After the war, I used to stroll as a boy with my mother and brothers to the Castillo de la Mota on Sundays. It was truly a beautiful walk, which will soon be ruined utterly by the citizens of San Sebastian. We looked out to sea from the Castillo and then we talked with the guard. We often met a lunatic there, who was in the care of a servant. As soon as he caught sight of us children, the lunatic was happy at once, but if a woman came near him, he ran away and flattened himself against the walls, kicking and crying out: "Blind dog! Blind dog!"
I remember also having seen a young woman, who was insane, in a great house which we used to visit in those days at Loyola. She gesticulated and gazed continually into a deep well, where a half moon of black water was visible far below. These lunatics, one at the Castillo and the other in that great house, haunted my imagination as a child.
THE HAWK
My latest recollection of San Sebastian is of a hawk, which we brought home to our house from the Castillo.
Some soldiers gave us the hawk when it was still very young, and it grew up and became accustomed to living indoors. We fed it snails, which it gulped down as if they were bonbons.
When it was full-grown, it escaped to the courtyard and attacked our chickens, to say nothing of all the cats of the neighbourhood. It hid under the beds during thundershowers.
When we moved away from San Sebastian, we were obliged to leave the hawk behind. We carried him up to the Castillo one day, turned him loose, and off he flew.
IN MADRID
We moved from San Sebastian to Madrid. My father had received an appointment to the Geographic and Political Institute. We lived on the Calle Real, just beyond the Glorieta de Bilbao, in a street which is now a prolongation of the Calle de Fuencarral.
Opposite our house, there was a piece of high ground, which has not yet been removed, which went by the name of "La Era del Mico," or "The Monkey Field." Swings and merry-go-rounds were scattered all over it, so that the diversions of "La Era del Mico," together with the two-wheeled calashes and chaises which were still in use in those days, and the funerals passing continually through the street, were the amusements which were provided ready-made for us, as we looked down from our balcony.