The Windmills of Criptana

AZORÍN

THE little windmills of Criptana turn and turn.

“Sacramento! Tránsito! María Jesús!” I called in a loud voice.

Where can those girls be? Two hours ago I arrived in Criptana. From the window of the train I looked out at the distant white town, planted on a hillside and now aglow in the scarlet, bloodstreaked fires of sunset. The windmills, on the crest of the hill, were slowly moving their sails. Below, the earth-red plain stretched out, flat and unbroken. On my arrival at the station I had caught sight of several ancient carriages on the other side of the barrier, carriages that hidalgos ride in, those faded, dusty, rattling carriages which clop-clop in the evenings down a road between two rows of thin, desiccated little trees, Inside, ladies’ faces were glued to the windowpanes, scrutinizing the movements and steps of this odd, solitary, mysterious traveler who had arrived via first class in a pair of worn shoes and a filthy hat.

Night was falling. The carriages drove off with a noisy creaking of boards and springs. I set out over the road on my journey toward the distant village. The carriages turned about for a moment, the faces of those good ladies never leaving the panes. Wrapped in my cloak, I walked on slowly, like a tramp bowed down by the weight of my misfortunes. The spacious corrals of the Mancha began to appear on each side of the road; after them, whitewashed houses with blue doors; and finally, larger houses with broad basketcurved grilles fashioned into crosses at the top. The sky grew darker. I could still make out in the distance, half hidden in the gathering dusk, the lumbering forms of those venerable, tired carriages.

In the streets of the village I passed women veiled in black. A bell tolled slowly in longdrawn-out vibrations. “Is the inn far from here?” I asked.

“It’s there,” they told me, pointing to an ancient dwelling, with a coat of arms, and a doorjamb and lintel of stone. The window grilles were small; the vestibule was broad, paved with tiny squares; the door at the further end led into a patio bordered by a gallery reposing on Doric columns; the dining room opened off to the right.

I mounted its steps and entered a dark room.

“Who is it?” a voice asked from the depths of the darkness.

“It is I,” I said in a hardy voice. “A traveler.”

In the silence I heard a clock go ticktock, ticktock. Then there was a faint sound, as of a rustling dress, and finally a voice shouted, “Sacramento! Tránsito! María Jesús!” Adding afterward, “Have a seat.”

Where was I to sit down? Who was speaking to me? Into what haunted mansion had I strayed?

“There’s no light,” I ventured timidly.

“No,” the mysterious voice replied, “they now put it on very late.”

But a maid arrived with a candle in her hand. Was it Sacramento? Was it Tránsito? Was it María Jesús? The candle, as for a figure in a Rembrandt painting, shed a bright light on a small oval face, with a smooth dainty chin, almond eyes, and thin lips.

“This señor,” said the old woman, seated in a corner, “wants a room. Take him to the inside one.”

The inside one was truly inside. We crossed the little patio, we went in through a small enigmatic door, we turned to the right, we turned to the left down a narrow passageway, we climbed some steps, we went down some others. Finally we entered a small room with a bed, and then a narrow room with a ceiling which one could touch with one’s hand, a glass-paned door stuck in a three-foot wall, and a diminutive window opening through another wall of the same thickness.

“This is the room,” said the maid, setting the candlestand down on the table.

And I said to her, “Is your name Sacramento?”

She blushed slightly. “No,” she answered, “I am Tránsito.”

I should have added, “How pretty you are, Tránsito!” But I didn’t. Instead I opened my Don Quixote and began reading from its pages. “And here,” I read by the light of the candle, “they discovered thirty or forty windmills that are to be found in this place. . . .”

The light began to fail, and I called out in a loud voice.

Tránsito arrived with another candle and said, “Señor, whenever you wish, dinner is ready.”

After dinner I went out for a short walk in the streets. A soft moon was bathing the white façades, projecting the denticulate shadows of the eaves over the river bed. The ample old balconies stood out, dim and mysterious, with their shields and grilles crowned with branches and filigree; the stout doors looked formidable with their iron nails and heavy knockers. There is a deep, intimate joy in strolling through an unknown village among the shadows. The doors, the balconies, the street corners, the apses of the churches, the towers, the illuminated windows, the sounds of distant footsteps, the plaintive barking of dogs, the little lamps burning beneath the statuettes — all combine to unleash our fancy, to incite us to reverie, to bear us away into the realm of dreams.

THE little windmills of Criptana turn and turn.

“Sacramento, what is it I’ve got to do today?”

I asked Sacramento this after finishing my breakfast. Sacramento was as pretty as Tránsito. The night was over. Shouldn’t one go to see the windmills? I walked through the streets. What an extraordinary difference between night and day! Where was the mystery, the charm, the suggestiveness of the preceding night?

With Don Jacinto I walked up the little winding uphill streets. The aged windmills stand on the hilltop above the village. Below, the gray-black expanse of the roof tops stretches away, interspersed with the flecks of white façades, as far as the plain. We stopped before the door of one of the windmills.

“Javier,” Don Jacinto said to the miller, “is this one going to work soon?”

“In an instant,” Javier answered.

Is it surprising that Don Alonso Quijano the Good should have taken these mills for giants? At the time Don Quixote lived, windmills were a stupendous novelty. They were introduced into the Mancha in 1575. Jeronimo Cardano wrote in his book De Rerum Varietate in 1580, “I cannot pass over in silence a thing so wondrous that before seeing it I could not have believed it without being upbraided as a trusting man.” Why be surprised that the fancy of the good knight of the Mancha should have been exalted by these unheard-of, wondrous machines?

Javier climbed up onto the crossbars of the arms of his windmill to spread the sails. A fierce, unbridled wind was blowing. The four sails were spread; now the arms started to turn slowly, now they turned rapidly. Inside the small tower are three tiny floors. The lowest is for the wheat sacks; the middle one is where the flour falls through a narrow chute; the upper one is where stone grinds on stone to crush the grain. There are several tiny windows on this floor, through which one can espy the landscape. The ancient apparatus works with a hollow rumble.

Through one of these windows I surveyed the immense, infinite, reddish plain, broken here and there by stretches of green. The roads wound off into dusty yellow snakelike curves. A few white walls gleamed in the distance. The sky was covered with gray clouds; a gale was blowing. And over the path crossing the hillside a column of ants advanced; a column of black-clad women with shawls over their heads, who had gone out in the morning, since it was a Lenten Friday, to kiss the feet of the Christ of Villajos in a distant shrine, were now returning slowly — black, sorrowful figures creeping over the empty, earth-red plain.

“María Jesús,” I said when the twilight began to fall. “Will the light be long in coming?”

“It will be a little while still,” she said.

I sat down in the darkened dining room. I heard the ticktock, ticktock of the clock. Some bells were ringing the Angelus.

The little windmills of Criptana turn and turn.