There is in Toledo a narrow street, crooked and dim, which guards so
faithfully the traces of the hundred generations that have dwelt in it,
which speaks so eloquently to the eyes of the artist and reveals to him
so many secret points of affinity between the ideas and customs of each
century, and the form and special character impressed upon even its most
insignificant works, that I would close the entrances with a barrier and
place above the barrier a shield with this device:
“In the name of poets and artists, in the name of those who dream and of
those who study, civilization is forbidden to touch the least of these
bricks with its destructive and prosaic hand.”
At one of the ends of this street, entrance is afforded by a massive
arch, flat and dark, which provides a covered passage.
In its keystone is an escutcheon, battered now and corroded by the
action of the years; in it grows ivy which, blown by the air, floats
above the helmet, that crowns it, like a plumy crest.
Below the vaulting and nailed to the wall is seen a shrine with a sacred
picture of blackened canvas and undecipherable design, in frame of gilt
rococo, with its lantern hanging by a cord and with its waxen votive
offerings.
Leading away from this arch, which enfolds the whole place in its
shadow, giving to it an undescribable tint of mystery and sadness,
extend on the two sides of the street lines of dusky, dissimilar,
odd-looking houses, each having its individual form, size and color.
Some are built of rough, uneven stones, without other adornment than a
few armorial bearings rudely carved above the portal; others are of
brick, with an Arab arch for entrance, two or three Moorish windows
opening at caprice in a thick, fissured wall, and a glassed observation
turret topped by a lofty weather-vane. Some have a general aspect which
does not belong to any order of architecture and yet is a patchwork of
all; some are finished models of a distinct and recognized style, some
curious examples of the extravagances of an artistic period.
Here are some that boast a wooden balcony with incongruous roof; there
are others with a Gothic window freshly whitened and adorned with pots
of flowers; and yonder is one with crudely colored tiles set into its
door-frame, huge spikes in its panels, and the shafts of two columns,
perhaps taken from a Moorish castle, mortised into the wall.
The palace of a grandee converted into a tenement-house; the home of a
pundit occupied by a prebendary; a Jewish synagogue transformed into a
Christian church; a convent erected on the ruins of an Arab mosque whose
minaret is still standing; a thousand strange and picturesque contrasts;
thousands on thousands of curious traces left by distinct races,
civilizations and epochs epitomized, so to speak, on one hundred yards
of ground. All the past is in this one street,--a street built up
through many centuries, a narrow, dim, disfigured street with an
infinite number of twists where each man in building his house had
jutted out or left a corner or made an angle to suit his own taste,
regardless of level, height or regularity,--a street rich in
uncalculated combinations of lines, with a veritable wealth of whimsical
details, with so many, many chance effects that on every visit it offers
to the student something new.
When I was first at Toledo, while I was busying myself in making a few
sketch-book notes of _San Juan de los Reyes_, I had to go through this
street every afternoon in order to reach the convent from the little
inn, with hotel pretensions, where I lodged.
Almost always I would traverse the street from one end to the other
without meeting a single person, without any further
[Illustration: CLOISTER OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES]
sound than my own footfalls disturbing the deep silence, without even
catching a chance glimpse, behind balcony-blind, door-screen or
casement-lattice, of the wrinkled face of a peering old woman, or the
great black eyes of a Toledan girl. Sometimes I seemed to myself to be
walking through the midst of a deserted city, abandoned by its
inhabitants since ages far remote.
Yet one afternoon, on passing in front of a very ancient, gloomy
mansion, in whose lofty, massive walls might be seen three or four
windows of dissimilar form, placed without order or symmetry, I happened
to fix my attention on one of these. It was formed by a great ogee arch
surrounded by a wreath of sharply pointed leaves. The arch was closed in
by a light wall, recently built and white as snow. In the middle of
this, as if contained in the original window, might be seen a little
casement with frame and gratings painted green, with a flower-pot of
blue morning-glories whose sprays were clambering up over the
granite-work, and with panes of leaded glass curtained by white cloth
thin and translucent.
The window of itself, peculiar as it was, would have been enough to
arrest the gaze, but the circumstance most effective in fixing my
attention upon it was that, just as I turned my head to look at it, the
curtain had been lifted for a moment only to fall again, concealing from
my eyes the person who undoubtedly was at that same instant looking
after me.
I pursued my way preoccupied with the idea of the window, or, rather,
the curtain, or, to put it still more clearly, the woman who had raised
it, for beyond all doubt only a woman could be peeping out from that
window so poetic, so white, so green, so full of flowers, and when I say
a woman, be it understood that she is imaged as young and beautiful.
The next afternoon I passed the house,--passed with the same close
scrutiny; I rapped down my heels sharply, astonishing the silent street
with the clatter of my steps, a clatter that repeated itself in
responsive echoes, one after another; I looked at the window and the
curtain was raised again.
The plain truth is that behind the curtain I saw nothing at all; but by
aid of the imagination I seemed to discern a figure,--the figure, in
fact, of a woman.
That day twice or thrice I fell into a muse over my drawing. And on
other days I passed the house, and always when I was passing the curtain
would be raised again, remaining so till the sound of my steps was lost
in the distance and I from afar had looked back at it for the last time.
My sketches were making but little progress. In that cloister of _San
Juan de los Reyes_, in that cloister so mysterious and bathed in so
profound a melancholy,--seated on the broken capital of a column, my
portfolio on my knees, my elbows on my portfolio, and my head between my
hands,--to the music of water which flows there with an incessant
murmur, to the rustling of leaves under the evening wind in the wild,
forsaken garden, what dreams did I not dream of that window and that
woman! I knew her; I knew her name and even the color of her eyes.
I would see her crossing the wide and lonely courts of that most ancient
house, rejoicing them with her presence as a sunbeam gilds a pile of
ruins. Again I would seem to see her in a garden of very lofty, very
shadowy walls, among colossal, venerable trees, such as there ought to
be at the back of that sort of Gothic palace where she lived, gathering
flowers and seating herself alone on a stone bench and there sighing
while she plucked them leaf from leaf thinking on--who knows? Perchance
on me. Why say perchance? Assuredly on me. Oh, what dreams, what
follies, what poetry did that window awaken in my soul while I abode at
Toledo!
But my allotted time for sojourning in that city went by. One day, heavy
of heart and pensive of mood, I shut up all my drawings in the
portfolio, bade farewell to the world of fancy, and took a seat in the
coach for Madrid.
Before the highest of the Toledo towers had faded on the horizon, I
thrust my head from the carriage window to see it once more, and
remembered the street.
I still held the portfolio under my arm, and on taking my seat again,
while we rounded the hill which suddenly hid the city from my eyes, I
drew out my pencil and set down a date. It is the first of the three,
and the one which I call the Date of the Window.