In the absence of any specific record in my notebook I do not know just
how it was between this first glimpse of the cathedral and dinner,
but it must have been on our return to our hotel, that the little
interpreter who had met us at the station, and had been intermittently
constituting himself our protector ever since, convinced us that we
ought to visit the City Hall, and see the outside of the marble tomb
containing the bones of the Cid and his wife. Such as the bones were
we found they were not to be seen themselves, and I do not know that I
should have been the happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no
great opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic fiction.
His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part of my young study in
Spanish, and when four or five years ago a friend gave me a copy of it,
beautifully printed in black letter, with the prayer that I should read
it sometime within the twelvemonth, I found the time far too short. As
a matter of fact I have never read the poem to this day, though. I have
often tried, and I doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. He
intended it rather to be recited in stirring episodes, with spaces for
refreshing slumber in the connecting narrative. As for the Cid in real
life under his proper name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he made his
king publicly swear that he had had no part in the murder of his royal
brother, and though he was the stoutest and bravest knight in Castile,
I cannot find it altogether admirable in him that when his king banished
him he should resolve to fight thereafter for any master who paid
him best. That appears to me the part of a road-agent rather than a
reformer, and it seems to me no amend for his service under Moorish
princes that he should make war against them on his personal behalf
or afterward under his own ungrateful king. He is friends now with the
Arabian King of Saragossa, and now he defeats the Aragonese under the
Castilian sovereign, and again he sends an insulting message by the
Moslems to the Christian Count of Barcelona, whom he takes prisoner
with his followers, but releases without ransom after a contemptuous
audience. Is it well, I ask, that he helps one Moor against another,
always for what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia from the
infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, but having tortured the
governor to make him give up his treasure, buries him to his waist and
then burns him alive? After that, to be sure, he enjoys his declining
years by making forays in the neighboring country, and dies “satisfied
with having done his duty toward his God.”
Our interpreter, who would not let us rest till he had shown us the
box holding the Cid’s bones, had himself had a varied career. If you
believed him he was born in Madrid and had passed, when three years old,
to New York, where he grew up to become a citizen and be the driver of a
delivery wagon for a large department-store. He duly married an American
woman who could speak not only French, German, and Italian, but also
Chinese, and was now living with him in Burgos. His own English had
somewhat fallen by the way, but what was left he used with great
courage; and he was one of those government interpreters whom you find
at every large station throughout Spain in the number of the principal
hotels of the place. They pay the government a certain tax for
their license, though it was our friend’s expressed belief that the
government, on the contrary, paid him a salary of two dollars a day; but
perhaps this was no better founded than his belief in a German princess
who, when he went as her courier, paid him ten dollars a day and all his
expenses. She wished him to come and live near her in Germany, so as to
be ready to go with her to South America, but he had not yet made up his
mind to leave Burgos, though his poor eyes watered with such a cold as
only Burgos can give a man in the early autumn; when I urged him to look
to the bad cough he had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. He had
a fascination of his own, which probably came from his imaginative habit
of mind, so that I could have wished more adoptive fellow-citizens were
like him. He sympathized strongly with us in our grief with the cold of
the hotel, and when we said that a small oil-heater would take the chill
off a large room, he said that he had advised that very thing, but that
our host had replied, with proud finality, “I am the landlord.” Whether
this really happened or not, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that our
little guide had some faith in it as a real incident. He apparently had
faith in the landlord’s boast that he was going to have a stately marble
staircase to the public entrance to his hotel, which was presently of
common stone, rather tipsy in its treads, and much in need of scrubbing.
There is as little question in my mind that he believed the carriage we
had engaged to take us next morning to the Cartuja de Miraflores
would be ready at a quarter before nine, and that he may have been
disappointed when it was not ready until a quarter after. But it was
worth waiting for if to have a team composed of a brown mule on the
right hand and a gray horse on the left was to be desired. These animals
which nature had so differenced were equalized by art through the lavish
provision of sleigh-bells, without some strands of which no team in
Spain is properly equipped. Besides, as to his size the mule was quite
as large as the horse, and as to his tail he was much more decorative.
About two inches after this member left his body it was closely shaved
for some six inches or more, and for that space it presented the effect
of a rather large size of garden-hose; below, it swept his thighs in a
lordly switch. If anything could have added distinction to our turnout
it would have been the stiff side-whiskers of our driver: the only pair
I saw in real life after seeing them so long in pictures on boxes of
raisins and cigars. There they were associated with the look and
dress of a _torrero,_ and our coachman, though an old Castilian of the
austerest and most taciturn pattern, may have been in his gay youth an
Andalusian bull-fighter.