To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
La Peninsular.
Seville. January 28, 1914.
Dear Susie
By this time I feel quite settled and happy here. My cough has disappeared with the cold and rainy weather, and I have come to find the hotel quite tolerable. The food is good enough if one makes a judicious selection of dishes, and I rather like monotony in food, e.g. I have an omelette and fried fish and a bit of guisado or rice and two or three oranges for lunch every day, and no wine It seems to agree with me; and if I went to a better hotel I fear I should find many worse things, tourists, for instance. This is a small place, with some old German women and business men living permanently and a very moderate tide of Spanish people coming and going. Not a single English or American person yet! Then my room is quite delightful, with so much sun that I already have to close the blinds not to be dazzled. I am in the principal, looking out on the main square, and almost in it, as I hear and see everything that is going on. I get up and have my chocolate at 9, and dress at 12. After lunch I go to a café, always the same one, and the same table, if possible, where the waiters are now my friends and bring me the illustrated papers, and then, with a note-book in my pocket, in case of inspiration, I start on my walk, through the Delicias into the country. On the way I watch the steamers loading and unloading, and if it is warm I sit in the gardens for a while. Tea I take on my return to the city, this at quite a different and more fashionable coffeehouse, where there are ladies and foreigners. Then I usually come to my room again, and read or write until dinner, which I have about 7:30. There is a good electric light over my table, by which I am writing now. In the evening, I return to my first café, in the Sierpes, overhear and sometimes join in conversation with some of the habitués, and then go to the theatre. I have seen a lot of things, good, bad, and indifferent, with and without local colour; but half the amusement is in seeing the people. I affect the dias de moda, tonight it will be at the cine in the teatro de San Fernando, the largest and best in Seville. In this way I see the beauty and fashion of the place, better than in their carriages and autos in the Delicias. Seville is a true and homogeneous capital city, like ancient towns, with its aristocracy just as native as its lower classes. I find it very simpático. Tomorrow we shall have the novelty of the arrival of the court. I suppose they will drive by my window in the morning, there is hardly another possible route, and I shall have other opportunities of seeing them during their sojourn, which I understand is to be for less than a fortnight. As you see, I dawdle and amuse myself a good deal, but at the same time I manage to work every day for two or three hours; and this is enough to keep my mind engaged and give me the resource of a settled occupation in the background, to which I can always return.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.