air of one who has performed an action, half courteous, half obligatory,
but refreshing to the soul.
The Consul, who well knew his ways, and knew that probably he seldom
prayed at home, and that the prayers he had just seen most likely were a
sort of affirmation of his neutral attitude before a stranger, yet was
interested.
Then, when the conversation was renewed, he said to him, “Prayer seems to
me, Sherif, to be the one great difference between the animals and man.
“As to the rest, we live and die, drink, eat, and propagate our species,
just as they do; but no one ever heard of any animal who had addressed
himself to God.”
A smile flitted across the pock-marked features of the descendant of the
Prophet, and looking gravely at his friend,—
“Consul,” he said, “Allah to you has given many things. He has endowed
you with your fertile brains, that have searched into forces which had
remained unknown in nature since the sons of Adam first trod the surface
of the earth. All that you touch you turn to gold, and as our saying
goes, ‘Gold builds a bridge across the sea.’
“Ships, aeroplanes, cannons of monstrous size, and little instruments by
which you see minutest specks as if they were great rocks; all these you
have and yet you doubt His power.
“To us, the Arabs, we who came from the lands of fire in the Hejaz and
Hadramut. We who for centuries have remained unchanged, driving our
camels as our fathers drove them, eating and drinking as our fathers ate
and drank, and living face to face with God. . . . Consu’, you should
not smile, for do we not live closer to Him than you do, under the stars
at night, out in the sun by day, our lives almost as simple as the lives
of animals? To us He has vouchsafed gifts that He either has withheld
from you, or that you have neglected in your pride.
“Thus we still keep our faith. . . . Faith in the God who set the
planets in their courses, bridled the tides, and caused the palm to grow
beside the river so that the traveller may rest beneath its shade, and
resting, praise His name.
“You ask me, who ever heard of any animal that addressed himself to God.
He in His infinite power . . . be sure of it . . . is He not merciful and
compassionate, wonderful in His ways, harder to follow than the track
that a gazelle leaves in the desert sands; it cannot be that He could
have denied them access to His ear?
“Did not the lizard, Consul . . ., Hamed el Angri, the runner, the man
who never can rest long in any place, but must be ever tightening his
belt and pulling up his slippers at the heel to make ready for the road
. . ., did he not tell you of El Hokaitsallah, the little lizard who, being
late upon the day when Allah took away speech from all the animals, ran
on the beam in the great mosque at Mecca, and dumbly scratched his
prayer?”
The Consul nodded. “Hamed el Angri,” he said, “no doubt is still upon
the road, by whose side he will die one day of hunger or of thirst. . . .
Yes; he told me of it, and I wrote it in a book. . . .”
“Write this, then,” the Sherif went on, “Allah in his compassion, and in
case the animals, bereft of speech, that is in Arabic, for each has his
own tongue, should not be certain of the direction of the Kiblah, has
given the power to a poor insect which we call El Masgad to pray for all
of them. With its head turned to Mecca, as certainly as if he had the
needle of the mariners, he prays at El Magreb.
“All day he sits erect and watches for his prey. At eventide, just at
the hour of El Magreb, when from the ‘alminares’ of the Mosques the
muezzin calls upon the faithful for their prayers, he adds his testimony.
“Consu’, Allah rejects no prayer, however humble, and that the little
creature knows. He knows that Allah does not answer every prayer; but
yet the prayer remains; it is not blotted out, and perhaps some day it
may fructify, for it is written in the book.
“Therefore El Masgad prays each night for all the animals, yet being but
a little thing and simple, it has not strength to testify at all the
hours laid down in Mecca by our Lord Mohammed, he of the even teeth, the
curling hair, and the grave smile, that never left his face after he had
communed with Allah in the cave.”
The Consul dropped his smoked-out cigarette, and, stretching over to his
friend, held out his hand to him.
“Sherif,” he said, “maybe El Masgad prays for you and me, as well as for
its kind?”
The answer came: “Consu’, doubt not; it is a little animal of God, . . .
we too are in His hand. . . .”
XIV
FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR
THE great Capilla, the largest in the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay, was
built round a huge square, almost a quarter of a mile across.
