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[Illustration: “DOÑA ELENA.”]
MY SPANISH YEAR
BY
MRS. BERNHARD WHISHAW
AUTHOR (WITH BERNHARD WHISHAW) OF
“ARABIC SPAIN”
WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
_Published 1914_
INTRODUCTORY
To the foreigner visiting Spain for the first time so many things seem
topsy-turvy that, unless a philosophical spirit be cultivated, one’s
temper might suffer serious damage. But there is one way not only
to endure, but actually to enjoy the minor discomforts, absence of
consistency, and utter lack of common sense forced upon one at every
turn in this most original country; and that is to regard them all from
the standpoint of comic opera. So many people expect to find Spain
merely an enlarged edition of Bizet’s _Carmen_ that it ought not to be
difficult for them to smile when comic-operatic incidents are enacted
before them in daily life; and yet one often sees the impatient traveller
exhausting himself in furious denunciations of tough beef, bad butter,
unpunctual trains, faulty postal services, retrograde hotels, and so on
_ad infinitum_, instead of thanking his lucky stars that there is still
one country in Europe which remains much as God made it, instead of being
recast in the mould preferred by the tourist agencies.
No doubt when we get express trains flying from Irun to Madrid and from
Granada to Seville at sixty miles an hour, with a chain of cosmopolitan
hotels all along the road, those tourist agencies will be able to do far
better business. But their clients will not then travel in Spain but in
Cosmopolitania, and the last stronghold of romance left in Western Europe
will have gone the way of Switzerland and Italy, where in some towns it
is almost the exception to hear the language of the native spoken in
the streets. Thank Heaven, Spain has not yet awakened to the commercial
advantages of moulding her national characteristics into the groove of
the common-place, and her soul has not yet been cut out and thrown away
in the pursuit of filthy lucre.
Meanwhile, the traveller who follows the beaten track has really very
little to complain of, for during the last ten years great progress has
been made both in the train service and the hotel accommodation; and
when you have grumbled and slept and scolded through the eight or ten
or twelve or twenty hours’ railway journey from one provincial capital
to another, and take your place at the table d’hôte in one of the big
new hotels, you might almost imagine yourself in London or Paris or New
York. One thing, however, reminds you that you are in Spain: the anxious
solicitude of the waiters, who watch your every mouthful as if it were a
matter of personal consequence to them that you should be pleased with
your dinner, and press fresh dishes upon you if you do not eat as much as
they think you ought, assuring you that they are very excellent and that
you must keep up your strength in order to enjoy the beautiful monuments
that you are going to visit to-morrow. This interest of the _mozo_ in
his master’s client is genuine, not inspired by the anticipation of
favours to come. He feels it as a reflection upon the credit of the house
if you refuse to take every course, and finds it difficult to understand
that abstinence may mean satiety, not dissatisfaction with the viands. I
doubt if anywhere else one seems of quite so much importance in the eyes
of the establishment as in Spain, for these attentions begin with your
first meal in the hotel and are continued throughout your stay; and can
anything make you more at home in an hotel than a cordial interest in
your appetite?
If you complain of the interminable time that you have spent on the
journey, you will be met with the grave assurance that it is safer to
travel slow than fast, and that Spain has far fewer railway accidents
than England or the United States. You may reply that she has far fewer
trains, but we don’t trouble ourselves about the law of averages in
Spain, and the Spaniard solemnly assures you that nothing is gained by
the alarming rapidity of Anglo-Saxon life except more speedy arrival at
the grave.
If you dispute an hotel bill, longer than would be made out at the Ritz,
for an entertainment which it would be complimentary to describe as
mediocre, the landlord justifies his charges by explaining how much you
get for your money in these days of progress, compared with what you
lacked when life in Spain was cheaper, and after all what can a dollar or
an _esterlina_ (£) more or less matter to so great a lord as yourself,
who must evidently be a millionaire to be able to travel so far from
home merely for his own pleasure. You must also take into account, he
says, that the tourist season only extends over a couple of months in
the spring, thanks to the general ignorance abroad of the charms of the
winter climate in that particular part of Spain. And how, he asks, is a
poor man to keep his hotel open all the year round for the convenience of
the English lord in the spring, unless the English lord pays enough when
he comes to save him from bankruptcy during the other ten months of the
year? And if these arguments—in the course of which the exorbitant items
under discussion have been skilfully left out of the conversation—do not
remove your objections to an extortionate bill, only one of two courses
remains open to you. Either shake the dust of Spain off your feet and
depart to some other land where the innkeepers realise that one contented
guest will bring more money into their coffers than ten who depart in
anger; or come with me right off the beaten track, and learn to know the
real Spain, and to love, as I do, the real Spaniard.
Will he exploit the foreigner? He would rather give you the coat off his
back than take a penny from you that he has not honestly earned; and
he will do you all sorts of services with the native grace which has
created the tradition that “every Spaniard is a gentleman.” That class
of Spaniard does not frequent the large cities, nor is he to be found by
foreigners who seek him with the aid of an interpreter. Indeed, he is not
worth the interpreter’s powder and shot, for he cannot pay a commission
on purchases made by the guileless traveller through the agency of his
guide: he has nothing to sell save his honour and courtesy, and those are
not marketable commodities. So he is left undisturbed in his beautiful
mountain fastnesses or in his fertile plains, where only a select few
will take the trouble to seek him out. And long may he remain there!
But when he is sought and found by the traveller who is not content to
form his opinion of the whole country on his observations from the window
of an hotel, then indeed it becomes evident that the heart of Spain beats
strong and true beneath the froth of political passion and greed of gain
which disfigure her outward semblance; and the veil of romance woven
about her by the poet and the artist will enwrap that traveller, and he
will return to Spain again and again, until he, like the writer, finds
that into the web are woven some of his own heartstrings.
Then all the minor discomforts will become but mere matter for laughter,
with an _arrière-pensée_ of satisfaction at the barrier they set up
against the flood of cheap trippers which, but for them, might overwhelm
our Peninsula. And if sometimes we hear a note of tragedy beneath the
light chorus of our opera, it does but deepen the music, as the purple
shadows in an Andalucian street throw up the golden glow that bathes the
white-washed houses basking in the sun.
One word more. My readers may perhaps be surprised to find a “heretic” on
good terms with many ecclesiastics in Spain, for there seems to be an
impression abroad that this is a bigoted land where foreign non-Catholics
are given the cold shoulder, if nothing worse.
Of course there are many Spaniards who feel strongly on the subject of
their religion, and no doubt any one who publicly showed disrespect to
objects of worship here would have cause to regret his lack of good
manners. But so long as he behaves decently in sacred places, and
observes a certain amount of discretion in conversation, the “heretic”
need fear no discourtesy either from priests or people. Nor will he
meet with any oppressive zeal in the direction of proselytising. The
most embarrassing effort in that direction that I have known was the
gentle remark from a nun: “You are so good already that you ought to be
a little better. I pray daily that you may become a good Catholic.” And
an entertaining experience was that of a member of our family whom a
distinguished divine announced his desire to convert—
“We will begin with a game of chess,” said he, “and after that we will
discuss dogmas.”
The game of chess proved so engrossing that it lasted till bedtime, when
the divine took his leave in a hurry, forgetting all about the dogmas.
The accusation of bigotry now—whatever may formerly have been the case—is
as undeserved as many other unkind things that have been said about Spain.
“We are very much misrepresented by foreign writers,” an intelligent
young officer said to me one day; “if ever _you_ write a book about
Spain, I hope you will speak of us as you find us, so that for once we
may have a little justice from a friend.”
With this rather pathetic appeal in mind I have tried my best to describe
Spain as I have found it, and I must maintain that I have done my Spanish
friends no more than justice, even though those who do not know them
write me down a prejudiced Hispanophil.
⁂ The accents marked on the Spanish words in the text are in
most cases added merely as a guide to the pronunciation, for
those who do not know the language.
CONTENTS
PAGES
PART I
SUMMER 1-64
PART II
AUTUMN 65-149
PART III
WINTER 150-241
PART IV
SPRING 242-312
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“DOÑA ELENA” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“A SUMMER AFTERNOON IN THE PATIO” 1
THE CHURCH WHERE CARMENCITA WAS MARRIED 21
IN THE FLOUR MARKET 37
PINE CONES AND PRICKLY PEARS 43
AN ANCIENT GATEWAY 48
IN THE KEEP OF ARCOS CASTLE 65
A PREHISTORIC WEIR 87
“A SADDLE FOR FEMININITY” 97
RUSTIC LOVERS 108
A FUNERAL VESTMENT OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 117
POSED FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHER 134
THE DANCE OF THE SEISES IN SEVILLE CATHEDRAL 150
From the picture by GONZALO BILBAO. By permission of
the owner, the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Rosebery, K.G.
THE BRIDEGROOM’S DOOR 183
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY BANNER OF OUR LADY OF GRANADA 199
“THE ENGLISH ECONOMICAL KITCHEN” 216
GOING HOME FROM THE MARKET 242
A REST AT THE FORD 261
THE COLUMBUS MONUMENT 281
DRESSED FOR THE FAIR 299
[Illustration: “A SUMMER AFTERNOON IN THE PATIO.”]
MY SPANISH YEAR
PART I.—SUMMER
CHAPTER I
Life in the patio—Locked doors and lovers—The uses of the
grated gate—Courting under difficulties: the keyhole and the
crack—Manolo and Carmencita, a romance in real life.
The great event to which the whole creation moves in the eyes of a
Spanish señorita—not being a resident in Madrid—is the annual fair in the
capital town of her province. This generally takes place in the spring,
and therefore, for her, the spring is the end and not the beginning of
the year, looked forward to with increasing excitement through autumn and
winter, while to that young lady summer is but the beginning of the long
year which has to be lived through until spring and LA FERIA, in capital
letters, comes round again.
I, like the Spanish señorita, will begin my Spanish year with the summer,
if not exactly for the same reason, for one akin to it. The great heat
of summer, with its dust, mosquitoes, and flies, is the most trying time
in all the twelve months in this country, as the spring is the most
enjoyable; and wise people keep the best to the last.
Let it not be supposed, however, that summer in Spain has no
compensations. They are many and various, and not the least among them is
the life of the patio, which begins in June and ends in September.
The patio is always spoken of as one of the peculiar charms of southern
Spain, but how many of my readers, who have not visited the country, know
exactly what it is? I myself, before I came here, had a vague idea that
it was something in the nature of a yard, and I remember that on seeing
a huge _corral_ for cattle, attached to a farmhouse near Tarifa and so
large as to be visible from the steamer as we approached Gibraltar, I
asked whether that was a patio!
The Andalucian house of to-day is in essentials the direct descendant of
the house built by the Greeks who colonised Andalucia, or Tartessus, as
they called it, some six or seven centuries B.C. The _pylon_, now called
the _zaguan_, is the vestibule leading from the street door direct into
the _peristyle_, the open courtyard round which the house is built, now
known as the _patio_. In the daytime the _zaguan_ is open to the street,
but entrance to the patio is barred by a large iron grille, which can
only be opened from within. The Romans continued the Greek form of
house, with slight structural modifications, and added the _solarium_,
an open gallery or arcade intended for basking in the sun. This feature
is common in the older houses of Andalucia to-day, although those of
more modern construction lack it, and the inmates when they wish to sun
themselves go up to the _azotea_, the flat brick roof on which the family
washing is usually hung out to dry. The names _azotea_ and _zaguan_
are both Arabic, showing, were demonstration needed, that neither the
Visigoths nor the Arabs made any essential alterations in the structure
of the houses they found when they respectively conquered Andalucia.
The patio is a central court off which numerous rooms open, always
including the summer dining-room and the summer kitchen, their winter
counterparts being on the floor above. There is also a _sala_ or
reception-room, and in old houses this may have beautifully carved
Arabic roof-beams, filled in with fine fifteenth- or sixteenth-century
lustre tiles: for while the upper stories are frequently modernised
and sometimes brought quite up to date in the matter of bathrooms,
ample windows, and effective ventilation, the patio with the dark rooms
surrounding it is very seldom reconstructed. It is only used as a refuge
from the summer heat, and the architects of to-day wisely refrain from
interfering with the shadowy lights and cool refreshing temperature which
make life enjoyable even when the thermometer outside stands at 110 or
more in the shade.
Great doors—sometimes of mahogany, cedar, or lignum-vitæ four inches
thick, studded with large brass or iron nails, and adorned with corner
pieces, lock, key, and knockers, all richly wrought to match—shut off
the _zaguan_ from the street. All day long these stand open, as though
inviting the passer-by to step in and admire the patio within, the
whole of which can be seen through the _cancela_ or iron grille already
mentioned: but at night they are closed and secured with a huge iron
bolt, often two or three feet long. The noise made by the closing of
these doors at night, and the shrieks of the great bolts, which are never
by any chance oiled, can be heard one after the other all along the
street, and are liable to interfere a good deal with the beauty sleep of
the stranger. But, unless there is a _velada_ or a _tertulia_ going on,
the noise is all over by 11 p.m. or earlier, because custom requires that
respectable houses should present blank faces to the moonbeams a full
hour before midnight.
If you ask how this can be when every one knows that Spanish gentlemen
make a practice of turning night into day at their cafés and clubs, I
must call your attention to the _postigo_, a little low wicket opening in
one of the great doors. The stern father, forgetful of his own youthful
escapades, or determined that his son shall not follow in his footsteps,
may order the door to be locked at eleven every night; but there is
always a corruptible servant or a tender-hearted sister on the watch to
lift the latch of the _postigo_ and screen the young scapegrace from the
paternal ire.
We may take it for granted that when the sister connives at her brother’s
late hours, it is not to enable him to gamble at his club or drink more
than is good for him at the café. It must be a love affair that enlists
pretty Amparo’s sympathies and keeps her out of her bed to all hours. She
has probably been listening to the professions of devotion of her own
forbidden lover until long after midnight, and thus all her sympathies
are with Manolo, who also has lost his heart without permission from the
parents.
In these cases the soft nothings have to be breathed between the bars
of the stout iron gratings which are placed outside every ground-floor
window, not only as a precaution against malefactors, but, as a young
Spaniard once told me, “to keep the girls in and the boys out.” To
English ideas this seems a poor enough way to make love, but in some
country towns even the grating is not considered sufficient protection
for the youth and beauty within, and I know of one case in which the
grandfather, a blue-blooded old aristocrat and a good deal of a martinet,
had wire netting fixed all over the ground-floor windows to prevent his
granddaughters being kissed between the bars! Such are the difficulties
attendant on _pelando la pava_ (plucking the turkey) or _comiendo hierro_
(eating iron), as these grating courtships are called.
In old houses, no matter how large, it is not unusual to see only a
single window, with its inevitable grating, on the ground floor of the
street front—a survival of the Oriental idea of the seclusion of women,
for down to the sixteenth century, in southern Spain, no windows at all
opened on to the street. This one window, which generally lights the
porter’s lodge, will be appropriated by the daughter of the house if
she encourages a secret admirer. The servants are always on the side of
romance, and will not hesitate to aid the lovers by every means in their
power, so the old porter, who is supposed by his mistress to see that no
illicit interviews go on after dark, finds no difficulty in taking a nap
in his rocking-chair in the patio, while _la niña_, whom he has known and
spoilt from her cradle, sits at his window and listens to the passionate
whispers of her admirer in the street.
Meanwhile the maid-servants have their own sweethearts to attend to,
and, failing a second window, it might seem difficult to get into
communication, for the daughters of the respectable poor are as strictly
chaperoned as the señoritas, and a girl would lose her character if she
had an “evening out,” unless under the wing of her mother or some female
friend of mature years. But love laughs at locksmiths, and a friend of
mine told me how he learnt by personal experience the way in which the
courting is managed in such cases, after the street door is closed.
He was going home along the main street of the country town in which
his father lived. The night was dark and the street lamps few and dim,
and he stumbled over something soft lying along the pavement in front
of the door of a large house. A sibilant whispering relieved his first
fear that an assassin’s knife had been at work. It was a young man lying
full length on the ground, with his lips at the crack under the door,
talking to his sweetheart, who lay on the floor inside, while another
maid-servant and her lover had possession of the keyhole, and the
señorita in the grated window modestly pulled the curtain to hide herself
from my friend’s glance when she heard his footsteps approach.
These be the amenities of summer. In winter fewer lovers are to be seen
about the streets, because bad colds and stiff necks are apt to be caught
by young men—even though wrapped in the voluminous cloak so dear to
romance—who stand for many hours out of doors “eating iron” with their
feet in a puddle, staring up at the beloved in the balcony of the first
floor whereon she resides from October to June. Indeed, I know of one
love affair that was broken off, never to be renewed, because the girl
took offence at the prolonged absence of her admirer, who, poor fellow,
was in bed with influenza and unable to get the sad intelligence conveyed
to his goddess at her window.
In this case the mother’s opposition had reached an acute stage, and the
love-sick Manolo’s explanation fell into the wrong hands. Intimation was
sent, as from Carmencita, that her legitimate fiancé was offended by
Manolo’s attentions, and that they were therefore unwelcome: and as the
unfortunate youth on his sick-bed had no means of getting into direct
communication with his charmer, he had to sigh with such patience as he
might until the weather improved and he could return to the window bars,
and demand an explanation of that cruel message. Meanwhile Carmencita was
told that Manolo’s absence was due to the attractions of a new _novia_:
in which, seeing that these loves of the grating are taken up and dropped
as easily as a travelling acquaintance, there was nothing inherently
improbable. So she wept profusely at his supposed inconstancy, and when
she learnt the truth adopted the last resource open to the heart-broken
señorita—hysterics, and threats to refuse food (a mode of coercing the
authorities in vogue among revolting daughters here long before it was
adopted by the suffragettes), and to fling herself from the _azotea_ into
the patio below, unless she were allowed to write to Manolo and assure
him of her undying devotion.
But alas! Manolo, although of good family, had no money and no prospects,
whereas the distinguished Señor Conde de las Patillas Blancas,[1]
although he had begun life as an assistant in a grocer’s shop, had gone
to Cuba before the war with America had destroyed that mine of riches
for Spaniards who knew how to make their account out of it, and having
returned wealthy had revived a title to which he may or may not have had
a legal claim. Thus he was now in every respect a most desirable _parti_
for the fair Carmencita.
So Manolo rose from his bed of sickness to read in the local paper that
“the aristocratic and affluent Señor Conde de las Patillas Blancas
had asked the hand of the exquisitely beautiful young Señorita
Carmen Perez y Dominguez, daughter of the Marquises[2] of Campos
Abandonados”—literally “deserted fields,” but perhaps best paraphrased
into the familiar English title of Bareacres.
As Manolo well knew, this was the end. For not only is the mother in
Spain absolute mistress in the matter of her daughter’s marriage, but
Carmencita herself, once she had shed the conventional tears over the
loss of her lover, was perfectly well aware on which side her bread was
buttered. Both these young people were intimate friends of mine, and if I
had consented to act as go-between when I went to congratulate Carmencita
on her engagement, and incidentally provoked a torrent of tears by
remarking on Manolo’s fortunate recovery, it is just possible that she
might have made a fresh effort to get her own way. But it is the part
of wisdom not to meddle with Spanish love affairs, which are seldom or
never quite what they seem, and in her inconstant little heart Carmencita
certainly thanked me for refusing to carry any messages. As for Manolo,
he consoled himself by marrying an heiress a year or so after, and
disappears from this veracious history.
CHAPTER II
Social life in a mountain town—Moslem traditions—The etiquette
of betrothal—Wedding presents—The trousseau—Little tragedies of
Spain—Dramatic Carmencita—Compensations for the Countess.
If I were to describe the scene of the wedding where it actually took
place, it is just possible that some of those concerned, if they happened
to see this book, might recognise themselves. I will therefore transfer
it to the picturesque mountain town of Ronda, which, although frequented
by tourists, and boasting two really comfortable hotels, still preserves
some peculiar local customs.
Of these perhaps the most noticeable is the Moslem tradition of the
separation of the sexes. The numerous travellers, both native and
foreign, who spend a day in the town on their way to or from Algeciras in
the spring or autumn, have as yet made no impression on the conservatism
of the Rondeños, and one has only to stroll up and down the Paseo de la
Merced on a Sunday night in summer to see that social customs in Ronda
are quite unaffected by contact with the outer world.
The heat of the day being over, and a cool west wind rustling the leaves
of the avenues of planes, the purple peak of La Liba, which forms the
_clou_ of a charming picture, is suddenly blotted out as the electric
light is switched on. In the matter of street lighting Spain is by no
means behind the age. The Spanish love for a blaze of light out of doors
probably accounts for the strides made by the electric lighting industry
during the last few years. It is true that often even well-to-do people
are still content to illuminate their houses with a cheap paraffin lamp,
or even with a _candil_ of brass with its tiny wick fed with olive oil.
But once these lovers of display realised that a few arc lamps hung
along the Paseo turned night into day, and that electricity would enable
the gilded youth to display his new straw hat of the English shape, his
beautiful red tie, and his shiny brown boots at least as well at midnight
as at noon, the towns found money for street lighting without apparent
difficulty, and now there is hardly a village, even in the plains where
there is no water-power available, that is not lit by electricity. I have
seen electric lamps at every street corner in a place to which there is
no means of access save a mule track, and no contact with the outer world
save a visit from the postman on his donkey two or three times a week, if
there happen to be any letters to deliver.
Ronda with its wonderful Tajo, through which the Guadalevin rushes in a
torrent during the winter rains, was provided with electric light when
I first visited it ten or eleven years ago. At that time the power used
to fail ignominiously in the summer, at which season all the water of
the shrunken river has to be turned into the irrigation channels, as
has been the legal right of the numerous market gardeners in the valley
from Arabic times. Now steam has been brought in to supplement the
water-power, and the lighting of the principal hotels, and above all of
the Paseo, is as brilliant as any one can desire.
In summer it is too hot to stroll about with comfort in the daytime, and
the youth of both sexes had little opportunity of contemplating each
other’s charms at that season until artificial light came to the rescue.
Now, especially on a Sunday night, the whole town crowds into the Paseo,
where under powerful arc lights the young people can admire each other to
their hearts’ content.
One of the curious customs of the place is that all the pretty girls
march up and down, from two to six or seven together, while their portly
mothers and aunts sit and fan themselves on the stone benches and chairs
ranged along both sides of the walk. The young men also march up and
down, also in groups, but carefully confining themselves to either
side of the broad space in the centre occupied by the girls. Each town
in Spain is socially a law to itself, and it seems to be contrary to
Ronda etiquette for the men to walk with the girls under any condition
whatever, although in other places the presence of a duenna makes it
quite correct.
Engaged couples may enter the Paseo together (of course properly
chaperoned) but they must not join in the promenade. They may only sit
under the trees with the mother or the aunt, and console themselves for
their enforced retirement by squeezing each other’s hands under cover of
the shadows cast by the overhanging boughs. But if the girl happens to
come late, her fiancé gets a chance to show himself. Then he may walk
up and down as much as he pleases in the midst of the swarm of girls,
pretending to be looking for his sweetheart. I watched Carmencita’s
elderly lover at this performance one Sunday night, and every time he got
well into the focus of one of the arc lamps he stopped short with the
light full on him, glancing this way and that with assumed anxiety as
to the whereabouts of the lady, although he knew, and she knew, and all
their friends and acquaintances knew, that his charmer would not appear
till the band began to play at ten o’clock.
Carmencita’s wedding was fixed for July, partly because the summer,
when the boys are home from school and university, is the gayest time
here, but mainly because propriety demands that the religious ceremony
shall take place within quite a few weeks of that known as “asking for
the hand”—in other words, the signing of the marriage contract. The
_noviazgo_, which is not strictly speaking an engagement, but rather a
protracted courtship which may or may not end in a wedding, sometimes
goes on for years and is then broken off, without any blame attaching
to the jilt, be he male or female. It is quite an understood thing that
there is no moral obligation to marry as long as the hand of the lady has
not been formally “asked.” But once this has been done, not by the lover
but by some relative of the elder generation, the marriage is regarded
as the necessary consequence, and a man or woman who declined to fulfil
the engagement after that ceremony had been gone through would be _mal
mirado_—badly looked at—which is more or less equivalent to being sent to
Coventry.
So when I heard that Carmen was finally engaged I knew it would not be
long before I received an invitation to the wedding, which came in due
course, printed in silver on a highly glazed card. It was not strictly
speaking an invitation at all, for it merely set out at full length
the names and titles of the bride and bridegroom and their parents
(and Spanish names and titles are as long as a Presbyterian sermon),
and announced the day and hour of the wedding without “requesting the
pleasure of my company.” The opposite side of the card contained an
identical announcement on the part of the bridegroom.
On the day before the wedding I went, by Carmencita’s special request, to
see her trousseau, which to the Andalucian bride is even more exciting
than the wedding presents.
She received me in a dainty _bata_, a garment which is a cross between a
tea-gown and a pinafore, with her hair loose and falling below her waist,
and her eyes were so bright and her laugh so gay that I felt sure she was
as contented as were her parents with the affluent future before her. She
took me to the winter reception-rooms upstairs, which looked as if they
were prepared for a sale of work. On a number of tables and chairs were
displayed the presents—innumerable sofa cushions, embroidered night-dress
cases, crocheted table-covers, antimacassars, lace d’oyleys, and so
forth; with the more solid offerings of glass, china and plate from older
relatives half lost to sight among the hand-made gifts from Carmencita’s
schoolfellows and girl friends.
But the presents were completely eclipsed by the far more important
personal outfit of the little bride. Trestle tables filled the middle
of the long room from end to end, and looked something like reefs under
the froth of breaking waves, so covered were they with house and table
linen, towels and side-cloths edged with wonderfully complicated _fleco
morisco_ (“Arabic fringe”), and a fluff and foam of personal wear of fine
lawn, lace, and muslin enough to last a lifetime, all made by Carmencita
and her sisters and her friends, and all exquisitely embroidered with her
initials in an endless variety of interlacing monograms. The wealthiest
English or American bride might be proud to wear such lingerie as I saw
there.
As soon as her tiny hands can hold a needle, the Spanish señorita is
taught by the nuns at her school to sew in this dainty fashion, and
from her earliest childhood she devotes the fruits of her labours to
furnishing her trousseau; for here the bride brings all the house linen
as part of her dowry, and long before she is old enough to have a lover
her careful mother will provide the huge quantities of fine linen and
lace, and the pounds of embroidery silk and cotton which are required for
the proper plenishing of one of those great carved chests in which the
daughters of the house have stored their wedding outfits for centuries
past.
If the daughter passes out of her teens without being married the chest
will be full long before it is required, and indeed sometimes it is never
needed at all; for unless a girl is rich, or of distinguished family, or,
if poor, remarkably beautiful, it is quite likely that no one will ever
ask for her hand.
And sometimes poverty descends on the family, and the daughters, orphaned
and penniless when already past their youth and unable to earn any sort
of a living, are reduced to selling one by one all the produce of so
many years of industry to satisfy the claims of hunger, or, if the old
house has been sold, to pay the rent of some wretched little room which
in their prosperous days they would hardly have given to a maid-servant.
I have witnessed pathetic scenes when ladies of gentle birth have come
to me in the dusk of evening to ask if I will buy some dainty embroidery
or delicate pillow lace “to help a friend who has lost her money.” And
to the end they will try to salve their hurt pride by keeping up this
transparent fiction, holding the bedspread or pillow-case upside down, in
the hope that until they have left with the money in their pockets I may
not notice that the initials worked on it are their own.[3]
But these are the little tragedies that lie beneath the surface, and we
must not dwell on them, for we have not done yet with the trousseau of
our Carmencita.
She was only seventeen when her fate was decided, so her chest was not
quite full; but fortunately there were enough nearly finished sheets and
pillow-cases and so forth in those of her younger sisters to supply all
deficiencies; and every afternoon through the weeks before the wedding
the three little _marquesitas_ and their girl friends had sat together
in their cool patio under the orange and palm trees in the shade of the
heavy canvas awning, stitching away for dear life, amid an incessant
prattle about clothes and lovers, and a continual munching of chocolates
flavoured with cinnamon.
Space for the unknown bridegroom’s initials had as usual been left on
all the house linen when it was made, but in this case only the Count’s
coronet had to be worked, and a heavy strain on girlish invention was
thus avoided, for there is not much variety about a coronet, while it
takes a good deal of imagination to vary an initial several dozen times.
Oddly enough, my admiration of some beautiful stitching in this heraldic
ornament seemed to upset Carmencita’s equanimity, and in an instant her
sunny smile and gay chatter turned into a tempest of sobs and tears.
“You are cruel, barbarous, Doña Elena, to remind me of all I am losing!
How can you dream that I am consoled by being a rich Countess for the
loss of the wealth of love lavished upon me by my adored Manolo? I am
a martyr, a victim to the ambition of my parents! Even now at the last
moment I think I shall declare that my heart is Manolo’s and I will never
marry any but him! _Madre mia de mi alma!_ how terrible is this life!
Better that I had flung myself from the roof, as I wanted to do when they
forbade me to see my Manolo: then I should have been spared this torment,
this broken heart which will end by dragging me into the grave!”
I was pretty sure that the theatrical outburst was provoked by a more or
less conscious desire to play up to the situation and to be consistent
to the last: for Carmencita, as I have hinted, had already made me her
confidante, and Spaniards are born actors. She would feel better all her
life for having dramatically rounded off the play to her audience of one,
and I would not spoil the climax by any lack of sympathy.
“True, true, my child,” I answered, “you are indeed a martyr, but it is
to duty. Think of the season in Madrid that you will be able to share
with your sisters—the theatres, the receptions, the dances! With your
birth and the Count’s wealth you will certainly be received at Court,
and what higher destiny could be offered to you than to take Pura and
Dolores away from this dreary village into all the delights of the
capital? Have courage, my noble girl, and crush the dictates of your
heart for their sake, and, believe me, happiness will be yours.”
“True, Doña Elena; how beautiful an ideal you put before me! And I
hear that Manolo has gone away and will not be back for six months, so
what should I gain by refusing to marry the Count? And it would make a
terrible scandal. And then, have you seen my wedding dress? It is too
lovely for words! Do you know, it has a train two yards long! Cesar
insisted; he says I am so little I must have a train to give me presence.
I have never worn a long dress in my life, and I am so afraid I shall
stumble over it. How dreadful if I made myself ridiculous in the church,
before all Ronda! Doña Elena, did you have a train two yards long to your
wedding dress, and did you find it difficult to manage?”
The melodrama was over, Carmencita was once more all smiles and
merriment, and my suggestion that she should put the wedding dress on
and practise walking up and down the patio in it for my benefit sent her
and all her companions into screams of laughter. She had made her little
oblation to the god of love, and now was ready to enjoy to the full the
material fruits of her sacrifice.
She made me promise that I would come to her house and accompany
the wedding party to the church, which is only a few yards from the
ancestral home of the Campos Abandonados. I told her she had better let
me efface myself in the back of the church, because I had no wedding
garment in my suit-case and should do the party no credit.
“Don’t be absurd,” she retorted, kissing me affectionately. “You look
like a Duchess with a black mantilla over your white hair, and if you
haven’t got yours here, Mamma shall find one for you.”
Who could resist the pretty creature? And she meant every word of it, at
any rate while she was speaking. But she really was sincere in her desire
that I should be there as an intimate friend, not a mere acquaintance,
and when I arrived shortly before two o’clock on the eventful afternoon I
found little ten-year-old Lola, otherwise Dolores, waiting for me at the
door, having been ordered by the bride to see that I was taken special
care of, “because being a foreigner I might not know exactly where to go,
and thus might fail to enjoy myself.”
Such consideration really surprised me. Carmen might well have been
excused for forgetting, on this great day of her life, that one of her
guests was a foreigner; yet she had not only planned for my pleasure,
but, as I found, had asked more than one of her old friends to look out
for me and see that I was placed where I could have a good view of the
ceremony before the side altar of the Virgen del Carmen, at which she had
worshipped throughout her short life.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH WHERE CARMENCITA WAS MARRIED.]
CHAPTER III
The wedding—Our Lady of the Carmen: her lady-in-waiting—The
ancestral house of the Campos Abandonados—The kissing habit in
Spain—Muscatel and Manzanilla—Arabic sweetmeats—King Alfonso
and the convent _yemas_—The bride’s dance—Mantillas and a
hat—Good-bye to Carmencita.
This image of the Virgin of the Carmen has no particular artistic merit,
but Carmencita was promoted to being her “lady-in-waiting” when she left
school, and had taken great pride in keeping “her” Virgin’s wardrobe in
perfect order; and to-day she had gone very early to Mass and had dressed
the image, for the last time, in the festival robe of eighteenth-century
brocade and the tulle veil she had herself embroidered to present to her
Virgin on her first communion. She had also filled the silver vases with
the tall stiff bouquets which are so much admired here, and had offered
quite a number of gilded wax candles for a blessing on her marriage.
And now she stood before the altar—her own altar—with her first long
dress trailing behind her (she had not stumbled over it, but had made a
most dignified entrance) and placed her helpless-looking little white
hand in that of the stout, common-place man, over thirty years her
senior, whose word was henceforth to be her law (for a married woman
in Spain has practically no civil rights), and who had already made it
evident that he would be a jealous husband. It may, however, be remarked
that marital jealousy is regarded by many Spanish wives as rather a
compliment than otherwise, as showing that their husbands think them
worth being jealous of.
The ceremony was soon over, and while the bride and bridegroom, the
bride’s parents and godparents, and her brothers and next sister, went
into the sacristy with the priest to sign and witness the register,
little Lola slipped her hand into mine.
“Carmencita told me to take you to our house now,” she said. “I am too
little to witness for her, and she was afraid you would go away, and she
wants you to see her dance in her wedding dress before she leaves with
Cesar.”
She led me out of the church and along the badly paved street, which was
lined with spectators anxious to see the new Countess whom they had known
from a baby.
“There are only two carriages,” said Lola, “mamma’s and Cesar’s. Can
you believe it? Carmencita has to come home all alone with Cesar in his
carriage! She cried last night, and so did Pura and I, we all cried
together. Fancy having to be left all alone with that horrid old man! Do
you know, she is afraid he will kiss her, and his ugly blue nose will
disarrange her hair. That is the only thing she is afraid of—being alone
with him.”
A Spanish girl is never, under any circumstances, left alone with her
fiancé, until she is actually married to him. There is always a mother,
or an aunt, or some other female relative present to superintend the
love-making. Small wonder that stolen interviews at the grating, with
no listeners but the moon, have their charm. And perhaps the happiest
marriages are those which come to pass, sometimes after years of parental
opposition, between lovers whose courtship began thus. They at least have
a chance of getting to know each other, free from the restraint of the
chaperone whose attentive ear makes all real confidence impossible.
The house of the Campos Abandonados in Ronda is one of the most perfect
examples of its kind in Spain. To the right of the spacious _zaguan_,
as large as many a patio, are the stables, empty now, save for the
Marchioness’s mules. The sixteen mangers are pure Arabic work, built
into the wall, with a cusped arch over each. Passing these we get to the
“modern” part of the house, which was renovated and “restored” in the
prosperous sixteenth century, when gold poured into Spain from her new
colonies across the Atlantic. Beyond this patio, the walls of which are
covered with roses, jessamine, and other creepers planted in the ground,
we get a glimpse of the inner one, cool and shady under its white awning.
This is the summer sitting-room, furnished with easy-chairs and lounges
all gay with bright calico covers, tables with work-baskets, photographs,
and knick-knacks, and the other trifles which ladies of gentle birth all
the world over collect about them, books and newspapers only excepted,
for it is a rare thing to see anything to read in a Spanish lady’s
sitting-room.
This inner patio is all just as it was when the Arabs ruled in Ronda:
columns, capitals, carved beams, round arches—nothing has been altered
since the conquest of the old town by the Catholic kings. In the
mountains it is the fashion to paint every brick within reach with a
solution of red ochre, and the maids, in their desire to add a touch of
extra glory to the place for the wedding, had painted the arches as well
as the brick floors. On one side of the arch nearest the staircase is
a stone roughly carved and springing from a base very much older than
the Arab invasion, and this was left of its own yellow stone colour, so
that its extreme age was apparent. For this is one of those Græco-Roman
houses of which I have spoken, and each of the successive races who
have inhabited it used the remains of their predecessors’ building and
carving when they in their turn added to it. There was a third patio
beyond this, from which one looked sheer down into the ravine 500 feet
below, past arched openings giving light and air to subterranean chambers
under the house, which are often said to be prison cells, but are in fact
_mazmorras_ for the storage of corn, wine, and oil. Indeed, there still
exist in one of these cellars, half built, half cut out of the rock, a
number of enormous oil-jars, quite large enough for the Forty Thieves to
hide in.
When I reached the house with Lola I found the inner patio transformed.
Everything movable had been taken away, and the arcades on all four
sides had been filled with chairs: the piano had been pushed to one side,
the whole centre of the court was bare, and the blind organist of one
of the churches, a couple of guitarists and a man with a _bandurria_ (a
tenor guitar) were busy tuning up, to the accompaniment of the shrill
whistling of half a dozen canaries and the excited screams of the
Marchioness’s pet parrot.
Two great seventeenth-century mirrors in handsome carved frames painted
red and gold had been brought downstairs and hung on two pillars opposite
each other, and Lola made straight for one of these the moment we came
in, to see, she said, if they reflected properly, but really to study her
own appearance.
“Carmencita was determined to have them brought down,” she told me:
“_Papaito_ [diminutive of Papa] objected because he says they are so old
that the frames might get broken, and they have never been moved since
they were made; but Carmen said she _must_ see what she looked like,
dancing _seguidillas_ in her satin train, and Mamma said of course she
should have what she wanted, now that she had been so good and obedient
about marrying the Conde. _Ay de mi de mi alma!_ I wonder what my husband
will be like when _my_ turn comes! I do hope he won’t be quite so old and
ugly as Cesar.”
Her further confidences were cut short by the arrival of her father and
mother in their ancient family coach, with leather curtains in place of
windows, drawn by two great black mules whose bells jingled so loudly and
the brass of whose harness was so bright as almost to hide the deplorable
state of the leather. The portly Marchioness had barely time to recover
her breath after the exertion of getting out, and to take up her post
of honour in the patio, before the bride and bridegroom appeared,
he almost as fat and short-winded as his mother-in-law, she looking
extremely pretty with a flush on her olive cheeks and her usually sombre
heavy-lidded eyes alight with excitement and pleasure at the openly
expressed admiration of the crowd all along the road from the church.
The instant they came in the whole place burst into life, for every
corner was invaded by the number of guests who had been invited and
the still greater number of those who had not. The well-to-do friends
and relations were followed by the poor ones, then came the household
servants, old and young, with their friends and relations, and then
everybody, without distinction, who wanted to see the bride and wish her
joy. And as these last seemed to be half the town, for a short time we
were packed like sardines, while the new little Condesa, standing at her
mother’s side, was receiving resounding kisses on both cheeks from every
woman, child, and old man in the crowd, the young men being apparently
the only ones who might not claim the privilege.
The amount of kissing done in Spain is extraordinary. Children as a
matter of course put up their faces to the merest stranger who speaks
to them, middle-aged ladies on notoriously bad terms would think it a
grave breach of courtesy not to kiss loudly on meeting and parting in an
afternoon call, young girls embrace effusively in the most public places,
fathers sit with their babies on their knees, mumbling their fat little
hands by the hour together, and all the servants expect to be kissed by
the ladies of the family when they start on or return from a journey—a
most embarrassing custom if the mistress is an Englishwoman. More than
once I have been in a shop when a woman has come in and put her baby on
the counter, whereupon the shopman has left me to go and kiss the child,
whom he probably had never seen before. Strangers will often stop short
before a nice-looking child, and exclaim “_Qué mono!_” (what a pretty
little thing) and bestow on it a couple of kisses that can be heard all
down the street. Of late an attempt has been made in Madrid, at the
instigation of the Queen, to stop this promiscuous kissing, and for one
season at least it was the fashion to hang a label round the babies’
necks when out walking, on which was written, “Please don’t kiss me.” But
there is no diminution of embraces outside of the capital.
As soon as every claimant to the cheeks of Carmencita had been satisfied,
the uninvited guests went away almost as suddenly as they had come in,
and the rest of the gathering moved on into the inner court, and turned
their attention to tobacco, wine, and sweet cakes. The sons of the house
and their friends carried round a tray of glasses in one hand and a
bottle of Malaga, Manzanilla, or Muscatel in the other, and each guest
was expected to empty his glass at once and replace it on the tray for
the use of his neighbour. Then came the bride’s sisters and their friends
with trays full of sweetmeats and pastry made of almond paste, cocoa-nut
paste, chocolate, custard with a variety of flavourings, and other sweets
of Arabic origin, with untranslatable names, the recipes for making
which are carefully preserved in a few convents, whose inmates sometimes
have little left to live on save what they can earn by the sale of their
cakes. Among these there is a popular kind called _yemas_, because
made from the yolks of eggs (_yemas_). They look like the yolk of a
hard-boiled egg, and are covered with transparent caramel of a surprising
stickiness.
And here I cannot refrain from digressing to tell a little tale about
King Alfonso.
The first time that he and the Queen came to Seville was when their first
baby, the little Prince of Asturias, was a few months old. The King,
whose active habits and disregard of ceremony are well known, went out
on the morning after their arrival for a walk through what is called
the “Moorish” quarter of the old town, a maze of narrow streets little
visited by sight-seers. Here he stopped at a certain convent famous for
its sweets, and asked the “mother” who opened the little grille in the
street door for “a packet of _yemas_ for his wife and child.” The good
nun hesitated: she had not the remotest idea who her customer was, and
the Mother Superior, she knew, had set aside all the best of the last
batch to send as an offering to the baby Heir to the Throne.
“Pardon me, Señor,” she stammered, divided between her desire not to lose
a possible peseta and the difficulty of reconciling a refusal with her
natural courtesy; “I fear—to-day—it is impossible—we—we,” and then, with
a brilliant inspiration, “we do not sell to foreigners.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the King, “I am a Spaniard by birth and
education, and my present address is the Alcazar of Seville.”
The conclusion of the purchase may be left to the imagination.
I have never been able to manage more than two of these luscious sweets
at a time, and little Lola became quite distressed when her sixth
invitation to eat more and still more of the sugary delicacies proved
unavailing.
“I know what you will like,” she said at last, “I am sure you will like
that, for our North American friend[4] said it was the best thing in
Ronda. It is time to hand those trays now, so I will run and get mine for
you.”
And the next moment Lola was at my side again, pressing upon me slices of
raw smoked ham, to be offered and eaten with the fingers, just as is done
with dainties at wedding parties in Constantinople and Beyrout to-day.
Undoubtedly the Andalucian acorn-fed hams are excellent, but it was
rather a shock to have to start upon ham, and raw ham at that, when one
had already eaten too many sweetmeats.
“Don’t you like _ham_?” said poor Lola, her mouth drooping with
disappointment. And then a brilliant idea struck her. She dumped her tray
down on a vacant chair and ran off to the kitchen, returning in triumph
with half of one of those iron-hard rolls known as _roscas_. This she
thrust into my hand and planted a slice of ham on the top of it, saying
with a sigh of relief—
“I know that is what you want, for the North American lady never would
eat ham without bread. I _am_ so glad I thought of it, because only a
few minutes ago Carmencita told me to be sure and get you everything you
like until she has time to come and talk to you. But now we are going to
dance, so she won’t have any time to spare yet.”
To eat raw ham with one’s fingers, as all the ladies round me were
doing quite simply and naturally—throwing the fragments that remained
on the floor under their chairs—may seem peculiar to our notions of
table etiquette; but nobody would laugh at these “country manners” who
saw, as I did, the innate courtesy that lay beneath. That the bride
at a fashionable wedding should have told off one of her sisters to
show special attention to an elderly lady of no particular importance,
simply and solely because “being a foreigner she might feel strange,”
illustrates the traditional courtesy of well-bred Spaniards. And perhaps
this funny little incident will explain to some of my readers why I love
the real Spain and the real unconventionalised Spaniard.
Now the piano, the guitars, and the bandurria struck up the
_seguidillas_, whereupon Carmen and her sister Pura at once stood up to
dance. The object of the two mirrors became apparent, for at every turn
of the dance the bride was able to see herself in a fresh attitude, and
her childlike delight in the folds of her long train, as she watched it
sweeping after and around her, was a pretty sight. She had the reputation
of being the best dancer in her native town, and loud cries of _Muy bien_
and _Olé_ greeted the conclusion of the performance.
All these dances consist of what are called _coplas_ (couplets), because
the movements of the dance were originally interludes in the singing
of verses, often traditional, among which extempore references to the
happenings of the moment are introduced. Thus when the girls dance
without any singing, a series of movements follow in sequence, lasting
twenty minutes or more, according to the number of _coplas_ that they
may perform. To the uninitiated all the dances, and still more all the
_coplas_, seem to be pretty much alike, when danced by girls only. But
when one sees these dances performed professionally by a man and a woman
together, one realises that every step, every turn of the head, and every
movement of the body and arms, has had its origin in a drama of passion,
of coquetry, or of courtship. One also realises why it is not permissible
for youths and girls to dance them together, save in the intimacy of a
family gathering, and why even then the man must, so to speak, only
play at taking part, snapping his fingers in response to the rattle of
the castanets as the girl waves them over his head, and holding himself
rigidly upright while his partner sways and bends as she whirls before
and round him.
The whole thing is essentially Oriental, and it needs only the glance of
an eye or the turn of a hand to convert the graceful movements of ladies
in a drawing-room into an exposition of sensuality.
One understands therefore why Spanish ladies are so careful how they
allow their daughters to dance even the apparently harmless _seguidillas_
with men instead of girls for their partners.
The usual form of concerted performance is for the men to sing the
_coplas_ and the girls to dance between each of them; and when Carmencita
had finished her performance, the guitarists struck up the rattling
chords that preface the _Peteneras_. After much pressing on the part of
the girls, Carmencita’s eldest brother Paco, otherwise Francisco, was
induced to sing, and here is a translation of his first and last verses,
which he sang to the strange quavering air without tune or rhythm, and
full of the odd intervals and curious turns and flourishes peculiar to
this kind of music, while the spectators accompanied him with a fusillade
of hand-clapping and shouts of applause which burst out at every pause.
“My _novia_ has deserted me,
Child of my heart;
Thinking that I should grieve for her,
Child of my heart.
I am not sure whether I shall take another sweetheart now,
Or wait and look about me through the summer.
When I am on my death-bed,
Child of my heart,
Seat thyself at my bed-head,
Child of my heart.
Bring me a good veal cutlet,
Two fowls and a nice beefsteak,
And if this does not seem to thee enough
Bring me anything else that occurs to thee.”
The wedding party thought this screamingly funny, and there were shouts
of _Otra copla! Otra copla!_ (another verse) when he had finished. But
he made a sign to his second sister Pura, and another to the musicians,
and the dancing began again.
The _peteneras_ are more dramatic and crisper in movement than the
_seguidillas_, and the brother and sister did a great deal of rhythmical
hand-clapping and stamping, curiously at variance with the sentimental
refrain of the song. When it was over, Pura dropped into the nearest
seat, panting and fanning herself vigorously, while Paco slipped away to
join the men, who from first to last sat in the outer patio and seemed
to take no interest in the proceedings within, except when occasionally
one of them planted himself in the entrance to commend some girl whose
dancing he admired.
Proceedings became increasingly lively as the afternoon advanced, though
the decorum was never relaxed. It got hotter and hotter, and the air grew
suffocating under the awning, but there was no pause in the dancing. As
soon as one couple of girls ended another stepped out, and sometimes
half a dozen were dancing together. All the grown-up girls wore high
combs and white mantillas, which never seemed to become disarranged,
and quantities of natural flowers on their heads and breasts, chiefly
jessamine blossoms pulled off their stems and fastened together to
form large rosettes—another survival of Arabic customs. One would have
expected to see the floor strewn with the flowers as the dancing went
on, but I knew that every girl had spent at least an hour arranging her
head-dress before she started for the wedding, and had taken good care
that everything was firmly fixed. And then, however lively the dancing
may be, it is always graceful, and there is never a jerky or violent
movement, which accounts for these elaborate head-dresses being as neat
at the end as they are at the beginning.
Everything must finish some time, and presently the bridegroom, who had
never come near the ladies since he and his wife entered the house,
appeared at the entrance of the inner patio, his nose rather bluer than
usual, and smelling strongly of smoke, to tell Carmencita that it was
time to change her dress for the train.
“_Por Dios!_” exclaimed the girl, “I had quite forgotten that I was going
away. Come, Pura; come, Lola, one more set of _seguidillas_: who knows
when we shall dance together again!”
Sixteen-year-old Pura in her first mantilla, Lola with streaming hair
and scanty petticoats little below her knees, and Carmencita with her
two yards of train, made a very ill-assorted trio; but they did not
concern themselves about the general effect. They danced no less than six
_coplas_ together, the last including some odd little jumps off the floor
with both feet, quite the least graceful performance I had yet seen, and
most inappropriate to a long train. And then, to a chorus of _Olé’s_
the three stopped dancing, flung their arms round each other, burst
into floods of tears over the imminent parting, and were all borne away
sobbing by their mother and various sympathetic friends.
The two younger sisters were still crying when they came downstairs an
hour later with the bride in her travelling dress, a really charming
arrangement of white muslin and blue ribbons, but Carmencita’s face was
almost hidden under an overwhelming straw hat covered with immense roses.
Now she was once more all smiles, and beamed impartially on everybody as
she moved towards the great doors amid a perfect fusillade of explosive
kisses. How they managed to reach her face under that hat I could
not understand, but I heard her say several times, “_Cuidado con mi
sombrero_” (Mind my hat), while she moved towards me; and as she embraced
me I discovered why she was leaving her home smiling instead of in a
flood of hysterical tears, as Spanish brides usually do.
“Isn’t my hat enchanting?” she whispered in my ear; “you know it is the
first hat I ever had in my life, and Cesar actually ordered it for me
from Gibraltar! Isn’t he an angel? And we are going to Madrid, and then
to Paris, and he is going to buy me ever so many more! But don’t tell
anybody; I want to pretend I am quite accustomed to wearing a hat.”
The fascinating novelty carried her through all the adieux and safe into
the carriage with her bridegroom, and the last we saw of Carmencita was
her laughing face as she straightened the monstrosity, which she had
almost knocked off against the carriage door as she got in.
[Illustration: IN THE FLOUR MARKET.]
CHAPTER IV
The “season of the baths”—Furnished apartments without beds—The
amenities of the _Balneario_—Sea views at a discount—Bathing
costumes: flounces and frills—The force of example—Happy
swimmers.
The “season of the baths,” as the summer holidays are here called, is a
very serious business indeed. In the fashionable seaside resorts such
as San Sebastian, Santander, Malaga, etc., it is possible to get a
comfortably furnished villa or flat for a few weeks, though only at a
ruinous cost; but in the smaller places it was until lately difficult
to get any accommodation at all outside of the _Balneario_ or Hotel for
Bathers, unless one took a so-called furnished house and sent the missing
necessaries from one’s own home by carrier or train; for the furnishing
in such houses generally consisted mainly of more or less rickety chairs.
Personal luggage, of course, goes with the traveller, but things which
do not come into that category, and they are many, must be booked and
paid for separately. What exactly constitutes personal luggage varies a
good deal with the taste and fancy of the booking-clerk. At one station,
for instance, they flatly refused to take my _jamugas_ (a folding donkey
saddle described on p. 66), and at another an obliging porter tied them
on to my suit-case and they went through without difficulty. But speaking
generally, nothing but portmanteaus, bags, and such like are admitted,
with one notable exception. About bedding there is never any trouble.
A mattress for each member of the party, with its pillows, sheets, and
blankets, will all go as personal luggage, though, as the limit of weight
is only 60 lbs. per head, you may have to pay a considerable sum for
excess. You can also book your bed and bedding (which it is just as well
to take with you to a “furnished house” at any of the smaller seaside
places) together with other immediate necessaries, by _grande vitesse_,
when it is supposed to travel by the same train as yourself, and to be
accessible immediately on arrival. But if there happens to be a crowd at
the departure station, it is as likely as not that the things booked by
_grande vitesse_ will be left behind.
This happened to some Spanish acquaintances of mine one summer. They had
booked everything except the children’s lunch and such trifles as they
could take in their hands, and they arrived at the village where they
and we were to spend the holidays late at night and dead tired, without
any luggage at all. The neighbours set to work and improvised beds
for the smallest children, and the mothers, aunts, and sisters sat in
rocking-chairs all night.
“What else is to be done?” they said philosophically; “this sort of thing
always happens if you go to the baths in the fashionable season, when
everybody wants to be there at once.”
None of them were at all cross or depressed, although they were very
grateful when we provided a mattress or two for the tired babies to be
put to bed on.
Travellers who want to see the Spanish bathing season in full swing
may put up at the _Balneario_ with which every little seaside resort
is provided. But they must be prepared to get no sleep or rest as
long as they stay there, for the noise is inconceivable. There will
be anything from fifty to two hundred men, women, and children—but
chiefly children—of all ages, and all agog to make the most of the
seven, fourteen, or twenty-one days of bathing prescribed by the family
physician. For be it known that we don’t bathe as we please in Spain,
but under medical orders and strictly for the good of our health, and
many people believe that all the virtue in salt water would be lost did
they take one bath too many or too few. And from the moment they wake in
the morning until the last frequenter of the hotel bar goes to bed some
time in the small hours, the din of voices and the clatter of feet on the
brick floors never ceases for one instant.
Most Spaniards have extraordinarily loud voices. Of course it is usual
in any country to shout at a foreigner under the impression that he
will understand better if you deafen him to begin with. But in Spain it
is not only the foreigner who is bawled at, for Spaniards all shout at
each other in the bosoms of their families to such a degree that when I
first came to live here I got the impression that they were continually
quarrelling. Men and women alike have this unpleasant habit, and although
many of them are aware what a noise they make and remark that it is a
bad custom, they seem constitutionally incapable of lowering their voices.
When I am almost driven crazy with the strain on my ears I pretend to be
puzzled at what is said, and politely remark—
“I am stupidly ignorant of Castilian, but I shall understand better if
you will kindly talk a little slower.”
“Slower” (_mas despacito_) is a euphemism for “lower,” and the request
never fails to elicit a pleasant smile and a comment on the shrillness of
Spanish voices, in a half whisper. But in two seconds habit holds sway
again, and the din rises higher and higher until one feels that one’s
only refuge is flight unless one wishes to qualify for Bedlam.
The children of the well-to-do—unlike those of the poor—are quite
undisciplined, and are allowed to shriek and scream as they please. Their
noise does not worry their parents, who take it as a matter of course,
and it never occurs to them that it can annoy any one else. When dozens
of children of all ages are collected together in a _Balneario_, the
racket is such as might have inspired Dante with an idea for a tenth
circle in his hell. If you suggest that some white-faced, heavy-eyed
creature of two or three years old would be better in bed than in the
hall of an hotel blazing with electric light at ten or eleven at night,
its parents merely reply “_No quiere_” (He doesn’t want to), which is
considered an entirely sufficient reason for letting their sickly infant
sit up to all hours.
The children mostly dine at the table d’hôte of the _Balneario_ in small
towns, and when the endless meal is at last over some one begins to thump
dance tunes on a cracked piano, and the little girls from six to fourteen
swarm into the general sitting-room and start dancing. When midnight
approaches and the children drop asleep from sheer weariness, filling
the benches and flopping across their parents’ knees, the grown-up young
ladies and their attendant swains take the floor, and keep the fun going
till 2 or 3 a.m. This is not one night but every night, and not in one
_Balneario_ but in every _Balneario_, throughout the month of August.
I once spent a day and a night in one of these hotels, which are often
pretty and sometimes have beautiful sea views and other advantages which
should make them really attractive out of the season, did they not all
close as soon as it is over. For my sins I was at the _Balneario_ of Our
Lady of the Rosary in the height of the summer. I fled by the earliest
train I could get next morning, and the landlord was most willing for
me to go, for he had a married couple with three children ready to pack
themselves into the tiny room I had engaged, which contained nothing in
the way of furniture save a looking-glass, one chair, a small enamelled
wash-basin, and one huge bed.
The last thing Spaniards seem to care about in the bathing season is the
sea. The _Balneario_ of Our Lady of the Rosary looked out right over the
Atlantic, whose blue waves washed the foot of the low cliff on which the
village stood. I never saw anything more lovely than the sunset over
the sea the evening I was there, and the hotel dining-room opened on
to a broad terrace supplied with numbers of chairs and tables at which
people sat and sipped _refrescos_—a mild beverage consisting largely of
sugar and water. Of all the people thus engaged I was the only one who
turned to look at the sunset. And when after dinner I went out to the
post office I found all the occupants of all the nice new houses built
by themselves to live in during the brief bathing season, seated on
uncomfortable chairs on the footway in the narrow, dirty street, and all
with their backs to the sea. Their houses all had terraces running out to
the edge of the water at high tide, like that of the _Balneario_, but as
I strolled back to the hotel in the moonlight along the shore I noticed
that there was not a single human being to be seen on any of these
terraces. I had never imagined such a waste of opportunity, or such a
strange idea of enjoying the sea. But I have been at a good many Spanish
bathing-places since then, and have always been regarded as a harmless
lunatic on account of my preference for sitting with my face to the sea
instead of at my street door watching the passers-by.
[Illustration: PINE CONES AND PRICKLY PEARS.]
The bathing at that village was excellent, the best, I think, that I have
ever known, though a trifle dangerous for any but strong swimmers when a
stormy day left a heavy roll and undertow. The _Balneario_, which had a
monopoly of the bathing-houses for about half a mile of beach, provided
a sufficiency of buoyed ropes, and a leaky old boat was anchored a
hundred yards out all the summer in case of accidents. This boat was only
accessible by swimming, there being no other anywhere within range, and
it had no oars, so its precise use on an emergency does not appear. It
filled and sank whenever the sea got up, but it was always dragged out,
emptied, and replaced in position by the men in attendance, by the time
the sea was calm enough for the visitors to bathe again.
Although we never stayed at the _Balneario_, we spent several summers in
the village, where we took a little cottage and furnished it with what
our Spanish friends thought very bad taste, for it contained plenty of
books and tables and not a single pier-glass. Here we attracted a good
deal of attention by sitting out at all hours, when the sun was not too
blazing hot, under an awning rigged up on a sandhill facing the sea,
where we watched with an amusement equal to their astonishment at our
eccentricities, the amenities of Spanish families taking their baths.
The first year we were there the women all wore heavy serge gowns right
down to their feet, mostly edged with a broad frill of the same material.
Strange to say, one of them managed to swim, and to swim well, in this
most unsuitable garment. Her husband, who was lame and could only walk
with a stick, also swam well. He used to fling his stick ashore as soon
as he was in the water to his waist, and he and his wife would swim out
to the old boat, her flowing robe ballooning largely behind her. Later on
we came to know them and their family, and the eldest son, a nice boy
of about sixteen, told us as politely as he could how dreadfully shocked
the Spanish ladies had been that first summer at our indelicate bathing
garments, consisting of blouses with short sleeves, knickers, and a skirt
to the knees. No doubt our by no means modern bathing dresses surprised
them, although we had no idea of it at the time, for that year even the
men wore long trousers, sometimes trimmed with little frills round the
ankles, while coats covered their arms to the wrists. True, the men so
attired did not attempt to swim, but bobbed up and down with their wives
and daughters, all holding on to the rope for dear life and never moving
an inch from where the bathing-man had put them, until he returned, when
he thought they had been in long enough, with sheets to envelop the
ladies and bring them to shore again.
Yes, all the ladies were carefully wrapped in sheets when they came out,
although no human eye could discern the form so carefully hidden under
their voluminous draperies. The only creatures who were allowed to expose
any part of their anatomy to direct contact with the water were the
babies. They, poor little miseries, were carried down stark naked to the
water’s edge and handed over to the bathing-men. These, no doubt with the
best intentions, would take the screaming mite in one hand and dip it
head first into a good big wave, using their free hand to disengage the
frantic clutch of the terrified creatures when they came up in an agony
of fright from their ducking and found themselves, choked and blinded
by the salt water, turned upside down for a second dip. Three times was
this brutality repeated every day, and if the piteous cries grew less the
third time, the parents, watching the proceedings from the shore, would
congratulate themselves that the child was beginning to enjoy his bath.
To me it seemed more likely that he was beginning to die from it,
and indeed a summer rarely passes without at least one or two small
children coming to an untimely end at the _Balnearios_. But nothing can
convince the mothers that such treatment is too violent for babies. They
themselves took their first sea baths under those conditions, and so did
their parents before them, and therefore it must be the right thing and
produce good results in the long-run, no matter how the little one may
suffer in health and nerves at the moment.
Infant mortality is always high in Spain. In summer, I understand, it is
higher than at any other time, and I do not wonder at it.
That first summer the lame Don Basilio and his wife were the only
swimmers except ourselves. But the next year several schoolgirls begged
him to teach them to swim, and as the season went on and they made
progress in the new accomplishment the flowing skirts were exchanged for
trousers, and the trousers gradually grew shorter until a reasonable
amount of bare leg was displayed. One or two of the girls managed to swim
out to the boat before their twenty-one baths came to an end, and indeed
the mystic number was treated with unusual disrespect that year, and the
limit often far exceeded.
And the following year, when we arrived rather later in the summer than
usual, we found all the girls wearing bathing costumes which gave their
limbs free play as they swam, and the old boat was the daily rendezvous
of a crowd of laughing and chattering young people, scrambling on board
and diving off again with as much energy as if they had been English.
I always maintain that Spaniards only want a lead to induce them to adopt
modern customs and conveniences, for no people are quicker or cleverer
at imitating new modes once they see that they are an improvement on the
old. The only difficulty is to make them see that any such novelty _is_
an improvement, and that, I admit, is a difficulty. The Andalucians have
a saying against themselves, that they are “_muy amarrados à la cola del
borrico_”—very fast tied to the donkey’s tail—meaning that they go along
in a stupid rut of inherited convention which they find it very hard to
get out of.
I think, however, that the speedy adoption of swimming knickers in place
of flowing skirts, and the rapid shortening of these same knickers as
soon as practical experience proved their convenience, argue that the
rising generation have more common sense and less conventionality than
their elders, and promise well for the future of athletic sports in
Spain. But all the same the young people, although they have learnt how
to enjoy mixed bathing in the sea on summer mornings, still sit with
their parents at their ugly street doors after dinner, turning their
backs on the beauty of the sea, the sunset, and the moon, while they
watch the passers-by and talk of lovers and frocks.
CHAPTER V
Travelling in Spain: four grades of trains but only one
price—Ten miles an hour—Dangerous speed—Amusing the villagers—A
slow night journey—Suppressing a raconteur—“Shall we go?”—Hot
water while we wait—The paralytic—Taking a photograph—The
beauty at the window—A discourteous custom—Empty minds—The
toothpick—A gentleman of the old school—Hospitality at
Antequera—A Spanish dinner table—Delightful memories.
Travelling in this country is really a trial to the patience. It is
true that the main lines have now been made comfortable, with corridor
carriages, well-cushioned seats, and good lighting on the night trains;
but the unpunctuality and the purposeless delays all along the line make
even a short journey tiresome and a long one intolerable, unless one
resolutely determines only to look at the comic side of things.
There are four classes of passenger trains, and we may take the journey
from Madrid to Seville as typical of the rest. This line is used by the
King, the Court, and the governing classes generally, and is travelled
by nearly every tourist who comes to Spain, for every one wants to
see Seville, Cordova, and Granada, while naturally the capital, with
its superlative picture gallery, is the objective of all foreigners
interested in art.
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT GATEWAY.]
The slowest of these trains is the _mixto_, a sort of cross between a
passenger and a luggage train. The distance from Madrid to Seville is 358
miles, and the _mixto_ does the journey in twenty-four hours and twenty
minutes, or at the rate of nearly fifteen miles an hour, if it gets in
punctually, which it seldom or never does. Next we have the _correo_ or
mail train, which nominally takes eighteen hours one way and nineteen the
other—the more rapid journey being rather under twenty miles an hour.
Then comes the _expreso_, which takes eleven and a half hours one way
and twelve the other, travelling at the rate of about thirty miles an
hour; and then the _expreso de lujo_, which does the journey in eleven
hours and forty minutes, being a shade faster than the _expreso_. Both
these last are _trains de luxe_, with dining-car and the wagon-lits
Company’s carriages, and are usually pretty punctual. These trains, be it
remembered, are running on one of the chief main lines of Spain.
On the branch lines nothing like these speeds are attained. On one of
these, as I was told by a friend who often had to travel by it, the usual
rate was ten miles an hour, and the district petitioned the railway to
reduce the speed, which was considered highly dangerous. The petition was
refused, on the ground that if the train went any slower it would come
too expensive, on account of the increased coal consumption.
With true Spanish inconsistency the same fares are charged for all these
trains except the _trains de luxe_, for which an excess of ten per
cent. is levied on the first-class fares. On these trains there is no
second-class, and on one of them only a single third-class carriage. The
_mixto_ is horribly uncomfortable, and the carriages of all classes are
usually dirty, but one need not fear any rudeness or roughness from one’s
fellow-travellers.
It was once my fate to travel by a _mixto_ from a wayside station where
I had missed the express after a long donkey ride across country. My men
had never been there, but when it became evident that by no possibility
could I catch the train I had intended, they declared, in their desire
to reassure me, that there was a decent _posada_ close to the station
where I could comfortably spend the night. We arrived to find not even
a cottage, but only a _choza_ or hovel, built of stones and thatched
with reeds, and a canteen consisting of the bar and a tiny room off it,
where the railway people took their meals, for it was a junction of some
importance, and several men were employed there. I had no alternative but
to go on by the _mixto_, and I sat for seven mortal hours in that train,
travelling in all eighty-four miles. It was about three in the morning
when I reached a town which gave reasonable promise of possessing some
sort of hotel, and at least half of that time we spent at stations, all
lighted up and all crowded with villagers, just as if it were day.
I am bound to say that although the seats were so hard and so grimy,
and the jolting of the train so incessant that sleep was impossible, I
neither heard nor saw anything offensive, although my fellow-travellers
were all men, and there was not one gentleman, in the conventional
sense of the term, among the lot. One man, it is true, began a funny
story which it was probably just as well that I did not understand, but
before he came to the point his friends hushed him up, on the ground
that they had heard it all before, whereupon the facetious person so
promptly dropped asleep that I guessed he had been looking too long on
the wine-cup before he started. Nothing was said to me, but I quite
understood that the raconteur was silenced out of consideration for my
presence.
The _correo_ on the main lines is much better than the _mixto_; the first
and second class even have corridor carriages, and these are roomy and
comfortably cushioned. If time were absolutely no object—as indeed seems
to be the case in Spain—one need not complain of the _correo_ at all.
But to people who prefer getting to their journey’s end to sitting in
the train, the endless delays and the purposeless dawdling are intensely
irritating. The train stops at every little station, apparently to amuse
the villagers, for often no one gets either in or out, though there will
be from twenty to a hundred loafers on the platform. After long waiting
a guard is heard to inquire, “Shall we go?” (_Vamonos?_); some other
official says, “Let’s go!” (_Vamonos!_); a third rings a bell and shouts,
“My lords the travellers to the train!” (_Señores viajeros, al tren!_);
some one blows a horn, the engine whistles two or three times, and we
drift out as vaguely as we drifted in, ten, twenty, or thirty minutes
before.
At one station on a very dull journey which I often have occasion to
make, an extra delay seems to have been arranged to enable the wives
of the stationmaster, the canteen keeper, and the one porter to obtain
a supply of hot water from the engine boiler, for every time I travel
that way I see a group of these ladies filling cans and buckets from a
steaming jet which certainly is not let off anywhere else.
At another station we spend an interminable time watering the engine.
This station is only half an hour from a junction where the train waits,
according to schedule, for thirty minutes, and why the water cannot be
taken in then, the demon of dilatoriness that presides over Spanish
railways alone knows. This, like the distribution of hot water, does not
occur only once in a way. I have been over the line eight times, for my
sins, and have seen the same incidents every time.
Once our train waited an extra ten minutes while a poor paralysed old
woman was conveyed in front of the engine from a train alongside of
ours to the exit from the station, where a donkey awaited her. The
porter carried her slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, head
downwards. We all thought she was dead until we saw her hands waving and
heard her shrill voice bidding the man shift her into an easier position,
which he did, by no means unkindly. She was a very poor woman, and her
old husband trudged after her, bearing a couple of worn pillows and a
bag of food. It was clear that there was no money wherewith to tip that
porter. No one grumbled at the time lost by our train, which was already
close on an hour late, although she might just as well have been carried
behind it and thus let us go on. They only said, “Poor creature! She
seems very ill.” On the other hand, no one thought of producing pesetas
or even coppers to alleviate her sufferings, though probably if I had
been ready-witted enough to suggest it, most of my travelling companions
would have contributed. Spaniards are curiously destitute of imagination
in such cases, but when I have had the presence of mind to propose some
such obvious charity as the above they have quickly followed suit,
expressing admiration of our English initiative.
The funniest example of official indifference to the time table that I
have seen occurred on a journey from Algeciras to Bobadilla. During a
long pause at a wayside station one of our party got out to photograph a
group of picturesque beggars—for on the Andalucian railways beggars are
chartered libertines, permitted to climb up to the windows and pester the
travellers for money. Before he had finished the bell rang for the train
to start, but seeing how he was engaged the stationmaster politely turned
to the guard.
“Wait a moment longer,” he said; “do you not see that the gentleman is
taking a photograph?”
Let it not be supposed, however, that Spanish travellers find their slow
trains such a trial as we do. The men chat, smoke, eat, drink, and sleep,
and the women eat and sleep—the elder ones, that is. The younger ones
spend most of their time standing at the window. This is a very favourite
occupation of all Spanish travellers in first-class compartments.
Directly the train slows into a station every window of the corridor
carriage will be occupied by a more or less portly person of either sex,
who thrust their heads and bodies out as far as they will go, to stare
up and down at the exceedingly uninteresting crowd assembled to see the
train come in. Except on Sundays and holidays, when the station is to
the village what the fashionable promenade is to the town, the people
who loaf on the platform are by no means the pick of the population,
being merely those who have nothing else to do. But this does not seem
to diminish the Spanish traveller’s interest in them, and he will block
the windows till the very last minute, watching the village idiot or the
diseased beggar until he is quite out of sight, as if all his hopes of
happiness depended on getting the very last glimpse of the unpleasing
spectacle.
The girls who travel have, it must be admitted, another object in
planting themselves at the window while the train is in a station. They
want not so much to see as to be seen, and _faute de mieux_, the open
admiration of the village loafer helps to pass the time. On one occasion
I travelled for many hours in company with the wife and daughter of a
man whose office under the Government argued a good social position and
a certain amount of cultivation. The mother talked of nothing but the
excellence of the food in the town we had both been visiting, and the
girl never spoke at all save to ask me at intervals where we were and
how much behind time the train was now. At every station she planted
herself in the window, and as she was strikingly handsome with unusually
brilliant colouring, a group of yokels never failed to collect in front
of our compartment, staring at her for all they were worth.
“I cannot imagine,” the mother once remarked to me, “why so many people
stand there.”
“Well,” I said with perfect sincerity, “they probably do not often have
any one so pretty as your daughter to look at.”
The mother bridled and smiled, and immediately told the girl what I had
said.
After that our young beauty never left the window at all—presumably lest
some admirer should miss the opportunity of gazing on her charms—from
the moment the train drew into any station until it left again; and I
calculated afterwards that she had stood three solid hours on end in the
corridor, only varying her position to move to my window at the opposite
end of the compartment when we stopped at a station where the platform
was on that side.
This discourteous habit, common to men and women alike, of blocking the
first-class carriage windows regardless of the comfort and convenience
of the other passengers, is in some ways the most unpleasant feature
of travelling in Spain. It is practically confined, however, to the
well-to-do, and I am bound to say that on short journeys, where a little
fatigue does not matter, I often prefer to travel second or even third
class, so that I may get my fair share of the view and the air, which
is impossible when travelling with Spaniards who can afford to pay the
higher fares. On the other hand, as they seem quite unable to amuse
themselves in other ways (for very few of them ever read in the train,
or indeed in their own houses), perhaps one ought not to grudge them
the delightful distraction and the wide enlightenment to be obtained by
looking out of the carriage window.
In other ways many little courtesies are shown. Food, for instance,
is always offered, even though you are at the moment unpacking your
own lunch basket. This is as a rule a form, which means no more than
the offer of his house, at such a number of such a street, which your
travelling acquaintance will make you when he gets out at his station,
well knowing that you and he will never meet again in this world. But
sometimes the offer to share with you is quite genuine, as in the case of
a stout Catalan commis-voyageur, who, after I had politely declined three
times over to divide his lunch, having just finished my own before his
eyes, took two elegant celluloid toothpicks out of his pocket, and laid
one upon my knee, saying, “That at least you will accept!”
He afterwards told me that he “travelled” for a German firm which made
celluloid ornaments, and I always regret that I returned his toothpick
without reading the advertisement printed on it. I thought he might want
it, and I knew I did not, but I believe he really did wish me to accept
his gift—and take a note of his firm.
When one has the luck to make the acquaintance of a Spanish gentleman
of the old school, one realises what a loss is inflicted on society by
his retirement from the world, for men of his kind dislike the new
aristocracy of wealth, and shrink from competing with the _cursileria_ of
the large towns as much as Don Quixote himself would have done.
On my way to Granada one lovely May day I had the rare good luck to
travel with one of these gentlemen. I was accompanied by an old friend
whom I had not seen for many years, and we congratulated ourselves on
finding an empty compartment when we got into the train. Just before we
started, however, a slim well-dressed man of forty or so clambered up
the precipitous steps into the carriage, with a pot of carnations under
each arm. This alone would have prepossessed one in his favour, for the
male Spaniard of any class above the labourer usually thinks it degrading
to be seen carrying anything in his hands, and leaves the parcels to be
borne by his wife if there is no servant handy. Our man not only carried
his own carnations, but was a great deal more careful of them than of his
smart personal luggage, and finally, after asking permission, he wedged
them up in the rack between his valise and mine, explaining that he had
bought them at the last moment to take to his wife, and was anxious that
they should come to no harm.
The ice thus broken, we soon got into conversation, and when he found
that we were going to stop the night at Antequera he seemed quite
delighted.
“That is my own town,” he said, “I can assure you that it is worth a
visit, and I wish more foreigners knew how beautiful is the situation,
and how many objects of interest it contains. There is also a quite
passable hotel, and the people of Antequera have good manners, and do
not worry tourists in the streets, although they see comparatively few
English ladies, or—what is even of greater interest to them—English
ladies’ hats.”
Most unluckily, he said, he would only be at home himself for quite a
few hours, as he had to go on to Malaga early next morning, but he was
deeply interested in archæology, and on finding that my tastes lay in
that direction, he said that, no matter what business he had to set
aside, he must have the pleasure of showing me some very curious capitals
of columns, recently unearthed from a fourteenth-century convent wall,
the period of which he found himself unable to determine. I accepted the
invitation with delight, for not only did I know by experience that great
interest often attaches to objects “found in the convent walls,” but I
knew it was the chance of a lifetime for my friend to see the interior of
a Spanish gentleman’s country house.
Having fixed the hour for our call and given us his address, our friend
proceeded to spread his belongings over three seats, for we were
approaching a junction, and he explained that he did not mean anyone else
to get in, as he had slept badly over-night and wanted a good nap.
The station was crowded and many people came and looked into our
compartment, shook their heads at the much-engaged seats, and went off
to stow themselves in the packed compartments elsewhere. Our friend
smiled pleasantly, showing beautiful white teeth under a short fair
moustache—for he was as blond as a Dane, with brown hair and blue
eyes—and suggested that the stationmaster should put on another carriage
when an insistent lady with several children tried, in vain, to force her
way in against his polite resistance.
And when we were safe out of the station he pulled out his three seats
to form a sofa, as is done when these compartments are converted
into sleeping carriages at night, and calmly slumbered until we got
to Bobadilla some three hours later. This is the Clapham Junction of
southern Spain, and it was impossible for our fellow-traveller, for
all his fine manners and general grand air, to appropriate our whole
compartment any longer; but, as he remarked, he had had his sleep and now
no longer required the extra seats. So other travellers were welcome to
come in, and the more so because we should all three be getting out at
the next station but one.
“You will require half an hour to secure your rooms at the hotel, and
half an hour to rest,” he said as we parted, we in one omnibus and he in
another, with many apologies for not being able to offer us his carriage,
because his return was unexpected, and no one had come to meet him. “But
I hope you will be able to reach my house conveniently by six o’clock,
that I may present my wife and children to you, and show you my capitals
in a good light.”
He had, of course, given us his card, but the name told us nothing
except that he was not a man of title. So in the omnibus we took the
opportunity of obtaining a little information about him. We found he was
the Alcalde, or Mayor, which means that he was little short of a king in
the town, for the Alcalde here holds a position social, political, and
municipal, considerably higher than that of any Lord Mayor in England. In
fact we have at home no authority with which the Spanish Alcalde can be
compared, for he is appointed by the Government, and can make and unmake
at will any of the numerous paid officials under him. Alcaldes therefore
generally have as many enemies as friends during their term of office,
but our Alcalde of Antequera seemed to have gained the affections of his
townspeople, not by political favouritism, but by his personal qualities.
“He is the richest and the best man in the town,” said the respectable
tradesman with whom we talked in the omnibus; “and I should not say that
if it was not true, for he is a Conservative and I am a Liberal, and I
lost my job at the Town Hall when they made him Alcalde, so I’ve kept a
sharp look out for any mistakes he might make.”
At six o’clock, according to promise, we made our way to the Alcalde’s
house, and were ushered by a smiling servant, evidently on the look out
for us, across a patio blazing with geraniums and heavy with the scent
of roses, heliotrope, and jessamine, through a long shady gallery with
fine eighteenth-century furniture ranged along the walls, into a charming
little reception-room, furnished with light-painted wood, and adorned
with the usual window blinds, chair-backs, and table-covers of exquisite
needlework, edged and inset with fine lace and embroidery.
To us here appeared our Alcalde leading his handsome wife and followed by
his two good-looking children. We were a little late, and he apologised
for the family being at dinner; but if we would come into the dining-room
and “accompany” them at their meal, without ceremony and as friends, he
and the Señora would soon have done eating and be ready to take us round
their—and our—house and show us any little object of interest which might
repay us for the trouble of looking at it.
Of course we agreed, while apologising for our unpunctuality, and
regretting the disturbance we were causing in the family.
But when we entered the large and well-furnished dining-room, we found
that the whole thing had been planned by our hospitable acquaintance in
order to induce us to dine with him; for places had been laid for us and
they had not even begun their dinner. So we had no alternative but to sit
down and accept the admirably cooked dishes that were set before us, or
feel that by not eating with the family we were compelling our friends to
swallow their food in haste while they kept us uncomfortably waiting.
The table was well furnished with good silver and glass, and china
bearing the Alcalde’s arms. A vase of choice roses stood in the centre,
and family portraits hung round the walls. We really might have been
at an English dinner party, save for the unceremonious attendance of
women servants with silk kerchiefs on their shoulders and flowers in
their hair, who casually strolled in and out with large dishes, which
they always offered first to their master, then to their mistress, and
afterwards to the guests. This is etiquette in old Spain, dating from
the times when the food might perhaps be poisoned, and the host helped
himself first to show that it could safely be eaten.
The dishes too, though tempting and well-cooked, were somewhat different
from ours. First came a white soup thickened with vermicelli and having a
strong flavour of fowl. Then a dish of _frituras_, a mass of milk sauce
thickened with flour and minced ham, allowed to cool, then shaped into
the form of pears, rolled in fine bread-crumbs, and fried with a skill
which makes a dish of this kind one of the most appetising in the Spanish
menu. Then came cold boiled fish, fresh from Malaga, served with a sauce
made of yolk of egg and oil, and garnished with raw tomatoes, raw onions,
and green and red _pimientos_, a kind of capsicum without any heat. A
fowl followed, whose lack of flavour showed that it had been boiled in
the soup; then the inevitable _puchero_ or _cocido_, also boiled in the
soup, and consisting of _garbanzos_, ham, bacon fat, beef, haricot beans,
and the stems of an edible thistle. Then an excellent concoction of
custard with tiny meringues floating on the top. After this, biscuits,
fruit, quince cheese, fresh goat-milk cheese, and various sweetmeats. Red
and white wine were on the table, and last of all came a cup of capital
black coffee. This was the everyday fare of the Alcalde’s family, but
not of the Alcalde. He told us that his stomach was delicate, and took
nothing but a couple of poached eggs and a glass of hot milk—which amply
accounted for his elegant slenderness, so unlike the enormous obesity
that afflicts most Spaniards of his wealth and position after twenty
years or so of the feeding above described.
What was most noteworthy in his house, however, was the daintiness and
luxury of the dining-room appointments, for it is not unusual to find,
even in the homes of well-to-do people, only just enough knives, forks,
and plates to go round once, while flowers on the table or anywhere else
in the house are unheard of. Perhaps the excessive scantiness of the
cutlery and crockery have much to say to the absence of those invitations
to lunch and dinner which are the current social coin with us. The idea
that a pretty and well-found table adds to the comfort and refinement of
life at home never seems to have occurred to the mass of middle-class
Spain; and of course where the family share a tumbler and eat three or
four courses off the same plate, a visitor at meals is not likely to be
welcome.
No doubt there are many people in the position of our Alcalde who live as
elegantly as he does, but it is a great exception to find oneself invited
to take one’s place as a guest at their table; and his hospitality, the
beauty of the town, the glorious mountain views all round, the wealth of
wild flowers on the hills, and the many remains of ancient buildings,
all combined to mark Antequera with a white stone in my friend’s and my
memories.
We see now that, although the “offer of the house” on the part of a
travelling acquaintance has become in ninety-nine cases out of one
hundred degraded into the merest empty compliment, the root whence grew
this flower of a fine courtesy thrives in the soil to which it is native.
For there are still Spanish gentlemen whose hospitality is as graceful
as it is instinctive, and who, when they tell you that at such-and-such
a number of such-and-such a street “you have your house and a friend,”
really hope and expect that if occasion offers you will take them at
their word and accept their frank invitations.
[Illustration: IN THE KEEP OF ARCOS CASTLE.]
PART II.—AUTUMN