"For as many auchours affirme (and mannes accions declare)
that man is but his mynde; so it is to bee daily tride, that
the bodie is but a mixture of compoundes, knitte together like
a fardell of fleashe, and bondell of bones, and united as a
heavie lumpe of Leade (without the mynde) in the sillie
substance of a shadowe."--THOMAS CHURCHILL, GENTLEMAN.
My Spanish hostess, brightest and prettiest of little ladies despite
the weight of sorrow upon sorrow, came tripping into my room one
afternoon with her black eyes starry bright under the lace mantilla.
"And where have you been to get so nicely rested?"
"To a _duelo_."
I turned the word over in my mind. _Duelo?_ Surely that must mean the
mourning at a house of death, when the men have gone forth to church
and the burial, and the women remain behind to weep together, or one
of those tearful _At Homes_ kept, day after day, until the mass, by
the ladies of the afflicted household for their condoling friends. But
such a smiling little senora! I hardly knew what degree of sympathy
befitted the occasion.
"Were you acquainted with the--the person?"
"No, I had never seen him. He had been an officer in the Philippines
many years, and came home very ill, fifteen days since. I wept
because I knew his mother, but I wept much. Women, at least here in
Spain, have always cause enough for tears. I thought of my own
matters, and had a long, long cry. That is why I feel better. There is
so little time to cry at home. I must see about the dinner now."
And she rustled out again, leaving me to meditate on Spanish
originality, even in grief.
In any country the usages of death are no less significant than the
usages of life. That grim necropolis of Glasgow, with its few shy
gowans under its lowering sky, those tender, turf-folded,
church-shadowed graveyards of rural England, those trains of mourners,
men by themselves and women by themselves, walking behind the bier in
mid-street through the mud and rain of wintry Paris to the bedizened
Pere Lachaise or Montparnasse--such sights interpret a nation as truly
as its art and history; but the burial customs of Spain, especially
distinctive, are, like most things Spanish, contradictory and baffling
to the tourist view. "La Tierra de Vice Versa" is not a country that
he who runs may read.
The popular verses and maxims treat of death with due Castilian
solemnity and an always unflinching, if often ironic, recognition of
the mortal fact. "When the house is finished," says the proverb, "the
hearse is at the door." Yet this Spanish hearse is one of the gayest
vehicles since Cinderella's coach. If the groundwork is black, there
is abundant relief in mountings of brilliant yellow, but the funeral
carriage is often cream-white, flourished over with fantastic designs
in the bluest of blue or the pinkest of pink. Coffins, too, may be
gaudy as candy-boxes. The first coffin we saw in Spain was bright
lilac, a baby's casket, placed on gilt trestles in the centre of a
great chill church, with chanting priests sprinkling holy water about
it to frighten off the demons, and a crowd of black-bearded men
waiting to follow it to the grave. Such a little coffin and not a
woman near! The poor mother was decently at home, weeping in the midst
of a circle of relatives and neighbors, and counting it among her
comforts that the family had so many masculine friends to walk in the
funeral procession and show sympathy with the household grief. There
would be, on the ninth day after and, for several years to come, on
the anniversary of the death, as many masses as could be afforded said
in the parish church, when, again, the friends would make it a point
of duty to attend.
The daily papers abound in these notices, printed in a variety of
types, so as to cover from two to ten square inches, heavily bordered
with black, and surmounted, in case of adults, with crosses, and with
cherubs' heads for children. I take up a copy of _La Epocha_ and read
the following, under a cross: "Third Anniversary. Senorita Dona
Francisca Fulana y Tal died the twenty-sixth of June, 1896, at
twenty-one years of age. R. I. P. Her disconsolate mother and the rest
of the family ask their friends and all pious persons to be so good as
to commend her to God. All the masses celebrated to-morrow morning in
the Church of San Pascual will be applied to the everlasting rest of
the soul of the said senorita. Indulgences are granted in the usual
form." It is the third anniversary, too, of a titled lady, whose
"husband, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, uncles, cousins, and all
who inherit under her will" have ordered masses in two churches for
the entire day to-morrow, and announce, moreover, that the
ecclesiastical authorities grant "one hundred and forty days of
indulgence to all the faithful for each mass that they hear, sacred
communion that they devote, or portion of a rosary that they pray for
the soul of this most noble lady."
In the case of another lady of high degree, who died yesterday,
"having received the Blessed Sacraments and the benediction of his
Holiness," the Nuncio concedes one hundred days of indulgence, the
Archbishop of Burgos eighty, and the Bishops of Madrid, Alcala,
Cartagena, Leon, and Santander forty each; while a marquis who died a
year ago, "Knight of the Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece," is
to have masses said for his soul in seven churches, not only all
through to-morrow, but for the two days following.
May all these rest in peace, and all who mourn for them be comforted!
Yet thought drifts away to the poor and lowly, whose grief cannot find
solace in procuring this costly intercession of the Church for the
souls they love. It seems hard that the inequalities of life should
thus reach out into death and purgatory. We used, during our sojourn
in Granada, to meet many pathetic little processions on "The Way of
the Dead." Over this hollow road, almost a ravine, the fortress walls,
with their crumbling towers, keep guard on the one side, and the
terraced gardens of the _Generalife_, with their grand old cypresses,
on the other. And here, almost every hour of the day, is climbing a
company of four rough men, carrying on their shoulders a cheap coffin,
which perhaps a husband follows, or a white-haired father, or, hand in
hand, bewildered orphan boys. The road is so steep that often the
bearers set their burden down in the shadow of the bank-side, and
fling themselves at full length on the ground beside it, thriftily
passing from man to man the slow-burning wax match for their paper
cigarettes. I remember more than one such smoking group, with a
solitary mourner, hat in hand and eyes on the coffin, yet he, too,
with cigarette in mouth, standing patiently by. All who pass make the
sign of the cross, and even the rudest peasant uncovers his head. Very
shortly the bearers may be seen again, coming down the hill at a merry
pace, the empty box, with its loose, rattling lid, tilted over the
shoulder now of one, now of another; for the children of poverty, who
had not chambers of their own nor the dignity of solitude in life, lie
huddled in a common pit after death, without coffin-planks to sever
dust from dust.
A century ago it was usual to robe the dead in monastic garb,
especially in the habit of St. Francis or of the Virgin of Carmen, and
within the present generation bodies were borne to the grave on open
biers, the bystanders saluting, and bidding them farewell and quiet
rest:--
"'Duerme in paz!' dicen los buenos.
'Adios!' dicen los demas."
But now the closed coffin of many colors is in vogue. In the Santiago
market we met a cheerful dame with one of these balanced on her head,
crying for a purchaser, and up the broad flights of steps to the
Bilbao cemetery we saw a stolid-faced young peasant-woman swinging
along with a child's white coffin, apparently heavy with the weight of
death, poised on the glossy black coils of hair, about which she had
twisted a carmine handkerchief.
Very strange is the look of a Spanish cemetery, with its ranges of
high, deep walls, wherein the coffins are thrust end-wise, each above
each, to the altitude of perhaps a dozen layers. These cells are
sometimes purchased outright, sometimes rented for ten years, or five,
or one. When the friends of the quiet tenant pay his dues no longer,
forth he goes to the general ditch, _osario comun_, and leaves his
room for another. Such wall graves are characteristically Spanish,
this mode of burial in the Peninsula being of long antiquity. Yet the
rich prefer their own pantheons, sculptured like little chapels, or
their own vaults, over which rise tall marbles of every device, the
shaft, the pyramid, the broken column; while a poor family, or two or
three neighboring households, often make shift to pay for one large
earth grave, in which their dead may at least find themselves among
kith and kin. Spanish cemeteries are truly silent cities, with streets
upon streets enclosed between these solemn walls, which open out, at
intervals, now for the ornamented patios of the rich, now for the
dreary squares peopled by the poor. Here in a most aristocratic
quarter, shaded by willows, set with marbles, paved with flower beds,
sleeps a duke in stately pantheon, which is carved all over with
angels, texts, and sacred symbols, still leaving room for medallions
boasting his ancestral dignities. A double row of lamps, with gilded,
fantastically moulded stands, and with dangling crystals of all
colors, leads to the massive iron door. What enemy has he now to guard
against with that array of bolts and bars? Here are a poet's palms
petrified to granite, and here a monument all muffled in fresh
flowers. Here the magnificent bronze figure of a knight, with sword
half drawn, keeps watch beside a tomb, while the grave beyond a rose
bush guards as well. And here an imaged Sandalphon holds out open
hands, this legend written across his marble scarf, "The tear falleth;
the flower fadeth; but God treasureth the prayer."
There is a certain high-bred reserve about these costly sepulchres,
but turning to the walls one comes so face to face with grief as to
experience a sense of intrusion. Each cell shows on its sealed door of
slate or other stone the name and age of its occupant, and perhaps a
sentiment, lettered in gilt or black, as these: "We bear our loss--God
knows how heavily." "Son of my soul." "For thee, that land of larger
love; for me, until I find thee there, only the valley of sorrow and
the hard hill of hope."
Most of the cells have, too, a glassed or grated recess in front of
this inscription wall, holding tributes or memorials--dried flowers,
colored images of saints and angels, crucifixes, and the like.
Sometimes the resurrection symbol of the butterfly appears. In the
little cemetery at Vigo we noticed that the flower-vases were in form
of great blue butterflies with scarlet splashes on their wings.
Sometimes there are locks of hair, personal trinkets, and often card
or cabinet photographs, whose living look startles the beholder. Out
from a wreath of yellow immortelles peeps the plump smile of an old
gentleman in modern dress coat; a coquettish lady in tiara and
earrings laughs from behind her fan; and a grove of paper shrubbery,
where tissue fairies dressed in rose petals dance on the blossoms,
half hides the eager face of a Spanish midshipman. Where the
photographs have faded and dimmed with time, the effect is less
incongruous, if not less pathetic.
The niches of children contain the gayest possible little figures.
Here are china angels in blue frocks, with pink sleeves and saffron
pantalets, pink-tipped plumes, and even pink bows in their goldy hair.
Here is a company of tiny Hamlets, quaint dollikins set up in a circle
about a small green grave, each with finger on lip, "The rest is
silence." Here are two elegant and lazy cherubs, their alabaster
chubbiness comfortably bestowed in toy chairs of crimson velvet on
each side of an ivory crucifix. And here is a Bethlehem, and here a
Calvary, and here the Good Shepherd bearing the lamb in His bosom; and
here, in simple, but artistic wood carving, the Christ with open arms,
calling to a child on sick-bed to come unto Him, while the mother,
prostrate before the holy feet, kisses their shadow. One cannot look
for long. It is well to lift the eyes from the niche graves of Granada
to the glory of the Sierra Nevada that soars beyond, and turn from the
patios of San Isidro to the cheerful picture of Madrid across the
Manzanares, even though, prominent in the vista, rises the cupola of
_San Francisco el Grande_. This is the National Pantheon, and within,
beneath the frescoed dome, all aglow with blue and gold, masses are
chanted for the dead whom Spain decrees to honor, as, so recently, for
Castelar.
Near this church a viaduct, seventy-five feet high, crosses the _Calle
de Segovia_; and, despite the tall crooked railings and a constant
police patrol, Madrilenos bent on suicide often succeed in leaping
over and bruising out their breath on the stones of the street below.
It is a desperate exit. The Seine and Thames lure their daily victims
with murmuring sound and the soft, enfolding look of water, but
Spaniards who spring from this fatal viaduct see beneath them only the
cruel pavement. That life should be harder than stone! And yet the
best vigilance of Madrid cannot prevent fresh bloodstains on the
_Calle de Segovia_.
Near the cemetery of San Isidro, across the Manzanares, are two other
large Catholic burial grounds, and the _Cementerio Ingles_.
"But murderers, atheists, and Protestants are buried way off in the
east," said the pretty Spanish girl beside me.
"Oh, let's go there!" I responded, with heretic enthusiasm; but I had
reckoned without the cabman, who promptly and emphatically protested.
"That's not a pleasant place for ladies to see. You would better drive
in the _Prado_ and _Recoletos_, or in the _Buen Retiro_."
We told him laughingly that he was speaking against his own interests,
for the Civil Cemetery was much farther off than the parks. He
consulted his dignity and decided to laugh in return.
"It is not of the _pesetas_ I think first when I am driving ladies.
But" (with suave indulgence) "you shall go just where you like."
So in kindness he gathered up his reins and away we clattered sheer
across the city. Presently we had left the fountain-cooled squares and
animated streets behind, had passed even the ugly, sinister _Plaza de
Toros_, and outstripped the trolley track; but still the road
stretched on, enlivened only by herds of goats and an occasional
_venta_, where drivers of mule trains were pausing to wet their dusty
throats. We met few vehicles now save the gay-colored hearses, and few
people except groups of returning mourners, walking in bewildered
wise, with stumbling feet.
"The Cemetery of the Poor is opposite the Civil Cemetery," said our
cabman, "and they have from thirty to fifty burials a day. The keeper
is a friend of mine. He shall show you all about."
A bare Castilian ridge rose before us, where a farmer, leaning on his
scythe, was outlined against the sky like a silhouette of Death. And
at last our cheery driver, humming bars from a popular light opera,
checked his mettlesome old mare,--who plunged down hills and scrambled
up as if she were running away from the bull-ring, where she must soon
fulfil her martyrdom,--between two dismal graveyards. From the larger,
on our right, tiptoed out a furtive man and peered into the cab as if
he thought we had a coffin under the seat.
He proved a blood-curdling conductor, always speaking in a hoarse
whisper and glancing over his shoulder in a way to make the stoutest
nerves feel ghosts, but he showed us, under that sunset sky, memorable
sights--ranks upon ranks of gritty mounds marked with black, wooden
crosses, a scanty grace for which the living often pay the price of
their own bread that the dead they love may pass a year or two out of
that hideous general fosse. Then the sexton reluctantly led us to the
unblessed, untended hollow across the way, where rows of brick
sepulchres await the poor babies who die before the holy water touches
them, where recumbent marbles press upon the dead who knew no upward
reach of hope, and where defiant monuments, erected by popular
subscription and often bearing the blazonry of a giant quill, denote
the resting-places of freethinkers and the agitators of new ideas.
There were some Christian inscriptions, whether for Protestants or not
I do not know, but to my two companions there was no distinction of
persons in this unhallowed limbo.
Our dusty guide led us hurriedly from plot to plot.
"They say the mothers cheat the priests, and there are babies over
yonder that ought to be here, for the breath was out of them before
ever they were baptized. They say the priests had this man done to
death one night, because he wrote against religion. He was only
twenty-two. The club he belonged to put up that stone. They say there
are evil words on it. But I don't know myself. I can't read, thanks to
God. They say it was through reading and writing that most of these
came here."
"But those are not evil words," I answered. "They are, 'Believe in
Jesus and thou shalt be saved.'"
He hastily crossed himself, "Do me the favor not to read such words
out loud. Here is another, where they say the words are words of
hell."
I held my peace this time, musing on that broad marble with its one
deep-cut line, "The Death of God."
"And over there," he croaked, pointing with his clay-colored thumb,
"is _Whiskers_."
The senorita, whose black eyes had been getting larger and larger,
gave a little scream and fairly ran for the gate.
Spaniards have usually great sympathy for criminals, newspaper
accounts of executions often closing with an entreaty for God's mercy
on "this poor man's soul," but _Whiskers_, the Madrid sensation of a
fortnight since, was a threefold murderer. Passion-mad, he had shot
dead in the open street a neighbor's youthful wife, held the public at
bay with his revolver, and mortally wounded two Civil Guards, before
he turned the fatal barrel on himself.
"His family wanted him laid over the way," continued that scared
undertone at my ear, "but the bishop said no. A murderer like that was
just as bad as infidels and Protestants, and should be buried out of
grace."
I felt as if Superstition incarnate were walking by my side, and after
one more look at that strangely peopled patch of unconsecrated ground,
with its few untrimmed cypresses and straggling rose bushes, hillside
slopes about and glory-flooded skies above, I gave Superstition a
_peseta_, which he devoutly kissed, and returned to the cab, followed
by the carol of a solitary bird.
I remember a similar experience in Cadiz. I had driven out with one of
my Spanish hostesses to the large seaside cemetery, a mile beyond the
gate. This is arranged in nine successive patios, planted with palms
and cypresses. In the niches, seashells play a prominent part. The
little angel images, as gay as ever, with their pink girdles and their
purple wings, may be seen swinging in shells, sleeping in shells, and
balancing on the edge of shells to play their golden flutes. Near by
is an English and German cemetery, with green-turfed mounds and a
profusion of blossoming shrubs and flower beds. Not sure of the
direction, as we were leaving the Catholic enclosure I asked a
bandy-legged, leather-visaged old sexton, who might have been the very
one that dug Ophelia's grave, if the "Protestant cemetery" was at our
right. He laid down his mattock, peered about among the mausolea to
see if we were quite alone, winked prodigiously, and, drawing a bunch
of keys from the folds of his black sash, started briskly down a
by-path and signed to us to follow. He led us through stony passages
out beyond the sanctified ground into a dreary, oblong space, a patch
of weeds and sand, enclosed by the lofty sepulchral walls, but with a
blessed strip of blue sky overhead.
"Here they are!" he chuckled. "They wouldn't confess, they died
without the sacraments, and here they are."
Some names lettered on the wall seemed to be those of Dutch and
Norwegian sailors, who had perhaps died friendless in this foreign
port. There were pebble-strewn graves of Jews, and upright marbles
from which the dead still seemed to utter voice: "I refuse the prayers
of all the saints, and ask the prayers of honest human souls. I
believe in God." And another, "God is knowledge." And another, "God is
All that works for Wisdom and for Love."
"Are there burial services for these?" I inquired.
If the Church of England could have seen that crooked old sexton go
through his gleeful pantomime!
"There's one that comes with some, and they call him Pastor! And he
scrapes up a handful of dirt--so! And he flings it at the coffin--so!
And then he stands up straight and says, 'Dust to dust!' I've heard
him say it myself."
"God of my soul!" cried the Spanish lady in horror, and to express her
detestation of such a heathenish rite, she spat upon the ground.
The monarchs of Spain do not mingle their ashes. Who knows where
Roderick sleeps? Or does that deathless culprit still lurk in mountain
caverns, as tradition has it, wringing his wasted hands and tearing
his white beard in unavailing penitence? The "Catholic kings,"
Ferdinand and Isabella, lie, not where they had planned, in that
beautiful Gothic church of Toledo, _San Juan de los Reyes_, on whose
outer walls yet hang the Moorish chains struck from the limbs of
Christian captives, but in Granada, the city of their conquest, where
they slumber proudly, although their coffins are of plainest lead and
their last royal chamber a small and dusky vault. Pedro the Cruel is
thrust away in a narrow wall-grave beneath the _Capilla Real_ of
Seville cathedral. His brother, the Master of Santiago, whom he
treacherously slew in one of the loveliest halls of the Alcazar, is
packed closely in on his left, and Maria de Padilla, for whose sake he
cut short the hapless life of Queen Blanche, on his right. Pleasant
family discussions they must have at the witching hour of night, when
they drag their numb bones out of those pigeon-holes for a brief
respite of elbow room! San Fernando, the Castilian conqueror of
Castile, canonized "because he carried fagots with his own hands for
the burning of heretics," is more commodiously accommodated in a
silver sarcophagus in the chapel above, where Alfonso the Learned also
has long leisure for thought. Another Alfonso and another Fernando,
with another wife of Pedro the Cruel, keep their state in Santiago de
Compostela, and still another Alfonso and two Sanchos have their
splendid tombs in the _Capilla Mayor_ of Toledo cathedral, while in
its _Capilla de los Reyes Nuevos_, a line descended from that brother
whom Pedro murdered, sleeps the first John, with the second and third
Henrys.
[Illustration: BULL-FIGHT OF TO-DAY]
Cordova cathedral, although this lovely mosque recks little of
Christian majesties, has the ordinary equipment of an Alfonso and a
Fernando, and the Royal Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos shelters
Alfonso VIII, with his queen, Eleanor of England. In less noted
churches, one continually chances on them, _rey_ or _reina_, _infante_
or _infanta_, dreaming the centuries away in rich recesses of fretted
marble and alabaster, with the shadow of great arches over them and
the deep-voiced chant around.
But since Philip II created, in his own sombre likeness, the monastery
of the Escorial, rising in angular austerity from a spur of the bleak
Guadarrama Mountains, the royal houses of Austria and Bourbon have
sought burial there. The first and chief in the dank series of
sepulchral vaults, the celebrated _Panteon de los Reyes_, is an
octagon of black marble, placed precisely under the high altar, and
gloomily magnificent with jasper, porphyry, and gold. It has an altar
of its own, on whose left are three recesses, each with four long
shelves placed one above another for the sarcophagi of the kings of
Spain, and on whose right are corresponding recesses for the queens.
As the guide holds his torch, we read the successive names of the
great Charles I, founder of the Austrian line; the three Philips, in
whom his genius dwindled more and more; and the half-witted Charles
II, in whom it ignobly perished. The coffin lid of Charles I has twice
been lifted, once as late as 1871, in compliment to the visiting
Emperor of Brazil, and even then that imperial body lay intact, with
blackened face and open, staring eyes. The gilded bronze coffin of
Philip II was brought to his bedside for his inspection in his last
hour of life. After a critical survey he ordered a white satin lining
and more gilt nails--a remarkable sense of detail in a man who had
sent some ten thousand heretics to the torture.
Looking for the Bourbons, we miss the first of them all, the
melancholy Philip V, who would not lay him down among these Austrians,
but sleeps with his second queen, the strong-willed Elizabeth
Farnese, in his cloudy retreat of San Ildefonso, within hearing of the
fountains of La Granja. His eldest son, Luis the Well-Beloved, who
died after a reign of seven months, rests here in the Escorial, but
Fernando VI, also the son of Philip's first queen--that gallant little
Savoyarde who died so young--was buried in Madrid. Charles III, best
and greatest of the Spanish Bourbons, is here, the weak Charles IV,
Fernando VII, "The Desired" and the Disgraceful, and Alfonso XII,
while a stately sarcophagus is already reserved for Alfonso XIII.
To the cold society of these five Austrian and five Bourbon sovereigns
are admitted nine royal ladies. Of these, the first three are in good
and regular standing--the queen of Charles I and mother of Philip II,
the fourth queen of Philip II and mother of Philip III, the queen of
Philip III and mother of Philip IV. But here is an intruder. Philip
IV, who had an especial liking for this grewsome vault, and used often
to clamber into his own niche to hear mass, insisted on having both
his French and Austrian queens interred here, although the first,
Isabel of Bourbon, is not the mother of a Spanish king, the promising
little Baltasar having died in boyhood. The brave girl-queen of Philip
V is here, in double right as mother both of Luis and Fernando VI, and
here is the wife of Charles III and mother of Charles IV. But of sorry
repute are the last two queens, the wife of Charles IV and mother of
Fernando VII, she who came hurrying down those slippery marble stairs
in feverish delirium to scratch _Luisa_ with scissors on her selected
coffin, and this other, Maria Cristina, wife of Fernando VII and
mother of the dethroned Isabel, a daughter who did not mend the story.
It will not be long before she returns from her French exile to enter
into possession of the sarcophagus that expects her here, even as
another sumptuous coffin awaits the present regent. Pity it is for
Isabel, whose name is still a byword in the Madrid cafes! But she
always enjoyed hearing midnight mass in this dim and dreadful crypt,
and will doubtless be glad to come back to her ancestors, such as they
were, and take up her royal residence with them in "dust of human
nullity and ashes of mortality."