Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

"No sé, señor," she answered.

"Don't know! When your town has only nine houses?"

But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my inquiry elsewhere. With no better result, however, for each one I asked returned the same laconic, "I don't know." I had sat down on a boulder in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with few words to the house of the head man. The latter was in bed with a broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days before. I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and, after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.

Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain inviting. For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals. The wife of the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen. I knew it was that, for she said so. The place was absolutely dark. Since leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Rañadoiro. There was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered. Smoker though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained in the room.

The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken by a continual droning. The floor was stone. In the room were six or eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices. Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the floor. Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl of the concoction.

It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed cabbage indigenous to the region. A spoon was then handed me. It was of wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of them being laid in my lap. It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the earth. This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk. From my unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk I never broke bread in.

Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room, like the croak of a distant ox-cart. Since my entrance, too, I had been struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse. When it occurred to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved. The flies were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly back and forth.

But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating. Here was, it is true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian monk. Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully as large as a half-bushel measure. It is baked from four to six months ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited period.

As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two pesetas. He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have, but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than in actions, did so laconically. When I offered it again he rose half up on his elbows and bellowed "No!" His gruffness was in no sense from anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of manner. I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back. But he roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."

Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me all but headlong downward. In the depths of the third I risked a plunge into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.