Mourning customs—“Keening” the dead—The night before the
funeral—Sympathetic friends—“Accompanying” the mourners—A
verbal error—Black masks at a dance—A black-draped house—The
locked piano—Three years’ seclusion—The mourning of the
poor—Black shirts but laughing faces—“Killed in action”—The
heroism of Rosa—“My Papa”—Why Paz will be an old maid.
Mourning in Spain is a serious feature of family and social life. Even in
the larger towns one sees but a slight tendency to move with the times,
and away from Madrid, Seville, or Barcelona the rigid observance of
ancient customs is, like the customs themselves, quite Oriental.
I remember being kept awake almost all one night in a large town by an
extraordinary concert of lamentable sounds which issued from a tenement
house next door. First came a long tenor wail, rising and falling in a
minor key, then a precisely similar wail in a deep contralto, and then
in a shrill treble, evidently from a child. I learnt next morning that
an infant had died in the house in question, and that the father, the
mother, and a small brother had been “keening” the dead all night long.
This demonstration of grief is not so common now as it was a few years
ago, even among the least educated classes, but other peculiarities
hardly more in accordance with modern ideas are to be observed among
mourners of all ranks.
Of these one of the strangest, to our ideas, is the custom of holding
what might be called a wake over the corpse the night after death. The
funeral has to take place within twenty-four hours, an excellent sanitary
regulation which we English might adopt with advantage. But, as a young
lady in deep mourning for her adored mother calmly remarked to me, “It is
true that in the cold climate of England dead persons do not decompose so
rapidly as here.” It is also true that twenty-four hours amply suffice
to put the family into mourning in a country where every woman has, as a
matter of course, a suit of black in her wardrobe all the year round, so
that no time is lost in making clothes for the funeral, and on the night
after a death has taken place all the most intimate friends are ready to
sit round in token of sympathy.
A great deal of very real kindness is shown in cases of severe illness.
Trained nurses are seldom or never called in, but the friends take turns
to sit up with the family and the patient, and, if they are not rich,
keep them supplied with chickens, eggs, and whatever else may be of use
in the sick-room. The custom of “accompanying” the sufferer is, however,
sometimes embarrassing to foreigners. On one occasion, when a member of
my family was supposed to be _in articulo mortis_, his most intimate
Spanish friend almost insisted on sharing my night-watches; and when at
length I persuaded him that even his sympathetic presence might prove
injurious to one for whom absolute quiet was the only chance, he said
with intense conviction—
“At least you must promise to send for me at any moment of the day or
night when you know the last hour is at hand, that I may witness the
ascent of so noble a soul to heaven!”
My appreciation of what I knew was meant for the truest kindness hardly
mitigated my repugnance to the mere suggestion of such an intrusion on
one’s privacy at such a time. Happily for Don Antonio’s feelings as
well as for mine, the illness took a favourable turn, and our friend’s
tears of delight at the good news quickly obliterated the jar he had all
unconsciously inflicted on one’s susceptibilities at the time of crisis.
Another friend, out of sheer courtesy and goodness of heart, contrived to
shock still more our British ideas: he came post-haste, on hearing that
the patient was given up, to offer his services in the arrangements for
the funeral!
Our ideas of keeping the sick-room free from movement or noise, and our
refusal to receive at the bedside all the kind Spanish friends who came
to inquire, struck them as very strange indeed, for with them sympathy
is necessarily expressed by providing plenty of company “to cheer the
sufferer” and those near and dear to him. I remember on one occasion
being pressed by a friend to go and call on the mother of a girl who
was desperately ill with meningitis—a complaint which (if correctly
diagnosed) seems curiously common among the well-to-do in this country. I
demurred, on the ground that my very slight acquaintance with the lady
hardly justified my intruding on her grief and anxiety.
“But she is my cousin, and you are my friend, and she will certainly
notice your absence if you do not go.”
I went. I counted twelve women and girls in the patient’s room, for I was
obliged to go upstairs and look at the poor girl through the open door,
or be regarded as cruelly unkind by the mother.
She died, as was to be expected, a few days later, and I had to appear at
the house of mourning on the evening of the funeral, accompanied by the
one member of our family belonging to the dead girl’s generation. I had
a black dress, but my girl had only a white one, and we had hoped that
this might be accepted as an excuse for her non-appearance. By no means.
The cousin and her two daughters came in person, swathed in black silk
shawls from head to foot, to insist on our both going with them to “_dar
el pésame_,” to express sympathy with the mourner.
It was one of the most distressing experiences I have had in Spain. We
elder people all sat round the room on chairs, sofas, and settees too
heavy to move an inch from their appointed places, and one by one we were
led into a small inner room where the mother, blind with crying, sat
hunched up with her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands, giving
loud utterance to her unrestrained grief.
“Oh, my daughter, my dear companion! Oh, my daughter, my dear companion!”
she moaned over and over again in a voice hoarse with sobbing, and not
in the least knowing what she was saying.
We had to sit down and kiss her tear-drenched cheek and say what a
beautiful and charming girl her Belén had been, and offer a conventional
prayer for divine consolation, and then some one else came in to take our
place, amid a fresh burst of sobs and moans. The poor soul had worked
herself into a state of hysterics, but through it all was conscious
that she was fulfilling her friends’ expectations and doing the right
thing by her daughter in thus proving herself helplessly broken down by
her trouble. Self-restraint on such an occasion is considered to show
coldness of heart and a lack of respect and affection for the dead.
When I came out after my painful interview with the mother, I found all
the young cousins and companions of poor Belén in shrieks of laughter,
and they all turned on me exclaiming—
“Oh Doña Elena, how funny your Olivita is! What amusing things she says!
And what strange customs you have in your country!”
It appeared that my “Olivita” had been trying to explain in her still
imperfect Spanish that in England young men and maidens were allowed to
go out walking together, unchaperoned as here by “Mamma” on one side and
“my aunt” on the other. And in mistake for _pasear_, to go out walking,
she had used the word _besar_, which means to kiss. So that our mourners
took her to say that it was the custom in England for the men and girls
to kiss each other whenever they met in the street, and their amusement
at the idea had completely blotted out of their minds for the time being
the melancholy reason for their meeting.
The elder ladies took it all as a matter of course.
“Poor children,” they remarked; “they are very tired, and they laugh
easily. It is quite natural, and generally happens on these sad
occasions.”
As may be imagined, such vociferous grief does not long endure; but well
as I thought I understood the Spanish temperament, I was rather shocked
when on one occasion two girls in black masks and dominoes accosted me at
a Carnival dance, and revealed themselves as the sisters of a youthful
bride who had died, with her baby, less than a month before.
They threw themselves on my mercy, fearing that I might recognise them,
and begged me not to betray their escapade to their mother, who believed
them to be spending the evening with a sick friend, and whose consent had
been with difficulty obtained for them to go out even on that errand, so
soon after their sister’s death. I think this was an exceptional instance
of “quick frost, long thaw,” but one often finds women in deep mourning
speaking bitterly of the restrictions imposed by custom on their social
and even their home life when a near relative dies.
I have heard of the whole house, from the street door to the ladies’
boudoir, being hung with black draperies for the nine days of rigorous
mourning after the sudden death of the master of the house, and during
all that time the women had to sit in semi-darkness, morning, noon, and
night. The daughters were not allowed to touch the piano for three full
years after their father’s death. A friend of theirs and mine told me
that the girls, who were very fond of music, and good pianists, moped
themselves into actual illness, so keenly did they feel the loss of their
favourite occupation after their first grief had worn off, but nothing
would induce the mother to have the piano unlocked. They were fresh young
girls in their teens when the father died, full of life, of good social
position, and with plenty of money to gratify every whim. When I saw them
after their three years’ seclusion they were pale, thin, and melancholy,
and looked like women nearer thirty than twenty in their enveloping
chiffon veils, for although they had left off crape they were still clad
in black from head to foot.
The friend in question, a young married woman with a devoted husband and
two pretty little girls, had herself just emerged from a year’s strict
retirement after losing her mother. She told me she was looked on by the
older generation as an unnatural creature, because she had now begun to
play her beloved piano again.
“You cannot tell how I have longed for music sometimes, as I grew
accustomed to my loss,” she said, “but I could not bring myself to
play. It would have seemed so dreadful to my friends and relations. I
have often been terribly sad. I have sometimes almost gone mad with
depression. My husband has begged me to travel with him, to play the
piano, to do anything in the world that would tend to lessen my sadness.
But as I never obey him when I am happy, you may guess how little
attention I paid to his wishes when I was mourning for my mother. Now it
is a year since she died, and I cannot help it if my neighbours criticise
me. I _must_ begin to live again.”
The strange thing about this shocking exaggeration of the outward
semblance of grief is that while almost every woman one meets complains
of its absurdity, its evil effects on the health, its cruel inroads on
youth and happiness, none of them have the courage actively to rebel.
Poor people, while of necessity rousing themselves speedily to go out
in search of the day’s wage, are just as strict as the rich in their
mourning garb. When a parent dies, everything has to be black: black
facings are stitched on to the men’s shirt fronts and cuffs, black
cotton coats are worn, black neckties in place of collars, and black
felt hats, even in the height of summer. The women for their part wear
black underclothes beneath their black dresses, and tie up their heads in
black handkerchiefs, sometimes pawning all their coloured clothes to pay
for the conventional garments of woe. Beneath these gloomy trappings one
often sees beaming smiles and eyes full of life and fun; for the workers
are nothing if not sincere, and when they feel happy they show it. But
when the country is in trouble whole towns and villages seem to feel it;
as, for instance, during the Moroccan War of 1909. The massacre of some
two thousand soldiers in the death-trap of the Gurugú at Melilla threw a
great number of poor families into mourning; and again in 1913, during
the campaign of Larache, as it was here called, mourning was widespread.
Every day brought news that one or two or ten or twenty men had fallen in
the guerilla war carried on against Spain by the arch-bandit El Raisuli:
and here not only the immediate family of the dead man wears black for
him, but mourning is _de rigueur_ among all the collateral relations even
to second and third cousins.
This was brought home to me one day when I wanted to photograph a stream
where women and girls were washing, for every one of them that day wore
black. We finally gave up the attempt, and waited for another occasion,
for, as I remarked to my photographer, we ought to introduce in the
brilliant sunshine at least one girl dressed in colours.
“Very true,” was his answer, “but there is a great deal of mourning
about. You see there are so many soldiers dying in Morocco just now.”
And many officers too, was my mental addition, for his words sent my
thoughts with a painful rebound to a scene of domestic tragedy which I
had witnessed not long before.
A lad of twenty-one, fresh from the Military Academy at Toledo, had
been killed in his first action, within a week of landing in Africa.
His younger brother and sister were driving to attend the _Jura de la
Bandera_ (oath to the colours) of the new recruits on the parade-ground
outside the town where they lived. They bought a morning paper and read
in it the news of their brother’s death, “which he gloriously met in
the endeavour to save a wounded private.” Their father, who was an army
doctor, was away from home; their mother, an invalid suffering from
heart trouble, never read a paper. The two poor children, for they were
nothing more, determined to conceal from her what had happened until
their father’s return. He meanwhile, to break the blow, telegraphed to
her that their Antonito was wounded, and she jumped to the conclusion
that he was bringing the young man home to be nursed, and for three
mortal days Julian and Adelita kept their secret and watched their mother
preparing the bedroom and making cooling drinks and strengthening broths
for the boy who was already in his grave.
My girl, who was a great friend of theirs, told me that Adela and her
brother broke down completely when they were with her and out of their
mother’s sight, but they contrived somehow or other to pull themselves
together and bear brave faces before her, even when she called them
straight from the condolences of sympathetic friends in the _cancela_
to ask their opinion of this or that arrangement she had made for the
comfort of their lost brother. They thought that their father, being a
doctor, would know how to tell her what had happened without danger to
her health, when he came home, and that gave them strength to play their
parts.
Poor children and poor mother! When on the third day the cab drove up and
the father got out alone, Doña Ramona needed no telling of the truth. She
cried out, “My son is dead! I knew it all the time,” and fell fainting on
the floor. And even then Adela and Julian subdued their own grief, while
they helped to carry her upstairs and lay her on the bed which she did
not leave again for many weeks.
And here I should like to tell another little story, also of brave
self-restraint in the face of death, though of a different character.
Whatever may be the attitude of certain classes of Spaniards towards
their religion and their priests, it is certain that most ladies of
gentle birth believe implicitly in the dogmas and teaching of their
Church. And of these one tenet of the truth of which they are absolutely
convinced is that a soul which leaves the body unshriven will suffer
doubly in purgatory, unless Supreme Unction is omitted owing to wilful
obstruction on some one else’s part. In such a case the one who
interferes with the last rites must bear the penalty, which here, in
the belief of a strict Catholic, amounts to little less than eternal
damnation.
A girl friend of mine saw her mother suddenly struck down with pneumonia,
and the doctors told her that the case was quite hopeless, and that
death must supervene within three days. None of the family had had the
slightest idea that there was any danger, and when Rosa returned to the
sick-room after hearing the verdict, her mother reproached her for being
so long away.
“I heard you talking,” she said; “who were you with, and what was all the
conversation about?”
“It was the—the—laundress,” said Rosa, “you know how careless she is.”
Her great-aunt, a stern old lady who ruled Rosa and her sister with a rod
of iron, here called the girl out of the room.
“Not a moment must be lost,” she said. “We must immediately send for the
priest, lest your mother should suddenly die without the Holy Oils.”
And now Rosa, a plump, placid, and hitherto seemingly characterless
person, showed what filial love is capable of. I will finish the story in
her own words, as she related it to me a few months later.
“I knew that if the priest came it would frighten my mother terribly.
She was not at all frightened then, and was she to spend her last days
on earth in a state of panic? ‘I will not send for the priest,’ I told
my great-aunt, for it was _my_ duty to send in the absence of my father,
because I was the elder of the children and a nearer relation than my
great-aunt. She was very angry. ‘You know what this means?’ she asked,
and I said ‘Yes.’ I knew what my punishment would be, and I was willing
to remain for ever in purgatory to spare my mother the fear and pain of
knowing that she must leave us all. I was very frightened, but I would
not give way, and my father is a free-thinker, so when he came home
he said I had done well. But after my mother was dead (she died quite
peacefully, thinking she was only falling asleep) my conscience troubled
me very much, and I went and told what I had done to our confessor. And
he was very gentle to me. He said: ‘Child, there are moments when what
seems a mortal sin is only a lesser sin.’ And he gave me only a little
penance, for he said he knew I had suffered very much.”
I am generally very careful to refrain from expressing any sort of
opinion regarding the rites and rules of a religion which is not my own;
but on this occasion I forgot myself. I told Rosa she had behaved nobly,
and kissed her on both cheeks as heartily as if I had been a Spanish
lady. With immense difficulty I had induced the father and the terrible
great-aunt to let Rosa come with me to the seaside, for she had been
ailing ever since her mother’s death, and it was considered impossible
for her to leave the house in her own town, even for the walks which the
doctor had recommended as necessary exercise.
“Dear Doña Elena, you are too good to me,” she said, returning my embrace
with effusion; “how glad I am Papa let me come to stay with you. Paz and
I were both getting so dreadfully fat sitting indoors all day, and oh!
so _triste_. My mother liked society and amusement, as you know, and
she took us out every day to the Promenade or to pay visits, and now we
can never go out at all, except to Mass, and we were getting fatter and
fatter. Paz has her _novio_, but I had nothing to distract me till you
brought me here. If it were not for my dear Papa I should like to stop
with you all the summer.”
Her “dear Papa” was a distinguished-looking man who earned a good
income in a Government office, but having perpetrated a poem or two
when younger, went through life posing as a soul astray in a desert
of uninteresting fact. He wore rather long hair thrown back from his
forehead in picturesque disarray. The picturesqueness was, however,
somewhat discounted by my simple Rosa, who, seeing a bottle of a
favourite Spanish hair-wash on my table, naïvely observed—
“My Papa is using this. His hair has got thin on the top of his head, and
he is so worried about it! Do you think this stuff is any good? Paz and I
take turns to rub it on his scalp every night for half an hour before he
goes to bed, but I don’t see much difference.”
“My Papa” was by no means a disconsolate widower. While the women of the
family carry their mourning to the exaggerated lengths I have described,
the men resume their usual habits a very short time after the funeral.
Thus Papa’s daughters would often have to sit up very late at night to
attend to his hyacinthine locks before he went to bed, but they took it
all as a matter of course, and would have been extremely surprised had I
hinted that Rosa’s delicate health and over-strained nerves might be a
sufficient excuse for her release from these nocturnal duties. This is
another aspect of the Oriental tradition—the inability of both men and
women to realise that the husband or the father has not the right, simply
because he is the husband or the father, to demand from his women-folk
the service of slaves at all hours of the day or night, regardless of
their convenience, happiness, or health.
When their mother had been dead a year, and Rosa and Paz had recovered
their natural spirits and were ready to enjoy life again, their father
had an attack of influenza, and both the girls got into a panic lest they
were to be left doubly orphaned. He was not seriously ill, but very sorry
for himself, and for months afterwards, whenever he caught the slightest
cold or felt the least little indigestion, he would come home from his
office and go straight to bed, and then he expected both his daughters to
be ready to wait upon him. Paz always had to prepare his meals, because
she knew better than the cook how he liked them flavoured; and Rosa had
to be on hand to sit with him, read to him, and generally anticipate his
every requirement. And as they never knew when he might feel unwell and
come home to bed, and as he, of course, never dreamed of sending them
notice beforehand from his office, it ended in his daughters literally
never daring to go out at all after lunch.
I was shocked when I discovered the life they were leading. The _novio_
of Paz had broken off the engagement, nominally because she could not pay
her weekly duty calls on his mother, who was a stickler for etiquette
and had no sympathy with “my Papa’s” hypochondria, and the only gleam of
brightness on the poor girls’ horizon was the appearance of a lover for
Rosa, the quiet one of the sisters, who had never attracted attention
like handsome Paz. It was quite useless to ask them out, to suggest
their taking turns in keeping Papa company, to make impromptu calls on
the way to cinematographs or theatres on the chance of finding them
free. Papa always either had just gone to bed or was just expected home
to dinner; their duty to him had become an obsession, and the obsession
was encouraged by him from purely selfish motives, and by the old aunt
because in her view the girls would be committing a grave breach of
decorum in going into society so soon (well over a year!) after their
mother’s death. And worst of all, papa, from pure jealousy, objected to
Rosa’s lover and forbade him the house, professing to have discovered
that his means were uncertain, and announcing that he had no intention of
spending his own hard-earned money on the support of an idle son-in-law.
But for once Papa met his match. The lover was neither idle nor
impecunious, but a man of strong character and good position, and he was
genuinely attached to our placid Rosa. So one fine morning the lovers met
at Mass, and got married after a fashion peculiar, I believe, to Spain.
Just before the Mass ended they stepped forward, declared themselves
man and wife, and asked for a blessing on their union. The priest may
object, but he cannot refuse, for he must pronounce the benediction after
saying Mass, and that serves as the blessing which sanctions these stolen
marriages.
So Rosa went away with her husband and was happy, and soon fined down
to her normal soft but shapely plumpness, while poor Paz stayed at home
and pandered to her father until she came to weigh something like two
hundredweight.
I met her quondam _novio_ shortly after Rosa’s marriage, and gently
reproached him for deserting the girl whom he had “pretended to” for so
long.
“Don’t blame me,” he said; “it’s all her father’s fault for not letting
her take enough exercise to keep her fat down. I am not tall (he was
about five feet high, a slim little pocket Adonis), and I haven’t the
courage to make myself ridiculous by marrying a woman who will make two
of me before she is thirty.”
I could not help feeling that there was something to be said on his side;
but once again the cruel results of this branch of Spanish etiquette
became apparent. If Paz had been able to lead a natural life, walking
by day and dancing by night, as she did while her mother was living,
she would not have lost either her figure or her lover, for before they
went into mourning she and Rosa were among the merriest and most active
of all the girls in their set. And now one can anticipate for her no
brighter future than to be the maiden aunt to Rosa’s children, a sort of
household drudge and mother’s help for life;—beloved, it is true, by the
nephews and nieces, who will regard her with an affection almost if not
quite equal to that bestowed on their mother herself, but always just
“my aunt,” a woman in a subordinate position, given a home for the sake
of her services as nurse while the children are young, and as duenna
when the girls grow up. She will always be cheerful and philosophical,
for Paz is made that way, and she will always be practical and helpful
in the house. But she will be an old maid, a good wife spoiled, and she
will feel it to the end. And all because when she was yet in her teens
she was compelled to sit indoors for a year after her mother’s death,
and therefore grew so fat that her lover was frightened away. Poor Paz!
She is one of many victims to a ridiculous and indefensible custom and a
mistaken sense of duty.