JIJONA--TIA ROGER
Jijona lived on almond paste. All around us the grey, pallid or zebra
striped mountains were terraced, and wherever enough earth could be
gathered together for an almond tree to grow, there it was planted. The
turron of Jijona, which is made in perfection nowhere else, is a very
popular sweet meat all over Spain and even is widely appreciated in
South America. In Barcelona I have been greeted by turron-selling youths
who addressed me as La Valiente. On the French frontier in a little
village we found a turron-stall kept by a man in Jijona costume of black
blouse and pointed hat; but he was a fraud: he had never been near
Jijona, nor could he speak the Jijona dialect. But the whole life of
Jijona was dominated by turron marzipan, and the varieties of sweet
meats made from almonds. We arrived as the almonds were beginning to
ripen. Out on the mountains one heard the thrashing of the canes amongst
the branches as the peasants beat the nuts off the almond trees. From
the village rose up a sound like that of a gigantic typewriter as the
women of the village sat in the streets in circles and cracked the
almond shells. In our entrada old Père Chicot crouched most of the day
on his haunches, peeling, drying and cracking the almonds from El
Señor's garden.
In consequence of the turron work we found it very difficult to get a
woman to work for us. Life became difficult. The conditions in Jijona
were not the same as those in Verdolay. In the latter place we could buy
excellent charcoal, but to our surprise we found charcoal difficult to
get in Jijona. When we did get it, from the proprietor of the local
cinematograph theatre, it was so hard that it would not burn. Père
Chicot said gruffly, "What are almond shells for?" We then tried burning
almond shells; but they made a poor fire, and an accumulation of shells
soon put itself out. We wasted one and a half hours trying to fry
potatoes on an almond-shell fire. So as long as we could not get a
woman, we had to live on cold stuff that we could buy from the shops:
Dutch cheese, and sardines, principally.
At last I thought that I had found a woman. I was perched on the
watercourse which ran across the face of the precipice opposite the
entrance of the town. From this spot there was an excellent view of
Jijona in its most romantic, but also in its most plastic aspect. To me
came a woman walking along the edge of the watercourse, balancing on her
head a large washing-basket. She stopped to watch my work, and as was
the custom in those early days began to talk about the bull episode.
"Ah, that was a terrible thing to do," she said. "If I had gone down
into the plaza, my knees would have turned to water."
I then asked her how I could get somebody to work for me.
"Why," she answered, "I'll come myself, or send somebody else."
She then began to move along her way. The wall of the watercourse was
about a foot wide; but ten yards further along it ceased to curve around
the face of the precipice and sprang across a chasm over a narrow
bridge. The approach to this bridge was guarded by a large polished
boulder about three feet high, and to get on to the bridge one had to
clamber over this boulder. I had crossed it on hands and knees
cautiously, for there was a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet below. The
woman looked at this boulder and turning said to me:
"That is a nasty spot. I'll have to be careful there, or I'll drop my
washing."
With the basket on her head she walked to the boulder and began to walk
up its slippery side. Balancing herself and basket in what appeared a
dangerous manner, giving little cries of "Aie! Aie! I'm afraid I'll drop
my basket," she surmounted the obstacle and strode carelessly across the
bridge. My heart left my throat to regain its normal position and I
realized that there is even a fashion in "fear."
But the woman never came, and for a week we were servantless. The pretty
girl who had driven out with us in the lorry, and who we had imagined to
be the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer, was as a matter of fact
our nearest neighbour. She lived at the top house of the town. Her
father was the village dust-cart, and any day could be seen walking
about the streets bent almost double beneath the weight of a huge
pannier which he carried on his back, into which he flung any object
which had no permanent right on the high road. Her house was a small
affair of two rooms only. We put our difficulty to her as she was
friendly, and to our surprise she said that she would come and do it
herself. She did arrange that the goat with his milk should call upon
us; but the Vinegars enticed her into their turron factory, and again we
were in despair. However, the girl had an idea.
"Why, Mother will do it for you," she said.
Mother was an apt-looking spouse for the dust-cart, and was considered,
we heard, the dirtiest woman in the village. Her foggy blue eyes showed
white all round them, and she threw up her lips like a biting horse when
she spoke Castilian (which she did very badly). I don't know why she
made me think of the Red queen in Alice, but her silhouette was not
unlike, and she had a queer trick of being in the house one instant, and
in the next of having quite vanished--which was Red-queenlike. She was
called "Aunt Roger" in the village, because of her ruddy hair. Aunt
Roger cleared up the mystery of the Jijona fuel. She made bargains with
boys, who wandered out over the hills, and returned looking like walking
haycocks under a load of branches of mountain pine and other coniferous
shrub. From then on we cooked over large bonfires built on the square
hearth which was in our largest room.
Tia Roger was elusive in small matters, as she was in larger ones. She
had a hasty Spanish way of agreeing at once to save herself the trouble
of understanding my language, and we never knew whether she would come
or no. She drew our pay without demur, but if an occasion offered for
other employment she took it. We would return home at eleven o'clock
worn out with a hard day's painting, to find the place uncleaned, no
fire alight, no food either bought or prepared. This would entail on our
part a rush down the steep hill into the town, to search for food.
Probably on the way we would discover Tia Roger sitting amongst a circle
of gossiping and pleased women, industriously cracking almonds. She
would show no signs of conscious sin, but would grin and nod at us as we
passed. Then we had to scramble again up to our eyrie under the full
heat of the Mediterranean sun.
Tia Roger had many children. Her eldest daughter was married to a man
who for some time puzzled us. We first saw him wandering about the upper
streets of the old town during the fiesta. He carried an elaborate pair
of sandwich boards. On the front was the well-known picture, "St.
Veronica's Handkerchief," and on the back an oleograph representing two
conventional angels--golden hair, nightdress, and wings. Both pictures
were surrounded by flat wooden frames fretworked in the hideous
art-nouveau manner. He wandered about thus, enclosed, as it were a slab
of humanity between two slices of divinity; but we could not imagine
what his purpose was. We imagined that he filled a semi-religious post,
something connected with the priests, and their fiesta, and their
cinema, and bull chasings. But on the fourth day of the fiesta, this
wandering, apparently purposeless man tripped over a washing-basket.
His language at once put to flight all our ideas of his religious
functions, it issued straight from a nature by no means purged of old
Adam, despite its devotional enclosure. Later, he fell over me as I was
sketching, and he cursed me with gusto. I then saw he was blind. This
had not been apparent to us earlier, for he took the rough and
precipitous streets of Jijona at an extraordinary speed.
One day we saw him still wandering to and fro, but the pictures had
disappeared. A cage was on his back, and in the cage, balancing against
the joggle and movement of his walk, was an uncomfortable hen. We had
become more accustomed to the Jijona speech by this time, and the
tickets which the pictures had hidden were plainly visible in his hands.
He was running a private lottery at three chances "a little bitch." I
took thirty tickets for the hen, and gave fifteen of them to Tia Roger,
but we pulled blanks. His next venture was a bedroom looking-glass, the
stand of which stuck out from his back in an ungainly fashion. It must
have needed considerable ingenuity to keep his small village clientèle
sufficiently desirous to ensure for him any sort of a living.
His wife learned that I had put him into one of my sketches. She hurried
to the Torre de Blay, carrying her child, and accompanied by a horde of
women friends to see "The Portrait." Her disappointment was great to
find that he was but a minute figure in a street landscape. She told me
that her husband had lost his sight ten years before in a street
quarrel. His opponent had slashed a knife across his eyes. For this the
law exacted no penalty. But she had drawn no lesson from her husband's
misfortune. Her baby was in a bad condition, flies, dust and exposure to
the sun were working wickedly on the child's eyes, and even then early
blindness appeared to be threatening. But it seemed to us that many of
the more ignorant Spanish were careless of their children's eyesight.
Blindness is rampant, but blindness leads to beggary; and beggary
accompanied by blindness is a profitable pursuit. Possibly a woman may
say, "Little Juan seems to be going blind. Well, that's a comfort, he
will be settled in life anyhow."
Jijona had two other blind men. The one made a living by selling cigars
from a glass case strapped to his chest.
We were sitting in the entrada of the Vinegars' on the first day of the
fiesta. The curtain was pushed slowly aside and through the opening
crept a pathetic figure. It was that of an old man; his eyes were
sightless and suppurating, a straw hat with a torn brim shaded his heavy
face, in one hand he grasped an aged guitar, in the other a stick with
which he explored the entrada for a chair. Jan quickly got out of his
chair for fear that the blind man should sit down on his lap. The man
found the chair with his stick, and trembling with the pain of movement
took a seat. Adjusting the guitar, with stiff fingers he rasped the
strings which gave out a sound, thin as though withered by extreme age.
With exercise his fingers strengthened, until from the decrepit
instrument he plucked a melody from which one might imagine that the
blind in Maeterlinck's play were dancing to solace their loneliness. The
almost macabre dance came to an end, then striking out a new set of
chords he broke into a Spanish song. His voice was an instrument as worn
out as the guitar.
He ceased his heartrending performance, collected his meed of halfpence;
I spoke to him, and he broke into an hysterical laugh of joy.
"You have returned, you have returned," he cried.
"It is El Señor that he takes you for," explained one of the girls. "He
was very good to him. The old man recognizes the English accent."
We explained to him his mistake, and the delight faded from his poor old
face, and the blank expressionless look of the blind came back. Slowly
he turned to the entrance and his tapping, which led him away down the
street. Thus he pursued his trade, feeling his way from door to door,
entering any one that was open, seating himself upon the first
unoccupied chair which he could find: few could have been hard-hearted
enough to deny his unspoken pleading.
One evening we met him in the upper town.... An accident had happened,
and his guitar was opened out like an old boot; it still held together
at the handle, but at the front of the instrument the soundboard and
back had become detached from the sides. In a clumsy fashion the hurt
had been bound up with string. We asked him what had happened. He did
not reply, but cried out with a high-pitched, half-crazy laugh. Then
standing astraddle in the precipitous street he began to pluck at the
strings as though the guitar could answer for him. The thin voice of it
had now sunk to a mere ghost of a sound, the murmur of a summer freshet
might well have drowned its plaintive whisper. Then turning he made his
way downhill.