Poor Folk in Spain Part 25

On Sunday night we gave a party to Emilio, his wife, the little Professor and other afficianados of the guitar. We played to them selections of genuine cla.s.sical music, Bach, Beethoven, Handel on the gramophone. Don Feliz sat by himself in a corner, his head in the air, tapping his foot to the metre.

"All that, all that I have heard before," he said.

Emilio listened with delight on his rugged face. Every few minutes he whispered to his wife:

"Shut up talking. This is worth listening to."

Then we tried an experiment. We had just received from El Senor a plate of Stravinsky's "Oiseau du Feu." We put it on to the machine. The audience kept an intense silence.

"But that is marvellous!" they exclaimed as soon as the record was over.

"Play it once more, Senor."

"Senor," said one of Emilio's friends, "what can I do for you? Have you any milk--no?"

He ran downstairs and out of the house. In ten minutes he came back, thrust a milk-can into Jan's hands.

"There!" he exclaimed. "And if you want any more cow's milk, come to me.

I keep a milk-shop, you know." Then he went on more seriously: "But you are indeed lucky to have bought that old guitar of Don Feliz. He would never sell it to me. I have offered a hundred pesetas for it; and there are others who have offered more."

This left us with a problem in psychology to work out for the next few days. Why had Don Feliz sold Jan the guitar?

We put the question to Luis.

"Oh," he answered, "probably Don Feliz found the Senor Juan sympathetic."

But this did not satisfy us. Don Feliz had made much of the fact that we were leaving the country: that we were going far away. At last we worked it out thus.

Don Feliz had bought his novia a laud. He was short of money to pay for it. This, however, would not have been enough reason in itself, but he was also jealous of the other players in the town, and by selling the guitar definitely to Jan he would first allay the temptation that he might sell it locally. He put the price low, because he knew we were badly off; but some of the wrench of parting with the instrument--of which he was very proud--was eased by knowing that it was going to be taken to the grand cities of London and Paris, where its uniqueness would be valued. But we think he would have died of starvation rather than allow one of his local rivals to possess his old guitar.

When I was not sketching in the campanile, Jan and I went to the cafes and drew the people sitting about us. This gave delight to the waiters.

One morning while we were at one of the cafe's facing the river Blas came up. He pa.s.sed over the fact that we had quarrelled, and that Jan had dropped him for Don Feliz.

"Draw me!" said Blas.

The result was that one by one all the richest gipsies of the town came and posed to me at the cafe tables. This was, in fact, the gipsies'

cafe. They were on the whole a handsome set of men, very intelligent and shrewd in expression and of prosperous appearance. Most of these carried the indefinable touch which makes an internationalism amongst those who are interested in beasts of burden. They are reputed to be expert cattle and horse thieves, and are still to some extent despised by the Spaniard. But our first impressions were not unfavourable.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The autumn seemed to be a period of fiesta. We had luckily just missed the great fiesta of Murcia which culminates with a huge procession out to Fuen Santa in the mountains. But often we were awakened at three in the morning by a series of alarming reports and explosions in the street outside. There was a large church at the end of the Paseo de Corveras, and it seemed as though guns were going off all around the walls. The first time we heard this we sprang to our windows, for we had heard something of the quarrelsome nature of the Murcians.

But the explosions were up in the air. Rocket after rocket soared up into the air and exploded with a loud crash, then large zigzag crackers were thrown down into the street. Grumbling at the noise, we went back to bed. Next day we found out that it was a fiesta, the rockets sent up by the priests; and often after that we were awakened in the dead of night by these almost Chinese religious ceremonies.

We had heard much of the quarrelsome nature of the huertanos. Luis and Flores had both told us tales of quarrels amongst the cultivators. Both at Verdolay and in Murcia we had seen small bands of young men wandering about at eventide with guitars and songs. They were hunting for trouble, and if they should meet another band, then a fight ensued, ending with broken instruments and possibly a stab or two.

One afternoon Jan was walking homewards from Emilio's, where he had been buying guitar-strings. He was close to the Paseo de Corveras, when a young man rushed round a corner and cannoned hard into him. Jan stumbled and to save himself clutched the man by the coat. It was a corner around which youths were accustomed to lark, and Jan, believing this to be a piece of horse-play, decided, while yet stumbling and clutching, that the horse-play was too rough. So dragging at the blouse of the man, who struggled to escape, Jan exhorted him to come back and to explain himself. While he was still holding on to the man, a crowd burst around the corner and flung itself on to the presumed joker. Jan's head was in a whirl. One man leapt fiercely on to the joker's back, wrenched his arms behind him and grasped him. The struggling crowd swayed to and fro and suddenly lurched sideways through the door of a tobacconist's shop.

Two women in the shop began to shriek at the upper pitch of their voices.

The turmoil quietened. A furious talk began in the shop. The young man who had pinioned the joker, trying to explain, loosened his grip to use his hands conversationally. At once the joker leapt for freedom. He ran, panting like a dog, out of the shop, the crowd bellowing, amid screaming, at his heels. The man was chased into an ironmonger's, where he took refuge behind the counter. The crowd blocked up the doorway.

Jan, who had joined the crowd in dismayed curiosity, then began to pick up detached words: "Asesino, Asesino ... asesinato."

"Good Lord!" said Jan to himself. "I don't want to get mixed up in a murder trial."

As he turned away, two gendarmes, with the ridiculous schoolgirl hats on their heads, led the murderer away.

During this time I had been at home. A sudden outburst of noise dragged me to the window. Down the street, a man was running. He went in a queer way, holding himself between the legs with his hands, and sometimes stumbling, sometimes leaping as one does in dreams of pursuit. Carts were driven furiously after him. He was shouting out in a voice, full of surprise and of anger. After a moment I made out the words:

"Catch the man who has murdered me! Catch the villain who has killed me!"

He stumbled once more and fell. Men jumped from the carts, lifted him into one, and drove him away.

I ran downstairs. Antonio's gaunt mother-in-law was standing in the doorway.

"It is an a.s.sa.s.sination," she said. "I doubt that the poor man will live. He was stabbed in a ticklish part."

"I wonder where Jan is," I said to myself; and at that moment saw him coming along the sidewalk. I ran to him. "Jan," I cried, "a man has been murdered."

"I know," he answered; "I unwittingly caught the murderer."

The Paseo de Corveras must have more than its fair percentage of fat old women. They all stood on their doorsteps talking in awed tones of the tragedy. Then with a ludicrous unanimity each pushed her skirts between her legs with a dramatic hand and holding herself so that she plainly ill.u.s.trated her meaning exclaimed,

"Ei! el pobre! Y en un sitio tan delicado."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 26: My village.]

[Footnote 27: "Peaches, Pears!" but "Grapes! Grapes!"]

[Footnote 28: The Arts Club of Murcia.]

[Footnote 29: Betrothed.]

CHAPTER XXVI

LORCA

We still had money for another three weeks, although we had been four months in Spain. The weather in Murcia was very cold; damp, chilling winds blew down the valley. We decided to go westwards, to explore Lorca, which we had heard was both fine pictorially and also which was called "the City of the Sun." On suggesting the idea to some of our Murcian friends, they advised us not to go. "It is a town of bad people," they said; "they are all gipsies." We had heard before of these towns of bad people. One lay on the far side of the Murcian valley; a village which cl.u.s.tered round the foot of the peak of rock on the top of which was a ruined castle. These people had the reputation of chasing out intruding strangers with sticks and stones. Antonio, fishing in the vicinity of this village, had once been maltreated. The villagers were proud of this brutality.

"Yes," they would say, "we _are_ brutes. We _are_ uncultivated. We are the biggest brutes for fifty miles around, and we mean to remain so."

Other people had said that Lorca was charming. So we decided to find out for ourselves. We hoped to find rooms in a posada, and we reduced our luggage to moderate dimensions; most of it we put in the van, leaving ourselves only the guitar and the laud to look after.

The train left early in the morning, and stopped at the first station, where we had to change. We rushed across the line, having to clamber under a long train of waggons which blocked the way, and won corner seats. A lanky boy of eighteen, dressed in a long white travelling ulster, with a _beret_ on his head, took most of the other seats in the carriage, filling them with packages. The young man seemed very familiar with railway travelling: he called all the porters by name, and exchanged smokes with the engine-driver.