Two great seventeenth-century mirrors in handsome carved frames painted red and gold had been brought downstairs and hung on two pillars opposite each other, and Lola made straight for one of these the moment we came in, to see, she said, if they reflected properly, but really to study her own appearance.
“Carmencita was determined to have them brought down,” she told me: “Papaito [diminutive of Papa] objected because he says they are so old that the frames might get broken, and they have never been moved since they were made; but Carmen said she must see what she looked like, dancing seguidillas in her satin train, and Mamma said of course she should have what she wanted, now that she had been so good and obedient about marrying the Conde. Ay de mi de mi alma! I wonder what my husband will be like when my turn comes! I do hope he won’t be quite so old and ugly as Cesar.”
Her further confidences were cut short by the arrival of her father and mother in their ancient family coach, with leather curtains in place of windows, drawn by two great black mules whose bells jingled so loudly and the brass of whose harness was so bright as almost to hide the deplorable state of the leather. The portly Marchioness had barely time to recover her breath after the exertion of getting out, and to take up her post of honour in the patio, before the bride and bridegroom appeared, he almost as fat and short-winded as his mother-in-law, she looking extremely pretty with a flush on her olive cheeks and her usually sombre heavy-lidded eyes alight with excitement and pleasure at the openly expressed admiration of the crowd all along the road from the church.
The instant they came in the whole place burst into life, for every corner was invaded by the number of guests who had been invited and the still greater number of those who had not. The well-to-do friends and relations were followed by the poor ones, then came the household servants, old and young, with their friends and relations, and then everybody, without distinction, who wanted to see the bride and wish her joy. And as these last seemed to be half the town, for a short time we were packed like sardines, while the new little Condesa, standing at her mother’s side, was receiving resounding kisses on both cheeks from every woman, child, and old man in the crowd, the young men being apparently the only ones who might not claim the privilege.
The amount of kissing done in Spain is extraordinary. Children as a matter of course put up their faces to the merest stranger who speaks to them, middle-aged ladies on notoriously bad terms would think it a grave breach of courtesy not to kiss loudly on meeting and parting in an afternoon call, young girls embrace effusively in the most public places, fathers sit with their babies on their knees, mumbling their fat little hands by the hour together, and all the servants expect to be kissed by the ladies of the family when they start on or return from a journey—a most embarrassing custom if the mistress is an Englishwoman. More than once I have been in a shop when a woman has come in and put her baby on the counter, whereupon the shopman has left me to go and kiss the child, whom he probably had never seen before. Strangers will often stop short before a nice-looking child, and exclaim “Qué mono!” (what a pretty little thing) and bestow on it a couple of kisses that can be heard all down the street. Of late an attempt has been made in Madrid, at the instigation of the Queen, to stop this promiscuous kissing, and for one season at least it was the fashion to hang a label round the babies’ necks when out walking, on which was written, “Please don’t kiss me.” But there is no diminution of embraces outside of the capital.
As soon as every claimant to the cheeks of Carmencita had been satisfied, the uninvited guests went away almost as suddenly as they had come in, and the rest of the gathering moved on into the inner court, and turned their attention to tobacco, wine, and sweet cakes. The sons of the house and their friends carried round a tray of glasses in one hand and a bottle of Malaga, Manzanilla, or Muscatel in the other, and each guest was expected to empty his glass at once and replace it on the tray for the use of his neighbour. Then came the bride’s sisters and their friends with trays full of sweetmeats and pastry made of almond paste, cocoa-nut paste, chocolate, custard with a variety of flavourings, and other sweets of Arabic origin, with untranslatable names, the recipes for making which are carefully preserved in a few convents, whose inmates sometimes have little left to live on save what they can earn by the sale of their cakes. Among these there is a popular kind called yemas, because made from the yolks of eggs (yemas). They look like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and are covered with transparent caramel of a surprising stickiness.
And here I cannot refrain from digressing to tell a little tale about King Alfonso.
The first time that he and the Queen came to Seville was when their first baby, the little Prince of Asturias, was a few months old. The King, whose active habits and disregard of ceremony are well known, went out on the morning after their arrival for a walk through what is called the “Moorish” quarter of the old town, a maze of narrow streets little visited by sight-seers. Here he stopped at a certain convent famous for its sweets, and asked the “mother” who opened the little grille in the street door for “a packet of yemas for his wife and child.” The good nun hesitated: she had not the remotest idea who her customer was, and the Mother Superior, she knew, had set aside all the best of the last batch to send as an offering to the baby Heir to the Throne.
“Pardon me, Señor,” she stammered, divided between her desire not to lose a possible peseta and the difficulty of reconciling a refusal with her natural courtesy; “I fear—to-day—it is impossible—we—we,” and then, with a brilliant inspiration, “we do not sell to foreigners.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the King, “I am a Spaniard by birth and education, and my present address is the Alcazar of Seville.”