Poor Folk in Spain Part 22

He picked it up, and fingered the chords. Then he went to the door and peered round it to see if Pere Chicot had gone home.

"I might sing you something if you won't tell any one," said the chief of the munic.i.p.al officers. "But I will sing it in a very low voice, so that it will be less disrespectful to my wife's father."

He sang, in a hoa.r.s.e unmusical whisper, a guajiras.

"I like the guajiras and also the tango," said he. "You see, I did my military duty in Cuba, and I learned many over there."

Here are three of the songs he sang:

"I will never marry, For as a bachelor I am gay, I have money to spend, I live like a general all day.

And if I come to marry, Though I may be rich, I shall have to lower my crest, Like 'Barrabas' the c.o.c.k, But the bachelor is Like G.o.d painted by Peter."

"On a serene night The sad lament was heard Of a poor soldier, wounded And covered with blood and sand.

For the ambulances were full, And the Red Cross doctors were busy.

At the sight of his oozing blood The brave soldier prayed That death should overtake him, For no one could a.s.sist him."

"At breakfast one morning A wise man said, sighing, That women in weeping Are false as are traitors.

This has oft been ignored.

But I've seen and I know That the tears of a woman, As down they are falling, Make naught but deception For the man who supports her."

As he went on he began to forget his father-in-law, and in a short while he was bawling indecent tangos at the top of his voice. He showed no signs of departure, so I began to prepare for supper. I lit the bonfire which Tia Roger had laid in the wide hearth-place, placed over it a three-legged trivet of iron and on the trivet our huge saucepan full to the brim with olive oil. We then made use of a Spanish custom. We asked him to supper with us. This he was forced by Spanish custom to refuse, and as we did not repeat the invitation he had to make his compliments--which he did with the greatest courtesy--and go home.

After supper, as our bread supply was short, we felt our way down the hill in the dark and down the staircases of streets to the shop of Manuel Garcia. Garcia and his wife sold bread at one fat dog cheaper than the other shops. The bread was quite as good as any other, it had a very white powdery kind of consistency, baked in flat loaves with a very hard, anaemic crust. The Garcias had showed us one of the economical devices which were in current use. We had for some days bought candles at this shop, but Mrs. Garcia said:

"Why do you spend all this money on candles? Here is a thing much better, and much cheaper. You first pour water into a cup or bowl until half-way up, then fill to the top with olive oil. Float one of these on the top of the oil, and set fire to it. There you have a light at half the cost of candles."

The box she handed to us was full of pieces of cork through which a wick had been thrust. On the top of the box was the name of the device "little-lamps-little-boats" and a picture of the Virgin. We stepped back in our illumination to the most ancient of methods--the old Roman conquerors of Spain must have illuminated their villas in this way.

"Little-lamps-little-boats" had probably given light to the halls of the Saracen castle which now was but a few crumbling ma.s.ses of slowly disintegrating cement. It was curious to think that one-half of Jijona was lit by electric light, the other by this antique device, and that there was practically nothing between. Mrs. Garcia had urged us to the stewing of garbanzos.

The Garcias were go-ahead Spaniards. Starting from very small origins, they had begun a small turron factory in a back room. Not content with making turron alone, they had peddled it all over the Balearic Isles.

Gradually they had prospered, and the whole upper part of the house was now factory, the entrance to the factory being higher up the hill in a back street. Yet they remained simple people, sitting, in the evenings, on their doorstep gossiping, while the flaxen-haired daughter, sixteen years old, painted with a toothpick dipped in dye eyes and noses on sugar pigs and cats.

"We had a hard time at first," said Mrs. Garcia. "In Majorca the people were very jealous of us, and often very rude. They would tell us to go back to our own district; they used to laugh at our speech, though G.o.d knows they can't speak proper Spanish themselves."

This inter-district jealousy seems characteristic of Spain. The man from Toledo laughed at the Jijona people; the people of Jijona called those of Murcia "gipsies"; the people of Murcia say that the Jijona folk are mere uncultivated mountaineers; Catalan and Castilian are in semi-enmity. Each person that one spoke to lauded the beauties and the food of his own district at the expense of other places. All about Jijona they would have nothing but maleguenas and Valencian jotas. The other varieties of Spanish music they were not interested in.

But the Garcias were progressive people. They had made a success of their Balearic venture, and now had a stall in the market of Alicante.

This was kept by a sister-in-law. Garcia and his wife were making preparations to go to the great fair at Albacete. The shop was full of large bales done up in straw matting, boxes and crates of sweets and of turron. They would go by road, for it was cheaper, and only about a hundred miles away.

"That is a queer town," said Garcia. "There are gates to the walls, and at a certain hour they shut the gates, and if you are outside you stay outside till the morning."

Mrs. Garcia wanted me to paint her portrait. If she would have posed to me in the ordinary, peasant, workaday dress I would have done it with pleasure. But she had a fine fashionable modern silk dress of black and she wanted to pose in this. I managed to put off the proposal until the time of her departure was too close. She went away unsatisfied.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: Spirit lamp.]

[Footnote 23: "She has painted everything, everything, everything!"]

[Footnote 24: "Would you like them?"]

CHAPTER XXIV

JIJONA--THE GOATHERDS

Murcia could be counted as unmusical, in Verdolay one heard either a gramophone of the little Senor, or the piano banged by the girls who lived in the topmost house of the village. In Jijona, on the contrary, almost every evening could be heard the sound of the guitar or of that strange Eastern singing of Spain. Young men sat on the edge of the cliff below the Saracen castle and thumped two or three chords from a guitar for half the night long. It had a delight, a.n.a.logous to that which the tom-tom gives, a delight drawn from the hypnotism of inexorable rhythm.

But save for the commandant of the munic.i.p.al officers, who was a stranger, we had made the acquaintance of none of the musicians until one afternoon the goatherds perched themselves in the shadow beneath our walls.

We were taking a siesta when the sound of thrumming roused us from the half sleep which the afternoon gives. Jan exclaimed:

"That music sounds quite near."

He jumped up and looked out of the window. On a narrow ledge of flat rock at the foot of the wall three men were sitting in the shadow of the house. Two had guitars, and all along the wall of the garden a number of goats were lying down or were browsing on the small weeds which sprouted between the rocks. On the hill-side the kids were engaging one another in mock battle, rearing up in feint, with the most dainty of gestures, or interlocking their infantile horns.

We slipped on our clothes, and crawling out by the garden door, the opening of which was only about four feet high, we joined the goatherds in their patch of shadow.

"Buenos dias," said Jan. "I, too, love the guitar."

"Si, Senor," answered one of the herds, "through the windows we have heard you playing."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

One of the men was thin but wore an enormous paG.o.da-like sombrero of straw, one was a boy of eighteen with a huge moustache, the third was an old man with a large nose, the wrinkles on his face drawn more deeply than any we have before seen. Their guitars were poor instruments and the strings were broken and knotted together, in consequence of which little bits of stick were tied across the arm of the instrument in order to clamp the strings down to the fingerboard below the knotted parts. As the strings break and are repaired, this stick is moved up the fingerboard until the strings are too short to play upon. Jan crawled through the small door and brought out the big white guitar. The thin man handled it with reverence.

"I know the instrument," he said. "It is El Senor's. It is a good instrument, but he has a better. A big brown one which is a marvel. He must be very rich. They say he gave more than two hundred pesetas for it."

He played on it for a moment, but soon handed it back to Jan.

"I'd rather play on my old one," he said. "I'm not afraid of it, and I can knock it about as I like."

All three were dressed in cotton shirts and pants, tied at the ankle with tape, over these they wore cotton coats and trousers; when the weather was very hot they dispensed with the trousers. Their feet were bare of stocking, but their shoes were heavy; woven by themselves out of esparto gra.s.s, very Oriental in shape with turned-up, pointed toes. On their backs were sacks containing esparto gra.s.s and half-fashioned sandals. Each possessed a long, heavy, crook'd stick shod with an iron point.

All too soon they said that they must be moving on. "But come down to the street of the soap house, top side, this evening, and we'll have a dance and singing."

I had sketched in this street. It was on the steepest part of the hill and ran almost horizontally across, so that the front door of the upper houses were on a level with the roofs of the lower ones. The roadway was divided along the centre, one-half being some twenty feet above the other; a low parapet protected the drop. It was lucky that the dwellers in the upper part of the street were sober Spaniards.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GIRL SINGING A MALAGUEnA

This type song is in 3/4-time, and is as a rule very melancholy. It is very popular in the south of Spain.]

We found, as usual, the party seated on chairs in the middle of the street, near a small electric light; some of the men were sitting along the parapet. We were greeted by an old, but very large woman who groaned all the evening with rheumatism. The girls were in their best dresses of pale coloured skirt and embroidered paisley patterned shawls. A long silence followed our arrival. We were waiting for a player who was the best in the village. He could not come, but sent his brother instead, who played well, but was left-handed. Three guitars and a guitarron formed the orchestra.

Thrum, thrum, thrum, went the guitars, while across the deeper chords the little guitarron, with its strange tuning, threaded a shrill pattern of monotonous arpeggios. The music of Spain has something fundamental about it. It has a hint of the heart-beat of the universe. The rich, pulsating rhythm of it seems to set the air flowing in waves like those in a disturbed pool. It seems to speak of something ideally simple, to create an harmonious forgetfulness. A girl sitting amongst us threw back her head and sang. Her voice carried the sad minor cadences of the eternal East; it was pitched queerly in the throat and wailed across the still night like the voice of a pa.s.sionate soul.

"When I am dead a hundred years, And when the worms have eaten me, The signs you find in my dead bones, Will show that I have worshipped thee.