Outside the tremor and traffic of spiritual movement, Spain moves like a somnambulant. Her body moves: but within her shut eyes there is a vision truer than her stirring: a vision stirless and composed.
Her mood is dark and stagnant. Yet it is pleasant, for it is not pain. Her soul is caressed passively by this rhythmic swing between the extremes of action: as if the long ages of Spain’s agitation had bred this sensuous delight in their denial.
Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors. But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber....
c. Madrid
In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic, a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch. Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona, Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this sum—Spain’s tragic consummation—there must be a modern city.
Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement—and for none of its factors. It is the capital of Spain—and of no old Spanish region. It is a pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand, a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to the next; they strike together a plaintive reminiscence against the modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be almost any provincial capital of central Europe.
Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air and make Madrid a maze of memory.
Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit, Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream.
On Sundays, the rastro—the great city fair—boils down hill, a human torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dry Manzanares. On feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries, motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta del Sol—theater of revolutions—is a somber well whose sides are gray soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish maze. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues, prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds; a murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet, there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular.
Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless. And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to where the starving madrileños stack their huts and air their tattered shirts—ironic flags under the flag of Spain.