The Aqueduct of Rome is Segovia’s youngest life. Its stones are immense, but its grace makes wings for them. Its tiers and terraces are an ordered song. Horatian is the balance of these pragmatic blocks. The mountains of Castile are old. The barren soil of Castile, stripped of its loam, is old. Segovia is old. It is a spilling of energy, a thing of chaos. Segovia comes to dark and tragic life within this Measure, sure and at ease, of the cool will of Rome.
d. The Miracle of El Greco
South of the Guadarrama lies New Castile. The world flattens to the vast plain of La Mancha. Towns stand like tiny toys on a table. It is a calm before storm: vineyards and wheatfields stop against the wildest pass of Spain, Despeñaperros of the Sierra Morena. Here Don Quixote like his idol Amadís went into penance and prayer; here the Arabs passed from Andalusia to the high Plateau; here at Las Navas de Toloso they were pushed back and down five centuries later. Within a land of fierce extremities, none is more telling than this sudden chaos rocking to the sky between two mellow plains. In the upper one, La Mancha, the eye is lost between the infinites of earth and heaven: it ceases to feed logic to the mind and the soul starves in a waste of vague realities or, like Don Quixote’s, leaps to the realm of visions.
North of La Mancha, another climax. The Tagus flows lazily west, carrying silt and loam from gradual hills serrated with the olive. The land is wide-browed. Its lack of trees gives it essential peace, as if it were in contemplation of its own fortunate ease among the embattled mountains. Now, swinging westward with the river, the land catches a spiritual fever. Fields grow rockier, hills abrupt. Rondure sharpens to angle; horizons shut. Something like a geological convulsion takes the body of New Castile and turns it into a steep, a tumultuous storm. The land becomes a maelstrom, swirling into a single rock—Toledo. The Tagus maddens too. Bending south, it cuts into a canyon, one of whose walls is Toledo and the other a rocky world to rim it. The river circles; deep in a notch of stone it becomes a purpling torrent. It cuts a precipice, it leaps a rapid, it reverses northward seeking again the long plains that lounge westward to rocky Portugal and to the sea.
Toledo is cold upon its sudden height. Across the gorge that makes it almost an island, olive groves, symmetrical as in the ancient prints, draw verdant stripes in the red face of the hills. The country houses and the chapels mark the swift slopes like little steadfastnesses nailing their chaos. But in this geologic gyre and husbandry, Toledo stands unmoving.
To the north where the plains lead to Toledo and where alone there is no fending water, are walls. So an unbroken rigor belts the high town. Here is the ancient Puerta de Visagra, unchanged since the Arabs put it up twelve centuries ago upon a Roman stronghold dizzily maintained by the Visigoths Athanagild and Leovgild to capital all the land. Gigantic stones not polished by time. Three separate tiers of bastion and of turret. And within the Gate’s shadow like a womb of rock, delicate Arab arches. Behind, the street leads with a promise of gentle curves into the harbored city. Children gambol in these monstrous walls; their calls are flowers suddenly alight in a bleak winter. Women sit before painted doorways and send voices like velvet strands into the silent granite of Toledo. But life cannot prevail against this protecting death. Nearby is a new Visagra (a mere five hundred years). Arms of Carlos V and a statue of San Antonio furbish its forbiddance. Through its round arch, you see two pointed towers with their Mudéjar tiles aflash in the sun. But the tiles are not verdant and skyey like the tiles of Granada and Seville. They are colorless, and they are cold.
Toledo is a coil of streets, like the Tagus stormy and like the rocks precipitous. Men and women live in Toledo. But they are void within the intricate death of convent walls and church, and convent and convent again. Rather than men and women of the sort who come together in the ache of flesh, and of their ease bear fruitage, there seem to live here creatures of prayer and dogma. Children indeed are scarce in these streets that are the bodies of a Creed and a Rite. When there is open, there is waste. When there is color, there is irony.
San Juan de los Reyes ... church, college, convent ... stands on the westward buttress of the Toledan mountain. The rock cuts to the river. The ancient bridge of San Martín loops high above the rapids, thrusting its road away into a waste of dust. The Gate of San Martín stands in a slanting square; and it is naked for the walls are gone. So desert comes into Toledo. Within the city Gate, here is the face of mountain. The streets stand on it, despite their ages, insecure and shallow. Desert is not hostile to them, so they have let it in. Was it not there before them? Let it come back to serve as the refrain of their bleak rigor—of their denials. And the Church which the Catholic Kings projected and then forgot—San Juan of the Kings—shrills with its painted statues in this desert: Gothic, Arabic, and baroque against a hardier silence.
Farther on is the Judería—what is left of this Borough of Jews who ruled Toledo when the Arabs came, and who throve thereafter in Toledo for seven hundred years. The rigid mood goes on. The Castle of the Jews has disappeared: but where it stood, beside the Paseo of a synagogue, falls the escarpment, dark and sheer, into the rushing river. On the farther side, the mountain is a wall. Water foams through the notch. There is a tower standing on a thrust of rock just above the waves. Halfway between the river and the Jewish homes, this ancient prison has survived and fronts with its bars the desolate interstice of stone. Churches and chapels stud the variant heights. And all about, the rise and fall of streets, shut in and clamorously silent, cold in the neutral tint of the Sierra.
You must cross the river. The Puente de Alcántara is a bridge whose subtle dichotomy of arch and gate marks in plastic terms the way from Moslem Musa to Christian Philip. Best strike down from the Cathedral to the ferry. These are the oldest and the poorest streets. And here are children—naked children, and naked patches of rock and turf within the filth of alleys. Dark, over-ripe, mute. These streets on the mountainside are as the hive of some subterraneous bee whose honey is bitter-black. The people are blind. They behold neither the river below that flows to the sea, nor the Cathedral above that touches God. They live compressed within the surging forces of Toledo. They live in a limbo of balance. Their obscurity is poignant, within so aspirant a world. The ferry is a round and ancient bark with a carved prow and two unwieldy oars to pilot it, for better or for worse, athwart the current. And above the precipice of the other side, is the rocky chaos where El Greco sat to paint his city....