The box she handed to us was full of pieces of cork through which a wick had been thrust. On the top of the box was the name of the device "little-lamps-little-boats" and a picture of the Virgin. We stepped back in our illumination to the most ancient of methods—the old Roman conquerors of Spain must have illuminated their villas in this way. "Little-lamps-little-boats" had probably given light to the halls of the Saracen castle which now was but a few crumbling masses of slowly disintegrating cement. It was curious to think that one-half of Jijona was lit by electric light, the other by this antique device, and that there was practically nothing between. Mrs. Garcia had urged us to the stewing of garbanzos.
The Garcias were go-ahead Spaniards. Starting from very small origins, they had begun a small turron factory in a back room. Not content with making turron alone, they had peddled it all over the Balearic Isles. Gradually they had prospered, and the whole upper part of the house was now factory, the entrance to the factory being higher up the hill in a back street. Yet they remained simple people, sitting, in the evenings, on their doorstep gossiping, while the flaxen-haired daughter, sixteen years old, painted with a toothpick dipped in dye eyes and noses on sugar pigs and cats.
"We had a hard time at first," said Mrs. Garcia. "In Majorca the people were very jealous of us, and often very rude. They would tell us to go back to our own district; they used to laugh at our speech, though God knows they can't speak proper Spanish themselves."
This inter-district jealousy seems characteristic of Spain. The man from Toledo laughed at the Jijona people; the people of Jijona called those of Murcia "gipsies"; the people of Murcia say that the Jijona folk are mere uncultivated mountaineers; Catalan and Castilian are in semi-enmity. Each person that one spoke to lauded the beauties and the food of his own district at the expense of other places. All about Jijona they would have nothing but malegueñas and Valencian jotas. The other varieties of Spanish music they were not interested in.
But the Garcias were progressive people. They had made a success of their Balearic venture, and now had a stall in the market of Alicante. This was kept by a sister-in-law. Garcia and his wife were making preparations to go to the great fair at Albacete. The shop was full of large bales done up in straw matting, boxes and crates of sweets and of turron. They would go by road, for it was cheaper, and only about a hundred miles away.
"That is a queer town," said Garcia. "There are gates to the walls, and at a certain hour they shut the gates, and if you are outside you stay outside till the morning."
Mrs. Garcia wanted me to paint her portrait. If she would have posed to me in the ordinary, peasant, workaday dress I would have done it with pleasure. But she had a fine fashionable modern silk dress of black and she wanted to pose in this. I managed to put off the proposal until the time of her departure was too close. She went away unsatisfied
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Spirit lamp.
[23] "She has painted everything, everything, everything!"