My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

Life in the patio—Locked doors and lovers—The uses of the grated gate—Courting under difficulties: the keyhole and the crack—Manolo and Carmencita, a romance in real life.

The great event to which the whole creation moves in the eyes of a Spanish señorita—not being a resident in Madrid—is the annual fair in the capital town of her province. This generally takes place in the spring, and therefore, for her, the spring is the end and not the beginning of the year, looked forward to with increasing excitement through autumn and winter, while to that young lady summer is but the beginning of the long year which has to be lived through until spring and LA FERIA, in capital letters, comes round again.

I, like the Spanish señorita, will begin my Spanish year with the summer, if not exactly for the same reason, for one akin to it. The great heat of summer, with its dust, mosquitoes, and flies, is the most trying time in all the twelve months in this country, as the spring is the most enjoyable; and wise people keep the best to the last.

Let it not be supposed, however, that summer in Spain has no compensations. They are many and various, and not the least among them is the life of the patio, which begins in June and ends in September.

The patio is always spoken of as one of the peculiar charms of southern Spain, but how many of my readers, who have not visited the country, know exactly what it is? I myself, before I came here, had a vague idea that it was something in the nature of a yard, and I remember that on seeing a huge corral for cattle, attached to a farmhouse near Tarifa and so large as to be visible from the steamer as we approached Gibraltar, I asked whether that was a patio!

The Andalucian house of to-day is in essentials the direct descendant of the house built by the Greeks who colonised Andalucia, or Tartessus, as they called it, some six or seven centuries B.C. The pylon, now called the zaguan, is the vestibule leading from the street door direct into the peristyle, the open courtyard round which the house is built, now known as the patio. In the daytime the zaguan is open to the street, but entrance to the patio is barred by a large iron grille, which can only be opened from within. The Romans continued the Greek form of house, with slight structural modifications, and added the solarium, an open gallery or arcade intended for basking in the sun. This feature is common in the older houses of Andalucia to-day, although those of more modern construction lack it, and the inmates when they wish to sun themselves go up to the azotea, the flat brick roof on which the family washing is usually hung out to dry. The names azotea and zaguan are both Arabic, showing, were demonstration needed, that neither the Visigoths nor the Arabs made any essential alterations in the structure of the houses they found when they respectively conquered Andalucia.

The patio is a central court off which numerous rooms open, always including the summer dining-room and the summer kitchen, their winter counterparts being on the floor above. There is also a sala or reception-room, and in old houses this may have beautifully carved Arabic roof-beams, filled in with fine fifteenth- or sixteenth-century lustre tiles: for while the upper stories are frequently modernised and sometimes brought quite up to date in the matter of bathrooms, ample windows, and effective ventilation, the patio with the dark rooms surrounding it is very seldom reconstructed. It is only used as a refuge from the summer heat, and the architects of to-day wisely refrain from interfering with the shadowy lights and cool refreshing temperature which make life enjoyable even when the thermometer outside stands at 110 or more in the shade.

Great doors—sometimes of mahogany, cedar, or lignum-vitæ four inches thick, studded with large brass or iron nails, and adorned with corner pieces, lock, key, and knockers, all richly wrought to match—shut off the zaguan from the street. All day long these stand open, as though inviting the passer-by to step in and admire the patio within, the whole of which can be seen through the cancela or iron grille already mentioned: but at night they are closed and secured with a huge iron bolt, often two or three feet long. The noise made by the closing of these doors at night, and the shrieks of the great bolts, which are never by any chance oiled, can be heard one after the other all along the street, and are liable to interfere a good deal with the beauty sleep of the stranger. But, unless there is a velada or a tertulia going on, the noise is all over by 11 p.m. or earlier, because custom requires that respectable houses should present blank faces to the moonbeams a full hour before midnight.

If you ask how this can be when every one knows that Spanish gentlemen make a practice of turning night into day at their cafés and clubs, I must call your attention to the postigo, a little low wicket opening in one of the great doors. The stern father, forgetful of his own youthful escapades, or determined that his son shall not follow in his footsteps, may order the door to be locked at eleven every night; but there is always a corruptible servant or a tender-hearted sister on the watch to lift the latch of the postigo and screen the young scapegrace from the paternal ire.

We may take it for granted that when the sister connives at her brother’s late hours, it is not to enable him to gamble at his club or drink more than is good for him at the café. It must be a love affair that enlists pretty Amparo’s sympathies and keeps her out of her bed to all hours. She has probably been listening to the professions of devotion of her own forbidden lover until long after midnight, and thus all her sympathies are with Manolo, who also has lost his heart without permission from the parents.