Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

You may traverse whispering cloisters heaped with fallen crosses, with truant tombstones, and severed heads and limbs of august prophets. Cast aside in dusky vaults lie broken shafts of rose-tinted marbles and fragments of rare carving in whose hollows the birds of the air once built their nests. Through the tangle of flowers and shrubbery that chokes the patios gleam the rims of alabaster urns and basins of jasper fountains. Such radiant wings and faces as still flash out from frieze and arch and column, such laughing looks, fresh with a dewy brightness, as if youth and springtime were enchanted in the stone! And what supreme grace and truth of artistry in all this bewildering detail! On some far-off day of the golden age, when ivory and agate were as wax, when cedar and larch wood yielded like their own soft leaves, the magician must have pressed upon them the olive leaf, the acacia spray, the baby's foot, that have left these perfect traces. And how did mortal hand ever achieve the intricate, curling, unfolding, blossoming marvel of those capitals? And who save kings, Wambas and Rodericks, Sanchos, Alfonsos, and Fernandos, should mount these magnificent stairways? And what have those staring stone faces above that antique doorway looked upon to turn them haggard with horror? City of ghosts! The flesh begins to creep. But here, happily, we are arrived in the Plaza de Zocodovér, where Lazarillo de Tormes used to display his talents as town crier, and in this long-memoried market-place, with its arcaded sides and trampled green, may pause to take our bearings.

Evidently the procession is to pass here, for the balconies, still displaying the yellow fronds of Palm Sunday, are hung with all manner of draperies—clear blue, orange with silver fringes, red with violet bars, white with saffron scallops. Freed from sordid cares about my pocket, I give myself for a little to the spell of that strange scene. Beyond rise the rich-hued towers of the Alcázar, on the site where Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, the Cid, and an illustrious line of Spanish monarchs have fortified themselves in turn; but Time at last is conqueror, and one visits the dismantled castle only to forget all about it in the grandeur of the view. From the east side of the Zocodovér soars the arch on whose summit used to stand the Santisimo Cristo del Sangre, before whom the Corpus train did reverence. And here in the centre blazed that momentous bonfire which was to settle the strife between the old Toledan liturgy and the new ritual of Rome; but the impartial elements honored both the Prayer Books placed upon the fagots, the wind wafting to a place of safety the Roman breviary, while the flames drew back from the other, with the result that the primitive rite is still preserved in an especial chapel of the cathedral.

A glorious plaza, famed by Cervantes, loved by Lope de Vega, but now how dim and shabby! On the house-fronts once so gayly colored, the greens have faded to yellows, the reds to pinks, and the pinks to browns. The awning spread along the route of the procession is fairly checkered with a miscellany of patches. I pass the compliments of the day with a smiling peasant woman, whose husband, a striking color-scheme in maroon blanket, azure trousers, russet stockings, and soiled gray sandals, offers me his seat on the stone bench beside her. But I am bound on my errand, and they bid me "Go with God." I select a trusty face in a shop doorway and ask if I can rent standing room in the balcony above. Mine honest friend puts his price a trifle high to give him a margin for the expected bargaining, but I scorn to haggle on a day when I am short of money, and merely stipulate, with true Spanish propriety, that no gentlemen shall be admitted. This makes an excellent impression on the proprietor, who shows me up a winding stair with almost oppressive politeness. A little company of ladies, with lace mantillas drooping from their graceful heads, welcome me with that courteous cordiality which imparts to the slightest intercourse with the Spanish people (barring pickpockets) a flavor of fine pleasure. Because I am the last arrival and have the least claim, they insist on giving me the best place on the best balcony and are untiring in their explanations of all there is to be seen.

The procession is already passing—civil guards, buglers, drummers, flower wreaths borne aloft, crosses of silver and crosses of gold, silken standards wrought with cunning embroideries. But now there come a sudden darkness, a gust of wind, and dash of rain. The ranks of cofradias try in vain to keep their candles burning, the pupils from the colleges of the friars, with shining medals hung by green cords about their necks, peep roguishly back at the purple-stoled dignitary in a white wig, over whom an anxious friend from the street is trying to hold an umbrella. The Jesuit seminaristas bear themselves more decorously, the tonsures gleaming like silver coins on their young heads. The canons lift their red robes from the wet, and even bishops make some furtive efforts to protect their gold-threaded chasubles. Meanwhile the people, that spectral throng of witches, serfs, feudal retainers, and left-overs from the Arabian Nights, press closer and closer, audaciously wrapping themselves from the rain in the rich old tapestries of France and Flanders, which have been hung along both sides of the route from a queer framework of emerald-bright poles and bars. The dark, wild, superstitious faces, massed and huddled together, peer out more uncannywise than ever from under these precious stuffs which brisk soldiers, with green feather brushes in their caps, as if to enable them to dust themselves off at short notice, are already taking down.

