Philip searches the waste fastness of Castile, until he finds his site: this barren spur of the Sierra below whose rock spreads the desert. Now he calls his slaves—they are the painters and the architects. Juan Bautista de Toledo and his successor Juan de Herrera, builders of the Escorial, are tools in the fever-cold hand of the king. Their plans are studied, revised, rejected. Their ebullient moods are flayed, their dignity is slurred. They are slaves—mere cutters of stone—they are tools.
And so, in a land of bastard architectures, where the Gothic is deformed, where Renaissance and baroque and Oriental forms are puddled and hypertrophied and belied, rises this masterwork. In its brutal chastity, speaks the tragic spirit of him who made it. The Escorial is to unverdant, fanatically ordered Spain what the green tragedies of Racine are to open, sweetly measured France.[16]
. . . . . .
Across the valley on a wooded height is a rocky bench known as the Seat of the King. Here Philip comes each day and watches the Escorial grow before him. He fears he might die ere it is done. He drives his slaves the artists; imports whole corps of them from Italy and Flanders. And when he is stricken with the illness which he thought his last, he is carried in a litter from Madrid, eight dolorous days upon the bleak meseta. He seeks the bare cell that is his Palace in the Escorial basement; he lies in the bedroom built beside the Altar so that he may hear Mass from his pillows. And so indeed he died. But still he sits each afternoon upon the Silla del Rey, and watches.
Below him, the sun goes down and a cold moon rises. Below him a patch of lawn and a flume float within this world splintered of granite and twilight. A wood of encina stands like an army of cowled saints. They are gnarled, gray-armored in moss, and their leaves are little refulgences of prayer, holding the sunset above the sodden ground. They look up, as Philip looks, toward the Escorial. It is matriced in jagged rock; it is sheer from the sun and the moon light....
CHAPTER VI
THE DREAM OF VALENCIA
Spain, with face turned east away from the sun, takes her afternoon siesta. She has dined well. Soup of seven meats, codfish, the seven meats, cheese rich as manure, Galician greens, Toledan mazapan, Sevillan dulces, wines from Málaga, Jérez and La Mancha, heroic tobacco from the Canary Islands, fill her. She was hungry. For her day had been active. She had served and fused the wills of many peoples: swift Phœnicians, heavy-headed Romans, meteor Greeks, Goths with wild hair and tender eyes, intricate introvert Jews, Arabs with convictions about the materiality of Cosmos, Moors whose blood was fierce like Atlas avalanche, sportsmen like the Cid whose charity was of the sword, whose religion was of the moment, mystics of Castile parsing Christ with Horace, Spaniards at last ... Torquemada, Isabela, Celestina ... makers of the dominance of Castile. So Spain was hungry and heartily ate: was weary and heavily slept. And her dream was a city of the eastern coast.