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Familiar Spanish Travels

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VI

A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO


If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in
Madrid, you have still to choose between going at eight in the morning
and arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one evening
and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case you will have
two hours' jolting each way over the roughest bit of railroad in the
world, and if your _mozo,_ before you could stop him, has selected for
your going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be sure that he
has done worse for you than you will have done for yourself when you
come back in a compartment between the trucks. However you go or come,
you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed at
every yard, or getting on without any track over a cobble-stone
pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well cushioned, as it is
in Spain nearly always, with free play for your person between roof and
floor and wall and wall; and if you go at five o'clock you have from
your windows, as long as the afternoon light lasts, while you bound and
rebound, glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer
kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and
yellow patches of vineyard.




I


I find from my ever-faithful note-book that the landscape seemed to grow
drearier as we got away from Madrid, but this may have been the effect
of the waning day: a day which at its brightest had been dim from
recurrent rain and incessant damp. The gloom was not relieved by the
long stops at the frequent stations, though the stops were good for
getting one's breath, and for trying to plan greater control over one's
activities when the train should be going on again. The stations
themselves were not so alluring that we were not willing to get away
from them; and we were glad to get away from them by train, instead of
by mule-team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered along the
horizon two or three miles off. There had been nothing to lift the heart
in the sight of two small boys ready perched on one horse, or of a
priest difficultly mounting another in his long robe. At the only
station which I can remember having any town about it a large number of
our passengers left the train, and I realized that they were commuters
like those who might have been leaving it at some soaking suburb of Long
Island or New Jersey. In the sense of human brotherhood which the fact
inspired I was not so lonely as I might have been, when we resumed our
gloomy progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands of a
Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings a bell of alarming
note hanging on the wall, and the _mozos_ run along the train shutting
the car doors. After an interval some other official sounds a pocket
whistle, and then there is still time for a belated passenger to find
his car and scramble aboard. When the ensuing pause prolongs itself
until you think the train has decided to remain all day, or all night,
and several passengers have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself
and utters a peremptory screech. This really means going, but your doubt
has not been fully overcome when the wheels begin to bump under your
compartment, and you set your teeth and clutch your seat, and otherwise
prepare yourself for the renewal of your acrobatic feats. I may not get
the order of the signals for departure just right, but I am sure of
their number. Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the
Sud-Express is partly French.

It had been raining intermittently all day; now that the weary old day
was done the young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself
to a steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had
taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of thunder and
long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning,
such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when
Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner
chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in
our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well
as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the
station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who
intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to
our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort,
during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of
historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently
flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the
dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and
motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately
stair from a beautiful glass-roofed _patio,_ columned round with airy
galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome
us.

The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against
our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not
sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue.
The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we
would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not.
We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo,
adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which
need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm
bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the _patio_
roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately
stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and
flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still
fourteen years old.

But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be
presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent
Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American
hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged
steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with
unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry
after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable
loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our
host, waiting skull-capped in the _patio,_ that we were in no real
palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by
the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip
his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten
his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I
remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination,
and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even
Spanish travel, has given me.




II


One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some
such emotion as one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one
feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of
retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after
dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this
Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky
warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb
dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and
unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's _Legends of the Conquest
of Spain;_ or to read in some such (if there is any such other)
imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as
Gautier's _Voyage en Espagne,_ the miserably tragic tale of that poor,
wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes
to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes
to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in
the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish
studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been
without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine
print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it
I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the
daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in
his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to
his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were
more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count
Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to
invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me
remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing
mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to
a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one
knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders.
Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of
Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among
the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of
him. It was not until nearly three hundred years afterward that the
Christians recovered the city. By this time they were no longer Arians,
but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. himself, one of the best of
Catholics (as I have told), is said to have removed the capital to
Madrid because he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity
of the Toledan Bishop.

Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader
of mine questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by
a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that "the most moderate
place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge," and he does not
see why they do not put the time "under the pre-Adamite kings, some
years before the creation of the world. Some attribute the honor of
laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the Greek; some to the Roman
consuls Tolmor and Brutus; some to the Jews who entered Spain with
Nebuchadnezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which
comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the
Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it."




III


Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered such an
embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or
nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny
morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted
all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over vast
plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching and
billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the
mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle
distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or
embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should
have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have
an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in
it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city
of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange.
Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and
if the reader's knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this
association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.

I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day's
demand upon the city's wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly
have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole
life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that
beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable
orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather
give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and
give another day to it and come every year and give a day. This very
moment, instead of writing of it in a high New York flat and looking out
on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that
glass-roofed _patio_ of our histrionic hotel, engaging the services of
one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal
Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord to shun the
cicerone of another hotel as "an Italian man," with little or no
English.

