Things seen in Spain

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

This room is bare, but never dirty; the filth which I had been led to expect from my experience of some of the smaller inns in the towns does not exist in the village posadas. The large windows open on to wooden balconies which look out on to the tree-shaded plaza. The walls are freshly whitewashed, and the bare boards of the floor are scrubbed to snowy whiteness by their daily scouring with sand; the curtains, too, when there are any, are always white. Sometimes a few highly coloured and amazing religious prints in black frames hang upon the walls, but, fortunately, more often they are bare. The furniture is of the simplest description—a large table, bare of any cloth, that fills most of the room, wooden chairs and a Spanish press, a great cupboard which holds the linen of the family. The beds are placed in small alcoves which lead out of the living-rooms; and these beds are always comfortable, with spotless linen, embroidered, lace-trimmed, and brought from the lavender-scented chest. There is no fireplace in the living-room, and if, as often chances in winter and early spring, the weather is cold, the only heat is gained from the brasero, whose charcoal ashes give the very faintest glow of warmth. The Spaniards accept cold without murmur; they wrap themselves in their cloaks, and wait till God sends out the sun.

The posada is ruled by the señora. She sways a rod of iron over her husband, relatives, servants, guests, and the arrangements of the house, being full of energy and the vigour of character that is common to Spanish women even in old age. She is the characteristic type of the Spanish woman of the people, her face a formidable mass of wrinkles; jamona, or stout in body, but of surprising agility; she is witty, smiling, and contented. From break of day until late evening she bustles about, shouting orders as she goes from one task to another, yet she seems never hurried, never overburdened. How happy she is if her efforts are appreciated and her guests enjoy the fare she has provided! how her face saddens and clouds if any dish is sent from the table uneaten. “Mas, mas!” (More, more!), is her constant cry as she enters the room at the beginning of every course to urge her guests to eat.

To have English visitors staying at her posada filled the good señora with pride. Her satisfaction reached its zenith when letters arrived from England. She was loath to yield them up. “The great English people will know of my posada now,” she said on one occasion, pointing to the address in triumph. With comical humility she asked that, in my goodness, I would give her the envelope. How well do I remember the joy with which she carried away the torn trophy!

Nothing was too good for these strangers who had come from a foreign land to stay at her posada. The best of everything the house contained was given up for our use, special food was cooked, and the village was ransacked to provide things fitting for los Ingléses. On one occasion, when I had asked for a certain food not to be obtained in the neighbourhood, a messenger was sent on horseback twenty miles over the mountains to the nearest town to procure it. Nor was any payment allowed for the service. No, the English señora was her guest; she had asked for something, it was her duty to provide it. The trouble! the expense! she did not understand. In the old Spain service is not rendered for payment.

It is in the villages that one is best able to study the peasants and the gipsies. Sunday is the dia festivo, when the youths and maidens, dressed in the picturesque native costumes, dance and sing to the music of the village piper, who plays the dulzaina, a kind of clarionet. He marks the time by beating on a drum which is slung around his waist. The singing is the tuneless chanting heard so often in Spain, a kind of interminable dwelling on one piercing note, not beautiful to unaccustomed ears, but disturbing in its strange appeal, which so persistently recalls the East. The dances are danced by boys and girls and men and women grouped in couples of four or six. There is a great deal of movement; the hands keep time with the feet, playing castanets hung with bright-coloured ribbons.

In all parts of Spain there are gipsies, but it is in the districts of the south that the stranger will see them best, for there would seem to be a special affinity between the Andalusian and the gipsy character. The Gitanas and Gitanos live in communities, often in houses carved out of the mountain sides. It is among them that we find the most typical of the Spanish dancers. Dancing is a universal accomplishment, a part of life, in which every girl and boy takes his or her share.

On one day in the week the market is held in every small town, on the open ground of the plaza, under the overspreading trees. Let us look at the market-place at Ampuero, a large village in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. The whole ground space is filled with booths that are piled up with fruit and vegetables, with dress-stuffs, pots, water-jugs, furniture, and a medley of wares that give bright colour to the scene. Peasants from the surrounding hamlets have all come to buy and sell. They are dressed in the native costume—the men with the boina, or cap of dark blue wool, shaped like a Scotch tam-o’-shanter, short smock jackets, trousers of bright blue linen, and red or black body sashes; and the women with their many-coloured handkerchiefs of silk, bright skirts that are short and very wide, and still brighter blouses. The Spanish peasants have the delight in vivid colour that belongs to all primitive and happy people.

The sellers and buyers stand about in groups talking in the ancient and mysterious Basque language, which once, as place-names prove, was spoken over the greater part of the Peninsula. All business is carried out in the vivid, primitive Spanish manner. And what impresses the stranger most is the courtesy and happy good-nature, which makes the universal bargaining a game enjoyed alike by buyer and seller.