achine movements."

Then he ran off and joined the group of men and boys who were singing
and drinking. Telemachus went back to bed. On his way upstairs he
cursed the maxims of his mother Penelope. But at any rate to-morrow, in
Carnival-time, he would feel the gesture.

_XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile_

"I spent fifty thousand pesetas in a year at the military school....
_J'aime le chic_," said the young artillery officer of whom I had asked
the way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled hill that led to the
irregular main street of Segovia. A moment before we had passed under
the aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon arch into the crimson
sky. He had snapped tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's that
good for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all for a puff of gasoline from
a Hispano-Suizo.... D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look at this
rotten town! There's not a street in it I can speed on in a motorcycle
without running down some fool old woman or a squalling
brat or other.... Who's this gentleman you are going to see?"

"He's a poet," I said.

"I like poetry too. I write it ... light, elegant, about light elegant
women." He laughed and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out from
each side of his moustache.

He left me at the end of the street I was looking for, and after an
elaborate salute walked off saying:

"To think that you should come here from New York to look for an
address in such a shabby street, and I so want to go to New York. If I
was a poet I wouldn't live here."

The name on the street corner was _Calle de los Desemparados_....
"Street of Abandoned Children."

* * * * *

We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling spoons in coffee-glasses
while a wax-pink fat man played billiards in front of us, being
ponderously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail with yellow face and
walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping _Bueno_ after every play. There
was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt
Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a
smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old
towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The
group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre
brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the
bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia.