Romantic legends of Spain

by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

I am going to confine myself, then, to the brief narration of three events which are wont to serve as headings for the chapters of my dream-novels; the three isolated points which I am accustomed to connect in my mind by a series of ideas like a shining thread; the three themes, in short, upon which I play thousands on thousands of variations, amounting to what might be called absurd symphonies of the imagination.

I.

There is in Toledo a narrow street, crooked and dim, which guards so faithfully the traces of the hundred generations that have dwelt in it, which speaks so eloquently to the eyes of the artist and reveals to him so many secret points of affinity between the ideas and customs of each century, and the form and special character impressed upon even its most insignificant works, that I would close the entrances with a barrier and place above the barrier a shield with this device:

“In the name of poets and artists, in the name of those who dream and of those who study, civilization is forbidden to touch the least of these bricks with its destructive and prosaic hand.”

At one of the ends of this street, entrance is afforded by a massive arch, flat and dark, which provides a covered passage.

In its keystone is an escutcheon, battered now and corroded by the action of the years; in it grows ivy which, blown by the air, floats above the helmet, that crowns it, like a plumy crest.

Below the vaulting and nailed to the wall is seen a shrine with a sacred picture of blackened canvas and undecipherable design, in frame of gilt rococo, with its lantern hanging by a cord and with its waxen votive offerings.

Leading away from this arch, which enfolds the whole place in its shadow, giving to it an undescribable tint of mystery and sadness, extend on the two sides of the street lines of dusky, dissimilar, odd-looking houses, each having its individual form, size and color. Some are built of rough, uneven stones, without other adornment than a few armorial bearings rudely carved above the portal; others are of brick, with an Arab arch for entrance, two or three Moorish windows opening at caprice in a thick, fissured wall, and a glassed observation turret topped by a lofty weather-vane. Some have a general aspect which does not belong to any order of architecture and yet is a patchwork of all; some are finished models of a distinct and recognized style, some curious examples of the extravagances of an artistic period.

Here are some that boast a wooden balcony with incongruous roof; there are others with a Gothic window freshly whitened and adorned with pots of flowers; and yonder is one with crudely colored tiles set into its door-frame, huge spikes in its panels, and the shafts of two columns, perhaps taken from a Moorish castle, mortised into the wall.

The palace of a grandee converted into a tenement-house; the home of a pundit occupied by a prebendary; a Jewish synagogue transformed into a Christian church; a convent erected on the ruins of an Arab mosque whose minaret is still standing; a thousand strange and picturesque contrasts; thousands on thousands of curious traces left by distinct races, civilizations and epochs epitomized, so to speak, on one hundred yards of ground. All the past is in this one street,—a street built up through many centuries, a narrow, dim, disfigured street with an infinite number of twists where each man in building his house had jutted out or left a corner or made an angle to suit his own taste, regardless of level, height or regularity,—a street rich in uncalculated combinations of lines, with a veritable wealth of whimsical details, with so many, many chance effects that on every visit it offers to the student something new.