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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 41 of 101
Words from 41082 to 42130
of 103320
