Wild Spain Part 16

At the cortijo, or corn-farm, are four or five permanent employes--the steward, the bread-maker, and the tenders of the working oxen. All the rest of the labourers--men or women--are hired temporarily as required.

Herdsmen and shepherds we do not include, as these do not live at the farm, but in some reed-built _choza_, or other rough shelter hard by their flocks. Hence it will be seen that the cla.s.s of labour employed on arable land is of the lowest--there is none of the inducement to steady industry begotten of permanent place. At the vineyards, in addition to the higher rate of wage, the food supplied is also much superior. This industry, in short, absorbs the pick of the labour-market. No women are employed in the vineyards, nor allowed to touch a vine, though on the farms many are engaged for such work as hoeing and weeding.

To become the capataz of a vineyard is the highest ambition of the labourer. To go into the market-place and hire, instead of standing there to be hired, are obviously very different things. It implies, besides, permanent wages at increased rate, without manual work to do, for the capataz only orders.

He hires the labourers required, often with an eye to his own advantage.

The master never sees the men engaged: there is no check on the honesty of the agent, but considerable variation in the quality of the hired.

The old, the halt and lame, if friends of the capataz, receive the same pay as the young and strong. Although all may go forth into the vineyard at the seventh hour, there is yet ground for doubting the substantial justice of the nineteenth-century capataz as there was in olden days of Bible history.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WOODEN PLOUGHSHARE.]

These and other minor abuses will not be remedied till landowner and farmer live on their properties--a thing unknown in Spain. The farmer, or _labrador_--as with grotesque incongruity he styles himself--lives in his cool and luxurious mansion in the town, receiving visits every few days from his steward; but months go by, even years, between his rare visits to the farm. The land is, as a rule, his own, and being a man of means, so long as things go on fairly, and his sacks of corn or casks of wine arrive in town in due season, and without excessive pillage, he is content.

Most of the farms being held by capitalists, the farmer can withstand the loss of a few bad years: and when a good one comes--they calculate one fat year to four lean--all losses are recouped and a large balance to the good rewards his patience.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate XXVII.

THE HARVEST-FIELD.

Page 225.]

Ploughing, or what pa.s.ses muster as such--a tickling of the surface by tiny wooden ploughshare identical with those of Roman days, drawn by yokes of tardy-plodding oxen--takes place in autumn. Wheat is sown in December, the seed scattered broadcast, and one-third of the land laid fallow each year. The fallows (_manchones_) in spring produce wildernesses of weeds, as tall and rank as the corn itself, and gorgeous with wild-flowers--Elysian fields for the bustards, which revel amidst the ripening seeds and legions of locusts and gra.s.shoppers. Here whole acres glow with crimson trefoil, contrasting with the blue borage and millions of convolvuli: there are lilies and balsams, asphodel, iris, and narcissi of every hue--but it is idle to attempt to describe the unspeakable floral beauties of the Spanish _manchon_.

The fallows are not, however, left to waste their substance entirely on weeds and wild-flowers, for they form the best spring-grazing grounds for cattle, and thus, too, receive a certain allowance of manure.

One's patience is exercised to watch the tardy oxen creeping along those league-long furrows! Even in our English corn-lands, in the fifty-acre fields of Norfolk or Northumberland, there appears to our non-technical eyes a grievous disproportion between the work to be done and the means employed, albeit a dozen stout draughts may be at work in a single field. Here, where the "field" stretches away unbroken by fence or hedge to the horizon, a day's journey in either direction for those plodding oxen, the task truly appears more hopeless than the labours of Sisyphus.

Not even on the prairies of Western America can they boast a longer furrow than can be traced on these plains of tawny, treeless Spain. Well may the ploughman seek, by chanting old-time ditties, to avoid utter vacuity of mind.

In June and July the harvest is gathered in--no musical rattle of reaper, for the sickle still holds its place: and over the breadth of fallen swathe soar hawks of every sort and size, preying on the locusts and other large insects and reptiles now deprived of their accustomed covert.

Then follows the threshing of the corn, an operation which is carried on with the primitive simplicity of the patriarchs of old--perhaps on precisely the same lines. The sheaves are brought from the stubble on creaking bullock-carts, and thrown on the _era_, or threshing-ground, a hardened level s.p.a.ce adjoining the farm. Here it is threshed--or rather, trodden out under foot by the _yeguas_--brood-mares, a team of which are kept briskly trotting over the circle of outstrewn sheaves, driven on by a man who stands in the centre. With a long whip and the skill of a circus manager, he drives the mares in circles, round and round--this is the only duty asked of the _yeguas_ all the year, except that of maternity. Amidst clouds of dust and heat the sweating animals are urged on till the corn and brittle straw is trodden into finest chaff. Then the mares are rested, the grain and chaff pushed aside to make room for fresh sheaves, and the operation is repeated till all the produce has been trodden out.

The next process is to throw the broken corn high in air with broad wooden shovels. The wind serves to separate the grain from the chaff, the former falling in heaps on the earth, while the lighter material drifts away to leeward. The grain is gathered into sacks, loaded upon donkeys, and away goes the team to the owner's granary in the town: as many as three score, and more, of patient _borricos_ may often at this season be seen plodding along the dusty byeway. Similarly one sees, at the same season, the casks of newly-pressed wine being jolted along on bullock-carts towards the town, along rough roads or tracks that will not be required again till the same traffic occurs after the next year's vintage.

The broken straw and chaff is stored in large stacks, to form the staple food for horses and cattle during the winter: and is indeed of good quality, affording as much nutriment as the best hay, of which none is grown in this southern land.[47]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate XXVIII.

THRESHING THE CORN WITH YEGUAS (MARES).

Page 226.]

The corn goes to the owner's granary, the wine to his bodega, and all is soon safely housed within the city walls. Nothing, beyond actual necessaries, is left in the country.

The antipathy evinced by Spaniards towards the country is a curious feature of this southern life. No Spaniard, rich or poor, will remain in the country for a single night, even in the green and glorious spring-time when the Andalucian _vegas_ revel in richest charm to eye and ear. The labourers whose work takes them into the _campo_ do their best to get back by night: even the poorest prefer a walk of several miles, morning and evening, rather than remain overnight amidst rustic scenes. Centuries of former insecurity may explain this: but now no present cause can be a.s.signed beyond the force of habit, and perhaps the fear of being overtaken by sudden illness or death beyond the reach of priest--in which case the last rites of religion might not be available.

Whatever be the cause, the country gentleman, the country parson and doctor, Hodge and rural population generally, are unknown in Spain. The landowner hies him townwards at night to his gossip, his _paseo_ and his favourite game of _tresillo_ at the casino--the workman to his village, his wife and bairns in the humble tenement he proudly calls his _casa_.

Spain is a land of customs and accepted traditions--be they good or bad.

For centuries no one has sought to introduce a novelty--say a taste for rural life, though the conditions for its enjoyment exist here as favourably, at least, as elsewhere. So far as we can judge, the vesper-bell will continue for all time to gather in the natives to the cities as rookeries unite their flocks when every sun goes down.

This, of course, does not apply to farmsteads remote from town or village, where labourers and herdsmen perforce live as in a rural fortress. It is not surprising that, with the gregarious instincts of the Spanish people, the lot of such men should be despised; and that there should arise in these unhappy groups, isolated for weeks from kith and kin, and with the barest means of subsistence, that spirit of discontent which resulted in 1883 in the _mano negra_, and this year in that anarchical furor which, on both occasions, was expiated on the scaffold.

Agriculture in Spain is thus deprived of that _gracia_ which in other lands distinguishes it from other commercial pursuits. It is devoid of that loving, homely interest that in England attaches to it, making the cultivation of the soil--at least when conducted (willingly) by the landowner--something of a recreation or "labour of love." Here, nothing beyond elementary and imperative operations are carried on--those which a rule-of-thumb experience has shown to give fairly good results with a minimum of trouble. Experiments are things unknown. There is a settled conviction among the agricultural cla.s.s that improvement is impossible, that their patriarchal system represents perfection. Reward is looked for rather in a twenty or thirty-fold return once in every four or five years by luck of favouring climatic conditions, than sought to be a.s.sured by skill and the adoption of modern modes of tillage.

Corn-growing nevertheless does pay in Spain, owing to the import-duty on foreign grain, which ensures a profit to the home-producer. But fortunes realized on the _cortijo_ are always ascribed rather to a run of good luck than to any other specific cause.

He would be a bold man who departed from the traditional systems in vogue since time began, in this land where "whatever is is best." And a strange fatality does await experimental changes. The very soil seems to repel innovation. A firm of practical English agriculturists failed signally some thirty years ago, and one still hears it satirically told how the deep-searching iron ploughshares from Inglaterra left offended fields which for years afterwards refused to yield a crop.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate XXIX.

WINNOWING.

Page 228.]

The minor accessories of farming, such as the dairy, poultry and the stock-yard, which, we are told, stand between many an English farmer and ruin, are here ignored. For this, however, there is some excuse in the vexatious and mistaken system of the octroi (_consumos_), under which farm-produce and consumables of every kind are taxed on entering the town. The rural farmer, it is true, escapes the town taxes, but as a counterpoise, to tax his produce on its way to market, is clearly saddling the wrong horse.[48] The incidence of such a burden clearly falls upon the already over-taxed consumer in the towns, increasing the cost of the necessaries of life. The whole system is, moreover, arbitrary and irritating. How would one like at home to be stopped every time he came in from a day's shooting, in order that a "duty" may be a.s.sessed on his bag of partridge, rabbits, or quail? Or, worse still, on a few bottles of wine which may remain unconsumed at luncheon, but which the official of the octroi knows perfectly well were taken out into the _campo_ that same morning?

The princ.i.p.al crops raised (Andalucia) are wheat, barley, beans, and chick-pea (_garbanzo_), together with rye, alfalfa, vetches, and canary-seed. Very few oats are sown, barley forming the chief grain-food for horses.[49] No roots are cultivated, no manure applied, nor any scientific rotation of crops attempted.

Neither maize nor rice are cultivated in the south, though both form important items in other parts of the Peninsula. Rice, especially, is grown on the Mediterranean coast (Valencia, &c.), and in Portugal.

Possibly the Andalucian marismas _might_ form "paddy-fields" that would make San Lucar a rival of Rangoon, as similarly Cadiz _might_ compete with Odessa. But may these "improvements" await another age! May some few outlandish nooks and corners of Europe be left as G.o.d made them, where primaeval conditions may yet survive, and wild nature reign in uncontaminated glory--at least during our time.

Much could easily be done to bring Spanish farming nearer to European standards. Improvements will come, one day or another: already the dawn of a more active industrial life is beginning to glimmer. But as yet the flutter extends only to manufactures, not to agriculture. Capitalists are beginning to furnish their factories with the appliances of modern machinery, and Spanish workmen are found capable of adapting themselves, by their intelligence and attention, to the new conditions, and to bear a fair comparison with the workmen of other countries.

The wave of progress is at present confined to the foundry, the mine, and the workshop, but will some day, perhaps, extend to the _campo_--subst.i.tute the steam-plough and reaper for the sluggish ox-team and sickle, the steam-thrasher for the trotting brood-mares, and metamorphose into an active industry the present drowsy, old-world routine of Spanish agriculture.

Progress in Spain moves with halting step, and it were folly to cherish sanguine expectations. Such a change can only come with altered conditions in the people. Why, for example, try to improve dairy arrangements when there is no demand for fresh b.u.t.ter? Why trouble with the cattle when the fighting bull is the prize animal of the pasture?

What encouragement is there to improve the grazing of stock when an enthusiast who had stall-fed his beasts is told by the butcher, "if you wish me to sell any more of your animals, you must send them _without fat_"? Hitherto this gentleman's efforts to reform the national taste have resulted in utter collapse. Fattened joints are, in Spain, in advance of the age, amongst a people wedded to the flesh-pots of the _puchero_, wherein the beef is required to be, above all things, lean.

The fat of the pig only is appreciated in Spanish cuisine.

CHAPTER XIX.

ON SPANISH AGRICULTURE--(CONTINUED).

THE OLIVE.

Interspersed amidst the monotony of corn-land and vineyard is seen the peculiar foliage of the olive. Its regular rows of sober green cover many of the higher lands and hillsides, and its produce, next to corn and wine, occupies the third place of importance. Outside the ancient _huertas_, where since Moorish days the orange, lemon, and citron have been carefully tended and watered, the olive is the only cultivated tree; and well does it repay the minimum of care which it requires. The olive enters largely into the economy of every-day existence, forming an important element both in the food and light of the Spanish people.

Olive-oil is the universal illuminant--in a little saucer with rudely-fixed cotton wick (the _mariposa_), it lights the herdsman's choza, the cottage, and cortijo: this oil is also a leading article of consumption with all cla.s.ses. To the poor it is an absolute necessary, taking the place occupied by meat among northern nations, giving flavour and zest to the hard bread and to the tough dry stock-fish imported from Newfoundland or Norwegian fjord--besides being an essential ingredient in the universal gazpacho. The fruit itself, in various forms, gives a national flavour to nearly every dish. Every one eats olives, from the wayfarer on the dusty highroad, whose hunch of dry bread is sweetened by a handful of the piquant fruit, to the Madrilenian epicure who at Lhardy's restaurant demands the "Reinas" from Seville. These olives are of large size,--almost like walnuts--and are only rivalled in flavour by the "manzanillas," a smaller variety more resembling the French olive, but, to our thinking, of superior taste.

These two kinds are carefully gathered in late autumn, and are in universal demand throughout the Peninsula. Beyond its boundaries they are little known or appreciated, though some few have already found consumers in the north of Europe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WAITING FOR DEATH."]

Although the olive-trees are of the hardiest nature--otherwise they could not survive, without irrigation, the intense heats of summer--yet the crop is a precarious one. After the fruit has been gathered in December, or rather beaten off the trees, for that is the method adopted, the olives destined for the oil-mill are subjected to severe pressure by rudely-constructed wooden screws, often supplemented by stone-weights--again the simplest appliances of modern machinery are often neglected--and the oil extracted is drawn off and separated into different qualities. None, however, is of that grade--or rather its manufacture and elaboration are too rough and careless, to enable the Spanish produce to compete with the refined neutral oils of Italy and France. With a little more care in its manufacture, and more energy in its introduction to foreign markets, the rich oils of Spain might doubtless be made a source of much additional national wealth.

Its substantial qualities, and in particular its power of long sustaining light, are appreciated in Russia, where it is superseding the oils of other countries for its reliable illumination of the _icons_, or sacred lamps. The religious tenets of the Muscovites require that these small lamps, suspended before their images, should burn brightly, without tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, through the longest winter nights of eighteen or twenty hours. The little gla.s.s tumblers of the icons are filled to the brim with Spanish oil: a perforated metal bar placed across, holds the lightly-twisted cotton wick, and once lighted the little lamp burns brightly, without smoke or attention, through the longest nights of the northern winter.