good bulls, it is rich. _Toreros_ come to study their victims, for when
the bull is not “game” the _espada_ is helpless. There are many bedrooms
for guests: the dining room is a long hall in mahogany or oak with
crystal candelabras, lofty leather chairs, sideboard glittering with
colored glasses, a bull’s-head over the door and portraits of great
toreros on the walls. But the house is cold; rustic and crude it is,
like the harsh earth of León. The livable room and the living room is
the kitchen. The owner, in _zamarra_ and _calzón_, smokes his rank pipe
by a vast open fire. (There are few stoves in this land.) A medieval
spit, great enough for the whole side of a beef, stands in the
blue-black chimney. And through the Castilian winter, when the wind is
unbroken from the Cantábrico to the Sierra Morena, the ranch house is a
cavern, but the kitchen is warm.
The hidalgo has changed little from his ancestors who fought the Moor at
Zamora. With him is his son, who incites the savagery of the bulls as a
gardener incites the color of rare flowers; and his son’s wife, a mellow
creature, quiet as the low flame of _encina_ that heats the _garbanzo_
jar upon the hearth; and her child, also, taking the breast of a nurse.
The other servants sit, too, before the fire in that equality which
alone a feudal sense of caste makes possible.
Salamanca is a land of little cities, of tight, insulate worlds with a
thousand or five hundred souls. A crude land and a people whose spirit
the land encases. A crustaceous people.... A tiny river is nearby, else
there could be no town. The houses ray out upon the turf like regimented
snails. Windows are spots in a chalky shell. The door, within a
triangular cut of the house (as if the reclusion made it less
penetrable) is massive oak impounded with iron or with copper. It is
divided horizontally, so that the housewife can open the upper half and
talk and trade, and yet be locked within her tiny castle.
She is locked ever within herself. Her garb is black. When she goes
forth to market in the village square (here bulls are fought on
holy-days), there is a black shawl over her black hair and very close to
her eyes. The face is beautiful. The skin, color of parchment, ages
silken soft. The jaw is round and unassertive. The nose is straight, the
mouth is thin and large. Passion, here, and right are not separate
claimants to her soul. All this peasant woman’s will and all her duty
unison from girlhood to the grave. Service to God and service to her
man, the sacraments of communion and of love, the tasks of household and
of motherhood ... are one and have one word in her plain mind. They are
life itself: like God a unity which miracle divides into three persons.
And she is like her hearthfire, this woman of Old Castile: fecund and
ensconced. She is the light of her shut home. She has jealous distrust
of sun and of the open air. They are her rivals and she bars them out
with her tiny windows and her divided door.
Her man moves slow through a strange outward world; for he is wholly
embraced by the close of his home and his woman. He wears knee-breeches
of hide that are tight as a skin and box his rump into a rigid square.
He wears a coat of raw sheepskin with a gap for the head and gaps for
the arms. For shoes, he has a bundle of rags cased in sandal-soles and
thonged. His hat is either the black skull boina of the Basque or the
true sombrero of Castile--pie-shaped, velvety black, with the center
pyramiding up to a peak. You see him best when he goes astride his ass.
A crude plaid muffler (_tapabocas_) stops his mouth. The woolen manta
regally folds from his shoulders to the flanks of his brute. The burro
trots sharp and perpendicular. The man is movelessly erect, untinged by
the mount’s rhythm. Even a peasant, even on an ass, he seems a
caballero. His head is sternly forward; his hands do not stir; he is
silent. His world is a coarse world. Winter is a blast and summer is a
blast; the short spring covers his field with mud more than with
flowers. This his encasement. And within, a balance like a tree’s of sun
and earth and weather. He wages an intricate but instinctive warfare
within the Hand of God. For God makes the sun a sear or a dim mockery;
and God makes foes of the men of the world. Unto the bloody Moor of
yesterday there has succeeded the bleeding Noble. Yet he has won of this
complexity a peace simple and deep. He lives in a profound seclusion.
Love and work are his hearthfire. And from their secret place he can
look out, his eyes old in understanding, his eyes bright with the irony
of distance.
