Beside the parasite, here is the thinker; beside the exploiter, here is the creator. Along the Gran Via, the calle de Alcalà or near the Puerta del Sol are the _tertulias_. They are cafés in which the men of the town congregate each night. You will find each of them in his appointed place, from close of work until nine, when the householder returns to dinner. The café is dark and the smoke fumes are thick. The muscular integument of the Castilian language is darker and thicker. It fills the air with a heavy yet swift texture. It is fluent, agile, potent. The plastic rigor of the Spanish world is in this tongue of Spain. The men sip coffee or vermouth. They are small drinkers. One can live in Spain a year and see no drunkard. They are too busy in talk, to think of alcohol. They are talkers, neither brilliant nor dull. Their speech has weight, acuity, vigor. It is too solid to be bright: it is like the pigment of a Velázquez. Most of these men in the tertulias are of the intricate army of bureaucratic Spain. Postman or Minister, clerk, alguacil or General--all attend their tertulia with a ritual devotion. They think that they are “running Spain”--directing a State more or less modern and which, since the choice of Ferdinand and Carlos, has willed to be European. But like all Spaniards, they are unselfconscious and are actors in a drama deeply beyond them. They are the tools of the Spanish will to remain in equilibrium--to remain in sleep. All their conservative energy goes to this end, whose symbol is Madrid. But beside them, at other tables, in the tertulias of other cafés, are other men who form the antiphony of their neighbors. These are the intellectuals. They too are largely unselfconscious. They believe, perhaps, that they are artists creating in word or color things of intrinsic beauty, like their Parisian models. So they also put their heads close together over smoky tables and drink coffee and talk “shop.” But in truth, they are the inevitable response--the stir against and within the sleep of Spain. They are the germs of dissolution. The bureaucrats hold Spain together--in sleep. The intellectuals plot and dream to burst Spain asunder--in a new waking. END OF PART TWO _PART THREE_ _Beyond Spain_ _CHAPTER XI_ _THE RIFT IN BARCELONA_ The cathedrals of Spain are splendors heaped by the hand of chaos. Well they sing the discord of a world too full of life to find perfection save in the dream of death. Most of them rise from stones that formed a mosque; the mosque ofttimes was a converted citadel of Visigoth or Roman. And here Spain brought her will to unity. Where could these rank lusts of a hundred factions, these voices of continents and peoples meet, save in death? The simple romanesque is buried under the aspiring jungle of baroque, plateresque, Gothic, _churriguera_. Window, _reja_, _retablo_, altar flourish like fevers and sum up to silence.