My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

Here the “stranger” dismounted and gave a gratuity to the arriero which left him speechless with surprise and delight, for it was more than a week’s wages that he found in his hand.

“Thank you for my pleasant ride,” said the gentleman. “And you can tell your friends that the King not only went to see you at the bottom of the Tajo, but was very glad to borrow your donkey to come up again.”

When he left that evening King Alfonso is reported to have said that he would never forget Ronda, for it was the first place he had been to in all his life where he was neither offered nor asked for anything.

These are but a few of the many stories we hear of the King, the Queen, and their people, but they will suffice to show the estimation in which their Majesties are held, as well as some of the reasons for it. And to end the chapter I will add one incident in very modern history, which occurred as recently as November 1913, and is significant, it seems to me, of the present state of Spanish politics.

The tax known in France as the octroi and in Spain as the consumos, because it is levied on nearly everything that is consumed in the use,—i.e. food and firing,—bears heavily on the poor and causes more discontent than any other detail of local administration. It is very harshly enforced in many places, every box, basket, or bundle that enters the town being examined with irritating and unnecessary thoroughness. Every traveller has suffered from it on arrival at the railway station, and what is worse, one often sees weary labourers forced to unload and reload again their tired donkeys on their way home from work, because the consumista chooses to imagine that some article of food may be concealed under a hundredweight of charcoal or firewood. I have myself been detained in pouring rain at the entrance to a town after a long day on the hills, while a surly official poked and prodded the panniers of a mule laden with nothing more dutiable than ancient tiles, bricks, and such-like from my excavations. A shocking accident occurred, in connection with this tax, at a seaside village where we spent one summer; for a poor woman had put her sleeping infant in the panniers of her donkey, and the consumista, assuming without inquiry that they contained vegetables, ran the baby through with the long sharp spike used for testing the contents of a load that is not unpacked before them, and killed it on the spot.

At election times, when the whole country is greatly excited, the consumos grievance is always prominent, and the popular indignation is apt to explode in plain language about the Town Councils, for these have a legal right to substitute some other local tax for the consumos, if they choose to do so. Naturally the poor feel that they, in whose starvation wages every farthing is of importance, suffer more by a direct tax on food than do the rich, and thus it has become a class question, needing extremely delicate handling at critical moments.

In a modest village of two or three thousand inhabitants, in the province of Huelva, called Bolullos del Candado, feeling about the consumos had risen to boiling-point before the 1913 municipal elections began, and some mismanagement at the Town Hall led the malcontents to believe—perhaps justifiably—that the voting would not be fairly conducted. In less than no time some five hundred people collected outside the Town Hall, and the authorities, alarmed at their menacing aspect, locked the doors and ordered the Civil Guard to fire on the crowd. Infuriated by being shot at when they had done nothing wrong or illegal, the people burst in the doors, and a free fight ensued. When it ended they were masters of the situation, and then they sacked the Town Hall and made a bonfire of the furniture in the village square.

But before a hand was laid on the municipal property, one of the “rioters” took down a picture of the King, which hung in the council-room, and a detachment of them conveyed it to a place of safety, while the whole crowd shouted Viva el Rey!

It was the triumph of King Alfonso’s personality over political passion, and shows, I think, that there is not much fear of a popular revolution against the Monarchy in Spain.