If it had nothing else than the Prado it would be worth spending a month in every spring, if you have money to spend a month in any European capital. But when you can have the Prado and the bullfight season at the same time with El Escorial not two hours to the north and Toledo to the south, a fine road to Avila and a fine road to Segovia, which is no distance from La Granja, it makes you feel very badly, all question of immortality aside, to know that you will have to die and never see it again.
The Prado is altogether characteristic of Madrid. From the outside it looks as unpicturesque as an American High School building. The pictures are so simply arranged, so easy to see, so well-lighted and with no attempt, with one exception, the Velasquez of the small maids of honor, to theatricalize or set off masterpieces that the tourist looking in the red or blue guide book to see which are the famous ones feels vaguely disappointed. The colors have kept so wonderfully in the dry mountain air and the pictures are so simply hung and easy to see that the tourist feels cheated. I have watched them being puzzled.
These cannot be great pictures, the colors are too fresh and they are too simple to see. These pictures are hung as though in a modern dealer’s gallery where they are being shown off to their best and clearest advantage in order to be sold. It cannot be right, the tourist thinks. There must be a catch somewhere. They get their money’s worth in Italian galleries where they cannot find any given picture nor see it any too well if they do find it. That way they feel they are seeing great art. Great art should have great frames and needs either red plush or bad lighting to back it up.
It is as though, after having known of certain things only through reading pornographic literature, the tourist should be introduced to an attractive woman quite unclothed with no draperies, no concealments and no conversation and only the plainest of beds. He would probably want a book to aid him or at least a few properties or suggestions. That may be one reason there are so many books on Spain. For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her. France sells better than books on France.
The longest books on Spain are usually written by Germans who make one intensive visit and then never return. I should say that it is probably a good system, if one has to write books on Spain, to write them as rapidly as possible after a first visit as several visits could only confuse the first impressions and make conclusions much less easy to draw. Also the one-visit books are much surer of everything and are bound to be more popular. Books like Richard Ford’s have never had the popularity of the bedside mysticism of such a book as Virgin Spain. The author of this book once published a piece in a now dead little magazine called S4N explaining how he did his writing. Any historian of letters wanting to explain certain phenomena of our writing can look it up in the files of that magazine.
My copy is in Paris or I could quote it in full, but the gist of it was how this writer lay naked in his bed in the night and God sent him things to write, how he «was in touch ecstatically with the plunging and immobile all.» How he was, through the courtesy of God, «everywhere and everywhen.» The italics are his or maybe they are God’s. It didn’t say in the article. After God sent it he wrote it. The result was that unavoidable mysticism of a man who writes a language so badly he cannot make a clear statement, complicated by whatever pseudo-scientific jargon is in style at the moment. God sent him some wonderful stuff about Spain, during his short stay there preparatory to writing of the soul of the country, but it is often nonsense. The whole thing is what, to make a belated entry into the pseudo-scientific field, I call erectile writing.
It is well known, or not known, whichever you prefer, that due to a certain congestion or other, trees for example look different to a man in that portentous state and a man who is not. All objects look different. They are slightly larger, more mysterious, and vaguely blurred. Try it yourself. Now there has or had arisen in America a school of writers who (this is old Dr. Hemingstein the great psychiatrist deducing) had, it would seem, by conserving these congestions, sought to make all objects mystic through the slight distortion of vision that unrelieved turgidness presents. The school seems to be passing now, or to have passed, and it was an interesting mechanical experiment while it lasted, and full of pretty phallic images drawn in the manner of sentimental valentines, but it would have amounted to more if only the vision of those writers had been a little more interesting and developed when, say, not so congested.
I wonder what such a book as Virgin Spain would have been like if written after a few good pieces of that sovereign specific for making a man see clearly. Perhaps it was. We pseudo-scientific coves may be all wrong. But to those inner-searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer, it seems as though, had the brain been cleared sufficiently, by a few good pieces, there might have been no book at all.
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
CHAPTER SIX
If you go first to a corrida in Madrid you can go down into the ring and walk about before the fight[2]. The gates into the corrals and the patio de caballos are open and there in the courtyard you will see the line of horses against the wall, and the picadors arriving on the horses they have ridden in from town, these horses having been ridden from the bull ring by the red-bloused monos or bull-ring servants to the lodgings in the town where the picadors live, so the picador, dressed in his white shirt, narrow black four-in-hand tie, brocaded jacket, wide sash, bowl-topped hat with the pompom on the side and the thick buckskin trousers that cover the steel leaf armor over the right leg, may mount and ride through the streets and in the traffic along the carretera de Aragon out to the ring; the mono sometimes riding behind his saddle, sometimes on another horse he has led out; these few horsemen in the stream of carriages, carts, taxis and motor cars serving to advertise the bullfights, to tire the horses ridden, and to spare the matador from having to provide room for the picador in his coach or motor.
As you ride toward the ring the best way to go is on one of the horse-drawn busses that leave the Puerta del Sol. You can sit on the top and see all the other people who are going and if you watch the crowd of vehicles you will see a motor car pass packed full of bullfighters in their costumes. All you will see will be their heads with the flat black-topped hats, their gold or silver brocade covered shoulders and their faces. If, in one car, there are several men in silver or dark jackets and only one in gold and while the others may be laughing, smoking and joking, his face is still, he is the matador and the others are his cuadrilla.
The ride to the ring is the worst part of the day for the matador. In