As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us;
but I hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of
the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor things
were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable. The
inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the majority, but
neither were these impressive in looks or bearing. Rather, I should say,
their average was small and dark, and in color of eyes and hair as well
as skin they suggested the African race that held Toledo for four
centuries. Neither here nor anywhere else in Spain are there any traces
of the Jews who helped bring the Arabs in; once for all, that people
have been banished so perfectly that they do not show their noses
anywhere. Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more
than the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem
rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as they constantly returned
to us, it did not avail to do them charity; that by no means dispersed
them; the thronging misery and mutilation in the lame, the halt and the
blind, was as great at our coming back to our hotel as our going out of
it. They were of every age and sex; the very school-children left their
sports to chance our charity; and it is still with a pang that I
remember the little girl whom we denied a copper when she was really
asking for a _florecito_ out of the nosegay that one of us carried. But
how could we know that it was a little flower and not a "little dog" she
wanted?

There was something vividly spectacular in the square, by no means
large, which we came into on turning the corner from our hotel. It was a
sort of market-place as well as business place, and it looked as if it
might be the resort at certain hours of the polite as well as the
impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked in any
of its classes. But at ten o'clock in the morning it was empty enough,
and after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed from it without
elbowing or being elbowed, and found ourselves at the portal of that
ancient _posada_ where Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least
long enough to write one of his _Exemplary Novels._ He was of such a
ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every city of Spain we should
have found some witness of his stay, but I do not believe we could have
found any more satisfactory than this. It is verified by a tablet in its
outer wall, and within it is convincingly a _posada_ of his time. It has
a large low-vaulted interior, with the carts and wagons of the muleteers
at the right of the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules
where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing uninterestedly
round at the intruders, for plainly we were not of the guests who
frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those around and behind the
stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money a day;
they supply their own bed and board and pay five cents more for the use
of a fire.

Some guests were coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous
spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal.
An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the
_patio_ overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen
watei jar, dim red; piles of straw mats, which were perhaps the bedding
of the guests, heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the
guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a
Greek perfection of profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference
that contrasted strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound
beside one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his
hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the
effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation
in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been in a
retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever
unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I
could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of
_The Illustrious Scullion._ But he seemed on reflection not to push the
matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came
away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of his tales there or
not, it is certain that he could have exactly studied from that _posada_
the setting of the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in _Don
Quixote,_ where the knight suffered all the demoniacal torments which a
jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to inflict.




IV


Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of
Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it
is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain.
Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that stupendous _retablo_
which fills one whole end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to
roof, tells the Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic
detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the _Calvario,_ at
the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably in the
consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature
of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from
level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what _is_ the
use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have
refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian,
any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of
trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish
churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest
endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory of
monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful
choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art
or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered
with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two
minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of the
free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish
convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.

The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on
our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in
appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands;
they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a
husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can
make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are good.
The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the
cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the
stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso
(she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception
long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in
the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute
inscription:

Quando la Reina del Cielo
Puso los pies en el suelo,
En esta piedra los puso,

or as my English will have it:

When the Queen of Heaven put
Upon the earth her foot,
She put it on this stone

and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger
through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years
of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.

We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away
enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;
and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur and
beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate
desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously
or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one
vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical
event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a
mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso
through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water.
Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied
the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave
reality to the affair in every part.

I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most
lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we
could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and catch
here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or
sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious
marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to
lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do
now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared
more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows?
It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet
shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast
church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left
it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow,
winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One
of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great
thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its
court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of
yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure
sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself,
as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had
here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through
French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to
the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and
near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it
hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the
crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade
cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the white
walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so
jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through
the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with
a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic
wall of King Wamba's time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost
his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and from
the borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover the gray
garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She said she was three _duros_
and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had
a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.




V


It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had begun
by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for
centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day
the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the
street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug
through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in
the church. We expressed our doubt of the man's knowing so unerringly
that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. "If you can believe
the rest I think you can believe that," our guide argued.

He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had a
pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry to
exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we
brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting,
and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have
learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house
of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in a
flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred
thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its decay,
but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the
households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which the
_patio_ and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool; in the
winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to
warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy days. The rents would
be thought low in New York: three dollars a month get a fair house in
Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant
and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the Toledans from high to low are
extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the
inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They
scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality;
there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great deal
of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the
streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered
from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other
classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the
other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no
men or women who looked great-world.

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