Avila is a city in which it should be pleasant to linger. There is nothing much to do there and little to see. The walls, greatly restored, are like the walls of an old city in a book of hours. The neat, round towers placed at regular intervals look like the trim curls of a seventeenth century peruke. The cathedral with its fortress-like air has not much to offer you but an effect of sombreness, and its Gothic porches and windows are not so good as many that you have seen elsewhere. Besides, now we are all a little bored with Gothic architecture. But the houses of the old hidalgos have still kept something of their grave stateliness; those grand escutcheons over the doorways are very impressive. A silent city. There are many streets in which you may stand for an hour without seeing a passer-by. The men in Avila wear black and the women are in deep mourning. The air even in summer has a certain sharpness; in spring and autumn the wind blows bitter, and in winter the cold is severe. It is Castile with its reserve, its taciturnity and its ceremonial stiffness. But the hotel is one of the worst in Spain. The rooms are bare and comfortless, it is none too clean and it smells; the food, served in a grim, large dining-room in which there is a harsh blaze of electric light, is frightful; one uneatable dish follows another, thrown at you by a slovenly waiter with dirty hands, on cold plates, and the cellar can provide hardly any of the wines the list offers.
I can eat almost anything, if not with pleasure, without distaste, and a bad dinner does nothing to disturb my serenity. I can say with truth that I have a soul above food, but alas, though my spirit is strong my flesh is weak, and a poor meal, which I have devoured without complaint, will make me as sick as a dog for a week. That body which Fray Roldan spoke of as the asinillo, the little donkey, will let my dancing spirit take no liberties with it. On one such occasion in Avila, having at last fallen asleep after tossing from side to side on my hard bed for hours, I was awakened by the crowing of a cock, and a few minutes later I heard the sudden hubbub of a bell. It was quite startling in that deep night. It occurred to me that they must be ringing for early mass. I got up, slipped a pair of trousers over my pyjamas and put on a great coat; the night porter opened the door for me and I walked across the street. The cathedral was in darkness but for one chapel in which burned an electric light. A sacristan, muffled up in a cloak, with a grey woollen scarf over his mouth and nose, was lighting the candles. I saw the backs of three women in black kneeling before the altar. A peasant-woman, with a basket on her arm and a handkerchief over her head, came along just before the priest. He seemed to be in a hurry, a fat little man with grey hair and an earthy face; he walked so quickly that the acolyte behind him was almost running. As he uttered the first words of the mass, gabbling unintelligibly in a low voice, a man stepped out of the darkness. I glanced at him with surprise. I had not thought that anyone was there but those four women. He was a tall, thin man, with a voluminous cloak draped round him; he had flashing eyes under bushy eyebrows, a big hooked nose and an immense head of long, curling, grey hair; his face was harsh and rugged. So might have looked one of the old conquistadores. He did not kneel. He stood motionless, his mouth tight-closed, with his strange eyes fixed on the altar. I wondered what he did there. It was bitterly cold. I felt very sick. I went back to the hotel and they gave me goat's milk with my coffee and rancid butter with my bread. It was too much.
You must not be blamed then if in Avila you say that it is impossible to get a decent meal in Spain. But it is an error. You can eat very well in Spain, only you must know where to go and how to set about it. In the first place you must decide to make your meal of a single dish and it may be that this is a very wise thing. For thus you do not overeat. However good one dish is you can only eat as much as will satisfy your hunger.
The Spaniards are coarse, but sparing eaters. They do not seem to mind if their food is bad and ill-cooked, they will eat fish that is far from fresh, and bollito and garbanzos, boiled beef and chick peas, monotonous fare, day after day without disgust. They have always been frugal. Indeed one of the great virtues of the Spanish soldier was that he could march and fight on so little food that you would have thought it hardly enough to keep body and soul together. The traveller, you read in the picaresque novels, was content to make a meal on a hunk of bread and an onion. On the other hand it must be admitted that when it came to a feast their capacity was enormous. When Sempronio and Parmeno wanted to offer their two girl friends and the old bawd Celestina a supper they sent along (for five persons) a ham, six pairs of young chickens and some pigeons, Murviedo wine and white bread. When I first went to Spain it was difficult, except in one or two hotels in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville where they made a poor imitation of French rolls, to get any bread except a sort of double roll of a doughy white substance unappetising to look at, tasteless to eat and heavy on the stomach. Now you can get French bread in any town of consequence, but it is neither crisp nor savoury. If you want good bread you must go to some of the mountain villages in the north, where, if you are lucky enough to get in just when it comes from the baker's, you may eat a loaf of rye bread, beautiful in colour and sweet-smelling, with a crust that crumbles in the mouth deliciously. With this and some butter–almost unobtainable in Spain thirty years ago, but now to be found everywhere–a few olives, anchovies and a goat cheese you can make a repast fit for a king.
