the heavy breathing of the untutored sons of the hills
about me sounded. Finally one of them cleared his throat and inquired
in humble voice:
"Would you be so kind, senor, as to tell us what is an elevator?"
It was by no means easy. Long explanation gave them only the conception
of a train that ran up and down the walls of the building. How this
overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in making clear to them;
moreover there was only one of the group that had ever seen a train.
In the morning the head man accepted with some protest two
_reales_--half a peseta. The highway again raced away downward,
describing its parabolas and boomerang movements as before, and
gradually bringing me to a realization of how high I had climbed into
the sky. On every hand rocky gorges and sheer cliffs; now and again a
group of charcoal-burners on the summit of a slope stood out against the
dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun was rarely visible. As
I descended still lower, more pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared,
and by mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo. As I was leaving
one of its shops a courtly youth introduced himself as a student in the
University of Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was with no
small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties to talk that tongue with
him in the mile or two he walked with me. That night for the first time
since leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public posada.
Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was so far down and
sheltered that figs sold--by number here rather than weight--nine for a
cent. Beyond, the highway strolled for miles through orchards of apples
and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road and were trodden under
foot. For the first time I understood the force of the expression, "not
worth a fig."
In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon lunch I got the shock of
that summer's journey. Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had
seen in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving. The entire
front page was taken up by a photograph showing Posadas lying in bed,
his familiar face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a priest,
and a fellow-torero.
"Carajo!" I gasped. "What's this; Posadas wounded?"
"Mas," replied the innkeeper shortly. "Killed last Sunday. Too bad; he
made good sport for the aficionados."
An accompanying article gave particulars. The Sevillian had been
engaged to alternate with a well-known diestro in the humble little
plaza of San Lucar de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the
Guadalquivir. The end of the day would have seen him a graduate matador.
The bulls were "miuras" five years old. As he faced the first, Posadas
executed some pass that delighted the spectators. For once, evidently,
he forgot his one "secret of success"; he turned to acknowledge the
applause. In a flash the animal charged and gored him in the neck. He
tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and was carried to the
little lazaret beneath the amphitheater, while the festival continued.
Toward morning he died.
All this had passed while I was climbing into the cloud-cloaked village
of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an hour since I had last seen the skilful
Sevillian in the ring. The article ended with the vulgarity common to
the yellow journal tribe:
"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand pesetas for the privilege
of taking this picture, which is almost all the unfortunate torero left
his sorrowing family."
I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting
little of the scene. At sunset I found myself tramping through a
warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with
its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes. As dusk fell I
paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder.
I continued, still pensive. Several times I halted, always to receive
the same reply, "A bit further, senor." Being in no sense tired, I gave
the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth
repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization
that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the
dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two
miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I
should certainly not have missed even without him.
The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young
vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering.
One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another
produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third
was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain. With
the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a
supply of hay offered comfortable quarters. For an hour he of the
falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his
native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:
"Mas bonita que hay,
A Zaragoza me voy
Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-on."
It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of
civilization. Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north
their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know
not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the
exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far
the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the
morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not
once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist.
The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp
I had spent less than twelve pesetas.
A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I
took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna. The boyhood home of Gil Blas
is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but
one day in four. Its inhabitants have much in common with the
slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and
self-satisfied. Of window displays the most frequent was that of a
volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores
(poisoners) de Chicago." It was, possibly, an expose of the packing
houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its
close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen.
Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful
days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.