The most intolerable odor pervaded the whole place. It was a singular mixture, arising from the trustful local habit of allowing every kind of garbage and ordure to disperse itself without drainage, and complicated with fumes of oil, garlic, general mustiness, and a whiff or two of old incense. The potency of olive-oil, especially when somewhat rank, none can know who have not been in Spain. That first steak—how tempting it looked among its potatoes, but how abominably it tasted! We never approached meat with the same courage afterward, until our senses were subdued to the level of fried oil. Combine this with the odor of corruption, and you have the insinuating quality which we soon noticed even in the wine—perhaps from the custom of transporting it in badly dressed pig-skins, which impart an animal flavor. This astonishing local atmosphere saluted us everywhere; it was in our food and drink; we breathed it and dreamed of it. Yet the Burgalese flourished in calm unconsciousness thereof. The splendidly blooming peasant women showed their perfect teeth at us; and the men, in broad-brimmed, pointed caps and embroidered jackets, whose feet were brown and earthy as tree-roots, laughed outright, strong in the knowledge of their traditionary soap, at our ignorant foreign clothes and over-washed hands! Among the humbler class were some who were prepared to sell labor—an article not much in demand—and they were even more calmly squalid than the beggars. They sat in ranks on the curb-stones of the plaza, a matchless array of tatters; and if they could have been conveyed without alteration to Paris or New York, there would have been sharp competition for them between the artists and paper-makers.
So my companion, the artist, assured me—whom, by-the-way, in order to give him local color, I had rechristened Velazquez. But as he shrank from the large implication of this name, I softened him down to Velveteen.
We had been twenty-four hours in Burgos before we saw a carriage, excepting only the hotel coach, which stood most of the time without horses in front of the door, and was used by the porter as a private gambling den and loafing place for himself and his friends. When wheels did roll along the pavements they awoke a roar as of musketry. Perhaps the most important event which took place during our stay—it was certainly regarded with a more feverish interest by the inhabitants than the Corpus Christi ceremonies—was the bold act of our landlady, who went out to drive in a barouche, while her less daring spouse hung out of the window weakly staring at her. The house-fronts were filled with well-dressed feminine heads, witnessing the departure; a grave old gentleman opposite left his book and glared out intently. When the wheels could no longer even be heard, he turned to gaze wistfully in the opposite direction, dimly hoping that life might vouchsafe him a carriage.
Although, as I have said, women avoid meeting male glances when on the sidewalk, they enjoy full license to stand at their high windows, which are called miradores, or "lookers," and contemplate with entire freedom all things or persons that pass; which, in view of the complete listlessness of their lives, is a fortunate dispensation. Existence in Burgos is essentially life from the window point of view. It proceeds idly, and as a sort of accidental spectacle. Yet there is for strangers a dull fascination in wandering about the narrow, silent streets, and contemplating ancient buildings, the chiselled ornaments and armorial bearings of which recall the wealth and nobility that once inhabited them during the great days of the town. Where have all the dominant families gone? Are they keeping store, or tending the railroad station? Their descendants are sometimes only too happy if they can get some petty government office at five hundred dollars a year. I strolled one afternoon into the Calle de la Calera, and through a shabby archway penetrated to a stately old ruined court, around which ran an inscription in stone, declaring this palace to have been reared by an abbot of aristocratic line a century or two since. It is used now as an oil factory. A pretty girl was looking out over a flower-pot in an upper window, and, as I strayed up the noble staircase, I met a sad-looking gentleman coming down, who I afterward learned was a widower, formerly resident in Paris, but now returned with his daughter to this strange domicile in his native place. Some of the lower rooms, again, were devoted to plebeians and donkeys.
The humble ass, by-the-way, begins to thrust himself meekly upon you as soon as you set foot in the Peninsula, and you must look sharp if you wish to keep out of his way. His cheap labor has ruined and driven out the haughtier equine stock of Arabia that once pawed this devoted soil. Even the Cid, however, did not boast a barb of the desert in the earlier days of his prowess; for when King Alfonso bade him quit the land, "then the Cid clapped spurs to the mule upon which he rode, and vaulted into a piece of ground which was his own inheritance, and answered, 'Sire, I am not in your land, but in my own.'" This little incident occurred near Burgos, and the drowsy city still keeps some dim memory of that great Warrior Lord the Cid Campeador, Rodrigo de Bivar, whose quaint story, full of hardihood, robbery, and cruelty, gallant deeds and grim pathos, trails along the track of his adventures through half of Spain. But there is a curious cheapness and indifference in the memorials of him preserved. In the Town-hall, for the sum of ten cents, you are admitted to view the modern walnut receptacle wherein all that is left of him is economically stored. Those puissant bones, which went through so many hard fights against the Moors, are seen lying here, dusty and loose, with those of Ximena, under the glass cover. Among them reposes a portly corked bottle, in which minor fragments of the warrior lord were placed after the moving of his remains from the Convent of San Pedro in chains, where for many years he occupied a more seemly tomb. Imagine George Washington, partially bottled and wholly disjointed, on exhibition under glass! The Spaniards, in no way disconcerted by the incongruity, have graven on the brass plate of the case a high-sounding inscription; but a tribute as genuine and not less valuable, though humbler, was the big, spruce-looking modern wagon I saw in the market-place one day, driven by an energetic farmer, and bearing on its side the title El Cid.
One would look to see the conqueror's dust richly inurned within the cathedral—a noble outgrowth of the thirteenth century, enriched by accretions of later work until its whitish stone and wrought marble connect the Early Pointed style with that of the Renaissance in its flower. But perhaps this temple has enough without the Cid. Strangely placed on the side of a hill, with houses attached to one corner, as if it had sprung from the homes and hearts of the people, it seems to hold down the swelling ground with its massive weight; yet the spires, through the open-work of which the stars may be seen at night, rise with such lightness you would think the heavy bells might make them tremble and fall. I passed an hour of peace and fresh air above the fetid streets, looking down from the citadel hill on these pinnacles, while around and below them lay the town—an irregular mass of gray and mauve pierced with deep shadows—in the midst of bare, rolling uplands. Before the fair high altar hangs the victorious banner of Ferdinand VII., recalling to the people the great battle of Tolosa Plains. And when one sees peasants—rough spots of color in the sombre choir—studying the dark, fruit-like wood-carvings through which the Bible story wreathes itself in panel after panel, one feels the teaching power of these old churches for the unlettered. In one of the corner chapels appears another less favorable phase of such teaching, in the shape of a miracle-working Christ, amid deep shadows and dim lantern-light, stretched on the cross, and draped with a satin crinoline. This doubtful reverence of putting a short skirt on the figure of the Saviour, often practiced in Spain, may perhaps mark an influence unconsciously received from the Moorish dislike for nudity. The cathedral bells were continually clanging the summons to mass or vespers, and their loud voices, though cracked and inharmonious, seemed still to assert the supremacy of ecclesiastical power. But while a priest occasionally darkened the sidewalks, many others, on account of the growing prejudice against them, went about in frock-coats and ordinary tall hats. And under all its crowning beauty the old minster, motionless in the centre of the stagnant town—its chief entrance walled up, and a notice painted on its Late Roman façade warning boys not to play ball against the tempting masonry—wore the look of some neglected and half-blind thing, once glorious, symbol of a power abruptly stayed in its prodigious career.
Meanwhile the daily history of Burgos went on its wonted way, sleepy but picturesque—a sort of illuminated prose. Women chaffered in the blue-tiled fish-market; the bourgeoisie patronized the sweetmeat shops, of which there were ten on the limited chief square; the tambourine-maker varied this ornamental industry with the construction of the more practical sieve; a peasant passed with a bundle of purple-flowering vetches on his head for fodder, and another drove six milch goats through the streets, seeking a purchaser. To this last one the proprietor of the principal book-store came running out to see if he could strike a bargain. One morning I met an uncouth countryman and his stout wife on the red-tiled landing of the inn stairs (they bowed and courtesied to me) with chickens and eggs for sale. In this simple manner our hotel was supplied. All the bread was got, a few pieces at a time, from a small bakery across the plazuela, in a dark cellar just under the niche of a neglected stone saint—a new arrival causing our maid to run hurriedly thither for a couple of rolls; and the water also came from some neighbor's well in earthen jars. The barber even exercises his primitive function in Burgos: he is called a "bleeder," and announces on his shop sign that "teeth and molars" are extracted there. Democratic and provincial the atmosphere was, and not unpleasantly so; yet during our stay Italian opera from Madrid was performing in the theatre, and large yellow posters promised "Bulls in Burgos" at an early date.
II.
TO pass from this ancient city to Madrid is to experience one of those astonishing contrasts in which the country abounds.