where the
Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre
Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding
new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid.

To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the
oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the
earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall.

_XIII: Talk by the Road_

On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in his
hands moaning "_!Ay de mi!_" over and over again.

"I beg pardon," he said stiffly, trying to slip by.

"Did you see the function this evening, sir?" asked the man looking up
at Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow face
with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustache
that had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of it
in his mouth.

"What function?"

"In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor." He got to his feet and
tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out
his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain
clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him.

They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told
how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be
expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And
the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd.
He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too
artistic for these pigs of provincials.

"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally.

"How ruined?" asked Telemachus.

"The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_
have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of
the _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a
tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a
great singer of _zarzuela_.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now
look at me!"

Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anaemic
wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark,
strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace of
red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron
spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic.
The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from sm