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Familiar Spanish Travels

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







III


I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in
the house, or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which I
could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and
looked down and over the most beautiful, the most magnificent scene that
eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. Beside us and before us the
silver cup of the Sierra Nevada, which held the city in its tiled
hollow, poured it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine
which brightened and darkened its spread in a thousand radiances and
obscurities of windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking
gardens. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say
now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine
moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges
honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the
wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it
dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it
had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang
of pure ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, and closed
the window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not
latch, and we were obliged to ring for a _camerero_ to come and see what
ailed it.

The infirmity of the door-latch was emblematic of a temperamental
infirmity in the whole hotel. The promises were those of Madrid, but the
performances were those of Segovia. There was a glitter, almost a glare,
of Ritz-like splendor, and the rates were Ritz-like, but there the
resemblance ceased. The porter followed us to our rooms on our arrival
and told us in excellent English (which excelled less and less
throughout our stay) that he was the hall porter and that we could
confidently refer all our wants to him; but their reference seemed
always to close the incident. There was a secretary who assured us that
our rooms were not dear, and who could not out of regard to our honor
and comfort consider cheaper ones; and then ceased to be until he
receipted our bill when we went away. There was a splendid dining-room
with waiters of such beauty and dignity, and so purple from clean
shaving, that we scarcely dared face them, and there were luncheons and
dinners of rich and delicate superabundance in the menu, but of an
exquisite insipidity on the palate, and of a swiftly vanishing Barmecide
insubstantiality, as if they were banquets from the _Arabian Nights_
imagined under the rule of the Moors. Everywhere shone silver-bright
radiators, such as we had not seen since we left their like freezing in
Burgos; but though the weather presently changed from an Andalusian
softness to a Castilian severity after a snowfall in the Sierra, the
radiators remained insensible to the difference and the air nipped the
nose and fingers wherever one went in the hotel. The hall porter, who
knew everything, said the boilers were out of order, and a traveler who
had been there the winter before confirmed him with the testimony that
they were out of order even in January. There may not have been any fire
under them then, as there was none now; but if they needed repairing now
it was clearly because they needed repairing then. In the corner of one
of our rooms the frescoed plastering had scaled off, and we knew that if
we came back a year later the same spot would offer us a familiar
welcome.

But why do I gird at that hotel in Granada as if I knew of no faults in
American hotels? I know of many and like faults, and I do not know of a
single hotel of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as that
hotel in Granada. The details which the sunlight of the morrow revealed
to us when we had mastered the mystery of our window-catch and stood
again on our balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moonlight
picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a more incredible scene of
mountain and plain and city, it gave us one particular tree in a garden
almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing
to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot
tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made up
of "patines of bright gold." Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it
darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it
in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning
we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,

Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.




IV


But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a romantic novelist.
Many other trees in and about Granada were yellower than that one, and
the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we left our
hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such as travelers use when they
do not want some wonder of the world to escape them. Of course there was
really no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow
a match to light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to
smoke. He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could
speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying, with
a wave of his cigarette, "_N'est ce pas?"_ For the rest he helped
himself out willingly with my small Spanish. At the end he would have
delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the
palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did not
repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next
day.

Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely
enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly
elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds
sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was
somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to
get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay
basking and dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient reader
that the whole Alhambra, by which he must understand a citadel, and
almost a city, since it could, if it never did, hold twenty thousand
people within its walls, is only historically and not artistically more
Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful than
its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by
Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the
Italian Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears
with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete
it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal
palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace
completed as the architect imagined it.

We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind
minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see
us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in
conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled
court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of
the Moors.

The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much
of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the
environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which
cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the
Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages
were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at
the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de
Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due
them from the Moor, "paused to regard its celebrated fountain" and "fell
into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the
Christian faith"? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed,
with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how "this most Christian
knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of
lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with
ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle
Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard,
but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question,
with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the
Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice
of a sudden, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the
same time he smote him on the head with his sheathed sword. In an
instant the Court of Lions glistened with the flash of arms," insomuch
that the American lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend
sketching there must have been startled from her opening words, "I am
sitting here with my portfolio on my knees in the beautiful Court of the
Lions," and if Muley Aben Hassan had not "overheard the tumult and
forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing the person of the ambassador
sacred," she never could have gone on.




V


I did not doubt the fact when I read of it under the level boughs of the
beechen tree with J. W., sixty years ago, by the green woodland light of
the primeval forest which hemmed our village in, and since I am well
away from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I doubt nothing that
Irving says of the Alhambra; he is the gentle genius of the place, and I
could almost wish that I had paid the ten pesetas extra which the
custodian demanded for showing his apartment in the palace. On the
ground the demand of two dollars seemed a gross extortion; yet it was
not too much for a devotion so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise
other travelers to buy themselves off from a vain regret by giving it.
If ever a memory merited the right to levy tribute on all comers to the
place it haunts, Washington Irving's is that memory. His _Conquest of
Granada_ is still the history which one would wish to read; his _Tales
of the Alhambra_ embody fable and fact in just the right measure for the
heart's desire in the presence of the monuments they verify or falsify.
They belong to that strange age of romance which is now so almost
pathetic and to which one cannot refuse his sympathy without sensible
loss. But for the eager make-believe of that time we should still have
to hoard up much rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept without
bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it. Washington Irving
had just the playful kindness which sufficed best to deal with the
accumulations of his age; if he does not forbid you to believe, he does
not oblige you to disbelieve, and he has always a tolerant civility in
his humor which comports best with the duty of taking leniently a
history impossible to take altogether seriously. Till the Spaniards had
put an end to the Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and
bloody civil brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it was not till
their power was broken forever that they became truly heroic in their
vain struggles and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic
resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their
ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second period
that Irving had to treat.




VI


The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the
unparalleled beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect
of art, the inspiration of its founders is affirmed by their choice of
an outlook which commands one of the most magnificent panoramas in the
whole world. It would be useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think
of far-off silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away
from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and towers,
and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and orchards and
forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective; think of steep and
sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, and one
crooked stream stealing snakelike in their depths; think of whatever
splendid impossible dramas of topography that you will, of a tremendous
map outstretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have some
notion of the prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and
perhaps not. Of one thing we made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the
Darro, and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the traveler visits
at the risk of his life in order to have his fortune told. At the same
moment we made sure that we should not go nearer it, for though we knew
that it was insurpassably dirty as well as dangerous, we remembered so
distinctly the loathsomeness of the gipsy quarter at Seville that we
felt no desire to put it to the comparison.

We preferred rather the bird's-eye study of the beautiful Generalife
which our outlook enabled us to make, and which we supplemented by a
visit the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our
hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers up and
down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so steep that at
a certain point the electric current no longer suffices, and the car
bites into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under-jaw and so
arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, with a conductor so
affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt after a
single day we should soon become brothers, or at least step-brothers.
Whenever we left or took his car, after the beginning or ending of the
cogway, he was alert to see that we made the right change to or from it,
and that we no more overpaid than underpaid him. Such homely natures
console the traveler for the thousand inhospitalities of travel, and
bind races and religions together in spite of patriotism and piety.

We were going first to the Cartuja, and in the city, which we found
curiously much more modern, after the Latin notion, than Seville, with
freshly built apartment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not
so modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter said to have
been assigned to the Moors after the fall of Granada. The dust lay thick
in the roadway where filthy children played, but in the sunny doorways
good mothers of families crouched taking away the popular reproach of
vermin by searching one another's heads. Men bestriding their donkeys
rode fearlessly through the dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant
woman, who sat hers plumply cushioned and framed in with a chair-back
and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future
shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.
When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since
suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited
for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the
church door, where she shared in our impartial alms. We were admitted to
the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, who went for one of the
remaining monks to show us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope
of clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself from it only
long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a
picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious to get
back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a church
which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar treasures of painting,
sculpture, especially in wood, costly marble, and precious stones than
any other I remember. According to my custom, I leave it to the
guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics of Spanish art
to celebrate the pictures and statues; it is enough for me that I have
now forgotten them all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by
certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time
when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions of all
other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent. When the monk
had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings (bad as their
subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes fall back upon his newspaper
before the door had well closed upon us.

The beggarmen had waited in their places to give us another chance of
meriting heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old
beggarwoinan. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were
sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper
big-dog in her leathern palm I said, _"Adios, madre."_ Then happened
something that I had long desired. I had heard and read that in Spain
people always said at parting, "Go with God," but up to that moment
nobody had said it to me, though I had lingeringly given many the
opportunity. Now, at my words and at the touch of my coin this old
beggarwoman smiled beneficently and said, "Go with God," or, as she put
it in her Spanish, "_Vaya vested con Dios."_ Immediately I ought to have
pressed another coin in her palm, with a _"Gracias, madre; muchas
gracias,"_ out of regard to the literary climax; but whether I really
did so I cannot now remember; I can only hope I did.




