Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

CHAPTER VII

SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS

In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color. Within the building were scattered a score of mules, borricos and machos. Several tough-clothed muleteers, with what had been bright handkerchiefs wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard or sat eating with their great razor-edged navajas their lean suppers of brown bread and a knuckle of ham. Even the massive wooden pump in the yard among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was there to complete the picture. Indeed, this was none other than the Venta de Cardenas, reputed the very same in which Don Greaves passed his vigilant night, where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master Nicholas, the barber, bearded himself with a cow's tail.

The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in the arrieros a suggestion of wonder and even an occasional question. But in general their interest was as meager as their knowledge of the world outside the national boundaries. Not once did they display the eagerness to learn that is so characteristic of the Italian. For the Spaniard considers it beneath his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show any marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign land, which cannot but be vastly inferior to his own. Four centuries of national misfortune and shrinkage have by no means eradicated his firm conviction, implanted in his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the days of conquest, that he is the salt of the earth, superior in all things to the rest of the human race.

Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the civilized world, yet also one of the best educated, unless education be merely that mass of undigested and commonly misapplied information absorbed within four walls. Few men have a more exact knowledge, a more solid footing on the everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the muleteer of Spain. One does not marvel merely at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound basic wisdom that stands forth in their every sentence. If their illiteracy denies them the advantage of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal, in compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful simplicity of diction that raises them many degrees above the corresponding class in more "advanced" lands.

It is of the "lower" classes that I am speaking, the common sense and backbone of Spain. The so-called upper class is one of the most truly ignorant and uneducated on earth--though among its members, be it noted, is no illiteracy. The maltreated Miguel was adamantinely right in choosing his hero from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the masses could be so far led astray from reason as to become a Quixote.

It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring class has almost none of that subservience born in the blood in the rest of Europe. Not only does each man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes and expects the world to take for granted that this is the case, and never feels called upon to demonstrate that equality to himself and the rest of the world by insolence and rowdyism. Dissipation he knows not, except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a guitar. Nowhere in Christian lands is drunkenness more rare. Like the Arab the hardy lower-class Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet; he can sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the creature comforts is supremely indifferent. One can hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the serving of more than two dishes of meat at a meal or the wearing of "slashed" silks. Yet the Spain of to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that within its borders frugality is universal and held in honor rather than contempt.

When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests lay down on the bare cobble-stones of the venta, making pillows of the furniture of their mules, and were soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously. For me, soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was spread a muleteer's thick blanket in the embrasure of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the munching of asses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish stable I, too, drifted into slumber.

From dawn until early afternoon I marched on across the rocky vastness of Spain, where fields have no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous country and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck of sand that binds Gibraltar to the continent. It is in these haggard, unpeopled plateaus of the interior that one begins to believe that the population of the peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.

At length, across a valley that was like a lake of heat waves, appeared Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless town where I was forced to be content with the usual bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the surrounding countryside. In the further outskirts of the place I found a potter at work in a large open hovel and halted to pass the most heated hour with him. In one end of the building was a great trough of clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading up and down. Now and again he caught up a lump of the dough and deposited it on a board before the potter. This the latter took by the handful and, placing it on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a vessel of a shape not unlike a soup-bowl. I inquired what these sold for and with a sigh he replied: