Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing at the kiln--"y cuantos--how many break in the glazing! It is no joyful trade, señor."

Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer me a cigarette and a drink from his leather bota, but soon drifted back to his task with the restless, harassed look of the piece-worker the world over. As I sat watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there came suddenly back to memory the almost forgotten days when I, too, had toiled thus in the gloomy, sweltering depths of a factory. Truer slavery there never was than that of the piece-worker under our modern division of labor. Stroll through a factory to find a man seated at a machine stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist, and his task seems easy, almost a pastime in its simplicity. But go away for a year, travel through half the countries of the globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian isles, and then come back to find him sitting on the self-same stool, in the self-same attitude, stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist.

Three blazing hours passed by, and I found myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepeñas. The vines were low shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon the railway. A half-hour along it brought me face to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap. He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally interesting in its absurdity. But he passed me with the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant railroad.

I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker. In the grassless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a roadster. Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his prostrate form.

"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest of us. Vaya como duerme!"

I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him. He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set off by a broad red faja around his waist. In one bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.

There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company. He was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in general and wherever else the gods might lead him.

"For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief. "This half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring and on the Alameda. But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less to buy. I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would not leave his amiga. Gásparo is a stone-polisher and had work.

"Then one day I am taken by the police for I know not what. When after two weeks I come out, Gásparo is gone. But he has come north and somewhere I shall run across him."

Jesús had just passed through a marvelous experience, which he proceeded to relate in all his Latin wealth of language--though not in the phraseology, of a graduate roadster: