Platero
PLATERO is a small donkey, a soft, hairy donkey: so soft to the touch that he might be said to be made of cotton, with no bones. Only the jet mirrors of his eyes are hard like two black crystal scarabs.
I turn him lose, and he goes to the meadow, and, with his nose, he gently caresses the little flowers of rose and blue and gold…. I call him softly, “Platero?” and he comes to me at a gay little trot that is like laughter of a vague, idyllic, tinkling sound.
He eats whatever I give him. He likes mandarin oranges, amber-hued muscatel grapes, purple figs tipped with crystalline drops of honey.
He is as loving and tender as a child, but strong and sturdy as a rock. When on Sundays I ride him through the lanes in the outskirts of the town, slow-moving countrymen, dressed in their Sunday clothes, watch him a while, speculatively:
"He is like steel," they say.
Steel, yes. Steel and moon silver at the same time.
White Butterflies
Night falls, hazy and purple. Vague green and mauve luminosities persist behind the tower of the church. The road ascends, full of shadows, of bells, of the fragrance of grass, of songs, of weariness, of desire. Suddenly a dark man wearing a cap and carrying a pick, his face red for an instant in the light of his cigarette, comes toward us from the wretched hut that is lost in piles of coal sacks. Platero is afraid.
"Carrying anything?"
"See for yourself.... White butterflies."
The man wants to stick his iron pick in the little basket, and I do not prevent him. I open the knapsack, and he sees nothing in it. And the food for the soul passes, candid and free, without paying tribute to the customs.
Twilight Games
At dusk, when, stiff with cold, Platero and I enter the purple darkness of the miserable bystreet that fronts the dry river bed, the children of the poor are playing at make-believe, frightening one another, playing beggars. One throws a sack over his head, another says he is blind, another limps....
Later, with that fickleness of children, since they at least wear shoes, and since their mothers - though only they know how - have fed them, they become princes and princesses.
"My father has a silver clock."
"Mine has a horse."
"Mine a gun."
Clock to rouse him at daybreak; gun that cannot kill hunger; horse to take him to misery....
Then the children join hands, dancing in a circle. In the darkness a little girl with fragile voice like a thread of liquid crystal in the shadow sings proudly like a princess:
"I am the young widow
Of great Count Oré…."
Aye, Aye! Sing, dream, children of the poor! Soon, at the awakening of your youth, spring, like a beggar disguised as winter, will frighten you.
"Let us go, Platero."
Eclipse
We unwittingly put our hands in our pockets, and on our brows we felt the fine touch of a cool shadow, as when entering a thick pine forest. The chickens began going up their perch, one by one. All around, the countryside darkened its greenness, as if the purple veil of the main alter were spread over it. The distant sea was visible as a white vision, and a few stars shone palely. How the whiteness of the roofs took on a changed whiteness! Those of us who were on the roofs called to each other more or less wittily, small dark creatures in the confining silence of the eclipse.
We tried looking at the sun through all sorts of things: opera glasses, telescopes, bottles, smoked glass, and from all angles: the dormer window, the ladder in the yard, the granary window; through the scarlet and blue panes of the skylight....
On hiding, the sun, which a moment before made everything twice, thrice, a hundred times greater and better with its complexities of light and gold, now leaves all things, without the long transition of twilight, lonely and poverty-stricken as though one had exchanged gold for silver first and then silver for copper. The town resembles a musty and valueless copper cent. How gloomy and unimportant the streets, the squares, the tower, the mountain roads.
Down in the yard Platero appears less real, different and diminished, a different donkey....
Fear
Large, round, pure, the moon comes with us. In the sleepy meadows we see shadowy forms like black goats among the blackberry bushes. At our passing, someone hides noiselessly. A huge almond tree, snowy with blooms and moonlight, its top enveloped in a white cloud, shadows the road shot with March stars. A penetrating smell of oranges.
"Platero, it is...cold!"
Platero - I do not know whether spurred on by his fear or by mine - trots, enters the creek bed, steps on the moon and breaks it into pieces. It is as if a swarm of clear crystal roses were entangled at his feet, trying to hold him....
And Platero trots uphill, shortening his croup as if someone were after him, already sensing the soft warmth - which seems unattainable - of the approaching town.
Kindergarten
If you would come to kindergarten with the other children, Platero, you would learn the ABC's and you would learn to write. You would know more than the donkey in the wax figures, the little mermaid's friend who appears garlanded with artificial flowers through the crystal which shows the mermaid all rosy flesh and gold in her green element. You would know more than the doctor and than the village priest, Platero.
But, although you are only four, you are so big and clumsy. In what little chair could you sit, at what table could you write, what paper and what pen would do for you, where in the chorus could you sing, say, the Credo?
No. Doña Domitilo in her purple habit of the Order of the Nazarene with its yellow cord like Reyes the fisherman, would have you, at best, kneeling for two hours in a corner of the plantain garden, or she would slap your hooves with her long dry cane, or she would eat the quince meat of your lunch, or she would put a burning paper under your tail so that your ears would be as red and warm as those of the farmer's son when it is going to rain....
The Crazy-Man
Dressed in mourning, with my long brown beard and my small black hat, I must look odd riding on Platero's grey softness.
When, on my way to the vineyards, I cross the last streets, whitewashed and dazzling bright in the sunlight, shaggy-haired gypsy children, with sleek tanned bellies showing out of their green, red, and yellow rags, run after us shrilling a long-drawn-out call:
"Crazy-man! Crazy-man!"
Before us lies the open country. Face to face with the vast pure sky of fiery blue, my eyes - so far from my ears - open contentedly, receiving in all its quietness that nameless call, that harmonious and divine serenity that lies in the infinitude of the horizon.
And from a distance, over the fields, sharp cries finely muffled, broken, breathless, faint:
"Crazy-man! Crazy-man!"
Early Figs
Daybreak was misty and raw, a good one for early figs, and at six o'clock we set out for Rica to pick them.
