Spain, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

"What stuff you are talking! How can I believe it?"

"But this history is connected with another. You know, without doubt, that Count Julian, the commandant of the fortress of Ceuta, betrayed Spain and allowed the Moors to pass when he might have barred the way. But you do not know why Count Julian turned traitor. He had a daughter at Toledo, and this daughter went every day with a number of her young friends to bathe in the Tagus. As misfortune willed it, the place where they went to bathe, which was called Los Baños de la Cava, was near a tower in which King Roderic was accustomed to pass the mid-day hours. One day Count Julian's daughter, who was called Florinda, tired of sporting in the water, sat down on the river-bank and said to her companions, 'Companions, let us see who is the most beautiful.'—'Let us see!' they cried, and as soon done as said. They seated themselves around Florinda, and each one revealed her beauty. But Florinda surpassed them all, and, unfortunately, just at the moment when she said to the others, 'Look!' King Roderic put his head out of the window and saw them. Young and dissolute, you may imagine he took fire like a match, paid his court to the beautiful Florinda, ruined and abandoned her; and from this followed the fury of the revenge of Count Julian, the treason, and the invasion."

At this point it seemed that I had listened long enough: I gave the custodian two reales, which he took and put in his pocket with a dignified air, and, giving a last look at Toledo, I descended.

It was the hour for promenading. The principal street, hardly wide enough for a carriage to pass through, was full of people; there may have been a few hundred persons, but they seemed like a great crowd; it was dusk, the shops were closing, and a few stray lights began to flicker here and there. I went to get my dinner, but came out quickly, so as not to lose sight of the promenade. It was night: there was no other illumination save the moonlight, and one could not see the faces of the people; I seemed to be in the midst of a procession of spectres, and was overwhelmed with sadness. "To think that I am alone!" I said—"that in all this city there is not a soul who knows me; that if I fall dead at this moment, there would not be a dog to say, 'Poor man! he was a good fellow!'" I saw joyous young men pass, fathers of families with their children, husbands or those who had the air of husbands with beautiful creatures on their arms; every one had a companion; they laughed and talked, and passed without so much as looking at me. How wretched I was! How happy I should have been if a boy, a beggar, or a policeman had come up and said, "It seems to me that I recognize you, sir"!—"It is impossible, I am a foreigner, I have never been in Toledo before; but it makes no matter; don't go away; stay here, and we will talk a while, for I am lonely."

In a happy moment I remembered that at Madrid I had received a letter of introduction to a Toledan gentleman. I hurried to the hotel, took out my letter, and was at once shown to his house. The gentleman was at home and received me courteously. It was such a pleasure to hear my own name again that I could have thrown my arms around his neck. He was Antonio Gamero, the author of a highly esteemed History of Toledo. We spent the evening together. I asked him a hundred things; he told me a thousand, and read me some splendid passages from his book, which made me better acquainted with Toledo than I should otherwise have been in a month's residence there.

The city is poor, and worse than poor: it is dead; the rich have abandoned it for Madrid; the men of genius have followed the rich; it has no commerce; the manufacture of cutlery, the only industry which flourishes, provides a livelihood for some hundreds of families, but not for the city; popular education is neglected; the people are lazy and miserable.

But they have not lost their ancient character of nobility. Like all the peoples of great declining cities, they are proud and chivalrous; they abhor baseness, deal justice with their own hands, when they can, to assassins and thieves and murderers; and, although the poet Zorilla, in one of his ballads, has bluntly called them a silly people, they are not so; they are alert and bold. They combine the seriousness of the Spaniards of the North with the vivacity of the Spaniards of the South; they hold the middle ground between the Castilian and the Andalusian; they speak the language with refinement, with a greater variety of inflexion than the people of Madrid, and with greater precision than the people of Cordova and Seville; they love poetry and music; they are proud to number among their great men the gentle Garcilaso de la Vega, the reformer of Spanish poetry, and the illustrious Francisco de Rojas, the author of the Garcia del Castañar; and they take pride in welcoming within their walls artists and students from all the countries in the world who come to study the history of three nations and the monuments of three civilizations. But, whatever its people may be, Toledo is dead; the city of Wamba, of Alfonso the Brave, and of Padilla is nothing but a tomb. Since Philip II. took from it the crown of the capital, it has been steadily declining, and is still declining, and it is consuming itself little by little, solitary on the summit of its gloomy mountain, like a skeleton abandoned on a rock in the midst of the waves of the sea.

I returned to the hotel shortly before midnight. Although the moon was shining brightly—for on moonlight nights they do not illuminate the streets, although the light of that silvery orb does not penetrate those narrow ways—I was obliged to grope my way along like a thief. With my head full, as it was, of fantastic ballads which describe the streets of Toledo traversed at night by cavaliers muffled in their cloaks, singing under the windows of their ladies, fighting and killing one another, climbing into palaces and stealing the maidens away, I imagined I should hear the tinkle of guitars, the clashing of swords, and the cries of the dying. Nothing of the kind: the streets were deserted and silent and the windows dark, and one heard faintly from time to time at the corners and crossways the light step of some one passing or a fugitive whisper, the source of which one could in no way discover. I reached the hotel without harming any fair Toledan, which might have caused me some annoyance, and also without having any holes made in my stomach, which was undoubtedly a consolation.

The morning of the next day I visited the beautiful building of the hospital of San Cruz, the church of Nuestra Señora del Transito, an ancient synagogue, the ruins of an amphitheatre and of an arena where naval battles were fought in Roman times, and the famous manufactory of arms, where I bought a beautiful dagger with a silver handle and a blade covered with arabesques, which at this moment lies on my table, and when I shut my eyes and take it in my hand I seem to be still there, in the courtyard of the factory, a mile out of Toledo, under the mid-day sun, surrounded by a group of soldiers, and enveloped in a cloud of smoke from their cigarettes. I remember that as I was walking back to Toledo, as I was crossing a bit of country solitary as a desert and silent as the Catacombs, a terrible voice cried out, "Away with the foreigner!"

The voice came from the city. I stopped—I was the foreigner, that cry was directed at me, and my blood curdled; the solitude and silence of the place increased my fear. I started forward and the voice cried again, "Away with the foreigner!"