The Prado
Is Ordinarily The Promenade Of The Better Classes, But Every Spanish
Family Has Its John, Paul, And Peter, And The Crowded Barrios Of Toledo
And The Penue-Las Pour Out Their Ragged Hordes To The Popular Festival.
The Scene Has A Strange Gypsy Wildness.
From the round point of Atocha
to where Cybele, throned among spouting waters, drives southward her
spanking team of marble lions, the park is filled with the merry
roysterers.
At short intervals are the busy groups of fritter merchants;
over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oil; beside it a
mighty bowl of dough. The bunolero, with the swift precision of
machinery, dips his hand into the bowl and makes a delicate ring of the
tough dough, which he throws into the bubbling caldron. It remains but a
few seconds, and his grimy acolyte picks it out with a long wire and
throws it on the tray for sale. They are eaten warm, the droning cry
continually sounding, "Bunuelos! Calientitos!" There must be millions of
these oily dainties consumed on every night of the Verbena. For the more
genteel revellers, the Don Juans, Pedros, and Pablos of the better sort,
there are improvised restaurants built of pine planks after sunset and
gone before sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the
loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast
gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing
fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great
trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of
the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a
striking and vivid picture.
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