I do not think we realized how much we were overpaying Blas until we decided to leave Murcia. We found a house, as you will hear, at Verdolay about five miles away. When he heard that we were leaving, Blas volunteered to come out as usual for the same pay. He said that he would cheerfully walk the distance—ten miles—for that money. But we were getting rather shy of Blas. He was too persistent a borrower for our slender means and we had heard of other teachers who were cheaper. So we took this opportunity and dropped him as a pilot to the guitar
[CHAPTER XI]
MURCIA—THE ALPAGATA SHOP
Save upon feast days, and with the exception of the nobility, who are few, and of the merchants, who have to be worldly commonplace, alpagatas, or string-soled shoes, are the footwear of the Spanish nation. If you dodge the big towns you may go for days and never see a boot. The agricultural labourer, the artisan, the beggar, the soldier, the engine-driver, the porters all wear either the alpagata or, in the summer, its cooler brother, the string-soled sandal. In Spain boots are not meant for real wear, you swagger around the town in boots, and have them cleaned four or five times a day. At a café a horde of bootblacks precipitate themselves towards you to renew the lustre—possibly dimmed by the all-prevalent dust—of those foot ornaments. The young man who goes to meet his novía removes his alpagatas, and puts on boots highly polished and with check tops; the young maiden who is sitting out with her novio has placed her alpagatas in the corner and stretches high-heeled shoes across the pavement. But for all-day-up-and-down use the alpagata wins every time; the baby wears alpagatas, and its grandmother wears a larger variant; there are white alpagatas, brown alpagatas, grey alpagatas, black alpagatas for those in mourning—a very important ceremony in Spain—and there are the elaborate, almost Eastern, alpagatas, entirely of esparto grass, the making of which occupies the time when the goatherd is not yelling at his goats. Even the horsemen, the caballeros, often wear alpagatas. It is true that one cannot strap a spur on to an alpagata, but on the whole spurs are little used in Spain. If the rider wishes his horse or donkey to mend his pace, he thumps the animal with a thick cudgel at about the place where St. Dunstan kicked the devil.
The alpagata is also a cheap form of footwear. Those which we were wearing cost three pesetas, say 2s. 9d. They should last two months. We were therefore spending 1s. 4-1/2d. a month each on shoes. A little arithmetic will show this as 16s. 6d. a year. To-day boots alone cost more than this in repairs, not counting the first cost. For children, of course, they are unrivalled, as the life of the alpagata almost fits the growth of the infant, which is spared the torture one remembers in childhood of boots which were too good to throw away and yet too small to wear with ease. But to taste the full romantic flavour of the alpagata, it should have been bought in the true alpagata shop. If you are in Spain don't go to the boot-shop. It does sell alpagatas, but it ought not to do so. In Spain the boot-seller should be classed with the jeweller. He sells ornaments. The boot merchant who sells alpagatas in Spain is as bad as the jeweller here who sells umbrellas. Go to the shop which sells things for the road, for that picturesque, coloured, moving life of Spain. The doorway of this fascinating shop is piled up with bales of a rough cloth of an exquisite hyacinthine blue, or of a strange yellow, which is seen to perfection only in the alpagata shop or in El Greco's pictures. This cloth is used for lining horse-collars and saddles. Above these beautiful bales are collars of white leather, heavy with small cone-shaped bells of copper, for the goats, larger collars of brown leather, either with small bells in rows, like a lady's pearl collar, or with one large bell pendant, for the oxen. Within are large coronet-shaped semicircles of leather and coloured woolwork, red, yellow, black, white, for the oxen's foreheads, long ribbons of coloured woolwork for the donkeys' harness, and fringes of brightly coloured wool netting, ending in tassels, like that which decorated the under edge of our grandmothers' sofas, to hang across the donkey's chest or down his nose. Muzzles for goats and for donkeys are here too. There is harness also in the shop, Gargantuan-looking harness studded with nails, so broad in its facets of leather that when the horse has his face inside it he looks not unlike an ancient knight in his armour. Only his eyes and his mouth are visible, and often indeed not the latter, for it may be guarded by a piece of leather work not unlike the tongue of a brogue shoe.
Talking of shoes brings us back to the alpagata. A man will be working at a table like a butcher's block. Deftly he cuts the rope, bending it around an iron peg into the shape of the sole, then with a long awl he pierces it through and through, sewing it with great rapidity, and almost hey presto! as it were, a pair of soles are finished. Women who sit almost on the edge of the street, chattering and gossiping—often with the passers-by—are making the uppers of stout canvas. They spring from work to serve you with a gracious kindliness, and seeing that you are English they probably with the same gracious kindliness clap an extra fifty centimos on to the price. If only we had such an alpagata shop in London what a rush there would be to purchase.
Your old alpagatas you leave behind you. What happens to them is to us a mystery. Old boots are the nuisance of the London dust heaps, the terror of the errant mongrel. Yorick, who, Sam Weller assures us, is the only person who has ever seen a dead donkey, may also in his travels have seen an extinct alpagata, but his "Sentimental Journey" is unfinished and we shall never know