It Is Intensely, Immemorially African, Flat-Roofed,
White-Walled; The Mules Waiting Outside In The Wet Might Have Been
Drooping There Ever Since The Going Down Of The Flood, From Which The
River Could Have Got Its Muddy Yellow.
If the reader will be advised by me he will not go to the Archaeological
Museum, unless he wishes particularly to contribute to the support of
the custodian; the collection will not repay him even for the time in
which a whole day of Cordova will seem so superabundant.
Any little
street will be worthier his study, with its type of passing girls in
white and black mantillas, and its shallow shops of all sorts, their
fronts thrown open, and their interiors flung, as it were, on the
sidewalk. It is said that the streets were the first to be paved in
Europe, and they have apparently not been repaved since 850. This indeed
will not Hold quite true of that thoroughfare, twenty feet wide at
least, which led from our hotel to the Paseo del Gran Capitan. In this
were divers shops of the genteeler sort, and some large cafes, standing
full of men of leisure, who crowded to their doors and windows, with
their hats on and their hands in their pockets, as at a club, and let no
fact of the passing world escape their hungry eyes. Their behavior
expressed a famine of incident in Cordova which was pathetic.
VII
The people did not look very healthy as to build or color, and there was
a sound of coughing everywhere. To be sure, it was now the season of the
first colds, which would no doubt wear off with the coming of next
spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much begging as at
Toledo, because there could not be anywhere. I am sorry I can contribute
no statistics as to the moral or intellectual condition of Cordova;
perhaps they will not be expected or desired of me; I can only say that
the general intelligence is such that no one will own he does not know
anything you ask him even when he does not; but this is a national
rather than a local trait, which causes the stranger to go in many wrong
directions all over the peninsula. I should not say that there was any
noticeable decay of character from the north to the south such as the
attributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan Knowlesian drama
would teach; the Cordovese looked no more shiftless than the haughtiest
citizens of Burgos.
They had decidedly prettier _patios_ and more of them, and they had many
public carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital. Rubber
tires I did not expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a city
where a single course over the pavements of 850 would have worn them to
tatters: but there seems a good deal of public spirit if one may judge
from the fact that it is the municipality which keeps Abderrahman's
mosque in repair. There are public gardens, far pleasanter than those of
Valladolid, which we visited in an interval of the afternoon, and there
is a very personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope of
seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. But there had been no
feast of bulls; and we had to make what we could out of the walking and
driving in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long,
discouraging course there were some good houses, but not many, and the
promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in
private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public ones
as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in the
horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their
hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray. No
ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her
nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but
men of every class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind
of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese:
flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.
I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in
the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that
I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my way
through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of the
man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my
struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate
of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much
labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I
came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to
untangle a little the web that the French and the Aragonese wove in the
conquest and reconquest of the wretched Sicilies; but how was I to
imagine in the Connecticut Western Reserve the scene of Gonsalvo's
victories in Calabria? Even loath Ferdinand the Catholic said they
brought greater glory to his crown than his own conquest of Granada; I
dare say I took some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy of Naples,
and I may have been indignant at his recall and then his retirement from
court by the jealous king. But my present knowledge of these facts, and
of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in 1500, as well as his
exploits as commander of a Spanish armada against the Turks is a recent
debt I owe to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and not to my boyish
researches.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 58 of 101
Words from 58443 to 59483
of 103320