Of course no one who has any sense will eat the table d'hôte meals provided in hotels. They are long and bad after the French style in the first-class hotels; they are long and no worse after the Spanish style in the second class. Their monotony is deplorable. In both you will get the same insipid clear soup; and you will seldom see any fish but the coarse, tough, savourless merluza. Hake! There is only one good soup in Spain, a soup of rice and vegetables and little bits of meat. It is called tres quartos de ora. You must order it beforehand, for as its name implies it takes three quarters of an hour to make; and of course not at an hotel, but in some little restaurant in a side street. It is a meal in itself, and a very good one.
But even in the hotels, in those not quite of the first class that is, if they are not very busy and you will talk it over in a friendly way with the head waiter or the cook, you can often get very good things to eat. Thus at Alicante, one of those agreeable towns in which there is nothing whatever to see, to which I went in the dead season, I got an arroz à la Valenciana which was perfect. I drank the local wine with it, a pale wine, very delicious, with a faint flavour of muscatel. I forgot to say that you will never like Spanish fare unless you can stomach food cooked in oil; if you insist that everything you eat should be cooked in butter then you must expect nothing from Spain but the gratifications of the spirit; the table can have no pleasures to offer you.
Arroz à la Valenciana is the local dish of Valencia and I dare say it was invented in that dull and noisy city. When Ruy Dias de Bivar conquered Valencia he proceeded according to the poem as follows:
'With my Cid to the Alcazar went straight his wife and daughters.
Once there he led them to the highest point of all,
Where did fair eyes look on all sides around.
At their feet they behold the city, Valencia where it lies,
And yonder on the other side within their view is the sea.'
I like to think that then he took them by the hand and led them to where was waiting for them a goodly dish of arroz à la Valenciana. I wish that Professor Peers who spent some months there, I believe, had for a little while diverted his erudite studies on El Cid Campeador (an engaging ruffian) to look into the origins of this tasty dish. I should like to know whether it was the discovery of a Moor of genius, or whether it invented itself by accident, simultaneously, in the kitchens of a hundred Moorish housewives. Though it is called after Valencia it is eaten all along the coast from Barcelona to Malaga. In Andalusia it is called paella. It is never bad and sometimes it is of an excellence that surpasses belief. Rice is of course its foundation, saffron and red peppers give it a Spanish tang; it has chicken in it, clams, mussels, prawns and I know not what. It takes a long time to make and is a great deal of trouble. It is worth the time and worth the trouble. But the best arroz I ever ate was at Tarragona.
Tarragona has a cathedral that is grey and austere, very plain, with immense, severe pillars; it is like a fortress; a place of worship for headstrong, violent and cruel men. The night falls early within its walls and then the columns in the aisles seem to squat down on themselves and darkness shrouds the Gothic arches. It terrifies you. It is like a dungeon. I was there last on a Monday in Holy Week and from the pulpit a preacher was delivering a Lenten sermon. Two or three naked electric globes threw a cold light that cut the outline of the columns against the darkness as though with scissors. It only just fell upon the crowd, mostly women, who sat, between the chancel and the choir, huddled together as though they cowered in fear of a foe that besieged the city. With violent gestures, in a loud, scolding voice, the preacher poured forth with extreme rapidity a torrent of denunciation. Each angry, florid phrase was like a blow and one blow followed another with vicious insistence. From the farthest end of the majestic church, winding about the columns and curling round the groining of the arches, down the great austere nave and along the dungeon-like aisles, that rasping, shrewish voice pursued you.
But a devout admirer had entertained the preacher at luncheon that day in the hotel in which I was staying. It was quite a party. There were the host's grey-haired and corpulent wife, his two sons with their wives, or his two daughters with their husbands (I could only guess), and eight or nine children of various ages, whom I tried to sort out. The preacher tucked in to the arroz like one o'clock. It comforted me at that moment to remember this. It was a bad, bad world, but a merciful providence had allowed occasional alleviations to the miserable lot of man, and among these must undoubtedly be placed arroz à la Valenciana as we had both eaten it that noon at Tarragona.
In almost every town in Spain you can find a restaurant in which you can eat well enough to satisfy an exigent taste. In Madrid you can find half a dozen. But there is one that should be known to all travellers. It is in the Plaza Herradores. It is bare and comfortless; you sit on a hard chair; the linen is coarse and the light is harsh. But you do not care, for your mouth waters with pleasant anticipation: you are going to eat sucking-pig. Four or five of them lie on a dish in the window, with cut throats, and they look so like newborn babies that it gives you quite a turn. But you must avert your mind resolutely from this notion. They are killed at three weeks old. It is impossible to describe how exquisite they are, how tender, how succulent, how juicy, and what spiritual ecstasy there is in the crackling: just as there is nothing really to say about a symphony, you must listen to it; so there is nothing to be said about a sucking-pig, you must eat it.
