Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

A half-hour later I was installed in a third-story room looking down upon the quiet little calle Rosario, and destined to be my home for a fortnight to come. During all that time Pasquale served me at table without once inflicting upon me a non-Spanish word. Nor did he once suspect what a hoax I had played on the "Four Nations" by announcing my nationality without prefixing the qualification "norte."

CHAPTER V

THE TORERO AT HOME

Even though one deny the right of its inhabitants to pity the man who must live and die elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering in the heat of summer, will still count it no punishment to spend a fortnight in Seville. Tranquillity and that laggard humor so befitting vacation days reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which is so like the silence of the grave in other towns of Andalusia. In the slender calle Rosario itself the stillness was never supreme, but tempered always by the droning of a passing ajero with his necklace of garlic, an itinerant baker, or a blind crone hobbling by with the fifth or the tenth of a lottery ticket, crooning in mournful voice, "La lotería! El numero trienta seis mil quinientos cincuenta y cinco-o-o. Who will win a fortune in the lotería-a-a?" Then above all else the soft, quarter-hourly booming of the cathedral bells to mark the passing of the day, like mile-stones on a wandering highway.

Nor with all her languor is Seville slovenly. Outwardly, like all that carries the ear-mark of the Moor, she is bare. In the first brief survey one may fancy one's self in a city of dismal hovels. But this is because the houses are turned wrong-side out; a glimpse into one of the marble-paved patios, fragrant with orange-trees and cooled by fountains throwing their waters high in the dry air, forever dispells the illusion.

My first full day in Seville fell on a holiday dedicated to San Pedro which, chancing also to be my birthday, it was easy to imagine a personal festival. In truth, the celebration of the day was marked by nothing other than a bit more indolence than usual. The real fiesta began at night in the Alameda of Hercules. There, among a hundred booths, the chief object of interest was a negro, the first of his race, one might fancy, who ever invaded the city.

By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville than the royal occupation of doing nothing, a stroll along the Sierpes in the morning, a retreat toward noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent cathedral or those other churches that rival it as museums of art, there to wander undisturbed among masterpieces of Spain's top-most century. The cathedral, by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the calendar of saints. Saint Anthony of Padua, not many years ago, released by the dexterous knife of an impulsive admirer, struck out into the unknown and journeyed as far as our own New York. But there repenting such conduct at his years or daring to venture no further when his companion found a sojourn in the Tombs imperative, he returned to his place, and resumed it so exactly that only the sharpest eye can detect the evidence of his unseemly excursion.

A city that styles her most important street that "of the Serpents," even though it harbors no more of the outcasts of the pavement than many another famous thoroughfare, may be expected to abound in other strange names. Nor are they lacking. How unworthy his lodging must the worldly Sevillian feel who wanders uncertainly homeward in the small hours to his abode in "Jesús del Gran Poder"--"Powerful Jesus street." Or with what face can the merchant turn off after a day of fleecing his fellow-man toward his dwelling in "Amor de Dios"? Top-heavy nomenclature is not confined to the streets. There are many windows in which one may read the announcement of a "Media Noche de Jamón." No, it is not a new law by the cortes, but a "Middle of the Night of Ham," or, succinctly, the over-worked ham sandwich. The uninstructed may be led at sight of a building proclaiming itself an "Academia del Tiro al Blanco" into the belief that Seville is overrun with institutions of higher learning. Not so, distinctly not so. The "Academy of the Shot at the White" is what less extravagant and imaginative peoples dub a shooting gallery.

The man in the street is frequently no less colorful in his language. Yet the crisp, trenchant word common to that personage the world over is here, too, in full force, led by that never idle explosive "hombre." Dictionarically speaking, "hombre" means "man," and nothing more--which only proves how dismally the dictionary has failed to keep up with the times. For child, woman, or hen-pecked male answers to the expression as readily as to his own name. A sevillano leading a pup at the end of a string may be frequently observed to give a jerk at the leash and cry over his shoulder, "Hombre! Vámonos!"--"Come along, man!"

Anent the man in the street, it may be asserted that the Sevillian is usually there. Writers of Spanish romances have for centuries sought to win our sympathy for their love-lorn heroes by stationing them in the public way to whisper their pleadings through the cold bars of a reja. The picture is true; the lover of flesh and blood and of to-day still stands there. But so, for that matter, does the butcher's boy, the ol'-clothes man, and even less reputable persons. In Spanish newspapers the national wealth of phrase is too often overshadowed--like the news columns--by the touching assurance of personal announcements. Rare the page that is not half taken up with a black-bordered inset conveying the information that: