Madrid is so subtle that it will kill a
man without putting out a candle. The same, at their best, can be said
of Benavente's satiric comedies:

El viento de Madrid es tan sutil
que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil.

From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken stream
usually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow the
undergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almost
entire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again;
clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards the
dome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating skyline with
cupolas and baroque belfries jutting among the sudden lights and darks
of the clouds. Then perhaps the sun will light up with a spreading
shaft of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a biscuit
manufacturer's warehouse, a row of white blocks of apartments along the
edge of town to the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal Madrid,
it will be a type city in Europe in the industrial era that shines in
the sun beyond the blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes on
the lines. So will it be in a few years with modernized Madrid, with
the life of cafes and _paseos_ and theatres. There will be moments when
in American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms, shiny restaurants
built in copy of those of Buenos Aires, someone who has read his
Benavente will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old intonations,
of witty parries, of noisy bombastic harangues and feel for one
pentecostal moment the full and by that time forgotten import of _lo
castizo_.

_XV: Talk by the Road_

The sun next morning was tingling warm. Telemachus strode along with a
taste of a milky bowl of coffee and crisp _churros_ in his mouth and a
fresh wind in his hair; his feet rasped pleasantly on the gravel of the
road. Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain,
roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of the
beetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against the
steamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to the
north. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the dark
figures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On the
telegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlight
glinting, when they stirred, on the white patches on their wings.
Telemachus felt well-rested and content with hims