My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

Of these one of the strangest, to our ideas, is the custom of holding what might be called a wake over the corpse the night after death. The funeral has to take place within twenty-four hours, an excellent sanitary regulation which we English might adopt with advantage. But, as a young lady in deep mourning for her adored mother calmly remarked to me, “It is true that in the cold climate of England dead persons do not decompose so rapidly as here.” It is also true that twenty-four hours amply suffice to put the family into mourning in a country where every woman has, as a matter of course, a suit of black in her wardrobe all the year round, so that no time is lost in making clothes for the funeral, and on the night after a death has taken place all the most intimate friends are ready to sit round in token of sympathy.

A great deal of very real kindness is shown in cases of severe illness. Trained nurses are seldom or never called in, but the friends take turns to sit up with the family and the patient, and, if they are not rich, keep them supplied with chickens, eggs, and whatever else may be of use in the sick-room. The custom of “accompanying” the sufferer is, however, sometimes embarrassing to foreigners. On one occasion, when a member of my family was supposed to be in articulo mortis, his most intimate Spanish friend almost insisted on sharing my night-watches; and when at length I persuaded him that even his sympathetic presence might prove injurious to one for whom absolute quiet was the only chance, he said with intense conviction—

“At least you must promise to send for me at any moment of the day or night when you know the last hour is at hand, that I may witness the ascent of so noble a soul to heaven!”

My appreciation of what I knew was meant for the truest kindness hardly mitigated my repugnance to the mere suggestion of such an intrusion on one’s privacy at such a time. Happily for Don Antonio’s feelings as well as for mine, the illness took a favourable turn, and our friend’s tears of delight at the good news quickly obliterated the jar he had all unconsciously inflicted on one’s susceptibilities at the time of crisis. Another friend, out of sheer courtesy and goodness of heart, contrived to shock still more our British ideas: he came post-haste, on hearing that the patient was given up, to offer his services in the arrangements for the funeral!

Our ideas of keeping the sick-room free from movement or noise, and our refusal to receive at the bedside all the kind Spanish friends who came to inquire, struck them as very strange indeed, for with them sympathy is necessarily expressed by providing plenty of company “to cheer the sufferer” and those near and dear to him. I remember on one occasion being pressed by a friend to go and call on the mother of a girl who was desperately ill with meningitis—a complaint which (if correctly diagnosed) seems curiously common among the well-to-do in this country. I demurred, on the ground that my very slight acquaintance with the lady hardly justified my intruding on her grief and anxiety.

“But she is my cousin, and you are my friend, and she will certainly notice your absence if you do not go.”

I went. I counted twelve women and girls in the patient’s room, for I was obliged to go upstairs and look at the poor girl through the open door, or be regarded as cruelly unkind by the mother.

She died, as was to be expected, a few days later, and I had to appear at the house of mourning on the evening of the funeral, accompanied by the one member of our family belonging to the dead girl’s generation. I had a black dress, but my girl had only a white one, and we had hoped that this might be accepted as an excuse for her non-appearance. By no means. The cousin and her two daughters came in person, swathed in black silk shawls from head to foot, to insist on our both going with them to “dar el pésame,” to express sympathy with the mourner.

It was one of the most distressing experiences I have had in Spain. We elder people all sat round the room on chairs, sofas, and settees too heavy to move an inch from their appointed places, and one by one we were led into a small inner room where the mother, blind with crying, sat hunched up with her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands, giving loud utterance to her unrestrained grief.

“Oh, my daughter, my dear companion! Oh, my daughter, my dear companion!” she moaned over and over again in a voice hoarse with sobbing, and not in the least knowing what she was saying.