VERDOLAY--THE INHABITANTS
The little village of Verdolay was not a characteristic Spanish village,
it was a watering-place. One came into it along the dusty road between
banks on which grew the spiky aloe shrubs, behind which spread the
spaced olive groves with trees drawn up into demure lines, amongst the
grey foliage of which could be seen the red painted corrugated roofs of
the French Silk Company. The village scrambled up a terraced hill. The
lower edge was a line of orange-vermilion one-storied houses faced with
a small promenade. Then the houses scattered. To the right as one faced
the hill were the baths, a collection of bulky, ramshackle buildings
which hid deep, cool courtyards, and from which came the plash of water
and the sound of young voices. The hill-side was covered with terraced
gardens in which were set houses painted yellow, green, blue or pink.
The apex of the hill was decorated by an iron windwheel for pumping. A
ridge joined the crest of the hill to the mountains, and here perched
the ancient monastery of Santa Catalina; while a mile away to the right,
showing white amongst a green bed of palms and firs, was the country
seat of the Count of El Valle, and to the left amongst groves of oranges
was the villa of an ex-Prime Minister.
One had almost a specimen of Spain in little in this one village. The
vermilion houses, called the Malecon, sheltered a transitory population;
visitors to the baths, who like ourselves arrived in carts with
furniture, and after a few months disappeared back to town duties. These
were usually of the superior artisan or small shopkeeping class. The
second row of houses contained persons such as Don Ferdinand, the little
Señor or the people who kept the baths. These represented the larger
tradesmen and in general lived all the year in Verdolay, travelling to
Murcia by tartana or by tram via Palmar. The two roads which swept up
each side of the hill were edged with small cottages where the real
peasantry lived, and the houses which stood amongst gardens on the hill
terraces, each owning its proper entrance, were the residences of the
merchantry. The Count of El Valle represented the county aristocracy and
the ex-Prime Minister the Court.
[Illustration]
In spite of a somewhat evil local reputation, the peasantry could be
counted as a quiet, hard-working, rather unintelligent, good-natured
community which leaned vaguely, on the male side, to liberalism and
atheism, but lacking the courage or determination to make either
effective. It cursed the Court and told dirty stories about the
priesthood, but all exasperation evaporated in words. This peasantry is
the foundation on which the whole of this plutocratical hill of Verdolay
rests; and it labours as severely as any other peasantry, perhaps even
working harder because of the lack of water, which adds a need to be
satisfied before work is over. The average traveller has the idea that
the Spaniard is lazy. We are not sure that this is a correct estimate of
him. We English have made a god of "Work." But indeed unnecessary work
is mere foolishness. The great blessing to be sought for is leisure.
Human advance comes from the reflections of leisure rather than from the
activities of work. The Spaniard recognizes leisure as the benefit which
it is. He has no false ideas about work. Adam bit the apple, and we pay
his debts, but why load ourselves with compound interest at many
hundreds per cent.? That is the Spaniard's point of view. He works when
he must work. He rises with the dawn or before it, say four a.m., he
works till eleven o'clock, then in the afternoon resumes toil from 3.30
till 6.30. The late-rising traveller who mouches about in his English
custom during the hottest hours of the day sees the Spanish labourer at
his siesta, snoozing by the roadside, or thrumming his guitar to a herd
of sleepy goats. He draws a natural, though incorrect, conclusion.
The Spaniard may be dilatory. He puts off doing to-day what he can do
to-morrow, but it is from an exaggerated respect for the benefits of
leisure. His handicap is that he has no proper means of filling that
leisure, his apparent laziness comes from lack of education. About
eighty per cent. cannot read, schooling is not enforced, and children
begin work at ten years of age or thereabouts. But do not lay up the
Spaniard's desire for inactivity as a crime; it is a virtue ill
employed.
Our particular specimen of the Spanish peasant was my female servant,
named Encarnacion. She was thirteen years old, could neither read nor
write, and worked like a small mule for the not extravagant wage of
eleven shillings and sixpence a month. She only worked half the day, it
is true, but we did not give her food. We indeed overpaid her, for the
regular wage of her kind was about eight shillings and fourpence a
month. She had a small, stumpy child's body, sprouting into a long neck,
at the top of which was a rounded head. Her forehead was intellectual,
her features flattened, and her hair, done up tight into a small ball,
was usually decorated with a flower or a green leaf.
At first, like all Spanish peasants, she made up her mind that she could
not understand what I said, but gradually learned that she had to do so,
and in general succeeded pretty well. But it was to her a tremendous
intellectual effort. She would wrinkle her noble-looking brow with the
strain, and was never satisfied until she had translated my orders into
her own patois for clarity. But she would not allow her fundamental
ideas of what was proper to be influenced by my foreign notions.
Sometimes she would interrupt me.
"No, Señora," she would say, "I do not like it done thus. That is not
the custom. It must be done so."
If one insisted upon one's own way, the work was ill done. So that, as a
rule, to save trouble, one allowed her to do as she wished. Encarnacion
worked all the morning, singing an interminable Spanish song, which
struck our ears queerly and pleasantly at the beginning, but of which in
the end we grew very tired. By eleven o'clock she would have done all
the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and would leave the stone
floors soaked in water, the evaporation of which did a little to
counteract the intense heat. She had a habit which we did not like of
scattering our household refuse all over the small square yard. It
looked dirty and untidy, but we found out that she knew better than we
did. The vagrant cats soon cleared up any remains of meat, while the
hot sun dried up all the other refuse, which could then be thrown away
conveniently.
Encarnacion was sad that she could neither read nor write, and was
proudly jealous of her younger sister, who, working in the milk factory,
was being taught to spell.
She of course acquired a proprietary right in us. She upheld the honour
of the house, and gave a lesson in manners to a gipsy girl from the cave
dwellings who had once thrown a stone at me. She also criticized our
work. To the almost daily parties of strangers who walked into our house
whenever the door was left unlocked, she acted as guide to our pictures
drying on the walls, and she would explain to whom each house in the
sketches belonged.
But she never said "Thank you."
There are considerable differences between Spanish customs and those of
ordinary Europe, and these are apt to disconcert the traveller. Here are
a few Spanish ones that we noted _en passant_.
You may walk into any house or garden if moved to do so by curiosity if
you, previous to entering, utter the magic formula: "Se pueda
entrar?"[18]
You may stare as much as you like at anything or anybody, for staring is
in reality a compliment.
Self-consciousness is a silly vanity.
If you feel friendly towards an acquaintance you may call on him at nine
in the morning and you may repeat your call three or four times during
the same day. (What the man does to get rid of you we have not yet
discovered. We have only been the victims, not the visitors.)
You must refuse everything that is suddenly offered to you, except
cigarettes or sweets offered in the fingers. Do not accept other things
until the third offer. But to refuse sweets or cigarettes is almost
insulting.
You must offer to give any object to anybody who admires it (especially
objects of jewellery or babies).
You may ask any questions you like, even upon the most intimate of
subjects; and you must expect to be asked similar questions.
If invited to a meal, you may refuse no dish that is served to you, even
though indigestion is clutching at your vitals, or repletion stopping
your throat.
For a specimen of the small tradesman class of the malecon we had La
Merchora. She kept the village shop, the last house on the terrace, and
was in some way a relative of Antonio. Her home was planned like ours
was, and one of the rooms beside the entrada had been filled with a
counter, some shelves, and a large tin of paraffin oil; ginger-coloured
sausages were festooned from the roof and the shop was complete. She was
unmarried, and therefore, from a theoretical point of view, negligible;
but it did not disturb her. Indeed, little did disturb her. She had the
figure which grows out of a combination of good living, no thinking and
reasonable working. In any village you will find an example of her kind.
She is good-natured but respected. Liberties are not taken with her, and
in Cornwall she is called Aunt So-and-so. La Merchora was not even
black-visaged, there was in fact nothing that one can count for Spanish
about her.
She had two epithets--atrocidad and barbaridad--but she said them with
so jovial an aspect that atrocity or barbarity faded into the gentlest
of denunciations. When our first servant, Encarnacion's elder sister,
deserted us without warning for a better job, La Merchora said it was an
atrocidad; when the water-carrier overcharged us she said it was
barbaridad. When the Count El Valle's watchman chased us off some square
miles of unfenced unproductive mountain she said it was atrocidad; when
the weather was hot she said it was barbaridad.
