Wanderings in Spain

It is now half-past nine o'clock. The crowd on the Prado begins to thin, and the promenaders direct their steps towards the coffee-houses and botillerias which line the Calle d'Alcala and the neighbouring streets.

To us who are accustomed to the dazzling and fairy-like splendour of the Parisian cafés, the coffee-houses of Madrid appear to be nothing more than mere low, twenty-fifth-rate public-houses. The manner in which they are decorated recalls most successfully to your recollection the wretched sheds in which bearded women and living sirens are shown to the public. But this want of splendour is amply compensated by the excellence and variety of the refreshments. I must frankly own that Paris, so superior in everything else, is behindhand in this respect: the art of the limonadier is with us in its infancy. The most celebrated coffee-houses are those of the Bolsa, at the corner of the Calle de Carretas; the Café Nuevo, which is the rendezvous of the exaltados; the Café de – (I have forgotten the name), where those who belong to the moderate party, and who are called cangrejos, that is to say, "crabs," meet; and the Café del Levante, just by the Puerta del Sol. I do not mean to assert that the others are not good, but simply that those I have mentioned are the most popular. I must not forget the Café del Principe, next the theatre of the same name, and which is the customary resort of the actors and authors.

With your leave, we will enter the Café de la Bolsa, which is ornamented with little mirrors, hollowed out behind, so as to form different designs, such as are to be seen in certain German glasses. Here is the list of the bebidas heladas, of the sorbetes, and of the quesitos. The bebida helada (iced drink) is contained in glasses distinguished by the name of grandes or chicos (large or small), and offers a great variety; there is the bebida de naranja (orange), de limon (lemon), de fresa (strawberry), and de guindas (cherries), which are as superior to those frightful bottles of sour currant juice and citric acid, which the proprietors of the most splendid Parisian cafés are not ashamed to serve up to their customers, as real sherry is to authentic vin de Brie: the bebida helada is a kind of liquid ice, a sort of most delicious purée de neige, of the most exquisite flavour. The bebida de almendra blanca (white almonds) is a delightful beverage, which is unknown in France, where we gulp down a something which is dignified by the name of orgeat, and compounded of a number of horrible medicinal materials of some kind or other. You can also procure iced milk, half strawberry, half cherry, which, while your body is boiling in the torrid zone, causes your throat to revel in all the frosts and snows of Greenland. During the daytime, when the ices are not yet ready, you have the agraz, a kind of beverage made of green grapes, and contained in bottles with extraordinarily long necks; the taste of this agraz is slightly acid and exceedingly pleasant. You can also indulge in a bottle of Cerveza de Santa Barbara con limon; but this requires some little preparation. First of all, a bowl and a large spoon are brought, like that with which punch is stirred round. A waiter then advances, carrying a bottle fastened at the top with wire. He undoes this with a vast amount of care, the cork pops out, and the beer is poured into the bowl, into which a small decanter of lemonade has previously been emptied. The whole is then stirred round with the spoon; you fill your glass, and swallow the contents. If this mixture does not please you, you have only to enter one of the orchaterias de chufas, which are generally kept by natives of Valencia. The chufa is a little berry, of the almond species, which grows in the environs of Valencia, and which, when roasted and beaten in a mortar, forms an exquisite beverage, especially when mixed with snow. Prepared in this manner it is extremely refreshing.