* * * * *
Within this land of unkempt fields studded with encina, land of wild
bulls, of towns shut from the sun and the wind, there glows a jewel that
has warmed the world. It is the city of Salamanca. It lies in treeless
mountains. Northward Zamora bristles warlike, westward Portugal turns an
unfriendly back: and all about, Castile. Sierra de Gata, Peña de
Francia, Sierra de Béjar, Sierra de Gredos ... from such wild quarries
has come the mellow stone to build a scholar city: the city of the
Wisdom and the Love of God within the crude dichotomy of Spain.
Salamanca is its University. Here in the first splendor of the
Reconquista, Christian kings foregathered wise men of Israel and Islam
and joined to them the aspirant scholars in Christ. The school was
founded by a king of León and chartered by a saint, San Fernando of
Castile. For two centuries, learning here was universalistic. Here, in
spirit, Ibn Gabírol the Jew became Avicebron, and his book _Makor Hayim_
the Latin _Fons Vitæ_ which nourished Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Here the
teaching of Averroës the Moslem was absorbed for Rome. The Mussulman
Avempace and Tofaíl--Platonists--here went down before the Stagyrite
phalanx which included Ibn Ezra, Ben Maimun and Gersonides. Here was
prepared food that later fed Albertus Magnus; here were married east and
west as a thousand years before in Alexandria. For the body of Catholic
Europe was bone of Greek logic, flesh of Jewish faith and eye of Arab
science.
Here, ages later, when the medieval unity of Rome drooped and split,
when Protestant heresy was annexed by the new State wills of the north,
the Church of Rome was saved. From Salamanca came the theocratic polity
of the Catholic kings which fused the modern will of the State to the
old idea of the Church. From Salamanca spread the religious energy which
won all South America and part of North America to Roman Doctrine.[12]
For here above all, were nurtured the Spanish mystics who made possible
that last great conversion: Cristobal Colón, Pedro de Alcántara, Juan de
Avila, Luis de León, Luis de Granada, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Jesús,
Iñigo de Loyola--that various athletic group who by book or preachment,
by crusade or compass revived Rome. In Salamanca, at least in spirit,
the Medieval Synthesis was reborn: and in spirit has subsisted to our
day.
The earlier, more liberal Salamanca which had so immediate a share in
the real splendor of that Synthesis is not this town still glowing by
the River Tormes. The Salamanca of today is that of Isabel and
Ferdinand, of the sixteenth century--of the Jesuits and the fanatical
revivers.
Unlike most of the great cities of Castile, it rises gently from the
meseta. And heroisms of the mind, rather than of blood, speak in the
smolder of its ancient body. The River Tormes is urbane, almost
European. It passes waving willows and lush fruit trees; washes the
shaded soto where the monks met to platonize with Luis de León upon the
Names of Christ. A Roman bridge leads low to the city. Here once stood
a granite bull by means of which the wily beggar knocked wisdom into the
head of Lazarillo. And the streets climb up through the mud. Walls
crumble with the hillside under the town. An ancient church stands on
the bank surrounded by the mire; and houses, foul with age, their carved
seals moldered, limp like proud beggars up the sharp incline. The
Cathedral is a soft gold crest in the sun: at its feet are waves of
convents, consistories, churches, schools. The central streets are paved
with cobble stones. The houses are low and the glass of their windows is
out of place, so new it gleams within the soft senility of walls. Dogs,
children, refuse clutter up the streets. Everywhere one feels the
elemental base--a hill--on which this young culture of Christian Spain
has builded. In the churches, five centuries are confused. The Old
Cathedral is Romanesque; with its chaste columns and its nave a
petrified forest, it stands beside the scintillance of the plateresque
New Cathedral. Nearby is a Dominican convent in which a queer mariner
named Columbus found refuge and support in a scheme rejected by most of
the Crowns of Europe. The seventeenth century baroque of the
Churrigueras flaunts its high monstrosities beneath ornate ceilings.
Much of the gold arrogance of this convent is a result of that mad
scheme of Columbus. But the man himself is closer to the streets; for
here one still encounters at least in spirit the pícaro, the monk
half-saint, half-satyr, the immortal Celestina. A Jesuit convent rears
its chill harsh walls in the town’s heart: a symbol of the ruthless
might of the Company of Jesus, of its enormous logic. And everywhere,
the alleys limping up, limping down, between the homes of the Church.
This Salamanca, fixed in the eras of Isabel, Carlos, Felipe II, has
aged; has not changed. The dirty streets are the same; the low blind
precincts of the poor (Cervantes lived here once) and the dominant
recurrent periods of church and tower. Life’s anarchy is here controlled
by learning. Every crooked street is righted by a convent; every lurch
of alley is stopped by a square. And the whole town is mastered by the
Plaza Mayor--a square as correct as a schoolman’s syllogism. Its sides
are unvariant four-storied walls; it is colonnaded equally and equally
façaded; it is the noble, proper heart of a town which has argued unity
in Christ through seven rank chaotic hundred years....
The buildings of the university are the least of it. In the Library you
may find manuscripts by Alfonso the Wise, glosses by thirteenth century
Jews, Arabic illuminations of Gazali. You may sit in the same chill
lecture halls where once great masters taught humanities and where but
yesterday Miguel de Unamuno “explained” Greek after the universal
measure. But Salamanca is an ancient seer whose word has gone forth to
the world, while the body shriveled and the blood grew bleak.
More of the university is the tropical gold work of the Dominican
altars; is the stupendous grace of the two Cathedrals; is the immense
glower of the Jesuit on the hill. More, the sedulous symmetry of the
Plaza within the coil of gutters. More, the glow of the yellow mellow
stone within the desert fastness of Castile.
_c._ _The Water Bridge_
The æsthetic sense of Spain is social, instinctive, unconscious. Her
master works of art rise like isolate acts from the trammels of her
life. Her cities are among them: and none more perfect than the ancient
towns bristling upon rocks within the Castilian desert.
Choose your day well for visiting these communal works of Spain.
Salamanca needs sun: its warm gold stones speak graciously within an
azure sky. The Escorial is best in rain: its chill stones shrink from
the blue-gold of the Spanish day, but under the drift of breaking clouds
it glows like fossil fire. Segovia sings most clearly in a wind. Great
clouds like armies plunge from the Sierras and invest the Castle. The
sun makes sudden sallies on the Cathedral. Then gloom once more on the
town, like repentance after violence.
Castile, here, is a chaos of mountain and of desert. The Guadarrama is
steep over the lofty town. The desert leaps and dips in a cacophony of
planes. Elsewhere in Spain, it is Spring. But April in Segovia is
stormy. The mountains are still clad in winter. In the pockets of the
surrounding valley almond trees and cherry are in bloom, making little
perfumed furls of mist against the barren earth. The sky is neither
spring nor winter. A great wind rages. Momently, heaven changes. Titanic
mounds of cloud are flung like eiderdown from peak to peak: the sun is a
swift flash between dark purples. Rain in melted diamonds glances across
the valley in the oblique shaft of the sun: is gone: a copse of poplar
sings suddenly green and yellow under gray. The volumnear motions of the
hills seem to be waves of a seismic sea, swept by the wind and roaring
with its might.
* * * * *
Segovia fills the height of a long rock shaped like a ship within this
stormy earth. Below one side pours the Eresma, with its melted snows.
The valley rises on the other beam, purple and bronze soil, blue sage,
rock ... rises to a village that lies flat like a dory on the breast of
a wave ... rises again to the sky where the clouds drive wildly.
Segovia’s ancient walls are bastioned, pierced with knotty towers and
gates, and topped with the typical round cubos which Rome gave to Spain.
The walls bind the precipitous rock which holds a park and the Alcázar,
the usual pile of tessellated towers that gave Castile its name.
This is one end of the town. The rock goes higher toward the center.
Houses are a clutter, unanimous like an army in the moment ere it comes
forth to attack. A romanesque church, a feudal tower rise from the stony
mob like leaders. And in the town’s heart, stands the Cathedral. Its
interior is intricate and cold. But in the façade of the city, it is
perfect. It is the climax of Segovia rising to meet it. To the right
Alcázar is alone, facing the waste of the meseta; alone above the river
and the rock like a lord of the city. But now, the streets mount, an
aspiration makes them one: their goal is the Cathedral. Its base is lost
in the streets. Rise free and clear only the two thick towers and the
crest of the gigantic nave. The Cathedral is a ship breasting the sea of
the town: even as the town is a ship, breasting the hills.
Down from the Cathedral in the direction away from Alcázar, once more
the city falls. No regular descent. There is no metric rhythm in
Segovia, save for the mind that stands outside of it. An Olympian eye
sees the vast bowl of the Guadarrama: and on the tide of turf and rock,
the city riding like a frigate: and in the town, this regular rise to
the Cathedral. But each of these general units is a chaos. The plateau
is an intricate context of heights, villages, farms and valley-spots
suddenly sweet with orchards. The wave on which Segovia rides is itself
broken into rising, falling crests. To make a hundred yards of
horizontal progress, the voyager must go up, go down: slipping through
alleys that swerve, climbing steps that lift him into hidden _plazas_
where an old church spreads its romanesque cloisters like wings, or a
palace with faceted walls stands aloof from a plebeian throng of houses.
So, laboriously the voyager makes his way to the other end of town.
There is a Square. The Aqueduct of Rome, immemorial and chaste, rises
from the Spanish market. _Plaza del Azoquejo_: it is a name that recalls
the soukhs and bazaars of Islam. Within its sordid taverns, fish-shops,
stands Rome.
Segovia’s chaos disappears. Segovia becomes a drama rigorously styled.
As the town bristles under the wind and the mountains, so has passion
run riot in this town. Here lived Juan Bravo, leader of the _Communeros_
who arose through Spain, in tragic presentiment of disaster, to oppose
the Austrian Karl who became Carlos the Great. Here lived the stubborn
burghers who shut their gates against the young Queen Isabel. Segovia is
crude, coarse, anarchic. But Spain’s unconscious art has made it
perfect, weaving the elements of its cross-grained will into a living
balance.
This is the work of the Roman Water Bridge. Two thousand years ago, the
Empire built it to carry from Fuenfría to a reservoir not far from La
Granja. The distance was great, so the Aqueduct was long. No aspirance,
here, no thinking about symbols. The pragmatic, confident Roman thought
not of miracle: the passionate Segovian, building his chaos beneath
these Roman arches, looked for miracle elsewhere. And the miracle is
born of the unwitting marriage of these wills....
Roman aqueduct and Spanish town offset each other and create, once more,
the complex unity of Spain. The Square is a boil of braying burros,
muddy motor-buses, lottery vendors, beggars, drinkers. Above it and
across it spans the double tier of arches. They are vast granite blocks,
pieced without clamp or mortar into a soaring lacework. Hundreds of feet
above, swings the upper rim. The town clambers after it on steps,
becoming at the top level a hidden maze of low houses. The Bridge,
dwarfed here, disappears into the wall of a convent. Its massive granite
shelters a patio with a pump, grapevines, geese--and a young girl
stringing red clothes on the branch of an encina. Upon the other height
from the Plaza del Azoquejo, the Bridge grows gradually less steep as
the town rises slowly. Rome’s cool stones run ever closer to the Spanish
streets, singing against sordid wineshops, almost touching a schoolhouse
dismal as death, skirting a square where boys play at _pelota_. Rome is
now a single-tiered, a stolid marching music. It turns at right angles
and runs along a road lined with indigent shops. A _bodega_ opens its
dark fragrance as it passes: pigskins filled lifesize with wine sprawl
like bloated corpses in the shadow of this march of Rome. The town is
behind: the sedulous arched mass moves like a resistless army into the
ground that rises toward La Granja....
The Aqueduct of Rome is Segovia’s youngest life. Its stones are immense,
but its grace makes wings for them. Its tiers and terraces are an
ordered song. Horatian is the balance of these pragmatic blocks. The
mountains of Castile are old. The barren soil of Castile, stripped of
its loam, is old. Segovia is old. It is a spilling of energy, a thing of
chaos. Segovia comes to dark and tragic life within this Measure, sure
and at ease, of the cool will of Rome.
_d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_
South of the Guadarrama lies New Castile. The world flattens to the vast
plain of La Mancha. Towns stand like tiny toys on a table. It is a calm
before storm: vineyards and wheatfields stop against the wildest pass of
Spain, Despeñaperros of the Sierra Morena. Here Don Quixote like his
idol Amadís went into penance and prayer; here the Arabs passed from
Andalusia to the high Plateau; here at Las Navas de Toloso they were
pushed back and down five centuries later. Within a land of fierce
extremities, none is more telling than this sudden chaos rocking to the
sky between two mellow plains. In the upper one, La Mancha, the eye is
lost between the infinites of earth and heaven: it ceases to feed logic
to the mind and the soul starves in a waste of vague realities or, like
Don Quixote’s, leaps to the realm of visions.
