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.