hanced
to be a new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in the new
Frenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Dinner came along round nine; from
there one went straight to the theatre to see that all went well with
the evening performance. At one the day culminated in a famous
_tertulia_ at the Cafe de Lisboa, where all the world met and argued
and quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epigrams at tables
stacked with coffee glasses amid spiral reek of cigarette smoke.

"But when were the plays written?" I asked.

My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons," he said, "and _en route_,
and in bed, and while being shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedy
between biscuits at breakfast.... And now that the Metro's open, it's a
great help. I know a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy,
sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos!"

"But Madrid's being spoiled," he went on sadly, "at least from the
point of view of _lo castizo_. In the last generation all one saw of
daylight were sunset and dawn, people used to go out to fight duels
where the Residencia de Estudiantes is now, and they had real
_tertulias_, _tertulias_ where conversation swaggered and parried and
lunged, sparing nothing, laughing at everything, for all the world like
our unique Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio.

'Yo a las cabanas baje,
yo a los palacios subi,
y los claustros escale,
y en todas partes deje
memorias amargas de mi.'

"Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of Carlist duchesses, and
God knows the crows and the cloisters weren't let off scot free. And
like good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if laughter did leave
bitter memories, and were willing to wait till their deathbeds to
reconcile themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our generation,
they all went solemn in their cradles.... Except for the theatre
people, always except for the theatre people! We of the theatres will
be _castizo_ to the death."

As we left the cafe, I to go home to bed, my friend to go on to another
_tertulia_, he stood for a moment looking back among the tables and
glasses.

"What the Agora was to the Athenians," he said, and finished the
sentence with an expressive wave of the hand.

It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as suspicious of neighbors as
if they still lived in the boggy forests of Finland, city-dwellers for
a paltry thirty generations, to understand the publicity, the communal
quality