Chapter II

Its antiquities are not the queerest thing about Toledo. The sights of the day, the isolated existence of the inhabitants, are things peculiar. The very sports of the children reflect the prevailing influences. A favorite diversion with them is to parade in some dark hall-way with slow step and droning chants, in imitation of church festivals; and in the street we found boys playing at _toros_. Some took off their coats to wave as mantles before the bull, who hid around the corner until the proper time for his entry. The bull in this game, I noticed, had a nice sense of fair play, and would stop to argue points with his antagonists--something I should have been glad to see in the real arena. Once the old rock town accommodated two hundred thousand residents. Its contingent has now shrunk to twenty thousand, yet it swarms with citizens, cadets, loafers, and beggars. Its tortuous wynds are full of wine-shops, vegetables, and children, all mixed up together. Superb old palaces, nevertheless, open off from them, frequently with spacious courts inside, shaded by trellised vines, and with pillars at the entrance topped by heavy stone balls, or doors studded with nails and moulded in rectangular patterns like inlay-work. One day we wandered through a sculptured gate-way and entered a paved opening with a carved wood gallery running around the walls above. Orange-trees in tubs stood about, and a brewery was established in these palatial quarters. We ordered a bottle, but I noticed that the brewer stood regarding us anxiously. At last he drew nearer, and asked, "Do you come from Madrid?"

"Yes."

"Ah, then," said he, in a disheartened tone, "you won't like our beer."

We encouraged him, however, and at last he disappeared, sending us the beverage diplomatically by another hand. He was too faint-spirited to witness the trial himself. Though called "The Delicious," the thin, sweet, gaseous liquid was certainly detestable; but in deference to the brewer's delicate conscientiousness we drank as much as possible, and then left with his wife some money and a weakly complimentary remark about the beer, which evidently came just in time to convince her that we were, after all, discriminating judges.

The people generally were very simple and good-natured, and in particular a young commercial traveller from Barcelona whom we met exerted himself to entertain us. The chief street was lined with awnings reaching to the curb-stone in front of the shops, and every public door-way was screened by a striped curtain. Pushing aside one of these, our new acquaintance introduced us to what seemed a dingy bar, but, by a series of turnings, opened out into a spacious concealed café--that of the Two Brothers--where we frequently repaired with him to sip chiccory and cognac or play dominos. On these occasions he kept the tally in pencil on the marble table, marking the side of himself and a friend with their initials, and heading ours "The Strangers." All travellers in Spain are described by natives as "Strangers" or "French," and the reputation for a pure Parisian accent which we acquired under these circumstances, though brief, was glorious. To the Two Brothers resorted many soldiers, shop-keepers, and well-to-do housewives during fixed hours of the afternoon and evening, but at other times it was as forsaken as Don Roderick's palace. Another place of amusement was the Grand Summer Theatre, lodged within the ragged walls of a large building which had been half torn down. Here we sat under the stars, luxuriating in the most expensive seats (at eight cents per head), surrounded by a full audience of exceedingly good aspect, including some Toledan ladies of great beauty, and listened to a _zarzuela_, or popular comic opera, in which the prompter took an almost too energetic part. The ticket collector came in among the chairs to receive everybody's coupons with very much the air of being one of the family; for while performing his stern duty he smoked a short brier pipe, giving to the act an indescribable dignity which threw the whole business of the tickets into a proper subordination. In returning to our inn about midnight we were attracted by the free cool sound of a guitar duet issuing from a dark street that rambled off somewhere like a worm track in old wood, and, pursuing the sound, we discovered by the aid of a match lighted for a cigarette two men standing in the obscure alley, and serenading a couple of ladies in a balcony, who positively laughed with pride at the attention. The men, it proved, had been hired by some admirer, and so our friend engaged them to perform for us at the hotel the following night.

The skill these thrummers of the guitar display is delicious, especially in the treble part, which is executed on a smaller species of the instrument, called a _mandura_. Our treble-player was blind in one eye, and with the carelessness of genius allowed his mouth to stay open, but managed always to keep a cigarette miraculously hanging in it; while his comrade, with a disconsolate expression, disdained to look at the strings on which his proud Castilian fingers were condemned to play a mere accompaniment. For two or three hours they rippled out those peculiar native airs which go so well with the muffled vibrations and mournful Oriental monotony of the guitar; but the bagman varied the concert by executing operatic pieces on a hair-comb covered with thin paper--a contrivance in which he took unfeigned delight. Some remonstrance against this uproar being made by other inmates of the hotel, our host silenced the complainants by cordially inviting them in. One large black-bearded guest, the exact reproduction of a stately ancient Roman, accepted the hospitality, and listened to that ridiculous piping of the comb with profound gravity and unmoved muscles, expressing neither approval nor dissatisfaction. But the white-aproned waiter, who, though unasked, hung spellbound on the threshold, was, beyond question, deeply impressed. The relations of servants with employers are on a very democratic footing in Spain. We had an admirable butler at Madrid who used to join in the conversation at table whenever it interested him, and was always answered with good grace by the conversationists, who admitted him to their intellectual repast at the same moment that he was proffering them physical nutriment. These Toledan servitors of the Fonda de Lino were still more informal. They used to take naps regularly twice a day in the hall, and could not get through serving dinner without an occasional cigarette between the courses. To save labor, they would place a pile of plates in front of each person, enough to hold the entire list of viands. That last phrase is a euphemism, however, for the meal each day consisted of the same meat served in three separate relays without vegetables, followed by fowl, an allowance of beans, and dessert. Even this they were not particular to give us on the hour. Famished beyond endurance, one evening at eight o'clock, we went down-stairs and found that not the first movement toward dinner had been made. The _mozos_ (waiters) were smoking and gossiping in the street, and rather frowned upon our vulgar desire for food, but we finally persuaded them to yield to it. After we had bought some tomatoes, and made a salad at dinner, the management was put on its mettle, and improved slightly. Fish in this country is always brought on somewhere in the middle of dinner, like the German pudding, and our landlord astonished us by following the three courses of stewed veal with sardines, fried in oil and ambuscaded in a mass of boiled green peppers. After that we forbore to stimulate his ambition any farther.

The hotel guest, however, is on the whole regarded as a necessary evil--a nuisance tolerated only because some few of the finest race in the world can make money out of him. The landlord lived with his family on the ground-floor, and furnished little domestic tableaux as we passed in and out; but he never paid any attention to us, and even looked rather hurt at the intrusion of so many strangers into his hostelry. Nor did the high-born sewing-women who sat on the public stairs, and left only a narrow space for other people to ascend or descend by, consider it necessary to stir in the least for our convenience. The fonda had more of the old tavern or posada style about it than most hotels patronized by foreigners. The entrance door led immediately into a double court, where two or three yellow equipages stood; and from this the kitchen, storerooms, and stable all branched off in some clandestine way. Above, at the eaves, these courts were covered with canvas awnings wrinkled in regular folds on iron rods--sheltering covers which remained drawn from the first flood of the morning sun until after five in the afternoon. Early and late I used to look down into the inner court, observing the men and women of the household as they dressed fish and silently wrung the necks of chickens, or sat talking a running stream of nothingness by the hour, for love of their own glib but uncouth voices. People of this province intone rather than talk: their sentences are set to distinct drawling tunes, such as I never before encountered in ordinary speech, and their thick lisping of all sibilants, combined with the usual contralto of their voices, gives the language a sonorous burr, for which one soon acquires a liking. Sunday is the great hair-combing day in Toledo, if I may judge from the manner in which women carried on that soothing operation in their door-ways and _patios_; and in this inner court below my window one of the servants, sitting on a stone slab, enjoyed the double profit of sewing and of letting a companion manipulate her yard-long locks of jet, while others sat near, fanning themselves and chattering. Another time a little girl, dark as an Indian, came there in the morning to wash a kerchief at the stone tank, always brimming with dirty water; after which she executed, unsuspicious of my gaze, a singularly weird _pas seul_, a sort of shadow dance, on the pavement, and then vanished.

All the houses are roofed with heavy curved tiles, which fit together so as to let the air circulate under their hollow grooves; and a species of many-seeded grass sprouts out of these baked earth coverings, out of the ledges of old towers and belfries, and from the crevices of the great cathedral itself, like the downy hair on an old woman's cheek.

The view along almost any one of the ancient streets, which are always tilted by the hilly site, is wonderfully quaint in its irregularities. Every window is heavily grated with iron, from the top to the bottom story, even the openings high up in the cathedral spire being similarly guarded, until the whole place looks like a metropolis of prisons. In the stout doors, too, there are small openings or peep-holes, such as we had seen still in actual use at Madrid--the relics of an epoch when even to open to an unknown visitor might be dangerous. White, white, white the sunshine!--and the walls of pink or yellow-brown, of pale green and blue, are sown with deep shadows and broken by big archways, often surmounted by rich knightly escutcheons. Balconies with tiled floors turning their colors down toward the sidewalk stud the fronts, and long curtains stream over them like cloaks fluttering in the breeze. At one point a peak-roofed tower rises above the rest of its house with sides open to the air and cool shadow within, where perhaps a woman sits and works behind a row of bright flowering plants. Doves inhabited the fonda roof unmolested by the spiritless cats that, flat as paper, slept in the undulations of the tiles; for the Toledan cats and dogs are the most wretched of their kind. They get even less to eat than their human neighbors, which is saying a great deal. And beyond the territory of the doves my view extended to a slender bell-spire at the end of the cathedral, poised in the bright air like a flower-stalk, with one bell seen through an interstice as if it were a blossom. At another point the main spire rose out of what might be called a rich thicket of Gothic work. Its tall thin shaft is encircled near the point with sharp radiating spikes of iron, doubtless intended to recall the crown of thorns: in this sign of the Passion, held forever aloft, three hundred feet above the ground, there is a penetrating pathos, a solemn beauty.