“These ideas were tormenting my imagination one wakeful, fevered night, when I saw the curtains of my alcove part and in the opening appeared a woman. I thought that I was dreaming; but no. That woman approached my bed, that poor, hot bed on which I was tossing in pain, and lifting the veil which covered her face, disclosed a tear trembling on her long, dark lashes. It was she!
“I started up with frightened eyes, I started up and—at that moment I arrived in front of Durán’s bookstore—”
“What!” I exclaimed, interrupting my friend on hearing that change of tone. “Then you were not wounded and in bed?”
“In bed!—ah! what the deuce! I had forgotten to tell you that all this is what I was thinking as I came from the jewelry shop of Samper,—where in sober truth I saw the set of emeralds and heard, on the lips of a beautiful woman, the exclamation which I have mentioned to you,—to the Carrera de San Jerónimo, where a thrust from the elbow of a porter roused me from my revery in front of Durán’s, in whose window I observed a book by Mery with this title, Histoire de ce qui n’est pas arrivé, ‘The Story of that which did not happen.’ Do you understand it now?”
On hearing this dénouement, I could not repress a shout of laughter. Really I do not know of what Mery’s book may treat, but I now see how, with that title, a million incomparable stories might be written.
THE TAVERN OF THE CATS
IN Seville, at the half-way point of the road that runs from the Macarena gate to the convent of San Jerónimo, there is, among other famous taverns, one which, because of its location and the special features that attach to it, may be said to have been, if it is not now, the real thing, the most characteristic of all the Andalusian roadside inns.
Picture to yourself a little house, white as the driven snow, under its roof of tiles, some reddish, some deep green, with an endless growth of yellow mustard and sprigs of mignonette springing up among them. A wooden overhang shadows the door, which has on either side a bench of cemented brick. Mortised into the wall, which is broken by various little casements, opened at caprice to give light to the interior, some lower, some higher, one square, another imitating a Moorish arched window with its dividing colonnettes, or a dormer, are seen at regular distances iron spikes and rings for hitching the horses. A vine, full of years, which twists its blackening stems in and out of the sustaining wooden lattice, clothing it with clusters of grapes and broad green leaves, covers like a canopy the guest-hall, that consists of three pine benches, half a dozen rickety rush chairs, and as many as six or seven crippled tables made of ill-joined boards. On one side of the house climbs a honeysuckle, clinging to the cracks in the wall, up to the roof, from whose eaves droop sprays that sway with the wind, like floating curtains of verdure. On the other side runs a fence of wattled twigs, defining the bounds of a little garden that looks like a basket of rushes overflowing with flowers. The tops of two great trees, towering up behind the tavern, form the dark background against which stand out its white chimneys; the decoration is completed by the orchard-plots full of century-plants and blackberries, the broom that grows on the borders of the river, and the Guadalquivir, which flows into the distance, slowly winding its tortuous way between those rural banks to the foot of the ancient convent of San Jerónimo, that peers above the thick olive groves surrounding it and traces the black silhouette of its towers against a transparent, azure sky.
Imagine this landscape animated by a multitude of figures—men, women, children and animals, forming groups that vie with one another in the characteristic and the picturesque; here the innkeeper, round and ruddy, seated in the sun on a low chair, rolling between his hands the tobacco to make a cigarette, with the paper in his mouth; there a huckster of Macarena who sings, rolling up his eyes, to the accompaniment of his guitar, while others beat time by clapping their hands or striking their glasses on the tables; over yonder a group of peasant girls with their gauzy kerchiefs of a million colors, and a whole flower-pot of pinks in their hair, who play the tambourine, and scream, and laugh, and talk at the top of their voices as they push like mad the swing hung between two trees; and the serving-boys of the tavern who come and go with trays of wine-glasses full of manzanilla and with plates of olives; and the group of village people who swarm in the road; two drunken fellows quarrelling with a dandy who is making love, in passing, to a pretty girl; a cock that, proudly spreading out its wings, crows from the thatch of the poultry-yard; a dog that barks at the boys who tease him with sticks and stones; olive-oil boiling and bubbling in the pan where fish is frying; the cracking of the whips of the cab-drivers who arrive in a cloud of dust; a din of songs, castanets, peals of laughter, voices, whistles and guitars, and blows on the tables, and clappings, and crash of breaking pitchers, and thousands of strange, discordant sounds forming a jocund hullabaloo impossible to describe. Fancy all this on a pleasant calm afternoon, the afternoon of one of the most beautiful days in Andalusia where all the days are so beautiful, and you will have an idea of the spectacle that presented itself for the first time to my eyes, when, led by its fame, I came to visit that celebrated tavern.
This was many years ago; ten or twelve, at least. I was there as a stranger, away from my natural environment, and everything about me, from the cut of my clothes to the astonished expression of my face, was out of keeping with that picture of frank and boisterous jollity. It seemed to me that the passers-by turned their heads to stare at me with the dislike with which one regards an intruder.