ROSI ANTE TO THE RO14D AGAIN By JOHN DOS PASSOS GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK CONTENTS CHAPTER I A Gesture and a. Quest, g II The Donkey Boy, 24 III The Baker of Almorox, 47 IV Talk by the Road, 71 V A Novelist of Revolution, 80 VI Talk by the Road, 101 VII Cordova No Longer of the Caliphs, 104 VIII Talk by the Road, 115 IX A n Inverted Midas, I2O X Talk by the Road, 133 XI Antonio Machado. Poet of Castile, 140 XII A Catalan Poet, 159 XIII Talk by the Road, 176 XIV Benaventes Madrid, 182 XV Talk by the Road, 196 XVI A Funeral in Madrid, 2O2 XVII Toledo, 230 ROSINANTE ID ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN A Gesture and a Quest TELEMACHUS had wandered so far in search of his father he had quite forgotten what he was looking for. He sat on a yellow plush bench in the cafe El Oro del Rhin, Plaza Santa Ana, Madrid, swabbing up with a bit of bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a plate of which the edges were piled with the dis membered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite Ms plate was a similar plate his companion had already polished. Telemachus put the last piece of bread into his mouth, drank down a glass of beer at one spasmodic gulp, sighed, leaned across the table and said I wonder why Im here. Why anywhere else than here said Lyaeus, 9 Rosinante to the Road Again a young man with hollow cheeks and slow-moving hands, about whose mouth a faint pained smile was continually hovering, and he too drank down his beer. At the end of a perspective of white marble tables, faces thrust forward over yellow plush cushions under twining veils of tobacco smoke, four German women on a little dais were playing TawiJiamer. Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps, roast pigeon. Do you know Jorge ManriqueThats one reason, Tel, the other man continued slowly. With one hand he gestured to the waiter for more beer, the other he waved across his face as if to brush away the music then he recited, pro nouncing the words haltingly Recuerde el alma dormida, Avive el seso y despierte Contemplando Como se pasa la vida, Como se viene la muerte Tan callando Cuan presto se va el placer, Coma despues de acordado 10 A Gesture and a Quest Da dolor, Como a nuestro parecer Cualquier tlempo pasado Fue mejor. Its always death, said Telemachus, but we must go on. It had been raining. Lights rippled red and orange and yellow and green on the clean paving stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled through clattering streets. As they walked, the other man was telling how this Castilian noble man, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his father, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, created this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of his great dust-colored mansion at Ocana, where the broad eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with ara besques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at a table under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral that was building in those days, full of a smell of scaffold en Rosinante to the Road Again ing and stone dust, there must have stood a tre mendous catafalque where lay with his arms around him the Master of Santiago in the carved seats of the choirs the stout canons intoned an endless growling litany at the sacristy door, the flare of the candles flashing occasionally on thejewels of his mitre, the bishop fingered his crosier restlessly, asking his favorite choir-boy from time to time why Don Jorge had not arrived...