A day or two later I was installed for a fortnight in a casa de huéspedes in the calle San Bernardo. In such places as one plans to remain for any length of time there are few cheaper arrangements for ample fare in all Europe than these Spanish "houses of guests." My room, which was temporarily on the second-floor front, but solemnly pledged to be soon changed to the third-floor back, was all that an unpampered wanderer could have required. Breakfast was light; a cup of chocolate and a roll--no self-respecting traveler ventures to sample Spanish coffee more than once. But one soon grows accustomed and indeed to prefer the European abstemiousness at the first meal. In compensation the almuerzo and comida, at twelve and seven, were more than abundant. A thick soup, not unseldom redolent of garlic, was followed by a salad, and that by a puchero, which is to say an entire meal on one platter,--in the center a square of boiled beef flanked like St. Peter's amid the hills of Rome by seven varieties of vegetables, the garbanzos--bright yellow chickpeas of the size of marbles--with the usual disproportion granted that robust comestible in Spain, overtowering not only every other eminence but carpeting the intervening valleys. That despatched, or seriously disfigured, there came a second offering from the animal world,--a cocido or an olla podrida, after which the repast descended gradually by fruit, cheese, and cigarettes to its termination. Through it all a common wine flowed generously.
Even on Friday this sturdy good cheer knew no abatement. Centuries ago, in the raging days of the Moor, the faithful of Spain were granted for their Catholic zeal and bodily behoof this dispensation, that they might nourish their lean frames on whatever it should please Santiago, their patron, to bring within bowshot of their home-made crosspieces. The Moor has long since removed his dusky shadow from the land, but the dispensation remains. Indeed, there is left scarcely a custom the inobservance of which betrays the non-Catholic; or if one there be at all general it is this: when he yawns--which he is not unwont to do even at table--the devout Spaniard makes over his mouth the sign of the cross, to keep the devil from gaining a foothold therein--an exorcism that is not always successful.
There is yet another custom, quite the opposite of religious in result at least, which the guest at a casa de huéspedes must school himself to endure. It grows out of the Spaniard's infernal politeness. Figure to yourself that you have just returned from a morning of tramping through sweltering Madrid on the ephemeral breakfast already noted, and sit down at table just as a steaming puchero is served. With a melodious and self-sacrificing "Serve yourself, señor," the addle-pated Spaniard across the way pushes the dish to his neighbor; to which the neighbor responds by pushing it back again with a "No! Serve yourself, señor," followed in quick succession by "No! No! Serve yourself, señor;" "No! No! No! señor! Serve yourself!" "No! No! No! No! serve--" and so on to the end of time, or until a wrathy Anglo-Saxon, rising in his place, picks up the source of dispute and establishes order.
Our household in the calle San Bernardo consisted of a lawyer, a "man of affairs"--using the latter word in its widest signification--of two young Germans, "Don Hermann" and "Don Ricardo," for some time employed in the city, and of the family itself. Of this the husband, a slouching, toothless fellow of fifty, and the grandmother were mere supernumeraries. The speaking parts were taken by the wife and daughter, the former an enormous, unpolished woman with a well-developed mustache and the over-developed voice of a stevedore. Indeed, a stentorian, grating voice and a habit of speaking always at the tiptop of it is one of the chief afflictions of the Spanish women of the masses--and of their hearers. Is it by chance due to the custom of studying and reciting always aloud and in chorus during their few years of schooling? Quién sabe? There was presented during my stay in Madrid the play, or more properly playlet--zarzuela--"Levantar Mueros--Raising the Dead"; but I dared not go lest it turn out to be a dramatized sewing circle.
But it remains to introduce the star member of the cast, the center of that San Bernardo universe around which revolved mother, supernumeraries, and guests like planets in their orbits--the daughter. I fully expect to wander many a weary mile before I again behold so beautiful a maid--or one that I should take more pleasure in being a long way distant from. She was sixteen--which in Spain is past childhood--a glorious, faultless blonde in a land where blondes are at high premium, her lips forming what the Spaniard calls a "nido de besos"--a nest of osculatory delights--and-- But why drive the impossible task further? Such radiant perfections in human form must be seen at least to be appreciated. It is sufficient, perhaps, to mention that her likeness was on sale in every novelty shop in Madrid and found more purchasers than that of Machaquito, King of the Toreros. In short, a supreme beauty--had she been captured early and suitably polished instead of remaining at home with mother until she had acquired mother's voice, and mother's roughshod manners, and a slothful habit of life that was destined, alas, in all probability to end by reproducing her mother's bulk and mustache.
There are two things worth seeing in howling, meeowling, brawling, blistering Madrid--her outdoor life and the Prado museum. It was the latter that I viewed by day, for when relentless August has settled down the capital is not merely hot, it is plutonic, cowering under a dead, sultry heat without the relief of a breath of air, a heat that weighs down like a leaden blanket and makes Seville seem by comparison a northern seaport. A saying as old as its foolish founder's grave credits the city with three month's invierno and nine months' infierno, a characterization that loses much in symmetry, though gaining, perhaps, in force by translation. It was my fortune to have happened into the place when the lowest circle of the latter region was having its inning.
Wherefore I went often to the Prado; and came as often away more physically fatigued than after a four-hour watch in a stokehole, and with my head in a bewildered whirl that even a long stroll in the Buen Retiro only partly reduced. It is like the irrationality of man to bring together these thousands of masterpieces, so close together that not one of them can produce a tenth of its proper effect. Of the pictures in the Prado the seeing alone would require two years of continuous work, the attempt to describe, a lifetime; pictures running through all the gamut of art from the fading of the pre-Raphaelites down to Goya, that plain-spoken Goya who seems to have stood afar off and thrown paint by the bucketful at his canvas--with marvelous results. A pandemonium of paintings, not one of which but off by itself would bring daily inspiration to all beholders. It is the tendency of all things to crowd together--wealth, art, learning, work, leisure, poverty; man's duty to combat this tendency by working for a sane and equitable distribution. The Prado collection would be a treasure, indeed, had those who exerted themselves to bring these paintings together given half that exertion to spreading them out. Then it might be that in a land as rich with art as Spain one would not find daubs and beer-calendars hung in the place of honor in the homes and fondas of "the masses." When the good day comes that the accumulation of the Prado is dispersed I shall bespeak as my share the "Borrachos" or "Vulcan's Forge" of sturdy Velazquez.
La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard'
center of the universe]