All the church bells of the city are chiming solemnly, and the splendid custodia, "the most beautiful piece of plate in the world," a treasure of filigree gold and jewels, enshrining the Host, draws near. It is preceded by a bevy of lovely children, not dressed, as at Granada, to represent angels, but as knights of chivalry. Their dainty suits of red and blue, slashed and puffed and trimmed with lace, flash through the silvery mist of rain. Motherly voices from the balconies call to them to carry their creamy caps upside down to shield the clustered plumes. Their little white sandals and gaiters splash merrily through the mud.

A flamingo gleam across the slanting rain announces Cardinal Sancha, behind whom acolytes uplift a thronelike chair of crimson velvet and gold. Then follow ranks of taper-bearing soldiers, and my friends in the balcony call proudly down to different officers, a son, a husband, a blushing novio, whom they present to me then and there. The officers bow up and I bow down, while at this very moment comes that tinkling of silver bells which would, I had supposed, strike all Catholic Spaniards to their knees. It is perhaps too much to expect the people below to kneel in the puddles, but the vivacious chatter in the balconies never ceases, and the ladies beside me do not even cross themselves.

The parade proceeds, a gorgeous group in wine-colored costume carrying great silver maces before the civic representation. The governor of the province is pointed out to me as a count of high degree, but in the instant when my awed glance falls upon him he gives a monstrous gape unbecoming even to nobility. The last of the spruce cadets, who close the line, have hardly passed when the thrifty housewife beseeches our aid in taking in out of the rain her scarlet balcony hanging, which proves to be the canopy of her best bed. But the sun is shining forth again when I return to the street to follow the procession into the cathedral.

Already this gleam of fair weather has filled the Calle de Comercio with festive señoritas, arrayed in white mantillas and Manila shawls in honor of the bull-fight. Shops have been promptly opened for a holiday sale of the Toledo specialties—arabesqued swords and daggers, every variety of Damascened wares, and marchpane in form of mimic hams, fish, and serpents. The Toledo steel was famous in Shakespeare's day, even in the mouths of rustic dandies, whose geographical education had been neglected. When the clever rogue, Brainworm, in one of Jonson's comedies, would sell Stephen, the "country gull," a cheap rapier, he urges, "'Tis a most pure Toledo," and Stephen replies according to his folly, "I had rather it were a Spaniard." But onward is the glorious church, with its symmetric tower, whose spire wears a threefold crown of thorns. The exterior walls are hung, on this one day of the year, with wondrous tapestries that Queen Isabella knew. An army of beggars obstructs the crowd, which presses in, wave upon wave, through the deep, rich portals in whose ornamentation whole lifetimes have carved themselves away.

Within this sublime temple, unsurpassed in Gothic art, where every pavement slab is worn by knees more than by footsteps, where every starry window has thrown its jewel lights on generations of believers, one would almost choose to dwell forever. One looks half enviously at recumbent alabaster bishops and kneeling marble knights, even at dim grotesques, who have rested in the heart of that grave beauty, in that atmosphere of prayer and chant, so long. Let these stone figures troop out into the troubled streets and toil awhile, and give the rest of us a chance to dream. But the multitude, which has knelt devoutly while Su Majestad was being borne into the Capilla Mayor, comes pouring down the nave to salute the stone on which—ah me!—on which the Virgin set her blessed foot December 18, 666, when she alighted in Toledo cathedral to present the champion of the Immaculate Conception, St. Ildefonso, with a chasuble of celestial tissue. The gilded, turreted shrine containing that consecrated block towers almost to the height of the nave. A grating guards it from the devout, who can only touch it with their finger tips, which then they kiss. Hundreds, with reverend looks, stand waiting their turn—children, peasants, bull-fighters, decorated officers, refined ladies, men of cultured faces. The sound of kissing comes thick and fast. Heresy begins to beat in my blood.

Not all that heavenward reach of columns and arches, not that multitudinous charm of art, can rid the imagination of a granite weight. I escape for a while to the purer church without, with its window-gold of sunshine and lapis-lazuli roof. When the mighty magnet draws me back again, those majestic aisles are empty, save for a tired sacristan or two, and the silence is broken only by a monotone of alternate chanting, from where, in the Capilla Mayor, two priests keep watch with El Señor.