Not Even In The Suburb Of Triana, Where The Small Boys Again
Consolingly Superabounded, Was The Great National Game Played Among The
Wheels And Hoofs Of The Dusty Streets To Which We Crossed The
Guadalquivir That Afternoon.
To be sure, we were so taken with other
things that a boyish bull-feast might have rioted unnoticed
Under our
horses' very feet, especially on the long bridge which gives you the far
upward and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet and empty
above, so busy and noisy and thronged with shipping below. I suppose
there are lovelier rivers than that - we ourselves are known to brag of
our Pharpar and Abana - but I cannot think of anything more nobly
beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she
has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab
and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only
from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession
beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to
welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of
Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers;
and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching
or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had
some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from
the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish
dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish
palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated
behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its
pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem
power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and
it was these that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana
bridge.
VII
We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were
especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes
with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.
Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit
the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would
willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty
squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually
to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile
potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of
one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and
vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was
beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner;
his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto's,
but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency
with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled
round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my
prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our
course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing
sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent
savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to
the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and
physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated
with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order of
things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells,
especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does
not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy
quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well
as nose, were all stenches.
Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged
children running beside us and after us and screaming, "Minny, niooney,
_ money!"_ in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the
door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the
thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the
sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and
some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with
both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the
road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a
hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could
persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street
in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled the
river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast
from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot
in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might
have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such
horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than
infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid
foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing
steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through
whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I
scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside,
and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir,
painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.
After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left
except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked
out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked
wholesome and kind.
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