For a reason that I have never been able to discover you eat much better in the north of a country than in the south. The English cherish the ingenuous notion that you can eat well anywhere in France. It is not true. They think that you can go to no restaurant in France, to no hotel, in which you cannot get a good omelette. It is not true. You cannot eat well south of Vienne. And in Andalusia you eat romantically rather than to the satisfaction of your palate. My thoughts wander back to a tavern in Seville, just off the Sierpes, where the manzanilla was good and the innkeeper got his hams from Estramadura. You used to go there late at night, after the zarzuela at the theatre was over, and order yourself half a portion of smoked ham and a dish of black, juicy olives A boy would cut across the street and bring you from the cook-shop a plate of fried fish . You sat in a little cubicle, on a wooden bench, with a companion (for who can eat alone?) and in the next cubicle, if you were in luck, there would be a little party, one of the men with a guitar, and after a long introductory twanging a woman broke into the melancholy, Moorish wail of a seguidilla. Ole, Ole!
The Spanish are very fond of sea-food. The itinerant salesmen with their baskets of shrimps, huge prawns, clams and sea-urchins do a great trade as they wander from tavern to tavern. The fish in the fried fish shops is very fresh and provided of course that you do not mind its being cooked in oil, exceedingly good. But if you want to eat fish you must really go to Vigo. When, notwithstanding all I have written, I am inclined with melancholy to agree with those who say that you cannot eat well in Spain, I think of Vigo and tell myself that this is nonsense. Vigo is one of the few ports in Europe where you can get fish. Boulogne is another. There are none in England. I have never eaten a better luncheon in my life than I ate at Vigo. There was every variety of fish as hors d'œuvre, clams, prawns, mussels, anchovies and a dozen more, a shrimp omelette, and then a delicious fried fish that you knew had come out of the sea that very morning, kid, very tender and good, and two or three dishes to follow. But these, my hunger satisfied, I left untouched. It was a wonderful meal.
But Vigo, alas, does not hold for me only this charming memory; it holds for me also the memory of an opportunity missed, and I cannot think of it without some pricking of conscience. It was like this. I stopped at Vigo on my way from Santiago to Salamanca. I had discovered from the map that it was not easy to find one's way out of the town, and when after luncheon I was asking the porter of the hotel to direct me, a small boy came up and offered to show me. To my surprise, for Vigo is on the western coast of Spain, a little north of Portugal, he spoke in French and not only in French but in the unmistakable accent of the Midi. I asked him what this meant. He told me he was born in Marseilles. I bade him jump in the car and we drove off.
He said he was fourteen, but he was undersized and looked less. He was very thin, almost in rags, with a pinched, sallow face all eyes. In the intervals of directing us through narrow streets and round unexpected turnings he told me that he was a foundling who had been taken care of in the hospital in Marseilles for lost children. A few months before, because he was unhappy, he had run down to the harbour and stowed away in a sailing ship which he learnt was about to sail. He did not know whither she was bound. They did not find him till they were well out at sea, and when they did they beat him and put him to work in the cook's galley. It was a French boat and he was afraid they would take him back to France and return him to the hospital; so when they touched at Vigo he ran away again and hid himself till she sailed. He had nothing but the clothes he stood up in, not a penny in his pocket, and no papers of any sort to identify him. His only name was the name they had given him at the hospital. I do not suppose anyone could be more alone in the world.
'How do you live?' I asked him.
'Oh, I manage. I run errands. Sometimes someone gives me a few coppers.'
'Don't you starve often?'
'Oh, I don't say I'm not hungry sometimes. I don't care. I'd sooner die than go back to the hospital.'
'And where do you sleep?'
'In the street. It's all right in summer. It's cold in winter, but I manage. I know a shed that's not locked and I can get in there whenever I want to. You see, I like my liberty.'
He had the meridional gift of the gab and he expressed himself with a fine flow of language, with eloquent shrugs of his little thin shoulders and with jaunty waves of the hand. He made light of everything. He was not only cheerful, he was gay. Then we reached the end of the town and the high road stretched before us. There was no longer any possibility of losing the way. I stopped the car and the boy jumped out.
'Bon voyage,' he said, with a smile, as we started off again.
I had rewarded him adequately, even generously I hope, for the service he had done me, but that is all I can say. The encounter was so unexpected, the boy's story so strange, that I had not time to bethink myself. When it was too late I wished that instead of a few pesetas I had given him enough to keep him for a month or two at least. I wished I had offered to take him on to Salamanca. I do not know what he would have done there, but he might have liked the adventure, and at all events I could have given him board and lodging for a while. For there, in flesh and blood, to-day was the picaroon of history. It was when he was fourteen that Agustin de Rojas ran away to Seville to be a soldier; it was when he was fourteen that Lazarillo de Tormes left his father's house to make his astonishing way in the world. Since then I have often, not without uneasiness, wondered what has happened to this little boy. I wonder if he has starved to death. I wonder if he has gone to gaol. (That would not matter so much, it would be part of the luck of the game). I wonder if the authorities got hold of him and sent him back to his own country. He was quick-witted, courageous and hardy. I have a feeling that he would find himself in no predicament that he could not wriggle out of. I have a hope that like those ancestors of his that he does not know, the careless picaroons of the Golden Age, he will go from master to master, now with good hap, now with bad, from one improbable adventure to another, light-fingered of course, keeping his head, with his bright alert eyes always on the watch to seize the passing chance and so make himself in the end master of the world whose only sense, so far as he can tell, is that it is there for him to exploit.
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