Recollections of Sevilla
If you would be idle in good company—that is to say, in the company of people who should have sufficient education and resources to make them industrious—Sevilla will give you…
Location: Seville, Spain
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Recollections of Sevilla
If you would be idle in good company—that is to say, in the company of people who should have sufficient education and resources to make them industrious—Sevilla will give you more satisfaction than almost any city of its size in the world. Laziness there is the order of the hour, the day, the year. One or two streets, like Sierpes, for example, are closed to vehicles. The clubs and cafes open onto the roadway, and there, shaded from the fierce glare of the sun by the awnings that stretch from roof to roof across the narrow street, you sit at your ease, and to quote the late Dr. Watts, you take no heed of time save by its flight.
Perhaps a pretty flower girl will beg you to buy a rose or carnation, a beggar will stand making dumb petition by your side, some small boy will offer you a newspaper, or unfold before you the latest edition of "La Lidia," the bull-fighters' paper, with illustrations in colour, or he will beg for a piece of sugar from the bowl before you. These are the most serious disturbances that are likely to threaten. Towards late afternoon the awnings above the Sierpes are withdrawn, the promenade becomes quite gay, for the Sevillana goes along Sierpes looking her best, not altogether unconscious perhaps that she is criticized by connoisseurs all the way down the street.
Many a man blessed or banned by a small income that removes him equally from want and ambition, idles half his life away here. By the side of the Sevillians who have succumbed to the fascinations of Sierpes, Tennyson's "Lotus Eaters" were hard-working men. Of course I do not speak in praise of this habitual idleness; it accounts in part for Spain's loss of her former estate and for the corruption in high places, but, so far as one is justified in seeking idle days, it is at least permissible to look for the spot where the art of doing nothing is best understood. One would not go to Sevilla to be industrious any more than one would go to Chicago to take a holiday. Only professed tourists could be guilty of conduct so utterly indefensible and nobody takes tourists seriously, at home or abroad.
Talking of these worthy people reminds me that they have their own hotels in Sevilla, large, pretentious places equally redeemed from real comfort and Spanish associations. There they can be fooled to the top of their bent, and deluded into the belief that they have caught a glimpse of the real Spain. The true idler will avoid these places, even though his purse be as long as Midsummer Day. He will seek some modest house that receives a few visitors and makes them comfortable, he will accommodate himself to the conditions of the country and the customs of its people.
He will rise soon after the sun and enjoy his morning stroll while the air is cool and fresh and pious folk are flocking to the earliest service in the cathedral. Perhaps he will explore the cathedral itself, once, says legend, a Temple dedicated to Venus, and later, adds rumour, unshamed possessor of subterranean chambers, where Holy Inquisition could work its will unseen upon the poor bodies of heretics. Sevilla was the happy hunting-ground of the Inquisitors. Within two centuries they burnt 30,000 people in the name of the Roman Catholic faith.
Today, the cathedral is in charge of some really clever vergers to whose skill I bow. When I went there for the first time and expressed a wish to see the different chapels, famous beyond the country's boundaries by reason of their treasures of pictures or precious stones, a verger took me over the first one, pocketed a fee, and then remarked that the key of the next chapel was in the keeping of another man. This one showed me his share of the cathedral's beauties, took a fee, and handed me over to a third rogue who had a chapel in his charge. I grew tired of the game long before I had met half the earnest workers who desired to take part in it. Doubtless I was set down as a heretic.
But it is not necessary to journey to Spain to find cathedrals in the charge of grasping and illiterate men, nor can they spoil our enjoyment of what cathedrals have to show us. Southern Spain is full of the genius of Murillo, a master whose limitations are hardly to be seen in the bright light of his favourite city. In an age when Spanish painters seemed to crowd as much ugliness as was possible within the frame of their pictures, it must have been refreshing to find an artist who chose perfectly charming types for his Holy Mothers and Children and reached the simple heart of the people as none did before him and few have done since.
At Easter-tide one sees in the cathedral the famous dance of the Seises, amid surroundings that are not readily forgotten. Great Church dignitaries are everywhere in evidence, the archbishop with golden crozier, bishops in their mitres, priests in blue and white. Before the high altar the dancing boys are grouped in a semicircle formed by the musicians. These lads are dressed in blue and white doublets, they wear white stockings and long-feathered hats. They sing and dance to curious old-world music belonging to any age between Palestrina and Gluck, and they mark time with castanets. It is a weird performance of which nobody knows the origin.
Sevilla has countless charming walks. One can go across the Guadalquivir by the Tower of Gold, once a State Treasury, and so into the Triana where the gipsies live. It is a rare place, rivalled only by the environs of Granada. One can stroll along the river-side to the public gardens that the Duchess of Montpensier took from the grounds of her palace of St. Telmo and gave to the public. I remember these gardens when they were very wild and solitary, in part like a jungle, and yet so rich in scent and colour that it was a pleasure to get lost within their mazy depths. Now alas, they are more tidy. The paths are cleaned, the hedges trimmed, the flowers shine from well-ordered beds, and electric trams have a right of way through the home of orange, lemon, and syringa trees. This suggestion of smug prosperity is not nearly so pleasing as the joyful poverty that greeted me, when an idler, I saw the garden for the first time only twelve years ago.
Then Spain still owned Cuba and the Philippines, but the natives were in revolt and the campaign was spreading distress from Malaga to San Sebastian. There was no public money for gardening work. I remember once how I was taking an early morning stroll through Sevilla when I heard the sound of martial music and hurried in its direction. In the Plaza San Fernando there was a great crowd of women and children on one side of the square, and presently, along
the other side, a military band approached. Following, with the red and yellow flags a-flying, came two or three hundred recruits marching to Sevilla's southern station to entrain for Cadiz, where the transports lay. Spain had sent her best soldiers already, these were but raw lads, untrained, unnerved, unfit, going from the pleasant old city that had sheltered their boyhood to die in the Cuban swamps. And the women, not able to encourage them, were crying bitterly. I had not quite grasped the situation, and turned to an old, tear-stricken peasant by my side. "Where are they going, mother?" I said to her. "To heaven, friend," she replied, and told me that her three grandsons were in the ranks that were passing, and that her two sons had laid down their lives already.
Since those days I have seen something of war and suffering, but I cannot forget the Plaza San Fernando as it was on that June morning when everything under heaven seemed made for happiness, and was, so far as I could see, full of misery. One realized for the first time perhaps the atmosphere of the Book of Lamentations. And yet how quickly the scene changed. Two days later one of Spain's great matadors, Espartero or Guerrita, I think, came to Sevilla to kill bulls “in manner that would honour the city," and the crowd took the horses from the great matador's carriage as he was going to the station in the evening and dragged him in triumph through that same square, with lighted torches that put the lamps to shame, and shouts that sent the startled pigeons circling round the Giralda Tower. To-day such an attention would be impossible, your matador rides in a motor-car.
I would not be so presumptuous as to express a decided opinion about the Spanish temperament. Among the hardest workers I have found industry, thrift, and a serious purpose, but the higher one goes in the social scale, the less one notes of strenuousness. The Catalans have the brains of Spain, the Castilians are contented with the traditions of world supremacy. Where the heat is greatest and the soil most fertile there is a minimum of work.
But we had gone for a morning walk before I began to moralize, and only a cock-fight could have kept me out so late.
The chief objection to cock-fighting in those degenerate idle days lay in the difficulty of getting back to the house under the blaze of the noonday sun. Save for the cock-pit's patrons, the streets would be deserted: from end to end Sevilla knew no shade. But home would come in sight at last, and I would sit at ease among the myrtles, the orange trees and the white acacias in the patio that was kept cool by sunblinds and by a fountain that never ceased from its play. It is so warm in Sevilla that only the very modern houses boast fire-places. The others are content in winter with the use of the copa, a round brass dish filled with charcoal. When I reflect upon this and upon the English June days that demand fires I recall Jean Paul Richter's statement that an English summer is merely winter painted green.
With half-past twelve breakfast would arrive, and following that I would pay back to sleep the hours stolen from the morning, and when four o'clock brought shade in the wake of sunlight to the streets, it would be time to dress carefully, and sally forth to ride, drive, or walk, where the life of Sevilla congregated. Among the places worth a visit in the late afternoon was a large barrack-like building standing in a big courtyard, and fronted with iron rails that could be seen from the gardens of the Alcazar. During the heat of the day it would be quiet enough, but towards evening a great crowd would gather by the gates—artisans, idlers, soldiers, all sorts and conditions of men—-and women would stream across from the building by the score. It was Sevilla's great tobacco factory.
Prosper Merimee wrote the story of Carmen, who was a cigarrera, and Bizet set it to music and gave us the delightful and familiar opera that takes us all to Sevilla, or as near to it as the stage-manager can contrive. I have seen that opera in many cities, but I have never seen the tobacco factory properly presented, though it is an eighteenth-century building and has not altered since the day when the story was written. I have been over the factory several times, and have seen the cigarreras hard at work, in long, bare rooms, making cigars and cigarettes that are better to look at than to smoke. One sees some of the prettiest heads in all Europe—and the emptiest.
The flowers the girls wear in their hair are set aside for the time being, to be resumed when work is done, and the cigarrera is free to lounge in the gardens, or patronize the little cafes with the rest of Sevilla's citizens. As a rule she is a very industrious worker, neat and tidy, able to extract the last ounce of effect from the most simple ornament, fond of music, a passionate dancer, and ready to spend an unfair proportion of her earnings upon weekly visits to the_ plaza de toros_. And she walks with a grace that is all to seek outside Spain. Tobacco is a Government monopoly, and is leased to a very influential company; the piece-work system prevails throughout the factory, and at normal times four or five thousand people find employment within its walls.
Like most cities beloved of Phoebus Apollo, Sevilla keeps late hours, in fact it may also be said that she turns night into day. By the time dinner is over the air has regained the coolness that left with early morning, the shops light up, as though they really did attach some importance to business after all, and the city seeks the streets. If you care for the theatre, you can always go and hear three zarzuelas or comic operas for a very little money, and, speaking of these entertainments, so bright, so merry, and so poorly paid, I am reminded that the theatrical world cannot be idle even in Sevilla. I have passed a theatre before ten o'clock in the morning, and heard rehearsals in full swing, and an evening programme that occupies four hours is not considered too long.
The reward of all this service is quite inadequate. A man who has written the book of music of one successful musical comedy in London can make more money than his Spanish brother receives throughout the days of his life. I suppose the real truth is that the Spaniard has been accustomed to spend so much on bull-fights that playgoing has ceased to be taken seriously, and the stage that gave Europe a Calderon and a Lope de la Vega has fallen upon evil days as far as the remuneration of workers is concerned, though in point of patronage and the activity of dramatists the Spanish stage is more flourishing than our own, as will be suggested in in a later chapter.
I do not despise the zarzuelas, as the musical comedies are called, but in Sevilla you waste the night in the city. Beyond its boundaries the country is at its best, and you can find a dozen little wayside inns, ventas or ventorillos, as they are called, where all the requirements of an idler are fulfilled. These are very simple, of course. You should want no more than a garden, one or two little arbours with the vine trellised over them so that in vintage-time you can pluck the purple grapes without effort, a bottle of white wine or red, some cigarettes, and a little music.
In the country round Malaga I have spent the most enjoyable season of the year watching the grape harvest, but the harvest men and women were so active that I grew quite tired of doing nothing. Sevilla, on the other hand, never offended me with suggestions of work when I wanted to be idle. To be sure, in one garden that I favoured with more than common pleasure there was a defect. The place was full of roses and pinks, tobacco plants and sugar-cane, to say nothing of orange-trees, palms, rhododendrons, and one huge saffrontree, pride of the place. There were trellised vines everywhere, but my enjoyment was nearly spoilt by the water supply. It was the primitive Moorish well, with water-wheel and bucket and chain apparatus, and as the buckets came up full, they tilted mechanically over the wheel into little sloping ditches that carried the water to most distant corners of the garden.
I might have pardoned the ceaseless activity of the buckets but for the fact that they were worked by an old blindfolded horse that, seemingly, had never known the luxury of an eight hours' day. He was at his hard labour when I went to the venta in the afternoons, and had not always finished when I arrived after dinner. His patient, plodding work seemed to reproach me; he had never known what it meant to be lazy all the summer through. The hotter the day the more the garden needed water, and I could do no more than sweeten his life by giving him sugar, and bribing his small boy attendant not to ill-treat him. "Why, he is worn out," explained the lad, when first I remonstrated with him.
There was one other annoyance in this garden. At its far end, in a regular jungle of sugar-cane, palms, and rushes, the bull-frogs croaked incessantly. They would never be quiet. Tonio, the tame stork, used to walk down the garden every afternoon and help to depopulate the marsh, but so soon as the night came, the survivors would assemble, to pass a vote of censure upon Tonio, I suppose, and go through the roll-call in order to ascertain the dimensions of the casualty list. They kept it up till daylight, perhaps later, for aught I know; I can only answer for the very earliest morning hours.
At the end of the garden, where it overlooked the highway, there was a pagoda, a flimsy thing enough with coloured glass windows on all but the roadside. It had a Moorish hanging lamp, a little round table, and some benches. I retained it three nights a week, for supper. This meal was served about one o'clock in the morning, or a little later, and was a simple affair of meat cut into very thin slices and served with salads, fruit, and wine of the district. The pagoda's lamp could be seen for a very long way across the country, and before it had been alight very long, it would attract some wandering guitarrero, one of the tattered musicians who are always to be found on the open road, their guitar and stock of ballads being all their worldly wealth. He would aim for the light as surely as a moth goes to a candle; perhaps one or two would see it, and then supper would be set to music.
And such music, national, characteristic, with mournful Moorish cadences, but withal absolutely fitting the hour and the place. If the singers and players did but know you loved their work, they would keep on, heedless of the hours, and then they would accept a modest gift with all possible courtesy, before they passed singing out of sight and hearing. Even these prosaic nineteenth and twentieth centuries of ours have their troubadours if we do but know where to look for them. In the meantime, if there were globe-trotting Europeans in the big hotels of Sevilla, they were being entertained by native guides with mock Spanish dances in the patios of the hotels, or were taken to the cafes that have arisen even in unsophisticated Sevilla to trick tourists.
During my first stay in this part of Spain, only two men who knew me found me. These very pushful acquaintances invited themselves to my pagoda, so I gave them a Spanish meal of the sort that only a Spaniard dare eat with impunity. There was puchero, of the sort in which garlic plays a strong and leading role; migas, in which breadcrumbs highly seasoned and fried in oil take a prominent part, and gazpacho, largely compounded of bread and oil. I had prepared myself for the ordeal by taking the lightest of dinners, and I could afford to indulge. They couldn't; the first guitarrero who came along to sing and play to us was sent on a three-mile tramp to the city to find a cab, and my visitors never troubled me again. I know it was wrong to treat them in this fashion, but desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and your cockney tourist is a dangerous disease in Sevilla, requiring the isolation of a cosmopolitan hotel.
Among all the pagoda nights one stands out above the rest. I had invited some friends to the theatre, and to sup with me afterwards, and had engaged a guitarrero whose voice, had it been properly developed, might have made his fortune in opera. Of course it is at least likely that he
would not have been so happy as he was while just singing for a bare subsistence. We had supped and were listening to his songs, when we heard the quick beat of a horse's hoofs and a man came down the road at a gallop. "It is the ‘encierro,'" cried our friend with the guitar, and I remembered it was a Saturday night, that there was to be a great bull-fight on the morrow, and that the fighting bulls had to be driven to the arena in the darkness. The horseman was hurrying on to warn stray wayfarers to seek hedges, and the drivers of belated vehicles to get off the road as best they could.
We stood by the open casement, and soon heard, above the croaking in the marsh, a far-off bellowing and a tinkle that recalled the sounds in an English meadow when the cows are coming home. The noises came steadily nearer, until they resolved themselves into the tramp of great beasts, moving clumsily to the music of cow bells. Then two horsemen, carrying long poles, came in sight, followed by a herd of tame bullocks escorting the six black fighting bulls of the herd known among bull-fighters as the “herd of death," because of the damage they have wrought in their time. It would be impossible to bring bulls along the road alone, so they are kept with bullocks on the bullfarms and in the corrales.
They get accustomed to the sound of the bells and will follow where the bullocks lead. Behind the massed bulls and bullocks rode a mixed company of the bull-ring patrons, farmers, fighters, amateurs, and friends of the great diestro who was to give additional honour to Sevilla on the following afternoon. Such a sight would be impressive at any time, and in most places; here under the light of the stars, and the faint glow of the pagoda's lamp, it was one of the most picturesque studies that has ever come my way. The little company moved along the road as far as the bull-ring, beyond which great bonfires were burning, to keep even restless bulls from venturing farther and make them well content to turn.
I suppose some description of bull-fighting is held to be a part of every record of life in Spain, but I do not propose to say anything here about the actualities of the plaza de toros. They are very ugly, and I cannot conceal their ugliness; indeed, I would not if I could. As far as is necessary some account will be given in a later chapter. Not without very careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that in bull-fighting, as practised in Spain, the vices outweigh the virtues. When I went to Andalusia for the first time, I saw nothing beyond the supremely vivid picture that the arena affords. The strong light, the gay dresses of the women, the splendid costumes of the bull-fighters, the barbaric music, the courage of the matador, the strength and ferocity of the bull—these impressions dominate all others. I was sorry in a vague way for the horses, but my senses could not grasp the full misery of their plight, because nobody round me noted it.
Only when I returned to Spain after an absence of four years did I realize a change. I found myself idle in Madrid, on an afternoon when a great fight was to be held, and I drove out to the crowded Plaza by myself. The animated crowd stirred me as of old time, for Madrid was in full season, and the sight along the road was a splendid one; but before the fight was half over I was driving home again, to the mingled amusement and contempt of the coachman.
In the early days I had seen little or nothing of human suffering; now I realized its meaning, if only to a limited extent, and I went home, wondering how I could have gone at any time to such a degrading spectacle as a bull-fight. Spanish children are taken at a tender age to the arena, and applaud sights that would sicken you or me. Can it be that their parents never realized the horrors, and that their little ones are growing up to be equally ignorant? When they have reached manhood or womanhood the habit of visiting the plaza de toros will be so rooted that they will not think anything of it. I cannot express a decided opinion; I am content to make the suggestion. It may help to solve a problem that has baffled many people.
A friend of mine who likes the excitement of the great gathering drives or rides out to the plaza de toros when he is in Spain, and goes early to his seat. There he watches the crowd assemble, and the arrival of the President, enjoys the music of the Spanish National Anthem, the splendid entry of the cuadrillas in their capas de paseo, the delivery of the toril key to the alguaziles, the triumphant onrush of the first doomed bull. Then he leaves his seat, oblivious quite of the scoffing remarks of rude neighbours, and goes home.
The only country I know in which bull-fighting has no cruelty worth mentioning is Portugal. In Lisbon, Oporto, and Alges, you can see splendid fights in which no horses suffer save by accident. No bulls are killed, and no men are seriously hurt. I can still enjoy these mild encounters, particularly when some great Spanish diestro comes across the border, and, being full of contempt for animals whose horns are cased in leather, awaits the bull's charge seated in a chair, or with no other aid than can be given by a slender pole, leaps right over the head of an animal coming down upon him at full gallop. But these matters belong to idle days in Portugal, and though I have placed many to my credit, further reference to them here would be out of place.
Pan y toros, bread and bulls! That has been the cry of the Spanish proletariat these very many years. Only lately a ministerial decree forbade bull-fighting on Sundays, but this decree was rescinded, and a nervous Government has. given the people their Sunday bulls once more.
Bensusan, Samuel Levy. Home Life in Spain. MacMillan, 1910.
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