SPANISH LETTER
have something to contribute to polite conversation when
The Song
of Bernadette
is discussed, of persisting to exhaustion among the strag–
glers in the chase after desirable things, the images of the earthly kingdom
reflected in every casual American, is nevertheless not
the
wretchedness.
That you see in the tenements and the inhabited ruins, old kilns and
caves, the human swarms in the dry rot of Vallecas and Mataderos.
Summer is arid in Madrid, and cloudless. The sound of thunder is
very rare. When it is heard, the maids cry out,
"Una tormenta!"
and
dart through the pension slamming the windows. Across the air-shaft,
the blonde Bibi calls "A storm!" to me in her tense, warlike voice,
wavers behind the smoky glass and leaves the thick drapes trembling
like the curtains of a stage on the last cry of a tragedy. Then the rain
begins with a plunge, falling with the heaviness of drops of mercury.
In ten minutes it is over; ten minutes more and it has dried. On
the hottest days the streets and the locust trees are watered morning
and evening. The parks are divided by irrigation ditches and are grass–
less. The only grass I saw in Madrid, that before the Prado, was kept
alive by continual sprinkling. As one goes out from the center of the
city the green becomes more and more thin until, from the blank;
sun-hardened flats of the outlying districts, overlooking the trenches
which have sunk and are grown over with brown weeds and brown
wires, there is only the scattered green of gardens on the immense plain,
each garden with the diagonal pole of a well sweep rising above the
Indian corn.
The Manzanares River is almost empty, yet on Sunday,
in
the
section called the Bombilla where, in places, the water
has
collected
to a depth of several inches, there are hundreds of bathers and picnickers
in throngs at the working-class cafes for miles along the shores, the
gente humilde,
choking the streets and bridges and lying on blankets
on the dusty banks under the scanty acacias. It is like a vision of the
first moments of resurrection, seeing those families lying in the smother–
ing dust and milling in the roads. On the city side there are homes
in the ruins, fenced round with the wreckage of bombardments and
rolls of barbed wire. A few gypsies live in the Bombilla, in wagons.
They are not like the Andalusian gypsies; they have a citified, depressed
air; the women, filthy and gaunt, sit by their iron pots; the children lie
naked on sacking. Goats are tethered to the wheels and axles and under
one wagon I saw two apes crouching spiritlessly. A factory that makes
concrete tubes rises on the other side-a long, proudly lettered, modern
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