My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

The entertainment was got up by the rank and fashion of the town, so everybody behaved with great dignity, and there was none of the rollicking fun we expected to see at a Carnival ball. The ladies in the boxes continually threw serpentinas and confetti at the dancers, until the floor was inches deep in them, and an Irish girl in our party said she felt as if she was dancing in one of her native bogs. But no one got excited, and an English artist on the look out for local colour began to bewail the absence of the light and life that he had believed inseparable from Spanish society.

A little before 1 a.m. there was a universal move towards the centre of the theatre, and at a given signal the heavens seemed to open and a mass of paper flowers, confetti, and bonbons concealed behind the garlands draping the ceiling, showered down on our heads, while a number of white pigeons were let loose and flew about in terror; but still nobody got excited. When this was over the Pierrot in charge of our party called the eldest of the Englishmen aside and asked him to take his ladies home, “because other ladies would be coming now”—a gentle hint, on which all the English and most of the Spanish dames hastily took their departure. The artist was the only one of us who stayed, hoping that with the advent of the “other ladies” he might see something of the celebrated animation which he wanted to introduce into his pictures of Spanish life. He told us next day that he had stopped till 4 a.m., and then came home escorted by half the Spanish army and all the Spanish navy—as represented at the ball—most of them rather and some of them very drunk, but solemn to the last.

“Spanish gaiety is a fraud,” he indignantly declared, and departed in dudgeon, shaking the dust of our town off his feet.

But when I came to know more of Spanish society I understood why all the ladies and many of the men were so solemn on that occasion. Being at a subscription and thus a semi-public ball, they considered that it would be infra dig. to show that they were amused. I never went to another such dance, for I prefer natural fun among young people at a party, but I would not have missed that one for the world; it was so delightfully unlike anything else of the kind one had ever seen.

Afternoon calling in Spain is very different from the quarter-of-an-hour duty visit or the formal leaving of cards which is customary in England—or was when I left my native country ten years or so ago.

Here it is a serious matter for those who have any sort of occupation, for one is expected to stay never less than an hour, and indeed your intimate friends are hurt if you don’t remain the whole afternoon.

It is absolutely contrary to etiquette to go out when you have visitors, no matter how important an engagement you may have made before the uninvited guests appeared. I have known friends fail to arrive when expected to a ceremonious dinner at our house, and the all-sufficient reply to my reproaches has been, “I was very sorry, but what was I to do? We had visitors.”

This exaggerated regard for the duties of hospitality in your own house, coupled with a calm disregard of any obligation imposed by an engagement to visit your neighbours, is another of the innumerable survivals of Arabic tradition, and as such must be respected by all who would enjoy the friendship of Spaniards. It is stronger in the south than in the north, where the Oriental influence was comparatively ephemeral and made no lasting impression on the natives. And it is even said that in Barcelona the Catalans sometimes turn up punctually when they have made a business engagement. This, I am credibly informed, is one of the causes, as well as an effect, of Cataluñan prosperity. But the Catalans are reputed to make a boast of their virtues, and this ridiculous regard for punctuality and the rest is one of their many offences in the eyes of e.g. the Andalucians, who are to the Catalans as oil to water, and never will agree with them on any single question to the crack of doom.

The extraordinary indifference of Spaniards to fixed hours and previously made engagements caused me no little trouble in connection with the photograph facing the head of this chapter. I wanted to take a pretty group formed day after day by the friends with whom I was staying, as they sat at work in their charming old patio, with some small nieces playing about them, and a typically Spanish air of ease and comfortable négligé pervading the whole scene. So I asked them to be in their usual rocking-chairs on a certain day, fixed by themselves, and arranged with the photographer to come at three o’clock on that afternoon, this being the time when my friends were always sitting there with their needlework, and the one hour in the whole day when the light in the patio, which was shadowed by a large orange tree, admitted of successful photography.