Poor Folk in Spain

by Jan Gordon; Cora Gordon

One had almost a specimen of Spain in little in this one village. The vermilion houses, called the Malecon, sheltered a transitory population; visitors to the baths, who like ourselves arrived in carts with furniture, and after a few months disappeared back to town duties. These were usually of the superior artisan or small shopkeeping class. The second row of houses contained persons such as Don Ferdinand, the little Señor or the people who kept the baths. These represented the larger tradesmen and in general lived all the year in Verdolay, travelling to Murcia by tartana or by tram via Palmar. The two roads which swept up each side of the hill were edged with small cottages where the real peasantry lived, and the houses which stood amongst gardens on the hill terraces, each owning its proper entrance, were the residences of the merchantry. The Count of El Valle represented the county aristocracy and the ex-Prime Minister the Court.

In spite of a somewhat evil local reputation, the peasantry could be counted as a quiet, hard-working, rather unintelligent, good-natured community which leaned vaguely, on the male side, to liberalism and atheism, but lacking the courage or determination to make either effective. It cursed the Court and told dirty stories about the priesthood, but all exasperation evaporated in words. This peasantry is the foundation on which the whole of this plutocratical hill of Verdolay rests; and it labours as severely as any other peasantry, perhaps even working harder because of the lack of water, which adds a need to be satisfied before work is over. The average traveller has the idea that the Spaniard is lazy. We are not sure that this is a correct estimate of him. We English have made a god of "Work." But indeed unnecessary work is mere foolishness. The great blessing to be sought for is leisure. Human advance comes from the reflections of leisure rather than from the activities of work. The Spaniard recognizes leisure as the benefit which it is. He has no false ideas about work. Adam bit the apple, and we pay his debts, but why load ourselves with compound interest at many hundreds per cent.? That is the Spaniard's point of view. He works when he must work. He rises with the dawn or before it, say four a.m., he works till eleven o'clock, then in the afternoon resumes toil from 3.30 till 6.30. The late-rising traveller who mouches about in his English custom during the hottest hours of the day sees the Spanish labourer at his siesta, snoozing by the roadside, or thrumming his guitar to a herd of sleepy goats. He draws a natural, though incorrect, conclusion.

The Spaniard may be dilatory. He puts off doing to-day what he can do to-morrow, but it is from an exaggerated respect for the benefits of leisure. His handicap is that he has no proper means of filling that leisure, his apparent laziness comes from lack of education. About eighty per cent. cannot read, schooling is not enforced, and children begin work at ten years of age or thereabouts. But do not lay up the Spaniard's desire for inactivity as a crime; it is a virtue ill employed.

Our particular specimen of the Spanish peasant was my female servant, named Encarnacion. She was thirteen years old, could neither read nor write, and worked like a small mule for the not extravagant wage of eleven shillings and sixpence a month. She only worked half the day, it is true, but we did not give her food. We indeed overpaid her, for the regular wage of her kind was about eight shillings and fourpence a month. She had a small, stumpy child's body, sprouting into a long neck, at the top of which was a rounded head. Her forehead was intellectual, her features flattened, and her hair, done up tight into a small ball, was usually decorated with a flower or a green leaf.

At first, like all Spanish peasants, she made up her mind that she could not understand what I said, but gradually learned that she had to do so, and in general succeeded pretty well. But it was to her a tremendous intellectual effort. She would wrinkle her noble-looking brow with the strain, and was never satisfied until she had translated my orders into her own patois for clarity. But she would not allow her fundamental ideas of what was proper to be influenced by my foreign notions. Sometimes she would interrupt me.

"No, Señora," she would say, "I do not like it done thus. That is not the custom. It must be done so."

If one insisted upon one's own way, the work was ill done. So that, as a rule, to save trouble, one allowed her to do as she wished. Encarnacion worked all the morning, singing an interminable Spanish song, which struck our ears queerly and pleasantly at the beginning, but of which in the end we grew very tired. By eleven o'clock she would have done all the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and would leave the stone floors soaked in water, the evaporation of which did a little to counteract the intense heat. She had a habit which we did not like of scattering our household refuse all over the small square yard. It looked dirty and untidy, but we found out that she knew better than we did. The vagrant cats soon cleared up any remains of meat, while the hot sun dried up all the other refuse, which could then be thrown away conveniently.

Encarnacion was sad that she could neither read nor write, and was proudly jealous of her younger sister, who, working in the milk factory, was being taught to spell.