Читать книгу Poor Folk in Spain - Jan Gordon - Страница 15

Borrow has a description of an inn in Galicia in which a whole family occupies but one bedroom while the servant sleeps across the door. Our bedroom in the Hôtel del Jardin was quite large enough for any family other than, perhaps, a French Canadian, which sometimes runs, we have heard, into twenties and thirties. The walls were painted a pinky-mauve stucco, decorated with a broad olive-green ribbon of colour making a complete oblong or frame on each wall about eighteen inches within the edges of the wall, top, bottom and sides.

This method of making, as it were, a separate frame of each wall, was novel and rather pleasant. It is a common practice in Spanish wall decoration and is probably Moorish in origin. The hotel was full of dark corridors leading to huge bedrooms: it had a broad veranda upstairs full of large wicker chairs, bottoms up, while downstairs was a dining room with square tables and a small entrance hall in which sat the three old ladies.

With one of the old ladies we had bargained in a sleepy way upon our arrival. She had conceded us the room with full pension (no extraordinarios) for eight pesetas a day, but in general the three old ladies sat in the entrada together, giving a sense of black-frocked repose and of quiet dignity to the place. One was thin-faced, dried-up but energetically capable; one was large and motherly, while the third had no characteristics whatever and was ignored by every one.

I do not think we realized that these three old ladies were the proprietresses until the second or third day at lunch-time. We had been given our seats at a table by the waiter; suddenly we found the three old ladies had surrounded us and were glowering down at us. We were rising to our feet but they peremptorily commanded us to stay where we were, breaking the rising tide of their wrath upon the waiter. Then, for the first time, we realized how completely we were married in Spain. In France, for instance, married people are "les époux," plural, separate; in England they are a "married couple," which still recognizes a duality though perhaps less definitely than does France; but in Spain we were "un matrimonio," indissolubly wedded into one in the language, and into a masculine one at that. Somehow I always felt that we ought to be wheeled in on casters: it was improper that so stately a thing as a matrimonio like the Queen of Spain should use legs. From the old ladies' annoyance we understood that the matrimonio had done something which was not correct, but they talked so fast, and they all talked together, so that the matrimonio could not make head or tail of what they were saying. Nor indeed did we ever discover our misdemeanour.

For our six and eightpence a day we had breakfast in a little side room. This meal was of café au lait in a huge bowl, rolls and butter. Sometimes we had companions for this meal. On the second day I was some minutes earlier than Jan. At the table was a young peasant priest. He ignored my tentative bow but began muttering to himself protective prayers in Latin. However, once I looked up suddenly and surprised him in the act of staring at me. He quickly crossed himself and redoubled the urgency of his protestations to God.

The other meals were excellently cooked and with four or five courses to each, but the diningroom bore on its walls a placard saying that owing to the rise of prices the management regretted that it was unable to provide wine at the pension. So there was an extraordinario after all—and a very good extraordinario it was too—red Rioja wine with the faint, strange exotic taste in it of the tar with which the wine barrels are caulked.

You know the queer old drawings one finds in ancient books: towns like bandboxes with the walls round a perfect circle, and peaked houses all comfortably packed inside, and soldiers' heads sticking out of the battlemented towers? Well, Avila is like that. You may stand on the opposite hillside and see the full circle of her walls with never a breach in it, with towers at every two hundred yards or so, and you can gaze down into her houses, fitted neatly within the bandbox, and wonder if the old manuscripts were quite as exaggerated as one often supposed. From this hillside one might imagine that Avila has never changed from the days when the monks drew their primitive pictures. The walls top the hill-side and one sees nothing of the modern Avila which has spread beyond those great frowning gateways facing the plaza, but even the modern part of Avila which has oozed out beyond the walls is not overwhelmingly modern. There are none of the exquisite specimens of Spanish bad taste like that we found in Irun. The plaza is surrounded by coloured houses and arcades much as is that of Medina; the sun-blinds of the two large cafés are tattered and weather-beaten; the peasants stare at strangers with an unspoilt curiosity.

The habit of rushing about towns, of penetrating into every gloomy interior, ecclesiastical or otherwise, which seems to be decently penetrable, is a modern convention to which we do not subscribe. There are two aspects to every place, the living and the dead, and we prefer the former. There is this advantage in our attitude, that one does not have to seek out the living, it flows quite easily and naturally by, and one does not remain an open-mouthed spectator with a jackdaw brain, but incorporates oneself with it. We did not go into the cathedral, nor into any convent, nor did we climb up the towers or into the walls: we sat at the café drinking in both coffee and Spain.

Of costume, as Spain is so often painted, there was little; the peasant men wore tall, flat-brimmed hats and broad, blue sashes about their stomachs; the women shawls and woven leggings; the mules and donkeys had trappings of bright-coloured woolwork and often saddlebags with fine woven coloured patterns on them. String-soled sandals were the footwear of the men and of the soldiers: string-soled shoes, alpagatas, were worn by the women and children. The town was moderately alive until eleven o'clock. Very early in the morning the peasants came into the market with their mules or donkeys, then gradually a quiet settled down, a quiet which lasted till the evening. After six o'clock Avila awoke, the business men left their shops, the officers their cantonments. The cadets and youths gathered in the plaza to flirt with the girls who, dressed in gay cottons, paraded to and fro in small giggling and swaying groups. Booths selling cool drinks and ices opened at the corners of the plaza, while wandering sweetmeat merchants sold fried almonds and sugared nuts. There was no woman with a lace mantilla and a high comb, nor any one with a flat hat, embroidered shawl and cigarette; so the cigar boxes are liars.

As one sits at the café table in Spain, life is, perhaps, presented to one in an aspect almost too crude. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gates exhibiting his sores, and the Spanish beggar follows his example. Spain needs no Charles Lamb to write of the decay of beggars. Decayed indeed they are, but not in that sense of which Lamb wrote: in tattered and unspeakable rags they pursue their trade from the Asturias to Cadiz. No dishonour attaches to beggary in Spain. A Spaniard was horrified when Jan told him that begging was not permitted in England.

"What, then, can those do who are unable or unwilling to work?" he asked.

A humble though probably verminous official refuge is provided for the beggar in each town, and, as he tells his clients, "God repays" his small extortions. The Spaniard is accustomed to his beggars, he does not nag at his conscience about them, but it harrows the unaccustomed heart of the Englishman who, taking his modest coffee or Blanco y negro after supper, finds a procession of misery thrusting importunate hands into his moment of quiet luxury. The Spanish beggar has no tenderness for one's sensibility. Each has the motto, "If you have tears prepare to shed them now." Naturally we were their quarry. They presented us with a series of specimens worthy of a hospital museum. We hardened our hearts, as we were afraid of consequences, but after two days, when the beggars, disappointed with us, relaxed their exertions, we gave or withheld alms with the outward serenity of a Spaniard, but feeling inwardly brutal whenever we refused to give a dole.

Dirty, half-naked children dodged about the café pillars, hiding from the waiter's eyes. They stared wistfully at the small, square packets of beet sugar which the waiter brought with the coffee, and if a lump were left over they would creep up and in a cringing whine ask for it. Boys slightly older usually begged for a perra chica or for a cigarette. Their voices would be pathetic enough almost to break one's heart—they would say they had not eaten for three days—but if the refusal was decisive they would suddenly change their tones and shout out gaily to a comrade or run away whistling, or turn a few cartwheels down the gutter.

In Avila, too, we encountered the money problem. We had been told that the Spaniard calculates his cash in pesetas and centimos, the peseta being worth normally tenpence in English money and the ten-centimo piece about one penny. So far this had worked fairly well, we had been on the travellers' route and the peculiarity of travellers had been catered for; but here we found a new system of coinage.

"How much is that?" I asked a woman in the market, pointing to some object.

"That," she replied, "is worth six 'little bitches.'"

"Six what?" I exclaimed.

"Well, three 'fat dogs,' if you prefer."

"Three 'fat dogs'?"

"Yes, or one 'royal' and one 'little bitch.'"

"But I cannot understand. What is a 'royal'?"

"Oh, don't you know? Why, twenty 'royals' make a 'hard one.'"

At last we worried it out. The little bitch (perra chica) is five centimos, or one halfpenny. The fat dog (perro gordo) is the ten-centimo piece; these are both so called because of the lion on the back, though why the sex should be changed we do not know. The royal (real) is twenty-five centimos or twopence-halfpenny, the "hard one" (duro) is a five-peseta piece. The peseta is ignored. Nobody except an ignorant foreigner calculates in pesetas. The Spaniard, who often cannot write, does staggering sums in mental arithmetic, reducing thirty-two "little bitches" or seventeen "royals" almost instantly into the equivalent in minted coin.

We had come to Spain for the several reasons mentioned in Chapter I. We had found the freedom: it was as though some oppressing weight were lifted from off us, as though an attack of mental asthma had been relieved. But on the whole we felt that we had been defrauded in other respects. The weather, except for the afternoon at Medina, had been very cloudy and at times almost cold. We had heard no guitar during our week in Spain. One day a man with a primitive clarinet, accompanied by a man with a side drum, had wandered about the town making a queer music which had given us thrills of unexpected delight. But Jan does not play the clarinet. He had made up his mind about guitars, and guitars he would have. The last night which we were to spend in Avila, he said:

"See here, Jo, we'll go out and we'll walk up and down, through and round this town, till we hear a guitar playing. Then we will walk in and explain. I'm sure the people, whoever they may be, will not mind, but I am going to hear Spanish music."

After supper we set out again. We walked the town from the top to the bottom. Not a whisper of guitar or of any other music. We bisected the town from left to right—still silence except for the dim sounds of normal evening life. We went out into the little garden which was beyond the walls and, leaning on the parapet, stretched our ears over the small suburb beneath. The cries of a wailing child or two, of a scolding woman and the shouts of an angry man answered us; of music not a note. We walked round the walls and were about to return in disappointment to the hotel, when Jan said "Hush!"

We listened. Barely audible, from below on the hill-side, came the faint tinkle of a guitar. We looked out across the dark country. The hill sloped steeply from our feet and rose again in planes of blue blackness to the distant mountains. Almost in the bottom of the valley we saw a square of light from an open door. The sound came from this direction. Cautiously we crept down the hill, which was steep, pebbly and without paths. As we came down, the noise grew louder.

There was a small drinking house or venta by the roadside; near to it, drawn up on a grassy spot beneath some big trees, were gipsy caravans and booths, and as we passed by we could see, dimly white, the blanketed shapes of the gipsies as they lay on the grass asleep under the stars. From the venta came the sounds of music.

After a momentary hesitation we went in. The room, lit by one dim lamp, was crowded with gipsies and workmen. It was long in shape and an alcove almost opposite to the door was partitioned off as a bar. At one end was a table upon which three gipsies with dark, lined Spanish faces were sitting, and the audience had formed itself into rough, concentric semicircles spreading down the length of the room. Most of the men were swarthy with the sun, clad in the roughest of clothes, some with tall hats on, others with striped blankets flung over their shoulders. The inn looked like what the average traveller would describe as a nest of brigands.

We murmured a bashful "buenos noches," bowed to the company and crept into the background. A few returned our greeting, but with delicacy of feeling the majority took no overt notice of our presence.

The man on the table who held the guitar began to thrum on the instrument. A tall gipsy, whose face was drawn into clear, almost prismatic shapes, and who might have stepped out of an etching by Goya, put his stick into a corner, slipped off his blanket and, standing in the open space before the table, began a stamping dance, snapping his fingers in time with the rhythm. A workman standing near to us said:

"That man does not play the guitar very well, the other one plays better."

He went out and in a short while returned with his wife, a laughing woman whom he placed next to me. There was no drinking of wine. The alcarraza, an unglazed, bottle shaped drinking vessel, full of water, was handed about. It has a small spout, and from this the Spaniard pours a fine stream of water into his mouth. But beware, incautious traveller—ten to one you will drench yourself.

Though the audience apparently took no notice of our presence, in reality they were extremely conscious of us. One by one, as if by accident, gipsy women clad in red cottons came into the already crowded room. Soon a girl was urged to dance. She demurred, giggling. At last she was pushed into the open space, and with a gesture of resignation she began to dance. We are not judges of Spanish dancing: we had been looking for atmosphere, and had plunged into the thick of it. This was no café in Madrid or Seville got up for the entertainment of the traveller. This was the true, natural, romantic Spain. Opportunity again had blessed her disciples. One of the women pushed her way out of the door, and in a short while returned, dragging with her a child about nine years old. The little girl's face was frowning and angered, the sleep from which she had been roused still hung heavy on her eyelids.

"Aha!" exclaimed the audience. "She dances well."

The man who was reputed the better player roused himself from the table and sat down on a chair. They put castanets into the child's hands. The man struck a few chords and slowly the music formed itself into the rhythm of a Spanish measure.