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.
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