Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

It was noon when I descended at Bobadilla, the sand-swept junction where all southern Spain changes cars. The train to Granada was soon jolting away to the eastward. Within the third-class compartment the heat was flesh-smelting. The bare wooden cell, of the size of a piano-crate, was packed not merely to its lawful and unreasonable capacity of ten persons, but with all the personal chattels under which nine of those persons had been able to totter down to the station. Between the two plank benches, that danced up and down so like the screen of a threshing machine as to deceive the blind man beside me into the ludicrous notion that the train was moving rapidly, was heaped a cart-load. To attempt an inventory thereof would be to name everything bulky, unpleasing, and sharp-cornered that ever falls into the possession of the Spanish peasant. Suffice it to specify that at the summit of the heap swayed a crate of chickens whose cackling sounded without hint of interruption from Bobadilla to the end of the journey.

The national characteristics of third-class are clearly marked. Before a French train is well under way two men are sure to fall into some heated dispute, to which their companions give undivided but speechless attention. The German rides in moody silence; the Italian babbles incessantly of nothing. An Englishman endures a third-class journey frozen-featured as if he were striving to convince his fellows that he has been thus reduced for once because he has bestowed his purse on the worthy poor. But the truly democratic Spaniard settles down by the compartmentful into a cheery family. Not one of my fellow-sufferers but had some reminiscence to relate, not a question arose to which each did not offer his frank opinion. He who descended carried away with him the benediction of all; the newcomer became in a twinkling a full-fledged member of the impromptu brotherhood.

Nine times I was fervently entreated to partake of a traveler's lunch, and my offer to share my own afternoon nibble was as many times declined with wishes for good appetite and digestion. Travelers who assure us that this custom inherited from the Moor has died out in Spain are in error; it is dead only among foreigners in first-class carriages and tourist hotels--who never had it. The genuine Spaniard would sooner slap his neighbor in the face than to eat before him without begging him to share the repast.

We halted more than frequently. On each such occasion there sounded above the last screech of the brakes the drone of a guard announcing the length of the stay. Little less often the traveler in the further corner of the compartment squirmed his way to the door and departed. With a sigh of relief the survivors divided the space equitably between them--and were incontinently called upon to yield it up again as some dust-cloaked peasant flung his bag of implements against my legs with a cheery "buenas tardes" and climbed in upon us.

Then came the task of again getting the train under way. The brisk "all aboard" of our own land would be unbearably rude to the gentle Spanish ear. Whence every station, large or small, holds in captivity a man whose only duty in life seems to be that of announcing the departure of trains. He is invariably tattered, sun-bleached, and sandal-footed, with the general appearance of one whom life has used not unkindly but confounded roughly. How each station succeeds in keeping its announcer in the pink of dilapidation is a Spanish secret. But there he is, without fail, and when the council of officials has at length concluded that the train must depart, he patters noiselessly along the edge of the platform, chanting in a music weird, forlorn, purely Arabic, a phrase so rhythmic that no printed words can more than faintly suggest it:

"Seño-o-o-res viajeros al tre-e-e-en."

"Gentlemen travelers to the train" is all it means in mere words; but rolling from the lips of one of these forlorn captives it seems to carry with it all the history of Spain, and sinks into the soul like a voice from the abysmal past.

Among my fellow-passengers was the first Spanish priest with whom I came into conversational contact. In the retrospect that fact is all but effaced by the memory that he was not merely the first but the only Spaniard who ever declined my proffer of a cigarette. To one eager to find the prevailing estimation of the priesthood of Spain false or vastly overdrawn, this first introduction to the gown augured well. He was neither fat nor sensual: rather the contrary, with the lineaments of a man sincere in his work and beneficent in his habits. His manner was affable, without a hint of that patronizing air and pose of sanctity frequently to be observed among Protestant clergy, his attitude of equality toward the laity peculiarly reminiscent of the priests of Buddha.

At the station of San Francisco half the passengers descended. The building was perched on a shelf of rock that fell away behind it into a stony gulf. Surrounding all the station precinct ran a weather-warped and blackened fence, ten feet high, along the top of which screamed and jostled fully two score women and girls, offering for sale every species of ware from cucumbers to turkeys. Hucksters and beggars swarm down--or rather up--on San Francisco in such multitudes that the railway company was forced to build the fence for the protection of its patrons. But the women, not to be so easily outdone, carry each a ladder to surmount the difficulty. As the train swung on around a pinnacle of rock, we caught a long enduring view of the source of the uproar--the populous and pauperous city of Loja, lodged in a trough-like hillside across the valley.

Not far beyond there burst suddenly on the sight the snow-cowled Sierra Nevada, and almost at the same moment the train halted at Puente Pinos. I recalled the village as the spot where Columbus saw the ebbing tide of his fortunes checked by the messengers of "Ysabel la Católica"; but not so the priest.