“I fed the horse, and procured some bread and barley, as the Gypsy had directed me. I likewise purchased three fine partridges of a fowler, who was drinking wine in the posada. He was satisfied with the price I gave him, and offered to treat me with a copita, to which I made no objection. As we sat discoursing at the table, the National entered with the passport in his hand, and sat down by us.
“National.—‘Caballero, I return you your passport; it is quite in form. I rejoice much to have made your acquaintance. I have no doubt that you can give me some information respecting the present war.’
“Myself.—‘I shall be very happy to afford so polite and honourable a gentleman any information in my power.’”
He won the hearts of the people of Villa Seca by the “formality” of his behaviour and language; for he tells us
that in such remote places might still be found the gravity of deportment and the grandiose expressions which are scoffed at as exaggerations in the romances. He speaks of himself in one place as strolling about a town or neighbourhood, entering into conversation with several people whom he met, shopkeepers, professional men, and others. Near Evora he sat down daily at a fountain and talked with everyone who came to it. He visited the College of the English Catholics at Lisbon, excusing himself, indeed, by saying that his favourite or his only study was man. His knowledge of languages and his un-English appearance made it easier for him to become familiar with many kinds of men. He introduced himself among some Jews of Lisbon, and pronounced a blessing: they took him for a powerful rabbi, and he favoured their mistake so that in a few days he knew all that related to these people and their traffic. On his journey in Galicia, when he was nearing Finisterra, the men of the cabin where he rested took him for a Catalan, and “he favoured their mistake and began with a harsh Catalan accent to talk of the fish of Galicia, and the high duties on salt.” When at this same cabin he found there was no bed, he went up into the loft and lay down on the boards’ without complaint. So in the prison at Madrid he got on so well with the prisoners that on the third day he spoke their language as if he were “a son of the prison.” At Gibraltar he talked to the man of Mogador in Arabic and was taken for “a holy man from the kingdoms of the East,” especially when he produced the shekel which had been given him by Hasfeldt: a Jew there believed him to be a Salamancan Jew. At Villafranca a woman mistook his voice in the dark for that of “the German clockmaker from Pontevedra.” For some time in 1839 he went among the villages dressed in a peasant’s leather helmet, jacket and trousers, and resembling “a person between sixty and
seventy years of age,” so that people addressed him as Uncle, and bought his Testaments, though the Bible Society, on hearing it, “began to inquire whether, if the old man were laid up in prison, they could very conveniently apply for his release in the proper quarter.” [{173}]
He saw men and places, and with his pen he created a land as distinct, as wild, as vast, and as wonderful as the Spain of Cervantes. He did this with no conscious preconceived design. His creation was the effect of a multitude of impressions, all contributory because all genuine and true to the depth of Borrow’s own nature. He had seen and felt Spain, and “The Bible in Spain” shows how; nor probably could he have shown it in any other way. Not but what he could speak of Spain as the land of old renown, and of himself—in a letter to the Bible Society in 1837—as an errant knight, and of his servant Francisco as his squire. He did not see himself as he was, or he would have seen both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, now riding a black Andalusian stallion, now driving an ass before him.
Only a power as great as Borrow’s own could show how this wild Spain was built up. For it was not done by this and that, but by a great man and a noble country in a state of accord continually vibrating.
Thus he drew near to Finisterra with his wild Gallegan guide:
“It was a beautiful autumnal morning when we left the choza and pursued our way to Corcuvion. I satisfied our host by presenting him with a couple of pesetas; and he requested as a favour that if on our return we passed that way, and were overtaken by the night, we would again take up our abode beneath his roof. This I promised, at the same time determining to do my best to guard against