North of La Mancha, another climax. The Tagus flows lazily west,
carrying silt and loam from gradual hills serrated with the olive. The
land is wide-browed. Its lack of trees gives it essential peace, as if
it were in contemplation of its own fortunate ease among the embattled
mountains. Now, swinging westward with the river, the land catches a
spiritual fever. Fields grow rockier, hills abrupt. Rondure sharpens to
angle; horizons shut. Something like a geological convulsion takes the
body of New Castile and turns it into a steep, a tumultuous storm. The
land becomes a maelstrom, swirling into a single rock--Toledo. The Tagus
maddens too. Bending south, it cuts into a canyon, one of whose walls is
Toledo and the other a rocky world to rim it. The river circles; deep in
a notch of stone it becomes a purpling torrent. It cuts a precipice, it
leaps a rapid, it reverses northward seeking again the long plains that
lounge westward to rocky Portugal and to the sea.
Toledo is cold upon its sudden height. Across the gorge that makes it
almost an island, olive groves, symmetrical as in the ancient prints,
draw verdant stripes in the red face of the hills. The country houses
and the chapels mark the swift slopes like little steadfastnesses
nailing their chaos. But in this geologic gyre and husbandry, Toledo
stands unmoving.
To the north where the plains lead to Toledo and where alone there is no
fending water, are walls. So an unbroken rigor belts the high town. Here
is the ancient Puerta de Visagra, unchanged since the Arabs put it up
twelve centuries ago upon a Roman stronghold dizzily maintained by the
Visigoths Athanagild and Leovgild to capital all the land. Gigantic
stones not polished by time. Three separate tiers of bastion and of
turret. And within the Gate’s shadow like a womb of rock, delicate Arab
arches. Behind, the street leads with a promise of gentle curves into
the harbored city. Children gambol in these monstrous walls; their calls
are flowers suddenly alight in a bleak winter. Women sit before painted
doorways and send voices like velvet strands into the silent granite of
Toledo. But life cannot prevail against this protecting death. Nearby is
a new Visagra (a mere five hundred years). Arms of Carlos V and a statue
of San Antonio furbish its forbiddance. Through its round arch, you see
two pointed towers with their _Mudéjar_ tiles aflash in the sun. But the
tiles are not verdant and skyey like the tiles of Granada and Seville.
They are colorless, and they are cold.
Toledo is a coil of streets, like the Tagus stormy and like the rocks
precipitous. Men and women live in Toledo. But they are void within the
intricate death of convent walls and church, and convent and convent
again. Rather than men and women of the sort who come together in the
ache of flesh, and of their ease bear fruitage, there seem to live here
creatures of prayer and dogma. Children indeed are scarce in these
streets that are the bodies of a Creed and a Rite. When there is open,
there is waste. When there is color, there is irony.
San Juan de los Reyes ... church, college, convent ... stands on the
westward buttress of the Toledan mountain. The rock cuts to the river.
The ancient bridge of San Martín loops high above the rapids, thrusting
its road away into a waste of dust. The Gate of San Martín stands in a
slanting square; and it is naked for the walls are gone. So desert comes
into Toledo. Within the city Gate, here is the face of mountain. The
streets stand on it, despite their ages, insecure and shallow. Desert is
not hostile to them, so they have let it in. Was it not there before
them? Let it come back to serve as the refrain of their bleak rigor--of
their denials. And the Church which the Catholic Kings projected and
then forgot--San Juan of the Kings--shrills with its painted statues in
this desert: Gothic, Arabic, and baroque against a hardier silence.
Farther on is the Judería--what is left of this Borough of Jews who
ruled Toledo when the Arabs came, and who throve thereafter in Toledo
for seven hundred years. The rigid mood goes on. The Castle of the Jews
has disappeared: but where it stood, beside the Paseo of a synagogue,
falls the escarpment, dark and sheer, into the rushing river. On the
farther side, the mountain is a wall. Water foams through the notch.
There is a tower standing on a thrust of rock just above the waves.
Halfway between the river and the Jewish homes, this ancient prison has
survived and fronts with its bars the desolate interstice of stone.
Churches and chapels stud the variant heights. And all about, the rise
and fall of streets, shut in and clamorously silent, cold in the neutral
tint of the Sierra.