My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

The visible result, however, is quite charming. There are whole streets of canvas booths, large and small, luxurious and the reverse, simple, artistic, and fantastic; handsome buildings of brick and iron set up by the fashionable clubs; ephemeral representations of favourite corrales and ventas, beloved of artists, who paint their typical casetas with their own hands; there are acres of canvas covering hundreds of toy and sweetmeat stalls, drinking stalls, Aunt Sallies or their Spanish equivalents, and, above all, stalls for the sale of the ever-popular buñolitos described in an earlier chapter. The casetas—a name given without distinction to every erection in the Fair—make in all directions boundary-lines between the carriage ways and the ground occupied by the cattle, of which there are thousands upon thousands, crowded together over the great plain, herd by herd, without any sort of partition between them, donkeys cheek by jowl with pigs, sheep rubbing shoulders with mules, all peacefully lying or standing in their appointed places.

Here San Fernando encamped for a time when he was besieging Seville, and here later on stood the Quemadero, the burning-place of the Inquisition. Now, except during the great fair in April and the lesser one at Michaelmas, the Prado is the exercise-ground for the troops of the garrison. Here the annual batches of new recruits are drilled, and here takes place the interesting ceremony of the Jura de la Bandera, when thousands of conscripts, all kneeling together, swear fealty to their God, their Flag, and their King. Here, too, the football clubs, of which there are several, play on Sundays all the year round, even in the heat of summer. I don’t think many Englishmen would care to watch, far less to play, football with the thermometer at 100 in the shade; yet the “Sevilla Balompié” plays right through the summer, beginning their matches at 6 a.m. when the afternoons get too hot for running. And the more praise is due to these energetic lads because they get no support either in money or approval from those in a higher social position. What their financial difficulties are I learnt last summer from an English clerk who umpires for one of the clubs. He told me that now the weather was getting so hot they wanted to start cricket instead of football, but they had no money to buy the cricket things and knew no one who would help them to raise funds! And yet at election times, whether parliamentary or municipal, there is always plenty of money to buy votes, and one of these same footballers told me that he had been offered up to fifteen pesetas during a hotly contested election to go and personate a voter who was safe in his decent grave! It has never yet occurred to candidates that a subscription to football clubs and the like would be a more respectable form of bribery than offering money to a half-back.

But during the Fair nobody pays any attention to football, politics, or anything else of a serious nature. We are out to enjoy ourselves, and we do it.

A drive through the actual cattle fair surprises those who think that Spaniards are cruel to animals. Sheep, goats, pigs, donkeys, mules, horses, cattle, are all herded together, quite tame and happy, most of them loose and kept from wandering only by the voice of the herdsman and the bark of his dog; troops of young horses and young mules are enclosed only by an impromptu rail consisting of a rope tied to iron stakes driven into the ground; great long-horned oxen and bulls lie on the ground without any sort of tether or fence. The only animals really shut in are the well-bred riding and carriage horses, which occupy wooden stables on the farther side of the Reál de la Feria. This is the street where are the fashionable casetas, where the fireworks are let off at night, and where horsemen and women display their skill in a game which may be called threading the maze, among the countless motors and carriages of all sorts and kinds, private and hired, most of which contain daughters in white mantillas and mothers in black, all intent on seeing and being seen by the crowd.

Many of the horses in this medley of conveyances are harnessed à la Jerezana—a heavy collar and saddle, and rope traces covered with leather where they touch the horses, with many tinkling bells and innumerable balls and tassels of gay-coloured wool tied on wherever possible, and especially to the headpiece. I do not know why this harness is called “Jerez fashion,” for I have seen far more animals thus decorated in the Sierra than I ever saw at Jerez. But even the most persistent seeker after information is fain to put aside his notebook here, and merely enjoy the picturesqueness and old-world air of these family coaches with their Goya-like occupants, and the life, colour, and animation of the whole scene. For in spite of the exhilaration produced by the pure fresh April air with its brilliant sunshine, and the universal atmosphere of enjoyment, one never quite loses the feeling that it is a play, even though oneself be one of the players, and that all too soon the curtain will ring down on one of the prettiest scenes to be found in Spain if not in Europe.

I have been told that the really smart young lady has fourteen new dresses every year for the Fair. How she contrives to wear them all I don’t know, unless she puts one on over the other, for she can only change her frock three times a day, because all the rest of the day and night she is en evidence. In the morning she puts on the latest hat from Paris to drive round and look at the cattle, hiding her almond eyes and her pretty arched eyebrows with some horrible “creation” utterly unsuited to her style. Few Spanish women can put on a hat—very likely from want of practice, for it is only in the last twenty years or so that the mantilla or velo has ceased to be the universal wear.

When our élégante shows herself in the afternoon in her second new dress, with her hair done very high, a mass of carnations resting against it and the immense comb of pierced tortoiseshell which she has inherited from her great-grandmother, and with the soft folds of a white silk mantilla floating about her face as she drives (or motors—dreadful anachronism!) up and down the Reál, we hardly know her for the same girl who looked so dull and heavy under that Paris monstrosity this morning. Her eyes flash, her white teeth gleam, and one begins to understand what poets mean when they talk about the sparkling brilliance of an Andalucian beauty.

By this time the casetas are full of dancers, mostly schoolgirls and children as yet, for coquettes of sixteen and upwards are well aware that they will show to more advantage after nightfall, in the brilliant artificial light. The older girls, unless they own carriages or have the entrée to the fashionable clubs, stroll up and down with their friends of both sexes, criticising the “carriage folk” and thinking no doubt how much better they themselves would grace those expensively appointed vehicles. At six o’clock, when the bull-fight ends and the spectators come to the Prado, the already crowded drive, nearly a mile long with carriages four deep, becomes so congested that nothing can move beyond a foot’s pace, and nervous pedestrians can only cross the Reál and the intersecting roads at the entrance to the Fair by a sort of diminutive Eiffel Tower erection which was built some fifteen years ago for this particular purpose.

At night the Eiffel Tower, or Pasadera, as it is called, is illuminated from top to bottom, the whole of the Reál is arched over with garlands of coloured electric bulbs, and every caseta vies with its neighbours in the lighting of the reception-rooms in which the girls, in their third new frocks, are to dance. For the display of youth and beauty is the main object of the social side of the Fair, which is in point of fact the marriage market of Seville. It is said that more young people come to an understanding during these three days than in all the rest of the year, and it is easy to believe it, for we know that all the world over spring is the prettiest ring-time, and the young man’s fancy in particular lightly turns to thoughts of love at that season here in Seville.

Dancing goes on from nine o’clock till two or three in the morning. Whether it be good or bad, the sight of waving arms and bending heads in seguidillas and peteneras never fails to attract the passers-by. Often as many as a couple of hundred people will collect in front of a fashionable caseta where half a dozen Señoritas are dancing together, although only the first row of the crowd, pressed against the steps leading up from the footpath, can see anything beyond faces draped in white lace or black madroños, and white hands waving be-ribboned castanets.