Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

"One of our great industries, señor," he said, pointing to several smoke-belching chimneys near at hand. "Puente Pinos produces the best sugar in Spain."

"The cane is harvested early?" I observed, gazing away across the flat fields.

"No, no," laughed the priest, "betabel (sugar beets)."

Spanish railways are as prone as those of Italy to repudiate the printed promise of their tickets. We descended toward sunset at a station named Granada only to find that the geographical Granada was still some miles distant. The priest had offered to direct me to an inn or I should perhaps have escaped entirely the experience of riding in a Spanish street-car. It crawled for an hour through an ocean of dust, anchoring every cable-length to take aboard some floundering pedestrian. Many of these were priests; and as they gathered one by one on either side of my companion, the hope I had entertained of discovering more of virtue beneath the Spanish sotana than the world grants oozed unrestrainably away. For they were, almost without exception, pot-bellied, self-satisfied, cynical, with obscenity and the evidences of unnatural vice as plainly legible on their countenances as the words on a printed page.

We reached at last the central plaza, where my guide pointed out a large modern building bearing across the front of its third story the inscription, "Gran Casa de Viajeros de la Viuda Robledo." As I alighted, a band of valets de place swept down upon me. I gave them no attention; which did not, of course, lessen the impertinence with which they danced about me. Having guessed my goal, one of them dashed before me up the stairs, shouting to the señora to be prepared to receive the guest he was bringing.

The widow Robledo was a serene-visaged woman in the early fifties; her house a species of family hotel never patronized by foreigners. We came quickly to terms, however; I was assigned a room overhanging the culinary regions, for which, with the customary two and a half meals a day, I engaged to pay four pesetas.

At the mention of money, the tout, who during all the transaction had not once withdrawn the light of his simian countenance, demanded a peseta for having found me a lodging. I reminded him of the real facts of the case and invited him to withdraw. He followed me instead into my new quarters, repeating his demands in a bullying voice, and for the only time in my Spanish experience I was compelled to resort to physical coercion. Unfortunate indeed is the tourist who must daily endure and misjudge the race from these pests, so exactly the antithesis of the courteous, uncovetous Spaniard of the working class.

I had not yet removed the outer stain of travel when a vast excitement descended upon Granada,--it began to rain. On every hand sounded the slamming of doors, the creaking of unused shutters; from below came up the jangling of pans and the agitated voices of servants. The shower lasted nearly ten minutes, and was chronicled at length next day in all the newspapers of Spain.

From the edge of Granada city a long green aisle between exotic elms leads easily upward to the domain of the Alhambra. In its deep-shaded groves, so near yet seeming so far removed from the stony face of thirsty Spain, reigns a dream-inviting stillness, a quiet enhanced rather than broken by the murmur of captive brooks. For this, too, remains in memory of the Moor, that the waters of the Genii and Darro are still brought to play through a score of little stone channels beneath the trees. There I drifted each morning, other plans notwithstanding, to idle away the day on the grassy headland before and below which spreads the vastness of the province of Granada, or distressing the guardians of the ancient palace with my untourist-like loiterings. But for her fame the traveler would surely pass the Alhambra by as a half-ruined nest of bats and beggars. Yet within she retains much of her voluptuous splendor, despite the desolating of time and her prostitution to a gaping-stock of tourists. Like so much of the Mussulman's building, the overshadowed palace is effeminate, seeming to speak aloud of that luxury and wantonness of the Moor in his decadent days before the iron-fisted reyes católicos came to thrust him forth from his last European kingdom. In this she resembles the Taj Mahal; yet the difference is great. For the effeminacy of the Alhambra is the unrobustness of woman, while the Taj, like the Oriental man, is effeminate outwardly, superficially, beneath all which shows sound masculinity.

In the city below is only enough to be seen to give contrast to the half-effaced traces of magnificence on the hill. He who comes to Granada trusting to read in her the last word of the degradation of the once regal and all powerful must continue his quest. Of squalor and beggars she is singularly free--for Spain. Something of both remains for him who will wander through the Albaicin, peering into its cave-dwellings, wherein, and at times before which romp brown gypsy children garbed in the costume in which the reputed ancestor of us all set forth from the valley of Eden, or occasional jade-eyed hoydens of the grotto sunning their blacker tresses and mumbling crones plying their bachi in conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullible Busné from foreign shores.