Every evening after supper there was a gathering outside La Merchora's
shop. La Merchora, Uncle Pepe, her father, the niece, the gaunt woman
from next door, her baby, half naked but with a flower in its hair,
women coming through the night to fetch water (an interminable task),
carters returning from work and others, would gather on chairs, benches,
or on the stone wall of the malecon; and beneath the faint glow of the
electric light would gently talk of things, while the niece was catching
the foolish cicadas or crickets (attracted by the light) with which to
amuse the baby and with which to awaken in the child some primary
instinct of cruelty to animals.
Uncle Pepe was La Merchora's father. He was a withered brown peasant
baked by the sun to the colour of a pot. Wrinkles of careful economy and
of good humour were as indelibly roasted into him as the pattern on a
Roman dish. In recognition of La Merchora's accumulated kindnesses I
painted his portrait on a small panel for her. She pondered some while
on the problem of a suitable recompense, and at last gave us an antique
Sevillian basin decorated with a primitive painting of a yellow and
green cat. It was an old and valuable piece of earthenware used for
washing the linen, and had probably been employed to wash Uncle Pepe's
shifts and himself as well when he was a baby. These basins, two feet in
diameter, are used as decorative and practical adjuncts to the huge red
earthenware pots in which the villagers of the Murcian valley store the
household water. We protested against the generosity of this gift, but
in vain. One day, while we were out, she had it carried to our house,
and would on no account receive it back.
Pepe and La Merchora illustrate the rapid evolution of the modern
Spanish gentleman. Antonio is the third stage in the development. The
little Señor is the fourth. Pepe is an unlettered peasant, knowing
nothing but the labour of the soil but possessing the traditional
culture of Spain. By the time one has reached the little Señor and the
people of the Baths, one has arrived at letters but one has lost much
of the culture. Pepe's wisdom is the common sense of centuries stored up
in proverbs; he has one to fit every occasion. The little Señor's
learning is supplied by the newspapers. The grandparents of all these
people, even of the rich merchants who lived on the apex or Verdolay
hill, were peasantry--Pepes, as a rule. Then one perceives that with the
accumulation of wealth, the culture gradually diminishes in a like
proportion. The third generation has lost almost all culture and has
nothing but a kind heart and a love of making money. The Spanish
bourgeoisie is inverting the processes which are going forward in
England to-day. It is trying to forget its old customs--too late we are
trying to revive ours. It has learned to despise its exquisite folk
music, already becoming forgotten--we are trying to fudge out a few
miserable tunes from the memories of senile fiddlers.
These people have won to that leisure so sweet to the heart of man; but
they don't know what to do with it. They sleep and so grow fat. Having
become fat they are good-natured and laugh. The old saw should be
inverted. Indeed, many an old saw is in reality the truth turned inside
out. They were a good-natured kindly people, these bulky tradesmen, but
they were deadly dull. The daughters of Verdolay banged untuned pianos
to the strains of dances forgotten by Europe, polkas, mazurkas and pas
de quatre; but their own dances--the malagueñas and baturras--were
unknown to them. They were pressing in their invitations, and were angry
with us because we preferred La Merchora's doorstep with its changing
audience of passers-by.
Of the Count and the ex-Prime Minister we know but little; they lie,
anyway, beyond the scope of this book. The Count possessed in this
district a country house set in a deep, wooded valley, in which was a
medicinal spring, and a few square miles of unfenced sterile mountain
land from which his watchman, armed with a gun, was instructed to drive
away unauthorized pedestrians. He was not popular and was always at
daggers drawn with the village; though from other sources we have
learned that he is personally a charming and a generous man. At any rate
he has left a fine estate to remain practically unproductive (the two
farms and the house itself are in ruins). This practice seems to be
normal in Spain, and we have heard of many a case where the aristocracy
have deliberately hindered national development. There are rumours,
however, that this estate is being bought for the government and will be
afforested and developed.
The ex-Prime Minister's villa was the most amazing example of bad taste
in architecture that we have ever seen.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: "May one enter?"]