Poor Folk in Spain

by Jan Gordon; Cora Gordon

"Ei," she sighed, "how sad it is that one grows old. How sad that youth passes all too quickly!"

That night a terrific thunderstorm broke over the valley. The thunder crashed, the lightning flared and the rain came down as though pouring from a gigantic hose. In the middle of all the noise we heard a strange sound.

"Wah! wah! wah! Squeak! Squeak!"

The cat had come back; but with only one kitten. The next morning we stayed in the house. From the windows we could mark the change which autumn had brought over the Paseo de Corveras. The dust was no longer blown along the road, which was now a still river of liquid mud. The town dust-cart, a donkey with panniers, no longer promenaded the street; no longer did we hear the cheerful blasphemy of the dust-boy who, stooping to gather up some refuse, found that his dust-cart had impatiently trotted on. In its place were the exhortations of the pig-drivers, who urged hordes of monstrous black pigs through the mud. Some of the porkers were, however, so heavy on their feet that they had to be brought in carts. The squealing of them filled the morning air. The fruit merchants, also with panniered donkeys, no longer called out "Melacotones, peras!" but "Uvas! Uvas!"[27] and a man wandered about with a huge basket of snails. The maize fields in front of the house were cut and stacked, and in the fields queens of Sheba were dragging the primitive ploughs, while men behind them beat to powder the lumps of baked earth which were turned up. Instead of the almost dead silence which greeted the strengthening sun, people moved about all day; parasols had given place to flirting fans. The country girls wore bunches of flowers in their hair, some even put one tall blossom sticking upright from the coiffure, where it nodded and bowed with the movements of the wearer. In the fruit garden the lemons had quite fallen, but the oranges were beginning to become a livid yellow on one side of the bush, while the dates had passed from a pale to a deep golden hue.

I went about with Luis exploring balconies for views, and finally decided upon a view of Murcia from the tall campanile of the Cathedral. When I got back I found that the cat once more had decamped, taking the kitten with her. The second kitten had been lost. In the afternoon Luis came in. He brought an invitation from some friends for me to play the piano at their house on Saturday evening. That evening Don Feliz exclaimed:

"I have an old guitar. It is a unique instrument, none other like it has ever been seen in Spain. I bought it, at a bargain, for thirty pesetas; but I would sell it to a friend for the same money. Now you, Señor, have no guitar of your own. This is a veritable instrument for a museum. Come and see it on Sunday morning. I will show you the way."

We dined at Elias', as was our custom, and trudged back through the mud. On the darkened stairs of our house we heard a wailing and almost tumbled over the spitting cat, which had brought back the kitten once more. We gathered up the kitten and, followed at some distance by the suspicious cat, put it back into the packing-case.

All this while we were rather short of electric lights in our house. Antonio had borrowed most of the light-bulbs to decorate a shrine which he had erected in one of the churches. The candle which the righteous once offered up to God is going out of fashion. Nowadays, instead of burning so many feet of bees-wax, one turns on so many volts. Lamb has drawn a picture of two priests disputing as to which should offer up a blessing, with a final compromise that neither should do so; and the disappointment of the defrauded God. To-day he could go further, he could depict the deity being forced to go to the factory chimney for the scent of his burnt sacrifice. A Spanish writer, Pio Baroja, in a novel proposes a society called the "Extra-Rapid to Heaven Assurance Society." The insurer pays in a sum, and on his death hundreds of gramophones are turned on chanting prayers for his speedy deliverance from purgatory. "God," says the author, "is so far away, that he will not notice the substitution." This is, of course, a satire on the modern habit of replacing candles by electric lights, but the satire is no more absurd than the actuality.

Alongside of the bridge was a tall shrine built into the side of the house and lit up thus at night with electric light. The image was covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and I said that it was a sculptured figure. Jan, on the other hand, insisted that it was a painting. We had an argument about it and on the next day returned to verify together. It was, in fact, a painting. But at night, returning from Elias', we looked up at the shrine by chance, and stopped, astonished. If it was a painting it was most realistic. We looked more closely. The more we examined it, the more did it seem sculptured. Then the explanation dawned on us. It was sculptured, but during the daytime a painted curtain was drawn down in front of it.