Cervantes--is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain.
But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and
wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.
She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood
darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs
her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking
her own image in the water....
_e. The Gypsies Dance_
Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there
is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the
road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the
hill are caves, the dwellings of _gitanos_.
Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments,
their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are
shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an
unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men
are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women.
Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of
appetite and song had worn them.
The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are
white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make
this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave
within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.
It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests
of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot
stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish
cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.
The _gitano_ music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken
surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of
it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the
endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying _crescendo_ that splits, turns
back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women
have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in
a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of
the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of
the women.
Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight:
holds the _gitanos_ together: is their soul. But this softness and
spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the _gitanos_,
making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley.
We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.
_f. Spain Dances_
Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the
receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding
Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish.
Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian:
like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long
were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the
Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave
birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to
Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating
Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.
There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that
make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh
fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So
Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the
great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make
Spain one--to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and
Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the
north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the
rejuvenation.
The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals
reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in
Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the
huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the
crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our
Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into
heaven.) They live--and their stone world lives--in an expectant mood.
Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer;
blood is the paint of a picture. The _pueblo_ entire is platform for the
Dance.
* * * * *
Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and
in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they
came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly
forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she
has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the
swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla
that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become
the Andalusian shawl. The _bailarina_ bows and listens to the music. In
her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands a _peina_ of tortoise
shell. Most Andalusian--this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a
cadence--Andalusian too--whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body
is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head.
There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic
song with a gesture of Castile!
Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music.
Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace
in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and
this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile.
The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with
the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.
There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the
south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of
the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost
heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders
are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt
thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the
ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray
stockinged legs which are a minor almost girlish note within the
sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in
purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone
of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float
languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary.
Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as
Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.
The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of
Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of the
_gitana_, it is--as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites--a heightened
bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it
is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like
the arabesque--a decoration evolved from the written language--it
retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are
apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the
body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.
The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square.
She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand:
this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far
about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked
shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips
that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full
and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow
mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward
(the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile
mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous
breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of
passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to
the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the
Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances
fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees
her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the
new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic
transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at
last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle.
Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and
of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s
face is silence.
So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic
movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances
of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of
the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision.
One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to
harmonious flatness.
* * * * *
Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to
express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain
dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia
is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.
The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the good _andaluza_.
She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast,
strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the
matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the
classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been
purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual--the
accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]
The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid
without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color,
but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She
conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic
elements of the dance--lust, madness, nakedness--are sublimated into
social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements
(again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold
that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.
The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of
the _cuadro flamenco_ it is an æsthetic error for more than a single
dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same
exception) is a _woman_. The true Andalusian audience is a _man_. The
relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian
sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically,
Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She
holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music.
This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like
the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as
teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men,
with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from
her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the true _andaluza_
wins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain
and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a
single Beauty.
* * * * *
The cuadro flamenco is a brilliant dilution of the Andalusian dance.
_Flamenco_ means Flemish, and is applied strictly to Andalusia. The use
harks back to the age of Carlos I and Felipe II when Flanders was part
of the Theodicy of Spain and the best will of Castile and the best blood
of the south went into the wars with the Low Countries. It became
Andalusia’s pride to share in this mad religious struggle.[10]
The _cuadro_ is a “team” of perhaps two men guitarists, four women and
one man dancer. The men are clad in trousers that rise like cylinders to
a high black band above the waist. They wear white shirts and the coat
(which is often absent) is cut in the front like our evening dress, and
tailless. The women are soberly gowned. The shawl is brown or black.
Only the slippers give a flare of red. The hat is the stiff _sombrero
ancho_ of the farmer whose more romantic, more flexible offshoot is our
“cowboy Stetson.” The group sit in a half circle. The guitars thrum
almost absently. The men and women seem to be examining one another. A
woman rises and goes to the center of the group. She dances. The other
women and the single man from their chairs with clapping of hand and
foot-beat mark a skeletal obbligato.
To the more pigmented music and more volumnear forms of the other
Andalusian dances, this dance bears the relation of a steel-engraving to
an oil painting. It is a climax of the bare Castilian _motif_: the
warrior will of the Reconquest which lived on, after the Moor had
disappeared from Spain, in the Inquisition, in the Holy War against the
Dutch, in the rapt butcheries of Mexico and Peru--in this flamenco. The
dance makes saccade angles against the lush weave of the music. It is
too graphic, too linear: it remains in the realm of draughtsmanship and
drama.
The dancer does not move from her central square. Feet beat intricate
tattoos, the body is poised stiffly, the head turns, arms swerve up and
down in a sort of wistful memory of ease, while the fingers click an
osseous pointillation that is a shadow of the castanets. The lyrical
release of the arms is held to the verge of vanishment. The guitars make
a music like dry wind in autumn trees. The maternal verdure of the
women, fixed in their chairs, is sacrificed wholly to the stripped will
of the dance. One thinks of fields turned into the desert of Castile.
The fertile and the pagan are almost gone. And the protagonist of the
flamenco is a man.
He comes from his chair only after each woman has danced and has
retired. He is short, neither stout nor slender; there is no gallantry
about him. His face and his dark body are stamped with seriousness. He
has watched the women through their arid figures with eyes like the eyes
of a master. He is no lover: he is the priest of a rite. Now, he stands
moveless within the weave of the music. Sudden, his feet break in a
shattering tattoo from which his body rises in subtle suppressed waves.
Even the lyric holiday of the arms is absent from his dance. They are
still at his side, or they are held in fixity near the shoulder. The
body is vised; the head does not swerve. Feet and legs make a dance,
perpendicular and juiceless: bereft of rhetoric and gesture, they
bespeak the hoof-beat of armies, the vigils of the desert, the absolute
symbol of the Arab Darwish. All of Spain that is not this male message
of Castile has been crushed out....
* * * * *
The distinction of flamenco is only of degree. The Andalusian dance is
impersonal and abstract. All the movements of the soul and body of an
intricate race are essenced here into a ruthless form. The appolonian is
channeled; the dionysian is mastered; the dramatic is cleansed of
episode; the lyrical is exploited as a mere carrier of life to
sculptured unity.
The Andalusian dance is the converse of the art of the Russian ballet in
which the pure materials of plastic movement are exteriorized and
denatured into the melodramatic. In the Russian dance, the means is the
art; the end is the personal, the pathetic. The Russian dance is
analytic, episodic, realistic. The Spanish dance is organic and
essential. It is the one great classic dance surviving in our modern
world.
_CHAPTER IV_
_ARAGON_
_a._ _The Atom_
_b._ _The Way of the Atom_
_a._ _The Atom_
From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north boundary of Spain is
mountain. To the east it is called the Pyrenees: a wall of snowy rock
that falls, save for a space above the fertile fields of Catalonia, into
the desert of Aragon and Navarre. Westward, the wall is lower and has
another name: Cantábrico. It too is wild, but the more moderate moisture
covers it with pine and its fall southward is but a step to the high
meseta of León and Castile. Within this barrier that like a jagged knife
cuts Spain from Europe lived the Christian Remnant before the Arabs. And
from two fastnesses of this wall--where the Arabs never gained a
foothold--went forth at once the _Reconquista_ which for eight hundred
years, thrusting, expanding, retreating, made war upon the Moslem and at
last after innumerable shifts of fortune drove him out. The western
point of the Reconquest’s birth lies in the perpendicular rocks of the
Asturias. This is the cradle of the Kingdom of León, which, thrusting
from the Cantábrico, became Castile. To the east, the nucleus of the
long “push” south was in the bleakest and highest Pyrenees of Spain: the
Ribagorza and Sobrarbe whose hard squat Iberian chieftains were the
first kings of Aragon. Not till the last decades of the fifteenth
century, at the end of the long battle, did the two Christian forces
join and become Spain. During seven hundred years, they had waged war
against Mohammed; they had grown great in Spain; they had flung their
power northward across the mountains, eastward across the sea to Italy
and Greece: but they had lived--Castile and Aragon--separate from each
other and for the most part hostile.
Within the Pyrenees--the stratified chaos north of Huesca and
Barbastro--the atom of Aragon lives above the splendor it has given
forth. Here, if anywhere, is the aboriginal Spaniard--unchanged as his
mountains. The Iberians who were pushed north from the desert or south
from Acquitaine into the Sobrarbe and the Ribagorza found themselves in
a sort of Continental crow’s-nest, high above invasion. The Romans did
not tarry here, nor the Visigoths. The Arabs were beaten back, south of
Jaca, and had to veer to the east to enter France. For countless ages,
these primeval men beside the river Aragon lived uninvaded, until their
atomic energy grew to be explosive and they became invaders.
But they are still the atom. They live in the crannies of mountains, in
the steep stretches of valleys torn by torrents. The sky above them is
shut in by rock. Northward the Pyrenees stand ordered and columned upon
France. But in their southward march they become a delirium of broken
walls. They symbolize the cacophony of Spain. The little villages perch
on a precipitous bench of mountain or are lost within the immense sweep
of a moor. They too are stone. The houses are gathered fragments of the
heights. Often there is no wooden door. Windows are tiny apertures of
space. The houses huddle so close that they appear to be a single rock,
whence rise the blind walls of the church--fortress rather than
church--like an irregular edge. Another such obtrusion seems the entire
village upon the high face of the mountains. If it is low in a valley,
still the monotone is there. For the moor is gray and mournful like a
stone; and the furze of summer makes it but faintly fluid as if from the
blaze of the sun. The rushing river sends splinters of gray fume over
the teeth of its rapids. Stone....
From these stone towns come the creatures who have built them. Small
weazened men they are, with heads like nuts and eyes like iron. They
have no sensuality and no art. Indeed, they too are fragments of the
fragmented mountains: atoms of rock who have detached themselves and
learned to walk about. They are silent, impenetrable. They have the
mineral virtues. They are strong, they are steadfast, they are
inexpugnably honest, they are brave. To dislodge them from the inertia
of their world is as hard as to lodge an idea in their heads. And as
they walk about, their slow and clumsy gait perfects the sense that they
are walking stones: that this human venture is a masquerade: that
presently they will cast their uncouth manhood and go back into the
eternal mountain sleep.
They wear black leathern breeches slashed at the side and ending well
above the knee. In the split at the side and below, the drawers bulge
white or gray. The calf is enclosed in heavy leggings of white wool,
doubly lined with buttons. The feet are wrapped in a cloth and shod in a
sole of wood or wool that is thonged with leather, and bound about the
ankle. About the waist is a huge sash--_faja_--coming down thick on the
buttocks and serving as the pocket. The jacket is short. The aboriginal
Aragonese wears no hat: a handkerchief slanted athwart his head absorbs
the sweat of his labor and leaves the cropped crown free. When he wears
a hat, it is an adaptation either of the _boina_ of the Basque or a
lumpish variant of the pie-shaped hat of Castile. His invention has not
gone so high as his head.
The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly.
The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the
shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes
himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of
masquerade persists. This man is a stone--an atom of the horizons. With
his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated
this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still
too mineral to need a hat.
His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the
stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth--dark brown
and gray--from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the
earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the
savage and swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is
black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The
thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where
it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into
a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval
Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of
waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of
wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes.
Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the
mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his
stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the
woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him
along.
They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity
has come. They build monasteries--mountain fortresses for God. Strife
has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains,
nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little
villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as
Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the
Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It
sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights.
But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The
walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and
high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to
history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved
into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of
its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow
with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....
The valley of the Ebro--Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her
bloods--is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The
wall of the Pyrenees, in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but
drops, not as northward upon smiling France--drops to desolation. Aragon
which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the
narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of
what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of
Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro
trickles. The soil is still subaqueous: marl, clay, gypsum, alkalis make
its sterile surface. Salt lies free on it. Even the heather and grass of
the upland moors do not live here.