Rosinante to the Road Again Part 16

"Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain," began Don Alonso after a few moments of silent walking. "By that I mean that through the many Spains you have seen and will see is everywhere an undercurrent of fantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Morales, Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human life rising in a sudden paean out of desolate abandoned dun-colored s.p.a.ces.

To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce.... And the apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.... How strange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in such Venetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue, scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds of revelry and unabashed music that came from it at meal-times, making pert sayings under the nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living solitary in a country where he remained to his death misunderstood and alien and where two centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote as a madman,--how strange that it should be he who should express most flamingly all that was imperturbable in Toledo.... I have often wondered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we feel in El Greco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I see occasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious only because it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves of European ba.n.a.lity. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states of life only became conscious once their intensity was waning."

"But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus, "seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed to think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines."

"They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machine enterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves in Paris ... but let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road, round that little hill, we shall see Toledo."

Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled the speed of their stride.

First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowed field they saw a weatherc.o.c.k, then under it the slate cap of a tower.

"The Alcazar," said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive trees hid the weatherc.o.c.k. At the next bend the towers were four, strongly b.u.t.tressing a square building where on the western windows glinted reflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, and domes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of a pickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again, pa.s.sed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from the inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigs burning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted with almond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built of rough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appeared occasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which here and there a cl.u.s.ter of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At the summit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and below the Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo.

Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were piled ma.s.ses of b.u.t.tressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped outside the walls towards the river and the piers from which sprang the enormous arch of the bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet. A pale cobalt haze of supperfires hung over the quarters near the river.

As they started down the hill towards the heavy pile of San Juan Bautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome outside the nearest gate, a great volley of bell-ringing swung about their ears. A donkey brayed; there was a sound of shouting from the town.

"Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-morrow at the _fonda_,"

shouted Don Alonso. He took off his hat and galloped towards the gate, leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the roadside looking out over the city.

Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room with Nile-green walls into which light still filtered through three little round arches high up on one side. In a corner were some hogsheads of wine, in another small tables with three-legged stools. From outside came the distant braying of a bra.s.s band and racket of a street full of people, laughter, and the occasional s.h.i.+vering jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had dropped onto a stool and spread his feet out before him on the tiled floor.

"Never walked so far in my life," he said, "my toes are pulverized, pulverized!" He leaned over and pulled off his shoes. There were holes in his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and started wiggling his toes meditatively. His ankles were grimed with dust.

"Well...." began Telemachus.

The _padron_, a lean man with moustaches and a fancy yellow vest which he wore unb.u.t.toned over a lavender s.h.i.+rt, brought two gla.s.ses of dense black wine.

"You have walked a long way?" he asked, looking with interest at Lyaeus' feet.

"From Madrid."

"_Carai!_"

"Not all in one day."

"You are sailors going to rejoin your s.h.i.+p in Sevilla." The _padron_ looked from one to another with a knowing expression, twisting his mouth so that one of the points of his moustache slanted towards the ceiling and the other towards the floor.

"Not exactly...."

Another man drew up his chair to their table, first taking off his wide cap and saying gravely: "_Con permiso de ustedes._" His broad, slightly flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his spa.r.s.e blonde eyelashes were large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to draw their heads together and said in a whisper:

"You aren't deserters, are you?"

"No."

"I hoped you were. I might have helped you. I escaped from prison in Barcelona a week ago. I am a syndicalist."

"Have a drink," cried Lyaeus. "Another gla.s.s.... And we can let you have some money if you need it, too, if you want to get out of the country."

The _padron_ brought the wine and retired discreetly to a chair beside the bar from which he beamed at them with almost religious approbation.

"You are comrades?"

"Of those who break out," said Lyaeus flus.h.i.+ng. "What about the progress of events? When do you think the pot will boil over?"

"Soon or never," said the syndicalist.... "That is never in our lifetime. We are being buried under industrialism like the rest of Europe. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeois mentality. There is danger that we shall lose everything we have fought for.... You see, if we could only have captured the means of production when the system was young and weak, we could have developed it slowly for our benefit, made the machine the slave of man. Every day we wait makes it more difficult. It is a race as to whether this peninsula will be captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor the other, in its soul." He thumped his clenched fist against his chest.

"How long were you in prison?"

"Only a month this time, but if they catch me it will be bad. They won't catch me."

He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally rolling an unlit cigarette between his brown fingers.

"Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite dark?" said Telemachus.

"When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to the syndicalist.

"Oh, we'll meet if you stay in Toledo a few days...."

Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by the arm.

"Look, let me give you some money; won't you be wanting to go to Portugal?"

The man flushed and shook his head.

"If our opinions coincided...."

"I agree with all those who break out," said Lyaeus.

"That's not the same, my friend."

They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus went out of the tavern.

Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered shawls, full of dominos and pierrots and harlequins who threw handfuls of confetti at people along the sidewalks, clattered into town through the dark arches of the gate.

Telemachus got some confetti in his mouth. A crowd of little children danced about him jeering as he stood spluttering on the curbstone.

Lyaeus took him by the arm and drew him along the street after the carriages, bent double with laughter. This irritated Telemachus who tore his arm away suddenly and made off with long strides up a dark street.

A half-waned moon shone through the perforations in a round terra-cotta chimney into the street's angular greenish shadow. From somewhere came the seethe of water over a dam. Telemachus was leaning against a damp wall, tired and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a woman's face half surmised behind the bars of an upper window, when he heard a clatter of unsteady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared, reeling a little, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised in an expression of drunken jollity.

"Lyaeus, I am very happy," cried Telemachus stepping forward to meet his friend. "Walking about here in these empty zigzag streets I have suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if I had soaked up some essence out of it."

"Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly.... Awake all you need." Lyaeus stood on a little worn stone that kept wheels off the corner of the house where the street turned and waved his arms. "Awake!

_Dormitant animorum excubitor._... That's not right. Latin's no good.

Means a fellow who says: 'wake up, you son of a gun.'"

"Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important than that. It's like learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was that woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing...."