Upon three sides ran the low, continuous line of houses, like a “row” in
a Scotch mining village or a phalanstery designed by Prudhon or St. Simon
in their treatises; but by the grace of a kind providence never carried
out, either in bricks or stone.
Each dwelling-place was of the same design and size as all the rest.
Rough tiles made in the Jesuit times, but now weathered and broken,
showing the rafters tied with raw hide in many places, formed the long
roof, that looked a little like the pent-house of a tennis court.
A deep verandah ran in front, stretching from one end to the other of the
square, supported on great balks of wood, which, after more than two
hundred years and the assaults of weather and the all-devouring ants,
still showed the adze marks where they had been dressed. The timber was
so hard that you could scarcely drive a nail into it, despite the flight
of time since it was first set up. Rings fixed about six feet from the
ground were screwed into the pillars of the verandah, before every door,
to fasten horses to, exactly as they are in an old Spanish town.
Against the wall of almost every house, just by the door, was set a chair
or two of heavy wood, with the seat formed by strips of hide, on which
the hair had formerly been left, but long ago rubbed off by use, or eaten
by the ants.
The owner of the house sat with the back of the strong chair tilted
against the wall, dressed in a loose and pleated shirt, with a high
turned-down collar open at the throat, and spotless white duck trousers,
that looked the whiter by their contrast with his brown, naked feet.
His home-made palm-tree hat was placed upon the ground beside him, and
his cloak of coarse red baize was thrown back from his shoulders, as he
sat smoking a cigarette rolled in a maize leaf, for in the Jesuit
capillas only women smoked cigars.
At every angle of the square a sandy trail led out, either to the river
or the woods, the little patches planted with mandioca, or to the maze of
paths that, like the points outside a junction, eventually joined in one
main trail, that ran from Itapua on the Paraná, up to Asuncion.
The church, built of wood cut in the neighbouring forest, had two tall
towers, and followed in its plan the pattern of all the churches in the
New World built by the Jesuits, from California down to the smallest
mission in the south. It filled the fourth side of the square, and on
each side of it there rose two feathery palms, known as the tallest in
the Missions, which served as landmarks for travellers coming to the
place, if they had missed their road. So large and well-proportioned was
the church, it seemed impossible that it had been constructed solely by
the Indians themselves, under the direction of the missionaries.
The overhanging porch and flight of steps that ran down to the grassy
sward in the middle of the town gave it an air as of a cathedral reared
to nature in the wilds, for the thick jungle flowed up behind it and
almost touched its walls.
Bells of great size, either cast upon the spot or brought at vast expense
from Spain, hung in the towers. On this, the feast day of the Blessed
Virgin, the special patron of the settlement, they jangled ceaselessly,
the Indians taking turns to haul upon the dried lianas that served
instead of ropes. Though they pulled vigorously, the bells sounded a
little muffled, as if they strove in vain against the vigorous nature
that rendered any work of man puny and insignificant in the Paraguayan
wilds.
Inside, the fane was dark, the images of saints were dusty, their paint
was cracked, their gilding tarnished, making them look a little like the
figures in a New Zealand pah, as they loomed through the darkness of the
aisle. On the neglected altar, for at that time priests were a rarity in
the Reductions, the Indians had placed great bunches of red flowers, and
now and then a humming-bird flitted in through the glassless windows and
hung poised above them; then darted out again, with a soft, whirring
sound. Over the whole capilla, in which at one time several thousand
Indians had lived, but now reduced to seventy or eighty at the most,
there hung an air of desolation. It seemed as if man, in his long
protracted struggle with the forces of the woods, had been defeated, and
had accepted his defeat, content to vegetate, forgotten by the world, in
the vast sea of green.
On this particular day, the annual festival of the Blessed Virgin, there
was an air of animation, for from far and near, from Jesuit capilla, from
straw-thatched huts lost in the clearings of the primeval forest, from
the few cattle ranches that then existed, and from the little town of
Itapua, fifty miles away, the scanty population had turned out to attend
the festival.
Upon the forest tracks, from earliest dawn, long lines of white-clad
women, barefooted, with their black hair cut square across the forehead
and hanging down their backs, had marched as silently as ghosts. All of
them smoked great, green cigars, and as they marched along, their leader
carrying a torch, till the sun rose and jaguars went back to their lairs,
they never talked; but if a woman in the rear of the long line wished to
converse with any comrade in the front she trotted forward till she
reached her friend and whispered in her ear. When they arrived at the
crossing of the little river they bathed, or, at the least, washed
carefully, and gathering a bunch of flowers, stuck them into their hair.
They crossed the stream, and on arriving at the plaza they set the
baskets, which they had carried on their heads, upon the ground, and
sitting down beside them on the grass, spread out their merchandise.
Oranges and bread, called “chipa,” made from mandioca flour and cheese,
with vegetables and various homely sweetmeats, ground nuts, rolls of
sugar done up in plaintain leaves, and known as “rapadura,” were the
chief staples of their trade. Those who had asses let them loose to
feed; and if upon the forest trails the women had been silent, once in
the safety of the town no flight of parrots in a maize field could have
chattered louder than they did as they sat waiting by their wares. Soon
the square filled, and men arriving tied their horses in the shade,
slackening their broad hide girths, and piling up before them heaps of
the leaves of the palm called “Pindó” in Guarani, till they were cool
enough to eat their corn. Bands of boys, for in those days most of the
men had been killed off in the past war, came trooping in, accompanied by
crowds of women and of girls, who carried all their belongings, for there
were thirteen women to a man, and the youngest boy was at a premium
amongst the Indian women, who in the villages, where hardly any men were
left, fought for male stragglers like unchained tigresses. A few old men
came riding in on some of the few native horses left, for almost all the
active, little, undersized breed of Paraguay had been exhausted in the
war. They, too, had bands of women trotting by their sides, all of them
anxious to unsaddle, to take the horses down to bathe, or to perform any
small office that the men required of them. All of them smoked
continuously, and each of them was ready with a fresh cigarette as soon
as the old man or boy whom they accompanied finished the stump he held
between his lips. The women all were dressed in the long Indian shirt
called a “tupoi,” cut rather low upon the breast, and edged with coarse
black cotton lace, which every Paraguayan woman wore. Their hair was as
black as a crow’s back, and quite as shiny, and their white teeth so
strong that they could tear the ears of corn out of a maize cob like a
horse munching at his corn.
Then a few Correntino gauchos next appeared, dressed in their national
costume of loose black merino trousers, stuffed into long boots, whose
fronts were all embroidered in red silk. Their silver spurs, whose
rowels were as large as saucers, just dangled off their heels, only
retained in place by a flat chain, that met upon the instep, clasped with
a lion’s head. Long hair and brown vicuna ponchos, soft black felt hats,
and red silk handkerchiefs tied loosely round their necks marked them as
strangers, though they spoke Guarani.
They sat upon their silver-mounted saddles, with their toes resting in
their bell-shaped stirrups, swaying so easily with every movement that
the word riding somehow or other seemed inapplicable to men who, like the
centaurs, formed one body with the horse.
As they drew near the plaza they raised their hands and touched their
horses with the spur, and, rushing like a whirlwind right to the middle
of the square, drew up so suddenly that their horses seemed to have
turned to statues for a moment, and then at a slow trot, that made their
silver trappings jingle as they went, slowly rode off into the shade.
The plaza filled up imperceptibly, and the short grass was covered by a
white-clad throng of Indians. The heat increased, and all the time the
bells rang out, pulled vigorously by relays of Indians, and at a given
signal the people turned and trooped towards the church, all carrying
flowers in their hands.
As there was no one to sing Mass, and as the organ long had been
neglected, the congregation listened to some prayers, read from a book of
Hours by an old Indian, who pronounced the Latin, of which most likely he
did not understand a word, as if it had been Guarani. They sang “Las
Flores á Maria” all in unison, but keeping such good time that at a
little distance from the church it sounded like waves breaking on a beach
after a summer storm.
In the neglected church, where no priest ministered or clergy prayed,
where all the stoops of holy water had for years been dry, and where the
Mass had been well-nigh forgotten as a whole, the spirit lingered, and if
it quickeneth upon that feast day in the Paraguayan missions, that simple
congregation were as uplifted by it as if the sacrifice had duly been
fulfilled with candles, incense, and the pomp and ceremony of Holy Mother
Church upon the Seven Hills.
As every one except the Correntinos went barefooted, the exit of the
congregation made no noise except the sound of naked feet, slapping a
little on the wooden steps, and so the people silently once again filled
the plaza, where a high wooden arch had been erected in the middle, for
the sport of running at the ring.
The vegetable sellers had now removed from the middle of the square,
taking all their wares under the long verandah, and several pedlars had
set up their booths and retailed cheap European trifles such as no one in
the world but a Paraguayan Indian could possibly require. Razors that
would not cut, and little looking-glasses in pewter frames made in
Thuringia, cheap clocks that human ingenuity was powerless to repair when
they had run their course of six months’ intermittent ticking, and gaudy
pictures representing saints who had ascended to the empyrean, as it
appeared, with the clothes that they had worn in life, and all
bald-headed, as befits a saint, were set out side by side with
handkerchiefs of the best China silk. Sales were concluded after
long-continued chaffering—that higgling of the market dear to old-time
economists, for no one would have bought the smallest article, even below
cost price, had it been offered to him at the price the seller originally
asked.
Enrique Clerici, from Itapua, had transported all his pulperia bodily for
the occasion of the feast. It had not wanted more than a small wagon to
contain his stock-in-trade. Two or three dozen bottles of square-faced
gin of the Anchor brand, a dozen of heady red wine from Catalonia, a pile
of sardine boxes, sweet biscuits, raisins from Malaga, esparto baskets
full of figs, and sundry pecks of apricots dried in the sun and cut into
the shape of ears, and hence called “orejones,” completed all his store.
He himself, tall and sunburnt, stood dressed in riding-boots and a broad
hat, with his revolver in his belt, beside a pile of empty bottles, which
he had always ready, to hurl at customers if there should be any attempt
either at cheating or to rush his wares. He spoke the curious lingo,
half-Spanish, half-Italian, that so many of his countrymen use in the
River Plate; and all his conversation ran upon Garibaldi, with whom he
had campaigned in youth, upon Italia Irredenta, and on the time when
anarchy should sanctify mankind by blood, as he said, and bring about the
reign of universal brotherhood.
He did a roaring trade, despite the competition of a native Paraguayan,
who had brought three demi-johns of Caña, for men prefer the imported
article the whole world over, though it is vile, to native manufactures,
even when cheap and good.
Just about twelve o’clock, when the sun almost burned a hole into one’s
head, the band got ready in the church porch, playing upon old
instruments, some of which may have survived from Jesuit times, or, at
the least, been copied in the place, as the originals decayed.
Sackbuts and psalteries and shawms were there, with serpents, gigantic
clarionets, and curiously twisted oboes, and drums, whose canvas all hung
slack and gave a muffled sound when they were beaten, and little fifes,
ear-piercing and devilish, were represented in that band. It banged and
crashed “La Palomita,” that tune of evil-sounding omen, for to its
strains prisoners were always ushered out to execution in the times of
Lopez, and as it played the players slowly walked down the steps.
Behind them followed the alcalde, an aged Indian, dressed in long cotton
drawers, that at the knees were split into a fringe that hung down to his
ankles, a spotless shirt much pleated, and a red cloak of fine merino
cloth. In his right hand he carried a long cane with a silver head—his
badge of office. Walking up to the door of his own house, by which was
set a table covered with glasses and with homemade cakes, he gave the
signal for the running at the ring.
The Correntino gauchos, two or three Paraguayans, and a German married to
a Paraguayan wife, were all who entered for the sport. The band struck
up, and a young Paraguayan started the first course. Gripping his
stirrups tightly between his naked toes, and seated on an old “recao,”
surmounted by a sheepskin, he spurred his horse, a wall-eyed skewbald,
with his great iron spurs, tied to his bare insteps with thin strips of
hide. The skewbald, only half-tamed, reared once or twice and bounded
off, switching its ragged tail, which had been half-eaten off by cows.
The people yelled, a “mosqueador!”—that is, a “fly-flapper,” a grave
fault in a horse in the eyes of Spanish Americans—as the Paraguayan
steered the skewbald with the reins held high in his left hand, carrying
the other just above the level of his eyes, armed with a piece of cane
about a foot in length.
As he approached the arch, in which the ring dangled from a string, his
horse, either frightened by the shouting of the crowd or by the arch
itself, swerved and plunged violently, carrying its rider through the
thickest of the people, who separated like a flock of sheep when a dog
runs through it, cursing him volubly. The German came the next, dressed
in his Sunday clothes, a slop-made suit of shoddy cloth, riding a horse
that all his spurring could not get into full speed. The rider’s round,
fair face was burned a brick-dust colour, and as he spurred and plied his
whip, made out of solid tapir hide, the sweat ran down in streams upon
his coat. So intent was he on flogging, that as he neared the ring he
dropped his piece of cane, and his horse, stopping suddenly just
underneath the arch, would have unseated him had he not clasped it round
the neck. Shouts of delight greeted this feat of horsemanship, and one
tall Correntino, taking his cigarette out of his mouth, said to his
fellow sitting next to him upon his horse, “The very animals themselves
despise the gringos. See how that little white-nosed brute that he was
riding knew that he was a ‘maturango,’ and nearly had him off.”
Next came Hijinio Rojas, a Paraguayan of the better classes, sallow and
Indian looking, dressed in clothes bought in Asuncion, his trousers
tucked into his riding-boots. His small black hat, with the brim
flattened up against his head by the wind caused by the fury of the
gallop of his active little roan with four white feet, was kept upon his
head by a black ribbon knotted underneath his chin. As he neared the
arch his horse stepped double several times and fly jumped; but that did
not disturb him in the least, and, aiming well he touched the ring,
making it fly into the air. A shout went up, partly in Spanish, partly
in Guarani, from the assembled people, and Rojas, reining in his horse,
stopped him in a few bounds, so sharply, that his unshod feet cut up the
turf of the green plaza as a skate cuts the ice. He turned and trotted
gently to the arch, and then, putting his horse to its top speed, stopped
it again beside the other riders, amid the “Vivas” of the crowd. Then
came the turn of the four Correntinos, who rode good horses from their
native province, had silver horse-gear and huge silver spurs, that
dangled from their heels. They were all gauchos, born, as the saying
goes, “amongst the animals.” A dun with fiery eyes and a black stripe
right down his back, and with black markings on both hocks, a chestnut
skewbald, a “doradillo,” and a horse of that strange mealy bay with a
fern-coloured muzzle, that the gauchos call a “Pangaré,” carried them
just as if their will and that of those who rode them were identical.
Without a signal, visible at least to any but themselves, their horses
started at full speed, reaching occasionally at the bit, then dropping it
again and bridling so easy that one could ride them with a thread drawn
from a spider’s web. Their riders sat up easily, not riding as a
European rides, with his eyes fixed upon each movement of his horse, but,
as it were, divining them as soon as they were made. Each of them took
the ring, and all of them checked their horses, as it were, by their
volition, rather than the bit, making the silver horse-gear rattle and
their great silver spurs jingle upon their feet. Each waited for the
other at the far side of the arch, and then turning in a line they
started with a shout, and as they passed right through the middle of the
square at a wild gallop, they swung down sideways from their saddles and
dragged their hands upon the ground. Swinging up, apparently without an
effort, back into their seats, when they arrived at the point from where
they had first started, they reined up suddenly, making their horses
plunge and rear, and then by a light signal on the reins stand quietly in
line, tossing the foam into the air. Hijinio Rojas and the four centaurs
all received a prize, and the alcalde, pouring out wineglasses full of
gin, handed them to the riders, who, with a compliment or two as to the
order of their drinking, emptied them solemnly.
No other runners having come forward to compete, for in those days horses
were scarce throughout the Paraguayan Missions, the sports were over, and
the perspiring crowd went off to breakfast at tables spread under the
long verandahs, and silence fell upon the square.
The long, hot hours during the middle of the day were passed in sleeping.
Some lay face downwards in the shade. Others swung in white cotton
hammocks, keeping them in perpetual motion, till they fell asleep, by
pushing with a naked toe upon the ground. At last the sun, the enemy, as
the Arabs call him, slowly declined, and white-robed women, with their
“tupois” slipping half off their necks, began to come out into the
verandahs, slack and perspiring after the midday struggle with the heat.
Then bands of girls sauntered down to the river, from whence soon came
the sound of merry laughter as they splashed about and bathed.