“God has closed His ears to all supplications offered Him in its presence. In the winter, packs of wolves gather about the juniper which overshadows it to rush upon the herds; banditti wait in its shade for travellers whose slain bodies they bury at its foot, and when the tempest rages, the lightnings deviate from their course to meet, hissing, at the head of this cross and to rend the stones of its pedestal.”
In a portfolio which I still treasure, full of idle drawings made during some of my semi-artistic excursions to the city of Toledo, are written three dates.
The events whose memory these figures keep are up to a certain point insignificant.
Nevertheless, by recollecting them I have entertained myself on certain wakeful nights in shaping a novel more or less sentimental or sombre, in proportion as my imagination found itself more or less exalted, and disposed toward the humorous or tragic view of life.
If on the morning following one of these darkling, delirious reveries, I had tried to write out the extraordinary episodes of the impossible fictions which I invented before my eyelids utterly closed, these romances, whose dim dénouement finally floats undetermined on that sea between waking and sleep, would assuredly form a book of preposterous inconsistencies but original and peradventure interesting.
This is not what I am attempting now. These light--one might almost say impalpable--fantasies are in a sense like butterflies which cannot be caught in the hands without there being left between the fingers the golden dust of their wings.
I am going to confine myself, then, to the brief narration of three events which are wont to serve as headings for the chapters of my dream-novels; the three isolated points which I am accustomed to connect in my mind by a series of ideas like a shining thread; the three themes, in short, upon which I play thousands on thousands of variations, amounting to what might be called absurd symphonies of the imagination.
There is in Toledo a narrow street, crooked and dim, which guards so faithfully the traces of the hundred generations that have dwelt in it, which speaks so eloquently to the eyes of the artist and reveals to him so many secret points of affinity between the ideas and customs of each century, and the form and special character impressed upon even its most insignificant works, that I would close the entrances with a barrier and place above the barrier a shield with this device: