commercial--let us hope unenvious--windows of the government tobacco
factory; an enormous building, guarded like a fort to prevent the
smuggling out of tobacco. Indeed, every one of the three thousand women
employed is carefully watched for the same purpose as she passes forth
at the general evening dismissal. Mounting the broad stairs of stone, I
heard a peculiar medley of light sounds in the distance. If a lot of
steam-looms were endowed with the faculty of throwing out falsetto and
soprano notes instead of their usual inhuman click, the effect could not
be more uninterrupted than this subdued merry buzzing. It was the
chatter of the working-girls in the cigarette room. As we stepped over
the threshold these sounds continued with _crescendo_ effect, ourselves
being taken for the theme. At least one hundred girls fixed their
attention on us, delivering a volley of salutations, jokes, and general
remarks.
"What do you seek, little señor? You will get no _papelitos_ here!"
exclaimed one, pretty enough to venture on sauciness.
"French, French! don't you see?" another said; and her companions, in
airy tones, begged us to disburse a few _cuartos_, which are
cent-and-a-quarter pieces.
There was one young person of a satirical turn who affected to approve a
very small beard which one of us had raised incidentally in travelling.
She stroked her own smooth cheek, and carolled out, "What a pretty
barbule!"
They certainly were not enslaved to conventionality, though they may be
to necessity. They seemed to enjoy themselves, too. Their eyes flashed;
they broke into laughter; they bent their heads to give effect to the
regulation flat curls on their temples, and all the time their nimble
fingers never stopped filling cigarettes, rolling the papers, whisking
them into bundles, and seizing fresh pinches of tobacco. In all there
were three or four hundred of them, and some of them had a spendthrift,
common sort of beauty, which, owing to their Southern vivacity and fine
physique, had the air of being more than it really was. At first glance
there appeared to be a couple of hundred other girls hung up against the
walls and pillars; but these turned out to be only the skirts and boots
of the workers, which are kept carefully away from the smouch of the
cigarette trays, so as to maintain the proverbially neat appearance of
their wearers on the street. Some of the women, however, were scornful
and morose, and others pale and sad. It was easy to guess why, when we
saw their babies lying in improvised box-cradles or staggering about
naked, as if intoxicated with extreme youth and premature misery, or as
if blindly beginning a search for their fathers--something none of them
will ever find. We laid a few coppers in the cradles, and went on to the
cigar-room.
It was much the same, excepting that the soberness of experience there
partially took the place of the giddiness rampant among the cigarette
girls. There were some appalling old crones among the thousand
individuals who rolled, chopped, gummed, and tied cigars at the low
tables distributed through a heavily groined stone hall choked with
thick pillars, and some six hundred or seven hundred yards in length.
Others, on the contrary, looked blooming and coquettish. Many were in
startling deshabille, resorted to on account of the intense July heat,
and hastened to draw pretty _pañuelos_ of variegated dye over their bare
shoulders when they saw us coming. Here, too, there was a large nursery
business being carried on, with a very damaged article of child, smeary,
sprawling, and crying. Nor was it altogether cheering to observe now and
then a woman who, having dissipated too late the night before, sat fast
asleep with her head in the cigar dust of the table.
"_Ojala!_ May God do her work!" cried one of her friends. If he did not,
it was not because there was any lack of shrines in the factory. They
were erected here and there against the wall, with gilt images and
candles arrayed in front of a white sheet, and occasionally the older
women knelt at their devotions before them. I don't object to the
shrines, but it struck me that a good _crèche_ system for the children
might not come amiss.
As to the factory-girls smoking cigarettes in public, it is an operatic
fiction: no such practice is common in Spain. And the beauty of these
Carmens has certainly been exaggerated. It may be remarked here that, as
an offset to occasional disappointment arising from such exaggerations,
all Spanish women walk with astonishing gracefulness, a natural and
elastic step; and that is their chief advantage over women of other
nations. Even the chamber-maids of Sevilla were modelled on a heroic,
ancient-history plan, with big, supple necks, and showed such easy power
in their movements that we half feared they might, in tidying the rooms,
pick us up by mistake and throw us away somewhere to perish miserably in
a dust-heap. Why there should be so much inborn ease and freedom
expressed in the manner of women who are guarded with Oriental
precautions, I don't know. Andalusian fathers have, no doubt, the utmost
confidence in their daughters, but at the same time they save them the
trouble of taking care of themselves by putting iron gratings on the
windows. The _reja_, the domestic gittern, is very common in Sevilla.
The betrothed suitor, if he is quite correct, must hold his tender
interviews with his mistress through its forbidding bars. My companion
actually saw a handsome young fellow standing on the sidewalk, and
conducting one of these peculiar _tête-à-têtes_.
[Illustration: "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a
cage."]
Every house is, furthermore, provided with a _patio_. The façades, as a
rule, are monotonous and unspeakably plain, but the poorest dwelling
always has its airy court set with shrubs, and perhaps provided with
water. They are tiled, as most rooms are in Spain--a good precaution
against vermin, which unluckily is not infallible as regards fleas,
which search the traveller in Spain even more rigorously than the
customs officers or the Civil Guards. The flea is still and small, like
the voice of conscience, but that is the only moral thing about him. In
the Peninsula I found him peculiarly unregenerate. As to these patios,
the well-to-do protect them from the open vestibule leading to the
street by gates of ornamental open iron, letting the air-currents play
through the unroofed court, and sometimes with movable screens behind
the gate. Chess-tables and coffee are carried out there in the evening,
and the music-room gives conveniently upon the cool central space.
In Sevilla, if you hear a shrill little bell tinkling in the street, do
not imagine that a bicycle is coming. One day a slight tintinnabulation
announced the approach of a funeral procession, headed by two gentlemen
wearing round caps and blue gowns, on which were sewed flaming red
hearts. One bore a small alms-basket; the other rung the bell to attract
contributions. It appears that this is the manner appointed for sundry
brothers who maintain the Caridad, a hospital for indigent old men. The
members, though pursuing their ordinary mode of life, are banded for the
support of the institution. Necessarily rich and aristocrats, it matters
not: when one of them dies, he must be buried by means of offerings
collected on the way to his grave. This Caridad, let me add, was founded
by Don Miguel de Manera, a friend of Don Juan, and a reformed rake. His
epitaph reads: "Here lie the ashes of the worst man that ever was." I
suspect a lingering vanity in that assertion, but at any rate the
tombstone tries hard _not_ to lie.
Fashionable society, after recovering from its mid-day siesta, and
before going to the theatre or ball, turns itself out for an airing on
Las Delicias--"The Delights"--an arbored road running two or three miles
along the river-side. Nowhere can you see more magnificent horses than
there. Their race was formerly crossed with the finest mettle of Barbary
studs, and their blood, carried into Kentucky through Mexico, may have
had its share in the victories of Parole, Iroquois, and Foxhall. A more
strictly popular resort is the New Plaza, where citizens attend a
concert and fireworks twice a week in summer, and keep their distressed
babies up till midnight to see the fun. They are less demonstrative than
one would expect. An American reserve hangs over them. Perfect
informality reigns; they saunter, chat, and laugh without constraint,
yet their enjoyment is taken in a languid, half-pensive way. In the
various foot-streets where carriages do not appear--the most notable of
which is the winding one called simply Sierpes, "The Serpents"--the same
quietude prevails. Lined with attractive bazar-like shops, and overhung
by "sails" drawn from roof to roof, which make them look like
telescopic booths, these streets form shady avenues down which figures
glide unobtrusively: sometimes a cigarette girl in a pale geranium
skirt, with a crimson shawl; sometimes a lady in black, with lace-draped
head; and perhaps an erroneous man in a heavy blue cloak, saving up
warmth for next winter; or a peasant re-arranging his scarlet
waist-cloth by tucking one end into his trousers, then turning round and
round till he is wound up like a watch-spring, and finally putting his
needle-pointed knife into the folds, ready for the next quarrel.
[Illustration: IN "THE SERPENT."]
Once we caught sight of two belted forms with carbines stealing across
the alley, far down, as if for a flank movement against us. Oh, horror!
they were the Civil Guards, who were always blighting us at the happiest
moment. As they did not succeed in capturing us, we believed they must
have lost themselves in one of the _calles_ that squirm through the
houses with no visible intention of ever coming out anywhere. Velveteen
wanted to go and look for their bones, thinking they had perished of
starvation, but I opportunely reflected that we might ourselves be lost
in the attempt. No wonder assassination has been frequent in these
narrow windings! Once astray in them, that would be the easiest way out.
Shall we go to the Thursday-morning fair, which begins, in order to
avoid the great heats, at 6 A.M.? Come, then; and if we are up early, we
may pass on the way through the low-walled market, gay with fruits,
flowers, vegetables, where bread from Alcalá in the exact pattern of
buttercup blossoms is sold, and where, at a particularly bloody and
ferocious stall, butchers are dispensing the meat of bulls slaughtered
at the fights. The fair is held in Fair Street. A frantic miscellany of
old iron, of clothing, crockery, mat baskets, and large green pine-cones
full of plump seeds, which, when ripened, taste like butternuts, is set
forth. Full on the pavement is spread an array of second-hand shoes--the
proverbial dead men's, perhaps--temptingly blacked. Pale cinereous
earthen vessels, all becurled with raised patterns like intelligent
wax-drippings, but exceedingly well shaped, likewise monopolize the
thoroughfare, put in peril only by random dogs, which, having quarrelled
over the offal freely thrown into the street for them, sometimes race
disreputably through the brittle ware. At apt corners old women have set
up their frying-pans under Bedouin tents, and are cooking
_calentitos_--long coils of dough browned in hot olive oil--which are
much sought as a relish for the matutinal chocolate. Omnipresent, of
course, are those water stalls that, in Sevilla especially, acquire
eminent dignity by their row of stout jars, and their complicated
cordage rigged across from one house-top to another, so as to sustain
shadowing canvas canopies. There is a great crowd, but even the fair is
comparatively quiet, like the other phases of local life.
The absence of wagon-traffic in the town creates, notwithstanding its
reposeful character, a new relative scale of noises, and there is
consequently good store of fretting attacks on the hearing in Sevilla.
With very early morning begins the deep clank of bells, under the chins
of asses that go the rounds to deliver domestic milk from their own
udders. There is no end of noise. Even in the elegant dining-room where
we ate, lottery-dealers would howl at us through the barred windows, or
a donkey outside would rasp our ears with his intolerable braying. Then
the street cries are incessant. At night the crowds chafe and jabber
till the latest hours, and after eleven the watchmen begin their drawl
of unearthly sadness, alternating with the occult and remorseless
industry of the mosquito; until, somewhere about dawn, you drop
perspiring into an oppressively tropical dream-land, with the _sereno's_
last cry ringing in your ears: "Hail, Mary, most pure! Three o'clock has
struck."
This is the weird tune to which he chants it:
[Illustration: Musical notation: _A--ve Ma--ri--a pur--is--si--ma! Las
tré--es han toc--ca--do._]
II.
An English lady, conversing with a Sevillan gentleman who had been
making some rather tall statements, asked him: "Are you telling me the
truth?"
"Madam," he replied, gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, "I am an
Andalusian!" At which the surrounding listeners, his fellow-countrymen,
broke into an appreciative laugh.
So proverbial is the want of veracity, or, to put it more genially, the
imagination, of these Southerners. Their imagination will explain also
the vogue of their brief, sometimes pathetic, yet never more than
half-expressed, scraps of song, which are sung with so much feeling
throughout the kingdom to crude barbaric airs, and loved alike by gentle
and simple. I mean the _Peteneras_ and _Malagueñas_. There are others of
the same general kind, sung to a variety of dances; but the ruling tunes
are alike--usually pitched in a minor key, and interspersed with
passionate trills, long quavers, unexpected ups and downs, which it
requires no little skill to render. I have seen gypsy singers grow
apoplectic with the long breath and volume of sound which they threw
into these eccentric melodies amid thunders of applause. It is not a
high nor a cultivated order of music, but there lurks in it something
consonant with the broad, stimulating shine of the sun, the deep red
earth, the thick, strange-flavored wine of the Peninsula; its
constellated nights, and clear daylight gleamed with flying gold from
the winnowing-field. The quirks of the melody are not unlike those of
very old English ballads, and some native composer with originality
should be able to expand their deep, bold, primitive ululations into
richer, lasting forms. The fantastic picking of the _mandurra_
accompaniment reminds me of Chinese music with which I have been
familiar. Endless preludes and interminable windings-up enclose the
minute kernel of actual song; but to both words and music is lent a
repressed touching power and suggestiveness by repeating, as is always
done, the opening bars and first words at the end, and then breaking off
in mid-strain. For instance:
"All the day I am happy,
But at evening orison
Like a millstone grows my heart.
