February 6, 2009


Isn’t This a Lovely Paragraph?

My friend Rick loaned me a book by Camilo José Cela–Journey To The Alcarria–translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. It concerns the author’s travels on foot through the Spanish countryside, in a region described by the writer of the introduction (Paul Ilie) as “a territory in New Castle, northeast of Madrid, surrounding most of Guadalajara province.” Here is an early paragraph in the book–the one that pulled me right in:

The Alcarria is a beautiful region which people apparently have no desire to visit. I walked through it for a number of days, and I liked it. It is a region of great variety, and except for honey (the dealers buy up all of that), it has everything: wheat, potatoes, goats, olives, tomatoes, and game. The people seemed like honest folk; they speak magnificent Spanish with a fine pure accent, and though they didn’t know much about what I was doing there, they treated me well and fed me, sometimes scantily, but always with kindness. There was one town where they even made me a guest of honor of the town council and paid my bill at the inn; in another, perhaps by way of compensation, they threw me in jail by order of the mayor (who was a drunken, tongue-tied albino), and kept me there for a day and a night, locked in a stinking cellar and nourished on garlic soup and a couple of mouthfuls of wine dregs. There was a gypsy about my own age in the cell, who had stolen a mule. He thought, Heaven knows why, that I was a traveling actor, and kept asking me, “If you’re an artist, why don’t you say so?” The poor fellow simply couldn’t get into his head that it wasn’t because I didn’t want to say so, but simply that I wasn’t an artist. I don’t mention this town in the book because I couldn’t say much of anything pleasant about it.

posted by Daryl Scroggins in adventure, books, travel 

comments

2 Responses to “Isn’t This a Lovely Paragraph?”

  1. India on February 6th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    Now I would like to read a book that contains this and the Maud Newton paragraph from the previous post. How might the narrative make its way from point A to point B?

  2. Rick Neece on February 6th, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    I love how this swerves from the beginning to the end and yet the end is present in the beginning.

Leave a Reply