Part 50 (2/2)
From the inscriptions on its various escutcheons one can gather that it was erected by the Duke of Castro Duro and his wife, Dona Guiomar.
In the rear of the palace, like a high belvedere built on the rampart, there appears a gallery formed of ten round arches, supported on slender pilasters. Below the gallery are the remains of a garden, with ramps and terraces and a few old statues. The river comes almost to the foot of the gardens.
Today the palace belongs to Don Calixto Garcia Guerrero, Count de la Sauceda.
Don Calixto and his family have no necessity for the whole of this big palace to live in, and have been content to renovate the part fronting on the Calle Mayor. They have had new belvederes built in, and have given over the apartments looking on the Square and the Calle del Cristo to the Courts and the school.
Another great building, which astonishes every one that stops over at Castro Duro, by its size, is the Convent of la Merced. It has been half destroyed by a fire. In the groins there remain some large Renaissance brackets, and in one wing of the edifice, inhabited by the nuns, there are windows with jalousies and a rather lofty tower terminating in a weather-c.o.c.k and a cross.
LIFE AT CASTRO
Castro Duro is princ.i.p.ally a town of farmers and carriers. Its munic.i.p.al limits are very extensive; the plain surrounding it is fertile enough.
In winter there are many foggy days, and then the flat land looks like a sea, in which hillocks and groves float like islands. Wine and cultivated fruits const.i.tute the princ.i.p.al riches of Castro. The wine is sharp, badly made; there is one thick dark variety which always tastes of tar, and one light variety which they reinforce with alcohol and which they call aloque.
Autumn is the period of greatest animation in the town; the harvest gets stowed away, the vintage made, the sweet almonds are gathered and sh.e.l.led in the porticoes.
Formerly in all the houses of rich and poor, the murk of the grapes was boiled in a still and a somewhat bitter brandy thus manufactured.
Whether in consequence of the brandy, or of the unusual amount of money about, or of both, the fact is that at that period a great pa.s.sion for gambling developed in Castro and more crimes were committed then than during all the rest of the year.
The industrial processes in Castro are primitive; everything is made by hand, and the Castrian people imagine that this establishes a superiority. In the environs of the town there are an electrical plant, a brickyard, various mills, and lime and plaster kilns.
The town's commerce is more extended than its industries, although no more prosperous. In the Square and in the Calle Mayor, under the arcades white goods are sold and woollens, and there are hat-shops and silversmiths, one alongside the other. The shopkeepers hang their merchandise in the arches, the saddlers and harness-makers decorate their entrances with head-stalls and straps, and those that have no archway put up awnings. In the Square there are continually stalls set up for earthenware jars and pitchers and for articles in tin.
In the outlying streets there are inns, at whose doors five or six mules with their heads together are almost constantly to be seen; there are crockery stores containing brooms and every kind of jug and glazed pan; there are little shops in doorways holding big baskets full of grain; there are dark taverns, which are also eating-houses, to which the peasants go to eat on market days, and whose signs are strings of dried pimentoes and cayenne peppers or an elm branch. In the written signs there is a truly Castilian charm, chaste and serene. At the Riojano oven one reads: ”'Bred' baked for all 'commers.'” And at the Campico inn it says: ”Wine served by Furibis herself.” The shops and the inns have picturesque names too. There is the Sign of the Moor, and the Sign of the Jew, and the Sign of the Lion, and one of the Robbers.
The streets of Castro, especially those near the centre, where the crowd is greater, are dirty and ill-smelling in summer. Clouds of flies hover about and settle on the pairs of blissfully sleeping oxen; the sun pours down his blinding brilliance; not a soul pa.s.ses, and only a few greyhounds, white and black, elegant and sad, rove about the streets...
In all seasons, at twilight, a few young gentlemen promenade in the Square. At nine at night in the winter, and at ten in summer, begins the reign of the watchmen with their dramatic and lamentable cry.
Alzugaray gave Caesar these details by degrees, while they were both seated in the hotel getting ready to dine.
”And the type? The ethnic type? What is it, according to you?” asked Caesar.
”A type rather thin than fat, supple, with an aquiline nose, black eyes...”
”Yes, the Iberian type,” said Caesar, ”that is how it struck me too.
Tall, supple, dolichocephalic... It seems to me one can try to put something through in this town...”
III. CaeSAR'S LABOURS
FIRST STEPS
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