Sing us a song, Paco.... He's a Galician, you
see."

The goblin driver grinned and threw back his head.

"Go to the end of the world, you'll find a Gallego," he said. Then he
drank down his wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand, and
started droningly:

'Si quieres qu'el carro cante
mojale y dejel'en rio
que despues de buen moja'o
canta com'un silbi'o.'

(If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it in the river, for
when it's well soaked it'll sing like a locust.)

"Hola," cried Don Antonio, "go on."

'A mi me gusta el blanco,
!viva lo blanco! !muera lo negro!
porque el negro es muy triste.
Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'

(I like white; hooray for white, death to black. Because black is
very sad, and I am happy, I don't like it.)

"That's it," cried Don Antonio excitedly. "You people from the north,
English, Americans, Germans, whatnot, you like black. You like to be
sad. I don't."

"'Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'"

The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and swollen. The east was
beginning to bleach before the oncoming sun. Birds started chirping
above our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed, I could hear the
hoarse voice of the goblin driver roaring out:

'A mi me gusta el blanco,
!viva lo blanco! !muera lo negro!'

At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on a red jutting cliff over the
beach where brown children were bathing, there was talk again of _lo
flamenco_.

"In Spain," my friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and
loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic
and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest
Panza is _lo flamenco_."

"But you do live."

"In dirt, disease, lack of education, bestiality.... Half of us are
always dying of excess of food or the lack of it."

"What do you want?"

"Education, organization, energy, the modern world."

I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road down
from the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and rest
so as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world.

And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work.

That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from a
roadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession with
candles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swaying
cone-shaped figure carried on the shoulder