Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 6

At intervals of two or three hundred yards along the precipitous cliff that half circles the city stood the shelter of an octroi guard, built of anything that might deflect a ray of sunlight. In the shade of each crouched a ragged, ennui-eyed man staring away into the limitless expanse of sunshine. Their fellows may be found forming a circle around every city in the kingdom of Spain, the whole body numbering many thousands. The impracticable, the quixotic character of official Spain stands forth nowhere more clearly than in this custom of sentencing an army of her sons to camp in sloth about her cities on the bare chance of intercepting ten-cent's worth of smuggling, when the same band working even moderately might produce tenfold the octroi revenues of the land.

I halted with one of the tattered fellows, whose gladness for the unusual boon of companionship was tempered by a diffidence that was almost bashfulness, so rarely did he come in contact with his fellow-man. For a long hour we sat together in the shadow of the hut, our eyes drifting away over the gray-roofed, closely-packed city below.

When our conversation touched on the loneliness of his situation the guard grew vehement in bewailing its dreariness and desolation. But when I hinted that the octroi might perhaps be abolished to advantage, he sprang to his feet crying almost in terror:

"For los clavos de Cristo, senor! What then would become of nosotros?

I have no other trade whatever than to be guard to the octroi."

A sorry craft indeed, this squatting out a lifetime under a gra.s.s hut.

The bluish haze of a summer evening was gathering over Jaen when, returning through a winding street to my lodging, there fell on my ear the thrum of a solitary guitar and the rich and mellow voice of a street singer. The musician was a blind man of fifty, of burly build and a countenance br.i.m.m.i.n.g with good cheer and contentment, accompanied by a woman of the same age. As I joined the little knot of peasants and townsmen gathered about him, his song ended and he drew out a packet of hand bills.

"On this sheet, senores," he announced, holding one up, "are all the songs I have sung for you. And they are all yours for a perro gordo."

I was among the first to buy, glad to have paid many times this mere copper to be able to carry home even one of those languorous ballads so filled with the serene melancholy of the Moor and the fire of Andalusia.

But the sheet bore nothing but printed words.

"Every word is there, senores," continued the minstrel, as if in response to my disappointment. "As for the music, anyone can remember that or make it up for himself."

To ill.u.s.trate how simple this might be he threw a hand carelessly across his guitar and struck up another of the droning, luring melodies, that rose and fell and drifted away through the pa.s.sages of the dimming city.

Easy, indeed! One could as easily remember or make up for one's self the carol of the meadow lark in spring or the lullaby of the nightingale in the darkened tree-tops.

That I might catch the five-thirty train my host awoke me next morning at three-twenty. I turned over for a nap and descending in the dawn by the dust-blanketed Alameda to the station two miles distant, found this already peopled with a gathering of all the types of southern Spain.

The train was due in twenty minutes, wherefore the ticket-office, of course, was already closed. After some search I discovered the agent, in the person of a creature compared with whom Caliban would have been a beauty, exchanging stories with a company of fellow-bandits on the crowded platform. He informed me in no pleasant manner that it was too late to buy a ticket. When I protested that the legal closing hour was but five minutes before train time, he shrugged his shoulders and squinted away down the track as if he fancied the train was already in sight. I decoyed him into the station at last, but even then he refused to sell a ticket beyond Espeluy.

We reached that junction soon after and I set off westward along the main line. The landscape was rich and rolling, broad stretches of golden grain alternating with close-shaven plains seething in the sun.

Giant cacti again bordered the way. Once, in the forenoon, I came upon a refreshing forest, but shadows were rare along the route. The line was even more traveled than that below Honda. Field-laborers pa.s.sed often, while sear-brown peasant women, on dwarf donkeys jogged by in almost continual procession on their way to or from market.

Not once during all my tramps on the railways of Spain had a train pa.s.sed of which the engineer did not give me greeting. Sometimes it was merely the short, crisp "Vaya!" more often the complete expression "Vaya V. con Dios!" not infrequently accompanied by a few words of good cheer.

Here on the main line I had occasion to test still further the politeness of the man at the throttle. I had rolled a cigarette only to find that I had burned my last match. At that moment the Madrid-bound express swung out of a shallow cutting in the hills ahead. I caught the eye of the engineer and held up the cigarette in sign of distress. He saw and understood, and with a kindly smile and a "Vaya!" as he pa.s.sed, dropped two matches at my very feet.

It was not far beyond that I caught my first glimpse of the Guadalquivir. Shades of the Mississippi! The conquering Moor had the audacity to name this sluggish, dull-brown stream the "Wad-al-Gkebir,"

the "Great River!" Yet, after all, things are great or small merely by comparison. To a people accustomed only to such trickles of water as had thus far crossed my path in the peninsula no doubt this over-grown brook, bursting suddenly on their desert eyes, had seemed worthy the appellation. But many streams wandering by behind the barn of an American farmer and furnishing the old swimming-hole are far greater than the Guadalquivir.

I crossed it toward three of the afternoon by an ancient stone bridge of many arches that seemed fitted to its work as a giant would be in embroidering doilies. Beyond lay Andujar, a hard-baked, crumbling town of long ago, swirling with sand; famous through all Spain for its porous clay jars. In every street sounded the soft slap of the potter; I peeped into a score of cobble-paved courts where the newly baked _jarras_ were heaped high or were being wound with straw for shipment.

A long search failed to disclose a casa de comidas in all the town. The open market overflowed with fruit, however, stocked with which I strolled back across the river to await the midnight train. It was packed with all the tribes of Spain, in every sleeping att.i.tude. Not until we had pa.s.sed Cordoba at the break of day did I find s.p.a.ce to sit down and drowse for an hour before we rumbled into Seville.

I had exhibited my dust-swathed person in at least half a dozen hotels and fled at announcement of their charges, when I drifted into the narrow calle Rosario and entered the "Fonda de las Quatro Naciones."

There ensued a scene which was often to be repeated during the summer.

The landlord greeted me in the orange-scented patio, noted my foreign accent, and jumped instantly to the conclusion, as Spaniards will, that I knew no Castilian, in spite of the fact that I was even then addressing him with unhesitating glibness. Motioning to me to be seated, he raced away into the depths of the fonda calling for "Pasquale." That youth soon appeared, in tuxedo and dazzling expanse of shirt-front, extolling as he came the uncounted virtues of his house, in a flowing, unblushing imitation of French. Among those things that I had not come to Spain to hear was Spanish mutilation of the Gaelic tongue.

For a long minute I gazed at the speaker with every possible evidence of astonishment. Then turning to the landlord I inquired in most solemn Castilian.

"Esta loco, senor? Is he insane that he jabbers such a jargon?"

"Como, senor!" gasped Pasquale in his own tongue. "You are not then a Frenchman?"

"Frenchman, indeed!" I retorted. "Yo, senor, soy americano."

"Senor!" cried the landlord, bowing profoundly, "I ask your pardon on bended knee. In your Castilian was that which led me to believe it was not your native tongue. Now, of course, I note that it has merely the little pequenisimos peculiarities that make so charming the p.r.o.nunciation of our people across the ocean."

A half-hour later I was installed in a third-story room looking down upon the quiet little calle Rosario, and destined to be my home for a fortnight to come. During all that time Pasquale served me at table without once inflicting upon me a non-Spanish word. Nor did he once suspect what a hoax I had played on the "Four Nations" by announcing my nationality without prefixing the qualification "norte."

CHAPTER V

THE TORERO AT HOME

Even though one deny the right of its inhabitants to pity the man who must live and die elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering in the heat of summer, will still count it no punishment to spend a fortnight in Seville. Tranquillity and that laggard humor so befitting vacation days reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which is so like the silence of the grave in other towns of Andalusia. In the slender calle Rosario itself the stillness was never supreme, but tempered always by the droning of a pa.s.sing _ajero_ with his necklace of garlic, an itinerant baker, or a blind crone hobbling by with the fifth or the tenth of a lottery ticket, crooning in mournful voice, "La loteria! El numero trienta seis mil quinientos cincuenta y cinco-o-o. Who will win a fortune in the loteria-a-a?" Then above all else the soft, quarter-hourly booming of the cathedral bells to mark the pa.s.sing of the day, like mile-stones on a wandering highway.

Nor with all her languor is Seville slovenly. Outwardly, like all that carries the ear-mark of the Moor, she is bare. In the first brief survey one may fancy one's self in a city of dismal hovels. But this is because the houses are turned wrong-side out; a glimpse into one of the marble-paved patios, fragrant with orange-trees and cooled by fountains throwing their waters high in the dry air, forever dispells the illusion.

My first full day in Seville fell on a holiday dedicated to San Pedro which, chancing also to be my birthday, it was easy to imagine a personal festival. In truth, the celebration of the day was marked by nothing other than a bit more indolence than usual. The real fiesta began at night in the Alameda of Hercules. There, among a hundred booths, the chief object of interest was a negro, the first of his race, one might fancy, who ever invaded the city.

By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville than the royal occupation of doing nothing, a stroll along the Sierpes in the morning, a retreat toward noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent cathedral or those other churches that rival it as museums of art, there to wander undisturbed among masterpieces of Spain's top-most century. The cathedral, by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the calendar of saints. Saint Anthony of Padua, not many years ago, released by the dexterous knife of an impulsive admirer, struck out into the unknown and journeyed as far as our own New York. But there repenting such conduct at his years or daring to venture no further when his companion found a sojourn in the Tombs imperative, he returned to his place, and resumed it so exactly that only the sharpest eye can detect the evidence of his unseemly excursion.

A city that styles her most important street that "of the Serpents,"

even though it harbors no more of the outcasts of the pavement than many another famous thoroughfare, may be expected to abound in other strange names. Nor are they lacking. How unworthy his lodging must the worldly Sevillian feel who wanders uncertainly homeward in the small hours to his abode in "Jesus del Gran Poder"--"Powerful Jesus street." Or with what face can the merchant turn off after a day of fleecing his fellow-man toward his dwelling in "Amor de Dios"? Top-heavy nomenclature is not confined to the streets. There are many windows in which one may read the announcement of a "Media Noche de Jamon." No, it is not a new law by the cortes, but a "Middle of the Night of Ham," or, succinctly, the over-worked ham sandwich. The uninstructed may be led at sight of a building proclaiming itself an "Academia del Tiro al Blanco" into the belief that Seville is overrun with inst.i.tutions of higher learning. Not so, distinctly not so. The "Academy of the Shot at the White" is what less extravagant and imaginative peoples dub a shooting gallery.

The man in the street is frequently no less colorful in his language.

Yet the crisp, trenchant word common to that personage the world over is here, too, in full force, led by that never idle explosive "hombre."

Dictionarically speaking, "hombre" means "man," and nothing more--which only proves how dismally the dictionary has failed to keep up with the times. For child, woman, or hen-pecked male answers to the expression as readily as to his own name. A sevillano leading a pup at the end of a string may be frequently observed to give a jerk at the leash and cry over his shoulder, "Hombre! Vamonos!"--"Come along, man!"

Anent the man in the street, it may be a.s.serted that the Sevillian is usually there. Writers of Spanish romances have for centuries sought to win our sympathy for their love-lorn heroes by stationing them in the public way to whisper their pleadings through the cold bars of a reja.

The picture is true; the lover of flesh and blood and of to-day still stands there. But so, for that matter, does the butcher's boy, the ol'-clothes man, and even less reputable persons. In Spanish newspapers the national wealth of phrase is too often overshadowed--like the news columns--by the touching a.s.surance of personal announcements. Rare the page that is not half taken up with a black-bordered inset conveying the information that:

"Senor and Senora Perez have the honor to advise their sorrowing friends and business a.s.sociates that little Willie Perez, aged six, went up to heaven at 7:32 last evening."

There is nothing like being exact and punctual in these little matters.

Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely a la mode but good sense to stroll down to the banks of the Guadalquivir by the Golden Tower and drift an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded Alameda. There one will be in the best company in Seville--and the worst; for all the city is there, lolling in its carriage or pattering along the gravel in its hempen sandals.

But it is only at night that Seville is wholly and genuinely awake and approaches somewhat to that fountain of joy her inhabitants would have the world believe her. Then at last does she shake off entirely the daytime la.s.situde. The noises of the day are all there, the street-hawkers have gained a hundredfold in volume of lung, in number, and in activity, the cathedral bells seem twice as loud. Toward nine all the city and his wife and children and domestics are gathered or gathering in the great focal point, the palm-fringed Plaza San Fernando.

The attractions are several. First of all is the "cinematagrafo," a moving-picture machine throwing its mirth and puerility on a sheet suspended in the center of the plaza. Second, a military band, not a caterwauling of strange noises that one would desire suppressed by fire or earthquake, but a company seriously and professionally engaged in producing genuine music, which it does from near nine till after midnight as continuously as any band could be expected to until some invention makes it possible to blow a trombone and smoke a cigarette at one and the same time. Third, there is the excitement which the mingling together in crowds brings every Latin people, and the supreme pleasure of strolling to and fro admiring one another and themselves. Fourth, if so many excuses are needed, there is fresh air and the nearest approach to coolness that the city affords.

Yet with all Seville gathered the thousand roped-off chairs around the curtain are rarely half filled; for to sit in one costs a "fat dog," as the Spaniard facetiously dubs his Lacedemonian two-cent piece. But what a mult.i.tude in the rest of the square! Out of doors all Spain mixes freely and heartily. Hidalgos with the right to conceal their premature baldness from Alfonso himself shudder not in the least at being jostled by beggars; nay, even exchange with them at times a few words of banter.

Silly young fops, in misfit imitation of Parisian style, a near-Panama set coquettishly over one ear, trip by arm in arm, swinging their jaunty canes. Workingmen scorning such priggishness stride slowly by in trim garments set off by bright red _fajas_ in which is stuck a great _navaja_, or clasp-knife of Albacete. Rich-bosomed _majas_ with their black ma.s.ses of mane-like hair, in crimson skirts or yellow--as yellow as the gown of Buddha--drift languorously by with restless fan. No type is missing from the strolling mult.i.tude. Strolling, too, it is, in spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like movement of the throng not only gives opportunity but compels any lazy foreigner to walk whether he will or not. Everyone is busy with gallantry and doing nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can who, thanks to temperament, climate, and training knows that peerless art and follows it with pleasure, not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to prefer to be working.

The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his amus.e.m.e.nts, a full-grown child. Groups of portly business men, Seville's very captains of industry, sit hour by hour watching the unrolling of just such films, as are shown in our "nickelodeons," shouting with glee and clapping each other on the shoulder when a man on the screen falls off a chair or a baker's boy deluges a pa.s.serby with flour. No less hilarious are the priests, shaking their fat sides with merriment at the pictured discomfiture of one of their guild in eager pursuit of some frail beauty. As interested as the rest are the policemen--and as little engaged in the fulfillment of their duties, whatever those may be. A poor species, a distressingly unattractive breed are these city policemen of Spain, in their uniform closely resembling checkerboard pajamas, lacking even the Hibernian dignity of size, stoop-shouldered and sunken-chested with lounging on their spines and the inordinate sucking of cigarette smoke into their lungs. Of the self-respect and pride of office characteristic of the national guardia civil they have none whatever. I recall no evening in the Plaza San Fernando that at least one pair of these wind-broken, emasculate caricatures of manhood did not fall to quarreling, dancing in rage and shrieking mutual curses in their smoke-ruined voices, while the throng dogged them on.

Families gather early in the plaza. There ensues a moment or two of idle thrumming--for father or brother is certain to bring his guitar--then out bursts the sharp, luring _fandango_; the little girls in snowy white squirm a moment on their seats, spring suddenly out upon the gravel, and fall to dancing to the click of their castanets as rhythmically as any professionals. They do not dance to "show off,"

they are indeed rarely conscious of attracting attention; they dance because the fire in them compels, because they wish to--and what the Andalusian wishes to do he does then and there, gloriously indifferent to whoever may be looking on. Let him who can imagine an American bringing his guitar to the public square of a large city and, surrounded by thousands, play serenely on into the depths of the night.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Sevillian street]

The Andalusian is one of the most truly musical beings on earth, in the sense that his music expresses his real emotions. Song is almost his natural mode of expression, always spontaneous, with none of the stiffness of learned music. He has no prelude, follows no conscious rules, displays none of that preliminary affectation and patent evidence of technic that so frequently makes our northern music stilted and unenchanting. He plunges headlong into his song, anywhere, at any time, as a countryman unsullied by pedantry enters into conversation.