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.