To conclude my account of the coffee-houses, I will remark that the sorbetes differ from those in France by being more solid; that the quesitos are little ices, very hard, and shaped like small cheeses; there are some of all sorts, apricot, pine-apple, orange, and so on, as in Paris; but there are likewise some made up with butter (manteca) and eggs not yet formed, and taken from the hens which have been opened on purpose. This custom is peculiar to Spain, for I never heard of this singular piece of refinement anywhere else but at Madrid. They give you also spumas of coffee, chocolate, and other materials. These spumas are a kind of iced whipt cream, as light as a feather, and sometimes powdered with cinnamon grated very fine. All these various compounds are accompanied by barquilos, a kind of cake or wafer rolled up in a long cylindrical shape, through which you drink your bebida, as you would with a syphon, by sucking slowly one of the ends. This is a little piece of refinement which allows you to enjoy the coolness of the beverage longer than you otherwise could do. Coffee is not served up in cups, but in glasses; it is, however, very rarely taken. All these details will perhaps strike the reader as highly fastidious; but if he were exposed, as I am, to a heat of from 30 to 35 degrees, he would consider them deeply interesting. The papers most frequently met with in the coffee-houses are the Eco del Comercio, the Nacional, and the Diario, which gives a list of the various festivals every day, the hour at which mass is performed and sermons preached in the various churches, the degree of heat, lost dogs, young countrywomen who want situations as wet-nurses, criadas who want places, &c. &c. – But it is striking eleven. It is time to return home; the only persons in the Calle d'Alcala are a few promenaders who have stopped beyond the usual hour. There is no one in the streets but the serenos, with their lantern suspended at the end of a pole, their cloak, which is of the same colour as the walls around them, and their measured cry: all that you hear besides this is a chorus of crickets singing, in their little cages decorated with small glass ornaments, their dissyllabic lament. The people of Madrid have a taste for crickets; each house has one hung up at the window in a miniature cage made of wood or wire. They have also a strange affection for quails, which they keep in open osier coops, and which vary, in a very agreeable manner, by their everlasting pue-pue-pue, the crick-crick of the crickets. As Bilboquet remarks, those who are fond of this particular note must be highly delighted.

The Puerta del Sol is not a gate, as any one would suppose, but the façade of a church, painted rose-colour, and decorated with a clock, which is illuminated at night, and also with a large sun with golden rays. It is from the latter that it derives its name of Puerta del Sol. Before the church is a place, or square, traversed, in its greatest length, by the Calle d'Alcala, and crossed by the Calles de Carretas and de la Montera. The Post-office, a large regular building, occupies the corner of the Calle de Carretas, with its façade looking upon the square. The Puerta del Sol is the rendezvous of the idlers of the town, who, it appears, are rather numerous, for from eight o'clock in the morning there is always a dense crowd on the spot. All these grave personages stand about the place, enveloped in their cloaks, although the heat is overpowering, under the frivolous pretence that what protects you from the cold protects you from the heat, too. From time to time an index and forefinger, as yellow as a guinea, are seen to issue from beneath the straight motionless folds of a cloak, and roll up a paper containing a few pieces of chopped cigar, while, shortly afterwards, there rises from the mouth of the grave personage who wears the cloak a cloud of smoke; proving that he is endowed with the power of respiration, a fact which his perfectly motionless appearance might lead any one to doubt. With regard to the papel Español para cigaritas, I may as well take this opportunity of remarking that, as yet, I have not seen a single packet of it. The natives of the country employ ordinary letter-paper, cut into small pieces; the packets, tinted with liquorice-juice, variegated with grotesque designs, and covered with letrillas, or comic songs, are sent to France, for the use of the amateurs of local colouring. Politics form the principal subject of conversation; the seat of war is a favourite topic, and there is more strategy at the Puerta del Sol than on all the battle-fields of all the campaigns in the world. Balmaseda, Cabrera, Palillos, and other adventurers of more or less importance, at the head of different bands, are, every moment, being brought upon the tapis, when things are related of them which make you shudder – atrocities that have gone out of fashion, and long been looked upon as displaying bad taste, even by the Caribbees and Cherokees. Balmaseda, during his last expedition, advanced to within some twenty miles of Madrid, and, having surprised a village near Aranda, amused himself by breaking the teeth of the ayuntamiento and the alcade, and terminated the pastime by nailing horseshoes on the feet and hands of a constitutional curé. When I expressed some astonishment at the perfect indifference with which this piece of intelligence was received, I received for answer that the affair had taken place in Old Castile, and that, consequently, it concerned nobody. This reply sums up the whole history of Spain at the present moment, and furnishes us with a key to very many things which to us in France appear incomprehensible. The fact is, that an inhabitant of New Castile cares no more for anything that happens in Old Castile, than for what occurs in the moon. As forming one great whole, Spain does not yet exist; it is still the kingdoms of Spain, Castile and Leon, Aragon and Navarre, Granada and Murcia, &c.; it is composed of a number of different races, speaking different dialects, and hating one another most cordially. Being a simple-minded foreigner, I spoke warmly against such a refinement of cruelty, but my attention was called to the fact that the curé was a constitutional curé, which considerably extenuated the matter. Espartero's victories, which appear to us, who have been accustomed to the colossal victories under the Empire, rather mediocre, frequently serve as a text for the politicians of the Puerta del Sol. After one of these triumphs, in which two men have been killed, three made prisoners, and a mule seized carrying one sabre and a dozen cartridges, the town is illuminated, and a distribution of oranges and cigars made to the army, producing a degree of enthusiasm easily described. Formerly, and even at present, the nobles used to go into the shops near the Puerta del Sol, and, ordering a chair to be brought, stop there for a good part of the day, conversing with the customers, to the great annoyance of the shopkeeper, who was afflicted with such a proof of familiarity.

