We strolled on the banks of the Manzanares river by moonlight and seemed to walk through fairyland, though by day hundreds of Spanish women used the river as a washing-tub, and forests of clothes props and stretched lines blossomed forth with delicate and beautiful undergarments of silk material. The hildagos’ velvet breeches and the maids’ fajas fluttered cheerfully side by side in the winds among the chestnut groves, and often the cavaliers and dark-eyed maids that owned them lay tucked in bed till the laundress brought them home, so poor were they.
My comrade could speak Spanish fairly well, and kept excitedly telling me so many things that I remembered none of them. In the cheap quarter of the town, where touring violinists and poets generally reside, mysterious smells of garlic and cooking steams killed the romance that hovered about the beautiful terraced architecture of Madrid.
I looked in vain for a position as violinist, but it was not to be had, or the salary was only sufficient to enable one to live on garlic. So I was forced to become a Spanish troubadour and go off serenading affluent hidalgos. Fortunately I very soon replenished our dwindling exchequer. My comrade, having been educated in France, could bow as royally as the Spanish señores, and conducted all the financial part of the business. We went into partnership with our landlady’s daughters, who played the guitar and mandoline, and I conducted the troupe. When the festival carnivals began a week later we had a glorious time and made enough money to enable us to live comfortably. I played my Samoan waltz, arranging it for two violins, guitar and mandolines, and the wild barbarian note of the strain was very popular. Maidens, who looked like Arab girls with shining eyes, whirled and swayed in the arms of their Don Juans, as under the Spanish moon my cheerful troupe tinkled away and I played the violin. Except for their artistic gowns and the sashes flapping as they danced, I saw the South Sea Islanders dancing before me; the same abandonment was there. Their musical voices, as they sang the refrain, brought back to me wild tribal dances of the South Sea forest, where a few years before I had conducted the banging war-drums and wedding music for cannibals, high chiefs, dethroned kings and discarded queens.
Pretty Mercedes and Mary, her sister, sang minor melodies in duet style as I extemporised an obbligato on my violin. They then danced the Jota Aragonesa and other dances, and little children romped about and imitated bull-fights, singing wildly all the time.
After the carnival was over my comrade and I strolled about the sleeping city, and visited the old quarter of alleyways and gloomy buildings and hidden dens where suspicious characters met and loose lovers played guitars and mandolines. We watched old priests shuffling along to visit the sick señores, who had fed on garlic and walnuts, and lived in Madrid’s East End, but dressed in the blue, open days in majestic splendour and vivid colour.
We went to the many temples of Madrid. They are seldom silent, for up their aisles creep gentle Spanish girls, who come in, cross themselves and kneel in prayer to Jesus and the Holy Virgin. The earnestness of it all would soften the hardest cynic. Old priests abound, and revel in the confessions of those innocent girls as they bow their heads with shame and confess that they have thought more during the week of Don Juan’s stalwart, lithe figure than of the Holy Virgin. As they pass one sees them crossing themselves and murmuring their prayers. At the doors wrinkled old women pester one with little boxes of wax matches, walnuts and photographs of Madrid and the Blessed Virgin. If one buys a cent’s worth of anything from them they follow on for three hundred yards, calling down the blessing of God, Jesus and the Virgin on one’s head.
At night-time, when the moon is high and the olive-trees and palms are windless and still, down the white-terraced avenue goes Don Quixote astride his ass, twirling his moustachios, till far away, with Sancho Panza by his side, he fades under the moonlit chestnut groves. From the forests of alleyways steal appealing figures, with eyes that beg for an admiring glance, and in strange, soft tones wail of sorrows and no food or place to lay their weary heads. Give them a coin and pass on, they cross themselves and mention the Holy Virgin’s name, and you realise there is something wrong with the world, for the cry of the Virgin’s name sounds sincere. All the cities have that frail woman begging the world to be her husband, because she never secured one good man to love her and rear those bonny boys and girls who wail to be born in the infinite shadows behind her. It is a sorrow that has even spread across the world and reached the island tribes of the South Seas.
Standing on the garden roof of our house in Madrid we could see the country round, a barren country, and looking like the Australian Never-Never Land in a civilised state. It is dotted with dusty tracks and old isolated inns; herds of goats and mules fade far across the tracks, looking like droves of rats in the desert distance.
There are beautiful spots in Madrid, on the banks of the Manzanares, and firs, beeches and chestnuts shade the waters and the slopes by the Royal Gardens.
At night I used to lie in my attic room and listen to the nightingales singing in the chestnut-tree outside my window, its mate piping back approval from another tree at regular intervals. My old comrade lay fast asleep on the next trestle bed, for the Spanish hidalgos gave him cognac, and on the way home from the festival concerts he would clutch me tightly by the arm, as little Mercedes and Mary laughed by my side. In the morning he used to say: “Dear boy, whatever was it that overcame me last night? It’s that wretched garlic.”