“Oh!” replies Marcos, “it is a family trait, as you must know. Our father, our grandfather were extemporary composers who were heard with pleasure in all the festivals of the Basque country, and our mother also was the daughter of a grand improvisator of the village of Lesaca. And then, every evening in taking back the oxen or in milking the cows, we practice, or at the fireside on winter nights. Yes, every evening, we make compositions in this way on subjects which one of us imagines, and it is our greatest pleasure—”
But when Florentino's turn to sing comes he, knowing only the old refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it the day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going down into a sad and closed valley, toward a solitary farm—and suddenly the unexplained anguish returns to him, the one which he had before; the fear of living and of passing thus always in these same villages, under the oppression of these same mountains; the notion and the confused desire for other places; the anxiety for unknown distances—His eyes, become lifeless and fixed, look inwardly; for several strange minutes he feels that he is an exile, from what country he does not know, disinherited, of what he does not know, sad in the depths of his soul; between him and the men who surround him have come suddenly irreducible, hereditary barriers—
Three o'clock. It is the hour when vespers, the last office of the day, comes to an end; the hour when leave the church, in a meditation grave as that of the morning, all the mantillas of black cloth concealing the beautiful hair of the girls and the form of their waists, all the woolen caps similarly lowered on the shaven faces of men, on their eyes piercing or somber, still plunged in the old time dreams.
It is the hour when the games are to begin, the dances, the pelota and the fandango. All this is traditional and immutable.
The light of the day becomes more golden, one feels the approach of night. The church, suddenly empty, forgotten, where persists the odor of incense, becomes full of silence, and the old gold of the background shines mysteriously in the midst of more shade; silence also is scattered around on the tranquil enclosure of the dead, where the folks this time passed without stopping, in their haste to go elsewhere.
On the square of the ball-game, people are beginning to arrive from everywhere, from the village itself and from the neighboring hamlets, from the huts of the shepherds or of the smugglers who perch above, on the harsh mountains. Hundreds of Basque caps, all similar, are now reunited, ready to judge the players, to applaud or to murmur; they discuss the chances, comment upon the relative strength of the players and make big bets of money. And young girls, young women gather also, having nothing of the awkwardness of the peasants in other provinces of France, elegant, refined, graceful in costumes of the new fashions; some wearing on their hair the silk kerchief, rolled and arranged like a small cap; others bareheaded, their hair dressed in the most modern manner; most of them pretty, with admirable eyes and very long eyebrows—This square, always solemn and ordinarily somewhat sad, is filled to-day, Sunday, with a lively and gay crowd.
The most insignificant hamlet in the Basque country has a square for the ball-game, large, carefully kept, in general near the church, under oaks.
But here, this is a central point and something like the Conservatory of French ball-players, of those who become celebrated, in South America as well as in the Pyrenees, and who, in the great international games, oppose the champions of Spain. So the place is particularly beautiful and pompous, surprising in so distant a village. It is paved with large stones, between which grass grows expressing its antiquity and giving to it an air of being abandoned. On the two sides are extended, for the spectators, long benches—made of the red granite of the neighboring mountain and, at this moment, all overgrown with autumn scabwort.
And in the back, the old monumental wall rises, against which the balls will strike. It has a rounded front which seems to be the silhouette of a dome and bears this inscription, half effaced by time: “Blaidka haritzea debakatua.” (The blaid game is forbidden.)
Still, the day's game is to be the blaid; but the venerable inscription dates from the time of the splendor of the national game, degenerated at present, as all things degenerate. It had been placed there to preserve the tradition of the “rebot”, a more difficult game, exacting more agility and strength, and which has been perpetuated only in the Spanish province of Guipuzcoa.