Let us enter, if you please, the Post-office, to see whether there are no letters from France. This hankering after letters is an actual disease. You may be sure that the first public building a traveller visits when he arrives in any city, is the Post-office. At Madrid, every letter addressed poste restante is numbered, and the number and name of the person to whom the letter is sent are posted upon a certain pillar. There is a pillar for January, another for February, and so on. You look for your name, observe the number, and go and ask for your letter at the office, where it is delivered up to you without any further formality. At the expiration of a year, if the letters are not fetched away, they are burnt. Under the galleries surrounding the courtyard of the Post-office, and shaded by large spartum blinds, are established all kinds of reading-rooms, like those under the galleries of the Odéon, at Paris, where you go to see the Spanish and foreign papers. The postage is not dear, and, despite the innumerable dangers to which the couriers are exposed on the road, which is almost invariably infested by insurgents and bandits, the service is conducted as regularly as possible. It is on these pillars, too, that poor students post notices to the effect that they are willing to black the boots of some rich cavalier, in order to procure the means of attending their lectures of rhetoric or philosophy.

Let us now go about the town as chance may lead us, for chance is the best guide, especially as Madrid is not rich in architectural beauties, and as one street is as remarkable as another. The first thing that you perceive on the angle of a house or street directly you raise your nose in the air, is a small porcelain plate with the following inscription —Manzana. vicitac. gener. These plates formerly served to number entire blocks or heaps of houses. At present each house is numbered separately, as in Paris. The quantity of plates that decorate the fronts of the houses and inform you that they are insured against fire, would excite your astonishment, especially in a country where there are no fireplaces and no fires. Everything is insured, including even the public monuments and churches. The civil war, it is said, is the cause of this great alacrity in insuring. As no one is certain of not being more or less fried alive by some Balmaseda or other, he endeavours to save at least his house.

The houses of Madrid are built of lath and plaster, and bricks, save the jambs, the belting courses, and the straps, which are sometimes of grey or blue granite. The whole is rough-cast, and painted fantastically enough, sea-green, bluish ash-colour, fawn-colour, canary, and other hues more or less Anacreontic. The windows are surrounded by imitations of architectural ornaments of every description, with an infinite profusion of volutes, scroll-work, little loves and flower-pots. They have likewise large Venetian blinds with broad blue and white stripes, or spartum matting, which is sprinkled with water in order that it may render the wind cool and humid as it passes through. The modern houses are merely whitewashed, or coloured cream-colour like those in Paris. The balconies and miradores jutting out from the walls, somewhat relieve the monotony of so many straight lines with their regular well-defined shadow, and diversify the naturally flat aspect of all these buildings, in which the portions that should be raised in relief are merely painted, as they would be on a scene in a theatre. Fancy all this lighted up with a blazing sun; at certain distances along these streets bathed in light, place a few long-veiled señoras spreading their fans out like parasols and holding them against their cheeks; a few bronzed and wrinkled beggars, clothed in scraps of cloth and rags as rotten as tinder; some few Valencians, half-naked and looking like Bedouins; imagine that you behold rising up between the housetops the small dwarf cupolas, and little bulging bell-turrets, terminated by leaden balls, and belonging to some church or convent, and the result will be rather a strange kind of scene, which will at least prove that you are no longer in the Rue Lafitte, and that you have decidedly left the Parisian asphalte for the time being, even if your feet, which are cut about by the pointed flint-stones of the pavement, had not already convinced you of the fact.

