196
XVI: _A Funeral in Madrid_, 202
XVII: _Toledo_, 230

ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN

_I: 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 dismembered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite
his 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 I'm here."

"Why anywhere else than here?" said Lyaeus, 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 _Tannhauser_.
Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps, roast pigeon.

"Do you know Jorge Manrique? That's 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, pronouncing 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,
Como despues de acordado
Da dolor,
Como a nuestro parecer
Cualquier tiempo pasado
Fue mejor.'

"It's 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 nobleman, 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