“Oh, but you will be baptized, and all Noya will run to see. Your face tells me that you will be baptized. What is your name?”
“Maria.”
“Ah! they say the devil spins round three times every time he hears that name.”
On Easter Sunday we were present at the ten o’clock Mass, and saw the village women walk coolly into the middle of the church with their great market baskets on their heads; then each in turn lifted her basket off her head and placed it by her side till the service was over, when she again lifted it to the top of her head and marched out. To the English mind this close combination of Sabbath and market-day is at first somewhat repugnant, but surely if our religion is worth anything it must have a better influence over us when it is part of our daily life than when it is kept quite separate, like a Sunday-go-to-meeting bonnet! Yes, it was both Easter Sunday and market-day; as we came out of church we were immediately confronted by innumerable booths, stalls, and tables covered with village merchandise,—oranges grown in the vicinity, the local wide-brimmed straw hats, baskets of eggs, rows of coffins—large ones painted black, small ones white—village cheeses and young vegetables, small piles of maize, millet, chick-peas, hand-woven cloth, and tin kitchen utensils. I asked the price of the straw hats; they were about tenpence halfpenny each, and came from the village of San Cosmo. Small onions were twisted into a regular braid and sold by length, and “Spanish” onions, cebollas, were also plentiful.
On another occasion we wandered through some of the older streets; there was one, very narrow, the calle de la Condessa, with thirteenth-century houses on both sides; they had Gothic windows and Gothic colonnades, and the outer walls were ornamented with an artistic device peculiar to Roman architecture, entabtamento (entablature). In a more modern street we found a tablet on the house in which one of Noya’s heroes was born,—“Luis Cradaso Rey, born in 1844, commanded the Spanish fleet in the Philippines; he died on board his flagship, the Reina Cristina, in 1898.” I have already mentioned the bust of Felipe de Castro in the Alameda, but Noya was also the birthplace of Galicia’s other great sculptor, José Ferreiro. Friar Luis Rodriquez was another of her famous men; he was a monk of the Franciscan monastery (which is now a prison) and the first person to publish a vocabulary of the Gallegan language.
There is no public square in Noya, and there is no bull-ring, but Noya has her bull-fights four times a year, as regularly as the seasons. On these occasions a street serves the purpose of a ring; the two ends are blocked by tribunes filled with spectators, and the balconies of the houses on both sides overflow with ladies and gentlemen. A Noya bull-fight is conducted in this way:—The men rush at the bull—which is practically a tame one from the neighbouring hills—and try to aggravate it; at length they succeed, and it plunges at them, whereupon they turn their backs and flee before it in a crowd, falling at last in a heap, one on top of another, those who come last and fall on top getting their clothes rent by the horns of the bull, to the immense gratification of the spectators; it ends in the bull becoming the matador and the men playing the part usually assigned to the bull. There is a poetical description of one of these performances, by Enrique Labarta Posé. We are told, in running verse, how the town was placarded with “A Grand Bull-fight,” and how the inhabitants gathered from far and near on a sweltering August day—the feast day of Noya’s patron saint, San Bartolomé. When the company had assembled—all the children, all the young people and all the old ones—the president rose and waved a handkerchief, as the signal that the performance should now begin. Music burst forth, a door opened, and—a bull appeared; but such a quiet, gentle creature! he actually walked along as if he were going to pay a call—to chat with a fellow-bull in the neighbouring field. The men now rushed at the poor creature; one pulled its tail, another beat its back, another ran a stick into its side till the president felt so sorry for it that he gave the signal for its withdrawal. Another bull then appeared. The men simply threw themselves upon it, and the bull bore their onslaught with the serenity of a martyr at the stake! and without moving a hair. Again the president’s heart was touched; he signalled, and the victim was allowed to go. A third bull now came forth to the sound of more music, and a similar scene was enacted. At last some one roused the president, who had dozed away in his chair, and that gentleman now brought the performance to a close amid the ringing cheers of a delighted audience.
All the students who had come to Noya for Easter returned to Santiago by coach on Sunday, to be ready for work on Easter Monday, which is not Bank Holiday in Galicia.
We returned by the first coach on Monday, and found the scenery of the journey even more beautiful than when we had come. It was as we were nearing Santiago that we saw three hundred young men who had come down from the mountains to search for work, and to emigrate if none could be found. I understood now how it came about that the Gallegan emigrants sometimes died of home-sickness, for I had experienced something of the inexpressible charm of their beautiful country, their hills and valleys always green, and their perennial streams that are never parched, and I could understand something of what it must be to these poor fellows to be separated from such a home by thousands and thousands of miles in a land where all nature was so different. South America, with its wide prairies under a merciless sun, its wild and savage mountains where one may travel for days together without finding a sign of human life, is very different from populous Galicia with its gentle, smiling scenery, its mountains whose slopes are veritable gardens, its innumerable springs, its rias and its rivers, its vines and its orchards. Every step of land visible from Noya is cultivated, every peasant is a proprietor. Yes, I had begun to understand the devotion of the Gallegans to their beautiful native land. Who would not love passionately so sweet a birthplace? Even the Russian loves his steppe, where the scene never changes for thousands of miles. In Galicia, every nook, every crag, every peak, every valley has a distinctive character that is all its own, with its own peculiar beauty. Galicia’s cottage homes are of granite, they last for many generations; even the Russian exile loves his home, though his isba of wood will not last twenty years. Shall not the Gallegan regret Galicia, where there is so much that his memory can cling to? There are two kinds of home-sickness to which the Gallegan emigrants are subject,—saudades, a milder form, and morrina, already mentioned; they die of the latter, but the former is not fatal, and the sound of their beloved musical instrument, the gaita, or bagpipe, has been known to revive their spirits and give them the power to throw it off.
CHAPTER XX
PONTEVEDRA
Villagarcia—Site of King Alfonso’s new palace—Pontevedra—A magnificent stone bridge—The fishermen’s guild—The fishermen’s church—The façade—The interior—The architect of Santa Maria la Grande—Morales—Santo Domingo—Beautiful ruins—A romantic museum—Sepulchral effigies—Ambassadors to Tamerlane—Roman milestones—Escutcheons—The contents of the museum—Iberian, Celtic, and Sueve antiquities—Stonemasons’ marks—The founder of the Pontevedra Archæological Society—The Conventual Church of San Francisco—The legendary Chariño—Museum in the Municipal Buildings—Mediæval keys—The archives of Pontevedra—Drive to Marin—English Protestant missionaries—The river Lerez—Santa Clara—Drive to the village of Combarro—Pedro Sarmiento—The house in which he was born—Las Sarmientas—Heavy taxes—San Juan de Poyo—Santa Tramunda—The Jewish quarter—Mansion of the Sotomayor family—The Castillo de Mos—A mediæval castle—A beautiful drive—Passing through a battlefield—Vines trained over granite—Entering the castle grounds—The little theatre—The old keep—Gothic staircase—Dungeons—The chapel—The parapet—The turret—The reception rooms—An authoress—Three periods of architecture—Very old chestnut trees—Prehistoric rock drawings—Cup marks—Half an hour’s walk from Pontevedra