One circumstance struck me as really most astonishing; I allude to the frequency of the following inscription: Juego de Villar, which is repeated every twenty steps. For fear you should imagine that some mystery lies concealed beneath these three sacramental words, I will instantly translate them. They only signify, Game of Billiards. I cannot possibly conceive what can be the use of having so many billiard-rooms; there are enough for the whole universe. After the Juego de Villar, the most common inscription is, Despacho de Bino (wine stores). In these places you can buy Val-de-Peñas, as well as wines of a better quality. The counters are painted in the most gaudy colours, and ornamented with drapery and foliage. The confiterias and pastelerias are likewise very numerous, and ornamented in a very natty manner. Spanish preserves deserve to be particularly mentioned; there is one sort, known by the name of angel's hair (cabello de angel), which is truly exquisite. The pastry is as good as it can be in a country where there is no butter, or where, at least, butter is so dear and so bad that it can hardly be used. The Spanish pastry rather resembles what we call in France petit four. All these various signs are written in abbreviated characters, with the letters entwined in one another; which renders it at first a difficult task for foreigners to understand them; and if ever there were any persons famous for reading signboards, foreigners are most decidedly those persons.

The houses are vast and convenient inside; the rooms are lofty, and the architects have evidently not been cramped for space. In Paris a whole house would be built in the well of certain staircases I have seen here. You traverse a long succession of rooms before reaching that part of the house which is really inhabited, for the furniture of all these said rooms consists only of a little whitewash, or a dull yellow or blue tint, relieved by a fillet of colour and sham panelling. Smoky, black-looking pictures, representing some martyr or other in the act of being beheaded or ripped open, favourite subjects with Spanish painters, are suspended against the walls, most of them having no frames, and hanging in folds on the wood-work. Board flooring is a thing that is not known in Spain – at least, I never saw any there. Every room is paved with bricks; but as these bricks are, during the winter, covered with matting made of grass, and during the summer with matting made of rushes, they are much less disagreeable than they otherwise would be. This matting is made with great taste; it could not be better even if manufactured by savages of the Philippine or Sandwich Islands. There are three things which, in my eyes, determine with the precision of thermometers the state of a people's civilization: these are – its pottery-ware, the degree of skill it possesses in plaiting osiers or straw, and its manner of caparisoning its beasts of burden. If the pottery is handsome, pure in form, as correct as the antique, and with the natural colour of the white or red clay; if the baskets and the matting are fine, wonderfully entwined, and enhanced by arabesques of the most admirably-selected colours; and if the harness is embroidered, stitched, and decorated with bells, tufts of wool, and elegant designs, you may be sure that the people is in a primitive state, still very near that of nature: civilized nations can make neither a pot, a mat, nor a set of harness. At the moment I am writing these lines, there is hanging before me, attached to a column by a small string, the jarra, in which the water I drink is cooling. This jarra is an earthen pot, worth twelve cuartos, – that is to say, about six or seven French sous: its outline is charming, and, with the exception of the productions of Etruscan art, I never saw anything more pure. It spreads out at the top, forming a sort of trefoil with four leaves, each of which has a slight indenture down the middle, so that the water can be poured out in whatever direction the vessel happens to be taken up. The handles, which are ornamented with a small hollow moulding, are most elegantly joined on to the neck and sides; the swell of the latter is delicious. Instead of these charming vases, the wealthy people prefer abominable big-bellied, podgy, ill-shapen English pots, covered with a thick coating of varnish, and resembling large jack-boots polished white. But while talking of boots and pottery we have strayed rather far from our description of the houses; let us resume it without further delay.

