Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

At intervals of two or three hundred yards along the precipitous cliff that half circles the city stood the shelter of an octroi guard, built of anything that might deflect a ray of sunlight. In the shade of each crouched a ragged, ennui-eyed man staring away into the limitless expanse of sunshine. Their fellows may be found forming a circle around every city in the kingdom of Spain, the whole body numbering many thousands. The impracticable, the quixotic character of official Spain stands forth nowhere more clearly than in this custom of sentencing an army of her sons to camp in sloth about her cities on the bare chance of intercepting ten-cent's worth of smuggling, when the same band working even moderately might produce tenfold the octroi revenues of the land.

I halted with one of the tattered fellows, whose gladness for the unusual boon of companionship was tempered by a diffidence that was almost bashfulness, so rarely did he come in contact with his fellow-man. For a long hour we sat together in the shadow of the hut, our eyes drifting away over the gray-roofed, closely-packed city below. When our conversation touched on the loneliness of his situation the guard grew vehement in bewailing its dreariness and desolation. But when I hinted that the octroi might perhaps be abolished to advantage, he sprang to his feet crying almost in terror:

"For los clavos de Cristo, señor! What then would become of nosotros? I have no other trade whatever than to be guard to the octroi."

A sorry craft indeed, this squatting out a lifetime under a grass hut.

The bluish haze of a summer evening was gathering over Jaen when, returning through a winding street to my lodging, there fell on my ear the thrum of a solitary guitar and the rich and mellow voice of a street singer. The musician was a blind man of fifty, of burly build and a countenance brimming with good cheer and contentment, accompanied by a woman of the same age. As I joined the little knot of peasants and townsmen gathered about him, his song ended and he drew out a packet of hand bills.

"On this sheet, señores," he announced, holding one up, "are all the songs I have sung for you. And they are all yours for a perro gordo."

I was among the first to buy, glad to have paid many times this mere copper to be able to carry home even one of those languorous ballads so filled with the serene melancholy of the Moor and the fire of Andalusia. But the sheet bore nothing but printed words.

"Every word is there, señores," continued the minstrel, as if in response to my disappointment. "As for the music, anyone can remember that or make it up for himself."

To illustrate how simple this might be he threw a hand carelessly across his guitar and struck up another of the droning, luring melodies, that rose and fell and drifted away through the passages of the dimming city. Easy, indeed! One could as easily remember or make up for one's self the carol of the meadow lark in spring or the lullaby of the nightingale in the darkened tree-tops.

That I might catch the five-thirty train my host awoke me next morning at three-twenty. I turned over for a nap and descending in the dawn by the dust-blanketed Alameda to the station two miles distant, found this already peopled with a gathering of all the types of southern Spain. The train was due in twenty minutes, wherefore the ticket-office, of course, was already closed. After some search I discovered the agent, in the person of a creature compared with whom Caliban would have been a beauty, exchanging stories with a company of fellow-bandits on the crowded platform. He informed me in no pleasant manner that it was too late to buy a ticket. When I protested that the legal closing hour was but five minutes before train time, he shrugged his shoulders and squinted away down the track as if he fancied the train was already in sight. I decoyed him into the station at last, but even then he refused to sell a ticket beyond Espeluy.