Mañana

ESPECIALLY since a corrupt Spanish bureaucracy was deprived of power in Cuba, and the government bestowed upon corrupt Cubans, it has become a dogma the world over that Spain is a decadent nation.

I came to Spain expecting to find anæmic yellow faces, the sapped vitality of degenerates; when not sunk into a coma from indigence or secret vice, I looked to find the people cribbed and confined by a mediæval religion; pale children in gutters I looked for, and few of them. I was wrong. By and large, they are the healthiest-looking animals in Europe. Not those in the industrial cities, but those in rural Spain — which is infinitely the largest part, and will remain so. The Spanish land, the Spanish mountains, and above all the Spanish character forbid an invasion of anything more industrial than a Ford.

If, then, the Spaniard has devoted himself neither to building factories in which to burn soft coal, as we have done, nor to conquering backward nations, like the British, what has he done with his biceps and brain?

Most Americans will be unable to survive a visit to Spain, but those who do will be better men. By visit I do not mean Cadiz or Madrid, train de luxe, Seville, Cordova, Granada, Burgos, cathedrals, the Prado, monasteries, a bullfight, and home in time for the hunting. That has its uses, but it can be done without leaving America — that is, leaving it linguistically, gastronomically, socially, or mentally. The sort of thing I mean is a sojourn in Spain, be it long or short, where trippers are not.

One or two simple principles are absolutely necessary to American survival. The first is: Be courteous on all the occasions when you would be courteous at home, and likewise on all those when you would n’t. If you are, the Spanish will outdo you exactly twofold in every courteous word and act; if you are n’t, and become, say, brusque, they will either put you in jail or leave you on top of a mountain without anything to eat. The second principle is: Whenever you are in a hurry, do nothing about it. This is more important than the first. It will secure for you most of the good things in Spain.

Of course I had read of these laws of Spanish character in books, — on the Soul of Spain, the Heart of the Iberian, and all the rest, — but never ground them by circumstance and calamity into my bones, and my diary.

Here is the working of the first. My friend and I entered Spain on foot on a discouraging day of mist, over the pass that had been used by Hannibal, Cæsar, Abd-er-Rahman, and Napoleon. For a week the clouds had been a swaying bank of moisture over the French side of the peaks. Just at the frontier, the watershed of the Pyrenean wall, they broke, and gave us Spain.

It was partly the sunlight of Spain that melted them. We looked down upon baked, castellated barricades running fifty miles into the plain. Real or natural castillos grew out of their tops, and the flanks of the mountains were dyed many colors: red and orange, for example; blue and green. Between, the Spanish valleys lay lush with vineyards and grain, or arid with rock and sand. The country seemed poised — a rude balance between desert sand and Eden.

At first historically infected with memories of Rahman and Hannibal, and then smitten with the scarring, boiling beauty of the landscape, we stepped on, in a happy hypnosis, till we met three soldiers. Then came a wave of concern for our defective passports. We had been moving over the frontier, before, through remote and unguarded mountains where no customs officer had ever trekked. The carabineros wore the green musical-comedy costume of the Spanish soldier, with fireman helmets turned up and flattened in back. They assumed attitudes and manners of immense dignity — the Spaniard has tons of it in reserve — and studied our papers with black brows. The senior official fingered the passports; the others fingered their guns; we fingered nervously the newly changed pesetas in our breeches’ pockets.

Suddenly the situation changed: the tail of a Spanish eye had caught sight of our kodak; we offered with courtesy to take their picture. Passports were folded up, uniforms brushed, and faces screwed into expressions of military rigor. We snapped the three soldiers; we shook hands, we exchanged addresses, we conversed in bad French, we saluted — we entered Spain.

Principle No. 2. We entered Canfranc, a tiny frontier village which the guidebook had told us to avoid. It had the immemorial look of all Spanish towns — baked, built of stone and slate, and resembling the landscape. But there were no monuments historiques there; it was just a village where we went to wait for the Jaca bus.

The bus was due at four o’clock. It was the mail bus into Spain. By 4.30 it was n’t in sight on the road from the Somport pass into France. But sometime about 5.30 five thousand sheep arrived instead. The children of Canfranc ran among them, pinched their tails, and made them hurdle each other in fright.

At 5.45 the mail bus squeezed its way along Main Street, and we climbed on the roof of it. Then, about six, the tiny town awoke into a rich, varied, and amazing life. The passeo began! The mayor, aristocracy, the thirty tradesmen with their wives, the peasants, and incredible numbers of children appeared mysteriously on balconies and in the street. We hoped the bus would n’t start. It did n’t.

The people passed each other, slowly, with that amazing dignity of the Spanish, talking with animation, gazing with consummate curiosity at everyone else — as though they had n’t seen them at yesterday’s passeo. There were the young bloods, with Englishcut clothes and faces like American sophomores. Also, stuffing the balconies and the windows, one-hundredper-cent Spanish señoritas, carrying on, in the authentic manner of romance, a commerce of chaff and looks with the lads below. Farmers passed on donkeys, and hay loads fell from mules’ backs to the side of the road. A man appeared with five musical instruments, which he distributed to tiny boys and girls who screamed with delight as they took them. He kept the cornet himself. They followed him, dancing and leaping over the cobblestones, down the narrow street where the sheep had gone.

The show went on for an hour; nothing whatever happening — in an American sense. Nobody playing baseball, or pitching quoits, or going to see Harold Lloyd. Just explosion after explosion of animal spirits, and the gayest curiosity about the lives and loves of everybody in Canfranc. Not the slightest interest in Madrid, or New York, or the League of Nations.

The mail bus left at 6.30, two hours late.

Any guidebook, or history, or newly baked tripper from Spain will tell you slyly that the key to Spanish character is mañana. Nonsense. It s perfectly true that the Spaniard puts off till tomorrow such things as business appointments, the building of railroads, or the conquest of the Riff. What of it! All matters of real importance, like singing or worshiping God or making love to his señorita, he attends to without a wasted minute — to-day.