DRESSED FOR THE FAIR.
CHAPTER XIX
The April Fair—From the harem to the caseta—The Prado of San Sebastian—The Inquisition—Conscripts and the Flag—Spanish football clubs—Buying votes—The cattle at the Fair—Harnessed à la Jerez—The Sevillian élégante: fourteen dresses for three days—The afternoon drive—Dancing at night—The marriage market—Mantillas, velos, and Paris hats—Midnight in the Fair—The curtained casetas of the clubs—Manila shawls—The Queen and the mantilla—“John-a-Dreams” and the national dress—Three engagements and a marriage—The year ends in Paradise.
The true history of the April Fair at Seville, like so much else in Spain, is lost in the mists of ages; but old prints and pictures combine with tradition to show that it was at first merely a cattle fair, where dealers coming from a distance set up tents in which to sleep and transact business, attended by the itinerant gipsies who flock to fairs of every kind in every country. Gradually the tents of the dealers became a meeting-place for their families and their friends from the town, and then refreshments had to be provided, and amusements such as music, dancing, and singing soon followed. Now the Seville Fair on the Prado de San Sebastian almost suggests, in some respects, a show at Earl’s Court or Olympia, with the important difference that it is a living reality, not a scenic representation for which one takes a ticket at the gate.
The most curious feature about this three days’ riot of festivity is its extraordinary contrast to the daily life of Spain. I have already referred to the seclusion of women, the extreme privacy of domestic life, typified by the lace curtains which shroud every window on the street and are never drawn aside, the darkness of the rooms thus guarded from the intrusion alike of the sun and of the stranger’s eye, the strict surveillance exercised over young girls not only in the street but in their own homes—in short, the persistence of the Oriental tradition that the women belong to their men, not to themselves, and that no stranger has a right to look at and admire them.
This is the mode of life imposed on the women throughout the whole year. But when April comes and the Fair begins, all these restrictions are thrown to the winds, the mothers escort their daughters to the Prado, and there, seated in the “reception-room” of a caseta or booth, with its wooden floor raised three feet above the ground to give a better view, they look on while their girls dance in full view of the public, hour after hour and night after night, for all the world as if they were professionals at a theatre. The whole thing is an anomaly without explanation, unless indeed one takes it as an unconscious protest of the Sevillian women against their lifelong imprisonment in a home which in respect of its seclusion is not very different from a harem.