Under the century-old fig trees, whose grey trunks entwined their huge muscles in the cold shadows as under a skirt, night still slept; and the wide leaves - such as Adam and Eve wore - treasured a fine web of tiny pearls of dew that whitened their new greenness. From within it and through the low emerald foliage we could see the dawn that was gradually turning to rose the colourless veils of the east.
… Crazy with excitement, we ran to see who would get first to each fig tree. Rociillo caught with me the first leaf of one, in a smother of laughter and swift heartbeats.
"Feel here."
And with her hand she took mine and placed it over her heart, above which her young breast rose and fell like a tiny imprisoned wave. Adela could hardly run, being plump and short, and she fretted from a distance. I picked a few ripe figs for Platero and put them on the seat of an old vine stump so that he would not get bored.
Adela, irritated by her own slowness, started the fig fight, with laughter in her mouth and tears in her eyes. A fig she threw at me burst on my forehead. Rociillo and I took up the fight, and much more than through our mouths, we ate figs through our eyes, noses, sleeves, necks, amid ceaseless shrill cries, which fell with the broken figs on the dawn-fresh vines. One fig struck Platero, and he became the target for the fun. Since the luckless one could neither defend himself nor reply in kind, I took his side; and a soft blue deluge crossed the pure air in all directions like rapid machine-gun fire.
The Pit
You, my dear Platero, if you die before I do, are not going to the marsh nor to the deep ravine-like pit beside the mountain road in the old town crier's cart like poor donkeys and dogs and horses whom no one loves. You will not be, with your fleshless ribs bloody from the crow's picking - like the bare ribs of a boat against the scarlet sunset - an ugly spectacle for the travellers to San Juan Station in the six o'clock coach; nor lie swollen and rigid on the rotten shells of the pit to frighten thrill-seeking children on their Sunday evening walk through the pine grove when they gaze in fear and curiosity over the edge.
Do not worry, Platero. Live in peace. I shall bury you at the foot of the tall round pine in the orchard which you like so well. You shall lie beside gay and beautiful life. The children will play around you, and the young girls will learn to sew sitting in low chairs by your side. You will know the verses brought to me by solitude. You will hear the singing of the washer girls in the orange grove, and the sound of the well will add joy and coolness to your sleep. All the year round, the larks, the titmice, and the young green finches will swarm above you, in the perennial verdure of the pine top, a brief canopy of music between your quiet slumber and the blue of the infinite sky.
The Thorn
On entering the pasture lands Platero begins limping. I jump quickly to the ground.
"What is the matter, child?"
Platero lets his right forefoot hang limp without weight or strength, barely touching the burning sand of the road, showing the frog of the hoof.
With greater solicitude, no doubt, than that shown him by old Darbón, his doctor, I stoop to examine the bruised foot. A long green orange-tree thorn is stuck in like a little round emerald dagger. All sympathy with Platero's pain, I pull out the thorn and take the poor fellow to the brook of the yellow lilies so that the running water may lave the little wound with its long pure tongue.
Then we go on toward the white sea, I leading, he following, still limping, his head knocking softly against my body at each faltering step.
The Swallows
There she is, Platero, black and spritely in her grey nest on the frame that holds the image of the Virgin of Monte Mayor, a nest that has always been unmolested. The luckless bird is bewildered. It seems to me that this time the poor swallows made a mistake, as the chickens did last week in going to roost at two o'clock during an eclipse. Spring had the coquetry to arrive early this year, but she has been obliged to take her tender nakedness, all ashiver, back to the cloudy bed of March. It is sad to see the virgin blossoms of the orange-grove die in the bud.
The swallows are back, Platero, and yet one can hardly hear them, as in other years, when on their first day back they would greet everything and curiously examine it, chattering tirelessly in their flutey chirping. They would tell the flowers all they had seen in Africa, about their two trips across the sea, how they sometimes lay on the water with one wing as a sail, or on the masts of ships; they would talk of other sunsets, other dawns, other starry nights....
They do not know what to do. They fly about, mute, bewildered, as ants walk when some child stamps out their trail with his feet. They dare not go up and come down Nueva Street in insistent straight line with the little flourish at the end, nor go down to their nests in the wells, nor perch, in classic post-card fashion, by the white transformer on the telegraph wires, through which the wind hums.... They will freeze to death, Platero.
The Ghost
The greatest fun for Annilla the butter-maker, whose impetuous and fresh youth was an endless fountain of gaiety, was dressing up as a ghost. She would wrap herself in a sheet, add flower to the lily whiteness of her face, put garlic cloves on her teeth, and when, after supper, we half-dozed in the little living room, she would suddenly appear from the marble staircase, carrying a lighted lantern, walking slowly, mute and imposing. Dressed thus, it was as if her figure had become a robe. Yes. The sepulchral vision that she brought from the dark heights caused terror, but at the same time her whiteness alone fascinated with some vague sensual fullness....
I shall never forget, Platero, that September night. For an hour the storm had been beating over the town like a sick heart, discharging water and hail to the despairing insistence of lightning and thunder. The cistern was overflowing and had flooded the courtyard. The final accompaniments - the nine-o'clock coach, the vesper bells, the postman - were over.... Shaking with fear, I had gone to the dining room for a drink, and in the green whiteness of a lightning flash, I saw the Velarde's eucalyptus tree - the cuckoo tree, as we called it, which fell that night - doubled over the foot of the tool shed....
Suddenly a frightful dry noise, like the shadow of a cry of light that blinded us, shook the house. When we came back to reality, we were all in a different spot from the one we had occupied a moment before, and each one as though alone, without anxiety or concern for the others. One complained of a headache, another of smarting eyes, another of his heart.... One by one we returned to our places.
The storm was abating.... The moon, between enormous clouds that split from top to bottom, lit with her white fire the water that overflowed the courtyard. We walked about looking at everything. Lord kept running to the yard steps and away again, barking crazily. We followed him.... Platero, near the night-blooming vine whose wet flowers exhaled a nauseating odour, lay Annilla, dead, dressed as a ghost, the lantern still burning in her lightning-blackened hand.
The Parrot
We were playing with Platero and the parrot in the garden of my friend the French doctor when a young woman, dishevelled and anxious, came downhill toward us. Before reaching us she turned her anxious black eyes toward me and pleaded:
"Young man, is the doctor there?"
Behind her came a number of dirty, ragged children who panted and kept looking up the road; last of all came several men carrying another man, livid and exhausted. He was a poacher, one of those who hunt deer in the Doñana preserve. His gun, an absurd old thing tied together with woven bark, misfired, and the hunter had the bullet in his arm.
My friend approached the wounded man with friendliness, removed the dirty clothes from the wound, washed off the blood, and began feeling the bones and muscles with his fingers. From time to time he would say to me:
"Ce n'est rien…."
Dusk was falling. From Huelva came an odour of Marche, of resin, of fish.... Against the rosy sunset the orange trees showed their rounded thick emerald velvet. In a lilac bush, lavender and green, the parrot, green and red, came and went, examining us with his little round eyes.
The poor hunter's tears were filled with sunlight; at times he uttered a muffled cry. And the parrot would say:
"Ce n'est rien…."
My friend was dressing the wound with cotton and bandages.
The poor man:
"Ooooh!"
And the parrot among the lilies:
"Ce n'est rien…. Ce n'est rien…."
The Roof
You, Platero, have never climbed to the flat roof of the house. You cannot know how one's heart expands with the joy of breathing, when, attaining it from the dark and narrow wooden stairway, one feels the heat of the full day-time sun and knows himself flooded with blue, as though touching the sky itself, blinded by the whiteness of the lime with which, as you know, the brick floor is covered, so that the water from the clouds may reach the cistern clear and clean.
What enchantment on the roof! The bells of the tower ring within you, on a level with your heart, which beats faster; you can see in the distant vineyards the hoes gleaming with a glint of silver and sunlight; you dominate everything: other roofs; yards where forgotten people work, each at his own task - the chairmender, the painter, the hooper - spots that are trees in barnyards, with the bull or the goat; the cemetery to which there comes from time to time, small and black and unnoticed, a humble third-class funeral; windows at which a girl in a white bodice carelessly combs her hair and sings; the river, and a boat that never quite reaches port; granaries where a lone musician practices on his horn - or where blind, violent love is having its way....
The house has disappeared like an underground cellar. How strange, through the crystal skylight, ordinary life below: words, sounds, even the garden, so beautiful in itself; you, Platero, drinking at the trough, not seeing me, or playing like a simpleton with the sparrow or with the turtle.
Return
Platero and I were returning from the mountains heavily loaded: he with sandalwood, I with yellow lilies.
It was spring dusk. Everything that in the west had been limpid gold was now limpid silver, a smooth luminosity of Cape Jessamine petals. Then the vast sky became transparent sapphire; then emerald. Sadness held me like a shroud....
From the hilltop the one tower of the town, the church steeple, crowned with blue tiles, acquired in the clarity of the hour a monumental aspect. For the moment it was the Giralda from a distance…. And my yearning for Seville, acute in springtime, found in the sight a melancholy comfort.
Return.... Where? From what? To what? For what? But the lilies I carried were more odorous in the warm freshness of approaching night, their fragrance was more penetrating and at the same time more vague, coming from the unseen blossoms, as if they had become all odour, intoxicating the body and the soul in the solitary darkness.
Spring
My morning nap is disturbed by a devilish noise of children and I am in an ill-humour. No longer able to sleep, I leave my bed in despair. Then, looking out from my open window, I realise that it is the birds whose shrill clatter has disturbed my slumbers.
I go down to the garden and sing thanks to the God of the blue day. Free concert of singing bills, fresh and endless music. The swallow, fanciful one, utters her warbling from the well; the blackbird whistles on the fallen orange; the fiery golden oriole chatters from evergreen to evergreen; the blue titmouse laughs long and daintily on the top of the eucalyptus tree; and in the tallest pine the sparrows argue outrageously.
What a morning! The sun spreads his gold and silver gladness on the earth; myriad-coloured butterflies flit everywhere, among the flowers, through the house - now in, now out - above the spring. Everywhere the countryside bursts open to a bubbling of new and wholesome life, which might be the heart of an immense, mellow, scarlet rose.
The Cistern
Look at it: the last spring rains have filled it to the brim, Platero. It has no echo now, nor can one see, in its new depth, the reflection of the oriel window bathed in sunlight, prismatic jewel above the yellow and blue pattern of the glass patio roof.
You have never been down in the cistern, Platero. I have; I went down when it was emptied, many years ago. Listen; it has a long underground gallery, and then a very small room. When I entered it, the candle I carried was snuffed out by the fingers of the darkness, and a salamander crawled over my hand. Two icy sensations crossed each other in my breast like two swords, or like the crossbones under a skull. The whole town is honeycombed with cisterns and galleries, Platero. The largest cistern is the one in the courtyard of the ancient citadel of the castle. The best one is this one at my house, which, as you see, has the curbstone carved in one piece of alabastrine marble. The gallery of the church goes as far as the Pontales vineyard, and there it opens on the fields, near the river. The one that starts at the hospital no one has ever dared to follow to its end, because it never ends.
I remember how when I was a child the sobbing murmur of the rain that fell from the flat tiled roof into the cistern troubled my sleepless hours. Then, in the morning, mad with eagerness, we would go to the cistern to see how high the water had reached. When it was up to the rim, as now, what surprise, what excitement, what exclamations....
Well, Platero, now I am going to give you a bucketful of this pure fresh water, from the same bucket that old Villegas used to drink from, poor Villegas, whose body was already dried up with cognac and brandy...
The Mangy Dog
He used to come sometimes, lean and panting, to the garden house. The poor thing was always running from someone, accustomed to shouts and stones. Even other dogs snarled at him. And he would go back in the noonday sun, slow and sad, down the hill.
That afternoon he had followed Diana. As I was coming out, the keeper, who on an evil impulse had aimed his gun, fired at him. I had no time to stop him. The wretched dog, with the bullet in his body, whirled dizzily for a moment with a round sharp howl, and fell dead under an acacia bush.
Platero, head erect, kept his eyes fixed on the dog. Diana was frightened and kept trying to hide behind one or the other of us. The keeper, perhaps in remorse, repeated long explanations to no one in particular, angry and helpless in his effort to silence his conscience. A veil hid the sun, as in morning, a large veil, like the tiny one that clouded the one good eye of the murdered dog.
Beaten to exhaustion by the sea wind, the eucalyptus wept ever more loudly toward the storm in the deep crushing silence that noon spread above the dead dog throughout the yet golden countryside.
April Idyll
The children took Platero with them to the brook of the poplars, and now they are bringing him back trotting, in the midst of pointless playing and senseless laughter, loaded with yellow flowers. It rains on them down there - that fleeting cloud which veiled the green meadow with its threads of gold and silver on which there trembled, like a lyre of tears, the rainbow. And in the drenched hair of the little donkey the wet bellflowers are still dripping.
Fresh, gay, sentimental idyll! Even Platero's braying sounds tender under the sweet, rain-drenched load. From time to time, he turns his head and bites off the flowers his big mouth can reach. The white and yellow blooms hang for a moment from his mouth, streaked with his greenish slaver, then disappear into his round, cinched belly. If one could only eat flowers like you, Platero, and not suffer.
Ambiguous April evening! The brilliant eyes of Platero reflect the hour of sun, against whose setting above the field of San Juan is seen another rosy ravelled cloud raining.
The Canary's Flight
One day the green canary - I do not know how or why - flew out of his cage. He was an old bird, a sad legacy from a dead woman, which I had not set at liberty for fear that he might starve or freeze to death, or that he might be eaten by the cats.
All morning long he flew about the pomegranate blossoms in the garden, through the pine tree by the gate, along the lilacs. And all morning long the children sat on the porch, absorbed in the brief flights of the yellowish bird. Platero rested close to the rosebushes, playing with a butterfly.
In the late afternoon the canary came to the foot of the large house, and there he remained a long time, fluttering in the soft light of the setting sun. Of a sudden, without anyone's knowing how or why, he appeared in the cage, gay once more.
What a stir in the garden! The children leaped about, clapping their hands, rosy and laughing as the dawn; Diana, mad with joy, followed them, barking at her own tinkling bell; having caught their mirth, Platero capered around like a wild young goat, stood on his hind legs dancing a rude waltz, and then, standing on his forefeet, kicked his hind feet in the clear warm air....
The Leech
Just a moment. What is it, Platero? What is the matter?
Platero's mouth is bleeding. He coughs, and he walks more and more slowly. I understand in a moment. On passing by Pinetree Fountain this morning, Platero drank. And though he always drinks in the clearest spot and through tight-clenched teeth, a leech must have fastened on his tongue or on the roof of his mouth.
"Wait, old man. Show me."
I ask Raposo, the farmer who has come from the almond grove, for help, and between us we try to open Platero's mouth. He has closed it fast, as with Roman concrete. I realise sorrowfully that poor Platero is less intelligent than I had thought. Raposo takes a stout stick, breaks it in four pieces, and tries to insert a piece between Platero's jaws. It is not an easy undertaking. Platero raises his head to the zenith, standing on his hind legs; he flees; he runs hither and yon. Finally in an unguarded moment, the stick goes into Platero's mouth. Raposo mounts the donkey and pulls back on the stick, holding the ends of it with both hands so that Platero will not drop it.
Yes, far inside, full and black, the leach is fastened. I pull it off, using two twigs as pincers. It looks like a little sac of red ochre or a tiny wineskin filled with red wine; and against the sunlight it is like the comb of a turkey angered by a red rag. So that it may never again suck the blood of a donkey, I slit its body and cast it into the brook, where for a moment Platero's blood gives a red tinge to the foam of a brief whirlpool.
The Cart
In the big creek, which the rains had swelled as far as the vineyard, we found an old cart stuck in the mud, lost to view under its load of grass and oranges. A raged, dirty little girl was weeping over one wheel, trying to help the donkey, who was, alas, smaller and frailer than Platero. And the little donkey was spending himself against the wind, trying vainly at the sobbing cry of the girl to pull the cart out of the mire. His efforts were futile, like the efforts of brave children, like the breath of those tired summer breezes which fall fainting among the flowers.
I patted Platero, and as well as I could I hitched him to the cart in front of the wretched little donkey. I encouraged him then with an affectionate command, and Platero, at one tug, pulled cart and beast out of the mud and up the bank.
How the little girl smiled! It was as if the evening sun, setting among the yellow-crystal rain clouds, had kindled a dawn of joy behind her dirty tears.
With tearful gladness she offered me two choice oranges, perfect, heavy, round. I took them gratefully, and I gave one to the weak little donkey, to comfort him; the other to Platero, as a golden reward.
Aglaia
How very handsome you are today, Platero. Come here. What a fine bath Macaria has given you this morning. All the white and all the black in you shines and stands out like day and like night after rain. How handsome you look, Platero.
Platero, somewhat abashed by his appearance, comes to me slowly, still wet from the bath, so clean he is like a naked girl. His face has become clear, like a dawn, and in it his great eyes sparkle brightly, as if the youngest of the Graces had lent them ardour and brilliance.
I tell him so, and, in sudden fraternal enthusiasm, I take his head in my arms, press it in affectionate embrace, tickle him.... He, with lowered eyes, shies mildly but does not leave me, or frees himself in a brief run, to stop abruptly and wait, like a playful dog.
How handsome you are, my boy, I repeat.
And Platero, like a poor child wearing a new dress, runs about timidly, talking to me, looking at me in his flight, showing his joy in the movement of his ears, and stops, pretending to eat some red bellflowers at the door of the stable.
Aglaia, the giver of kindness and of beauty, leaning against the pair tree that displays its triple crown of leaves, pears and sparrows, looks on smilingly, almost invisible in the transparency of the morning sun.
Albert Lynch: Gathering Flowers
Barbón
Barbón, Platero's doctor, is big as the dappled ox, red as a watermelon. He weighs over two hundred pounds. His age, by his own account, is threescore years.
