Poor Folk in Spain Part 20

The family heaved itself to its feet, surrounded and escorted us down a narrow lane which ended at a platform which hung on the cliff's edge.

Three men were sitting on the doorstep of a house, two playing guitars, one playing the bandurria. A crowd, young men in blouses and girls, with light skirts and shawls, were standing about or dancing. Three couples were dancing a Valencian jota. Some of the movements of the dance seemed intricate, but they danced with a fine natural grace, and there was a beautiful balance of body which echoed the movement of the music. A woman standing behind me said:

"Now, Senora, I will teach you the jota one of these evenings. And you will take my baby, because I have lots and they say you have none."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Both on Sat.u.r.day and on Sunday bull-baiting exhibitions had taken place, but we had not gone to see them. One day had been quite sufficient. On Monday morning we were awakened by the sounds of music. The local band was parading the streets playing a queer semi-Oriental music. As the morning advanced other bands came in until seven or eight bands were in full blast, each playing a different tune and each trying to drown its rivals with sound. Gradually Moors and Christians gathered. The Moors came from the Near East and from the Far. The Chief and his immediate suite were Bedouin Arabs, and there were Turks, Saracens, Hindus, Chinamen, negroes and some of uncertain lineage. Girls accompanied each group dressed in appropriate Houri costume, carrying bottles filled with a liquor which would have pleased Omar rather than Mahomet. The Christians included Roman soldiers, crusaders, cavaliers and smugglers of 1800. The latter were the chief Christian and his retinue.

Vivandieres attended the Christians with drink no less stimulating than that supplied to their Moorish enemies. Moors and Christians carried large blunderbusses of ancient mode, and all day long to the sounds of indefatigable melody they paraded the town. It appeared to be the duty of the Moors to be comic; they wore big goggles and many had huge imitation beards with which, when the heat grew greater, they fanned themselves. They pranced and postured through the streets while the Christians marched along in solemn ranks. Nor did the fiesta end with the going down of the sun. With discreet intervals for refreshment, marching and music continued till 2 a.m., at which time sleep and a blessed silence fell on Jijona.

Undeterred by but four hours' rest, punctually at six the cacophony of bra.s.s began again. By midday crusaders and bandsmen, having exchanged helmets and caps, were dancing jotas down the princ.i.p.al streets. But a short siesta revived them for the princ.i.p.al work of the day: the entry of the Moors. At about four in the afternoon the performers gathered at the picturesque southern entrance of the village, thus symbolizing the direction from which the Moors had come. Then group by group, with blunderbusses banging off into the air, the Christians retreated slowly up the street, going backwards. Last of all the Christians went the Contrabandistas, and last of the Contrabandistas the Captain, dressed in a wonderful ancient costume of velvet, embroidered with gold, silver and silk, and a blanket striped in many colours. Facing him, advanced with equal solemnity and noise the chief Moor. After some two hours of deafening reports the whole troupe was in movement, some forwards, others backwards, and had arrived at the wooden castle in the plaza. By seven o'clock, at this funereal pace, the Moors were at last ma.s.sed before the castle.

"Now for the charge and for some fun," we thought. But mounting a profusely decorated horse, the chief Moor began a speech. The Contrabandista, evidently a man of deeds only, had hired a real actor, dressed in the costume of a cavalier, to represent him. For almost an hour exchange of dramatic verse continued, after which the Christians quietly walked out of the castle, and the Moors walked in.

"Good heavens," thought we, "is that all?"

With ears deafened from the guns we went home; pa.s.sing on the way a booth of green branches in which Moors and Christians, overcome either by the heat or by the a.s.siduous ministrations of Houri or Vivandiere, were laid out on sacks.

Though officially the day was ended, practically it was not. Those who had private stocks of powder continued the gunfire till midnight. The bands, their music becoming more and more incoherent, played on till two o'clock.

We decided that we had seen enough fiesta. We stayed in our castle and went out sketching in the country to avoid the appalling din which rose from the town to our windows. At night there was a modest display of fireworks in the plaza, which we were quite content to enjoy from where we were.

After all was over they said to us:

"Wasn't it a beautiful fiesta?"

Outwardly we were forced to agree with them, but inwardly we recognized--perhaps with a sense of regret--that to enjoy these fiestas as they ought to be enjoyed, that is, as a Spaniard enjoys them, requires a sense of values and perhaps a nervous organism which we do not possess.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: "Look! Jijona!"]

[Footnote 21: Luxury.]

CHAPTER XXII

JIJONA--TIA ROGER

Jijona lived on almond paste. All around us the grey, pallid or zebra striped mountains were terraced, and wherever enough earth could be gathered together for an almond tree to grow, there it was planted. The turron of Jijona, which is made in perfection nowhere else, is a very popular sweet meat all over Spain and even is widely appreciated in South America. In Barcelona I have been greeted by turron-selling youths who addressed me as La Valiente. On the French frontier in a little village we found a turron-stall kept by a man in Jijona costume of black blouse and pointed hat; but he was a fraud: he had never been near Jijona, nor could he speak the Jijona dialect. But the whole life of Jijona was dominated by turron marzipan, and the varieties of sweet meats made from almonds. We arrived as the almonds were beginning to ripen. Out on the mountains one heard the thrashing of the canes amongst the branches as the peasants beat the nuts off the almond trees. From the village rose up a sound like that of a gigantic typewriter as the women of the village sat in the streets in circles and cracked the almond sh.e.l.ls. In our entrada old Pere Chicot crouched most of the day on his haunches, peeling, drying and cracking the almonds from El Senor's garden.

In consequence of the turron work we found it very difficult to get a woman to work for us. Life became difficult. The conditions in Jijona were not the same as those in Verdolay. In the latter place we could buy excellent charcoal, but to our surprise we found charcoal difficult to get in Jijona. When we did get it, from the proprietor of the local cinematograph theatre, it was so hard that it would not burn. Pere Chicot said gruffly, "What are almond sh.e.l.ls for?" We then tried burning almond sh.e.l.ls; but they made a poor fire, and an acc.u.mulation of sh.e.l.ls soon put itself out. We wasted one and a half hours trying to fry potatoes on an almond-sh.e.l.l fire. So as long as we could not get a woman, we had to live on cold stuff that we could buy from the shops: Dutch cheese, and sardines, princ.i.p.ally.

At last I thought that I had found a woman. I was perched on the watercourse which ran across the face of the precipice opposite the entrance of the town. From this spot there was an excellent view of Jijona in its most romantic, but also in its most plastic aspect. To me came a woman walking along the edge of the watercourse, balancing on her head a large washing-basket. She stopped to watch my work, and as was the custom in those early days began to talk about the bull episode.

"Ah, that was a terrible thing to do," she said. "If I had gone down into the plaza, my knees would have turned to water."

I then asked her how I could get somebody to work for me.

"Why," she answered, "I'll come myself, or send somebody else."

She then began to move along her way. The wall of the watercourse was about a foot wide; but ten yards further along it ceased to curve around the face of the precipice and sprang across a chasm over a narrow bridge. The approach to this bridge was guarded by a large polished boulder about three feet high, and to get on to the bridge one had to clamber over this boulder. I had crossed it on hands and knees cautiously, for there was a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet below. The woman looked at this boulder and turning said to me:

"That is a nasty spot. I'll have to be careful there, or I'll drop my washing."

With the basket on her head she walked to the boulder and began to walk up its slippery side. Balancing herself and basket in what appeared a dangerous manner, giving little cries of "Aie! Aie! I'm afraid I'll drop my basket," she surmounted the obstacle and strode carelessly across the bridge. My heart left my throat to regain its normal position and I realized that there is even a fashion in "fear."

But the woman never came, and for a week we were servantless. The pretty girl who had driven out with us in the lorry, and who we had imagined to be the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer, was as a matter of fact our nearest neighbour. She lived at the top house of the town. Her father was the village dust-cart, and any day could be seen walking about the streets bent almost double beneath the weight of a huge pannier which he carried on his back, into which he flung any object which had no permanent right on the high road. Her house was a small affair of two rooms only. We put our difficulty to her as she was friendly, and to our surprise she said that she would come and do it herself. She did arrange that the goat with his milk should call upon us; but the Vinegars enticed her into their turron factory, and again we were in despair. However, the girl had an idea.

"Why, Mother will do it for you," she said.

Mother was an apt-looking spouse for the dust-cart, and was considered, we heard, the dirtiest woman in the village. Her foggy blue eyes showed white all round them, and she threw up her lips like a biting horse when she spoke Castilian (which she did very badly). I don't know why she made me think of the Red queen in Alice, but her silhouette was not unlike, and she had a queer trick of being in the house one instant, and in the next of having quite vanished--which was Red-queenlike. She was called "Aunt Roger" in the village, because of her ruddy hair. Aunt Roger cleared up the mystery of the Jijona fuel. She made bargains with boys, who wandered out over the hills, and returned looking like walking hayc.o.c.ks under a load of branches of mountain pine and other coniferous shrub. From then on we cooked over large bonfires built on the square hearth which was in our largest room.

Tia Roger was elusive in small matters, as she was in larger ones. She had a hasty Spanish way of agreeing at once to save herself the trouble of understanding my language, and we never knew whether she would come or no. She drew our pay without demur, but if an occasion offered for other employment she took it. We would return home at eleven o'clock worn out with a hard day's painting, to find the place uncleaned, no fire alight, no food either bought or prepared. This would entail on our part a rush down the steep hill into the town, to search for food.

Probably on the way we would discover Tia Roger sitting amongst a circle of gossiping and pleased women, industriously cracking almonds. She would show no signs of conscious sin, but would grin and nod at us as we pa.s.sed. Then we had to scramble again up to our eyrie under the full heat of the Mediterranean sun.

Tia Roger had many children. Her eldest daughter was married to a man who for some time puzzled us. We first saw him wandering about the upper streets of the old town during the fiesta. He carried an elaborate pair of sandwich boards. On the front was the well-known picture, "St.

Veronica's Handkerchief," and on the back an oleograph representing two conventional angels--golden hair, nightdress, and wings. Both pictures were surrounded by flat wooden frames fretworked in the hideous art-nouveau manner. He wandered about thus, enclosed, as it were a slab of humanity between two slices of divinity; but we could not imagine what his purpose was. We imagined that he filled a semi-religious post, something connected with the priests, and their fiesta, and their cinema, and bull chasings. But on the fourth day of the fiesta, this wandering, apparently purposeless man tripped over a washing-basket.

His language at once put to flight all our ideas of his religious functions, it issued straight from a nature by no means purged of old Adam, despite its devotional enclosure. Later, he fell over me as I was sketching, and he cursed me with gusto. I then saw he was blind. This had not been apparent to us earlier, for he took the rough and precipitous streets of Jijona at an extraordinary speed.

One day we saw him still wandering to and fro, but the pictures had disappeared. A cage was on his back, and in the cage, balancing against the joggle and movement of his walk, was an uncomfortable hen. We had become more accustomed to the Jijona speech by this time, and the tickets which the pictures had hidden were plainly visible in his hands.

He was running a private lottery at three chances "a little b.i.t.c.h." I took thirty tickets for the hen, and gave fifteen of them to Tia Roger, but we pulled blanks. His next venture was a bedroom looking-gla.s.s, the stand of which stuck out from his back in an ungainly fashion. It must have needed considerable ingenuity to keep his small village clientele sufficiently desirous to ensure for him any sort of a living.

His wife learned that I had put him into one of my sketches. She hurried to the Torre de Blay, carrying her child, and accompanied by a horde of women friends to see "The Portrait." Her disappointment was great to find that he was but a minute figure in a street landscape. She told me that her husband had lost his sight ten years before in a street quarrel. His opponent had slashed a knife across his eyes. For this the law exacted no penalty. But she had drawn no lesson from her husband's misfortune. Her baby was in a bad condition, flies, dust and exposure to the sun were working wickedly on the child's eyes, and even then early blindness appeared to be threatening. But it seemed to us that many of the more ignorant Spanish were careless of their children's eyesight.

Blindness is rampant, but blindness leads to beggary; and beggary accompanied by blindness is a profitable pursuit. Possibly a woman may say, "Little Juan seems to be going blind. Well, that's a comfort, he will be settled in life anyhow."

Jijona had two other blind men. The one made a living by selling cigars from a gla.s.s case strapped to his chest.

We were sitting in the entrada of the Vinegars' on the first day of the fiesta. The curtain was pushed slowly aside and through the opening crept a pathetic figure. It was that of an old man; his eyes were sightless and suppurating, a straw hat with a torn brim shaded his heavy face, in one hand he grasped an aged guitar, in the other a stick with which he explored the entrada for a chair. Jan quickly got out of his chair for fear that the blind man should sit down on his lap. The man found the chair with his stick, and trembling with the pain of movement took a seat. Adjusting the guitar, with stiff fingers he rasped the strings which gave out a sound, thin as though withered by extreme age.

With exercise his fingers strengthened, until from the decrepit instrument he plucked a melody from which one might imagine that the blind in Maeterlinck's play were dancing to solace their loneliness. The almost macabre dance came to an end, then striking out a new set of chords he broke into a Spanish song. His voice was an instrument as worn out as the guitar.

He ceased his heartrending performance, collected his meed of halfpence; I spoke to him, and he broke into an hysterical laugh of joy.

"You have returned, you have returned," he cried.

"It is El Senor that he takes you for," explained one of the girls. "He was very good to him. The old man recognizes the English accent."

We explained to him his mistake, and the delight faded from his poor old face, and the blank expressionless look of the blind came back. Slowly he turned to the entrance and his tapping, which led him away down the street. Thus he pursued his trade, feeling his way from door to door, entering any one that was open, seating himself upon the first unoccupied chair which he could find: few could have been hard-hearted enough to deny his unspoken pleading.

One evening we met him in the upper town.... An accident had happened, and his guitar was opened out like an old boot; it still held together at the handle, but at the front of the instrument the soundboard and back had become detached from the sides. In a clumsy fashion the hurt had been bound up with string. We asked him what had happened. He did not reply, but cried out with a high-pitched, half-crazy laugh. Then standing astraddle in the precipitous street he began to pluck at the strings as though the guitar could answer for him. The thin voice of it had now sunk to a mere ghost of a sound, the murmur of a summer freshet might well have drowned its plaintive whisper. Then turning he made his way downhill.

CHAPTER XXIII

JIJONA--A DAY'S WORK