Poor Folk in Spain Part 14

It happened that the water of Verdolay was not very nice for drinking purposes, being full of minerals and salts, while that of La Luz was delicious. A poor woman, who did charing jobs for the farmer above-mentioned, was delighted to be allowed to carry us heavy cantaros full of La Luz water, a mile and a half, for the pay of fivepence a cantaro. One day after the sketch was finished she came in with a look of importance on her face.

"My Senora," she said, "is enamoured of the little painting which you have done of her house and farm. She wishes to buy the sketch."

I had had some experience of Spanish prices, so I said:

"These paintings are made to exhibit in England. It is of no use to tell you the price, because English prices and Spanish prices are different."

"But, Senora," said the woman, "my masters are very rich, excessively rich. They will pay any price that you like to ask."

But I suspected her protestations. The sketch was one of the best I had done in Spain. I was not very eager to part with it. But owing to her entreaties, against my better judgment, fixing a low price because of Spain, I said at last:

"Two hundred pesetas."[15]

Her mouth dropped open. For a moment she remained speechless with amazement. Then hastily crossing herself she gasped out:

"Madre Maria Sanctissima!"

Being a woman I was often asked to paint female portraits, but suspecting the monetary value which the people would put on paintings I refused. Jan overheard a red-faced, wealthy looking farmer discussing with his father on our doorstep the question of how much I was likely to ask for a portrait of the farmer's daughter.

_Red Face_: "I think we might offer her ten pesetas."[16]

_The Grandfather_: "Well, she is foreign, she might demand fifteen."

_Red Face_: "Even if she wishes twenty we might yet consider it; or perhaps twenty-five; but then we would have to think it carefully over."

Occasionally we would be asked into houses to examine pictures which the peasants believed to have value. In one house, a room was set aside as a small private chapel; it was full of painted plaster images covered with false jewels and tinsel; on the walls were oleograph reproductions of the Virgin by Spanish Old Masters, but one painting of the Murillo School probably had a real value. In another house we found a picture of Napoleon before which the inhabitants were burning a candle under the impression that the print represented an unidentified Saint. Maybe stranger personalities have been canonized before now.

Jan escaped from intimate touch with the people by making for the open country. He thus had fewer adventures than did I. Often, however, peasants spied him from the distance of a mile, and came to see what he was doing.

Once, when he had been painting on the cart-road near El Angel and had put a cart into his painting, a small boy followed him all the way home, shouting out to every one that he pa.s.sed:

"That is a painter! He painted a cart and horse; just as it went along; all in a flash!"

We used to pin up our sketches on the wall of the house; because, as we intended to travel, we wished the sketches to become as dry as we could make them. This used to attract numbers of people, and usually the grilled window of our front room was occupied by a crowd of faces peering into the house. The fame of our picture exhibition spread over the country-side. People came from some distance to see the pictures; and if the front door was unlocked walked in, saluted us, and proceeded to go the round of the walls. At first we found this disconcerting, but with use much of our needless self-consciousness and desire for unessential privacy began to wear off.

As we left our front window open during the night for air, we were many times awakened by the voices of the picture-gazers who gathered at our window as soon as the day broke.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 14: "She has painted my donkey, _my_ donkey."]

[Footnote 15: 8.]

[Footnote 16: 8_s._ 4_d._]

CHAPTER XVI

VERDOLAY--CONENI

The peasant who came every morning with his daughter and donkey-cart full of vegetables and fruit at the dawn was rather like a genial bird of prey in features. This type is typically Spanish. There was something of the condor about him, though one can scarcely picture a condor with his welcoming smile or his kindly nature. He began with a fixed idea of our practical dumbness and deafness to the Spanish language. He was, we learned later, an exquisite dancer. We have heard tell of a well-known musician who has a dance for making the household beds, and another for digging potatoes, and so on, trying to bring aesthetics into the commonplaces of life. Coneni, for such was the peasant's name, tried to dance for us the fact that tomatoes were a halfpenny a pound or that a melon was sixpence. His pretty, demure daughter resorted to more practical measures, held up fruit as samples and condescended to calculate in pesetas and centimos instead of in "royals" and "little b.i.t.c.hes."

But the manners both of Coneni and of his daughter were impeccable. I think that they overcharged us slightly, but that was the Spanish tradition. Certainly they did not overcharge us as much as they would have done had they not liked us, and later on they quieted their consciences by making us presents.

Coneni was one of the first of our picture admirers, but he had pre-Raphaelite tendencies, and always said that he supposed they would be better when we painted them out properly. He became eager that we should sketch in his market garden, and gave us elaborate topographical directions. So one day, shouldering our sketch-boxes, off we set.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We pa.s.sed through El Angel on to the Murcia road. We then asked a group of men, who were winnowing corn on a flat biblical threshing floor of beaten mud, which was the direction. Unfortunately we had got rather mixed in the name. The peasant had not spoken his name very clearly and we had confused it with conecho.[17] The winnowers said that they could not understand us very clearly, but that it was probably further along, and they wished us to "go with G.o.d." Further along the road we, having found in the dictionary what conecho really means, tried the other name.

The use of this brought us into a narrow side-path between rows of mulberry trees and deep watercourses. It took a sudden turn to the left, and on the path we saw Coneni, tall and lank, waving welcoming arms at us.

The place was embowered in trees: lemon, fig, pear, plum, apple, quince and pomegranate flourished luxuriantly in the irrigated soil. The huertas of the Murcian plain were not separated, one from another, by hedges, and it was difficult to know how large was Coneni's garden. In one corner, beneath the shelter of overhanging fruit-trees, was a hut made of stiff bamboo-like reeds, the roof daubed with mud against the rain. From the front of this hut projected a long awning of reeds, beneath which the Coneni family was awaiting us. Mrs. Coneni was plump, motherly, and had a genial nature covering an inflexible will. She also had perfect manners, was full of courtliness and kindness, and was delighted to see us. She showed her nave pleasure by touching me whenever she was able to do so without rudeness. Our broken Spanish aroused her sense of wonder. Coneni, for the first time in his life, made up his mind to understand us. He stopped his habitual pre-breakfast pantomime and swaggered about, saying:

"But I understand all they say. Yes, I do."

He disappeared into the square small hut and came out again carrying an enormous green water-melon called locally a sandia. He tapped it with a knuckle and, from the sound that it made, decided that it was ripe. He then cut off top and bottom with a small hatchet and divided it into huge slices. While we were eating the luscious pink fruit neighbours began to saunter up. They stood in a circle around us. Coneni, with the air of a showman, said:

"Now I will show you something. She smokes; it is true. I have seen her myself."

He made me a cigarette. The men were delighted and Mrs. Coneni was amazed. Coneni stood behind me with a lean hand on his hip, as if to say: "Alone I did it."

Beneath the reed shelter some of the children were lying asleep, and the youngest of all, a baby, was sitting by itself in a corner, stark naked, playing with a large lemon. The exquisite colour contrast between the transparency of skin of the sunburnt child and the hard yellow brilliance of the lemon filled me with a wild desire to paint it.

Indeed, one does not come to appreciate the full beauty of the nude until one has seen it in a country where it is natural. In Spain the children, usually half nude, sprawled about in the heat in the most graceful of relaxed poses, sometimes lying half asleep across their mothers' laps, and a continual impulse was driving me to make studies of them. But the task is almost impossible. The fact of being sketched is too unusual. The people, naturally unselfconscious, at once become stiff and formal.

Within Coneni's hut was no furniture other than a four-post bed which almost filled the floor s.p.a.ce. Here slept Coneni and his wife, and the s.p.a.ce beneath the bed was used as a storehouse for melons. The children, three girls and four boys, all slept on the ground in the open beneath the shelter. But Mrs. Coneni explained to me with some care that the poverty was only apparent; that this was but their summer residence. For the winter they had a fine house in Alverca.

We did not have any very keen impulse to paint--it had become for that afternoon rather too much of a ceremony, like the old State painter _performing_ before the Court--but to save our faces we had to do something, so Jan painted a portrait of a calf, while I selected a lemon tree. Before I had half finished, the interior of the tree was swarming with Coneni's children, hoping that they would be included. By my side sat Coneni's little girl nursing a bantam, like a doll, a.s.suring it that mother wouldn't love it if it were not more quiet.

"And the Senor plays the guitar," exclaimed Coneni. "He is affectionate to music."

We discussed Spanish music and dancing. Coneni, bursting with hospitality, said:

"Come again next Sunday. I will invite the young men and the girls and we will have a party. There are guitar and lute players at Alverca. They will all come."

Antonio's brother-in-law, Thomas, had spoken of the gay times when there is a party in the huertas; we accepted eagerly.

We went home laden with presents of fruit which Coneni had pressed upon us. Especially was our greed delighted with a large basket of figs. We had been asking the Conenis to bring us some figs for some days, but they had said:

"We can't bring you figs. n.o.body sells figs here. We give them to the pigs."

So that evening we rivalled the pigs

FOOTNOTES: