Shall we go to the Thursday-morning fair, which begins, in order to avoid the great heats, at 6 A.M.? Come, then; and if we are up early, we may pass on the way through the low-walled market, gay with fruits, flowers, vegetables, where bread from Alcalá in the exact pattern of buttercup blossoms is sold, and where, at a particularly bloody and ferocious stall, butchers are dispensing the meat of bulls slaughtered at the fights. The fair is held in Fair Street. A frantic miscellany of old iron, of clothing, crockery, mat baskets, and large green pine-cones full of plump seeds, which, when ripened, taste like butternuts, is set forth. Full on the pavement is spread an array of second-hand shoes—the proverbial dead men's, perhaps—temptingly blacked. Pale cinereous earthen vessels, all becurled with raised patterns like intelligent wax-drippings, but exceedingly well shaped, likewise monopolize the thoroughfare, put in peril only by random dogs, which, having quarrelled over the offal freely thrown into the street for them, sometimes race disreputably through the brittle ware. At apt corners old women have set up their frying-pans under Bedouin tents, and are cooking calentitos—long coils of dough browned in hot olive oil—which are much sought as a relish for the matutinal chocolate. Omnipresent, of course, are those water stalls that, in Sevilla especially, acquire eminent dignity by their row of stout jars, and their complicated cordage rigged across from one house-top to another, so as to sustain shadowing canvas canopies. There is a great crowd, but even the fair is comparatively quiet, like the other phases of local life.
The absence of wagon-traffic in the town creates, notwithstanding its reposeful character, a new relative scale of noises, and there is consequently good store of fretting attacks on the hearing in Sevilla. With very early morning begins the deep clank of bells, under the chins of asses that go the rounds to deliver domestic milk from their own udders. There is no end of noise. Even in the elegant dining-room where we ate, lottery-dealers would howl at us through the barred windows, or a donkey outside would rasp our ears with his intolerable braying. Then the street cries are incessant. At night the crowds chafe and jabber till the latest hours, and after eleven the watchmen begin their drawl of unearthly sadness, alternating with the occult and remorseless industry of the mosquito; until, somewhere about dawn, you drop perspiring into an oppressively tropical dream-land, with the sereno's last cry ringing in your ears: "Hail, Mary, most pure! Three o'clock has struck."
This is the weird tune to which he chants it:
II.
AN English lady, conversing with a Sevillan gentleman who had been making some rather tall statements, asked him: "Are you telling me the truth?"
"Madam," he replied, gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, "I am an Andalusian!" At which the surrounding listeners, his fellow-countrymen, broke into an appreciative laugh.
So proverbial is the want of veracity, or, to put it more genially, the imagination, of these Southerners. Their imagination will explain also the vogue of their brief, sometimes pathetic, yet never more than half-expressed, scraps of song, which are sung with so much feeling throughout the kingdom to crude barbaric airs, and loved alike by gentle and simple. I mean the Peteneras and Malagueñas. There are others of the same general kind, sung to a variety of dances; but the ruling tunes are alike—usually pitched in a minor key, and interspersed with passionate trills, long quavers, unexpected ups and downs, which it requires no little skill to render. I have seen gypsy singers grow apoplectic with the long breath and volume of sound which they threw into these eccentric melodies amid thunders of applause. It is not a high nor a cultivated order of music, but there lurks in it something consonant with the broad, stimulating shine of the sun, the deep red earth, the thick, strange-flavored wine of the Peninsula; its constellated nights, and clear daylight gleamed with flying gold from the winnowing-field. The quirks of the melody are not unlike those of very old English ballads, and some native composer with originality should be able to expand their deep, bold, primitive ululations into richer, lasting forms. The fantastic picking of the mandurra accompaniment reminds me of Chinese music with which I have been familiar. Endless preludes and interminable windings-up enclose the minute kernel of actual song; but to both words and music is lent a repressed touching power and suggestiveness by repeating, as is always done, the opening bars and first words at the end, and then breaking off in mid-strain. For instance:
"All the day I am happy,
But at evening orison
Like a millstone grows my heart.
All the day I am happy." [Limitless Guitar Solo.]
It is like the never-ended strain of Schumann's "Warum?" The words are always simple and few—often bald. One of the most popular pieces amounts simply to this: