Letters from Spain

by Joseph Blanco White

LETTER V.

Seville, —— 1801.

The calamity which has afflicted this town and swept away eighteen thousand of its inhabitants,[24] will more than sufficiently account for my long silence. But, during the interruption of my correspondence, there is a former period for which I owe you a more detailed explanation.

My travels in Spain have hitherto been as limited as is used among my countrymen. The expense, the danger, and the great inconvenience attending a journey, prevent our travelling for pleasure or curiosity. Most of our people spend their whole lives within their province, and few among the females have ever lost sight of the town that gave them birth. I have, however, brought home some of your English restlessness; and, as my dear friend, the young clergyman, whose account of himself is already in your hands, had to visit a very peculiar spot of Andalusia, I joined him most willingly in his excursion, during which I collected a few traits of our national manners, with a view to add one more to my preceding sketches.

My friend’s destination was a town in the mountains or Sierra de Ronda, called Olbera, or Olvera, for we make no difference in the pronunciation of the b and the v. A young man of that town had been elected to a fellowship of this Colegio Mayor, and my friend, who is a member of that body, was the appointed commissioner for collecting the pruebas, or evidence, which, according to the statutes, must be taken at the birth-place of the candidate, concerning the purity of his blood and family connexions. The badness of the roads, in that direction, induced us to make the whole journey on horseback. We were provided with the coarse dress which country gentlemen wear on similar occasions—a short loose jacket and small-clothes of brown serge; thick leather gaiters; a cloak tied up in a roll on the pommel of the saddle; and a stout spencer, ornamented with a kind of patchwork lace, made of pieces of various colours, which is a favourite riding-dress of our Andalusian beaux. Each of us, as well as the servant, whose horse carried our light luggage, was armed with a musket, hanging by a hook, on a ring, which all travelling-saddles are furnished with for that purpose. This manner of travelling is, upon the whole, the most pleasant in Andalusia. Robbers seldom attack people on horseback, provided they take care, as we did, never to pass any wooded ground without separating to the distance of a musket-shot from each other.

My fellow-traveller took this opportunity to pay a visit to some of his acquaintance at Osuna, a town of considerable wealth, with a numerous noblesse, a collegiate church, and a university. At the end of our first days’ journey we stopped at a pretty populous village called El Arahal. The inn, though far from comfortable, in the English sense of the word, was not one of the worst we were doomed to endure in our tour, for travellers were not here obliged to starve if they had not brought their own provisions; and we had a room with a few broken chairs, a deal table and two flock beds, laid upon planks raised from the brick-floor by iron tressels. A dish of ham and eggs afforded us an agreeable and substantial dinner, and a bottle of cheap, but by no means unpleasant wine, made us forget the jog-trot of our day’s journey.

We had just felt the approach of that peculiar kind of ennui which lurks in every corner of an inn, when the sound of a fife and drum, with more of the sporting and mirthful than of the military character, awakened our curiosity. But to ask a question, even at the best Spanish fonda (hotel), you must either exert your lungs, calling the waiter, chambermaid, and landlord, in succession, to multiply the chances of finding one disposed to hear you; or adopt the more quiet method of searching them through the house, beginning at the kitchen. Here, however, we had only to step out of our room and we found ourselves within the cook’s dominions. The best country inns, indeed, consist of a large hall contiguous to the street or road, and paved like the former with round stones. At one end of this hall there is a large hearth, raised about a foot from the ground. A wood-fire is constantly burning upon it, and travellers of all ranks and degrees, who do not prefer moping in their cold, unglazed rooms, are glad to take a seat near it, where they enjoy, gratis, the wit and humour of carriers, coachmen, and clowns, and a close view of the hostess or her maid, dressing successively in the same frying pan, now an omelet of eggs and onions, now a dish of dried fish with oil and love-apples, or it may be the limbs of a tough fowl which but a few moments before had been strutting about the house. The doors of the bed-rooms, as well as that of the stable-yard, all open into the hall. Leaving a sufficient space for carriages and horses to cross from the front door to the stables, the Spanish carriers, or harrieros, who travel in parties of twenty or thirty men and double that number of mules, range themselves at night along the walls, each upon his large packsaddle, with no other covering but a kind of horse-cloth, called manta, which they use on the road to keep them dry and warm in winter.

Into this truly common-hall were we brought by the sound of the drum, and soon learned from one of the loungers who sauntered about it, that a company of strolling-players were in a short time to begin their performance. This was good news indeed for us, who, unwilling to go early to bed with a certainty of not being allowed to sleep, dreaded the close of approaching night. The performance, we were told, was to take place in an open court, where a cow-house, open in front, afforded a convenient situation both for the stage and the dressing-room of the actors. Having each of us paid the amount of a penny and a fraction, we took our seats under a bright starry sky, muffled up in our cloaks, and perfectly unmindful of the danger which might arise from the extreme airiness of the theatre. A horrible screaming fiddle, a grumbling violoncello, and a deafening French-horn, composed the band. The drop-curtain consisted of four counterpanes sewed together; and the scenes, which were red gambroon curtains, hanging loose from a frame, and flapping in the wind, let us into the secrets of the dressing-room, where the actors, unable to afford a different person for every character, multiplied themselves by the assistance of the tailor.

The play was El Diablo Predicador—“The Devil turned Preacher”—one of the numerous dramatic compositions published anonymously during the latter part of the Austrian dynasty. The character of this comedy is so singular, and so much of the public mind may be learned from its popularity all over the country, that I will give you an abstract of the plot.