Three Dates · I

In a drawing portfolio that I still keep, filled with light sketches made during some of my semi-artistic excursions to the city of Toledo, three dates are written down.

The events whose memory these numbers guard are, to a certain extent, insignificant. Nevertheless, with their recollection I have amused myself on several nights of insomnia by forming a novel, more or less sentimental or gloomy, according to whether my imagination was more or less exalted and prone to cheerful or terrible ideas.

If on the morning following one of these nocturnal and extravagant deliriums I had been able to write down the strange episodes of the impossible stories that I forge before my eyelids close entirely—those stories whose vague outcome finally floats, undecided, at that point separating wakefulness from sleep—they would surely form a nonsensical book, but original and perhaps interesting.

That is not what I intend to do now. These light and, so to speak, impalpable fantasies are in a certain way like butterflies, which cannot be caught in one’s hands without the golden dust of their wings remaining between one’s fingers.

I shall go on, therefore, to limit myself to briefly narrating the three events that usually serve as an epigraph for the chapters of my dreamed-of novels; the three isolated points that I usually bring together in my mind by means of a series of ideas like a thread of light; the three themes, in short, upon which I make a thousand and one variations, what we might call the absurd symphonies of the imagination.

There is in Toledo a narrow, twisted, and dark street that preserves so faithfully the trace of the hundred generations that have inhabited it; that speaks with such eloquence to the artist’s eye, and reveals to him so many secret points of affinity between the ideas and customs of each century and the form and special character imprinted upon its most insignificant works, that I would close its entrances with a barrier, and place upon the barrier a placard with this inscription:

«In the name of poets and artists; in the name of those who dream and those who study, civilization is forbidden to touch a single one of these bricks with its demolishing and prosaic hand.»

Entering this street at one of its ends is a massive, flattened, and dark arch that supports a covered passageway.

On its keystone there is a coat of arms, already broken and eaten away by the action of the years, in which ivy grows, which, stirred by the air, floats above the helmet that crowns it like a plume of feathers.

Beneath the vault and embedded in the wall, one sees a reredos with its blackened canvas impossible to decipher, its gilded and Churrigueresque frame, its little lantern hanging from a cord, and its wax ex-votos.

Beyond this arch, which bathes that place in its shadow, giving it a tinge of indescribable mystery and sadness, two rows of dark, uneven, and strange houses extend on both sides, each one of its own shape, dimensions, and color. Some are constructed of rough and uneven stones, with no other ornaments than some blazonry coarsely sculpted over the doorway; others are of brick, and have an Arab arch serving as their entrance, two or three ajimeces opened at a whim in a cracked wall, and a bay window ending in a high weather vane. There are some with a trace belonging to no order of architecture, yet having a patch of all of them; which are a finished model of a special and known genre, or a curious sample of the extravagances of a period of art.

These have a wooden balcony with an absurd shed; those a recently plastered Gothic window with a few flowerpots; the one further on some painted tiles in the door frame, enormous nails on the panels, and two column shafts, perhaps coming from a Moorish alcazar, embedded in the wall.

The palace of a magnate converted into a tenement courtyard; the house of an alfaqui inhabited by a canon; a Jewish synagogue transformed into a Christian oratory; a convent raised upon the ruins of an Arab mosque, of which the tower still remains standing; a thousand strange and picturesque contrasts, a thousand and one curious samples of different races, civilizations, and epochs epitomized, so to speak, in a hundred yards of terrain. Here is everything to be found in this street: a street built over many centuries, a narrow, misshapen, dark street with an infinity of twists, where each person, when raising their dwelling, took a projection, left a nook, or made an angle according to their taste, without consulting level, height, or regularity; a street rich in uncalculated combinations of lines, with a true luxury of capricious details, with so many and so many accidents that each time it offers something new to the one who studies it.

When I first went to Toledo, while I was busy making some sketches of San Juan de los Reyes, I had the necessity of crossing it every afternoon to make my way to the convent from the inn with pretensions of a hotel where I was lodging.

I almost always crossed it from one end to the other, without finding a single person in it, without its profound silence being disturbed by any other noise than the sound of my steps, without seeing, even by chance, behind the blinds of a balcony, the screen of a door, or the grating of a window, the wrinkled face of a curious old woman or the black, almond-shaped eyes of a Toledan girl. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was crossing through the middle of a deserted city, abandoned by its inhabitants since a remote epoch.

One afternoon, however, as I passed in front of an extremely old and dark mansion, on whose high walls three or four windows of unequal shapes could be seen, distributed without order or reason, I happened to fix my gaze on one of them. It was formed by a large ogival arch, surrounded by a festoon of sharp, jagged leaves. The arch was closed by a light partition, recently constructed and white as snow, in the middle of which was seen, as if contained within the first, a small window with a frame and green ironwork, a pot of blue bellflowers whose stems climbed to entangle themselves among the granite work, and stained-glass windows with leaded panes and a curtain of a light, transparent white fabric.

The window in itself was already worthy of drawing attention on account of its character; but what most powerfully contributed to my fixing my gaze upon it was noting that when I turned my head to look at it, the curtains had lifted for a moment only to fall back down, concealing from my eyes the person who was undoubtedly watching me at that very instant.

I continued on my way preoccupied with the idea of the window, or rather of the curtain, or more clearly still, of the woman who had lifted it; for undoubtedly, at that window so poetic, so white, so green, so full of flowers, only a woman could appear, and when I say a woman, let it be understood that she is supposed to be young and pretty.

I passed another afternoon; I passed with the same care; I hurried my heels, stunning the silent street with the sound of my steps, which two or three echoes repeated, answering one another; I looked at the window, and the curtain rose once again.

The truth is that behind it I really saw nothing; but with my imagination I thought I discovered a shape, the shape of a woman, in fact.

That day I became distracted two or three times while drawing. And other days passed, and whenever I passed by, the curtain rose anew, remaining thus until the sound of my steps faded away, and from afar I turned my eyes toward it for the very last time.

My drawings made little progress. In that cloister of San Juan de los Reyes; in that cloister so mysterious and bathed in sorrowful melancholy, seated upon the broken capital of a column, my portfolio upon my knees, my elbow upon the portfolio and my forehead between my hands, to the sound of the water running there with an incessant murmur, to the noise of the leaves of the wild and abandoned garden, which the twilight breeze stirred, how much did I not dream of that window and that woman! I knew her; I already knew what her name was and even what the color of her eyes was.

I watched her cross the vast and solitary courtyards of the very ancient house, cheering them with her presence like a ray of sun gilding ruins. Other times it seemed to me I saw her in a garden with very high and very dark walls, with very stout and aged trees, which must have been there at the back of that sort of gothic palace where she lived, gathering flowers and sitting alone on a stone bench, and sighing there while she plucked their petals thinking of... who knows?... Perhaps of me; what do I say perhaps? of me surely. Oh! how many dreams, how many follies, how much poetry that window awakened in my soul while I remained in Toledo!...

But the time I was to spend in the city elapsed. One day, sorrowful and dejected, I put all my papers into my briefcase; I said farewell to the world of chimeras, and took a seat in the coach for Madrid.

Before the highest of the towers of Toledo had vanished on the horizon, I poked my head out the carriage door to see it once more, and I thought of the street.

I still had my portfolio under my arm, and as I turned back to my seat, while we rounded the hill that suddenly hid the city from my eyes, I took out my pencil and jotted down a date. It is the first of the three, the one I call the date of the window.

After a few months I found another opportunity to leave the court for three or four days. I dusted off my sketching portfolio, tucked it under my arm, and provided with a quire of paper, half a dozen pencils, and a few napoleons—lamenting that the railway line was not yet completed—I packed myself into a vehicle to retrace in reverse the locations where Tirso’s famous comedy From Toledo to Madrid takes place.

Once established in the historic city, I set myself to revisiting the places that had most caught my attention on my first journey, and some others that I knew hitherto only by name.

Thus I let most of the time I could spare for my little artistic expedition slip by in long and solitary walks among its oldest quarters, finding a true pleasure in losing myself in that confusing labyrinth of dead ends, narrow streets, dark passageways, and steep, impassable slopes.

One afternoon, the last that I was to remain in Toledo for the time being, after one of those long excursions through the unknown, I could not even say by what streets I reached a large, deserted square, seemingly forgotten even by the town’s own inhabitants, and as if hidden away in one of its most secluded corners.

The refuse and rubble, dumped there from time immemorial, had so identified themselves with the ground, as it were, that it presented the broken, mountainous aspect of a miniature Switzerland. Upon the hillocks and ravines formed by its undulations grew, to their heart’s content, mallows of colossal proportions, mounds of gigantic nettles, creeping clumps of white bellflowers, meadows of that nameless, fine, dark green grass, and swaying gently to the slight breath of the air, standing out like kings among all the other parasitic plants, the poetic yet vulgar hedge mustard, the true flower of the wastelands and the ruins.

Scattered across the ground, some half-buried, others almost hidden by the tall grasses, an infinity of fragments of a thousand and one different things could be seen there, broken and cast at various times into that place, where they came to form strata in which it would have been easy to trace a course of historical geology.

Glazed colored Moorish tiles, pieces of marble and jasper columns, fragments of a hundred different kinds of bricks, large ashlar stones covered in verdure and moss, splinters of wood now almost turned to dust, remnants of ancient coffered ceilings, rags of cloth, strips of leather, and a hundred other formless and nameless objects were what appeared at first sight upon the surface, likewise catching the attention and dazzling the eyes with a myriad of sparks of light scattered over the greenery like a handful of diamonds thrown down by the handful, which, upon closer inspection, were nothing other than small fragments of glass, pots, plates, and vessels that, reflecting the sun’s rays, feigned a whole heaven of microscopic and dazzling stars.

Such was the pavement of that square, paved here and there with small pebbles of various hues forming patterns, here and there covered with large flagstones of slate, and for the most part, as we have said, resembling a garden of parasitic plants, or a barren and uncultivated meadow.

The buildings that traced its irregular shape were no less strange and worthy of study.

On one side it was closed by a row of dark and small hovels, with their jagged roofs of chimneys, weathercocks and sheds, their marble corner-stones fastened to the corners with an iron ring, their flat or narrow balconies, their little windows with flowerpots, and their streetlamp surrounded by a wire mesh protecting the smoked glass from the boys’ stone-throwing.

Another front was formed by a blackened wall, full of cracks and crevices, where some reptiles poked their heads with small, bright eyes out from among the moss leaves; a towering wall, made of thick ashlar blocks, sown with the hollows of doors and balconies, walled up with stone and mortar, and to one of whose ends there joined, forming an angle with it, a brick wall, chipped and full of putlog holes, stained in stretches with red, green, or yellowish inks, and crowned by a hedge of dry hay, among which ran a few stems of climbing vines.

This was nothing more, so to speak, than the wings of the strange scenery which, upon entering the square, suddenly presented itself to my eyes, captivating my spirit and holding it in suspense for some time, for the true culminating point of the panorama, the building that gave it its general tone, could be seen rising at the back of the square, more whimsical, more original, infinitely more beautiful in its artistic disorder than all those that rose around it.