Delights of a Madrid Winter
No, sir, you cannot deny that the best season of the year is winter. The theatres fill up. Gastronomists return to the juicy oyster; and as soon as it begins to freeze still their appetites with the tasty sea-bream. The crown ministers can infringe the laws with impunity, fearless of tumults and insurrections, for the people’s blood does not boil as in the month of July, and patriots prefer roasting chestnuts and toasting themselves over the brazier to haranguing in rain and snow. The shoeblacks dance with joy, for the mud is all in their favour. The doctors make their fortunes with colds and lung diseases. The apothecaries sell cough lozenges to their hearts’ content. The maid-servants make a new conquest every day of the Savoyards who cross the Pyrenees to clean out our chimneys and purses with their monkeys and hurdy-gurdies. But besides these and other votaries, who have powerful reasons for liking winter, there are other admirers of this season dubbed rigorous by the ignorant vulgar. These devotees are the only really intelligent beings, and nobody will be able to deny they are right, when they patent the advantages of the months of November, December, and January over those of May, June, and July.
The monotony of summer is insipid. The sun shines upon everything with the very same rays. The flowers unceasingly diffuse the identical scent. The country is always green.... It is unsupportable, horrible! The votaries of summer say that all this makes the little birds charm with their trills and warbles every heart sensible to the delights of harmony. And we defenders of winter reply, who can compare the feeble song of the timid nightingale to the animated and piercing duets intoned by enamoured cats on our roofs in January? And the rain? Can anything be more delicious than rain? Oh, how I rave for the rain! Let us talk about the rain!
Some people say the rain is monotonous. Ignorant idiots! Let them apply that epithet to the sun, but the rain—monotonous? Bah! Could anybody adduce anything more varied and agreeable than rain? Clouds, mists, dew, hail, drizzle, showers, snow-storms... what a charming mosaic of precious things!
Is there a more sublime spectacle than a shower?... especially when contemplated from behind a well-glazed window? When the cataracts of heaven are opened on Sundays, it is worth while hiring a balcony in the Puerta del Sol. Those who have been so imprudent as to sally out without their wife and umbrella, recognise the advantage of the latter article over the former. But what a pleasing sight is the picturesque group of a married pair and their little children under the protection of one umbrella! And when the crystalline rain is accompanied by a strong soester, which the most impermeable of taffety cannot resist—that boisterous blast which removes hats and wigs... oh, then the respectable couple who have issued forth to air their Sunday-best present a marvellous and really romantic spectacle. The husband, fearful for his precious umbrella abandons the arm of his better-half, and presses his feet firmly to the ground to save the article in question, for the wind has turned it inside out like a stocking, and seems desirous of snatching it from his hands, in the same way that it has whirled off his hat just as a flower-pot falls from one of the houses and smashes his skull. The modest spouse pays no attention either to her husband’s catastrophe, or to the gusts or downpour, but thinks only of her angelical prudicity, and how she may best avoid making a display of her person, for the wind against which she is struggling marks out all her contour, seeming to take a pleasure in exposing to the spectators the most hidden curves of his victim.
But I should never end if I gave a minute description of all the fascinations of my favourite season. I have said enough about the beauties of rain. In another article I hope to illustrate the pleasures of the cold, the charm of chilblains, and particularly all tha heroic in cerebral rheums, fully persuaded that once the reasons upon which I base my opinions are read, all my readers will agree with me that there is nothing to be compared with the delights of winter.
Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco.