MURCIA—AUTUMN IN THE PASEO DE CORVERAS
We came back to Murcia, to our headquarters in the Paseo de Corveras, at the beginning of October. Though the town was so far south, the cold weather had well begun. In the daytime the sun seemed as fierce as ever, but the dust that had lain inches deep during the summer was now an equal depth of semi-liquid mud, and the house, without fireplaces or any means of creating artificial warmth, had in it a faint though insidious chill. Save in the hottest weather, stone or cement floors are comfortless to live with. Marciana, the woman whose services we had shared with Antonio during Rosa's smallpox, returned to us. She was a woman of sixty years, bulky in figure, dressed in black of an eternal mourning, and was mother of the most talented sculptor of Murcia. She was an illustration of the inter-provincial jealousy of the Spaniard. She came from Don Quixote's country, La Mancha, and was never weary of chanting its praises.
"Ah, Señora," she exclaimed, "that is a wonderful land. Corn, oil and wine in abundance. Dancing and singing in the villages all night long. And what a wonderful people are those of mi pueblo.[26] My two sisters, they each weigh at least twice as much as do I. And then we are a civilized folk there, I can assure you. You saw how they treated it here when Rosa had the smallpox. No precautions, even though one died of it a few doors down the street. Now in mi pueblo they stretch sheets in front of the doors of warning; the necessaries of life are put on to the doorstep, and the money to pay for them is dropped by the hands of those who are in the house, and who are not allowed beyond the sheet, into pans of vinegar, so that they may be purified of the disease. Now that is real cleanliness.
"But, thanks to God, Señora, Rosa is much better. The spots are disappearing, she will not be marked, and she has given birth to a son. It was a most divine birth. Of course it was fear for the son that made everybody so anxious."
Marciana was a dilatory servant. Nothing was ever ready up to date, and she invariably drowned all my commissions for the market with a flood of words. She would wait all the morning in the queue which gathered at the Government Olive Oil depot, to buy olive oil for me at a few centimos cheaper than she could buy it from the grocers; and no explanation that she wasted more of our pay than she gained in cheapness convinced her.
Antonio greeted us with delight, as did Emilio, the guitar maker, whom we went to visit on the first day of our return. Each, however, was in a different mood. Antonio, in spite of the joy caused by his new son, who he said had been born "most preciously," was in a rage. He was in trouble with the local authorities about his taxes. It appears that there is a factory tax which does not depend upon the size of the business, but the mere fact that there is a business. Thus Antonio, with his three or four girl helpers, was condemned to pay the same sum as a factory employing a thousand hands.
"It is impossible!" shouted Antonio. "We are thus crushed out of existence. I may be able to arrange it, but, if I cannot, then it is no use my going on. All the profits are swallowed up in one gulp. I shall shut down, and sell up everything."
Emilio, on the other hand, was flushed with unsullied delight. A pompous man was sitting in his shop with a guitar across his knees. Now and then he drew from it a flourish of arpeggios, very technical, but rather meaningless. Emilio stood over him, his eyes sparkling at the guitar, which appeared to be exquisite in tone and strong in volume.
"Aha! my friends, congratulate me," cried he. "I have surpassed myself. Permit me, Señor." He took the guitar from the pompous man, and handed it reverently to Jan. "Try it, only touch it and see what a quality it has. See how the bass note rings out, and how well-balanced to it is the treble. I had no more than set the strings out on to it when Don Feliz, the little maestro whom you know, came in. He played upon it, and so full was my heart with the perfect tone of it, and with the thought that I, Emilio Peralta, had made it, that the tears came running down my face. I wept, Señor, to hear it. All night long I could not sleep for fear that the tone might alter, as sometimes it does. Sometimes, indeed, a guitar newly made sounds of no value, but in a few days or weeks even it may become first rate. But this was good from the beginning, and it has remained so."
The pompous man took a stately leave of us. Emilio was so excited by his new achievement that he went on talking:
"One does not come to make guitars like this easily. How many are there alive in Spain to-day who could do it? Only one, and I am he. Arias is dead, Raminez also, though I have not seen a Raminez to equal this one. For I will warrant that there are few better guitars than this in Spain. Unluckily, it was sold before it was completed, or I would scarcely have let it go. It was ordered by a colonel in the Army. Play on it, Señor, but do not play Flamenco, for you must not tap upon the soundboard, or you will injure the varnish. This is built for Classical."
Jan played, and it gave out a sonorous arid clear melody.
"From whom did I learn, Señor? I learned from nobody. My father was a guitar-maker, but a poor one. He taught me nothing. Indeed, I was married before the desire came to me to make fine instruments. Then how I worked, Señor! I had an idea of the perfect guitar in my head; but between idea and accomplishment what a gap! I could not cross it. Of two guitars, made equally alike, one would be good, the other useless. When this happened I would take them to pieces to search for the reason. For years I have lived in poverty, spoiling good wood which cost me all my earnings. I have not studied the guitars of others. Always in my head I carried the idea of the perfect instrument. Slowly I have struggled towards it. Now I know. But at what a cost have I acquired knowledge!"
Jan touched a chord on the instrument in his hands, and as it throbbed out its deep responsive note he remembered the saying of Chopin: "Nothing is more beautiful than a good guitar; save perhaps two."
Emilio promised to send Professor Feliz to us as soon as he came in; and we walked back to the house through the Murcian mud, which, soaking through our shoes, made us modify our previous eulogy of the alpagata. On barrows in the street they were selling the first culled clusters of dates of the season; we bought both pale and dark varieties, but they were hard and tasteless. With the dates on the barrows were the orange fruit of the persimon.
While we had been away at Jijona a cat had taken possession of our house for the purpose of kittening. How she had got in was a mystery, for the windows and doors all had been tightly sealed up, but we had discovered her with her family at the bottom of the packing-cases which had formed our bed at Verdolay. We had heard strange faint sounds as though of mice on the evening of our return. The noises, however, did not cease for all our presence. We had gone to explore; suddenly, a noise like a boxful of exploding matches had burst up from under our noses, and something black dashed across the dimly lit room and out through the window. There were two kittens at the bottom of the narrowest of the packing-cases. We had moved them to a large box near to the window. That night there had been a fearful noise of yowling and squeaking. In the morning we found the kittens back in the box from which we had moved them. The cat was quite unapproachable. She burst out into a fury of spitting whenever we came near. Then with one final explosion hurried from the room. These wild cats were the pest of Murcia. One could leave no window open but they poured into the house. All food had to be securely shut up, the marks of their dusty paws were everywhere.
When we returned from Emilio's we found that our presence in the house had been too much for the cat's nerves. She had disappeared from her box and the kittens were gone with her.
Don Feliz, the half-blind guitar teacher, came in the evening. He again said he was an honest man, and that his terms were five pesetas a month. He was delighted to hear that we both were to be his pupils. Part of his delight came from the money he would earn; but some of his delight was due to the fact that he had ousted Blas as Jan's teacher. I do not think we have met anybody more inappropriately named than Don Feliz. If Mr. Shandy's theories have any foundation he was cursed from his christening. He was not a Murciano, but a Castilian, and, in consequence, depreciated the people he lived amongst and was in turn not appreciated by them. He lived constantly torn by jealousy of the other guitar-players in the town.
"Tell me," he exclaimed, "what do you think of the playing of Don Ambrosio?"
Don Ambrosio was the pompous man we had met in Emilio's shop.
"Technically, excellent, but rather frigid," we said.
"Yes," exclaimed Don Feliz, "that is it. Frigid, yes, frigid! Nor is Don Timoteo a good player, and as for that Blasito, that gipsy—pah! You see, he has never learned music. So that, if he does get a good melody from somebody else, he cannot harmonize it. And his Flamenco is of the taverns. It is low, common music. Now I play Classical. Have you heard my piece which represents a battle? How I imitate the mitrailleuse on the base string? Now that is quite different from anything which that fellow Blas can play. Of course I regret that you wish to learn Flamenco. But that which I will teach you will be a classicized Flamenco. I have made it into music. You see, I have been in a conservatoire in my youth. That puts me on a different level from all these other players. So I have made of my Flamenco something more refined. It is no longer your tavern monstrosity that Blas plays."
Personally we preferred Blas as a player, and the music of Blas as music. But Don Feliz was somewhat better as a teacher. His conservatoire had taught him at least the names of the notes. But he was very irritable. Poor fellow, at twopence a lesson, he had to give a round of thirty lessons per day to make a bare subsistence. Sometimes he said that his pupils were so dense that he could teach them but three or four consecutive notes per day. Once we heard him debating with a possible client whether it was worth while or no to walk two miles in order to get three lessons in the same house. Our consciences—concerning sweating—pricked us and we paid him double fees. In consequence of his gratitude he came to our house last of all and gave us lessons of four times the duration of any one else.
After he had gone, we were still playing, when Marciana came in with some parcels.
"Aha!" she cried. "That is a jota. It is the music of mi pueblo. La jota, La jota."
She put down the parcels; spread out her arms and with a balance and elegance extraordinary in one so bulky began to dance. After twenty bars, however, she stopped.
"Ei," she sighed, "how sad it is that one grows old. How sad that youth passes all too quickly!"
That night a terrific thunderstorm broke over the valley. The thunder crashed, the lightning flared and the rain came down as though pouring from a gigantic hose. In the middle of all the noise we heard a strange sound.
"Wah! wah! wah! Squeak! Squeak!"
The cat had come back; but with only one kitten. The next morning we stayed in the house. From the windows we could mark the change which autumn had brought over the Paseo de Corveras. The dust was no longer blown along the road, which was now a still river of liquid mud. The town dust-cart, a donkey with panniers, no longer promenaded the street; no longer did we hear the cheerful blasphemy of the dust-boy who, stooping to gather up some refuse, found that his dust-cart had impatiently trotted on. In its place were the exhortations of the pig-drivers, who urged hordes of monstrous black pigs through the mud. Some of the porkers were, however, so heavy on their feet that they had to be brought in carts. The squealing of them filled the morning air. The fruit merchants, also with panniered donkeys, no longer called out "Melacotones, peras!" but "Uvas! Uvas!"[27] and a man wandered about with a huge basket of snails. The maize fields in front of the house were cut and stacked, and in the fields queens of Sheba were dragging the primitive ploughs, while men behind them beat to powder the lumps of baked earth which were turned up. Instead of the almost dead silence which greeted the strengthening sun, people moved about all day; parasols had given place to flirting fans. The country girls wore bunches of flowers in their hair, some even put one tall blossom sticking upright from the coiffure, where it nodded and bowed with the movements of the wearer. In the fruit garden the lemons had quite fallen, but the oranges were beginning to become a livid yellow on one side of the bush, while the dates had passed from a pale to a deep golden hue.
I went about with Luis exploring balconies for views, and finally decided upon a view of Murcia from the tall campanile of the Cathedral. When I got back I found that the cat once more had decamped, taking the kitten with her. The second kitten had been lost. In the afternoon Luis came in. He brought an invitation from some friends for me to play the piano at their house on Saturday evening. That evening Don Feliz exclaimed:
"I have an old guitar. It is a unique instrument, none other like it has ever been seen in Spain. I bought it, at a bargain, for thirty pesetas; but I would sell it to a friend for the same money. Now you, Señor, have no guitar of your own. This is a veritable instrument for a museum. Come and see it on Sunday morning. I will show you the way."
We dined at Elias', as was our custom, and trudged back through the mud. On the darkened stairs of our house we heard a wailing and almost tumbled over the spitting cat, which had brought back the kitten once more. We gathered up the kitten and, followed at some distance by the suspicious cat, put it back into the packing-case.
All this while we were rather short of electric lights in our house. Antonio had borrowed most of the light-bulbs to decorate a shrine which he had erected in one of the churches. The candle which the righteous once offered up to God is going out of fashion. Nowadays, instead of burning so many feet of bees-wax, one turns on so many volts. Lamb has drawn a picture of two priests disputing as to which should offer up a blessing, with a final compromise that neither should do so; and the disappointment of the defrauded God. To-day he could go further, he could depict the deity being forced to go to the factory chimney for the scent of his burnt sacrifice. A Spanish writer, Pio Baroja, in a novel proposes a society called the "Extra-Rapid to Heaven Assurance Society." The insurer pays in a sum, and on his death hundreds of gramophones are turned on chanting prayers for his speedy deliverance from purgatory. "God," says the author, "is so far away, that he will not notice the substitution." This is, of course, a satire on the modern habit of replacing candles by electric lights, but the satire is no more absurd than the actuality.
Alongside of the bridge was a tall shrine built into the side of the house and lit up thus at night with electric light. The image was covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and I said that it was a sculptured figure. Jan, on the other hand, insisted that it was a painting. We had an argument about it and on the next day returned to verify together. It was, in fact, a painting. But at night, returning from Elias', we looked up at the shrine by chance, and stopped, astonished. If it was a painting it was most realistic. We looked more closely. The more we examined it, the more did it seem sculptured. Then the explanation dawned on us. It was sculptured, but during the daytime a painted curtain was drawn down in front of it.
At luncheon next day we were disturbed by a hullabaloo from the attic. The wretched cat had taken her kitten up there, to look for peace from those meddlesome humans. That night we were awakened again by terrible noises from under our bed. The cat was still wandering like a lost soul looking for peace. Daily the kitten appeared and disappeared with exasperating irregularity. At last, however, we managed to tame the cat so that we were able to stroke her. Then the animal burst out into the strangest of noises, like a small badly oiled circular saw. It was purring. From that moment it took possession of the house. All its shyness vanished. It tucked up its sleeves and turned out of the house any other feline intruder.
One afternoon we were awakened from our siesta by a furious cat fight underneath the bed. The black cat and a ginger-coloured female were locked in combat, and making a noise like a hundred siphons. The battle continued across the sitting-room, the ginger cat giving ground. Finally she retreated to the balcony, where there was for a while armed neutrality, both singing war songs quite Spanish in their intervals. Then the black cat sprang. Ginger backed to avoid the rush, but backed too far. She toppled over into the street, fell with a thud on to the mud pavement, gathered herself together and with a scream of disappointed fury dashed through the nearest open door. To our amazement all the occupants of the house, a young man, an old woman, a girl of seventeen and one of six hurried into the street, their eyes wide open with terror.
"What is the matter?" we shouted to them.
"A cat with rabies has just rushed into our house," they cried in answer.
The fear of rabies is very prevalent, and with reason. One does not pat stray dogs in Spain, nor does one make advances to unknown cats. Any animal which can bite is under suspicion. It is lucky, indeed, that fleas can't get rabies.
One Saturday I began sketching in the Cathedral campanile. The ascent of the tower was not by means of steps but by sloping lanes which travelled all round the inner walls. I had chosen my view from the belfry. On each side of me were small bells, and as each in turn clanged out the half or quarter hour according to size I stopped my ears. Suddenly there was a deafening crash. Before I realized what had happened I had fallen from my seat, the easel had gone spinning ... almost fainting from the shock, I looked about me. Over my head an enormous clapper was swinging. Unconsciously, I had seated myself almost inside one of the biggest bells in the south of Spain, and it had rung. The clapper again swung itself with force against the side of the bell, and in spite of my protecting hands the sound burst through my head. For ten minutes afterwards my hand was shaking too violently to allow me to paint.
The view from the tower was exquisite. Immediately below me were the blue glazed cupolas and the arabesques of the cathedral facade on which little stone saints gazed out over the town. Then came a large square centred on a circular garden of flowers—edged on one side by the pink front of the Archbishop's palace, many windowed. From the end of the square narrow sunless streets led into the town, which gradually became a patchwork of flat roofs on which smaller buildings were erected. The huge square block of red brick of the Reina Victoria Hotel stood out over the sinuous river, on the banks of which stood the red pepper mills and beyond which showed the huertas stretching out to the mountains. Red, ochre, yellow and green were the chief colour notes, while blue and purple shadows gave relief and solidity to the whole.
In the evening I played the piano at the house of Luis' friends. Here was a typical Spanish bourgeois interior. Every resting-place was crowded with cheap bric-à-brac. The chairs were draped with velvet and silk hangings and antimacassars; the walls hung with enormous photographic enlargements, from the decorating of which Flores made some of his living. Card-racks covering the interspaces of the walls were filled with coloured picture postcards.
"We have brought you here," said Flores, "because it is just opposite to the Circulo des Varios Artes.[28] The pianist of the Arts Club is very conceited. We want to take him down, by showing him that a Señora can play better than he does."
I was rather annoyed; but could not draw back. So I put my best into the music. Grieg (pronounced by them Hriech) seems to suit the Spanish temperament: so I played The Wedding March, Papillion and the Carnival. There was a pause. Then faintly as a retort, from the Circulo des Varios Artes, came the easiest of Grieg's "lyrical pieces" played carefully by the maestro. As if he would say, "I too can play Grieg."
On Sunday morning we set off with Don Feliz to see the old guitar.
"It is in the house of my novia,[29] whom I shall be delighted to introduce to you."
We were amazed. Until that moment we had imagined Don Feliz to be quite an old man, but looking closely at him one could see that he might be within the limit of thirty to forty years. On this second visit to Murcia the people were not so strongly affected by my appearance in the streets. For my part I no longer wore a hat, but carried a parasol; I had exchanged my ordinary dress for an ex-munition overall, which people said was muy elegante. But we penetrated into a new part of the town, then was some staring and some pointing. I mentioned this casually to Don Feliz.
"Do not fear," he exclaimed, "you are safe with me. I have a terrible reputation in these parts. I am known as a bad man. If I get into a rage, my anger is terrible to see ... terrible. The children slink away in the street at my coming."
This was not the estimate we had formed of him, from his encounter with Blas in Emilio's shop. Poor Don Feliz, like so many others he had formed a dream self which contained most of the qualities in which he was lacking. I fear that only his illusive self was terrible, and that none but dream children ever shrank at his passing. The house of his novia bore on its weather-beaten front the arms of some bygone hidalgo; now it was an apartment house. We clambered up staircases of black wood, into one of the few dark-coloured interiors we have seen in Spain. The guitar was of a strange form and with a scrolled head, the curve of its shape having some of the beauty to be found in negro sculpture. Jan seized the bargain, and carried it home.
No sooner had he the guitar in the house than he tuned it, and crashing his finger-nails across it, struck out a rasped chord. He quickly followed it with a shout of dismay. From out of one of the big holes had crept a startled bug.
After my experience with the church bell I could sympathize with the insect, weeping perhaps "walrus tears" upon its death-bed. But the problem of how one could disinfect a guitar was worrying. The case had no cracks for vermin-harbouring, so we shut up the instrument; and after some indecision Jan decided to trust to luck and leave it alone.
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 classical 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 Señor 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, Señor."
"Señor," 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 Señor 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 cafés and drew the people sitting about us. This gave delight to the waiters. One morning while we were at one of the café's facing the river Blas came up. He passed 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 café tables. This was, in fact, the gipsies' café. 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.
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 assassination," 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 illustrated her meaning exclaimed,
"Ei! el pobre! Y en un sitio tan delicado."