Part 5 (1/2)
”The gesture of Castile.”
The man on the grey horse rode along silently for some time. The sun had already burnt up the h.o.a.r-frost along the sides of the road; only an occasional streak remained glistening in the shadow of a ditch. A few larks sang in the sky. Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on their shoulders pa.s.sed on their way to the fields.
”Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?... I am from La Mancha myself.” The man on the grey horse started speaking gravely while with a bony hand, very white, he stroked his beard. ”Something cold and haughty and aloof ... men concentrated, converging breathlessly on the single flame of their spirit.... Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortes, Santa Teresa.... Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness....
Every man's life a lonely ruthless quest.”
Lyaeus broke in:
”Remember the infinite gentleness of the saints lowering the Conde de Orgaz into the grave in the picture in San Tomas....”
”Ah, that is what I was trying to think of.... These generations, my generation, my son's generation, are working to bury with infinite tenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain....
Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set out once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed.”
They had come into town. In the high square tower church-bells were ringing for morning ma.s.s. Down the broad main street scampered a flock of goats herded by a lean man with fangs like a dog who strode along in a snuff-colored cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head.
”How do you do, Don Alonso?” he cried; ”Good luck to you, gentlemen.”
And he swept the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as might a courtier of the Rey Don Juan.
The hot smell of the goats was all about them as they sat before the cafe in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightly proportioned brick arcades of the mudejar apse of the church opposite.
Don Alonso was in the cafe ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared.
Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. ”Ouf,” he said, ”I'm tired.” Then he walked over to the grey horse that stood with hanging head and drooping knees. .h.i.tched to one of the acacias.
”I wonder what his name is.” He stroked the horse's scrawny face. ”Is it Rosinante?”
The horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulled back black lips to show yellow teeth.
”Of course it's Rosinante!”
The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his head and whinnied shrilly, exultantly.
_V: A Novelist of Revolution_
I
Much as G. B. S. refuses to be called an Englishman, Pio Baroja refuses to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits having been born in San Sebastian, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous coast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers and fishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square jowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintings of the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and its ancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people the world over.
From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our own New England clipper s.h.i.+ps, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanish trade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept their privileges and their munic.i.p.al liberties all through the process of the centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and f.a.ggot, which historians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in the mountains were full of s.h.i.+pyards that turned out privateers and merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked faces and huge hands coa.r.s.ened by generations of straining on heavy oars and halyards,--men who feared only G.o.d and the sea-spirits of their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and bigots.
It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and the pa.s.sing of sailing s.h.i.+ps broke the prosperous independence of the Basque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current of Spanish life. Now papermills take the place of s.h.i.+pyards, and instead of the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundland and Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay of Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of the industrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancient prosperity of its s.h.i.+pping.
Pio Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between green mountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears up with legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains and slavers and s.h.i.+pwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left the mist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrile capital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry upland plateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in a town near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for the Mediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province at Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything else to acquire the c.o.c.ksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In _Juventud-Egolatria_ (”Youth-Selfwors.h.i.+p”) a book of delightfully shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years before starting to write. And he still runs a bakery.
You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from the great focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing window. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages and white sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's ”Graces,”
others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle are oblong plates with pates and sliced bologna and things in jelly; then come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscene jam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door you see a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful of brown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread and pastry swirls about the sidewalk.