He made me a cigarette. The men were delighted and Mrs. Coneni was amazed. Coneni stood behind me with a lean hand on his hip, as if to say: "Alone I did it."
Beneath the reed shelter some of the children were lying asleep, and the youngest of all, a baby, was sitting by itself in a corner, stark naked, playing with a large lemon. The exquisite colour contrast between the transparency of skin of the sunburnt child and the hard yellow brilliance of the lemon filled me with a wild desire to paint it. Indeed, one does not come to appreciate the full beauty of the nude until one has seen it in a country where it is natural. In Spain the children, usually half nude, sprawled about in the heat in the most graceful of relaxed poses, sometimes lying half asleep across their mothers' laps, and a continual impulse was driving me to make studies of them. But the task is almost impossible. The fact of being sketched is too unusual. The people, naturally unselfconscious, at once become stiff and formal.
Within Coneni's hut was no furniture other than a four-post bed which almost filled the floor space. Here slept Coneni and his wife, and the space beneath the bed was used as a storehouse for melons. The children, three girls and four boys, all slept on the ground in the open beneath the shelter. But Mrs. Coneni explained to me with some care that the poverty was only apparent; that this was but their summer residence. For the winter they had a fine house in Alverca.
We did not have any very keen impulse to paint—it had become for that afternoon rather too much of a ceremony, like the old State painter performing before the Court—but to save our faces we had to do something, so Jan painted a portrait of a calf, while I selected a lemon tree. Before I had half finished, the interior of the tree was swarming with Coneni's children, hoping that they would be included. By my side sat Coneni's little girl nursing a bantam, like a doll, assuring it that mother wouldn't love it if it were not more quiet.
"And the Señor plays the guitar," exclaimed Coneni. "He is affectionate to music."
We discussed Spanish music and dancing. Coneni, bursting with hospitality, said:
"Come again next Sunday. I will invite the young men and the girls and we will have a party. There are guitar and lute players at Alverca. They will all come."
Antonio's brother-in-law, Thomas, had spoken of the gay times when there is a party in the huertas; we accepted eagerly.