VII


I think that it was while I was still in this high satisfaction that we
went a drive in the promenade, which in all Spanish cities is the
Alameda, except Seville, where it so deservedly is the Delicias. It was
in every way a contrast to the road we had come from the Cartuja: an
avenue of gardened paths and embowered driveways, where we hoped to join
the rank and fashion of Granada in their afternoon's outing. But there
was only one carriage besides our own with people in it, who looked no
greater world than ourselves, and a little girl riding with her groom.
On one hand were pretty villas, new-looking and neat, which I heard
could sometimes be taken for the summer at rents so low that I am glad I
have forgotten the exact figures lest the reader should doubt my word.
Nothing but the fact that the winter was then hanging over us from the
Sierras prevented my taking one of them for the summer that had passed,
the Granadan summer being notoriously the most delightful in the world.
On the other hand stretched the wonderful Vega, which covers so many
acres in history and romance, and there, so near that we look down into
them at times were "the silvery windings of the Xenil," which glides
through so many descriptive passages of Irving's page; only now, on
account of recent rain, its windings were rather coppery.

At the hotel on the terrace under our balcony we found on our return a
party of Spanish ladies and gentlemen taking tea, or whatever drink
stood for it in their custom: no doubt chocolate; but it was at least
the afternoon-tea hour. The women's clothes were just from Paris, and
the men's from London, but their customs, I suppose, were national; the
women sat on one side of the table and talked across it to the men,
while they ate and drank, and then each sex grouped itself apart and
talked to its kind, the women in those hardened vowels of a dialect from
which the Andalusians for conversational purposes have eliminated all
consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with a play of many
lights and tints, over the landscape up to the snow-line on the Sierra.
The town lay a stretch of gray roofs and white walls, intermixed with
yellow poplars and black cypresses, and misted over with smoke from the
chimneys of the sugar factories. The mountains stood flat against the
sky, purple with wide stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows.
The light became lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a dull crimson
under pale violet.

The twitter of the Spanish women was overborne at times by the voices of
an American party whose presence I was rather proud of as another
American. They were all young men, and they were making an educational
tour of the world in the charge of a professor who saw to it that they
learned as much of its languages and history and civilization as
possible on the way. They ranged in their years from about fifteen to
twenty and even more, and they were preparing for college, or doing what
they could to repair the loss of university training before they took up
the work of life. It seemed to me a charming notion, and charming the
seriousness with which they were fulfilling it. They were not so serious
in everything as to miss any incidental pleasure; they had a large table
to themselves in our Barmecide banquet-hall, where they seemed always to
be having a good time, and where once they celebrated the birthday of
one of them with a gaiety which would have penetrated, if anything
could, the shining chill of the hostelry. In the evening we heard them
in the billiard-room below lifting their voices in the lays of our
college muse, and waking to ecstasy the living piano in the strains of
our national ragtime. They were never intrusively cheerful; one might
remain, in spite of them, as dispirited as the place would have one; but
as far as the _genius loci_ would let me, I liked them; and so far as I
made their acquaintance I thought that they were very intelligently
carrying out the enterprise imagined for them.




VIII


I wish now that I had known them well enough to ask them what they
candidly thought of the city of which I felt the witchery under the
dying day I have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of
them. It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not
duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very badly and
was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst
places are in the older quarters, where the streets are very crooked and
very narrow, so narrow that the tram-car can barely scrape through them.
They are old enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like
many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides
could identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is
indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which
the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a moment I did
so, but upon second thought I unpinned it.

We visited this plated fragment of the old Moorish capital when we
descended from our hotel with a new guide to see the great, the
stupendous cathedral, where the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed
in the heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the other
Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of
Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere simplicity, it
is somehow even less like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of
Burgos or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at Granada is classicistic,
but the whole is often of Gothic effect, especially in the mass of those
clustered Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their
prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York
Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors
of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one
bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's
fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that
gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the
music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys
pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the
immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively
bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or than
a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling age, with his lion curled
cozily up in his mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve and
the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in the
exquisite temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on
horseback, with his horse's hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or
than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and brocaded
skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the Baptist bloodily
falling forward with his severed gullet thrusting at the spectator.
Nothing has ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to represent;
it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature; and of all the
painters and sculptors who have portrayed the story of Christianity as a
tale of torture and slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it
closest from the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition
lavished the fact upon them.

The supreme interest of the cathedral is, of course, the Royal Chapel,
where in a sunken level Ferdinand and Isabel lie, with their poor mad
daughter Joan and her idolized unfaithful husband Philip the Fair, whose
body she bore about with her while she lived. The picture postal has
these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen,
which falters also from the tremendous _retablo_ of the chapel dense
with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic
Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors. If the picture postal will not
supply these, or reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which
abound .there and in the sacristy--jewels and vestments and banners and
draperies of the royal camp-altar--there is nothing for the reader but
to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while, and if he cannot
believe in a box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave Columbus
her jewels in merely because he has been shown a reliquary as her
hand-glass, so much the worse for him. He will not then merit the
company of a small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to the
crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and
defiantly pockets the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve
to witness the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel,
where many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes,
preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the mothers of the flock
is pinioned much against her will by a street boy volunteering for the
office, and her head held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure
full at the other end.

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