When he speaks, he misses some notes, as old pianos do; at other times, instead of words, air whistles through. And these false cues carry an accompaniment of nods, of ponderative hand-wavings, of senile hesitations, of clearings of the throat and spitting into a handkerchief, which is beyond words. A pleasant concert for just before dinner.
He has neither molar not incisor left, and he eats almost nothing but bread crumb, which he first softens in his hand. He rolls it into a pellet and - into his red mouth it goes. He holds it there, pushing it around with his tongue, for an hour. Then another pellet, and another. He chews with his gums, and his chin then reaches his aquiline nose.
I say he is big as the dappled ox. At the door by the bench, he hides the house. But he is easily moved, just like a child, at the sight of Platero. And if he sees a flower or a bird, he laughs suddenly, opening his mouth wide, with great, sustained laughter whose speed and duration he cannot control, and which always ends in tears. Then, calm once more, he looks a long time in the direction of the old cemetery:
"My little girl, my poor little girl...."
Friendship
We understand each other. I let him go at his fancy, and he always takes me where I want to go.
Platero knows that on reaching the Corona pine I like to get close to its trunk and touch it, and to look up at the sky through its enormous, light-filtered top; he knows that the narrow path that leads between grassplots to the Old Fountain delights me; that it is high festival for me to watch the river from the pine hill, which, like a sorceress, brings classic scenes before me. If I go to sleep, unafraid, on his back, my awakening always finds me at one of these friendly spots.
I treat Platero as if he were a child. If the road is rough or a little too hard for him, I get down to make it easy for him. I kiss him; I tease him mercilessly. He knows that I love him and bears me no grudge. He is so like me, so different from the rest, that I have come to believe that he dreams my own dreams.
Platero has given himself to me like a passionate adolescent. He protests at nothing. I know that I am his happiness. He even avoids donkeys and men....
The Consumptive Girl
She was sitting up straight in a poor, mean chair, her face a dead white, like a bruised lily, in the centre of the cold, whitewashed room. The doctor had prescribed walking in the country, to take the sun of that chilly May; but the poor child could not go.
"When I get to the bridge," she told me, you see, sir, just close by, I can't breathe."
The childish voice, thin and broken, would fail her, as a summer breeze sometimes fails.
I offered her Platero for a little ride. Mounted on him, what laughter from her sharp, dead child's face, all black eyes and white teeth.
Women would look out the doorways to watch us pass. Platero walked slowly, as if knowing that he was carrying a fragile lily of fine crystal. The girl, in her spotless habit of the Virgin of Montemayor tied at her waist with scarlet cord, transfigured by fever and hope, looked like an angel passing through the town on her way to the southern sky.
Promenade
How pleasantly we go along the deep, honeysuckle-hung roads of summer. I read or sing or recite verses to the sky. Platero nibbles the thin grass on the shady roadside, the dusty blooms of the mallows, the yellow vinegar flowers. He spends more time standing than walking. I let him....
The infinitely blue sky, receiving the arrows of my ecstatic eyes, rises to glorious space above the laden almond trees. The entire ardent and silent countryside is gleaming. In the river a small sail stands still in the windless water. The compact smoke of a fire swells in round black clouds toward the hills.
But our journey is short. It is like a sweet defenceless day in the midst of multiple life. Not the apotheosis of the day, nor the sea to which the river goes; not even the tragedy of the flames.
When in the smell of orange blossoms the gay, cool sound of the well pulley is heard, Platero brays and frisks with delight. What a simple daily pleasure. At the cistern I fill my glass and drink that liquid snow. Platero sinks his mouth in the dark water and sips greedily here and there in the cleanest spots.
When in the smell of orange blossoms the gay, cool sound of the well pulley is heard, Platero brays and frisks with delight. What a simple daily pleasure. At the cistern I fill my glass and drink that liquid snow. Platero sinks his mouth in the dark water and sips greedily here and there in the cleanest spots.
Sparrows
The morning of Santiago Day is clouded with grey and white, as if set in cotton. Everyone has gone to church. The sparrows and Platero and I have remained in the garden.
Sparrows! Under the round clouds which at times rain a few drops, how they come and go in the climbing vines, how they shrill, how they peck at each other's bills! One lights on a bough, takes flight, and leaves it quivering; another drinks a bit of sky from the little pool on the well curb; another has leapt up to the roof from the olive tree, whose almost-dry flowers the grey day brightens in contrast.
Blessed birds, with no fixed holy days! Free in the monotony of the innate, the real, bells mean nothing to them, unless it be a vague joyousness. Well content, with no fatal obligations, with no Olympus to enrapture nor Avernus to terrify them, with no morality but their own nor any God but the blue, they are my brothers, my sweet brothers.
They travel without money and without luggage; they leave a house when the fancy strikes them; they know where to find a brook: they divine a fern; and they need but open their wings to gain happiness. They know nothing of Mondays or Saturdays; they bathe anywhere, any time; they love nameless love, the universal loved one.
And when people - poor wretched people - go to church on Sundays, locking their doors behind them, they, in a glad example of riteless love, suddenly come, with their fresh and jovial shrilling, to the gardens of the closed houses in which some poet whom they know well, and a tender small donkey - will you let me join our names, Platero? - watch them with fraternal love.
(Avernus is a crater lake in Italy, near Naples: in ancient times regarded as an entrance to hell.)
Bullfight
I wager you do not know, Platero, what those children wanted. To see whether I would let them take you to ask for the key at the bullfight this afternoon. But do not worry. I told them they must not even think of it.
They were crazy with excitement, Platero. The whole town is excited over the bullfight. The band has been playing since daylight in front of the taverns; it is now out of tune; cars and horses go up Nueva Street, down Nueva Street. Back there they are decorating the "Canary", that yellow carriage the children like so well, for the bullfight's parade. Gardens have been robbed of their flowers for the patronesses. It is a sad night, the young boys staggering down the streets, their wide-brimmed hats askew, their cigars, their shirts, themselves, smelling of horses and of brandy....
