Hasta la Vista!
Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, _via_
Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic
Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging of Galicia, the blazing heat
and the incessant, exhausting warfare against vermin, had begun to
tell. That Spanish fever with which so many foreigners make too
intimate acquaintance was at our doors, and we found ourselves forced
at last to sacrifice enthusiasm to hygiene. The most eccentric train
which it was ever my fortune to encounter shunted and switched us
across country to Vigo in about the time it would have taken to make
the journey donkeyback. Here we tarried for a week or so, gathering
strength from the Atlantic breezes, and when, one sunny August day, a
stately steamboat called for an hour at Vigo harbor on her way from
Buenos Ayres to Southampton, we went up over the side. Our shock of
astonishment at the cleanliness around us could not, however, divert
our attention long from the receding shores of Spain, toward which one
of us, at least, still felt a stubborn longing.
They lay bright in the midday sunshine, those green uplands of
Galicia, mysterious with that patient peasant life of which we had
caught fleeting, baffling glimpses. Still we seemed to see the
brown-legged women washing in the brook and spreading their
coarse-spun, gay-bordered garments on the heather; children, with the
faces of little Pats and little Biddies, tugging a bleating sheep
across the stepping-stones, or boosting an indignant goat over the
wall; lean pigs poking their noses out of the low, stone doorways,
where babies slept on wisps of hay; girls in cream-colored kerchiefs,
starred with gold, bearing loads of fragrant brush or corded fagots on
their heads. As the evening should come on, and the sea-breeze stir
the tassels of the maize, we knew how the fields would be dotted with
impromptu groups of dancers, leaping higher and higher and waving
their arms in ever wilder merriment,--a scene pastoral down to the
pigs, and poetic up to those gushes of song that delight the listener.
"I went to the meadow
Day after day,
To gather the blossoms
Of April and May,
And there was Mercedes,
Always there,
Sweetest white lily
That breathes the air."
"North-wind, North-wind,
Strong as wine!
Blow thou, North-wind,
Comrade mine!"
"The Virgin is spreading handkerchiefs
On the rosemary to dry.
The little birds are singing,
And the brook is running by.
"The Virgin washes handkerchiefs,
And spreads them in the sun,
But St. Joseph, out of mischief,
Has stolen every one."
It was only now and then that we had realized a touch of genuine
fellowship with these Galician peasants. I remember a little
thirteenth-century church, gray crosses topping its low gray towers,
one of which was broken off as if a giant hand had snapped it. In the
porch a white-headed woman, in a gold-edged blue kerchief and
poppy-red skirt, was holding a dame-school. It took her all the
morning session, she told us, to get the fifty faces washed, but in
the afternoon the children learned to read and knit and play the
choral games. She had ten cents a month for every child, when the
parents were able to pay. From a convenient hollow in a pillar of
Arabic tradition she proudly drew her library,--a shabby primer and a
few loose leaves of a book of devotion. As we talked, the midgets grew
so restless and inquisitive that she shook her long rod at them with a
mighty show of fierceness, and shooed them out of the porch like so
many chickens. Then she went on eagerly with the story of her life,
telling how she was married at fifteen, how her husband went "to serve
the king" in the second Carlist war, and never came back, and how her
only daughter had borne nine children, of whom eight died in babyhood,
"_angelitos al cielo_," having known on earth "only the day and the
night." The last and youngest had been very ill with the fever, and
the afflicted grandmother had promised that noble Roman maiden, the
martyr saint of the little gray church, to go around the edifice seven
times upon her knees, if only the child might live. The vow had been
heard, as the presence of a thin-faced, wistful tot by the old woman's
side attested, but so far only three of the seven circuits had been
made. "It tires the knees much." But even with the words she knelt
again, kissing the sacred threshold, and began the painful, heavy,
shuffling journey around the church, while the baby, with wondering
gray eyes, trotted beside her, clinging to the wrinkled hand. When at
last, with puffs and groanings, the old dame had reached the carven
doorway again, she rose wearily, rubbing her knees.
"A sweet saint!" she said, "but _ay de mi!_ such gravel!"
We ought, of course, to have been impressed in Galicia with its
debasing ignorance and superstition, and so, to a certain extent, we
were. We went to see a _romeria_, a pilgrimage to a hilltop shrine, on
one of our last afternoons in Vigo, and found a double line of dirty,
impudent beggars, stripped half naked, and displaying every sort of
hideous deformity,--a line that reached all the way from the
carriage-road up the rugged ascent to the crest. We had to run the
gantlet, and it was like traversing a demoniac sculpture-gallery made
up of human mockeries. We had to push our way, moreover, through scene
after scene of vulgar barter in things divine, and when at last the
summit was achieved, the shrine of the Virgin seemed robbed of its
glory by the ugliness, vice, and misery it overlooked. Spain is
mediaeval, and the modern age can teach her much. But with all her
physical foulness and mental folly, there still dwells in her that
mediaeval grace for which happier countries may be searched in vain.
Yet Spain is far from unhappy. It is beautiful to see out of what
scant allowance of that which we call well-being, may be evolved
wisdom and joy, poetry and religion. Wearied as we two bookish
travellers were with lectures and libraries, we rejoiced in this wild
Galician lore that lives on the lips of the people. The written
Spanish literature, like other Spanish arts, is of the richest, nor
are its laurels limited to the dates of Cervantes and Calderon. The
modern Spanish novel, for instance, as Mr. Howells so generously
insists, all but leads the line. But Spain herself is poetry. What
does one want of books in presence of her storied, haunted
vistas,--warrior-trod Asturian crags, opalescent reaches of Castilian
plain, orange-scented gardens of Andalusia? A circle of cultivated
Spaniards is one of the most charming groups on earth, but Spaniards
altogether innocent of formal education may be walking anthologies of
old ballads, spicy quatrains, riddles, proverbs, fables, epigrams. The
peasant quotes "Don Quixote" without knowing it; the donkey-boy is as
lyric as Romeo; the devout shepherd tells a legend of the Madonna that
is half the dream of his own lonely days among the hills. Where
Spanish life is most stripped of material prosperity, it seems most to
abound in suggestions of romance. This despised Galicia, the province
of simpletons, is literary in its own way. The hovel has no bookshelf,
but the children's ears drink in the grandmother's croon:--
"On a morning of St. John
Fell a sailor into the sea.
'What wilt thou give me, sailor, sailor,
If I rescue thee?'
"'I will give thee all my ships,
All my silver, every gem,
All my gold,--yea, wife and daughters,
I will give thee them.'
"'What care I for masted ships,
What care I for gold or gem?
Keep thy wife and keep thy daughters,
What care I for them?
"'On the morning of St. John
Thou art drowning in the sea.
Promise me thy soul at dying,
And I'll rescue thee.'
"'I commend the sea to God,
And my body to the sea,
And my soul, Sweet Mother Mary,
I commit to thee.'"
And well it was for this bold mariner that he did not take up the
Devil's offer, for everybody knows that those who have signed away
their souls to the Devil turn black in the moment of dying, and are
borne, black and horrible, to the sepulchre.
In this northwestern corner of Spain are many mountain-songs as well
as sea-songs. One of the sweetest tells how the blue-robed Virgin met
a young shepherdess upon the hills and was so pleased with the
maiden's courtesy that she straightway bore her thence to Paradise,
not forgetting, this tender Mary of Bethlehem, to lead the flock
safely back to the sheepfold. The love of the Galician peasantry for
"Our Lady" blends childlike familiarity with impassioned devotion.
"As I was telling my beads,
While the dawn was red,
The Virgin came to greet me
With her arms outspread."
Her rank in their affections is well suggested by another of the
popular _coplas_.
"In the porch of Bethlehem,
Sun, Moon, and Star,
The Virgin, St. Joseph,
And the Christ Child are."
With their saints these Spanish peasants seem almost on a household
footing, not afraid of a jest because so sure of the love that
underlies it.
"St. John and Mary Magdalen
Played hide and seek, the pair,
Till St. John threw a shoe at her,
Because she didn't play fair."
Yet there is no lack of fear in this rustic religion. There is many a
"shalt not" in the Galician decalogue. One must not try to count the
stars, lest he come to have as many wrinkles as the number of stars he
has counted. Never rock an empty cradle, for the next baby who sleeps
in it will die. So often as you name the Devil in life, so often will
he appear to you in the hour of death. If you hear another name him,
call quickly, before the Devil has time to arrive, "Jesus is here." It
is ill to dance alone, casting your shadow on the wall, because that
is dancing with the Devil. But the Prince of Darkness is not the only
supernatural being whom Galicians dread. There is a bleating demon who
makes fun of them, cloudy giants who stir up thunderstorms, and are
afraid only of St. Barbara, witches who cast the evil eye, but most of
all the "souls in pain." For oftentimes the dead come back to earth
for their purgatorial penance. You must never slam a door, nor close a
window roughly, nor kick the smallest pebble from your path, because
in door or stone or window may be a suffering soul. To see one is to
die within the year. If you would not be haunted by your dead, kiss
the shoes which the body wears to the burial.
It is well to go early to bed, for at midnight all manner of evil
beings prowl up and down the streets. Who has not heard of that
unlucky woman, who, after spinning late and long, stepped to the
window for a breath of air exactly at twelve o'clock? Far off across
the open country she saw a strange procession of shining candles
drawing nearer and nearer, although there were no hands to hold them
and no sound of holy song. Straight toward her house came those
uncanny lights, moving silently through the meadow mists, and halted
beneath her window. Then the foremost one of all begged her to take it
in and keep it carefully until the midnight following. Scarcely
knowing what she did, she closed her fingers on the cold wax and,
blowing out the flame, laid away the taper in a trunk, but when, at
daybreak, after a sleepless night, she raised the lid, before her lay
a corpse. Aghast, she fled to the priest, who lent her all the relics
of the sacristy; but their united power only just availed to save her
from the fury of the spirits when they returned at midnight to claim
the taper, expecting, moreover, to seize upon the woman and "turn her
to fire and ashes."
Sometimes a poor soul is permitted to condense the slow ages of
Purgatory into one hour of uttermost torment. Galicians tell how a
young priest brought his serving-maid to sorrow and how, to escape the
latter burning, she shut herself, one day when the priest was engaged
in the ceremonial of High Mass, into the red-hot oven. On his return,
he called her name and sought her high and low, and when, at last, he
opened the oven door, out flew a white dove that soared, a purified
and pardoned soul, into the blue of heaven. The science of this simple
folk is not divorced from poetry and religion. The rainbow drinks,
they say, in the sea and in the rivers. The Milky Way, the Road to
Santiago, is trodden every night by pale, dim multitudes who failed to
make that blessed pilgrimage, from which no one of us will be excused,
in time of life. When the dust stirs in an empty house, good St. Ana
is sweeping there. When babies look upward and laugh, they see the
cherubs at play. Tuesday is the unlucky day in Spain, whereas children
born on Friday receive the gift of second-sight, and those who enter
the world on Good Friday are marked by a cross in the roof of the
mouth and have the holy touch that cures diseases. It is a fortunate
house beneath whose eaves the swallow builds,
"For swallows on Mount Calvary
Plucked tenderly away
From the brows of Christ two thousand thorns,
Such gracious birds are they."
[Illustration: ST. JAMES]
The Galicians, butt of all Spain for their dulness, are shrewd enough
in fact. It is said that those arrant knaves, the gypsies, dare not
pass through Galicia for fear of being cheated. Like other unlettered
peasants, Gallegos whet their wits on rhyming riddles.
"Who is the little pigeon,
Black and white together,
That speaks so well without a tongue
And flies without a feather?"
"A tree with twelve boughs and four nests on a bough,
In each nest seven birdlings,--unriddle me now."
In many of their proverbial sayings one gets the Spanish tang at its
best. "A well-filled stomach praises God."
"Why to Castile
For your fortune go?
A man's Castile
Is under his hoe."
And I fear if my comrade were to speak, in Spanish phrase, of our
return to Galicia, she would bid St. James expect us "on Judgment Day
in the afternoon."