All the day I am happy." [_Limitless Guitar Solo._]
It is like the never-ended strain of Schumann's "Warum?" The words are
always simple and few--often bald. One of the most popular pieces
amounts simply to this:
"Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo
Swordsmen are of quality,
Since when they the bulls are slaying--
O damsel of my heart!
They do it with serenity.
Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo
Swordsmen are of quality."
But such evident ardor of feeling and such wealth of voice are breathed
into these fragments that they become sufficient. The people supply from
their imagination what is barely hinted in the lines. Under their
impassive exteriors they preserve memories, associations, emotions of
burning intensity, which throng to aid their enjoyment, as soon as the
muffled strings begin to vibrate and syllables of love or sorrow are
chanted. I recalled to a young and pretty Spanish lady one line,
"Pajarito, tu que vuelas."
She flushed, fire came to her eyes, and with clasped hands she murmured,
"Oh, what a beautiful song it is!" Yet it contains only four lines. Here
is a translation:
"Bird, little bird that wheelest
Through God's fair worlds in the sky,
[Illustration: "ALL THE DAY I AM HAPPY."]
Say if thou anywhere seest
A being more sad than I.
Bird, little bird that wheelest."
Some of these little compositions are roughly humorous, and others very
grotesque, appearing to foreigners empty and ridiculous.
The following one has something of the odd imagery and clever
inconsequence of our negro improvisations:
"As I was gathering pine-cones
In the sweet pine woods of love,
My heart was cracked by a splinter
That flew from the tree above.
I'm dead: pray for me, sweethearts!"
There was one evening in Granada when we sat in a company of some two
dozen people, and one after another of the ladies took her turn in
singing to the guitar of a little girl, a musical prodigy. But they were
all outdone by Cándida, the brisk, naïve, handsome serving-girl, who was
invited in, but preferred to stand outside the grated window, near the
lemon-trees and pomegranates, looking in, with a flower in her hair, and
pouring into the room her warm contralto--that voice so common among
Spanish peasant-women--which seemed to have absorbed the clear dark of
Andalusian nights when the stars glitter like lance-points aimed at the
earth. Through the twanging of the strings we could hear the rush of
water that gurgles all about the Alhambra; and, just above the trees
that stirred in the perfumed air without, we knew the unsentinelled
walls of the ancient fortress were frowning. The most elaborate piece
was one meant to accompany a dance called the _Zapateado_, or
"kick-dance." It begins:
"Tie me, with my fiery charger,
To your window's iron lattice.
Though _he_ break loose, my fiery charger,
Me he cannot tear away;"
and then passes into rhyme:
"Much I ask of San Francisco,
Much St. Thomas I implore;
But of thee, my little brown girl,
Ah, of thee I ask much more!"
The singing went on:
"In Triana there are rogues,
And there are stars in heaven.
Four and one rods away
There lives, there lives a woman.
Flowers there are in gardens,
And beautiful girls in Sevilla."
Nevertheless, we had been glad to leave Sevilla, especially since during
our stay an epidemic was in progress, graphically called "the minute,"
from its supposed characteristic of finishing off a victim ready for the
undertaker in exactly sixty seconds after attacking him.
The inhabitants of Granada likewise seemed to be a good deal occupied in
burying themselves--a habit which became confirmed, no doubt, during the
wars and insurrections of their ancestors, and is aided to-day by bad
sanitary arrangements. We saw a dead man being carried in the old
Moorish way, with his forehead bared to the sky, a green wreath on his
head, his cold hands emerging from the shroud in their last
prayer-clasp, and quite indifferent to the pitiless sun that beat down
on them. But, perched as we were on the Alhambra Hill, high above the
baking city, such spectacles were transient specks in the world of
fascination that infolded us.
[Illustration: GRANADA UNDERTAKER.]
[Illustration: THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA.]
Granada rests in what might pass for the Happy Valley of Rasselas, a
deep stretch of thirty miles, called simply the Vega, and tilled from
end to end on a system of irrigation established by the Moslem
conquerors. Rugged mountains, bastions of a more than Cyclopean
earthwork, girdle and defend it. To penetrate them you must leave the
hot rolling lands of the west, and confront steep heights niched here
and there for creamy-hued villages or deserted castles, and sentried by
small Moorish watch-towers rising like chessmen on the highest crests.
The olive-trees spread on wide slopes of tanned earth were like thick
dots of black connected in one design, and seemed to suggest the
possible origin of Spanish lace. The shapes of the mountains, too, were
extravagant. One of the most singular, the _Peñon de los Enamorados_,
near Antequera, showed us by accident at a distance the exact profile of
George Washington, with every detail after Stuart, hewn out in mountain
size and looking directly up into the heavens from a position of supine
rigidity. Our first intimation of a near approach to Granada was a long
stretch of blanched folds showing through evening mistiness in the
southern sky, like the drapings of some celestial tabernacle, so high up
that they might have been clouds but for a certain persistent, awful
immobility that controlled them. Their spectral whiteness, detached from
the earth, hung, it is true, ten thousand feet above the sea-level; but
they were not clouds. They were the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the
great Snowy Range.
Twenty miles to the north of these frosty heights stands the Alhambra
Hill, shrouded in dark trees, and dominated by the Mountain of the Sun.
The names are significant--Snowy Range and Mountain of the Sun--for the
landscape that unrolls itself between these ridges is a mixture of
torrid glow and Alpine coldness. I stood in a hanging garden delicious
with aromatic growths, on the ramparts beside the great Lookout Tower,
the city lying like a calcareous deposit packed in the gorge of the
Darro's stream below. Across the Vega I beheld that sandy pass of the
hills through which Boabdil withdrew after his surrender--the Last Sigh
of the Moor. Fierce sunlight smote upon me, spattering the leaves like
metal in flux; but the snow-fields mantling the blue wall of the Sierra
loomed over the landscape so distinct as to seem within easy hail, and I
felt their breath in a sweet coolness that drifted by from time to time.
The other mountains were bare and golden brown. But in their midst the
mild Vega, inlaid with curves of the River Genil, receded in breadths of
alternate green orchard and mellow rye, where distant villages are
scattered "like white antelopes at pasture," says Señor Don Contreras,
the accomplished curator of the Alhambra. It was not like a dream, for
dreams are imitative; nor like reality, for that is too unstable. It was
blended of both these, with a purely ideal strand. As I looked at the
rusty red walls and abraded towers palisading the hill, the surroundings
became like some miraculous web, and these ruins, concentring the
threads, were the shattered cocoon from which it had been spun.
The Alhambra was originally a village on the height, perhaps the first
local settlement, surrounded by a wall for defensive purposes.
[Illustration: A WATER-CARRIER.]
The wall, which once united a system of thirty-seven towers, fringes the
irregular edges of the hill-top plateau, describing an enclosure like a
rude crescent lying east and west. At the west end the hill contracts to
an anvil point, and on this are grouped the works of the citadel
Alcazaba, governed by the huge square Lookout Tower. On a ridge close to
the south stand the Vermilion Towers, suspected of having been mixed up
with the Phoenicians at an early epoch, but not yet fully convicted by
the antiquarians. The intervening glade receives a steep road from the
city, and is arcaded with elms and cherries of prodigious size, sent
over as saplings by the Duke of Wellington half a century ago. There the
nightingales sing in spring-time, and in summer the boughs give perch to
other songsters. Ramps lead up to the top of the hill, and on the
northern edge of its crescent, at the brink of the Darro Valley, the
Alhambra Palace proper is lodged.