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Familiar Spanish Travels

W >> W. D. Howells >> Familiar Spanish Travels



Produced by Eric Eldred







FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS


W. D. HOWELLS



ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1913




TO M. H.




CONTENTS


I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY

III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS

IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

V. PHASES OF MADRID

VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO

VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE

VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE

IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

XI. TO AND IN GRANADA

XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA





FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS

I

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES


As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward
Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the
air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an
autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of
northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city
where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical
air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of
my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter
who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other:
the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to
dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would
give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of
seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada
from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in
the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than
the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally
ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even
longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly
into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided
for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves
and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple
orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the
drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada,
and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me
in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my
infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more
or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep
my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not
always succeed.

Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but
probably it was with my first reading of _Don Quixote_ in the later
eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and,
of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole
of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish
and then the purpose of some time writing the author's life grew in me
with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done
either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I
lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early
chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not
remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language as
has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of
everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction; but
it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were
not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my
longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of
practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who
came to me for an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to
talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish
that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my store.
My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped his _c's_ and
_z's_ like any old Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the
accent of his native Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might
have profited by his instruction if he had not been such a charming
intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and philosophy
and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the
question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the
dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor's, or the forms of greeting
and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases,
the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old
acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish)
the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the
English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I
was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if in
the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing
Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my
speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in
conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am
not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The
days, or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly,
as quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the
present pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had
cloistered my youth or not.

I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have
cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly
knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the
Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their
atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I
can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though
I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for
the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known
to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish
sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I
had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and
inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in
those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and the
Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his
chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my
difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these
had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an
affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet I
felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at
seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had
win, though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more
than four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided
allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of
the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever
Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has
been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been
the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the
unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and
cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of
ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of
Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps
ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to
slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under the
rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my
attitude toward Spain was ever that of the impartial observer after I
crossed the border of that enchanted realm where we all have our
castles. I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at the
beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of
doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes. In
return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the
chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the
boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were
always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference
between the two?




II


It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived
in Spain after some sixty years' delay. During this period I had seen
almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or
six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a
fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and
gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I had
never once visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at
this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from
the surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding
out my dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that
left me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the
way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune
conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual
acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to
America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and
when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding
of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate
longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London
I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays
at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the Pyrenees and
I found myself in Spain, it was with an incredulity which followed me
throughout and lingered with me to the end. "Is this truly Spain, and am
I actually there?" the thing kept asking itself; and it asks itself
still, in terms that fit the accomplished fact.




II

SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY


Even at Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at
once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against
my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs
inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them all
with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a
gentleman. Perhaps he was also loath to attempt any inquiry in that
Desperanto of French, English, and Spanish which raged around us; but
the porter to whom we had fallen, while I hesitated at our carriage door
whether I should summon him as _Mozo_ or _Usted,_ was master of that
_lingua franca_ and recovered us from the customs without question on
our part, and understood everything we could not, say. I like to think
he was a Basque, because I like the Basques so much for no reason that I
can think of. Their being always Carlists would certainly be no reason
with me, for I was never a Carlist; and perhaps my liking is only a
prejudice in their favor from the air of thrift and work which pervades
their beautiful province, or is an effect of their language as I first
saw it inscribed on the front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It
looked so beautifully regular, so scholarly, so Latin, so sister to both
Spanish and Italian, so richly and musically voweled, and yet remained
so impenetrable to the most daring surmise, that I conceived at once a
profound admiration for the race which could keep such a language to
itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young
porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, and
honoring him because he could have read those words with the eyes that
were so blue amid the general Spanish blackness of eyes. He imparted a
quiet from his own calm to our nervousness, and if we had appealed to
him on the point I am sure he would have saved us from the error of
breakfasting in the station restaurant at the deceitful _table d'hote,_
though where else we should have breakfasted I do not know.

I

One train left for San Sebastian while I was still lost in amaze that
what I had taken into my mouth for fried egg should be inwardly fish and
full of bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance, which I
somehow understood, that there would be another train soon. In the mean
time there were most acceptable Spanish families all about, affably
conversing together, and freely admitting to their conversation the
children, who so publicly abound in Spain, and the nurses who do nothing
to prevent their publicity. There were already the typical fat Spanish
mothers and lean fathers, with the slender daughters, who, in the
tradition of Spanish good-breeding, kept their black eyes to themselves,
or only lent them to the spectators in furtive glances. Both older and
younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of Occidental
civilization, lurking or perking in deep-drooping or high-raking hats,
though already here and there was the mantilla, which would more and
more prevail as we went southward; older and younger, they were all
painted and powdered to the favor that Spanish women everywhere corne
to.

When the bad breakfast was over, and the waiters were laying the table
for another as bad, our Basque porter came in and led us to the train
for San Sebastian which he had promised us. It was now raining outside,
and we were glad to climb into our apartment without at all seeing what
Irun was or was not like. But we thought well of the place because we
first experienced there the ample ease of a Spanish car. In Spain the
railroad gauge is five feet six inches; and this car of ours was not
only very spacious, but very clean, while the French cars that had
brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were
neither. I do not say all French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are
as clean as they are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard to
get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of
steps; in fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy
of access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which the
Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take advantage of
their trust by transferring much of their heavy stuff to them. Without
owning that we were such travelers, I find this the place to say that,
with the allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, our excess
baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in a
month's travel, with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to
Algeciras in the extreme south of Spain.




II


But in this sordid detail I am keeping the reader from the scenery. It
had been growing more and more striking ever since we began climbing
into the Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon the whole it was not so sublime
as it was beautiful. There were some steep, sharp peaks, but mostly
there were grassy valleys with white cattle grazing in them, and many
fields of Indian corn, endearingly homelike. This at least is mainly the
trace that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes; and after
Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in fact, more
corn than anything else, though there were many orchards, also
endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red showing among the
leaves still green on the trees; if there had been something more
wasteful in the farming it would have been still more homelike, but a
traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were often terraced, as
in Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The
farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was
molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their
tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They were
never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to let them pass
for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in _Don Quixote,_ if I
had thought of these in time. But one ought to be honest at any cost,
and I must own that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing with
every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I
never once recurred to it. That was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves by
the green margins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where
shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and maids forlorn might
wander and maunder; and here were fields of corn and apple orchards and
vineyards reddening and yellowing up to the doors of those comfortable
farmhouses, with nowhere the sign of a Christian cavalier or a turbaned
infidel. As a man I could not help liking what I saw, but I could also
grieve for the boy who would have been so disappointed if he had come to
the Basque provinces of Spain when he was from ten to fifteen years old,
instead of seventy-four.

It took our train nearly an hour to get by twenty miles of those
pleasant farms and the pretty hamlets which they now and then clustered
into. But that was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run,
but, as it were, walks with dignity and makes long stops at stations, to
rest and let the locomotive roll itself a cigarette. By the time we
reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and by
the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it was
storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the
curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded
promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid
sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands
standing out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with
the stony cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and
we shivered in the splendid sight.




III


The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the
prettiest town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully
contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a
noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its principal
street, shaded with a double row of those feathery tamarisks, and with
handsome shops glittering on both sides of it. Very easily it is first
of the fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has his villa
there, and the court comes every summer. But they had gone by the time
we got there, and the town wore the dejected look of out-of-season
summer resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine
casino at one end of the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all
along it to the other end. On the sand were still many
bathing-machines, but many others had begun to climb for greater safety
during the winter to the street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping
up from the surf and seeking shelter among those that remained, but they
were mostly tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward through their
open doors, and made no secret of their cozy domesticity, where they sat
and sewed or knitted and gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and
mothers they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be resting from the
summer pleasure of others. They had their beautiful names written up
over their doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only;
there were other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their
owners whom we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into
the carts drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but
pulled by a band drawn over their foreheads under their horns, and they
had the air of not liking the arrangement; though, for the matter of
that, I have never seen oxen that seemed to like being yoked.

When we came down to dinner we found the tables fairly full of belated
visitors, who presently proved tourists flying south like ourselves. The
dinner was good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for an
average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive rate which you must
double for as good accommodation in our States. Let no one, I say, fear
the rank cookery so much imagined of the Peninsula, the oil, the pepper,
the kid and the like strange meats; as in all other countries of Europe,
even England itself, there is a local version, a general convention of
the French cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere, and oftener
superabundant than subabundant. The plain water is generally good, With
an American edge of freshness; but if you will not trust it (we had to
learn to trust it) there are agreeable Spanish mineral waters, as well
as the Apollinaris, the St. Galmier, and the Perrier of other
civilizations, to be had for the asking, at rather greater cost than the
good native wines, often included in the inclusive rate.

Besides this convention of the French cuisine there is almost everywhere
a convention of the English language in some one of the waiters. You
must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate wants, but in
this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had even a wider range with the
English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with a
fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I began to flounder in
the language which I had read so much and spoken so little or none. He
had been a year in London, he said, and he took us for English, though,
now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we
spoke "quicklier" than the English. We did not protest; it was the
mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined to get
from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not the
English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we asked for a
fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared there was no fuel; and,
though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night,
she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would not have it. The cold
abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which
had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the
first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine,
which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive
summer farther south.




IV


In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque
cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above the
legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new, with
their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find glooming and
glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of like things. We got
from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which
the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but
what their historical associations were I will not offer to say. The
associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at
least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under
Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems
to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the
partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since
as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink
the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they
need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps
no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the
Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of
other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps
confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in
the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the
Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of
Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from
which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her losses from
the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was in this heroic fate,
again I must leave the Basques to say. They would doubtless say it with
sufficient self-respect, for wherever we came in contact that day with
the Basque nature we could not help imagining in it a sense of racial
merit equaling that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another
branch of the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are
Iberians. Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they never
were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became too
strong for them.

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