Through populous Madrid—a massive flesh—runs the artery of the calle de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep—not gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short: the leisurely streets of the old inns—posadas—of the stagecoach, of the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door, one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror.
All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walk like wafts of a hot night through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ...
It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of commerce, of defense. God—or profit—gave them energy. But Madrid is of no such beginning: Madrid is of the end. It is a consummation. It stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions.
Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is a conservative town. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. A town of government—a parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For in these, greatness came first, and made them govern.
There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its voices—of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.
Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta del Sol are the tertulias. They are cafés in which the men of the town congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the air with a heavy yet swift texture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the pigment of a Velázquez.
Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General—all attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are “running Spain”—directing a State more or less modern and which, since the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in equilibrium—to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to this end, whose symbol is Madrid.
But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe, perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.” But in truth, they are the inevitable response—the stir against and within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The bureaucrats hold Spain together—in sleep. The intellectuals plot and dream to burst Spain asunder—in a new waking.