At two o'clock, Platero, in that instant of sunny solitude, in that empty moment of the day, while bullfighters and patronesses are dressing up, you and I will leave by the side door and go along the lane to the country, as we did last year.
How beautiful the country is on these holidays when everyone forsakes it! The vineyards are deserted, and the orchards; one scarcely sees even an old man bent over a sour vine or stooped silently above a clear pool. In the distance, over the town, rises the full-throated clamour, the clapping of hands, the music from the bullfight, lost as one wanders on serenely to the sea. And the soul, Platero, feels itself complete master of the great body of Nature which, when respected, yields to him who deserves it the spectacle of her resplendent and eternal beauty.
Sunday
The clamorous voice of the bell, now near, now far, resounds in the sky as if the blue were a crystal goblet. And the open country, already a little sickly, seems to guild itself with open notes calling from the joyous chiming.
Everyone, even the watchman, has gone to town to see the procession. Platero and I are alone. What peace! What freedom! What well-being! I turn Platero loose in the meadow, and, under a pine which the birds have not deserted, I fling myself on the ground to read Omar Khyyam.
The silence between two peals, the inner tumult of the September morning, acquire shape and sound. The gold and black wasps flutter round the bunches of muscatel grapes which load the vine; the butterflies, indistinguishable from the flowers, seem to renew themselves in metamorphosis of colour as they fly. The solitude is like a great thought of light.
Now and then Platero stops eating and looks at me. I, now and then, stop reading and look at Platero.
Storm
Fear. Held breath. Cold sweat. The terrible low sky strangles the daybreak.
And nowhere to escape.
Silence. Love stops. Guilt trembles. Remorse closes its eyes. More silence.
Thunder, dull, reverberating, interminable, like a yawn that does not quite end, like an enormous cargo of rocks falling from the zenith on the town, overruns again and again the deserted morning.
And nowhere to flee.
Everything that is weak - flowers, birds - disappears from life.
Terror peeps timidly out the half-open window to behold God tragically showing Himself in flashes of light. Far in the east, between tatters of clouds, sad mauve and rose clouds, dirty, cold clouds, are unable to vanquish the blackness. The six o'clock stagecoach - it might be four o'clock - is heard at the corner in the downpour, the coachman singing to give himself courage. Then an empty farm wagon hurries along.
The Angelus. A harsh, desolate Angelus sobs through the thunder. The last Angelus in the world? And one might wish that it would stop quickly, or else go on ringing, ringing, to drown the storm. And there is walking to and fro, and weeping, and one does not know what one wants....
And nowhere to escape.
Hearts are rigid. Children call....
And what of Platero, so alone in the defenceless stable in the yard?
October Afternoon
Vacation days are over, and with the first yellow leaves the children have returned to school. Solitude. The heart of the house, also, with the fallen leaves, seems empty. Distant cries and faraway laughter are heard only in fancy.
Evening falls apace, slowly, on the flowering rosebushes. The sunset glow reddens the last late roses, and the garden, lifting its flame of fragrance to the flame of the dying sun, smells of burnt roses. Silence.
Platero, wearily restless as I, does not know what to do. Hesitently he comes toward me, considers, wonders, and at last, confidently stepping sturdily and clearly on the brick floor, he comes with me into the house....
Antonia
The brook was so full that the yellow lilies, hardy gold band of its banks in summer, were drowning in isolated dispersal, bestowing their beauty petal by petal on the swift current.
Where would Antoñilla, in that sunny dress of hers, be able to cross it? The stones that we tried sank in the mud. The girl walked up along the bank as far as the poplar hedge to see whether she could cross there. She could not.
... Then in a gallant gesture I offered her Platero.
As I addressed her, Antoñilla blushed all over, her blushes burning the freckles that modestly framed her grey eyes. Then suddenly she burst into laughter and leaned against a tree.... Finally she made up her mind. She threw her pink woollen shawl on the grass, took a running start, and, nimble as a greyhound, landed on Platero, letting her legs hang on each side, hard legs whose unsuspected ripeness was encircled by the red and white stripes of her course stockings.
Platero pondered a moment, and, in a sure leap, he reached the opposite bank. Then, as Antoñilla, between whose bashfulness and me the brook now lay, spurred him with her heels, he went trotting across the plain, accompanied by the gold and silver laughter of the jolting, dark-skinned girl.
There was a fragrance of lilies, of rain, of love. Like a crown of thorny roses, the line that Shakespeare gave Cleopatra to speak rounded out of my thought:
"Oh happy horse, to bear the weight of Anthony!"
"Platero!" I called out discordantly, feeling outraged and angry....
The Forgotten Grape Cluster
After the long October rains, in the golden blueness of the first clear day, we went in a body to the vineyards. Platero carried the lunch and the girls' hats on one side of his little pannier and on the other, to balance the weight, Blanca, soft and white and pink, like a peach blossom.
What charm in the rain-washed countryside! The brooks were full to the brim, the fields carefully furrowed, and on the roadside poplars which still flaunted a few yellow leaves, birds in black contrast.
Suddenly the girls, one after the other, rushed forward crying:
"A cluster, a cluster!"
In the old vine whose long tangled branches still showed some blackened and some reddened dry leaves, the burning sun shone on a clear amber bunch of grapes, brilliant and inviting like a woman in her autumn. Everybody wanted it. Victoria, who reached it first and plucked it, defended it royally. Then I asked it of her, and she, with that soft docility which a child turning into a woman shows to a man, held it to me willingly.
The cluster held five large grapes. I gave one to Victoria, one to Blanca, one to Lola, one to Pepa, and the last one, amid unanimous laughter and applause, to Platero, who quickly caught it between his huge teeth.
Admiral
You did not know him. He was taken away before you came. From him I learned nobleness. As you see, the plaque bearing his name is still above the stall that was his, and his saddle, bridle, and halter are there.
What a delight when he entered the yard for the first time, Platero. He came from the dunes, and he brought me a wonderful store of strength, life, and gaiety. How pretty he was! Very early every morning I would ride him toward the beach and gallop by the marshes, rousing flocks of jackdaws that were marauding the closed mills. Then we would turn into the highway, and he would enter Nueva Street at a firm short trot.
