Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

"And where have you been to get so nicely rested?"

"To a duelo."

I turned the word over in my mind. Duelo? Surely that must mean the mourning at a house of death, when the men have gone forth to church and the burial, and the women remain behind to weep together, or one of those tearful At Homes kept, day after day, until the mass, by the ladies of the afflicted household for their condoling friends. But such a smiling little señora! I hardly knew what degree of sympathy befitted the occasion.

"Were you acquainted with the—the person?"

"No, I had never seen him. He had been an officer in the Philippines many years, and came home very ill, fifteen days since. I wept because I knew his mother, but I wept much. Women, at least here in Spain, have always cause enough for tears. I thought of my own matters, and had a long, long cry. That is why I feel better. There is so little time to cry at home. I must see about the dinner now."

And she rustled out again, leaving me to meditate on Spanish originality, even in grief.

In any country the usages of death are no less significant than the usages of life. That grim necropolis of Glasgow, with its few shy gowans under its lowering sky, those tender, turf-folded, church-shadowed graveyards of rural England, those trains of mourners, men by themselves and women by themselves, walking behind the bier in mid-street through the mud and rain of wintry Paris to the bedizened Père Lachaise or Montparnasse—such sights interpret a nation as truly as its art and history; but the burial customs of Spain, especially distinctive, are, like most things Spanish, contradictory and baffling to the tourist view. "La Tierra de Vice Versa" is not a country that he who runs may read.

The popular verses and maxims treat of death with due Castilian solemnity and an always unflinching, if often ironic, recognition of the mortal fact. "When the house is finished," says the proverb, "the hearse is at the door." Yet this Spanish hearse is one of the gayest vehicles since Cinderella's coach. If the groundwork is black, there is abundant relief in mountings of brilliant yellow, but the funeral carriage is often cream-white, flourished over with fantastic designs in the bluest of blue or the pinkest of pink. Coffins, too, may be gaudy as candy-boxes. The first coffin we saw in Spain was bright lilac, a baby's casket, placed on gilt trestles in the centre of a great chill church, with chanting priests sprinkling holy water about it to frighten off the demons, and a crowd of black-bearded men waiting to follow it to the grave. Such a little coffin and not a woman near! The poor mother was decently at home, weeping in the midst of a circle of relatives and neighbors, and counting it among her comforts that the family had so many masculine friends to walk in the funeral procession and show sympathy with the household grief. There would be, on the ninth day after and, for several years to come, on the anniversary of the death, as many masses as could be afforded said in the parish church, when, again, the friends would make it a point of duty to attend.

The daily papers abound in these notices, printed in a variety of types, so as to cover from two to ten square inches, heavily bordered with black, and surmounted, in case of adults, with crosses, and with cherubs' heads for children. I take up a copy of La Epocha and read the following, under a cross: "Third Anniversary. Señorita Doña Francisca Fulana y Tal died the twenty-sixth of June, 1896, at twenty-one years of age. R. I. P. Her disconsolate mother and the rest of the family ask their friends and all pious persons to be so good as to commend her to God. All the masses celebrated to-morrow morning in the Church of San Pascual will be applied to the everlasting rest of the soul of the said señorita. Indulgences are granted in the usual form." It is the third anniversary, too, of a titled lady, whose "husband, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, uncles, cousins, and all who inherit under her will" have ordered masses in two churches for the entire day to-morrow, and announce, moreover, that the ecclesiastical authorities grant "one hundred and forty days of indulgence to all the faithful for each mass that they hear, sacred communion that they devote, or portion of a rosary that they pray for the soul of this most noble lady."

In the case of another lady of high degree, who died yesterday, "having received the Blessed Sacraments and the benediction of his Holiness," the Nuncio concedes one hundred days of indulgence, the Archbishop of Burgos eighty, and the Bishops of Madrid, Alcalá, Cartagena, Leon, and Santander forty each; while a marquis who died a year ago, "Knight of the Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece," is to have masses said for his soul in seven churches, not only all through to-morrow, but for the two days following.