Castro Duro is principally a town of farmers and carriers. Its municipal
limits are very extensive; the plain surrounding it is fertile enough.
In winter there are many foggy days, and then the flat land looks like
a sea, in which hillocks and groves float like islands. Wine and
cultivated fruits constitute the principal riches of Castro. The wine is
sharp, badly made; there is one thick dark variety which always tastes
of tar, and one light variety which they reinforce with alcohol and
which they call aloque.
Autumn is the period of greatest animation in the town; the harvest
gets stowed away, the vintage made, the sweet almonds are gathered and
shelled in the porticoes.
Formerly in all the houses of rich and poor, the murk of the grapes
was boiled in a still and a somewhat bitter brandy thus manufactured.
Whether in consequence of the brandy, or of the unusual amount of money
about, or of both, the fact is that at that period a great passion for
gambling developed in Castro and more crimes were committed then than
during all the rest of the year.
The industrial processes in Castro are primitive; everything is made
by hand, and the Castrian people imagine that this establishes a
superiority. In the environs of the town there are an electrical plant,
a brickyard, various mills, and lime and plaster kilns.
The town’s commerce is more extended than its industries, although no
more prosperous. In the Square and in the Calle Mayor, under the
arcades white goods are sold and woollens, and there are hat-shops
and silversmiths, one alongside the other. The shopkeepers hang their
merchandise in the arches, the saddlers and harness-makers decorate
their entrances with head-stalls and straps, and those that have no
archway put up awnings. In the Square there are continually stalls set
up for earthenware jars and pitchers and for articles in tin.
In the outlying streets there are inns, at whose doors five or six mules
with their heads together are almost constantly to be seen; there are
crockery stores containing brooms and every kind of jug and glazed pan;
there are little shops in doorways holding big baskets full of grain;
there are dark taverns, which are also eating-houses, to which the
peasants go to eat on market days, and whose signs are strings of dried
pimentoes and cayenne peppers or an elm branch. In the written signs
there is a truly Castilian charm, chaste and serene. At the Riojano oven
one reads: “‘Bred’ baked for all ‘commers.’” And at the Campico inn it
says: “Wine served by Furibis herself.” The shops and the inns have
picturesque names too. There is the Sign of the Moor, and the Sign of
the Jew, and the Sign of the Lion, and one of the Robbers.
The streets of Castro, especially those near the centre, where the crowd
is greater, are dirty and ill-smelling in summer. Clouds of flies hover
about and settle on the pairs of blissfully sleeping oxen; the sun
pours down his blinding brilliance; not a soul passes, and only a few
greyhounds, white and black, elegant and sad, rove about the streets...
In all seasons, at twilight, a few young gentlemen promenade in the
Square. At nine at night in the winter, and at ten in summer, begins the
reign of the watchmen with their dramatic and lamentable cry.
* * * * *
Alzugaray gave Cæsar these details by degrees, while they were both
seated in the hotel getting ready to dine.
“And the type? The ethnic type? What is it, according to you?” asked
Cæsar.
“A type rather thin than fat, supple, with an aquiline nose, black
eyes...”
“Yes, the Iberian type,” said Cæsar, “that is how it struck me too.
Tall, supple, dolichocephalic... It seems to me one can try to put
something through in this town...”