Poor Folk in Spain
by Jan Gordon · English · Gutenberg #40776 · 468,845 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Poor Folk in Spain
Author: Jan Gordon
Cora Gordon
Release date: September 16, 2012 [eBook #40776]
Most recently updated: November 27, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POOR FOLK IN SPAIN ***
Produced by Bryan Ness, Matthias Grammel and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
POOR FOLK IN SPAIN
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS
With 20 Illustrations in colour and 24
in black and white. Crown 4to. 21_s._ net.
MOTHER AND CHILD
Drawings by BERNARD MENINSKY. With
letterpress by JAN GORDON. Crown 4to.
15_s._ net.
THE BODLEY HEAD
[Illustration: SPANISH COURTYARD]
POOR FOLK IN SPAIN
BY JAN AND CORA GORDON
ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHORS
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED
VIGO ST.:::::::: LONDON
_First published 1922_
_Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay,
Suffolk._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. LONDON 3
II. JESUS PEREZ 7
III. THE FRONTIER 17
IV. MEDINA DEL CAMPO 29
V. AVILA 40
VI. MADRID 51
VII. A HOT NIGHT 60
VIII. MURCIA--FIRST IMPRESSIONS 70
IX. MURCIA--SETTLING DOWN 81
X. MURCIA--BLAS 90
XI. MURCIA--THE ALPAGATA SHOP 95
XII. MURCIA--BRAVO TORO 98
XIII. AN EXCURSION 109
XIV. VERDOLAY--HOUSEKEEPING 123
XV. VERDOLAY--SKETCHING IN SPAIN 133
XVI. VERDOLAY--CONENI 142
XVII. VERDOLAY--THE INHABITANTS 147
XVIII. VERDOLAY--THE DANCE AT CONENI'S 156
XIX. MURCIA--THE LAUD 161
XX. ALICANTE 169
XXI. JIJONA--THE FIESTA 185
XXII. JIJONA--TIA ROGER 200
XXIII. JIJONA--A DAY'S WORK 207
XXIV. JIJONA--THE GOATHERDS 218
XXV. MURCIA--AUTUMN IN THE PASEO DE CORVERAS 226
XXVI. LORCA 244
XXVII. MURCIA--LAST DAYS 260
XXVIII. THE ROAD HOME 268
LIST OF PLATES
_To face page_
SPANISH COURTYARD _Frontispiece_
CARTERS IN THE POSADA 70
A MURCIAN BEGGAR WOMAN 78
GIRL SINGING A MALAGUEÑA 220
THE VALENCIAN JOTA DANCED BY THREE COUPLES 222
POOR FOLK IN SPAIN
CHAPTER I
LONDON
We had tasted of Spain before ever we had crossed her frontiers. Indeed,
perhaps Spain is the easiest country to obtain samples from without the
fatigue of travelling. The Spaniard carries his atmosphere with him:
wherever he goes he re-creates in his immediate surroundings more than a
hint of his national existence. The Englishman abroad may be
English--more brutally and uncompromisingly English than the Spaniard is
Spanish--yet he does not carry England with him. He does not, that is,
re-create England to the extent of making her seem quite real abroad;
there she appears alien, remote, somewhat out of place. So, too, neither
the Russian, the German, the Dane, the Portuguese, the Italian, nor the
American can carry with him the flavour of his homeland in an essence
sufficiently concentrated to withstand the insidious infiltration of a
foreign atmosphere. To some extent the Scandinavian countries, Norway
and Sweden, have this power; but Spain is thus gifted in the greatest
measure. These three countries seem to possess a national
unconsciousness which fends them off from too close a contact with lands
which are foreign to them; perhaps one might almost accuse them of a
lack of sensitiveness in certain aspects....
However, be the reason what it may, we had gathered some experience of
Spain in Paris before, and in London during the war. What we had tasted
we had liked, and so when in our low-ceilinged attic refuge in London we
gazed out upon a sky covered with flat cloud, as though with a dirty
blanket, and wondered how we might escape in order to seek for our
original selves--if they were not irretrievably lost--we thought of
Spain. I think that we went to Spain to look for something that the war
had taken from us. It was as though the low ceiling of our room, and the
low-lying sky, shut us in with something which was not altogether true;
indeed, we feel that many years must pass before the dissipation of this
curious sensation of unreality which the war had stamped on to every
one, except the most callous.
It is now clear that peace is the normal condition of the human race. In
the olden days this was not the case, but the tendency has been
changing, and to-day we increase our powers during times of peace, and
our powers fall from us during the disorganizations of war. The artist,
who is the barometer of social change, was attuned to peace. In peace he
exercises important functions. But with the sudden outbreak of war the
whole foundation of his being was suddenly torn away. When war broke out
Art for the artist seemed almost meaningless. In the face of a human
catastrophe who could paint pictures? Nero may have fiddled while Rome
was burning, but it must have been a poor meaningless tune that he
played, some popular jingle, a Roman variation of "Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-Ay."
We had come at last to a peace which still carried on its breezes all
the poisons of war, and we, at least, felt an imperative need of escape
to some place where the war had not been; to some place where perchance
life had carried on a not too distorted existence since 1914.
Spain drew us to her more than did Scandinavia. Romance certainly had a
finger in it; the sun perhaps two fingers--for we are undoubted
sun-worshippers; the music of Spain, which had attracted us in Paris,
causing Jan to abandon the banjo for the guitar, added an appeal; and I
think an exhibition of Spanish landscapes by Wyndham Tryon at the
Twenty-One Galleries settled the matter. We had been in Majorca before
the war, and this combined with our experience of Spaniards in Paris had
fixed in our minds a belief in a simplicity and courtliness of the
Spanish people which we hoped would be very soothing. Finally, two
houses were offered by a friend rent free for the whole of the summer,
together with introductions which would smooth the way. We then packed
up painting materials, stamped clothes into a trunk, worried a strangely
assorted collection of packages down our narrow and twisted staircase
into a cab, and so--hey, for the Sun, southward!
Perhaps the reader should be warned that this is not properly a book
about Spain in the true sense of the word; it is a book about ourselves.
We are inclined to doubt if, in the true sense of the word, a book can
ever be written about a country. Curiously enough the native scarcely
perceives his country at all as long as he is living in it. When he
travels he may come to a clearer vision, but then scarcely perceives
with truth the country in which he is travelling. We might say that by
travelling he makes out of the foreign land a sort of inverted image of
his home. What he relishes abroad is probably what is lacking, what he
dislikes abroad is perhaps more perfect in his own country. And thus his
vision of abroad makes, as it were, a mould, and, if one could pour into
it a substance which would reproduce the exact reverse as one makes a
cast, one might procure a fairly faithful image of his unconscious
judgment of his own land. So perhaps if this book could be turned inside
out it might be found that, after all, stripped of its unessentials, we
have been writing a book, not about Spain, but about England. Indeed, we
have been writing about England already--romance, sun, an interesting
national music, the guitar, and national unconsciousness are not assets
to be found here in any overwhelming quantities. We must then deny that
we are trying to write a book of any authority; we do not even assert
that our facts are correct, even though they are as we saw them; we
admit a mental astigmatism which we cannot avoid and which may have
twisted actual happenings or hearings as much as optical astigmatism may
twist a straight line.
CHAPTER II
JESUS PEREZ
Jesus Perez took us to Spain in spirit while we were still in Paris. We
were off to Spain to paint, that being the normal course of our lives,
but in addition Jan had formed a fixed resolution that happen what might
he was not coming home without having bought a good Spanish guitar by
the best guitar-maker he could find, while I wished to buy a Spanish
lute. Arias and Ramirez, the two best modern _luthiers_ in Madrid, both
had recently died; we had, however, the address of the widow of Ramirez,
who carried on her husband's business, but faintly in Jan's mind a cloud
hung over the lady's name. He did not trust her. Not she, but Ramirez
had made those superfine instruments. So we were overjoyed to meet Perez
upon the Boulevard Montparnasse soon after our arrival in Paris. Perez
was a friend of ours from the times before the war. He was almost a
mystery man. Native of Malaga, self-styled painter--though he never
showed his work--nobody could tell how he had managed to make a living
during fifteen years of apparently unproductive existence. It is true
that one summer he had disappeared from the quarter, returning late in
November browned by the sun, and had explained that he had been
smuggling in the Pyrenees; but that event was an exception, and for some
months subsequently Perez was obviously well off as a result of his
risky enterprises. Normally, he survived like so many others in the
Quartier Montparnasse, drawing sufficient nourishment (supplemented very
obviously by borrowing) from mysterious sources. But while most of his
confrères in penury had no talents, not even the talent for painting,
Perez did know the guitar. Rumour said that he was one of the best
amateur players of the Jota Arragonesa in Spain. Rumour may have
exaggerated without detracting from the real quality of Perez's
exquisite gift.
We saw a Perez very much polished up by so many years of war. He wore a
clean straw hat, new clothes of the latest cut, a waistcoat of check
with ornamental buttons, patent leather boots with a lacquer which flung
back the rays of the June sun, and heavy owlish eyeglasses of
tortoise-shell fastened with a broad black ribbon. Indeed, so
transformed was he, that it was he who recognized us; and for some
moments we stood trying to pierce through the new respectability, as
though it were through a disguise.
Seated together at the "Rotonde" we exchanged some petty items of news.
Perez had but recently returned from Spain; he had held a small
exhibition, he said, which had provided funds; pictures were selling
well in Spain.... He was delighted to hear of our plan, and thereupon
wrote for us an introduction to a painter, a friend, who lived in
Madrid. "Un homme très serviable," he said, manufacturing a French word
out of one Spanish. Jan then asked his question. "A good guitar-maker in
Spain," said Perez, pinching his lower lip between finger and thumb. He
shook his head slowly.
"A good guitar-maker," repeated Perez. "In Madrid, eh? Frankly, no, I do
not know of one at the moment. And you are going away at once. Tomorrow.
Well, this afternoon I am free, that is good. The best guitar-maker at
the moment lives here, here in Paris. His name is Ramirez. Yes, a
relative of that other Ramirez. He has found a new form for the guitar.
More fine, more powerful. Each one like a genuine _Torres_. You come
with me. I will show you one or two that he made from an old piano which
he pulled to pieces for the wood. Exquisite! And if you like them,
together we will seek out Ramirez and he will make you one. He is very
busy, oh, excessively busy, but he will make you one because he is an
old friend of mine."
So the hot afternoon found us sweating up the slopes of Montmartre.
"First," said Perez, "I will take you to the house of a friend who
possesses two of Ramirez' guitars. One is one of those made from the old
piano. It is marvellous!"
But when we reached the street he could not remember the number. It was
four years, he explained, since last he had been there.
"However," he went on, "not far away is another possessor of such a
guitar; possibly he will be in."
Up the hill we went into streets which became more narrow and more
steep, until at length he led us through a courtyard with pinkwashed
walls, up five flights of polished stairs, to a studio door upon which a
visiting card was pinned:
AUGUSTE LA BRANCHE
_Artiste Peintre_
_Aquafortist_
The door, under Perez's knuckles, sounded hollow and forlorn. We waited
for a while, and Perez was beginning to finger his lip when a faint
shuffle on the other side of the door changed into the noise of locks.
The door swung ajar revealing a small man, with a thin face and tousled
head, clad in pyjamas and a Jaeger dressing-gown which trailed behind
him on the floor. Failing to penetrate to the real Perez, as we also had
failed, he blinked inquiringly at us. A moment of confused explanation
ended with a warm hand-shake. Perez explained our presence and our
purpose; with protestations of apology for his _négligé_ M. La Branche
led us into his studio.
[Illustration]
From the card upon his door we must presume that M. La Branche was both
painter and etcher, and pictures hanging from the walls, and an etching
press almost buried beneath a mound of tossed draperies, were evidences
of the fact. But where he found space either to paint or to etch was a
puzzle. The large studio was crammed with bric-à-brac. Indian tables,
Chinese tables, wicker chairs, lacquer stools, screens, figures in
armour, large vases, birdcages and innumerable articles strewed the
floor, across which narrow lines of bare parquet showed like channels
upon the chart of an estuary. Over the chairs were heaped draperies,
on the tables smaller bric-à-brac crowded together. Upon a sofa thrust
to one side sat a woman methodically sewing at the hem of a long sheet.
She took no notice of us, nor of M. La Branche, but continued her
sewing, careful, however, not to swing her arm too wide for fear of
banging into several guitars and other musical instruments, which
almost disputed possession of the sofa with her.
Having cleared a table and sufficient chairs, M. La Branche gave us _thé
anglais_, by the usual complex French method. Then from amongst his
guitars he selected that made by Ramirez, and sitting down began to
play. It is strange how a man's personality appears in everything he
does. M. La Branche in his paintings was an expert painter rather than
an artist; his etchings, large colour plates, showed a similar skill
with the burin. His music was of the same nature. Everything that a
practiced player should do, he did; his nimble fingers raced up and down
the frets, his tempo and his modulations were impeccable, yet he did not
make music. But we had not come with the intention of hearing music, but
of hearing the qualities and power of the guitar, and this was, perhaps,
more ably shown by the technicalities of M. La Branche than it might
have been in the hands of a more artistic though less able musician.
The shop of Ramirez, the luthier, was down the hill, and to this,
thoroughly satisfied about the excellence of his instruments, we went,
Perez grumbling to us in undertones.
"That fellow La Branche--he does not play Spanish music. No--he comes
from Toulouse. That explains it. It is the talent of the South of
France, all on the top, all lively and excitable and showing off--that
is how it is. Now I tell you, Monsieur and Madame Gordon, just because
of that the Frenchman never will be able to understand our music. You
English are nearer to us. You, when you have acquired ability, will play
our music with much more insight and much more sensibility than that La
Branche."
This comforted us exceedingly, for one day in wrath Modigliani, the
Italian painter, had said that it was mere impertinence for an
Englishman to think that he could understand the subtleties of the music
of Spain.
Ramirez almost makes his guitars out in the street. His workshop was
about ten feet square with a door six feet wide. Here was a piece of
pure Spain, though we could not recognize it (at the moment having no
data), ten feet square, thrust bodily into the lower floor of a French
house. The only light came in from the door, but the door was nearly as
broad as the room. Almost blocking up the entrance, Ramirez, a burly,
blue-jowled Spaniard, with something of the physical construction of a
boxer, was working at delicate shavings of wood. Behind him the wall was
hung with templates, cut from white wood, of the parts of the
instruments he was making, guitars and lauds and bandurrias, strange
instruments which Europe, outside of Spain, scarcely knows. On a shelf
at the back of the small shop were heaped unfinished bandurrias bound
with string, for the glue to become hardened in them. The workshop of
Ramirez was not what we had expected. One is, I think, justified in
expecting a neatness, a delicacy, about the place where fine musical
instruments are made. Had Ramirez been a maker of chairs, or even of
cartwheels, his workshop, though small, would have appeared appropriate;
but that, from this rough place, could come out "the most difficult of
musical instruments to make" disturbed one's sense of suitability.
The greeting which Ramirez gave us touched with doubt the picture which
we had conceived of the amiability of the Spaniard. There was no
cordiality in him. Some of his aloofness cleared away when he had
penetrated through the disguise of a dandy to the real Perez beneath,
but he continued his occupation, and to the statement that we wished him
to make a guitar for Jan he shrugged his fat shoulders. He declared that
he had already too much work.
"Those two instruments, for instance," he said, pointing to two
unfinished guitars elaborately ornamented standing in a corner, "I have
already been nine months over those, and have not had time to finish
them. It is true they are exhibition instruments, for shops, and
therefore have little if any interest for me."
Perez led him on with compliments, thawing away his frostiness gradually
with Jan's admiration for the guitar of M. La Branche. Suddenly Ramirez
put down his tools.
"Look here," he said, "I'll make the Señor a guitar. Three hundred
francs is the price, and it will be finished in three months."
The bargain concluded, Ramirez picked up one of the unfinished
instruments. He handed it to Jan, exhorting him to explore with a finger
the exquisite workmanship of its interior. He rapped on the belly with
his knuckle, and at the sound of its deep musical boom he smiled for the
first time. Ramirez, having thawed, did not freeze up again. He began
explaining the novel shape of his instrument, a shape which had been
worked out for him by a mathematical philosopher. He said that the
guitar was the most difficult of musical instruments to make, requiring
a volume of tone which had to be produced from strings easy to pluck and
finger. A problem very difficult to solve.
"And the guitar I made for you," he said, turning to Perez, "you gave it
to S----?"
"Yes," said Perez.
"See here," said Ramirez, turning to us, "I make a guitar, an excellent
one, one of my best. This fellow comes to see me, he hears the
instrument. He says to me, 'Ramirez, keep that guitar for me, and I will
at once go to work in a French munition factory, and I will work like a
slave, and every week I will send you money until the guitar is paid
for.' And I agree. And he goes and makes aeroplanes, and does honest
work for the first time in his life, I believe, and every week he sends
money to me. And the week it is all paid up he stops work and goes off
with the guitar. And he is crazy about the instrument. And he goes back
to Spain and then he hears S---- playing. He is so enraptured by the
wonderful playing of the man, that he runs home, fetches his guitar, and
thrusts it into S---- 's hands, exclaiming: 'Here is an instrument
worthy of you. It is too good for me, for I am a mere bungler beside
you.' And so he gives away the guitar that he has laboured for. Ah yes,
you villain, I have heard of you."
As we went down the hill, Perez tried to explain away this generosity so
characteristic of his impulsive nature.
"It is not as though I would have played on the instrument again after
having heard S---- touch it. Every time that I wished to play I would
have thought, 'Ah yes, but if only _he_ were playing it and not I.' And
I had to give it to him, or perhaps I would never have been able to play
again."
He asked us to come that evening to a certain small café in the Rue
Campagne Premier; some other Spaniards were to come also and there was
to be playing and singing. We were to come after the legal closing time,
and we were to thump on the shutters.
In the night, in the dark, we rapped upon the rusty iron shutters, and
one by one, like conspirators, were admitted into the dimly-lit café. It
was a small place, characteristic of Paris, a combination of _buvette_
with zinc bar, and cheap restaurant with marble-topped tables. Five
years ago a good meal could be bought here for less than a franc. Behind
the bar bottles and glass vats reached up to the ceiling; upon the
dirty, green, oil-painted walls, cheap almanacs and trivial popular
prints hung, together with excellent drawings and sketches, presented to
Madame by her clients. One by one the _invités_ slipped in. Madame and
her two girl waitresses laughed and giggled at the kitchen door, while
the _patron_, grey-moustached, hollow-eyed and cadaverous, uncorked the
bottles of wine behind the bar.
Here again for several hours the Spaniards re-created Spain. Perez is a
player of temperament. Half of his skill and art he appears to suck from
his audience. Thus at first he plays but indifferently well; but any
music will rouse a crowd of Spaniards. To the growing excitement Perez
responds, playing the better for it, thus creating more enthusiasm, and
these interchanges continue, until he reaches the limit of his ability.
But he is so sensitive to his audience that one indifferent person can
take the edge off all his power. This night there was no one
unresponsive. The playing of Perez became more and more brilliant. With
his nails be rasped deep chords from his responsive instrument; to and
fro he beat the strings in the remorseless rhythm of Jota Arragonesa. In
the dimly lit café the dark figures and the sallow faces of the
Spaniards were crowded about him in an irregular circle. "Olé! Olé!"
they cried, and clapped their hands in time with the music. The air
within the café throbbed and pulsated with the music. "Mais, c'est très
bien," exclaimed Madame at intervals from her corner. "C'est très
amusant, hein?" Two of the younger men were murmuring to the waitresses
and were making them titter.
"Come," exclaimed Perez at last, "enough of this piece playing. Let us
have a song. Vamos! who will sing?"
But something, possibly my presence, deterred the Spaniards from
singing. They were shy as a group of schoolboys. One at last began to
chant in a high quavering falsetto, but before the first half of his
_copla_ was ended he broke down into a laugh of hysterical shyness.
"Why then," cried Perez, "I'll have to sing myself, and Heaven knows
I've got no voice."
The Spaniard believes that any singing is better than no singing. One of
his chief pursuits in life is that of happiness--"_allègre_" he calls
it. This _allègre_ is produced not by perfect results but by evidence
of good intentions. He would rather have a bad player who plays from his
heart than a good player who plays for his pocket. Any singing, then, so
long as it is of the right nature, will suffice, no matter what its
musical effect. Perez's singing had _allègre_, but no music. He lowed
like a calf, rising up into strange throaty hoarseness like a barrow
merchant who has been crying his goods all day, and descending into dim
growls of deep notes. But even he at last tired; and after Madame had
been yawning for some while, after the last bottle of wine had been
drained of its last drops, we slipped out one by one into the moonlit
streets of Paris and said our farewells on the Boulevard.
CHAPTER III
THE FRONTIER
I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down
from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours?
Probably the hero would have been paralysed with terror during the
journey and would have revenged himself upon the magician by means of a
little stake party.
But what would have been magic and miracle to Charlemagne remains in
one's mind as a jumble--the interior of a second-class carriage;
antimacassars; an adolescent who ate lusciously a basket of peaches,
thereby reminding us that French peaches ripen early in June; intrusive
knees and superfluous legs; an obese man who pinched my knee in his
sleep, probably from habit; touches of indigestion which made one
fidget, and in the dawn a little excitement roused by observing the
turpentine tapping operations at work on the pine-trees by the side of
the railroad--cemented together by the thick atmosphere of a summer's
night enclosed between shut windows.
It is a strange fact that the more perfect do we make travelling, the
more tedious does it become--I wonder whether the same may not apply to
almost all progress in civilization.
The most primitive aspect of travel is that of walking, and even upon
the most tedious of walks the exercise itself seldom degenerates into
definite boredom, one is never far away from one's fellow men, yet even
if one is quite alone the mere fact of walking is an occupation which
cannot be despised; of riding similar things may be said. Coaching may
have had its inconveniences, yet a coach drive cannot have been lacking
in definite interest. One was in very close contact with one's fellow
passengers, coaching made as strange bedfellows as any adversity, and
the journey was seldom so short that one could enjoy a sort of snuffy
insulation from one's fellows--mutual discomforts, even mutual terrors
of footpads made a definite bond of humanity.
It is true that in all these primitive processes the act of getting from
here to there is prolonged--perhaps extremely prolonged--but mere
duration is not tedium. If the act itself is interesting and vivid then
the act itself is worth while. To-day the act of travelling by a fast
train is scarcely worth while--the traveller can almost count it out as
so much time lost out of life. I fear that when the aeroplane is
perfected journeys will be performed in a tedium absolutely unrelieved,
and those patients who have to undertake journeys would be advised to
take a mild anæsthetic at the beginning.
What is missing to-day from the act of travelling--and what lacks from
much modern civilization--is the expectation of the unexpected; the
sense of adventure, the true sauce of life.
Now to have the true sense of adventure it is not necessary that one
should always be expecting to meet a lion round the corner. Any little
thing will do, anything not before experienced, anything that will give
the imagination that extra fillip of interest which will convince it
that the world will always remain a Fortunatus purse of new things to
learn, anything that will make positive the fact that the act of living
is also the act of growing,--anything of this nature will contribute to
the sense of adventure.
But the trend of civilization to-day is that all these little interests
are being quietly but very effectively crushed: we fling them beneath
the wheels of railway trains and into the cogs of factories, with the
result that only those experiences which are too large for us to fling
thus are allowed to flourish. We have, in fact, almost cleared away the
little things and left only the big. Now, if we turn the corner, either
there is nothing at all or, in one case out of a hundred, we find the
lion. In our railway travelling to-day, either nothing happens or there
is a railway accident; but we have turned so many corners in our lives
which led to the mere blankness of more empty road, that the possibility
of the lion has almost faded from our minds--and so the sense of
adventure in little, the true sense of adventure, is in danger of
atrophy.
Some day, I feel sure that this sense of adventure will take a revenge
on the civilization which would destroy it. We kill off birds and
caterpillars flourish. Some worm lies near the heart of things ready to
gnaw at the right moment. I fear that never will they apply
"preservation laws" to the sense of adventure, or we, as adventurers,
properly appreciated, should be in receipt of a scholarship or of a
civil list pension.
We were too dazed by the drug of twenty hours of tedium and
sleeplessness to suck any adventure from the passage through the French
Customs House at Hendaye. But this experience roused us so that we were
quite mentally awake by the time that we reached Irun. Here a problem
confronted us.
We had in our large leather trunk a good many yards of government
canvas, several pounds' worth of paints, and ten pounds in weight of
preparation for turning the government canvas into material for painting
upon. We had heard that the Spanish customs were very strict; very
strict in theory, that is.
"But if they worry you, bribe them a bit," had said a friend. Were these
things contraband? If so, how much was one to bribe, and how was one to
do it? There are plenty of men with nerve enough to try to tip Charon
for his trip over the Styx, but Jan is not one of these.
Now for a man of Jan's kind to attempt a delicate piece of palmed
bribing often results in things worse than if he had left well alone.
Ten to one there is a fumble and the coin drops to the floor beneath the
nose of the chief bug-a-bug. So, fingering two unpleasantly warm
five-peseta pieces in his pocket, he prayed fervently to kind
Opportunity to step in.
To his prayer the goddess answered. We had brought with us from our
Paris studio a mosquito curtain which once before had been used in
Majorca. As our baggage was packed in London we had, rather than undo
straps and locks, tied this mosquito curtain, wrapped in clean brown
paper, on to the outside of our suit-case. Upon this the authorities
flung themselves.
"Hi!" they cried. "You will pay duty on this, it is new."
Two gendarmes and a clerk tore off the paper, pitched the mosquito
curtain into a pair of scales, weighed it and wrote out the bill. All
the while we had been clamouring, with a sudden memory from Hugo:
"Antigua, antigua, antigua...."
This clamour became suddenly effective as soon as the officials had
nothing to do than to collect the money. Instead of cash we gave them a
chorus of "Antigua, antigua." The clerk and the two gendarmes then began
what seemed to be an impromptu imitation of Miss Loie Fuller in her
celebrated skirt dancing--mosquito curtain whirled this way and that in
voluptuous curves. They were looking for evidence. Suddenly I pointed
out a spot where perchance some full-blooded mosquito had come to a
sudden death in 1913, when the world was yet at peace. The mosquito
curtain was refolded, the bill torn up. They were quite peremptory with
the rest of our luggage; so Jan dropped the two warm five-peseta pieces
back into his pocket.
However much one may be in a country, one never feels that one _is_ in
the country until the door leading out of the customs house has been
passed. So we never really thought of ourselves as being in Spain until
we stepped on to the platform where the train for Madrid was standing.
With a bitter shock, we realized that it was a chill day and raining.
We had come all the way from England, hunting the sun, to be greeted in
June by a day which would fit, both in temperature and atmosphere, the
tail-end of a March at home.
[Illustration]
Of those minor adventures which make life so valuable, some of the
finest flowers amongst them which may be picked are the delicate first
impressions of a new country. These impressions have a flavour all their
own; they are usually compressed within the space of one hour or so, and
once experienced they never return. New impressions indeed one may
gather by the score, but those first, fine savourings of the new can
never be retasted.
We had expected so much from Spain. We had hoped at the first moment to
open out our arms to her sun, to satiate our colour sense with the
blueness of her skies--we were received instead with this grey, gloomy
weather. How can one describe the revulsion? It would be an exaggeration
to say that it was as though we had touched a corpse where we had
expected to find a living man, but the revulsion was of this nature
though perhaps less poignant.
I left Jan to finish with the larger luggage and, securing the aid of a
porter, set out to look for an hotel. At the exit of the station I was
accosted by a sallow man with a large, peaked jockey cap pulled down
over a thin face.
He said: "Hey, Señora! Hotel? Spik Engleesh. Yes."
"We don't want a dear place," I answered in English. "We want a cheap
one, understand?"
"Hotel. Spik Engleesh. Yes," replied the tout.
"Cheap hotel--cheap," I said.
"Hotel. Spik Engleesh--yes," said he.
"Puede usted recomendarme una fonda barata?" said I, out of the
conversation book, though the "_barata_"[1] at the end was my own.
But the tout turned sulky and would not answer--I suppose he thought his
fee would diminish if he were enticed into Spanish. The porter stood on
one side; he was a small, inadequate man and he sniffed continually.
Whether he had caught cold from the rain, or whether he was expressing
his private opinion of travellers, I did not learn. Jan was arranging
about our trunk and a hold-all; I had in my charge two thermos flasks, a
camera, two rucksacks--memories of days in the German Tyrol before the
war--and a suit-case which had been with us in Serbia and which still
bore the faint traces of a painted red cross, but the cat had for the
last two years been sharpening her claws upon it and the leather now
looked something like "Teddy Bear" material. These I distributed between
the porter and the tout, and, trusting to Providence and my own powers
of observation, we entered Irun.
Where was the queer magic which lies in the first impressions of a new
land, the dreamlike quality, the unreality which almost puts one's feet
for a moment into Fairyland? Spain had played a nasty trick upon us;
the grey sky and the low-lying cloud and the drizzling rain had nothing
of Fairyland for us. With head held low against the drizzle one was
conscious of nothing but a wall on the right hand and of dirty pavement
beneath the feet.
The tout led me into the first house we reached. There, was a narrow
passage which passed by a room of a dingy whiteness; but the tout showed
me on, up some stumbly stairs and through a spring door. We came into a
dark room in which, by means of the light filtering through the slats of
the closed shutters, could be seen the dim outlines of a bed and of a
tin wash-hand-stand.
"Ocho pesetas," said the tout.
"Por todo," I answered.
"Todo--todo--comida y toda," protested the tout. I had been waiting for
this moment. In the conversation book which I had been studying was a
phrase which had caught my fancy; it meant "no extras," but it was much
more beautiful. The time had come.
"No hay extraordinario?" said I sternly.
"No, Señora, no," said the tout, spreading out his hands.
The matter having been thus settled, he took me downstairs again; and,
in the dingy white diningroom, introduced me to a plump woman, the
proprietress. I was ravenously hungry; the tables were laid. I asked:
"What time is lunch?"
"At two, Señora."
I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock--we had eaten little since the
night before.
"But," I stammered, "I am hungry. Tengo hambre." My memory shuffled with
conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but
could find nothing about the minutiæ of food.
"Tengo hambre," I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to
me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that
has laid an egg.
For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is
much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went
up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a
restraining hand--he had not yet received his tip--while an old woman
who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off:
"Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He! Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He!"
At this moment Jan arrived, having deposited the bigger luggage and
having been informed that the train to Avila, our first stopping-place,
went out at 8 a.m. I led him along the dark passage and upstairs. He
flung wide the shutters. The window looked into a deep, triangular well
at the bottom of which was a floor of stamped earth, a washtub and a
hen-coop. Windows of all sizes pierced the walls at irregular intervals
and across the well were stretched ropes, from some of which flapped
pieces of damp linen or underclothes. In the light of the open window
the room was dingy. We wondered if there were bugs in it, for we had
been cautioned against these insects.
But the room did not smell buggy; it had a peculiar smell of its own.
The strong characteristics of odours need more attention than novelists
give them. For instance, I remember that German mistresses had a faint
vinegary scent, but French governesses an odour like trunks which had
been suddenly opened.
This room had an austere smell. It smelt, I don't know how, Roman
Catholic: not of incense nor of censers, but of a flavour which, by some
combination of circumstances, we have associated with Roman Catholicism
in bulk. The bedroom door was largely panelled with tinted glass; it had
a very flimsy lock, but we did not fear that we would be murdered or
burgled in our bed.
The omelet was ready when we came down. The diningroom had two doors,
one leading to the kitchen, one up some steps and into the street. There
was a broad stretch of window and almost all the other walls of the room
were covered with big mirrors.
[Illustration]
About five grim people, mostly clad in black--including the old
lady--sat in the room and stared at us as we ate. We could not avoid
this disconcerting gaze--look where we would we either caught a human
eye or else, what was worse, we were fascinated by a long procession of
eyes passing away into the dim mysteries of reflection and re-reflection
of the mirrors. We had to choose between the gaze of one real old lady
or of twenty-five reflected old ladies, of one callow youth or of
twenty-five youths diminishing towards the infinite. The audience stared
at us as we ate our omelet, watched the fruit--apricots, cherries and
hard pears--with which we finished the meal, and noted each sip of
coffee. At last, unable to bear any longer the embarrassment of this
mechanically intensified curiosity, we took refuge in our bedroom and
lay down. We then noted that the bed was too small, all the rest of the
furniture, on the contrary, being much too big.
We rested till lunch. The omelet and the fruit had but filled some of
the minor vacancies within us and we were ready again on the stroke of
two. Once more we faced the Spanish stare and all the reflected
repetitions of it. A fair number of persons lunched at the hotel. As
they came in the women sat themselves directly at the table, but the men
without exception went to the far corner where, suspended against the
wall, was a small tin reservoir with a minute tap and beneath it a tiny
basin. Each man rinsed his hands in the infinitesimal trickle, before he
sat down to dinner. Why the men and women made this distinction we could
not guess. It seemed to be a custom and not to be dependent upon whether
the hands were dirty or not. Even if the hands had been dirty the small
amount of water used would not have cleaned them.
In the centre of the dining table were white, porous vessels containing
drinking water. The water oozes through the porous clay and appears on
the outside of the vessel as a faint sweat. This layer of moisture
evaporates and keeps all the water in the vessel at several degrees
cooler than the surrounding atmosphere.
Between mouthfuls of soup and wedges of beef the diners were watching
us. As soon as the meal was over we fled into the streets of Irun. One
cannot call Irun Spanish. It is abominably French, though France is
pleasant in its own place. The café in the little plaza is French, with
a French _terrasse_, French side screens of ugly ironwork and glass, and
faces a square full of shady trees between which one sees modern
fortifications of French appearance. So we sat sipping coffee and we
said to ourselves: "Forget that you are in Spain. Put off your
excitement. Don't waste your sensations with false sentiment".
Nor did the fact that all the wording on the shops was Spanish, nor even
the sight of a building of pure modern Spanish architecture rouse us
from our cloudy resignation. The building which towered into some six
stories by the side of the railway was of a maroon brick. The lower
story, including the entrance door, was decorated with _appliqué_ in the
design which the French used to call "l'art nouveau," and which now is
confined almost exclusively to the iron work on boulevard cafés. It is
marked by exaggerated curves. The whole bottom story of this building
was sculptured in this fantastic fashion; in order to fit in with the
decorations the front door was wider at the top than it was at the
bottom, while the windows were of every variety of shape, squashed
curves, dilated hearts, indented circles and so on. Above this story the
building rose gravely brick save for the corners, which were decorated
with bathroom tiles of bad glaze upon which flowers had been painted;
roses, violets and pansies: the top story, however, was part Gothic,
part Egyptian, with a unifying intermixture of more bathroom tiles.
A munition millionaire went to an art dealer saying he wanted a picture,
but he didn't mind what sort of a picture it was provided it looked
expensive. We imagined that the architect of this house had received a
similar order. Later on we were undeceived.
A yellow tram went by bearing the name "Fuentarabia." Having heard
eulogies of this place, we decided to go. We reached the terminus of the
tramway and the conductor told us we were there. Since then we have met
so many people who were in ecstasies about the beauties of Fuentarabia,
about its pure Spanish character, etc., etc., that we are still
wondering if we went to Fuentarabia after all.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Cheap.]
CHAPTER IV
MEDINA DEL CAMPO
If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could
pass through and circumambulate a foreign country yet never come into
closer contact with the inhabitants than that transmitted through a
Cook's interpreter. So that if you want to learn anything about a
country, either you must put a sprag into the wheels of this
civilization or you must let Opportunity do it for you. Opportunity is a
very complaisant goddess: give her an inch and the ell at least is
offered to you. She smiled upon us when we decided to stay the night at
Irun; once more she smiled when the porter told us that the train to
Avila left about eight o'clock, so we humped the two rucksacks and the
suit-case from the inn to the station, got our trunk and hold-all from
the baggage office and went to buy our tickets. Then we realized what
Opportunity had been up to. The ticket clerk refused to give us tickets
to Avila.
"Why not?
"The train does not go through Avila, it goes to Madrid by the other
branch through Segovia. The train by Avila goes at four."
"Where, then, does it branch off?"
"At Medina del Campo."
"Then give us tickets to Avila and we will wait at Medina del Campo."
But the authorities did not approve of this novel idea. It seemed that
the through-ticket system had not become the custom in Spain. We must
then take tickets to Medina or wait in Irun till the proper,
respectable Avila train should go, so to the astonishment of the booking
clerk we said:
"All right, give us tickets for Medina."
[Illustration]
I do not believe that any pleasure traveller had stopped at Medina
before we did. That is the impression we received, both from the
behaviour of the porters at Irun and of those at Medina itself.
The scenery from the railway was, as scenery always is, fascinating
because of one's elevation and the scope of one's view, tiring because
of its continuous movement. We passed through mountains worthy of
Scotland, very Scotch in colour, and at last came out upon the big plain
of Valladolid.
While we were streaming across this and the mountains were fading slowly
into a distant blue the luncheon-car waiter announced his joyful news.
We had heard that living in Spain was going to be dear, so, with some
trepidation, we decided to take that train luncheon--for our financial
position did not encourage extravagance. The whole trip was, in theory,
to come within the limits of Jan's war gratuity--about £120. We had
calculated the railway travelling as £50 in all; this gave us £70 for
all other expenses, including the purchase of the musical instruments
upon which we had set our minds, and we hoped to stay for four or five
months. Yet in spite of the need for economy luncheon called us if only
as an experience.
The meal cost us about three and fourpence apiece: it was a complicated
affair of many courses--even in a Soho restaurant the same would have
come to about ten shillings, so that the spirit of economy in us was
cheered and inspirited. Of our fellow passengers we remember nobody save
a gigantic priest who waddled slowly along the corridors, carrying,
suspended on a plump finger, a very small cage in which, like a mediæval
captive in a "little ease," was a canary almost as large as its prison.
Medina station looked like an exaggerated cart-shed on a farm; two long
walls and a roof of corrugated iron--there were no platforms, only one
broad pavement along one of the walls. A small bookstall was against the
wall and further along the pavement a booth of jewellery. This booth had
glass windows and "Precio Fijo"[2]--"No bargaining," in other words--was
painted across the glass in white letters.
Why Spaniards, _en route_, should have mad desires to purchase
jewellery, we have not learned, but these jewellery booths are common on
Spanish stations. The jewellers seem to detest bargaining, for these
words always appear on the windows. I suppose the fact that the
purchaser of jewellery has got to catch a train may give him some occult
advantage over the seller. One may imagine him slamming his last offer
down on the counter and sprinting off with the coveted trinket to the
train, while the defrauded merchant is struggling with the door-handle
of his booth--so "No Bargaining" is painted up, very white and very
positive.
As we had nine hours to wait, there was no need to hurry, so we allowed
the crowd to drift out of the platform before we began to see about the
disposal of our luggage. Stumbling about in Hugo Spanish we discovered
that, owing to the receipt that had been given us at Irun, our big trunk
would look after itself until claimed, but that there was no luggage
office or other facility for getting rid of our smaller baggage. We,
however, insinuated understanding into the head of a porter, who
thereupon led us to a door amongst other doors in the wall labelled
"Fonda." We came into a huge hall. Across one end stretched a majestic
bar four feet high, of elaborately carved wood, upon the top of which
were vases of fruits, tiers of bottles and glittering machines for the
manufacture of drink. Three long tables were in the room, two spread
simply with coffee-cups. The third table occupied the full length of the
middle of the room. It seemed spread for some Lord Mayor's banquet.
Snowy napery was covered along the centre with huge cut-glass dishes,
stacked with fruit, alternated with palms flanked by champagne bottles
and white and red wine bottles. Fully fifty places were laid, each place
having seven or eight plates stacked upon it while the cutlery sparkled
on either hand. A cadaverous, unshaven waiter lounged about amongst this
magnificence and lazily flicked at the flies with his napkin.
This huge, deserted room, expectant of so many guests, made one think of
the introduction to a fairy story: one could have sat the mad hatter,
the dormouse and the March hare down there, but one could never imagine
that fifty passengers could in sober earnestness crowd to have supper at
Medina del Campo upon the same day. No, rather here was one flutter of
the dying pomp and majesty of Spain.
We placed our bags in a corner of the pretentious room and went from the
station to look for the town. It was nowhere to be seen. A white road
deep in dust gleamed beneath the afternoon sun and led away across the
ochreous plain, but, of town, not a sign. Yet the white road was the
only road; Medina must be somewhere, so off we walked. The plain was not
quite flat, it flowed away in undulations which appeared shallow, but
which proved sufficiently deep to swallow up all signs of Medina del
Campo at the distance of a mile.
First we came to a line of little brightly coloured hovels, square
boxes, many of only one room, then to a church, an ancient
Spanish-Gothic church surrounded by gloomy trees. Suddenly the road
turned a corner and we were almost in the middle of the town. Medina was
Spanish enough. Here was the plaza at the end of which towered a high
cathedral decorated with colour and with carving. The plaza lay broad
and shining beneath the sunlight; loungers sprawled in the shadows
beneath the small, vivid green trees, and in the deep stone arcades
which edged the open square the afternoon coffee-drinkers, clad in cool
white, lolled at the café tables.
In the centre of the plaza was a fountain running with water, and about
it came and went a continual procession of women bearing large, white
amphoras upon their hips, children carrying smaller drinking vessels,
and men wheeling long, barrow-like frameworks into which many amphoras
were placed. The shops and cafés were painted in gay colours which were
brilliant in the sun and which contrasted pleasantly with the crude--as
though painted--green of the trees and the clear, soothing hue of the
sky.
I know that historical things have happened at Medina del Campo, but we
are not going to retail second-hand history. To us, as living beings, it
is far more important that we bought our first oily, almondy Spanish
cakes here than that Santa Teresa (who started off at the age of ten
years to be martyred by the Moors) founded a convent in the town.
Medina is a dead place and must be typical of Spain. It has a market, a
plaza and a few ragged fringes of streets more than half full of
collapsing houses, and in this gay-looking remnant of past glory are at
least three enormous churches with monasteries in attendance. But even
the churches are falling into ruin and the storks' nests are clustered
flat on the belfries, while Hymen's debt collectors, clapping their
beaks, gaze down from aloft into the empty roadways.
Sunset had played out a colour symphony in orange major by the time we
had arrived back at the station where we asked for a meal; but the
cadaverous, blue-jowled waiter had not laid covers for fifty in order
that intrusive strangers might push in and demand food at whatever hour
they chose.
"Supper," he said with some dignity and disgust at our ignorance, "is at
eight."
So out we went on to the pavement platform, found a lattice seat and ate
the cakes we had bought. They were like treacly macaroons, so oily that
the paper in which they had been wrapped was soaked through, but it was
with pure almond oil and the cakes were delicious. Lunch had been eaten
at twelve and in trains one never eats quite at one's ease; hunger had
gripped us when eight o'clock struck by the station clock. We took our
seats at the long table before those piles of plates. A quarter-past
eight went by, half-past eight was approaching. One by one about six or
seven persons sauntered into the room and seated themselves, distant
from each other in comparison with the size of the table as are the
planets in the solar system. Nearest to us, our Mars, as it were, was a
very fat commercial man, his face showing the hue of the ruddy planet.
Our Venus was represented by a pale young priest, his long wrists
projecting far from the sleeves of his cassock. Mercury looked
appropriately enough like one who was always travelling; Saturn was
covered with rings--he must have been one of the customers of the
"precio fijo" booths--the other planets were lost amongst cumulus of
fruit and cirrus of palm.
The waiter became active. Balancing a large soup tureen, he ladled a
thin, greenish soup into the upper plate. We then understood that we
would have to eat our way down through the pile of plates, each plate a
course. Mars rushed at his soup in such a wild manner that we felt it
was a good thing indeed that the soup-plate was thus raised so near to
his mouth or fully the half of the soup would have drenched his
waistcoat.
Alice again was recalled to my mind. I remembered her dismay during her
regal banquet when the dishes once introduced to her were whisked away
from under her nose, for every time I laid down my knife and fork to
speak to Jan my plate was seized and carried off by the cadaverous
waiter. No sooner was I introduced to a new Spanish dish than it was
wrested from me. Twice this had occurred. On the third occasion I lay in
wait: as the waiter swooped for my plate I seized it. There was a
momentary struggle, but I had two hands to his one; he retired with a
look of astonishment on his face. Gradually I became aware of the fact
that Mars never loosed his knife and fork until he had cleared his
plate. He held both firmly in his two red hands. If he drank--which he
did with gusto, throwing his head back, washing the wine, which had a
queer tarry taste, about the inside of his mouth, almost cleaning his
teeth with it--he held his fork sceptre-wise as if to say to the waiter,
"Touch that last corner of beefsteak at your peril." When he had quite
finished the course, when he had mopped up all the remnants with a piece
of bread, then and then only did he lay down both knife and fork.
Unconsciously I had been giving a signal to the waiter.
After the beefsteak we had a surprise. One has been so long accustomed
to the French custom in gastronomy, that one almost forgets that
courses are not arranged in an immutable order. Once indeed I did make a
bet in Paris that I would eat a meal in the inverse direction, beginning
with the coffee and sweets and ending with the soup--which, by the way,
proved very hard to swallow--but the mere fact that one could bet about
it proves how fixed one imagines the laws of food progression to be. At
Medina del Campo, after the beefsteak, which was about the third item on
the menu, the waiter brought us fried fish, thereby proving that
gastronomic progression is not so unalterable as is usually imagined.
The fish looked like very small plaice, but they had a strange flavour
which we had never before tasted. That the fish had been packed for
several days in rotting hay seemed the nearest description and
explanation, and we would have clung to this idea if the salad had not
also had a perceptible tang of this unpleasant taste. We asked the
waiter what the flavour was, but our Spanish broke down under the
strain, and the waiter said "Claro"[3] and went away.
For some weeks afterwards the word "Claro" became our bugbear. The
Spaniard gets little amusement from hearing his language spoken by
foreigners. If the unfortunate foreigner does not get pronunciation,
accent and intonation perfect the Spaniard says "Claro," in reality
meaning "I can't make head or tail of what you are talking about." Both
laziness and courtesy make the Spaniard say "Claro," and often the poor
foreigner is quite delighted with his progress in the language--the
people tell him that everything he says is perfectly clear, hooray; he
thinks that he must have an unsuspected gift for languages--until one
day he asks the way to somewhere and receives the usual answer, "Claro."
The Redonda Mesa,[4] which would I think be the Spanish for a "square
meal," cost us again four pesetas, and it was an even better three and
eightpenn'orth than we had been given on the train. The meal finished,
the planets held a public tooth-picking competition for a while, then
one by one they resumed their normal orbits and passed from our sight.
We, with the processes of digestion heavy upon us, went back to the seat
in the ill-lit station. Three more hours we had to wait for the train to
Avila, so we sat in the mild night watching the only engine at
Medina--an engine which looked like an immediate descendant of
Stevenson's Rocket--push trucks very slowly to and fro. This engine,
though it made a lot of spasmodic noise, did not destroy, it only
interrupted, the intense silence which lay over the country-side. The
platform was quite deserted. Presently two small boys came along. One
had a red tin of tobacco which he offered to Jan; Jan shook his head but
did not answer. They then tried to talk to us, but we knew better than
to expose our imperfect Castilian to two small boys--so we kept silence.
At last they said we were "misteriosos" and went away.
A luggage train steamed in. At the tail end of the train were three
third-class carriages, and from these carriages, as well as from the
waggons, poured out a mob of wild-looking men. They were dark brown,
unshaven, covered with broad tattered straw hats, clothed in rough and
ragged fustian and carried blankets of many coloured stripes. Huge
bundles, sacks and strange implements were slung upon their backs. As
they crowded in beneath the dim lamp at the station exit one could
almost have sworn that all the figures from Millet's pictures had come
to life. A smell of the soil and of labour and of sweat went up from
them. These men were peasants from Galicia; they had come in third-class
carriages, in goods waggons, travelling probably for two or three days,
attached to luggage trains, across the country to the harvesting. One by
one they passed out, their voices trailed away into the night towards
Medina, and once more the silence came back.
Time wears itself out in the end. The train to Avila, when it came, was
fairly empty, so we could lay ourselves out at full length and rest,
disturbed, however, by the continual fear that we might overshoot our
destination.
It was pitchy night when we clambered down from the train at Avila. The
large barn of a station was lit by but three minute lamps and the glow
from the fonda door. In the semi-darkness the passengers moved about
like ghosts, each intent on his own business. It was two o'clock in the
morning, so before exploring we again put our baggage in a corner of the
fonda; where also we found the one waiter presiding over a banquet laid
for fifty non-existent guests. Speaking as little of the language as we
did, it seemed impossible to go exploring a foreign town in the dead of
night for a hotel which would probably be shut when we found it. So,
feeling somewhat like Leon Berthelini and his wife in Stevenson's story,
we sat down on a seat in the station to await the dawn.
The temperature of the night was almost perfect; there was a hint of
chill in our faces which, however, did not penetrate through the
clothing. For awhile porters moved about arranging luggage, then one by
one the three lights were extinguished and the station was left to
darkness. One porter clambered into a carriage which was standing on a
siding; as he did not come out again nor pass down on the other side we
imagine he went to bed in it. We were tempted to follow his example, but
feared the train might move off unexpectedly and carry us to some remote
part of Spain before we could wake up. One can tempt opportunity too
far.
But the seat was hard. If, like Berthelini, we had had a guitar we might
have performed miracles with it similar to his, but we had left our
guitars in England. So Jan went exploring. Outside the station he found
a small omnibus, its horses eating hay out of nose-bags. Hearing faint
voices he discovered a sort of dimly lit underground bar annexed to the
fonda, in which the driver of the omnibus and a friend were drinking
spirits, while the tired waiter lounged yawning behind the counter. Our
ignorance of Spanish prevented us from thrusting ourselves into their
company: but we waited for the driver to attend to his horses and in
halting Hugo we asked him at what hour the omnibus went to the hotel. He
replied "In the morning" and went back to his drinking.
The eau-de-nil of dawn found us on the edge of shivering, but the day
warmed rapidly. A train thundered into the station pouring out its
cascade of passengers. Gathering up our packages and tipping the waiter
fifty centimes, we found a new omnibus which was labelled "Hotel Jardin"
and took our seats inside. Dawn was over by the time we reached the
hotel, though it was but four o'clock. We had a confused impression of
great buff battlements overhanging the buildings, of a few stunted
bushes, of one or two girls in black, of a huge room which was to be our
bedroom and then--bed--sleep.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Fixed prices.]
[Footnote 3: "That is clear."]
[Footnote 4: Round table.]
CHAPTER V
AVILA
Borrow has a description of an inn in Galicia in which a whole family
occupies but one bedroom while the servant sleeps across the door. Our
bedroom in the Hôtel del Jardin was quite large enough for any family
other than, perhaps, a French Canadian, which sometimes runs, we have
heard, into twenties and thirties. The walls were painted a pinky-mauve
stucco, decorated with a broad olive-green ribbon of colour making a
complete oblong or frame on each wall about eighteen inches within the
edges of the wall, top, bottom and sides.
This method of making, as it were, a separate frame of each wall, was
novel and rather pleasant. It is a common practice in Spanish wall
decoration and is probably Moorish in origin. The hotel was full of dark
corridors leading to huge bedrooms: it had a broad veranda upstairs full
of large wicker chairs, bottoms up, while downstairs was a dining room
with square tables and a small entrance hall in which sat the three old
ladies.
With one of the old ladies we had bargained in a sleepy way upon our
arrival. She had conceded us the room with full _pension_ (no
extraordinarios) for eight pesetas a day, but in general the three old
ladies sat in the entrada together, giving a sense of black-frocked
repose and of quiet dignity to the place. One was thin-faced, dried-up
but energetically capable; one was large and motherly, while the third
had no characteristics whatever and was ignored by every one.
[Illustration]
I do not think we realized that these three old ladies were
the proprietresses until the second or third day at lunch-time. We had
been given our seats at a table by the waiter; suddenly we found the
three old ladies had surrounded us and were glowering down at us. We
were rising to our feet but they peremptorily commanded us to stay where
we were, breaking the rising tide of their wrath upon the waiter. Then,
for the first time, we realized how completely we were married in Spain.
In France, for instance, married people are "les époux," plural,
separate; in England they are a "married couple," which still
recognizes a duality though perhaps less definitely than does France;
but in Spain we were "un matrimonio," indissolubly wedded into one in
the language, and into a masculine one at that. Somehow I always felt
that we ought to be wheeled in on casters: it was improper that so
stately a thing as a matrimonio like the Queen of Spain should use legs.
From the old ladies' annoyance we understood that the matrimonio had
done something which was not correct, but they talked so fast, and they
all talked together, so that the matrimonio could not make head or tail
of what they were saying. Nor indeed did we ever discover our
misdemeanour.
For our six and eightpence a day we had breakfast in a little side room.
This meal was of _café au lait_ in a huge bowl, rolls and butter.
Sometimes we had companions for this meal. On the second day I was some
minutes earlier than Jan. At the table was a young peasant priest. He
ignored my tentative bow but began muttering to himself protective
prayers in Latin. However, once I looked up suddenly and surprised him
in the act of staring at me. He quickly crossed himself and redoubled
the urgency of his protestations to God.
The other meals were excellently cooked and with four or five courses to
each, but the diningroom bore on its walls a placard saying that owing
to the rise of prices the management regretted that it was unable to
provide wine at the _pension_. So there was an extraordinario after
all--and a very good extraordinario it was too--red Rioja wine with the
faint, strange exotic taste in it of the tar with which the wine barrels
are caulked.
You know the queer old drawings one finds in ancient books: towns like
bandboxes with the walls round a perfect circle, and peaked houses all
comfortably packed inside, and soldiers' heads sticking out of the
battlemented towers? Well, Avila is like that. You may stand on the
opposite hillside and see the full circle of her walls with never a
breach in it, with towers at every two hundred yards or so, and you can
gaze down into her houses, fitted neatly within the bandbox, and wonder
if the old manuscripts were quite as exaggerated as one often supposed.
From this hillside one might imagine that Avila has never changed from
the days when the monks drew their primitive pictures. The walls top the
hill-side and one sees nothing of the modern Avila which has spread
beyond those great frowning gateways facing the plaza, but even the
modern part of Avila which has oozed out beyond the walls is not
overwhelmingly modern. There are none of the exquisite specimens of
Spanish bad taste like that we found in Irun. The plaza is surrounded by
coloured houses and arcades much as is that of Medina; the sun-blinds of
the two large cafés are tattered and weather-beaten; the peasants stare
at strangers with an unspoilt curiosity.
The habit of rushing about towns, of penetrating into every gloomy
interior, ecclesiastical or otherwise, which seems to be decently
penetrable, is a modern convention to which we do not subscribe. There
are two aspects to every place, the living and the dead, and we prefer
the former. There is this advantage in our attitude, that one does not
have to seek out the living, it flows quite easily and naturally by, and
one does not remain an open-mouthed spectator with a jackdaw brain, but
incorporates oneself with it. We did not go into the cathedral, nor into
any convent, nor did we climb up the towers or into the walls: we sat at
the café drinking in both coffee and Spain.
Of costume, as Spain is so often painted, there was little; the peasant
men wore tall, flat-brimmed hats and broad, blue sashes about their
stomachs; the women shawls and woven leggings; the mules and donkeys had
trappings of bright-coloured woolwork and often saddlebags with fine
woven coloured patterns on them. String-soled sandals were the footwear
of the men and of the soldiers: string-soled shoes, alpagatas, were
worn by the women and children. The town was moderately alive until
eleven o'clock. Very early in the morning the peasants came into the
market with their mules or donkeys, then gradually a quiet settled down,
a quiet which lasted till the evening. After six o'clock Avila awoke,
the business men left their shops, the officers their cantonments. The
cadets and youths gathered in the plaza to flirt with the girls who,
dressed in gay cottons, paraded to and fro in small giggling and swaying
groups. Booths selling cool drinks and ices opened at the corners of the
plaza, while wandering sweetmeat merchants sold fried almonds and
sugared nuts. There was no woman with a lace mantilla and a high comb,
nor any one with a flat hat, embroidered shawl and cigarette; so the
cigar boxes are liars.
As one sits at the café table in Spain, life is, perhaps, presented to
one in an aspect almost too crude. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gates
exhibiting his sores, and the Spanish beggar follows his example. Spain
needs no Charles Lamb to write of the decay of beggars. Decayed indeed
they are, but not in that sense of which Lamb wrote: in tattered and
unspeakable rags they pursue their trade from the Asturias to Cadiz. No
dishonour attaches to beggary in Spain. A Spaniard was horrified when
Jan told him that begging was not permitted in England.
"What, then, can those do who are unable or unwilling to work?" he
asked.
A humble though probably verminous official refuge is provided for the
beggar in each town, and, as he tells his clients, "God repays" his
small extortions. The Spaniard is accustomed to his beggars, he does not
nag at his conscience about them, but it harrows the unaccustomed heart
of the Englishman who, taking his modest coffee or Blanco y negro after
supper, finds a procession of misery thrusting importunate hands into
his moment of quiet luxury. The Spanish beggar has no tenderness for
one's sensibility. Each has the motto, "If you have tears prepare to
shed them now." Naturally we were their quarry. They presented us with a
series of specimens worthy of a hospital museum. We hardened our hearts,
as we were afraid of consequences, but after two days, when the beggars,
disappointed with us, relaxed their exertions, we gave or withheld alms
with the outward serenity of a Spaniard, but feeling inwardly brutal
whenever we refused to give a dole.
Dirty, half-naked children dodged about the café pillars, hiding from
the waiter's eyes. They stared wistfully at the small, square packets of
beet sugar which the waiter brought with the coffee, and if a lump were
left over they would creep up and in a cringing whine ask for it. Boys
slightly older usually begged for a perra chica or for a cigarette.
Their voices would be pathetic enough almost to break one's heart--they
would say they had not eaten for three days--but if the refusal was
decisive they would suddenly change their tones and shout out gaily to a
comrade or run away whistling, or turn a few cartwheels down the gutter.
In Avila, too, we encountered the money problem. We had been told that
the Spaniard calculates his cash in pesetas and centimos, the peseta
being worth normally tenpence in English money and the ten-centimo piece
about one penny. So far this had worked fairly well, we had been on the
travellers' route and the peculiarity of travellers had been catered
for; but here we found a new system of coinage.
"How much is that?" I asked a woman in the market, pointing to some
object.
"That," she replied, "is worth six 'little bitches.'"
"Six what?" I exclaimed.
"Well, three 'fat dogs,' if you prefer."
"Three 'fat dogs'?"
"Yes, or one 'royal' and one 'little bitch.'"
"But I cannot understand. What is a 'royal'?"
"Oh, don't you know? Why, twenty 'royals' make a 'hard one.'"
At last we worried it out. The little bitch (perra chica) is five
centimos, or one halfpenny. The fat dog (perro gordo) is the ten-centimo
piece; these are both so called because of the lion on the back, though
why the sex should be changed we do not know. The royal (real) is
twenty-five centimos or twopence-halfpenny, the "hard one" (duro) is a
five-peseta piece. The peseta is ignored. Nobody except an ignorant
foreigner calculates in pesetas. The Spaniard, who often cannot write,
does staggering sums in mental arithmetic, reducing thirty-two "little
bitches" or seventeen "royals" almost instantly into the equivalent in
minted coin.
We had come to Spain for the several reasons mentioned in Chapter I. We
had found the freedom: it was as though some oppressing weight were
lifted from off us, as though an attack of mental asthma had been
relieved. But on the whole we felt that we had been defrauded in other
respects. The weather, except for the afternoon at Medina, had been very
cloudy and at times almost cold. We had heard no guitar during our week
in Spain. One day a man with a primitive clarinet, accompanied by a man
with a side drum, had wandered about the town making a queer music which
had given us thrills of unexpected delight. But Jan does not play the
clarinet. He had made up his mind about guitars, and guitars he would
have. The last night which we were to spend in Avila, he said:
"See here, Jo, we'll go out and we'll walk up and down, through and
round this town, till we hear a guitar playing. Then we will walk in and
explain. I'm sure the people, whoever they may be, will not mind, but I
am going to hear Spanish music."
After supper we set out again. We walked the town from the top to the
bottom. Not a whisper of guitar or of any other music. We bisected the
town from left to right--still silence except for the dim sounds of
normal evening life. We went out into the little garden which was beyond
the walls and, leaning on the parapet, stretched our ears over the
small suburb beneath. The cries of a wailing child or two, of a scolding
woman and the shouts of an angry man answered us; of music not a note.
We walked round the walls and were about to return in disappointment to
the hotel, when Jan said "Hush!"
We listened. Barely audible, from below on the hill-side, came the faint
tinkle of a guitar. We looked out across the dark country. The hill
sloped steeply from our feet and rose again in planes of blue blackness
to the distant mountains. Almost in the bottom of the valley we saw a
square of light from an open door. The sound came from this direction.
Cautiously we crept down the hill, which was steep, pebbly and without
paths. As we came down, the noise grew louder.
There was a small drinking house or venta by the roadside; near to it,
drawn up on a grassy spot beneath some big trees, were gipsy caravans
and booths, and as we passed by we could see, dimly white, the blanketed
shapes of the gipsies as they lay on the grass asleep under the stars.
From the venta came the sounds of music.
After a momentary hesitation we went in. The room, lit by one dim lamp,
was crowded with gipsies and workmen. It was long in shape and an alcove
almost opposite to the door was partitioned off as a bar. At one end was
a table upon which three gipsies with dark, lined Spanish faces were
sitting, and the audience had formed itself into rough, concentric
semicircles spreading down the length of the room. Most of the men were
swarthy with the sun, clad in the roughest of clothes, some with tall
hats on, others with striped blankets flung over their shoulders. The
inn looked like what the average traveller would describe as a nest of
brigands.
We murmured a bashful "buenos noches," bowed to the company and crept
into the background. A few returned our greeting, but with delicacy of
feeling the majority took no overt notice of our presence.
The man on the table who held the guitar began to thrum on the
instrument. A tall gipsy, whose face was drawn into clear, almost
prismatic shapes, and who might have stepped out of an etching by Goya,
put his stick into a corner, slipped off his blanket and, standing in
the open space before the table, began a stamping dance, snapping his
fingers in time with the rhythm. A workman standing near to us said:
"That man does not play the guitar very well, the other one plays
better."
He went out and in a short while returned with his wife, a laughing
woman whom he placed next to me. There was no drinking of wine. The
alcarraza, an unglazed, bottle shaped drinking vessel, full of water,
was handed about. It has a small spout, and from this the Spaniard pours
a fine stream of water into his mouth. But beware, incautious
traveller--ten to one you will drench yourself.
Though the audience apparently took no notice of our presence, in
reality they were extremely conscious of us. One by one, as if by
accident, gipsy women clad in red cottons came into the already crowded
room. Soon a girl was urged to dance. She demurred, giggling. At last
she was pushed into the open space, and with a gesture of resignation
she began to dance. We are not judges of Spanish dancing: we had been
looking for atmosphere, and had plunged into the thick of it. This was
no café in Madrid or Seville got up for the entertainment of the
traveller. This was the true, natural, romantic Spain. Opportunity again
had blessed her disciples. One of the women pushed her way out of the
door, and in a short while returned, dragging with her a child about
nine years old. The little girl's face was frowning and angered, the
sleep from which she had been roused still hung heavy on her eyelids.
"Aha!" exclaimed the audience. "She dances well."
The man who was reputed the better player roused himself from the table
and sat down on a chair. They put castanets into the child's hands. The
man struck a few chords and slowly the music formed itself into the
rhythm of a Spanish measure.
[Illustration]
Relaxing none of her angry, sleepy expression, the child danced
wonderfully. The castanets clashed and fluttered beneath her fingers,
her skirts swirled this way and that, her feet beat the floor in time
with the pulsation of the guitar. The audience shouted encouragement at
her. With a wild series of movements, the dance at last came to an end.
"Brava! Brava!" cried the gipsies.
"One day that girl will be worth much money," said a man, with approval
in his voice.
Then the best male dancer took the floor. With true artistic instinct he
did not attempt to rival the active dancing of the child, but performed
a stately movement, holding his arms above his head, and slowly turning
himself about. When he sat down an old man of seventy or so began a
series of senile caperings, thumping his stick on the floor. The
audience rolled with laughter at the ancient buffoon.
For some while Jan had been wondering whether he should pay for two or
three bottles of wine for the company, but we did not know the
delicacies of Spanish etiquette, nor had we sufficient language in which
to make an inquiry, so, pushing my way to the child who had danced so
well, I pressed a few coppers into her hand. She looked up at me in
astonishment.
"What do you want me to do, then?" she asked.
Our Spanish failed to shape a proper reply, so I smiled at her as
answer.
"Buenos noches," and "Muchos gracias," we said to the crowd, and made
our way out again into the night.
We were followed up the hill by a gipsy boy who begged cigarettes, but
he had pestered us during the whole of our stay at Avila, and we did not
feel kindly towards him. Nor indeed had we any cigarettes to give,
because Spain was suffering from a tobacco famine, and those which we
had brought with us from France had just come to an end.
The next morning we left the Hôtel del Jardin, which owes its name to
the fact that it possesses in the front a tiny square of earth on which
grow five bushes and a small tree. We were bound for Madrid.
CHAPTER VI
MADRID
Madrid Station was the usual dark barn into which the trains ran and
where they rested, as the diligences rest beneath the barn of the
coaching inn. One descended the steps of the carriage into gloom; found
a dim porter whom one would never recognize again; made one's way
amongst the towering, sniffling black Pargantua of locomotives; was
fought for by an excited mob of cabmen, amongst whom one remained
passive until a cabman dowered with more character than his fellows had
managed to attract one's notice; and finally we were packed into a
small, four-square omnibus, our luggage on the top, the driver and his
tout on the box. A police official in a grey uniform halted us. He asked
our names, our destination and warned us not to pay the driver more than
five pesetas for the trip, including the luggage.
To-day was Sunday. We had, indeed, on getting up at Avila imagined it to
be Saturday. We were leaving Avila expressly on a Saturday in order to
be in Madrid for the great Sunday bullfight, for practically all
bullfighting in Spain is reserved as a mild sport for Sunday afternoon,
or for other days of Church festival. Unfortunately, we had learned on
the train that it was not Saturday but Sunday. Somehow, we had mislaid a
day. We had presented ourselves with a Wednesday or a Thursday or a
Friday too many, and now Sunday had gone bang and the bullfight with it.
But in consequence our entry into Madrid had some of the dignity of a
royal procession. We plunged, a shabby omnibus, into the flood of
carriages which parade the parks of Madrid on bullfight occasions. There
were doubtless ladies with high combs placed in their raven hair; with
lustrous eyes glowing from the deep caverns of their eye sockets; with a
waxy and sensuous flower hanging from their full-blooded lips; clad in
mystery-lending mantilla and gorgeous shawl, over which the Orient has
burst a splendour of silken blossom. There were, no doubt, such
spectacles to see; there must have been; all the artists who paint Spain
cannot lie. Yet I confess that we did not see them. Though we are
beginning to be suspicious of Spanish painters, we will not assert that
no such ladies drove in procession, tempting the lounging Spaniard with
glances from eyes of melting jet.
We did not see them because the whole flood of carriages was plunged in
a strange golden haze. Dusk had fallen and overhead signs of daylight
showed purplish through the fog, but lower down it was quite dark, and
through this haze of orange-gold particles, which drifted in the air as
golden particles drift in a chemical solution, the lamps of the
carriages threw long searchlights, arresting strange silhouettes of the
coach-borne crowd, so that we made our first acquaintance with the
people of Madrid merely as black shadows against a radiance of gold. It
was, indeed, somewhat a prophetic introduction. These black shadows
against the gold may stand as a figure for Spain. We think of Spain as
the land of the last romance, whereas the Spaniard's real romance is
money and the gaining of it. But this is a mixing of secondary and
primary impressions. Before our eyes Madrid rolled forward, gloating in
an aureate solution, accompanied by the shouts of coachmen and the
blaring from aristocratic and impatient motor-cars. We sat looking out
of the black windows of the omnibus with much of that childish delight
which a shadowgraph theatre gives. In time, however, we began to cough.
After a while longer we began to realize that this haze so exquisite in
the lamplight was dust--dust.
We rolled along, manufacturing our halo as we went, until, coming out of
the press of carriages into cobbled and ill-lit streets, our glory fell
away from us and we rocked on, reflecting on this apt illustration of
the old French proverb concerning beauty and suffering. Gradually we
decided that we could have dispensed with this weird introduction to
Madrid in order to have spared our throats.
Our friend Jesus Perez had given us an address appropriately enough in
the Place of the Angel. But there were three _pensions_ in the same
building and he had not discriminated. So I, leaving Jan to look after
the bus, went to explore, and knocking at random was brought face to
face with an old lady who had not a trace of the angelic in her
constitution. While she was grumpily and wilfully misunderstanding me,
insisting that the Señor for whom I was looking did not live there, a
crowd of well-fed persons sifted from the dining-room and stood in a
circle staring at me with cold-eyed curiosity. As they stared they all
picked their teeth. At last I forced understanding on her and she told
me in a surly voice that her _pension_ was full. The other two
_pensions_ were full also. It was explained to me that Madrid was
suffering from congestion, that never had such a season been
experienced.
So I retreated from the stairs and we held a council of distress in the
street. The driver of the bus, who did not indeed look like a very
competent judge, said that he knew of a good _pension_. By a series of
manoeuvres, about as complicated as the turning of a large ship in a
small river, he got his bus reversed and we set off again the way we had
come. But once more we met a refusal, backed by wide-eyed staring and
public tooth-picking.
We had the address of an hotel, as a last resource indeed, for it was
somewhat beyond our means, costing seventeen pesetas a day _en pension_.
So in despair we made our way to it, wondering whether the congestion
had spread from the eight peseta boarding-houses to the
seventeen-peseta hotels, and whether our first night in Madrid was to be
spent in the bus. We came back into the garishly lit main streets of
Madrid and at last the bus halted. There was no hotel front, and we
plunged between two shops along a passage from which photographs of the
beauties of Madrid showed exquisite sets of teeth from the showcases of
a society photographer. A narrow, twisting staircase--the lift was out
of order--spiralled us up to a sumptuous hotel decorated with mirrors
and white paint arranged with a Permanic taste. Rooms were to be had,
and so we resigned ourselves to luxury for a few days.
Luxury indeed it was. For our eight pesetas a day in Avila we had had as
much as we wanted. Here it was in proportion. We were expected to eat
our seventeen pesetas' worth a day. Course followed course until, more
than replete, we had to wave away almost the whole of the second half of
this truly Roman repast. The waiters were aghast. What? Not eat
seventeen pesetas worth when one had paid for it? Incredible! We gazed
about at our fellow diners and saw that we were unique. But then as a
rule our fellow diners surpassed us as much in girth as in appetite;
they had "excellent accommodations." Your true Spaniard adores his
dinner. There is a general superstition that love is the Spaniard's
prime passion. But I doubt it. For the once that we have been asked what
we think of Spanish beauty, we have been twenty times questioned about
our judgment of Spanish cooking.
Madrid at night. How much has one not dreamed of southern romance
beneath skies of ultramarine? But Madrid seems just like any other large
European city. It is Paris without the wit, Munich without the music. We
talk, of course, of first impressions. The first impressions of a town
are rarely national. Collective humanity is collective humanity
everywhere; has the same needs and devises the same methods of
satisfying them. Some needs Madrid supplies more blatantly than is done
in other places. The Latin is indifferent to noise and the Spaniard is
the most hardened of the Latin races. There seems to be no curb on the
cries of the street vendors. The consequence is that each shouts out his
wares in competition with his fellows; the louder the yell the more the
custom. The peculiar qualities of Spanish singing further stimulate to a
point of mordant acidity the Iberian voice. For a person of sensitive
hearing Madrid is intolerable: newspaper men, flower-merchants,
toothpick-sellers, and above all the lottery ticket vendors, scream
their wares with nerve-racking persistency; added to which, to make
pandemonium complete, the cab-drivers and their touts bellow and shout,
while the horns of the motor-cars are the most discordant that we have
ever heard.
As the night progressed from a stifling heat to a comparative coolness
the noise seemed to increase. At two o'clock in the morning we thought,
surely, it had reached its limit. And to some extent it had. One thanks
Heaven sometimes that the human machine runs down; and we, when the
"sweet sister of death" laid her hands upon newspaper and lottery ticket
sellers, sent a thanksgiving up towards the stars, a thanksgiving the
more sincere at the moment because it was silent. The diminution of
noise went on steadily until about three, and we imagined that Madrid
was going to sleep. It was, however, but a ruse of the subtle city. As
is well known, one can become used to a persistent or regularly repeated
noise, for Jan used to sleep sweetly close to the stamp battery of a
mine, the din of which was so deafening that the voice was inaudible,
even at the loudest shout; and dwellers near a railway line are but
little disturbed by the nightly trains. Madrid knew that in time we
would become accustomed to the human babel, in spite of its strident
note; so she substituted a fictitious silence torn into strips by the
sudden passage of motors which had taken advantage of the clearness of
the streets to put on full speed and also to cut off the silencer.
Irregularly these motors went by about one every five minutes. Each
silence was about long enough to let us reach the edge over which one
tumbles into sleep, and each roaring passage of a car jerked us back
into disgusted wakefulness. We arose to a very early breakfast, wishing
we had Mr. G. K. Chesterton at hand so that we could enter into an
argument with him about the beauties of liberty.
To retrace our steps for a moment, it was just about at the hither side
of the noise climax, that is, about 2.20 in the morning, that we got
back to our hotel. We found the street door shut and locked, and no bell
could we find to pull. We thumped on the door, but only a hollow,
drum-like echoing answered us. We were dismayed. We had got up early at
Avila, a train journey and discoverings in Madrid had worn us out, and
on the other side of this locked door our bed tempted us; for we were
not then aware that sleep was forbidden to us whether we got in or
stayed in the street. It seemed strange in Madrid, wide awake and noisy,
that our hotel should have locked up so early and should have shut us
out. Despairingly again we drummed on the door. We awakened sympathy in
a passer-by. A few words explained our plight. He whistled, and we
presently saw a man with a lantern in his hand and with an official cap
on his head coming towards us. Our helper explained and the official
unlocked the door, let us in, and locked the door behind us.
This wandering latchkey is the equivalent to our old night-watchman.
Amongst his duties is that of chanting out the hours of the night as
they pass--for the benefit of the sleepless--to which he adds the
condition of the weather. Since fully ninety-five per cent. of the
Spanish nocturnes are Whistlerian blue, he has earned the title of El
Sereno, or the serene. There is an advantage in this custom--one cannot
forget one's latchkey. The worst evil which can happen to one is that
one's latchkey may forget itself: but Spain is on the whole a sober
country.
A big town reveals its flavour but by degrees. Madrid, whatever its real
character may be, had hidden herself behind a veil--a veil of dust. That
golden aura which had enveloped our first vision was not a permanent
characteristic of the town. The dust hung in the air, rising higher than
the houses. From the outskirts, maybe one would have seen Madrid as it
were enclosed in a dome of dust. We marvelled that people could live in
such at atmosphere.
We had noticed that, in addition to its dustiness, Madrid was suffering
from a dreadful shortage of water. It was, of course, July, and one
might expect some famine on the high and arid tableland of Spain, but we
wondered that so great a city could have arisen with so meagre a water
supply. At street corners queues of tired women and children waited for
hot hours with buckets, pails, jugs and amphoras. Soldiers with a hose
pipe from which trickled a paltry stream of water filled the vessels one
by one. There was gaiety and bad temper, giggling and quarrelling
amongst the women.
"This," said we, "is a primitive city."
In the public gardens water-carts were standing, and crowds of men were
baling water up from the decorative ponds.
"A real famine," said we, "could not be worse than this."
This was in fact the case. Madrid is supplied from the mountains by an
ancient aqueduct. The Spaniard has a principle of interfering with
nothing until the last moment; the ideals of liberty are carried so far
in Spain that they apply to inanimate objects as well as human beings.
Thus, if the aqueduct wishes to break, it is allowed to do so. Panic
ensues. The government is criticized, but words hurt nobody. The
aqueduct had given way a few days before our arrival. Had it not been
for the generosity of a nobleman who turned a private water supply into
the conduits of Madrid, we would have found not calamity but
catastrophe.
Madrid was unsavoury enough. The breakdown of the water-supply entails
also the failure of the drainage system. In a land of wine one might
dispense with water as a mere drink; but to dispense with flushed drains
in a semi-tropical climate is impossible.
[Illustration]
One late afternoon we were in our bedroom, having taken advantage of the
quiet which reigns from one p.m. till five, (for we got no other sleep
during out stay), we heard a faint strange murmur which seemed to be
drawing nearer. We went to the balcony and looked out. The sound was
coming from the direction of the Puerto del Sol, the sun's gate, the
torrid centre of Madrid so well named. The sound drew nearer. Soon it
shaped itself into a word murmur from thousands of throats:
"Agua, agua, agua."
The word passed us and fled down the streets, sweeping before the
hesitating trickle which crept along the gutters. With the word a
communal shiver of delight ran through the town, like a sort of physical
earthquake. Before six o'clock the road men were dragging their hoses
about the street, and the rising damp was dragging the dust out of the
air.
CHAPTER VII
A HOT NIGHT
(_This Chapter should be omitted by Prudes_)
The expense of an omnibus is not necessary to the experienced traveller.
A Spanish friend took us to a bureau of town porters in Madrid, and we
gave instructions to a dark-faced man in a shabby uniform, who promised
to see all our baggage to the station in good time for the evening train
to Murcia. Señor Don Mateo Bartolommeo was the name of the porter, for
he gave us his visiting card, on which was his professional and private
address, and a deep black mourning border like that on one's
grandmother's envelopes.
The preliminaries to travelling in Spain are lengthy. The ticket office
opens fifteen or twenty minutes before the train leaves, but the
passengers arrive an hour before, so that there is always a long queue
waiting at the ticket office. One can buy either tickets for the journey
or tickets for the thousand or more kilometres. The latter are a great
saving if one does much travelling, but they entail further delay at the
booking office, for verifying, tearing off, stamping, and so forth. Then
with one's tickets one goes to the luggage bureau, where the van luggage
is weighed, overweight charged, and a long slip receipt given. The
luggage is then presumed to travel to the journey's end and should be
forthcoming on the production by the passenger of the receipt. This is
not invariably the case; but of that we will tell in its place. The
wealthy traveller does not undergo all this fatigue. He shows a porter
the luggage for the van, tells him the station to which he wishes to
travel, gives him the money to pay for ticket and luggage, and bothers
his head no more about it. The Spanish porter is unusually honest. You
can give him two or three hundred pesetas to buy tickets with, and a few
minutes before the train starts up he runs with the tickets, the luggage
receipt, and the exact change.
We, however, wanted to experience everything; we did not wish to spend
our small capital on exorbitant tips, so I, leaving Jan to see to the
tickets and heavy luggage, argued my way past the ticket collector, who
is supposed to let nobody on to the platform without a ticket, found an
empty carriage, appropriated seats, and sat on the step waiting for the
porter to bring up the smaller luggage. An old lady in black, with a
huge bandbox and a birdcage, accompanied by three hatless girls dressed
in purple silk, all carrying at least four parcels apiece, filled up my
compartment, and I thought: "We are going to have a stuffy time of it."
The train was full of talk. In the corridors the people chattered at the
top of their voices like a rookery. Presently, conversing in shrill
tones, the old lady and her three daughters swooped back into the
carriage, and with much rustling of silk dragged all their parcels to
some other part of the train. A young officer, carrying about six
packages, took one of the vacated places, and marked his seat by
unbuckling his sword, which he placed in the corner. An old man, rather
run to stomach, took the seat opposite the soldier. He then stood in the
doorway, wedging his stomach into the opening, so that nobody else
should enter. The time drew closer to the departure of the train.
The noise increased a hundredfold. Three girls rushed along the corridor
and unceremoniously butted the old gentleman in the waistcoat. The
corridor was filled with a confused crowd of people, who handed in large
hat-boxes, brightly striped, square cardboard boxes, small suit-cases
with gilt locks, and a huge doll. The carriage was filled with a strong
smell of scent. There was giggling and the kissing of adieux. The escort
then retreated down the corridor and the three girls set to arranging
themselves for the journey. One of the girls was very dark, her face
like old ivory, her eyes large caverns of gloom, and her mouth painted a
brilliant scarlet; one was fair with a long face and grey eyes, very
excitable in manner, talking a high-pitched Spanish with a queer
intonation; the third was bigger than either of her companions, yet less
remarkable. One could easily have imagined her dressed in cowgirl's
costume, performing in a travelling Buffalo Bill show. All three had
bobbed hair, though that of the second girl was an elaborate _coiffure_
of short hair rather than a mere bob.
The dark girl picked up the soldier's sword and tossed it into the
luggage rack. The cowgirl pushed the stout old man's suit-case out of
his corner and took his seat. The old man but grinned and guffawed,
seeming pleased rather than angry. The soldier stood in the corridor and
glowered at the dark girl through the glass. He offered no objection to
the robbery of his seat, but it was evident what were his thoughts. The
second girl flung herself down on the seat next to Jan, blew out a long
sigh and exclaimed: "Aie, que calor, que calor."
It was indeed hot. All day long the sun had been beating down into
Madrid. The Puerto del Sol had been more like the "Puerto del Infierno."
The little trickles of water which the repaired aqueduct had afforded to
Madrid had done little to mitigate the dull reverberant heat of the
still air. Even now that the night had come the air was yet quivering,
and came into the lungs like half-warmed water.
The girls got down their dainty suit-cases from the rack, opened them,
burrowing amongst tawdry finery, manicure sets, powder-boxes and other
articles of toilet use, found boxes of cigarettes. To do this, the
cowgirl placed her suit-case on the seat and, standing, bent over it.
The stout old man, with a giggle, leant forward and gave the girl a
resounding smack with his open palm upon that part of her which was
nearest to him. The officer, through the glass, frowned and pursed up
his lips. The girl next to Jan caught my eye, smiled at me, and winked.
"Aie, que calor!" she exclaimed, blowing cigarette smoke into the air.
The train dragged itself out of the station and started southward
through the night.
The girl who was sitting next to Jan broke out into unexpected French.
"Mon Dieu! Qu'il fait chaud!" she exclaimed, as though Spanish would not
properly express the quality of the heat.
"But," said Jan to her, "you speak French very well."
"Well," she retorted, "I ought to, seeing that I am French."
Suddenly she came to a resolution. She stood up and again took down her
suit-case. She took from it a wrapper of tinted muslin. Slowly then she
began to take off her clothes. Her silk dress she folded up very neatly
and laid along the little rack which is set just below the ordinary one.
Then she slipped off her petticoat and camisole, and put on the muslin
wrapper.
"That is better," she exclaimed; folded up her discarded underwear, put
it into the suit-case, which she then replaced on the rack.
She then began on her _coiffure_. She detached a series of little curls
from over her ears, and twisting the wires on which they were made into
hooks, she suspended them from the netting of the rack, where over her
head they swung to and fro with the movement of the train.
"Maintenant," she said, "on est plus à son aise. Besides," she added,
with the instinct of true French economy, "it does so spoil one's
clothes if one takes a long railway journey in them."
The act had been performed with naturalness, and in view of the heat of
the night we could not help envying the French girl for her good sense
in making the long journey as comfortable as possible.
She began to tell Jan the story of her life. "Mother was a nuisance,"
she said; "she made life a little bit of hell at home. Well, one day we
had a fine old flare-up. I told mother that she could go to the devil if
she liked, and I just packed up and ran away. I came down to Madrid, and
on the whole I haven't done so badly. I send mother about eight hundred
pesetas a month. Most of that she'll keep for me, and I'll have a nice
little sum to start business with when I get back. Of course one can't
keep up a quarrel with one's mother for ever. _Hein!_"
Jan asked her how long she had been in Spain.
"Four months," she answered.
"You speak very good Spanish," said Jan.
"Oh," she answered, with a touch of desperation in her voice, "one can't
be all day doing nothing. It's a distraction learning something new."
"Where are you going now?" asked Jan.
"We are all going to Carthagena," said the French girl. "We'll be down
there all the summer. There are English there too, I have
heard--sailors. I like sailors. You see, I had to get away from Madrid.
I had a friend, and one day while I was out he stole all my spare money,
and all my clothes, which he took to the pawnshop. And that left me
stranded. Then I heard these two girls were going to Carthagena, to a
place, so I said, 'I'll come too,' and here I am. Anyway one has to be
somewhere, and I adore knocking about. It's life, isn't it?"
The dark girl was merely a selfish, pretty animal. She curled up on the
officer's seat like a black cat. She then slyly prodded the poor little
stout man with her high heels, so that he gradually moved up towards me,
leaving me little room in which to sit, while the dark girl could
stretch out at her ease. The other girl sat in her corner, saying
little, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She seemed to be one of those
stolid creatures who drop through life, taking good and bad without
change of face or of manner. She might have been rather South German
than Spanish. In contrast with these two the French girl was simple and
attractive. One noted, too, that she had a fine streak of unselfishness
in her character; she even talked without bitterness of the man who had
robbed her.
[Illustration]
Young men drifted along the corridors and stared in at the girls. One
man, who looked well off, dressed in a tweed sporting coat, came in and
made friends. He gave them cigarettes and drinks of brandy from a flask.
At about one o'clock in the morning, one of the cardboard boxes was
opened and disclosed a large pie, which was divided. The stout old
gentleman had a piece, so did "Tweeds." Some was offered to us, but we
had dined well at Madrid and did not feel hungry. But to refuse in Spain
is a delicate matter, so we gave them cigarettes to indicate goodwill.
We stopped at a dark station. The door was flung open and a tall
sunburned man clambered into the carriage. He had around his waist a
broad leather belt which was stuck full of knives. These implements were
clasp knives, and varied from small pocket knives and pruning knives to
veritable weapons a foot in length. He was not a famous brigand, though
he looked one, but a salesman. The larger knives had a circular ratchet
and a strong spring at the back, so that upon opening they made a
blood-curdling noise, which in itself would be enough to induce any
angry man to finish the matter by burying the blade in his enemy's
gizzard. He did no business in our carriage, and went off down the
platform opening and shutting a sample of his murderous wares, crying
out: "Navajos! Navajos!"
The train went on, and as we reached southward the night became warmer.
The stout old man left us, and the black girl stretched out at full
length, occasionally prodding me with her French heels. Presently the
darkness became less opaque. A faint silhouette of low hills, and then a
dim reflection from flat lands, appeared.
We stopped at another station; an unimportant wayside station with a
small house for booking-office and a drinking-booth in a lean-to
alongside.
"I must have a drink," exclaimed "Tweeds." "Who will come with me?"
Neither the black girl nor the cowgirl would move. We had still lemonade
in our Thermos flasks. So the French girl, in her muslin _peignoir_,
and "Tweeds" clambered down the carriage steps and disappeared through
the door of the fonda.
Disappeared is the right word. Without warning, the train began to move.
It gathered speed and clattered away southward. We never saw "Tweeds" or
the French girl again. In the thinnest of _négligés_ she was left
stranded upon the wayside station, to which no other train would come
for at least twelve hours, and possibly not for twenty-four.
The day broke, and we pounded along through a dusty arid country. There
was green in the bottom of the valley, but from the roads rose high
columns of dust, while the plastered villages of box-like houses near
the railroad were dried up and dust-coated. Dust blew in through the
carriage windows and settled thick upon the curls which, still swinging
and bobbing from the netting of the rack, were fast leaving their
mistress behind. At first her companions had been anxious; now they were
laughing.
"But," they said, "we wonder if she knows where to come for her things
when she does arrive?"
The train became more crowded. Soon people were running up and down,
looking angrily for places. Third-class passengers began to fill the
corridor of our second-class carriage. A boy of about nineteen, with the
half-angry intense face characteristic of some Latins, came into the
carriage and demanded a seat from the dark girl who was still stretched
at full length. This seat "Darkey," with her habitual selfishness,
refused to give up. Suddenly, we were in the middle of a full-fledged
Spanish row.
To us it had a comic side. It was not what we would have called a row,
as much as a furious debate. Of course with our slight acquaintance with
Spanish we missed the finer points of the varied arguments.
"Darkey" began by saying that she was keeping the seat for a friend who
was somewhere else. This was to some extent true; the French girl was
somewhere else, though there was little likelihood of her claiming the
seat.
The boy retorted that if she was somewhere else she probably had another
seat.
This argument went to and fro, increasing in acerbity. Each of the
quarrellers listened in silence to what the other had to say, making no
attempt to interrupt, though the voices grew hoarse with anger.
[Illustration]
Presently "Darkey" was telling the boy that he was a wretched
third-class passenger anyhow, and that he had no right in a second-class
carriage, and even if the seat were free he wasn't going to have it.
The boy retorted by saying that anybody could see what she was, and that
her mother was probably sorry that she had ever been born, etc., etc.
No English quarrel could have gone to half the length that this
proceeded. We were waiting to see either the boy jump into the carriage
and shake the life out of "Darkey," or to see "Darkey" spring, like the
young tiger-cat she was, at the boy and scratch his face. But nothing
happened. The crowded corridor listened with delight to the progress of
the quarrel.
The train stopped at a station. "Darkey" had sat up to pulverize the
impertinent youth with some evil retort. The carriage door on the
opposite side opened, and a placid, middle-aged peasant woman, followed
by an ancient peasant man, stepped into the carriage, and before
"Darkey" had well discovered what was happening had squashed down in the
disputed seat, left vacant by the removal of "Darkey's" feet. The woman
grinned at us all and sat nursing a large basket on her lap.
Then the quarrel slowly died down. After a while the boy went away.
However, he came back again whenever he had thought of something good,
and barked it round the corner of the door at "Darkey," who, usually
taken by surprise, could find nothing to retort before he had lost
himself again in the crowd.
The peasant woman smiled at us all, and, opening her basket, handed to
each of us a large peach. She selected one especially big for "Darkey,"
presumably as refreshment after the tiring argument.
The day became hotter and hotter. The dust gathered more thickly on to
the French girl's poor little curls. When the train stopped, children
ran up and down beside the carriages, selling water at the price of "one
little bitch" the glass. We were now in the province of Murcia, and the
scenery put on the characteristic appearance of that province, tall bare
hills of an ochreous mauve, sloping down into a flat, irrigated, fertile
valley. The division between mountain and valley, between the "desert
and the strown" was as sharp as though drawn with the full brush of a
Japanese. On the mountains were dead remnants of Saracen castles, of
dismantled Spanish robber fortresses, and the white or coloured
buildings of monasteries which still lived sparkling in the sun.
CHAPTER VIII
MURCIA--FIRST IMPRESSIONS
One has a right to expect that the station which is the finish of a long
and tiring journey should be both a terminus and have a quality all of
its own. Our egoism makes it seem at that moment the most important
place in the world. But Murcia (pronounced locally Mouthia) had only a
big ugly barn of a station like many through which we had already
passed, and even lacked a Precia Fijo jewellery shop. All we could see
of the town, on emerging, was a few houses and a line of small trees
which appeared as though they had been in a blizzard of whole-meal
flour, so thick was the dust. Over this buff landscape quivered the blue
sky.
In front of us were one or two cranky omnibuses and many green-hooded
two-wheeled carts. These carts were Oriental in appearance and had the
most distinctive appearance we had yet noted in Spain. They were gaily
painted, and the hoods bulged with the generous curves of a Russian
cupola. Inside they were lined with soiled red velvet, and the driver
sat outside of this magnificence on a seat hanging over one of the tall
wheels. Into one of these we were squeezed in company with two grinning
travellers, and started off, soon plunging into the shadow of an avenue
of lime trees, behind the grey trunks of which cowered insignificant
little houses painted in colours which once had been bright.
[Illustration: CARTERS IN THE POSADA]
The more communicative of our fellow travellers said it was indeed the
hottest day of the year. It was hot, but we were not oppressed by it,
and found out in time that the Spaniard always seemed to suffer from
the heat more than we did. Our endeavours to be agreeable in imperfect
Spanish worked up the traveller to a discussion on languages, and to
a eulogy on ourselves for taking the trouble to learn. We said that
we were artists. He answered:
"Ah, yes, that explains it. Poor people, of course, are forced to learn
languages."
We drove across a stone bridge, almost in collision with a bright blue
tram-car. A momentary glimpse was given to us of a muddy river running
between deep embankments; and we drew up before a square barrack of red
brick pierced by a regiment of balconied windows. The proprietor, oily
like a cheerful slug, waved his fingers close to us, and drew back his
hand in delicate jerks as though we were rare and brittle china. He
preceded us into an Alhambra-like central hall, led us carefully up a
stone staircase to a wide balcony, opened a door into a palatial bedroom
with a flourish; and demanded fifteen pesetas "sin extraordinario."
Intuition told us that this was not a case of "Precio Fijo," and we
reduced him gently to eleven pesetas before we accepted the bargain.
Then, to take off the raw edge left by the chaffering, Jan said:
"I don't suppose you get many foreigners here, Señor?"
"Si, si!" returned the hotelkeeper, anxious for the reputation of his
caravanserai. "We get quite a lot. Oh, yes, quite a lot. Why, only last
year we had two French people, un matrimonio; and this year you have
come."
The maid was in appearance and behaviour like an india-rubber ball, and
the conviction was firmly fixed in her mind either that we couldn't
speak Spanish or that she could not understand if we did. So she
grunted, bounced at us and smiled with her mouth wide open like a dog,
hoping that by this means she was translating a Spanish welcome into an
English one. With difficulty we dissuaded her from these antics and
persuaded her to speak, but she turned her words--which were already
dialect--into baby talk; and the less we understood the louder she
shouted.
However, she was a kindly creature and succeeded in cheering our
spirits, which were flagging, for we were very tired and almost ill,
having barely recovered from a severe attack of influenza before leaving
London. We washed off the thick dust and went downstairs into the large
cool hall. The central quadrangle had once probably been open to the
sky, but now was covered, five stories up, by a glass roof, beneath
which sackcloth curtains stretched on wires shut out the sun. There were
comfortable wicker chairs all about, and the hall was decorated with
four solemn plaster busts, one in each corner. We were curious to find
out who were thus honoured in a southern Spanish hotel. One was of
Sorolla, a popular Valencian painter, one was of a woman, a poetess. The
other two we did not know, but think they represented contemporary
literature and architecture. Imagine finding in an English hotel hall
busts of Brangwyn, Mrs. Meynell, Conan Doyle and Lutyens.
The hall was cool. We ordered coffee and buttered toast. But the butter
was rancid, for we had crossed the geographical line, almost as
important as the equator, below which butter is not, and oil must take
its place.
Four children, making a lot of noise over it, were in the hall, playing
a game peculiarly Spanish. The smallest boy, who always had the dirty
work to do, carried flat in front of him a board, to the end of which
were fixed a pair of bull's horns. He dashed these at his comrades in
short straight rushes. Two of the other boys carried pieces of red cloth
which they waved in front of the bull. The fourth boy carried a pair of
toy banderillas, straight sticks, covered with tinted paper and pointed
with a nail. As the bull rushed the "banarillero" dabbed his sticks into
a piece of cork. Then they decided that the bull was to die. One of the
cloak-wavers took a toy sword which he triumphantly stuck into the
cork. With a moan the small boy sank on to the floor. His companions
seized his heels and dragged him round the tiled floor of the hall. The
game seemed to us a little tedious; later on we were to learn how like
to actual bullfighting it was.
The hotel interpreter, for whom we had inquired, now came in. He spoke
in French:
[Illustration]
"What can I do for you?"
We wished to find a gipsy guitar-player named Blas, and we had been told
that the interpreter knew his house. We feared that he might be in
Madrid, where he sometimes played in the Flamenco cafés; but the
interpreter said that he was in Murcia, and that we could look for him
at once.
From the cool hall we stepped into the blazing sun of midday Spain,
crossed an open space so dazzling that it hurt the eyes, and entered a
maze of narrow, tall streets. Jan and I moved along in single file,
clinging to the narrow margins of shadow which edged the houses, while
the interpreter with a mere uniform cap on his head stalked
imperturbably in the sunlight. Across squares we hurried as rapidly as
possible to the shadow on the opposite side. The houses were orange,
pink, blue or a neutral grey which set off the hue of the tinted
buildings. The squares were planted with feathery trees of a green so
vivid that it appeared due to paint rather than to nature.
It was a clear and windless day, and soon we remarked a characteristic
which Murcia exhibited more strongly than any other Spanish town we have
visited. Each house had exuded its own smell across the pavement, so as
one went along one sampled a variety of Spanish household odours. Some
people find an intimate connection between colour and smell. We might
say that we passed successfully through a pink smell, a purple smell, a
citron green smell, a terra verte smell (very nasty), a cobalt smell, a
raw sienna smell, and so on. This characteristic clung to Murcia during
the greater part of our stay.
About fifteen minutes' walk through these variegated odoriferous layers
brought us into a street of mean appearance. The interpreter stopped
before a large gateway door, pushed it open and ushered us into a
courtyard in the corner of which was a black earthenware pot astew over
an open fire. A brown-faced crone, withered with dirt and age, her
clothes ragged, her feet shod in burst alpagatas, asked us what had
brought us there.
"Where is Blas?" said the interpreter.
With an unctuous gesture the old gipsy crone spread out her hands, and
turning to a doorway shouted out some words. Gipsy women young and old
came from the house. They were dark, dirty and tousled, clad in draggled
greys or vermilions, many carrying brown babies astraddle on the hip.
With gestures, almost Indian in subservience, they crowded about us,
looking at us with ill-disguised curiosity. The interpreter repeated his
question.
"Blas," said a young, beautiful, though depressed-looking woman, "is not
in the house."
[Illustration]
"The English Señor will speak to him," commanded the interpreter. "Send
him to the hotel when he comes home."
Then our friend the interpreter determined to earn a large tip, and
calculating on our ignorance brought us back by the longest route, past
all the principal buildings of the town; thereby quadrupling the journey
through the baking streets. Our desires, however, were fixed on home.
We were staggering beneath the heat. Had the interpreter but known it,
his tip would have been increased by celerity; but, stung by our apathy
over public monuments, he took us into a courtyard to look at some
gigantic tomatoes gleaming in the shade, and ran us across the street to
examine a skein of fine white catgut, dyed orange at the tips, which a
workman was carrying. He explained that this was for medical operations
and for fishing lines, which was a local industry.
Lunch was ready when we got back, a prolonged and delicious lunch for
those in health, but we could eat little of it. Black olives were in a
dish on the table; and the fruit included large ripe figs, peaches,
pears and apricots. A curious fact we had noted was that much of the
fruit did not ripen properly. Either it was unripe or else had begun to
rot in the centre. The sun was too strong to allow it to reach the stage
of exquisite ripeness which the more temperate climate of England
encourages. The waiter was dismayed by our lack of appetite. He urged us
repeatedly to further gastronomic efforts, and holding dishes beneath
our noses stirred up the contents with a fork. At last he made us a
special salad which was not on the menu. The other occupants of the long
white restaurant were all fat men who swallowed course after course in
spite of the heat. We looked at them and thought: "No wonder there are
so many plump people in Spain."
After coffee in the large hall, we went to our bedroom for a rest. The
windows of our room looked southwards, over the muddy river. Immediately
beneath was a road on which was a wayside stall of bottles and old
ironwork, an ice-cream vendor, a boy roasting coffee on a stove, turning
a handle round and round while the coffee beans rustled in the heated
iron globe, sending up a delicious smell to our windows. A row of
covered carriages, tartanas, waited beneath the shadows of the riverside
trees. All along the opposite bank were two-storied mills, and beyond
them the town stretched out in a wedge of flat roofs bursting up into
church towers. Green market gardens came up to the edge of the town, and
covered the valley to the base of the hills with a dense growth of flat
and flourishing green which one had not expected thus far south in
Spain.
We were awakened from our siesta by the spherical maid who mouthed and
pantomimed that a Señor was waiting for us in the hall. Luis Garay, a
young painter and lithographer to whom our friend had written about us,
had come at the earliest opportunity. He was slim, sallow, almost
dapper, with dark frank eyes, and we took a liking to him at once.
Together we went outside the hotel and sat at a table in the open place
facing the principal promenade of Murcia. The river was on the
right-hand side, and on the left was a line of tall buildings, some
cafés, others municipal. The heat attacked one in waves, it seemed as
palpable as though it possessed substance. When we took our seats the
plaza was empty because the siesta was not yet over, but after four
o'clock had passed gradually the life of the town blossomed out.
The army of beggars attacked us; in monotonous undertones they moaned
their woes.
"Hermanito, una limosna qui Dios se la pagara,"[5] they whined.
To those who seemed unworthy Luis answered, "Dios le ayude."[6]
How exquisite is the courtesy of the Spaniard even to a beggar. Our
manners have not this fine habitual touch--after the international
occupation of Scutari the beggars of the town had learned two English
phrases; one was "G'arn," the other "Git away." It is true that under
this harsh exterior the Englishman may hide a soft heart; he may be
like the schoolmaster who feels the caning more poignantly than does
the schoolboy; indeed many a man puts a deliberately rough exterior on
to mask the flabbiness of his sentimental nature; and the Spaniard, for
all his courtesy, may have the harder nature. Yet the courtesy which
recognizes a common level of humanity is a precious thing. It may be
that by refusing alms with respect one may be preserving in the beggar
finer qualities than would be generated by giving with contempt. A
Spaniard once said, "I like a beggar to say 'Hermanito, alms which God
will repay.' It is naïf and simple. It has a beauty for which one
willingly pays a copper. But when a beggar whines that he has eaten
nothing for three days, it is offensive. It is an insult to give a man a
halfpenny who has eaten nothing for three days; and one cannot afford to
give him the price of a square meal; and anyhow one knows that he is
lying."
As well as the pitiful beggars there were the musical beggars. Two men
came playing the guitar and laud. Another followed with a gramophone
which he carried from his shoulder by a strap. Then came the
barrel-organ. We had not noted its arrival. Suddenly the most appalling
din broke out. Awhile ago in Paris M. Marinetti organized a futurist
orchestra; one could imagine that it had been transported in miniature
to Murcia. There were bangs and thumps and crashes of cymbals, and
tattoos of drums, and tinkles of treble notes, and plonkings of base
notes intermixed apparently without order, rhythm or tune. What a state
the barrel must have been in! Once we presume that it played a tune, but
now it was so decrepit that nothing as such was recognizable. It was
dragged by a donkey and a cart and shepherded by a fat white dog which
had been shaved, partly because of the heat, partly because of vermin.
It was an indecent-looking dog, and the flesh stood out in rolls all
round its joints. No sooner had this musical horror disappeared round
the corner than another organ in an equal state of disrepair took its
place.
[Illustration: A MURCIAN BEGGAR-WOMAN]
"It is all right," Luis reassured us; "you have suffered the worst.
There are only two in the town."
A crowd of urchins carrying home-made boot-blacking boxes pestered us
with offers of "Limpia botas." A man and a woman sauntered between the
tables bellowing and screaming "Les numeros"; these were state lottery
sellers.
Also there were sellers of local lotteries, which were promoted by the
Church in aid of the disabled whom they employed to sell the tickets.
Nuns, too, were amongst the beggars. There were boys selling newspapers;
men selling meringues and pastry, others hawking fried almonds, very
salt to excite thirst; children hunting between the legs of the tables
and chairs for cast cigarette ends or straws discarded by the drinkers;
a man peddling minor toilet articles--toothpicks, scent, powder,
buttonhooks--and another with a basket of very odorous dried fish.
The smell of the fish banished our new-won universal brotherhood and we
waved the fish vender away without courtesy. But an elegantly dressed
young man sitting near accosted him and began to chaff him. But what was
pretence to the dude was earnest to the salesman. He had some talent for
selling and he pestered the dude for nearly half an hour, at the end of
which the latter in self-defence and for the sake of peace bought a
portion of the smelly commerce. Probably the fishmonger's total gain out
of the transaction was a fraction of a penny. But the Spanish is not a
wasteful nation. When the dude walked off home he took with him the fish
wrapped in his newspaper.
At last we called the waiter by the Spanish custom of clapping the
hands, paid for the drinks, and guided by Luis set out to visit the
house which our friend had lent us for the summer. Habits of cleanliness
were shown in the streets. Young girls were hard at work, each
industriously brushing the dust from the sidewalk in front of her house,
even though that sidewalk were itself of dried mud. To us it seemed
that the story was being repeated of the old woman who tried to besom
the tide out of her front door.
Many of the householders had spread their sphere of influence even
beyond the sidewalk, and had soaked their patch of road, turning the
dust into viscous mud. The pavements were already beginning to be
encumbered by chairs, and by groups of people sitting out in the cooling
day.
The Paseo de Corveras is a one-sided street darkened by tall trees. On
the other side stretch maize fields surrounding a small farm, and
walled-in gardens filled with tall feathery date palms. The dates were
already hanging in orange clusters beneath the sprouting heads of
fronds. Luis took us to the house of Antonio Garrigos, who lived at No.
12.
Antonio was a handsome man of pure Spanish type, giving an impression of
nervous vitality. He produced three keys, each of about a pound in
weight and large as any key of a theatrical gaoler. The house key was of
monstrous size, and he assured us that we would have to carry it with us
wherever we went. Our friend's apartment at No. 26 was on the first
floor and spread right across two humbler dwellings below. It was cool
and roomy, filled with specimens of Spanish draperies, pottery and
furniture, which he had collected during several years in Spain. At the
back was a kitchen, with large earthen vessels for water, and Spanish
grids for cooking on charcoal. The bed was big for one, but very small
for two, so we suggested taking off the spring mattress and laying
planks in its place. Antonio at once said that to-morrow he would get
the planks in time for the night.
Then, feeling very tired but thoroughly pleased with our prospective
house, and with the new acquaintances we had found, we walked back to
the hotel, had a supper as liberal as the lunch, and went to bed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: "Little brother, alms which God Himself will repay."]
[Footnote 6: "God will help you."]
CHAPTER IX
MURCIA--SETTLING DOWN
By the time we left the hotel, which we did on the second day, the maid
had reviewed her decision as to the state of our mentality. Receiving
her tips she shook our hands warmly, asked where we were going and said
that she would without fail call upon us. The tatterdemalion bootblack
at the hotel door, who could never quite make up his mind whether he
were bootblack or lottery-ticket seller--neglecting each business in
favour of the other--helped us with our luggage. He also on receipt of a
tip inquired our future address and assured us that he would call upon
us. The driver of the tartana told us that he would look us up one day
to see how we were getting on; and another visit was promised by a
ragged lounger whom we called in to aid us in getting our luggage
upstairs.
"Spain," we said, "seems to be a sociable country."
Don Antonio was waiting for us at his house, which was but a few doors
away from our own. He introduced us to his wife, a buxom, jolly woman of
about twenty-five; his sister, tall, elegant and dark, perhaps the most
complete type of Spanish woman we had yet met; and his brother-in-law.
Don Thomas, for such was the brother-in-law's name, was able to speak a
portion of the American language, and often by his imperfect knowledge
he would deepen our ignorance of what others were saying in Spanish.
Don Antonio had a small box factory. His house was two-storied, as were
most of the houses in the Paseo. On the ground floor the front room, or
entrada, was filled with wood, wood-working benches, and stacks of
unfinished boxes; the kitchen behind was not exempt from business, for
here Antonio made up his glues and pastes, while the whole top story was
occupied by girls who covered the crude shells of the boxes with velvet
and looking-glass and papier mâché adornments. Antonio and his wife were
crowded into two small rooms, a bedroom in the front alongside of the
entrada and a dining-room at the back parallel with the kitchen.
Our planks were ready for us, but Antonio refused to be paid for them.
He said that when we had finished with them he could make boxes out of
them. We spent the afternoon in our flat unpacking and arranging the
plank bed. The mattress was not broad enough to cover the planks which
we put down, but we managed to find a padded sofa-covering which, laid
alongside of the mattress, supplemented the inefficient breadth. As we
had met neither mosquitoes nor net in the hotel, we left the
mosquito-net in the trunk.
In the evening Luis Garay called for us. He led us through a maze of
darkened streets, at one time skirting the tall, over-decorated rococo
front of the cathedral, and brought us to a large doorway within which
was a smaller door. Two sharp raps and the door swung wide mechanically,
though a long rope tied to the latch and looping its way upstairs showed
how it had been opened. Up wide white stone stairs we went, watched by
an old, old man hanging over the balcony of the second floor. Luis said
no word to him, nor he to Luis.
The chief keynote of Spanish interiors is whiteness. The room into which
we came was white, and out of it was another white room set with
dining-tables and decorated with a huge white filter. This was "Elias,"
where we could dine excellently for the sum of one peseta fifty centimos
apiece.
Elias himself looked like a cheery monk painted by Dendy Sadler. Clad in
a long white overall, he stood in the midst of his snowy tables and
greeted us merrily.
Luis went away, having said good night, for he had an engagement. We ate
omelet, beefsteak and fried potatoes, finishing with a plate of fruit,
fixed by the multiple stare of the young men dining there. I was the
only woman at Elias while we dined there, for Spanish women are home
clinging folk, and even to the cafés they never go in large numbers.
As the young men finished their meals, they went out. Each one as he
passed through the door bowed and said something. It sounded like "Dobro
Vetche," but "Dobro Vetche" is Serbian for good evening. We could not
make out what the words were, so, as the Serbian seemed to be
appropriate, we boldly answered it in return. Later on we discovered
that they said "Buen Aproveche" with the first part of the sentence
slurred over by habit. It means "May it do you good," and the customary
sentence to say to any one who is dining. The correct answer is
"Gracias."
We left Elias' very satisfied with our cheap discovery. Jan, who
generally has a good head for locality, engaged to find his way back
without a guide. But he turned the wrong way out of Elias' door. We
wandered amongst deep darkened streets till suddenly we came out into
one as narrow as the others, but laid with flat pavements, instead of
rugged cobbles, and blazing with light. Through this we ran the gauntlet
of Murcia. The street was crowded with hotels and cafés, both sides
being lined with tables at which the evening drinkers were sitting. The
street itself was filled with a flux and reflux of the youth and beauty,
the "Hooventud, Bellitza and Looho,"[7] of the town.
We came, especially I, upon them as a catastrophe. The light died out of
their eyes, the smiles disappeared from their faces, mouths dropped
open, fingers pointed, people grasped each other. It was similar to the
moment when an elephant comes along in the village circus procession,
and I was the elephant.
During our first weeks in Murcia our appearance in the streets
invariably caused excitement and shrieks of laughter among young girls
and gossips. If we entered a shop the children crowded in with us to
listen to our attempts at Spanish. This was not done with deliberate
rudeness, but was more the result of unrestrained curiosity. This
attitude was not very evident when we went for strolls with Luis: the
presence of a fellow-townsman seemed to have a calming influence. At
last I found an effective weapon. With mock horror I stared at the feet
and ankles of any young woman too malicious. Self-consciousness at once
gripped her--almost invariably she hurried away to examine her shoes and
wonder what was wrong with them.
Curiously enough we never became conscious of a case of incivility among
the men. Even groups of lads at the difficult age which breeds larrikins
in Australia were on the whole less offensive than in other countries.
It seemed to us that if a Spanish woman were kind-hearted--and the
majority are so--she was the most kindly and charming of women, but if
of a spiteful nature she took less pains to hide or curb it than do the
women of more sophisticated countries.
The narrow street which we had discovered by accident was perhaps the
most disconcerting part of the town, as it was full of cafés, and
therefore of loungers; but we often had to go there for small
necessities. There we had to go for smoked glasses because of the
brilliance of the sun, for a parasol, and for a hatpin. The first two
objects were easily found, but the last was difficult. Hats, even in
Southern Spain, are worn only by the _crème de la crème_ for great
ceremonies, and the hatpins sold by the jewellers were intended for such
occasions. They were decorated affairs with huge heads of complicated
workmanship set with garish stones. Probably no other woman in the town
wore a hat for normal use, so we gave up the search and Jan made out of
hairpins something which served.
We ran the gauntlet of the quizzing street and made our way home.
All along the streets the people had brought their chairs out of doors
and were sitting on the pavements in the cool of the night. At Antonio's
door we found a group of his family, almost invisible in the dark. We
sat down with them. Presently Antonio said:
"I will go and fetch Don Luis, and he will play for us."
What then could be seen of Don Luis was a large nose, a check cap and a
pair of gnarled hands which grasped his guitar in a capable manner. He
sat down on a chair on the sidewalk and began to play.
"Curse it!" he exclaimed. "Do you know I used to play very well, but all
this factory work ruins the fingers for playing. Mine are getting as
stiff as if they had no joints in them."
Presently he was playing a jota and demanded that somebody should dance.
"Dance, dance!" he shouted. "Curse it! What's the good of playing if
nobody dances?"
By this time most of the inhabitants of the houses near had gathered
round, although almost hidden; but there were no young men. Antonio's
sister danced a jota with a pretty girl. The jota is the most common of
Spanish dances, as the waltz used to be with us. It has a _tempo_ which
fluctuates between three-four and two-four, the phrases being divided
into two beats each or three bars of two beats each at the will of the
player. The jota that evening appeared to be a very sedate kind of
dance. When it was over the crowd urged us to dance something English.
We asked Don Luis to play the jota again, and to it we danced a rather
mad waltz which we had invented. The path upon which we danced was of
dried mud, which is pounded into unusual shapes in the winter and dries
in whatever shape it happens to be when the heat comes. It was full of
lumps and holes, and the light was dim. In a moment we partially
understood why Antonio's sister had been so sedate. But the
brother-in-law informed us:
"Say," he said, "my girl can dance wonderful. But 't'aint proper, in de
town. Say, you see 'er in de country. Den she hop. She kick de window in
wid 'er toe. Sure. Show you one day."
Murcia is a town of about 100,000 inhabitants and is the capital of its
province, but it is hardly more than an overgrown village in spite of
its cathedral, its bullring, its theatre and its cinema palace. Both at
Avila and at Madrid they had said to us: "Aha, you are going to the town
of the beautiful women!"
But the women of Murcia, with the exception of some lovely and filthy
gipsies, were not unusually beautiful. They were thick-set and useful
looking with muscular necks and ankles, and their eyes had a
domesticated expression. Their clothes emphasized their defects. They
indulged in pastel shades and frills which were used in fantastic ways.
We have seen frills in spiral twisting around the frock from neck to
hem, or a series of jaunty inverted frills round the hips, which gave to
the wearer something of the appearance of one of those oleographs of a
maiden half emerging from the calyx of a flower: or perpendicular frills
which made the wearer resemble a cog-wheel.
We had ample opportunities of observing them from the windows of our
house, at which we started our experimental sketches in Spain, but we
had to sit back from the balcony because small crowds began to gather,
and boys to shout. Antonio then said that he would take us to one of the
big walled-in gardens where we could paint at our ease.
A huge gateway led into a courtyard which was completely covered by a
vine pergola. The grapes hung in large bunches, though yet green. At one
side of the courtyard was a low stall on which fruit and vegetables were
for sale, and near an arched door a woman was washing clothes in a large
basin of antique pattern. The garden was a rich mass of green. Huge
trees of magnolia were covered with waxy white flowers and gave out a
strong odour which scented the wide garden. Lemon trees and orange trees
were ranged in rows; the lemons yellow on the trees or lying on the
ground as thick as fallen apples after an autumn storm, the oranges
still hard spheres of dark green. Along the edges of the paths stood up
the tall palm trees with their golden clusters of unripe dates, or with
their fronds tied up in a stiff spike, some mystery of palm cultivation.
Fronds of palm, hacked from off the trees, lay about the ground, and we
were surprised to find by experience that they possessed long, piercing
and painful thorns.
We painted for several days in this small paradise, but our conscience
was accusing us. We had not come to Spain to paint gardens. One day we
took our courage in our hands.
"It is market day," said we; "we will go and paint the market."
Peasant carts loaded with fruit and vegetables were crowding into the
town; men clad in black cottons were dragging donkeys, upon the backs of
which were panniers filled with saleable provisions; women with
umbrellas aloft against the sun carried baskets in their arms or heavy
packages upon their hips. The market was spread in the sunlight behind
the Hôtel Reina Victoria. Grain was for sale in broad, flat baskets,
cheap cottons were on stalls; fruits--peaches, plums, and lemons--were
mixed with tomatoes, berenginas, and red or green peppers. To one side
of the market place was the fonda which had once been a monastery. This
was for the travellers by road as the hotels were for travellers by
rail. In a huge arched entrada carters and villagers were sitting at
their ease. To one side was a kitchen in which could be seen large red
earthen vessels which made one think of the last scene in "The Forty
Thieves," and beyond the entrada was an open courtyard in which the high
tilted road waggons were drawn up in rows.
Skirting the fonda wall I found a corner which seemed secluded, and
sitting down I began to paint an old woman and her fruit stall. One by
one a few people gathered behind me. Blas, the gipsy musician, came up,
greeted me, and added his solid presence to the spectators. A baker came
out of his shop and watched. The crowd began to increase. Soon they were
pressing all round, even in front, so that I could see nothing.
"I cannot paint if I cannot see," I exclaimed to Blas.
He and the baker set themselves one on each side and hustled an opening
in the crowd.
"Atras, atras!" they shouted. "En la cola, en la cola."[8]
But more and more people hurried up to see what was happening. Soon the
crowd, despite the strenuous efforts of Blas and the baker, closed up
again in front, and no efforts could keep an open vista.
Jan, who had been drawing in another part of the market, came up. He saw
in the midst of a maelstrom of heads the extreme tip of my hat and
worked his way through, to speaking distance. Brown-faced old women,
with market baskets, men with turkeys hung in braces over their
shoulders, young women with babies, gipsy men with tall hats and
gig-whips, noisy boys, all smiling, friendly and curious, were peeping
under my hat discussing the phenomenon.
We left the disappointed maelstrom, which changed its shape and followed
us like a rivulet to a café, where they stood for a while gazing
solemnly while we sipped iced coffee.
We then decided that sketching in the streets of Murcia was not to be
thought of. Luis, to whom we confided this, said that he would find us
balconies and roofs from which we could work, but we wanted to settle in
some small village where we could know everybody in a day, and sketch
where we liked, so Luis made arrangements to take us across the plain at
the foot of the mountains to see some villages that might suit us.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: (Spelt phonetically.) These three words, meaning youth,
beauty and luxury, are used in all Spanish theatre advertisements as
especial attractions of the spectacle advertised.]
[Footnote 8: "Back, back! Get into queue, get into queue!"]
CHAPTER X
MURCIA--BLAS
Spain is the true home of the guitar. Only in Spain is the guitar--the
most complete of solo instruments--heard in its true perfection. But
even in Spain the cult of the guitar is dying out. Nowadays, at
marriages, births or christenings the guitar is no longer inevitable,
for the cheap German piano and the gramophone are ousting the national
instrument. Jan had become enamoured of the guitar in Paris, some small
progress he had made with the help of a friend; but one cannot get the
true spirit of Spanish music at second hand. So Blas, the gipsy, was
called in to given him instruction.
We had been told not to give Blas more than twenty pesetas a month,
these to be full payment for a daily lesson. However, Blas proved to be
more adept at bargaining than we were. He looked very Egyptian in the
face, was very smart in a grey check suit, patent leather boots and
straw hat, a strange contrast to the poverty of his home and the
slatterns of women who were his family and relations. He came in rubbing
his hands together, grinning with an expanse of strong, white teeth, and
showing a sly expression in his curious eyes. He cringed to us.
He demanded two pesetas a lesson, or sixty pesetas a month. We held out
that we had been told to offer him twenty. This, he answered, was
impossible, quite impossible, out of the question. Some of his
subserviency was immediately put into his pocket. Jan said that as he
would be painting a good deal he would not want more than three lessons
a week. Blas hummed and hawed and chewed the idea for a while. Then,
with the air of one who is making a great concession, he said that since
it was the Señor and since he appeared "muy sympatico" he would consent
to take twenty-five pesetas, and that was his final offer. Jan agreed.
Blas then added that he was reducing his terms solely because of the
sympathetic nature of the Señor, and that he was by no means satisfied
with the bargain, and that it was "muy poco." He then asked Jan if he
had a guitar. Jan said that he was using the big white instrument made
by Ramirez which our friend had left in his house. Blas answered that he
possessed the brother of that instrument himself, and that it was a good
one.
Only after he had gone did we realize that three lessons a week meant
twelve lessons a month, and, at his original price, this would have
amounted to twenty-four pesetas, and that Bias had wheedled out a peseta
more than his original offer.
We do not like the bargaining system which is prevalent all over Spain,
a habit from which, in spite of their stern notices, the "precio fijo"
shops are not quite exempt. We are not registering this objection
because Blas cozened us of a peseta; but it seems to us that the whole
habit of chaffering inculcates a lack of generosity and lays a
foundation of unfriendly relationships between people. No matter upon
what friendly terms the bargaining is carried out, too much of an
element of positive personal competition is brought in; but much
bargaining is not carried on in a friendly way. It also necessitates a
wholesale campaign of lying--appreciative and depreciative--on the part
of both buyer and seller, and a certain amount of personal feeling on
the side of the loser. Nor does the constant simulation of anger tend to
make a person more pacific by habit. Curiously enough the most generous
man is often the worst treated by the bargaining system. He offers a
sum in excess of the real value in order to shorten the ordeal, and by
doing so only excites the seller to greater cupidity. We have noted that
the successful bargainer is treated with respect, while the other who
cuts short the bargain by paying too much earns contempt.
Blas came to our house at about twelve o'clock. He was a true musician
and lived--as far as we could discover--for but two things, music and
drink. He had seemed to understand our Spanish well enough to get the
better of the bargain, but he had forgotten this. He, like the maid, had
a fixed idea that Jan could not speak Spanish. He grinned, and made
strange noises, but never tried to explain anything by means of words.
One cannot say that he was a good teacher. All that he could do was to
play a piece over and over again, and trust you to get it by ear. Now
and again he would grasp Jan's fingers and try to force them into the
necessary positions. He was even incapable of playing his tunes slowly.
If Jan wished to analyse a movement which came in the middle of a melody
Blas had to begin at the beginning. Sometimes Jan was almost in despair,
but he worked hard and in the end drew a profit out of Blas's inadequate
instruction.
Spanish guitar music is unlike the music of Europe. It has a strange
primitive character depending for its marvellous rhythmic properties
upon a rhythm of phrase more than upon the rhythm of the bar division.
The form is simple, a passage played with the back of the nails across
the strings, called the "Rasgueado," a passage like a refrain or chorus,
"the Paseo," in reality the introduction of the dance or melody, and the
melodies proper called "Falsetas." The rhythmic structure which does not
correspond to the bar division of the music is usually emphasized by
drum taps made upon the sound board of the guitar with the nail of the
second finger.
Blas considered it his duty to teach Jan two falsetas on each visit.
[Illustration]
But if he was a bad teacher, he was a fine player. Resting his chin on
the great guitar as if the passage of the vibrations through his body
were a source of pleasure, he crouched, looking like something between a
bullfrog and a Cheshire cat.
Then with supple fingers he played, drawing delicious melodies; or
rasping with his nails he beat out complex harmonies that seemed to vie
with an orchestra in richness of sound.
When he came to a falseta, he would throw up his negroid eyes like a
Greco saint, he would kiss his hand, and, as likely as not, spit on the
floor to emphasize his delight.
Before he left the house he always tried to get an advance upon his
salary. After all, to him we were only _Busné_ to be fleeced if
possible. But when his indebtedness amounted to the whole of his month's
pay we fended him off by saying that we had no change.
I do not think we realized how much we were overpaying Blas until we
decided to leave Murcia. We found a house, as you will hear, at Verdolay
about five miles away. When he heard that we were leaving, Blas
volunteered to come out as usual for the same pay. He said that he would
cheerfully walk the distance--ten miles--for that money. But we were
getting rather shy of Blas. He was too persistent a borrower for our
slender means and we had heard of other teachers who were cheaper. So we
took this opportunity and dropped him as a pilot to the guitar.
CHAPTER XI
MURCIA--THE ALPAGATA SHOP
Save upon feast days, and with the exception of the nobility, who are
few, and of the merchants, who have to be worldly commonplace,
alpagatas, or string-soled shoes, are the footwear of the Spanish
nation. If you dodge the big towns you may go for days and never see a
boot. The agricultural labourer, the artisan, the beggar, the soldier,
the engine-driver, the porters all wear either the alpagata or, in the
summer, its cooler brother, the string-soled sandal. In Spain boots are
not meant for real wear, you swagger around the town in boots, and have
them cleaned four or five times a day. At a café a horde of bootblacks
precipitate themselves towards you to renew the lustre--possibly dimmed
by the all-prevalent dust--of those foot ornaments. The young man who
goes to meet his _novía_ removes his alpagatas, and puts on boots highly
polished and with check tops; the young maiden who is sitting out with
her _novio_ has placed her alpagatas in the corner and stretches
high-heeled shoes across the pavement. But for all-day-up-and-down use
the alpagata wins every time; the baby wears alpagatas, and its
grandmother wears a larger variant; there are white alpagatas, brown
alpagatas, grey alpagatas, black alpagatas for those in mourning--a very
important ceremony in Spain--and there are the elaborate, almost
Eastern, alpagatas, entirely of esparto grass, the making of which
occupies the time when the goatherd is not yelling at his goats. Even
the horsemen, the caballeros, often wear alpagatas. It is true that one
cannot strap a spur on to an alpagata, but on the whole spurs are
little used in Spain. If the rider wishes his horse or donkey to mend
his pace, he thumps the animal with a thick cudgel at about the place
where St. Dunstan kicked the devil.
The alpagata is also a cheap form of footwear. Those which we were
wearing cost three pesetas, say 2_s._ 9_d._ They should last two months.
We were therefore spending 1_s._ 4-1/2_d._ a month each on shoes. A
little arithmetic will show this as 16_s._ 6_d._ a year. To-day boots
alone cost more than this in repairs, not counting the first cost. For
children, of course, they are unrivalled, as the life of the alpagata
almost fits the growth of the infant, which is spared the torture one
remembers in childhood of boots which were too good to throw away and
yet too small to wear with ease. But to taste the full romantic flavour
of the alpagata, it should have been bought in the true alpagata shop.
If you are in Spain don't go to the boot-shop. It does sell alpagatas,
but it ought not to do so. In Spain the boot-seller should be classed
with the jeweller. He sells ornaments. The boot merchant who sells
alpagatas in Spain is as bad as the jeweller here who sells umbrellas.
Go to the shop which sells things for the road, for that picturesque,
coloured, moving life of Spain. The doorway of this fascinating shop is
piled up with bales of a rough cloth of an exquisite hyacinthine blue,
or of a strange yellow, which is seen to perfection only in the alpagata
shop or in El Greco's pictures. This cloth is used for lining
horse-collars and saddles. Above these beautiful bales are collars of
white leather, heavy with small cone-shaped bells of copper, for the
goats, larger collars of brown leather, either with small bells in rows,
like a lady's pearl collar, or with one large bell pendant, for the
oxen. Within are large coronet-shaped semicircles of leather and
coloured woolwork, red, yellow, black, white, for the oxen's foreheads,
long ribbons of coloured woolwork for the donkeys' harness, and fringes
of brightly coloured wool netting, ending in tassels, like that which
decorated the under edge of our grandmothers' sofas, to hang across the
donkey's chest or down his nose. Muzzles for goats and for donkeys are
here too. There is harness also in the shop, Gargantuan-looking harness
studded with nails, so broad in its facets of leather that when the
horse has his face inside it he looks not unlike an ancient knight in
his armour. Only his eyes and his mouth are visible, and often indeed
not the latter, for it may be guarded by a piece of leather work not
unlike the tongue of a brogue shoe.
Talking of shoes brings us back to the alpagata. A man will be working
at a table like a butcher's block. Deftly he cuts the rope, bending it
around an iron peg into the shape of the sole, then with a long awl he
pierces it through and through, sewing it with great rapidity, and
almost hey presto! as it were, a pair of soles are finished. Women who
sit almost on the edge of the street, chattering and gossiping--often
with the passers-by--are making the uppers of stout canvas. They spring
from work to serve you with a gracious kindliness, and seeing that you
are English they probably with the same gracious kindliness clap an
extra fifty centimos on to the price. If only we had such an alpagata
shop in London what a rush there would be to purchase.
Your old alpagatas you leave behind you. What happens to them is to us a
mystery. Old boots are the nuisance of the London dust heaps, the terror
of the errant mongrel. Yorick, who, Sam Weller assures us, is the only
person who has ever seen a dead donkey, may also in his travels have
seen an extinct alpagata, but his "Sentimental Journey" is unfinished
and we shall never know.
CHAPTER XII
MURCIA--BRAVO TORO
Along cool colonnades of raw-coloured brick, up a staircase arched with
concrete, and out through a sort of concrete culvert which spouted
humanity, we came into the huge round amphitheatre of the bullring.
Owing to Spanish dilatoriness, we were later than we had intended, and
in consequence were unable to get seats within the coveted shadow which
lay over half the great enclosure; but, thank goodness, the sky was
mottled with clouds which tempered both the heat and the glare of the
Spanish afternoon. We were in the cheapest seats, having disdained to go
skywards into the boxes, for we had come to taste the full flavour of an
average bullfight as a popular spectacle, and we wished it as pure as
possible. So we had bought purple tickets for two pesetas and a white
one for me at half price; at the same time repelling the persistence of
a feminine hawker, who pressed upon us large flabby looking paper bags
of mysterious content which we imagined to be some form of refreshment.
The seats of the bullring were of flat stone rising tier upon tier, and
we chose our places low down to get a good view, yet as near as possible
to the slowly creeping shadow; only one row of stone seats and two rows
of chairs of iron lattice separated us from the arena itself. The chairs
were empty, so I asked Luis if they were reserved for some special
purpose. "No," he answered, "but the bull may leap out of the ring.
Those chairs would entangle him, but it is uncomfortable if you happen
to be sitting there, so they are not very popular." As the edge of the
arena was guarded by a palisade of stout planking about five feet high,
through which were cut narrow gaps--bolt-holes--for the toreadors, and
the seats were separated from this palisade by a passage some six feet
wide, the lowest seats being set some ten feet above the floor, I felt
that the risk of finding an enraged bull in one's lap was rather remote.
The culverts spouted Spanish humanity: soldiers in greenish khaki; women
in black, white or colours dominated by a very popular pink; peasants in
blue blouses and sandals; bourgeoisie in straw hats and drill; youths in
caps of exaggerated English cut. Immediately below us two small
children, mothered by a third aged about eleven, all three exceedingly
unkempt, rather dirty, and possibly verminous, took their seats, and,
recognizing that I was a stranger, advised me in hoarse whispers all
through the progress of the spectacle. In spite of her obvious poverty
the eldest girl wore a large tortoise-shell comb of elaborate pattern in
a carefully arranged _coiffure_. Numberless children seemed to have
attended the spectacle thus, as the small Londoners go to the cinema. At
this moment the ring itself was full of them, some playing football, a
game very popular--there is even a Spanish periodical called
_Free-Kick_--others giving imitation exhibitions of bullfighting, more
or less like that played by the children in the hotel. When the
imitation bull, stabbed to death, was dragged around the ring, the real
spectators cheered loudly. We wondered what the bull's mother would say
about the state of his pants.
This was no Mantilla day, nor day of fiesta. It was just an ordinary
Sunday afternoon diversion in this provincial town. We took our first
dose of bullfight in this place for a reason. Essentially a popular
sport should be judged as a sport of the people: not by its highest
exponents, but by its average. An intelligent foreigner would not get
the truest impression of what cricket means to England at Lord's or at
the Oval; but on some village green at an inter-parochial contest.
The horrors of bullfighting began with a band, the age of the bandsmen
varying between fourteen and seventy years. The band marched around the
ring playing music as out of tune as the new age is with the old. The
ring emptied of children, and two horsemen superbly mounted dashed
across the arena to demand from the President the key of the bull-pen.
This was followed by a general parade of the toreros. Alas, for romance!
Their gilt was somewhat tarnished, most of their cloaks worn and faded;
usually the only part of the costume which seemed to have retained its
original brilliance was the coloured seat of the tight trousers, which I
suppose comes in for very little wear and tear. The picadors with their
nail-headed lances seemed veritable Don Quixotes on their more than
Rosinante steeds: poor beasts doomed to the knackers anyhow. The
procession ended with two cart-horses and a yoke destined to drag the
slaughtered bulls from the ring.
There was a pause. Luis said in a low murmur:
"Doesn't your heart beat? Isn't this moment exciting?"
He spoke truly. Around the huge oval all eyes were concentrated on the
red door of the bull-pen: the very air seemed rarefied and electric. For
me, I think this was the most tense moment of the day: that moment
before anything had happened. A bugle call cut the silence. The red door
swung open and with a peculiar rolling gallop the bull dashed into the
arena.
"Now," I thought, "this terrible bullfight, about which so much has been
written, so much discussed, has indeed begun."
The bullfights of our imagination are spectacles of sun and colour--of
madness stained with cruelty; the cruelty perhaps partly condoned by the
fierceness of the bull, by a sort of wild frenzy of sport which seems in
some part to excuse the murderous instinct of man.
[Illustration]
The bull, a coloured rosette nailed to its shoulder, reached the centre
of the ring, and then, for me, half the anticipated interest of the
fight vanished. We had expected a wild and furious gallop around the
arena; a bull lusting to kill or be killed; mad charges at the toreros,
who would elude it with quick baffling passes of the cloaks, wild dashes
at the unfortunate horses, the riders of which would at least make some
pretence of manoeuvering before the furious bull was allowed to fling
horse and rider into the air. But no! The bull slowed up, halted and
looked to this side and that. It was obviously perplexed. One could
almost imagine a crease of puzzlement between its eyes. What was all
this; where the sierras of its youth; into what strange place had it
come? And now began a taunting of the unwilling bull. The toreros
flapped their faded cloaks at it, but whenever the bull was tempted to
charge the man ran for safety and crammed himself through one of the
bolt-holes in the palisade--once a torero scampering for life reached an
opening at the same instant as a companion. For a moment there was a
flurry, but both men contrived to push through before the bull was able
to reach them. The first impression of the fight was of a certain power
and some magnificence on the part of the bull, and of degradation on the
part of the toreros--one thought of the shorn Sampson taunted by the
Philistines. In this contest the men seemed somehow ignoble in
comparison with the animals. The next act of the drama made this feeling
no better. The picador was led out on his blindfolded and skeleton-like
steed by a little man in a red shirt, who from behind the horse's head
held out, like a policeman regulating the traffic, a protesting hand at
the bull, as if to imply that the animal was not to charge till he was
ready to bolt. For some while the bull did not take the invitation,
though whenever he appeared likely to do so the small man dropped the
reins and ran for the paling, from which, however, he took care never to
be very far away. The picador himself is not in great danger, for his
trousers are armour plated.
By this time the audience was shouting out: "No quiere!"[9] but at last
the bull charged, the picador thrust his lance, and the bull with a
great thrust of its head overturned both horse and man. Immediately the
bull was surrounded by the toreros who with flapping cloaks distracted
its attention. Man and horse were lifted up again.
Large numbers of Spaniards do not like bullfighting, but a great many
Spaniards who do not in principle object to bullfighting do object to
the horse-slaughter. One, cutting to the roots of the truth, said it was
"not æsthetic." He was right. There should be a strong sense of the
æsthetic in sport--it is a thing more subtle than mere "fair play," and
when this sense of the æsthetic is ignored the sport becomes brutality.
This horse-slaughter more than oversteps the line of the æsthetic, so
for us did the bolt-holes provided for the toreros. For us bullfighting
would begin to be a serious sport if the men and the bull stood on the
same conditions.
[Illustration]
One picador, who by means of his lance kept the bull off from his horse,
received a round of well-earned applause. The bugle sounded once more
and the picadors were led out of the ring. There followed another rather
dull interval of cloak-flapping. One of the matadors, however, gave an
exhibition of passes which made the bull charge repeatedly within a foot
or so of the man's body, during which the torero did not move his feet.
When the bull, baffled and panting with exhaustion at his fruitless
tosses, paused, the torero went upon one knee before the animal. The
spectators shrieked applause and flung their hats into the ring. But
this exhibition was very different from the usual cloak-flapping
followed by a scamper for the bolt-hole: nor, indeed, was it shown
often.
A torero who had carried an exceedingly faded violet cloak, and who had
been perhaps most hasty in his dashes for the safety gaps, now discarded
his cloak, and waving a pair of pink banderillas stepped into the centre
of the ring. Like a foreigner at cricket we naturally missed much of the
subtlety, but it was obvious that there were certain conditions under
which the banderillero would meet the bull and others under which he
would not. When the toreador seemed to think the bull in a good
position, he waved his banderillas and stamped his feet as though about
to fence. But the bull did not want banderillas stuck into him. Again
and again he declined the invitation while the populace howled "No
quiere, no quiere!" Personally I should have sent the bull home and
ordered another with more ginger in it. At last, exasperated, the bull
charged, the banderillero ran towards it in a slightly circular path,
planted his two sticks, each some thirty inches long, into the bull's
neck, and, curving out more widely, avoided by a few inches the upward
thrust of the bull's horns. This piece of work looked dangerous, and the
pay of a banderillero amounts to between £3 and £4 an afternoon. I think
that he earns his money. What surprised us was to see the torero who had
appeared such a scamperer with the faded purple cloak performing most
pluckily with the paper-covered sticks. I suppose it is the case of a
good batsman and good bowler--the arts are not interchangeable.
The six banderillas having been placed, another interval of harrying the
unfortunate animal with minor exasperations of cloak-flapping followed:
but at last the espatero, the swordsman, and the matador prepared to
give the death stroke. Here again in first-class bullfighting probably
the whole exhibition is one of supreme skill. We expected a certain
number of showy passes with the scarlet flag, the matador keeping the
bull circling about him--"wearing the bull as a waist-belt," as the
saying is in Spain. Then a pause, a sudden thrust with the sword--and,
with a groan, the bull is dead. It was not so. The espatero walked about
flapping the cloak, at which sometimes the bull did charge, but more
often did not. Several times the espatero had to run into a bolt-hole.
The bull showed strong desires to go home: it went to the side of the
ring and looked at the door from whence it had emerged, while more
venturesome members of the audience leaned over the palisade and tried
to snatch out a banderilla as a souvenir. The toreador chivied the bull
round the ring, trying to get it face foremost. However, when he
succeeded in this he did not seem satisfied, for though the people
yelled: "Ahora! Ahora!"[10] the matador only flapped his cloak.
[Illustration]
"He is rather a nervous espatero," said Luis, "so, when he does prepare
to kill, look out. Sometimes the sword flies. Not very long ago it
landed in the audience and killed a spectator." At last, however, the
bull, tongue hanging out, foam dripping from its mouth, blood streaming
from the lance and banderilla wounds in the shoulders, faced the matador
with half lowered and sullen head. The matador, taking up the position
of a man about to throw a javelin, aimed his sword, which was curiously
curved in the blade, and with quick steps ran in, thrust, and
side-stepped. The bull, taken by surprise, could not bring its weight
into action rapidly enough, the upward tossing horns missed the man by
inches: the bull rushed forward at another torero who had taken position
in line to attract the animal's attention. The matador had made no
master stroke, the sword stood eighteen inches out of the bull's
shoulder. The bull showed no signs of death, so the matador went away to
procure another sword. Finally the bull, stabbed by four swords, was
worried to death rather than killed, after which the corpse was dragged
triumphantly around the ring at the tail of the team of horses, while
the spectators stood on the stone seats and cheered.
It may be that we English take our pleasures sadly, but at that moment
it struck me that at an ordinary bullfight the Spaniard seems to take
rather dull pleasures with ecstasy.
The second bull proved more lively, the second matador more expert, or
more lucky than his confrère; but here also the show seemed to partake
rather of the nature of what should properly be termed bull-baiting than
bullfighting. This second bull provided the thrill of the day to the
three small dirty children. With one thrust of its horn it killed a
horse. The small boy (aged six or seven) turned to me with eyes
sparkling with pleasure.
"Did you see that?" he exclaimed. "One thrust only."
After the death of this bull came the Interval.
"Look up the numbers printed on your tickets," said Luis.
Having found the papers, I raised my head and to my amazement saw, in
the centre of the arena, a donkey, two young calves and a
sewing-machine.
"Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "What are those?"
"They are the prizes of the tombola," explained Luis; "you or the Señor
may win one."
The lots were drawn out of a large hat-box, and the numbers displayed on
a blackboard. The donkey fell to a small boy, the calves to a peasant.
But for some while the sewing-machine, forlorn and incongruous, stood in
the centre of the bloodthirsty arena awaiting a claimant. Attention was
finally concentrated upon a point high up amongst the cheap seats, to
the right of the President's box. Shouting, persuasion, hand-clapping
and arm-waving ensued, and at last the crowd squeezed out a small, dark
woman, blushing and giggling behind her fan, accompanied by husband,
husband's friend and six-year-old son. The sewing-machine was escorted
out of the same door through which the dead bulls had been dragged.
Then the bullfight began again. The third bull, a lusty black, was the
most willing of all. He did charge, he leapt high in his endeavours to
kill those phantom cloaks. After all the necessary banderillas had been
placed, there followed an incident. A boy of about sixteen years leapt
the barrier and ran across the ring, hastily as he ran unwrapping
something from a covering of newspaper. There was a sudden hum of
excited voices from the spectators.
"Ei!" cried Luis. "An amateur!"
The boy reached the President's box, the unwrapped objects being a pair
of dirty banderillas. Bowing to the President he craved permission to
plant his banderillas in the bull. But, alas for youthful aspirations,
permission was not given. The boy clambered sadly over the palisade to
hide himself in the audience.
Unfortunately this bull, the bravest of the four, fell to the lot of the
nervous matador. Death was a very lengthy operation, during the progress
of which the bull knocked down the bullfighter. For a moment we wondered
if the bull were going to take its revenge, but flapping cloaks
instantly distracted it. Meanwhile, between the forelegs of the bull the
matador lay very still, shielding his head with his arms. The nervous
matador, however, went on with his task, using three swords before it
was completed.
The matador of the fourth bull made an exceedingly bad thrust. The
populace howled insults at him, flinging at the same time those paper
bags which we had seen on sale near the ticket-office. They contained no
refreshment, nor material for bombarding unsuccessful matadors, but were
stuffed with horsehair to soften the stone seats. By this time we wished
we had inquired more about them, for the stone had proved anything but
soft. The fourth bull dead, the bullfight was over.
"Come and see the toreros," said Luis.
So with the outflowing press we repassed into the culvert, down the
stairs and along the corridors of brick, till we reached a window or
grille, by staring through which we could see the "heroes of Spain"
clambering into an ordinary station bus, in which they sat, stiff,
cramped, dignified and unsmiling, conscious of their importance.
We returned with the returning crowds along the roads deep in dust, back
to the centre of the town where there were cooling drinks and seats
softer than those stone benches. While we were sitting thus, revelling
in varied positions and summing up our first impressions, a large box
cart of lattice work passed by. Within the cart were hung great joints
of meat which swung to and fro as the cart bumped over the uneven road.
"There," said Luis, "go the bulls. They will be sold to-morrow in the
market. The meat is cheap because it is rather tough."
This incident, because it seemed to contain a note of irony, because it
had in it something sardonic and something callous, seemed to us a
fitting termination to the spectacle which we had witnessed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: "He doesn't want to fight."]
[Footnote 10: "Now! Now!"]
CHAPTER XIII
AN EXCURSION
Murcia was very hot, very dusty and very sultry. We did not mind mere
heat--though Spanish midsummer heat was not the best of pick-me-ups for
the influenza--dust we could outlive, but the sultriness of the Murcian
valley was beyond our physique. This flat valley, which is ten miles
wide between abrupt mountains, is irrigated over the whole of its
breadth and is one of the richest agricultural parts of Spain. The
evaporation of the water makes the heat of Murcia damp; the summer in
addition was cloudy, and the sun shining on to the clouds seemed to cook
the air enclosed in the valley until the atmosphere resembled that of a
glass-house for orchids. We wished to leave Murcia in spite of an
affection which was growing in us for the town.
Luis met us at one o'clock on the terrace of the Reina Victoria. We had
_café au lait_ while waiting for the tartana. Luis said that the milk in
the coffee was not good: he deduced preservatives. But the lean waiter
stood loyally by his hotel.
"The milk is excellent, I assure you, Señor," he said. "My stomach is
excessively delicate; the slightest thing and it is ... I assure you
that I drink pints of this milk in this hotel. In fact my stomach is so
delicado that I am a connoisseur in milk, es vero.[11] If the milk were
bad this fatality would happen to me."
He gave a dumb-crambo exhibition of the results of bad milk on his
delicate digestion; it needed no words.
With deference he then proposed a new _café au lait_, which Luis sipped
with a judicial but unconvinced manner.
The tartana was a tight fit. It is about as large as a governess-cart
inside, and we were six. Luis, Jan and myself, a monk in brown, a thin
pale Señor who had long eyelashes and many rings, and another passenger,
a world type, the result of overwork and underpay, neither smart nor
slovenly, with a rough manner covering a kindly nature.
THE DRIVE
[Illustration]
We discovered why tartanas have bulging hoods. The vehicles roll and
rock so much over the bad roads that it is necessary to make room for
the passengers' heads to jerk backwards. Otherwise cerebral concussion
would be the invariable result.
_Luis_ (to the little monk): "Excuse me, but are not your clothes very
hot?"
_The Monk_ (spreading out his hands): "They are hot, but nevertheless
they keep out the sun."
We come out of the town into the gardens. There are flat fields of
cultivation spotted with mulberry trees, the trunks of which seem vivid
purple in the afternoon light.
I make a remark in Spanish. (Jan was still at the stage of appreciative
listener).
_The Clerkly Man_: "Señora, your Spanish is good for a stranger--you can
pronounce the Spanish J, which is difficult for foreigners."
_I_: "I have learned that from speaking German; it is rather like the
German _ch_."
A discussion on idioms at once begins. The Spaniard, though he speaks
foreign languages badly, has an inextinguishable interest in the subject
of tongues. If ever you are bored in Spanish company start an argument
about languages. After the discussion has been going on for some while
the pale Señor says:
"Nevertheless it is sad that the Catalans wish to root Castilian out of
their country."
_Luis_ (with some heat): "Well! why should they not? They are the
hardest working and the most valuable people of Spain. Why should not
they do as they like? Why should everybody not do as he likes if he
hurts nobody else?"
_The pale Señor_ (with frigidity): "But that is Bolshevism."
_Luis_ (with increasing heat): "If that is Bolshevism then I do not mind
being a Bolshevik."
Conversation is at an impasse. The carriage flings us to and fro for a
while.
A motor-car passes us. The dust which is about six inches deep on the
road is whirled up in a cloud so thick that we have to halt for a few
minutes to allow it to settle, or we might have driven into the deep
water-channels which edge each side of the road.
_Luis_ (to the Clerkly Man): "My friends want to live for a while out in
the mountains. Do you by any chance know of a house?"
_The Clerkly Man_: "I am living with my family in the monastery of Fuen
Santa. There is a guest house there and habitations are to let. I will
find out all about them if you wish."
_The pale little Señor_ (who has apparently forgotten all about
Bolshevism): "There are one or two houses in my village of Verdolay. The
proprietor is a friend of mine. I will inquire for you about it."
The tartana stops.
In front of a solitary house is a small wooden frame on which a few
strips of dusty meat are hung. The driver buys some of this from the
woman who comes out of the house.
_The Driver_ (confidentially to the passengers): "Better get a bit of
meat while you have the chance."
Nobody follows his example. The carriage bumps on.
The sun is now shining through the thin dust-laden trees which edge the
road: they appear as flames of pale gold.
We mount over a bridge. A broad deep but waterless canal stretches away
to right and left.
_The little Señor_: "We are now nearing Verdolay. It is still too hot
for you to go hunting for a house. I shall be delighted if you will take
possession of my house until the sun is cooler."
_Luis_: "Señor, I thank you very much, but we cannot do it."
_The little Señor_: "I insist--you will come?"
_Luis_: "Thank you very much."
This is Spanish courtesy. A single invitation is for politeness only,
like the last piece of bread and butter left for Miss Manners. A second
invitation means that it is really offered.
We pass a group of houses the colour of baked bread; the most
arid-looking spot we have seen as yet. The gardens come to an abrupt
end. The road rises slightly, and grey-green olive foliage over gnarled
trunks throw a thin lacework of shadow on the dry earth.
The tartana stops.
We all get out.
The clerkly man goes east; the priest south; we, led by the pale Señor,
west.
* * * * *
We were at the entrance of a village. It spread over a mound at the foot
of the higher hills. It was like a pyramid with toy houses coloured
yellow, orange, green and grey upon the ledges, and all around trees
like those from a child's play box. The village was fronted by a line of
houses painted a deep crimson-vermilion. An iron windmill for pumping
water was placed on the extreme point of the mound.
The little Señor showed us through the village to his house and left us
in the entrada, while he went to get beer. The room was decorated with
wooden "art-nouveau" chairs, oleographs and an extremely bad oil
painting of a bull with banderillas shedding much blood. On a cane table
was a gramophone.
The little Señor had shut a door made on the system of a Venetian blind
to keep out the sun, and presently the lattice-work was crowded with
children trying to peer in at us.
The Señor returned preceded by a large English setter. He drew the corks
of the beer and asked us to make ourselves at home.
"The house and all that is in it is at your service," he said in the
phrase of Spanish courtesy.
I was patting the dog.
"That dog," said the little Señor, "is a very valuable dog. It is unique
in the province and possibly is unique in the south of Spain. It has a
romantic history. It is bred by the monks in high Switzerland, and when
the snow is deep on the mountains it goes out to hunt for lost
travellers. It is the only specimen of a San Bernar' in the south of
Spain."
We looked at the setter; and drank some more beer.
"That bull," went on the Señor, pointing to the picture, "was painted by
one of the best bull painters in Spain."
We looked at the picture and again took refuge in beer. Luis, who did
not know about setters, but did know about pictures, drank in sympathy.
The Señor wound up his gramophone.
"Do you know 'Frou-Frou'?" he inquired.
"'Frou-Frou'?" we said.
"Yes, the French Comic Opera."
"But," said Luis, "have you not by chance a disc of Spanish music? You
see," he added as excuse, "the Señors are foreign. It interests them to
hear the national music, the Flamenco."
The little Señor pursed his lips.
"But," he said, "it is so vulgar. Nobody wants to hear that."
He possessed, however, a disc or two which he turned on, to our delight.
But before we left him he insisted that we should sit through his
favourite "Frou-Frou."
We went away. The strains of "Frou-Frou" which the little Señor had
turned on once more followed us on the still air. The setter-St. Bernard
walked with us to the beginning of the hill, from whence he turned
sedately homewards.
We strode upwards--past cottages of all colours, past a large rambling
monastery, which, perched on the far side of the Verdolay hill, very
cubic in shape, is as romantic as it is possible for a building to be;
past a watercourse, above which were dwellings hollowed out of the soft
rock of the mountain-side, cave dwellings, and out on to the side of
the mountains lying between Murcia and Carthagena. From here we could
appreciate the width, flatness and verdure of the Murcian valley in the
midst of which was the town, the campanile of the cathedral soaring into
the air.
Here we had our first experience of a Spanish country walk. We were all
wearing alpagatas, the canvas sides of which are not exceedingly thick.
The dried herbage of the hills was intermingled with all manner of
prickly weeds. The vegetation protects itself in this way from being
eaten by anything less leather-tongued than a goat. The results are
uncomfortable for the walker. The little hairlike spines pierce the
shoes and break off, remaining as a continual irritant until the shoe is
removed. Even then the spines, almost microscopic in size and almost
flesh colour, are often difficult to find. The same uncomfortable fate
is in wait for the unwary stranger who sits down without having
carefully explored the place where he is going to seat himself. Indeed
the fate is worse, because the thorns thus encountered cannot with
decency be extracted in a public place and the victim is condemned to a
lot similar to that of the naughty schoolboy.
The sun poured the full of its summer power on to the hill-side, which
reflected both heat and light with overpowering intensity. Though it was
almost four o'clock in the afternoon we felt that our salamandrine
limits were being put to a test. A broad white road, mounting up the
hill, crossed our path and we turned into it.
"We are going to the monastery of La Luz," said Luis. "I have heard that
they sometimes take visitors for short periods. It would be interesting
for you to spend a fortnight in a monastery."
[Illustration]
The road climbed up beneath high black cliffs. The other side of the
valley was coloured orange and red upon which the sun was shining with
all its force. The side of the hill was dotted with aloes, some having
upright flower stems fifteen feet high in the air, around the flowers
of which the bees were swarming in harmonious halos. A stately stone
pine overshadowed a medley of old buildings which sprang from the top
of a precipice out of which sprouted the weird branches of the prickly
pear cactus. The road circled round the foot of this cliff, and still
mounted till, making a full semicircle, it brought us on to a platform.
On one side of the flat space was an open cistern into which led a pipe.
From the pipe a deliberate trickle of water fell. Two women and two men
sat about this pipe slowly filling their amphoras of Grecian form,
while donkeys waited patiently in the background bearing panniers for
the water-vessels on their backs. On the other side of the platform the
monastery showed a high wall with a large gate leading into a courtyard
from which arose the face of the church, painted a Cambridge blue.
We could find no bell. The water-carriers shouted instructions to us.
The bell clanged with an empty sound, as though echoing through miles of
untenanted corridors. We rang again. No response. We rang three or four
times before we heard the sound of shuffling steps. A peep-hole, shaped
like a cross, opened and an eye examined us. The door swung slowly open,
revealing a small obsequious man dressed in peasant costume. Through
passages we came into a cloister which was built around a small
courtyard full of flowers. In the middle of the courtyard was a high
statue of the Virgin. It was framed and almost hidden by a creeper which
offered to it a tribute of gorgeous purple bell-shaped flowers. At the
foot of the figure was stretched a large cat. A strange thought came to
me that the cat did not bother itself about the Virgin other than as
something which threw a grateful shadow.
The apologetic little peasant monk, who had let us in was evidently an
underling. He murmured something about Brother Juan and went away.
Brother Juan came groaning along the corridor with rheumatic steps. He
had a tiny head and large-framed body; dressed in peasant's clothes,
white shirt, black cummerbund, short knee trousers, long white drawers
to the ankle and sandals on bare feet. He was rather like a dear old
gardener who has been in the family for years, and who has supported the
teasings of generations of children. Age and a sweet nature had carved
his face with horizontal wrinkles of kindliness; rheumatism and pain had
crossed these with downward seams of depression.
Luis introduced the object of our visit. Brother Juan doubtingly shook
his head. They did have visitors, yes, but those were always well-known
to the monastery. Introductions would be necessary. But, in any
circumstance, the Father Superior was in Murcia at the moment, and
nothing could be done without him.
I, made conceited by the praise of the clerkly man in the carriage, then
tried to charm Brother Juan by a series of apposite remarks in my most
careful Spanish.
Brother Juan scratched his head.
"Doubtless, what the Señora says is very interesting." He raised his
hands and eyes in pantomimed dismay. "But, oh, these languages! I can't
understand a word!"
Brother Juan, groaning with rheumatism, led us to the gate. By some
means an old woman dressed in black had joined us. As Juan was taking
his leave of us his eyes suddenly lit up with a merry twinkle.
"If you will excuse me," he said to Luis, "it would be better, when you
see the Father Superior, if the woman would dress rather less
indecently. You see, we are monks and are not used to it."
We went down the hill accompanied by the old woman in black, who was
chuckling at Brother Juan's last remark.
"If only the woman would ... he ... he ... we are monks and aren't used
to it ... ho ... ho."
I was surprised. It had not seemed to me that I was indecent. I was
wearing an ordinary English midsummer walking dress. Luis said:
"I think it was the opening at your neck that worried him. You see we
haven't really taken up the open neck in Murcia as yet."
Directed by the old woman, we scrambled down steep paths to the bottom
of the orange-coloured ravine, and up the other side past the aloes; we
went through an olive grove, and again up a steep zigzag road to the
second monastery. Here lived the clerkly man, but we did not know his
name. This monastery began with a terra-cotta-coloured Gothic church
with three tall towers and a cupola of blue glazed tiles, and rambled on
up the ridge of a long hill to end in a tall building which looked like
an overgrown Turkish bath. A grey building with a huge entrance door was
pointed out as the _pension_ of the monastery. We wandered into a large
courtyard and to us came a fat priest wearing a biretta. He was
courteous but firm.
"We have no room," he said.
But we remembered that the clerkly one had said that there was room. I
suppose again my dress was the real objection.
We went back towards the village of the little Señor. On our way we
again crossed the dusty road which led to La Luz. A carriage was driving
along it. In the carriage were two priests. Luis said:
"There probably goes the Father Superior. Shall we ask him now?"
After a moment's hesitation we turned and strode up the hill. We had to
walk fast to catch the carriage, but at last the driver, perceiving that
we were following him, halted.
"No," said one of the priests, "we are not the Superior of La Luz.
Indeed, at this moment he is behind you. There."
He pointed out an old man in the costume of a peasant, who, bent with
age, was toiling up the hill aided by his staff. The Father Superior was
still some distance away. Hastily, with a brooch, we pinned my blouse up
close around my throat.
The Father Superior had the face of one designed to be an ascetic, but
his expression was inscrutable. He was very suave. He felt honoured, he
said, by the request of the Señors, but there was no room. Now Brother
Juan had said that there was room.
Luis tried to urge the matter: he instanced our Red Cross work in
Serbia. The Father Superior said it was very praiseworthy of us, but
... and bowing unfelt regrets he left us.
We went back to our little Señor.
He found for us a woman with the usual pound's weight of keys and
conducted us to two bright red houses. Both were one story in height,
but one was for three months' tenancy only. We decided to take the
other. It was occupied to its limits by a Spanish family, so we took but
the most cursory of glances into it. Then, our business settled, we said
au revoir to the little Señor, who in Spanish fashion offered us his
services whenever they should be needed.
We walked down a road and, in a short while, came to the village of
Alverca. This was the first typical Spanish village we had passed
through. It was long, stretched on the edge between the bare mountain
and the fertile valley. The houses were low, one-storied for the most
part, and the dust was all-prevalent. In the dusty street boys were
playing football, which in Spain seems to be a summer game. In the
middle of the village was a shop, which advertised itself as a Tobacco
Agency, for tobacco is a Spanish government monopoly and can be sold
only in licensed places. We went in to get a drink and to ask if by
chance they had some tobacco, for all the while we were in Spain there
was a famine of tobacco.
The inside of the shop was a curious mixture of the modern and of the
very ancient. At one end of the counter was a modern brass beer machine,
with carbonic acid gas cylinder--which gives to the tepid beer an extra
fizz--pressure gauge and lead-lined sink. At the other end of the shop
were huge jars four feet high, and nine or ten feet in circumference;
amphoras of pale porous unglazed pottery, direct successors of the
Grecian vase; small drinking pots of clay with short spouts for water or
of glass with long spouts for wine, the latter in shape not unlike the
brass drinking-vessels of Benares. Pendent from the ceiling hung candles
two or three feet in length, for devotional purposes, and side by side
with the candles were festooned strings of orange-coloured, highly
flavoured sausages, which appeared very ominous. Some day one felt that
one would be tempted by a Spanish friend to eat one of these sausages,
and the fear of the experiment was always within us. Wine of a deep ruby
tinged with brown filled a large glass barrel; wine which could be
bought for one halfpenny a glass.
Inside the shop, leaning against the zinc bar, were two tramps; the one
swart with three days' beard on his chin, dressed in a blue jean smock
and soiled yellow velveteen trousers; the other leaner, more pallid,
furtive: in spite of the heat of the day he was covered with a large
black cloak.
They at once offered us their glasses of wine.
"Gracias. Buen aproveche," said we in customary refusal. They offered
cigarettes to Jan and Luis. These, by courtesy, had to be accepted.
While we were drinking our tepid beer--fizzed up with the carbonic acid
gas--Jan asked for and bought a box of matches. The Spanish matches,
very bad, a government monopoly, are packed in a small cardboard box.
This box is quite difficult to open. Whichever way you push it, like the
well-known trick matchbox, the inside part seems to have two bottoms and
no opening. The impatient traveller usually tears the box to pieces
trying to get at the forty matches which are inside.
Jan asked for tobacco.
"There is not," sighed the fat woman.
Outside the shop the two tramps were waiting for us. The swart one
peered quickly from left to right.
"We have tobacco," he said in a hoarse whisper. He snapped his fingers
at his companion, who produced from beneath the cloak, furtively, a
square orange packet.
"Good tobacco from Gibraltar," growled "Swart"; "will you buy?"
"No," said Luis.
The pallid man slid the tobacco beneath the cloak again. The two
slouched off through the dust.
"That would be tobacco at each end and cabbage or other refuse in the
middle," said Luis.
We turned towards the setting sun.
Murcia has a tramway system. Blue cars run all over the town and reach
out into the country at several spots. We came to the terminus in this
direction at Palma, on the road to Carthagena. The people of the village
crowded about us in curiosity; but by this time we were becoming used to
a publicity which is, as a rule, only reserved for Royalty.
As the tram carried us home--with several halts due to failure of the
electrical supply--we noticed through an open door a delightful
interior, decorated with the huge water-jars--on a raised step--with
which beautiful specimens of old Spanish pottery were arranged.
The village of the little Señor had pleased us so much that we made
arrangements to move out there as soon as possible; for the heat of
Murcia was now unbearable and we were in consequence on the verge of
being really ill.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: That is truth.]
CHAPTER XIV
VERDOLAY--HOUSEKEEPING
The house in Verdolay had five large rooms, stone-floored, and was
unfurnished. We decided to borrow all our friend's kitchen furniture, to
wit, a table, three chairs, water-vessels, etc., and we bought for
ourselves a large frying-pan. But the bed was a problem. Our friend's
bed looked too good to knock about, so at last we determined on the
planks which we had already, and four packing-cases on which to lay the
planks. Antonio, always eager to help us, promised to find the
packing-cases and to make all the arrangements about a cart. At this
moment Antonio's wife Rosa was ill. He had invited us to a noble lunch,
and upon the day following he had told us that the lunch had disagreed
seriously with Rosa. She did not get better. "There is much fever with
it," said Antonio. Marciana, our charwoman, of whom we will tell more
later, was also working for Antonio, and would bring us news of Rosa's
illness, which appeared quite serious for so slight a cause.
"We must look out for tummy-troubles," said I.
It is amazing what a lot a small amount of furniture appears when one is
preparing to move. We had thought the cart much too big, but we had some
difficulty in stacking into it all our material, including the guitar,
of which the driver was told to take especial care.
We drove out to Verdolay in a tartana, passing on the road our cart of
furniture. We noted that the driver had added above our load two huge
bundles of straw colour. We wondered what they might be. We were to
discover later.
The little Señor took us to the owner of our prospective abode. His
house was full of children, and the study, where we signed a Spanish
agreement, was festooned with
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