In His Declaration Before The Magistrates He Says That His
Literary Reputation Procured Him The Acquaintance Of Courtiers And
Scholars, Who Visited Him In That Pitiable Abode Where The Ladies Of His
Family Cared For Themselves And Him With The Help Of One Servant Maid.
They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a
stone terrace dropping from
The wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I
stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain)
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the
house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there
was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon
before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the
stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the
house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the
upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street again
by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some
unmentionable if not unimaginable source.
It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine
the house should have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as
forgotten in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm
of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the house
abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of Valladolid
for her neglect, and though she might have answered that her burden of
memories was more than she could bear, that she could not be forever
keeping her celebrity sweet, still I could have retorted, But Cervantes,
but Cervantes! There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never
would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of
his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with
the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what
had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep
of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet in
his house wall? - certainly I could have said that this did not excuse
her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed
most to blame.
IX
Now I look back and am glad I had not consciously with me, as we drove
away, the boy who once meant to write the life of Cervantes, and who I
knew from my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Spaniards
would not have listened to the excuses of Valladolid for a moment. All
appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which shone with such
allure far across the snows through which he trudged morning and evening
with his father to and from the printing-office, and made his dream of
that great work the common theme of their talk. Now the boy is as
utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a
very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man
trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited.
It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any
lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of
Cervantes's house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain
everywhere, and it is only fair to own that a psychological change
toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since luncheon which
Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for. Up to the time the
wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting
city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there a week; then,
suddenly, we began to turn against it. One thing: the weather had
clouded, and it was colder. But we determined to be just, and after we
left the house of Cervantes we drove out to the promenades along the
banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of a better mind, for we had read that
they were the favorite resort of the citizens in summer, and we did not
know but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of their recreation.
Our way took us sorrowfully past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and
when we came out on the promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of
close set mulberry trees, with the dust thick on the paths under them.
The leaves hung leaden gray on the boughs and there could never have
been a spear of grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was
shrunken in its bed, and where its current crept from pool to pool,
women were washing some of the rags which already hung so thick on the
bushes that it was wonderful there should be any left to wash. Squalid
children abounded, and at one point a crowd of people had gathered and
stood looking silently and motionlessly over the bank. We looked too
and on a sand-bar near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a
group of civilians. Between their fixed and absolutely motionless
figures lay the body of a drowned man on the sand, poorly clothed in a
workman's dress, and with his poor, dead clay-white hands stretched out
from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to the sky. Everywhere
people were stopping and staring; from one of the crowded windows of the
nearest house a woman hung with a rope of her long hair in one hand, and
in the other the brush she was passing over it. On the bridge the man
who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized
to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring
them from their statuesque fixity.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 23 of 101
Words from 22619 to 23626
of 103320
