I recall the journey from Miranda to Burgos as I would the page of a book read in bed when the eyes begin to close and the flame of the candle droops, for I was dead with sleep. From time to time one of my fellow-travellers shook me to make me look out. The night was calm and glorious, with clear moonlight. Whenever I looked out of the window I saw on both sides of the track huge rocks of fantastic form, so close that they seemed about to fall upon the train. They were white as marble, and shone so brightly that one could have counted all the points, the hollows and the boulders, as easily as in broad daylight.
“We are at Pancorbo,” said my neighbor. “Look at that height! Up there stood a terrible castle which the French destroyed in 1813. This is Briviesca. Look! here John I. of Castile summoned the States General, who granted the title of prince of Asturia to the heir to the throne. Look! there is the mountain of Brujola, which touches the stars.”
He was one of those indefatigable cicerones who would talk even to an umbrella, and while he was eternally saying “Look!” he kept punching me in the side near my pocket. At last we arrived at Burgos; my neighbor disappeared, without saying good-bye. I took a cab to a hotel, and just as I was about to pay the driver I discovered that the little purse in which I carried change, and which I was in the habit of carrying in my overcoat pocket, was missing. I thought of the States General of Briviesca, and ended the matter with a philosophic “I deserved it,” without making an outcry, as many do on similar occasions, “By the gods! where can we be? what a terrible country!” as though there are not in their own lands light-fingered people, who would carry off a purse without even having the courtesy to tell one of the history or geography of the country.
The hotel where I stopped was served by girls, as are all the hotels in Castile. There were six or seven of them, like great overgrown children, plump and muscular, who came and went with their arms full of mattresses and linen, bending back in athletic attitudes, rosy, panting, and laughing, so that it made one happy to see them. A hotel with women-servants is an entirely different thing from an ordinary hotel. The traveller seems to feel less strange and goes to rest with a quieter heart. The women impart a certain home-like air to the house which almost makes one forget one’s loneliness wheresoever one may be. They are more attentive than men; knowing that the traveller is inclined to be melancholy, they try to change his thoughts. They laugh and talk in a familiar way in an effort to make one feel like a member of the family and in safe hands. There is an air of housewifery about them, and they serve one, not because it is their business, but because they like to make themselves useful. They sew on buttons with an air of protection; they take the clothes-brush out of one’s hand with a gesture of impatience, as much as to say, “Let me have it, you good-for-nothing thing!” They pick the hairs off of your clothes when you are going out, and when you come back, all bespattered with mud, they say, “Oh! poor fellow!” They advise you not to sleep with your head too low when they bid you good-night; they bring your coffee to you in bed, telling you benevolently to “Lie still; don’t get up!” One of them was named Beatrice, another Carmelita, and a third Amparo (protection), and they all three possessed that ponderous highland beauty which makes one exclaim in a deep voice, “What splendid creatures!” When they ran along the corridors they shook the whole house.
At sunrise next morning Amparo called in my ear, “Caballero!” A quarter of an hour later I was in the street.
Burgos, built at the foot of a mountain on the right bank of the Arlanzon, is an irregular city, with narrow, winding streets, with few noteworthy buildings, and the larger part of its houses not older than the seventeenth century. But it possesses one particular characteristic which gives it a curious and genial appearance. It is painted in many colors, like one of those scenes in a puppet-show by which the painters are expected to draw cries of admiration from the servants in the pit. It seems like a city colored on purpose for a Carnival celebration, with the intention of having it whitewashed afterward. The houses are red, yellow, blue, gray, and orange, with ornaments and trimmings of a thousand other colors; and everything is painted—the doorframes, the railings of the landings, the gratings, cornices, corbels, reliefs, balconies, and windowsills. All the streets seem to have been prepared for a festival. At every turn a new effect strikes the eye; in every direction there is, as it were, a rivalry in displaying the most conspicuous colors. It almost makes one laugh: they are such colors as have never before been seen on walls—green, flesh-color, purple, colors of rare flowers, of sauces, sweets, and stuffs for ball-dresses. If there were at Burgos an asylum for mad painters, one would say that the city had been painted one day when its doors had been broken open.
To make the appearance of the houses more pleasing, a great many windows have in front of them a sort of covered balcony enclosed with an abundance of glass like a case in a museum. There is, as a rule, one of these on every floor, the one above resting on the one below, and the lowest of all on the show-window of a shop, in such a way that from the ground to the roof they look altogether like the single window of an immense store. Through the windows on every floor one sees, as though they were on exhibition, visions of girls and children, flowers, landscapes, and cardboard figures from France, embroidered curtains, lace, and Moorish ornaments. If I had not known differently, it would not have occurred to me that such a city could be the capital of Old Castile—of a people who have a reputation for gravity and anxiety; I should have believed it to be a city of Andalusia, where the people are gayest. I had expected to see a decorous nation where I found a coquettish masker.
After two or three turns I came out into a vast square called the Plaza Mayor, or the Square of the Constitution. It was entirely surrounded by ochre houses with porticoes, and in the middle stood a bronze statue of Charles III. I had not yet looked around when a boy ran toward me, enveloped in a long cape torn off at the bottom, and dragging behind him two old shoes and waving a paper in the air:
“Want the Imparcial, caballero?”
“No.”