One winter afternoon Monsieur Dupont, from the San Juan warehouses, came to my house, his whip in his hand. He left some bank notes on the lamp table of the little living room and went to the courtyard with Laura. Later, at nightfall, I saw through the window, as in a dream, Monsieur Dupont going up Nueva Street in the rain, his charrette drawn by Admiral.
I cannot say for how many days I was broken-hearted. The doctor had to be called, and I was given bromide and ether and what not, until time, which fades everything, took him out of my mind, as it took Lord, and the small girl, too, Platero.
Yes, Platero. What good friends you and Admiral would have been.
Jackdaws
Fright
It was the children's dinnertime. Dreamily the lamp cast its warm pattern on the snow-white cloth, and the red geraniums and red apples added a rough gaiety to that simple idyll of innocent faces. The little girls were eating like grown women; the boys discussed like grown men. In the background, the young mother, blond and beautiful, nursing the baby at her white breast, watched smilingly. Outside the garden window the clear starry night trembled cold.
Suddenly, Blanca ran like a weak ray of light to her mother's arms. There was an abrupt silence, and then, noisily upsetting their chairs, all the children followed her example in swift hubbub, turning terrified faces to the window.
Foolish Platero! With his big white head, enlarged by the shadow, the glass, and the fright in the children's eyes, pressed against the window pane, he was gazing, quiet and wistful, at the warm bright dining room.
The Runaway Bull
When Platero and I arrive at the orange grove, the ravine is still in shadow, but white with the frost-covered lion's claw. The sun does not yet gild the colourless and resplendent sky, against which the oak-covered hill shows its finest gorse.... From time to time a broad and prolonged murmur makes me look up. It is the starlings, returning to the olive groves in long formations, changing pattern in ideal manoeuvres.
I clap my hands.... Echo answers... "Manuel!" No one comes.... Suddenly, a rapid clamour, big and round.
... My heart beats to its full capacity with foreboding. I hide, with Platero, in the old fig tree....
Yes, hear he comes. A red bull passes, master of the morning, snuffing, bellowing, shattering for fun whatever is in his path. He stops a moment on the hill and fills the valley up to the sky with a short and terrible moan. The starlings, unafraid, continue passing against the rosy sky with a soft sound that is muffled by the beating of my heart.
In a cloud of dust which the now rising sun touches with copper, the bull comes down through the spiny amaryllis to the well. He drinks briefly, and then, superb, victorious, larger than the countryside, he goes uphill, his horns hung with tattered vine runners, toward the forest, and is lost to view at last between my eager eyes and the dazzling sunrise, now pure gold.
The White Mare
I am sad, Platero.... Look; when I was crossing Flores Street at Portada, in the same spot where lightning killed the twin children, Sordo's white mare was lying dead. Some almost naked little girls were walking around her silently.
Purita, the seamstress, who was passing by, told me that this morning Sordo, tired of feeding the mare, took her to the pit. You know the poor thing was as old and slow-witted as Don Julián. She could neither see nor hear, and she could scarcely walk.... About noon the mare was back at her master's porch. Irritated, he took a vine prop and tried to drive her away with it. She would not leave. Then he cut her with the sickle. People gathered, and in the cursing and joking the mare started up the street, limping and stumbling. Children followed with cries and rocks. At last she fell to the ground, and they finished killing her there. Some compassionate feeling fluttered above her: "Let her die in peace!" as if you or I had been there, Platero, but it was like a butterfly in the centre of a gale.
When I saw her the stones were still piled beside her, she as cold as they. One of her eyes was wide open, and, blind in life, now that she was dead seemed as if it could see. The only light left in the dark street was her whiteness, above which the night sky, very high in the cold, was disappearing, covered with the lightest of fleecy, rose-coloured clouds....
The Gypsies
Look at her, Platero. There she comes down the street in the coppery sunshine, straight, erect, shawl-less, looking at no one.... How well she carries the memory of her beauty, gallant still, like an oak, her red kerchief round her body, over her blue white-dotted skirt with many ruffles. She is on her way to the town hall to ask permission to encamp, as usual, behind the cemetery. You remember the sordid tents of the gypsies, their fires, their gaudy women, their starving donkeys all around.
The donkeys, Platero! The donkeys of the town must be trembling, hearing the gypsies from their stable-yards. I am not uneasy about Platero because to get to his stable the gypsies would have to leap over half the town, and, besides, Rengel, the watchman, likes him and me. But in jest, to frighten him, I say with a voice charged with implications:
"In, Platero, in! Let me close the grating. Someone will get you!"
Platero, sure that the gypsies will not get him, passes at a trot through the iron door, which closes after him with a harsh sound of iron and glass. He leaps from the marble court into the flower garden; like an arrow he speeds into the stable-yard, breaking, in his short flight, the blue morning-glory vine.
The Flame
Come closer, Platero, come. You need not stand on ceremony here. The master of the house is happy to have you here, because he is one of yours. Alí, his dog, likes you, you know. And I, need I say anything, Platero? How cold it must be in the orange grove. You can hear Raposo: "God grant that not many oranges may be burnt tonight."
Do you like the fire, Platero? I believe that not even a woman's naked body can compare with fire flame. What flowing hair, what arms, what legs could win in a comparison with these flaming nudities? Perhaps nature has no better example of herself than fire. The house is closed, and night is without and alone; and nevertheless, how much closer than the fields themselves are we to nature before this opening into the Plutonic lake. Fire is the universe indoors. Red and interminable, like the blood from a wound, it warms and strengthens us with all the memories of blood.
Platero, how beautiful is fire. Look how Alí, almost burning himself, watches it with his bright wide-open eyes. What joy! We are enveloped in golden dances and shadow dances. The whole house dances, becomes small and then immense in easy playfulness, like Russian dancers. All shapes issue from the fire in endless enchantment: branches and birds, lion and water, mountain and rose. Look, we ourselves, without knowing it, are dancing on the wall, on the floor, on the ceiling.
What a madness, what an intoxication, what a glory. Even Love is like death here, Platero.
Convalescence
Lying in the dim yellow light of my convalescent's room, comfortable with rugs and tapestries, I hear from the night street, as in a dream bedewed with stars, light-stepping donkeys returning from the country, children playing and shouting.
I can imagine the large dark heads of asses and the fine small heads of children who, amid braying, sing Christmas carols in crystal and silver voices. I feel the town rapped in the smoke of roasted chestnuts, in the effluvium from stables, in the emanation of homes at peace....
And my soul overflows, purifying me, as if a torrent of celestial waters supplied it from the hidden rock of my heart. Redeeming nightfall! Intimate hour, cold and warm at the same time, full of infinite revelations!
Up above, the bells peal gaily among the stars. Platero, caught in the prevailing spirit, brays in his stall, which, in the instant of heaven-at-hand, seems far away.... In my weakness I weep, moved to tenderness, and alone, just like Faust....
Ribera Street
Here in this big house, which is now the civil-guard headquarters, I was born, Platero. How, as a child, I liked this modest balcony, Moorish in Master Garfia's manner, with its coloured-glass stars, and how grand it seemed to me! Look through the grating, Platero; the white and lavender-coloured lilacs and the little bluebells still bedeck the time-blackened wooden railing at the back of the courtyard, delight of my childhood.
Platero, at this corner of Flores Street, the sailors, in rows like the furrows of an October field, used to stand in their uniforms of various blues. I remember that they seemed gigantic to me; for, between their legs, spread out through force of seagoing habit. I could see, far below, the river with its parallel stripes of water and sand, the former shining bright, the latter dry and yellow; with a slow boat on the edge of the other arm of the river; with the background of violent red spots in the western sky.... Later my father moved to Nueva Street, because the sailors were always having knife fights, because every night urchins would break the porch light and the doorbell, and because it was always windy at the corner....
From the bay window the see can be seen. And I shall never forget the night that all of us children, frightened and trembling, were taken there to watch the English ship that was burning in the sand bar....
The 'Oceanic', British ship built 1889
The Wreath of Parsley
"Let us see who gets there first!"
The prize was a picture book which I had received from Vienna the day before.
"Let us see who gets to the violet bed first! One... two... three... go!"
The little girls were off in a gay whirl of white and rose in the sunlight. In the silence that their mute forward rush cleft in the morning, the slow striking of the town's tower clock, the slight humming of a gnat in the pine hill that blue lilies covered, and the murmur of running water in the ditch were heard for an instant.... The children had reached the first orange tree when Platero, who had been idling somewhere around, caught the spirit of the game and joined the lively race. The girls, eager to win, could not stop to protest, nor even to laugh. I called out to them:
"Platero is going to win! Platero is going to win!"
Yes, Platero reached the violet bed before anyone else and remained by it, wallowing in the sand.
The girls came back protesting heatedly, rolling up their stockings, gathering up their hair:
"That wasn't fair! That wasn't fair! No, no, no!"
I told them that Platero had won the race and that it was fair to reward him. That the book, since Platero could not read, should be used as a prize for some other race of their own, but that we must give Platero a prize.
They, sure now of the book, leaped and laughed with joy, faces flushed:
"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
Realising that Platero had had his reward in his effort, as I have in my verses, I picked up a few sprigs of parsley from the housekeeper's parsley bed, made them into a wreath and placed it on Platero's head, as on a Spartan's.
Wine
Platero, I have told you that the soul of Moguer is bread. No. Moguer is like a pipe of thick clear crystal waiting the whole year through under its round blue sky for its golden wine. When September comes, if the Devil has not spoiled the feast, the cup fills to the brim with wine and overflows like a generous heart.
The whole town then smells of wine, more or less generously, and tinkles like crystal. It is as though the sun gave itself in liquid beauty for our four pence, for the pleasure of finding itself enclosed in the transparent cup of the white town and of gladdening its good blood. Every house is, in every street, like a bottle in Juanito Miguel's or the Royalist's wine shop when the dying day touches them with sunset light.
Carnival
How handsome Platero is today! It is Carnival Monday and the children are wearing masks and gay costumes. They have arrayed Platero in a Moorish harness, heavily embroidered in red, blue, white, and yellow arabesques.
Rain, sun, and cold. Coloured serpentine streams from the balconies and bits of confetti are tossed about in the sharp afternoon wind. The revellers, stiff with cold, try to warm blue hands in the folds of their flowing costumes.
When we arrive at the Square, some women, disguised as inmates of an insane asylum in long white robes, their loose black hair wreathed with green leaves, take Platero in the centre of their boisterous circle and, joining hands, dance gaily about him.
Platero, hesitating, pricks up his ears, raises his head, and, like a scorpion surrounded by fire, tries nervously to escape by every means. But, as he is so small, the crazy women are not afraid of him and continue gyrating around him, singing and laughing. The children make great sport of his captivity, imitating his braying, playfully clapping their hands when he answers them. The whole Square is now a confused concert of brayings, laughter, songs, tambourines, brass mortars....
Death
I found Platero lying on his bed of straw, eyes soft and sad. I went to him, stroked him, talking to him and trying to help him stand.
The poor fellow quivered, started to rise, one forefoot bent under.... He could not get up. Then I straightened his foot on the ground, patted him again tenderly, and called the doctor.
Old Badón, as soon as he saw him, puckered his toothless mouth and shook his bulbous head like a pendulum.
"No hope?"
I do not know what he answered.... That the poor fellow was dying ... nothing ... a pain.... Some root he had eaten, with the grass....
At noon, Platero was dead. His little cotton-like stomach had swollen like a globe, and his rigid discoloured legs were raised to heaven. His curly hair looked now like the moth-eaten tow hair of old dolls that falls off when you touch it.
Through the silent stable, its translucent wings seeming to catch fire every time it passed the ray of light that came in through the little window, fluttered a beautiful three-coloured butterfly.
Moguer, 1916
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