A Pomegranate Tree, Red With Fruit, Overhung Us, And From
The Borders Of Marigolds And Zinnias And German Clover The Gray
Garden-Wife Gathered A Nosegay For Us.
She said she was three _duros_
and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had
a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.
V
It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had begun
by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for
centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day
the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the
street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug
through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in
the church. We expressed our doubt of the man's knowing so unerringly
that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. "If you can believe
the rest I think you can believe that," our guide argued.
He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had a
pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry to
exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we
brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting,
and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have
learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house
of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in a
flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred
thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its decay,
but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the
households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which the
_patio_ and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool; in the
winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to
warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy days. The rents would
be thought low in New York: three dollars a month get a fair house in
Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant
and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the Toledans from high to low are
extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the
inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They
scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality;
there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great deal
of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the
streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered
from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other
classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the
other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no
men or women who looked great-world.
Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they
might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like
every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which
looked so pleasant.
The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is
a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish,
but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend
themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their
_patios_ to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact
of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade,
quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces or
palatial houses in my hurried impression. Whatever it may be
industrially or ecclesiastically, Toledo is now socially provincial and
tending to extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were living
in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief
sojourns to mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must
be easy to cherish such an object.
Industrially, of course, one associates it with the manufacture of the
famous Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever,
and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a, New
York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I only got so far
as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller sort in shops open to
the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little pair
of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous marchpane of Toledo
ended in a piece of that pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar.
Not all of the twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in
these specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not asking more about
the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom I
could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my
deficiency. In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military school in
the Alcazar, where and in the street leading up to it we saw some
companies of the comely and kindly-looking cadets. I know also that
there are public night schools where those so minded may study the arts
and letters, as our guide was doing in certain directions. Now that
there are no longer any Jews in Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they
betrayed the Gothic capital have all been Christians or exiles for many
centuries, we felt that we represented the whole alien element of the
place; there seemed to be at least no other visitors of our lineage or
language.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 43 of 101
Words from 43164 to 44172
of 103320
