Part 2 (1/2)
”At two, Senora.”
I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock--we had eaten little since the night before.
”But,” I stammered, ”I am hungry. Tengo hambre.” My memory shuffled with conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but could find nothing about the minutiae of food.
”Tengo hambre,” I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that has laid an egg.
For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a restraining hand--he had not yet received his tip--while an old woman who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off:
”Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He! Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He!”
At this moment Jan arrived, having deposited the bigger luggage and having been informed that the train to Avila, our first stopping-place, went out at 8 a.m. I led him along the dark pa.s.sage and upstairs. He flung wide the shutters. The window looked into a deep, triangular well at the bottom of which was a floor of stamped earth, a washtub and a hen-coop. Windows of all sizes pierced the walls at irregular intervals and across the well were stretched ropes, from some of which flapped pieces of damp linen or underclothes. In the light of the open window the room was dingy. We wondered if there were bugs in it, for we had been cautioned against these insects.
But the room did not smell buggy; it had a peculiar smell of its own.
The strong characteristics of odours need more attention than novelists give them. For instance, I remember that German mistresses had a faint vinegary scent, but French governesses an odour like trunks which had been suddenly opened.
This room had an austere smell. It smelt, I don't know how, Roman Catholic: not of incense nor of censers, but of a flavour which, by some combination of circ.u.mstances, we have a.s.sociated with Roman Catholicism in bulk. The bedroom door was largely panelled with tinted gla.s.s; it had a very flimsy lock, but we did not fear that we would be murdered or burgled in our bed.
The omelet was ready when we came down. The diningroom had two doors, one leading to the kitchen, one up some steps and into the street. There was a broad stretch of window and almost all the other walls of the room were covered with big mirrors.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
About five grim people, mostly clad in black--including the old lady--sat in the room and stared at us as we ate. We could not avoid this disconcerting gaze--look where we would we either caught a human eye or else, what was worse, we were fascinated by a long procession of eyes pa.s.sing away into the dim mysteries of reflection and re-reflection of the mirrors. We had to choose between the gaze of one real old lady or of twenty-five reflected old ladies, of one callow youth or of twenty-five youths diminis.h.i.+ng towards the infinite. The audience stared at us as we ate our omelet, watched the fruit--apricots, cherries and hard pears--with which we finished the meal, and noted each sip of coffee. At last, unable to bear any longer the embarra.s.sment of this mechanically intensified curiosity, we took refuge in our bedroom and lay down. We then noted that the bed was too small, all the rest of the furniture, on the contrary, being much too big.
We rested till lunch. The omelet and the fruit had but filled some of the minor vacancies within us and we were ready again on the stroke of two. Once more we faced the Spanish stare and all the reflected repet.i.tions of it. A fair number of persons lunched at the hotel. As they came in the women sat themselves directly at the table, but the men without exception went to the far corner where, suspended against the wall, was a small tin reservoir with a minute tap and beneath it a tiny basin. Each man rinsed his hands in the infinitesimal trickle, before he sat down to dinner. Why the men and women made this distinction we could not guess. It seemed to be a custom and not to be dependent upon whether the hands were dirty or not. Even if the hands had been dirty the small amount of water used would not have cleaned them.
In the centre of the dining table were white, porous vessels containing drinking water. The water oozes through the porous clay and appears on the outside of the vessel as a faint sweat. This layer of moisture evaporates and keeps all the water in the vessel at several degrees cooler than the surrounding atmosphere.
Between mouthfuls of soup and wedges of beef the diners were watching us. As soon as the meal was over we fled into the streets of Irun. One cannot call Irun Spanish. It is abominably French, though France is pleasant in its own place. The cafe in the little plaza is French, with a French _terra.s.se_, French side screens of ugly ironwork and gla.s.s, and faces a square full of shady trees between which one sees modern fortifications of French appearance. So we sat sipping coffee and we said to ourselves: ”Forget that you are in Spain. Put off your excitement. Don't waste your sensations with false sentiment”.
Nor did the fact that all the wording on the shops was Spanish, nor even the sight of a building of pure modern Spanish architecture rouse us from our cloudy resignation. The building which towered into some six stories by the side of the railway was of a maroon brick. The lower story, including the entrance door, was decorated with _applique_ in the design which the French used to call ”l'art nouveau,” and which now is confined almost exclusively to the iron work on boulevard cafes. It is marked by exaggerated curves. The whole bottom story of this building was sculptured in this fantastic fas.h.i.+on; in order to fit in with the decorations the front door was wider at the top than it was at the bottom, while the windows were of every variety of shape, squashed curves, dilated hearts, indented circles and so on. Above this story the building rose gravely brick save for the corners, which were decorated with bathroom tiles of bad glaze upon which flowers had been painted; roses, violets and pansies: the top story, however, was part Gothic, part Egyptian, with a unifying intermixture of more bathroom tiles.
A munition millionaire went to an art dealer saying he wanted a picture, but he didn't mind what sort of a picture it was provided it looked expensive. We imagined that the architect of this house had received a similar order. Later on we were undeceived.
A yellow tram went by bearing the name ”Fuentarabia.” Having heard eulogies of this place, we decided to go. We reached the terminus of the tramway and the conductor told us we were there. Since then we have met so many people who were in ecstasies about the beauties of Fuentarabia, about its pure Spanish character, etc., etc., that we are still wondering if we went to Fuentarabia after all.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Cheap.]
CHAPTER IV
MEDINA DEL CAMPO
If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could pa.s.s through and circ.u.mambulate a foreign country yet never come into closer contact with the inhabitants than that transmitted through a Cook's interpreter. So that if you want to learn anything about a country, either you must put a sprag into the wheels of this civilization or you must let Opportunity do it for you. Opportunity is a very complaisant G.o.ddess: give her an inch and the ell at least is offered to you. She smiled upon us when we decided to stay the night at Irun; once more she smiled when the porter told us that the train to Avila left about eight o'clock, so we humped the two rucksacks and the suit-case from the inn to the station, got our trunk and hold-all from the baggage office and went to buy our tickets. Then we realized what Opportunity had been up to. The ticket clerk refused to give us tickets to Avila.
”Why not?
”The train does not go through Avila, it goes to Madrid by the other branch through Segovia. The train by Avila goes at four.”