My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

Medina Sidonia, however, was a very chivalrous gentleman. The tidings of the lady’s plight reached him as he lay before Setenil (so called, according to local etymology, because the Romans besieged it seven times—septem = sete—and took nothing—nil!) some twenty miles from Arcos. He turned back at once with half of his troops, drove the Moslems out of the town, left a strong guard with the rescued lady, and then returned to continue the siege of the still stronger fortress of Setenil, and to play his part in the taking of Alhama.

If Medina Sidonia had not brought the feud between the two families thus dramatically to an end Arcos would have had to capitulate, as its neighbour Zahara had already done, and once the Moslems had recovered the four strategic points, Arcos, Zahara, Setenil, and Ronda, the war against Granada might have had a different ending.

We do not find this story in the published histories of Ferdinand and Isabella, but it is written in the archives of the city of Arcos and in those of the Arcos family, now, alas! mouldering in a locked room in one of the great towers of the castle, which is falling to ruin because its owners cannot afford to keep it up.

With regret I tore myself away from the castle, whose once warlike keep is now a garden of roses, orange trees, jessamine, and geraniums grown into bushes with age. But I had to get on to Bornos and Villamartín on the way to Algodonales, where I was to change the diligence for the donkey.

Of that stage of the road the less said the better. Much of it was dull, all of it was dusty, and the diligence was packed to its utmost capacity, for it was the eve of the Villamartín September Fair, and the rattling old shandridan, built to carry eight or ten passengers in all, had five horses instead of three, and no less than twenty-seven people were stowed inside, on the box, and on the roof. Every one declared that it was excessively dangerous, and made a great joke of the fact; and as Spanish drivers make a point of whipping up their horses when they near the bottom of a hill, in order to take the next rise on the run, and the over-loaded machine rocked like a ship in a storm on every such occasion, it was little short of a miracle that we arrived at Villamartín alive.

Arrive we did, however, and at once found ourselves in all the fun of the fair.

The only fonda in the place looked out on the main square. The polite name for fonda (the Arabic fondak) in English is hotel, and the fonda professes to provide food and beds for its customers; unlike the parador (stopping-place), which only gives beds to travellers providing their own food, and the posada (rest-house), which is really little more than a stable for animals with some sort of shelter attached for the people who belong to them. Our Villamartín “hotel” only had three or four bedrooms and no sitting-room at all, the food being served in a passage through which one passed from the street to the staircase, or one might rather say step-ladder, leading up to an open gallery containing one of the convenient and comfortable folding bedsteads called catres, minus a mattress; one broken-backed chair, and nothing else. From this a narrow door led into a tiny bedroom which just held a bed and a washstand.

We had no choice but to stay here. The humble Spanish friends with whom I was travelling to their home at Algodonales—a mother and son—insisted on my taking the bedroom, although they gladly accepted my invitation to share the washstand. The mother said she could sleep on the catre with a pillow from my bed, and the boy on the floor alongside, with his head on my travelling-bag. Every other corner in the house was full for the fair, and even this modest accommodation could only be had for one night. Poor as it was, the bedding and the linen were clean, and we thought ourselves lucky to get a room at all.

But we rashly arranged a pillow and rug for Rosario on the catre before going out to see the town, and when we got back, the catre, the pillow, and even the broken-backed chair had been carried off for another customer, and my poor friends had just to sit downstairs at the street door and amuse themselves as best they could till it was time to start. This, however, was not quite the hardship it sounds, for all Spaniards love to turn night into day; and their main concern was lest I should be uncomfortable.

We were to start by diligence for Algodonales, our final destination, at 3 a.m., and pretty Rosario had agreed to let me sleep till two—if I could, which seemed doubtful in view of the incessant noise in the main street on which my tiny window looked. I did sleep, notwithstanding the noise, and woke to find the sun streaming in, and the town alive with goatherds and their flocks, donkeys loaded with fruit and vegetables, women with baskets of eggs and live fowls tied together by the legs and distressfully clucking, and a continual stream of ponies, mules, cows, calves, pigs, sheep, and oxen coming in from the country to the fair; while all along the footwalks little canvas-covered sweet-stalls had sprung up like mushrooms in the night. I had slept through all the riot of the small hours, and the diligence had either not gone at 3 a.m. or had gone without me.