The small quantity of furniture found in Spanish houses offers a specimen of the most frightful bad taste, and reminds you of the Goût Messidor and Goût Pyramide. The forms that were popular under the Empire still flourish in all their integrity, and you once more meet mahogany pilasters terminated by sphinxes' heads of green bronze, as well as the brass rods and frame of garlands in the style of Pompeii; all which objects have long since disappeared from the face of the civilized world. There is not a single piece of furniture of carved wood, not a single table inlaid with burgau, not a single Japan cabinet – in a word, there is nothing. The Spain of former days has completely passed away; all that remains of it are a few pieces of Persian carpeting and some damask curtains. On the other hand, however, there is a most extraordinary profusion of straw chairs and sofas. The walls are disfigured with false columns and false cornices, or daubed over with some kind of tint or other which resembles water-colours. On the tables and the étagères are arranged little biscuit-china or porcelain figures, representing troubadours, Mathilda and Malek Adel, and a variety of other subjects equally ingenious, but long since gone out of fashion: there are also poodle dogs blown in glass, plated candlesticks with tapers stuck in them, and a hundred other magnificent things, which would take me too long to describe; what I have already said will perhaps be thought sufficient. I have not the courage to dwell on the atrocious coloured prints, which are hung on the walls under the absurd pretence that they adorn them. There are perhaps some exceptions to this state of things, but they are rare. Do not run away with the notion that the houses of the higher classes are furnished with more taste and richness. My description is most scrupulously exact, and holds good of the houses of persons keeping their carriage, and six or eight servants. The blinds are always drawn down and the shutters half closed, so that the light which reigns in the apartments is about a third only of that outside. A person must become accustomed to this darkness before he can discern the different objects, especially if he comes from the street. Those who are in the room see perfectly, but those who enter it are blind for eight or ten minutes, especially if one of the rooms they have to traverse is lighted up, which is often the case.

The heat at Madrid is excessive, and breaks out suddenly without any spring to prepare people for it. This has given rise to the saying with regard to the temperature of Madrid: "Three months of winter, and nine months of – :" the reader can perhaps supply the deficiency. It is impossible to protect yourself from this flood of fire otherwise than by remaining in low rooms, which are almost buried in complete obscurity, and where the humidity is constantly kept up by a continual watering. This craving for coolness has given rise to the fashion of having bucaros, a savage and strange piece of refinement which would certainly possess no charm for our French ladies, but which appears to the Spanish beauties to be a most useful and elegant invention.

The bucaros are a sort of pot, formed of red American earth, rather similar to that of which the bowls of Turkish pipes are formed; they are of all sizes and of all forms, some being gilt along the rims, and decorated with coarsely-painted flowers. As they are no longer manufactured in America, these bucaros are becoming very scarce, and in a few years will be as fabulous and as difficult to be met with as old Sèvres china; of course when this is the case, every one will want to possess some.

The manner of using the bucaros is as follows: – Six or eight of them are placed upon small marble tables or the projecting ledges round the room, and filled with water. You then retire to a sofa, in order to wait until they produce the customary effect and to enjoy it with the proper degree of calm. The clay soon assumes a deeper tint, the water penetrates through its pores, and the bucaros begin to perspire, and emit a kind of perfume which is very like the odour of wet mortar, or of a damp cellar that has not been opened for some time. This perspiration of the bucaros is so profuse, that at the expiration of an hour half the water has evaporated. That which is left has got a nauseous, earthy, cisterny taste, which is, however, pronounced delicious by the aficionados. Half-a-dozen bucaros are sufficient to charge the air of a drawing-room with such an amount of humidity that it immediately chills any one entering the apartment, and may be considered as a kind of cold vapour-bath. Not content with merely enjoying the perfume and drinking the water, some persons chew small pieces of the bucaros, which they swallow after having reduced them to powder.