at Escalona, their legs so long that they had to tilt their bodies to reach the ground. But when they fly, Diego,” he had continued, “they’re majestic. White with black wings and with a call like the yelp of a small dog. Your abuelo and I were on our way to Salamanca to visit the university. ‘Following knowledge endlessly like stars sinking below the horizon,’ is how my papa described it.”
“Stars, how stars, Papa?”
“Well, not stars, exactly” he had said, peering into the fading light and pulling his collar about his neck. “At least not the kind we see in the sky. But hopes and dreams. Salamanca is where your grandpa and I went in search of my education.”
“Further than Carmena, Papa?” Diego had asked. “Maybe we can go someday, Papa,” he had said, emphasizing the “we.”
“Perhaps, Diego,” his father had answered as though considering the possibility. “We’ll see, Diego,” he had said. ‘”We’ll see.”
_____________
Pedro leaned against the wrought iron rail and thought of the sentiment expressed by his father-in-law, a sentiment he wished his father had also held: that it’s better to dare mighty things than to count oneself among those that neither enjoy much nor suffer much. “You must not grieve,” his father-in-law had said. “You must look for happiness, for to do otherwise is to live in a gray twilight and know neither success nor failure.”
We’ve suffered much, Pedro said to himself, and Ana, Luis and my poor nephew paid the ultimate price. The joy of his existence had been rooted in Castile and now God who had given these children to him had also taken then away. “I’ll keep you in my heart,” he said aloud to his beloved dead. And with no further time to contemplate their loss, left the balcony.
This Crag of Sorrow
“I can go by myself, Papa,” Lucia pleaded in her small voice as she stood beside her hooded mule, the hem of her nightdress trailing in the mud. “Like Diego,” she said. “I can go by myself.”
“Shh,” her father responded as he put his finger to her lips. He then placed her astride her mule, the scent of her—of angel water and sleep—sweet in the damp cool air. “We’ll see, ijika,” her father promised as he placed her in her saddle. “You’ll go with Tonio for now,” he said, “but we’ll see. We’ll see how it goes.”
Lucia, appearing spare and wan, held her thin arms tightly across her chest refusing to touch the withers or mane of her beast. The corners of her budded lips drooped slightly at their edges as she observed the remainder of her family waiting in the darkness. While she sat there, her father so close she could have reached out and touched him, she looked down into her mother’s sedan chair and could, she thought, make out her mother’s knees and her clasped hands which were folded in her lap. It was one of those moments, however, when one did not know whether what one was experiencing was real or imagined. She knew that her mother’s face and neck were hidden from her view, and that it would have been impossible for her to see the auburn hair, long, white throat or those blue-green eyes which she wished were her own. But would she have been able to see her mother’s hands? she asked herself. Or was this just the way she knew her mother would be seated? She did not know. What she did know was that she could see or sense movement within the sedan chair as her mother rearranged her seating.
Within the chair, Catalina felt for the correct placement of her feet on top of the Moroccan cushion which she had asked to take from her mother’s parlor. She had, until this moment, been brooding and immobile, locked in a deep trance from which she could not seem to escape. However, with the realization that she had to provide for the welfare of her remaining children, she had broken through her passivity, and assumed an active role in the preparations, even seeking to take some precious objects from her parents’ home to which she would likely never return. The darkness, as well as the haunches of her lead mule, obscured her view forward, although she knew that her position in the train, as in life, was immediately behind her husband who now sat on his mule ahead of her. As she settled back within her enclosed settee, which rested on the haunches and shoulders of her mule team, she could, through the dark clothing and the black shawl that she wore, feel the cold leather of the sedan’s seat and back as they pressed against her frail body. Additional mules, coughing and wheezing in protest, carried the trunks and valises containing the meager clothing and household goods they had obtained from her father. Once mounted, the family waited in silence.
The stars and the moonlight cast shadows against the walls of the tortuous passageway, a street so narrow that the overhanging roofs of the adjacent homes nearly touched. The normal qualities of the stones of this passageway were unrecognizable in the veiled light. The sky, reflected in the family’s tears and in the pools of moisture that had collected from the evening’s heavy dew, had a timeless quality about it that did not identify it as either a day or night sky. In the darkness, Lucia could barely distinguish one silhouette from another as additional muleteers came up the cobbled path. She tried to tell whether or not any of them were men who worked for her grandfather. One of them—whom she identified by his ‘limp of Lepanto’—was Tonio, her grandfather’s mayordomo or overseer. It was unlikely she knew any of the others. Still, she wondered who these men were who were about to lead them into the night. The light had the cast of sadness. The sounds were those of anxious hooves. And the smells those of working men, leather, and mules.
In the darkness, Tonio and his head packer, or cargador, rechecked the seating of every load, each of them walking down his own side of the mule train, the clack of their double-soled boots resounding in the darkness. Tonio, who was responsible for the safety of his charges, his men, and his beasts, wanted to assure himself that his muleteers had done their work well as he felt for the correct placement and security of each item. Saddle clothes, grass stuffed pads, grass cinch, straw mat coverings—nothing was overlooked in his inspection. Once the examination was completed, he mounted his own mule which stood at the front of the train. Then with the cargador’s “Adios!” and Tonio’s response of “Vaya!” the mules, led by a bellmare and divided into four strings, began to inch their way down the steep cobblestoned corridor and away from the house on one of Toledo’s highest hills. Then, although admonished by his father not to look back, Diego glanced one final time at his grandfather’s home which now appeared empty, dark, and desolate, and at its exterior balcony as he rode beneath it. He searched in vain for the spot in the wall where he had hidden his white stone as a prayer to assure their return and worried that it would not be able to work its magic. However, his attention was quickly diverted to more pressing matters when one of his mother’s mules slid into his as they exited the corridor.
Through shadowed, Moorish streets like dark ravines, the family moved along steep, narrow corridors paved with cobbles taken from the muddy, red bed of the Tagus. They rode past crowded whitewashed houses, which faced terraced streets, the corridors overhung by glazed verandas or by wrought-iron balustrades enclosing narrow passages. The silence was broken only by the sound of hooves and of water splashing into stone basins.
As they neared the river, they rode through the ancient Jewish quarter of Toledo, virtually a town in itself, situated in the southwestern portion of the city. The southern section of the district sloped down an incline to the bank of the Tagus and included a fortress once known as the ‘Jew’s Citadel.’ Here, with the clatter of their mules the only sound to be heard they passed through the battle-scarred walls of the fortress, away from the roofs, towers, and domes of the ancient city and began their steep descent to the river.
Galiana’s Palace
A few plain trees and Spanish poplars marked the road the Robledo party traveled. There were many rocks, and the fields, which at winter’s end had been a broad stretch of parched meadows, were now covered with the emerald grasses of an early spring. The hollows of dry waterbeds were choked with tamarisk, their fine, feathery branches and minute scale-like leaves now moving in the pristine air. A gentle breeze sprang up along the deeply etched bed of the Tagus, bearing the scent of mud and dry leaves and, incongruously, the faint odor of animal dung, the remains of a previous passage.
As they rode alongside the river, which was bordered