Poor Folk in Spain Part 13

Then came a witch-faced woman with a disagreeable voice. She carried a huge basket and said she was the shopping woman of Verdolay. Verdolay had no market, nor could one buy there anything other than the few immediate necessities which La Merchora sold. This woman was equivalent to our country carriers. She walked to Murcia every day and returned with laden basket through the heated dust. For this work she demanded a small percentage upon the value of her purchases; probably she also extracted a small commission from the shops in which she dealt. We did not employ her much, as her temperament was not agreeable to us.

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Last of all came a little old woman--with a face seamed like a kindly walnut--dragging an old grey donkey. On the donkey's back was a pair of time-worn panniers from which bulged a medley of fruit and vegetables.

She was the donkey-cart's rival. I had forgotten to buy onions.

During our trip we had been bothered by the fact that at moments our uncertain Spanish would be displaced by the language we had last learned, Serbian. Instead of the Spanish sentence, quite against our wills Serbian would speak itself. This phenomenon is quite common, I believe, to those who learn several languages more or less imperfectly.

I now asked the old woman in unwished-for Serbian for onions. She struck an att.i.tude of theatrical dismay.

"Senora," she exclaimed, "que es eso?"[12]

I repeated my desire, and again Serbian came out. The old lady shook her head, and seemed frightened. I got a strong hold over my tongue, and said slowly in Spanish:

"Tiene cebollas?"[13]

The old lady's face broke into a hundred wrinkles of delight.

"Ahe, Senora," she cried, "if you say 'cebollas,' I can understand that you want cebollas. But if you say something different from 'cebollas,'

how can I know that you need cebollas?"

We walked round the corner to La Merchora's to discover what could, and what could not, be bought at first hand. La Merchora could supply us with olive oil, but not with vinegar. She sold beer, wine, lemonade and soda-water in siphons; dried sardines, very smelly; orange-coloured sausages; bread at a peseta the kilo; Dutch cheese, red pepper, chocolate and eggs. The last-named item on the list she said was scarce and variable in quality. I then asked her if it would be possible to find a maid in the village. The little Senor had said that servants were as plentiful as flies in June, but La Merchora said that they were as scarce as were the eggs. All the girls went off to Murcia, she said.

There were several women in the little shop and a discussion began; they reviewed a list of the likely girls. A young woman came in, and said at once that her sister was out of a job. She would send her along. La Merchora was reluctant to tell us the correct price to pay. I suppose she thought that she might be spoiling a beautiful piece of bargaining.

Upon pressure, however, she admitted that the local price was about ten pesetas a month, this to include all the washing of linen, both house and personal.

We bought some of La Merchora's chocolate. She asked us if we would have Spanish or French flavouring. We naturally chose the Spanish variety. It was very cheap. It had a dusty consistency in the mouth, and tasted of chocolate not at all, but strongly of cinnamon. It was eatable, but not exciting; we consoled ourselves with the reflection that it was nourishing without temptations towards greediness and ate no other chocolate during our stay in Verdolay. Behind her shop La Merchora had a large yard, with outside stove for cooking. In the yard was a flock of turkeys and several pigs. A black and white terrier pup was having a game with the pigs, running about and pulling their tails with his sharp teeth.

Our house had inconveniences. There was, as far as we could see, no place to put household refuse, nor any means in the village of collecting it. The windows on the road commanded a view almost of the whole house, and if we left them open at once the curious were at the grilles, staring through at us. As we could not open the back door or windows during the afternoon, this meant that if we wished for privacy we had to live in semi-gloom. n.o.body in Spain, however, tries to live other than in public; the people walked in and watched us as we were having our meals; walked round the house examining with interest the pictures which we hung on the walls to dry; and in time we became case-hardened to this semi-public life.

We had a siesta during the afternoon to make up for the sleep we had lost. At first we lay down without the mosquito-net, but the flies soon drove us to its protection. In the evening we called on the little Senor. He was a delicate and very likeable man, but his pretty wife showed a strong dislike for us, for which we could find no explanation save that perhaps she had been a pro-German during the war. We sat uncomfortably in a mixed atmosphere of liking and hate for some while, then, making our adieux, and followed by the setter-St. Bernard, we went home.

I think that we first discovered the lack of privacy while we were undressing. We had left the front windows open for air, and soon a crowd was watching our preliminaries to sleep. Luckily we discovered it early.

Jan closed the shutters, upon which a number of boys sat down on our doorstep and sang serenades to us for several hours.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: "What is that?"]

[Footnote 13: "Have you onions?"]

CHAPTER XV

VERDOLAY--SKETCHING IN SPAIN

Sketching in Spain has inconveniences. In the summer the heat makes it imperative that the painter should be up with the dawn, for between eleven a.m. and four p.m. the heat and the brilliance of the light impose too great a strain on the eyes and the endurance. Under any circ.u.mstances we were almost forced to rise with the sun, for Milk and Vegetables both called before six.

Verdolay was an excellent spot at which to begin an acquaintance with Spanish scenery. There was a great variety of subject matter. The village itself was full of vividly coloured houses, and at the back was the wonderful old monastery of Santa Catalina. In the valley less than half a mile away were the huertas, or irrigated gardens, full of rich green. On the sides of the mountains were the olive terraces, which traced the architecture of the hills in a way to delight the painter's heart. Between the olives and the garden was the dusty cart road with its intermittent traffic, and the small dusty strung-out villages, the houses threaded on the road like beads on a necklace, especially that one called El Angel--though anything more arid and less angelic could hardly be imagined. In the hills themselves were fine ravines of strangely coloured ferruginous earths, orange, purple and blue; and the tops of the foothills were often crested with monasteries, like that of La Luz, which gave the scene a most romantic atmosphere. I clung more or less to the village, Jan wandered about the surrounding country or sat in the insufficient shadow of the olive trees near El Angel.

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The first real inconvenience which we noted was that seldom did the best view possess a suitable piece of shade from which to paint it. Thus the artist's task was doubled; one had to find coincident scene and shadow.

The apparently aimless wander of the artist looking for a subject usually excited the curiosity of the pa.s.sers-by, so that either one was irritated by a series of remarks or became possessed of a small following of the curious. I use a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard in order to test the view and judge whether it would frame as satisfactorily as it promised to do. Whenever I placed this square to my eye one of my followers bobbed up his head and stared back at me through the hole, trying to fathom the mystery of my act. Once I had begun work I would become the centre of an excited conversation.

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The first strokes of the brush aroused merriment. But often some onlooker astonished me by perceiving the object of my sketch long before the drawing was in any way clear. She (it was generally a she) would then be eager to exhibit her superior knowledge to the others. She would therefore dab her finger on to my painting to point out what she had perceived. This nuisance I fought by covering intrusive fingers with oil paint. By the time the overwise one had cleaned off the paint the drawing would be far advanced enough for the others to see for themselves what I was doing. As soon as I got well into the swing of work questions would begin.

"Why do you do this? Is it to make picture postcards from? Why isn't your husband with you? Are your father and mother alive? Do you like Spanish food? Have you got any children? If you have no children, as we have too many, would you like a baby to take away with you? Are you doing this for the cinematograph? Do you like painting? How old are you?

Why haven't you put in So-and-so's house?" In this case the house in question was usually behind me.

These questions were asked in Murcian Spanish not very easy to understand with my small lack of acquaintance; and I had to take my attention off my painting in order to find suitable Spanish answers. I tried once not to answer, but my audience then demanded:

"Are you deaf? Can't you hear? Don't you understand what we say?"

All this was said with the most courteous of intentions, direct questioning being permissible in Spain. Chairs were generally brought out, one for me and others for the spectators. Nurse-maids with half-nude babies formed a large proportion of my audiences. The Spanish baby suffers from over nursing; it is carried remorselessly about from six in the morning till twelve at night; it is as a rule fretful and feverish both from the heat and from lack of sleep. Indeed Verdolay always shrilled with wailing children.

At about nine o'clock the Spaniard takes a morning snack. This consists of a slice of bread soaked with olive oil and a dried sardine, the smell of which was almost paralysing. With the perfect courtesy which marked all my peasant audiences, this would be offered to me before it was chewed loudly in my ear. When the heat was very great I would abandon my sketch as soon as the sardine stage arrived.

I was continually pestered by polite requests that So-and-so should be painted in. This often led to a lecture on composition and on the introduction of figures. If I did, however, paint in anybody the enthusiasm was enormous. People would run down the road shouting in at every cottage door:

"She has painted Enrico" (or Miguel or Maria) "into her picture."

Once while near the water-fountain I painted in the donkey of a water-carrier. For days afterwards Paco, the donkey-boy, grasped the pa.s.sers-by and exclaimed with tears of joy in his voice:

"Ha pintado mi burro, _mi_ burro."[14]

The water-fountain was one of the gathering places of the village. It was the end of a small iron pipe which writhed down from the hills.

There were generally three or four donkey-boys with cantaros, and a crowd of women with amphoras waiting their turns to wedge their pots beneath the small trickle which ran from the nozzle of the pipe. Old Grumpy spent the best part of his day there, sitting with sour face in the shadow of a small tree--his chief work was either waiting his turn or leaving his pots to fill themselves. A tall bank of p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus made a background to the gay scene. Women came from dawn until midnight, and even from the villages of the valley, for water was very scarce and most of the water in the valley wells unfit for drinking.

With their heavy cantaros balanced on a projecting hip, these women walked two miles or more beneath the sweltering sun; and they asked me if I _liked_ painting.

Sometimes the ladies of the village stopped and made suitable remarks.

One, a summer visitor, told me that she knew a very good painter--"very good indeed," she said with a gentle emphasis which revealed what she thought of my work. "Why, he painted things five times as big as these which you do."

As the sketch progressed my audiences were very eager to point out to me anything which I seemed to have forgotten. At this moment somebody always said that Uncle Pepe's or Aunt Conchas' house wasn't in the sketch. These houses were invariably out of sight or behind my back. The Spaniards had futuristic instincts. But once they knew me, my friends would not have me criticized. One pa.s.ser-by made some disparaging remark about the painting.

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"We won't have our Dona abused," said the nurse-maids. "She is very clever. She knows lots more than you do; and plays the piano as well."

Sometimes I accompanied Jan out into the country, in the direction of La Luz or down into the huertas.

One day we were near La Luz and my interest was captured by a lemon and vine garden which was cultivated on terraces down the side of a baking ravine. The farmer's house with a red roof topped the hill. I sat down to paint. Presently the farmer with his wife and family clambered down into the ravine and climbed up the side to where I was sitting. Each time I returned the family came back and in awed silence watched the progress of the sketch.