Gatherings from Spain

by Richard Ford

Akin to the posada is the “parador,” a word probably derived from Waradah, Arabicè, “a halting-place;” it is a huge caravansary for the reception of waggons, carts, and beasts of burden; these large establishments are often placed outside the town to avoid the heavy duties and vexatious examinations at the gates, where dues on all articles of consumption are levied both for municipal and government purposes. They are the old sisa, a word derived from the Hebrew Sisah, to take a sixth part, and are now called el derecho de puertas, the gate-due; and have always been as unpopular as the similar octroi of France; and as they are generally farmed out, they are exacted from the peasantry with great severity and incivility. There is perhaps no single grievance among the many, in the mistaken system of Spanish political and fiscal economy, which tends to create and keep alive, by its daily retail worry and often wholesale injustice, so great a feeling of discontent and ill-will towards authority as this does; it obstructs both commerce and travellers. The officers are, however, seldom either strict or uncivil to the higher classes, and if courteously addressed by the stranger, and told that he is an English gentleman, the official Cerberi open the gates and let him pass unmolested, and still more if quieted by the Virgilian sop of a bribe. The laws in Spain are indeed strict on paper, but those who administer them, whenever it suits their private interest, that is ninety-nine times out of a hundred, evade and defeat them; they obey the letter, but do not perform the spirit, “se obedece, pero no se cumple;” indeed, the lower classes of officials in particular are so inadequately paid that they are compelled to eke out a livelihood by taking bribes and little presents, which, as Backshish in the East, may always be offered, and will always be accepted, as a matter of compliment. The idea of a bribe must be concealed; it shocks their dignity, their sense of honour, their “pundonor:” if, however, the money be given to the head person as something for his people to drink, the delicate attention is sacked by the chief, properly appreciated, and works its due effect.

THE VENTA.

THE VENTA.

Another term, almost equivalent to the “posada,” is the “meson,” which is rather applicable to the inns of the rural and smaller towns, to the “hosterias,” than to those of the greater. The “mesonero,” like the Spanish “ventera,” has a bad reputation. It is always as well to stipulate something about prices beforehand. The proverb says, “Por un ladron, pierden ciento en el meson”—“Ventera hermosa, mal para la bolsa.” “For every one who is robbed on the road, a hundred are in the inn.”—“The fairer the hostess, the fouler the reckoning.” It is among these innkeepers that the real and worst robbers of Spain are to be met with, since these classes of worthies are everywhere only thinking how much they can with decency overcharge in their bills. This is but fair, for nobody would be an innkeeper if it were not for the profit. The trade of inn-keeping is among those which are considered derogatory in Spain, where so many Hindoo notions of caste, self-respect, purity of blood, etc., exist. The harbouring strangers for gain is opposed to every ancient and Oriental law of sacred hospitality. Now no Spaniard, if he can help it, likes to degrade himself; this accounts for the number of fondas in towns being kept by Frenchmen, Italians, Catalans, Biscayans, who are all foreigners in the eye of the Castilian, and disliked and held cheap; accordingly the inn-keeper in Don Quixote protests that he is a Christian, although a ventero, nay, a genuine old one—Cristiano viejo rancio; an old Christian being the common term used to distinguish the genuine stock from those renegade Jews and Moors who, rather than leave Spain, became pseudo-Christians and publicans.

The country Parador, Meson, Posada, and Venta, call it how you will, is the Roman stabulum, whose original intention was the housing of cattle, while the accommodation of travellers was secondary, and so it is in Spain to this day. The accommodation for the beast is excellent; cool roomy stables, ample mangers, a never-failing supply of fodder and water, every comfort and luxury which the animal is capable of enjoying, is ready on the spot; as regards man, it is just the reverse; he must forage abroad for anything he may want. Only a small part of the barn is allotted him, and then he is lodged among the brutes below, or among the trusses and sacks of their food in the lofts above. He finds, in spite of all this, that if he asks the owner what he has got, he will be told that “there is everything,” hay de todo, just as the rogue of a ventero informed Sancho Panza, that his empty larder contained all the birds of the air, all the beasts of the earth, all the fishes of the sea,—a Spanish magnificence of promise, which, when reduced to plain English, too often means, as in that case, there is everything that you have brought with you. This especially occurs in the ventas of the out-of-the-way and rarely-visited districts, which, however empty their larders, are full of the spirit of Don Quixote to the brim; and the everyday occurrences in them are so strange, and one’s life is so dramatic, that there is much difficulty in “realising,” as the Americans say; all is so like being in a dream or at a play, that one scarcely can believe it to be actually taking place, and true. The man of the note-book and the artist almost forget that there is nothing to eat; meanwhile all this food for the mind and portfolio, all this local colour and oddness, is lost upon your Spanish companion, if he be one of the better classes: he is ashamed, where you are enchanted; he blushes at the sad want of civilization, clean table-cloth, and beefsteaks, and perhaps he is right: at all events, while you are raving about the Goths, Moors, and this lifting up the curtain of two thousand years ago, he is thinking of Mivart’s; and when you quote Martial, he and the ventero set you down as talking nonsense, and stark staring mad; nay, a Spanish gentleman is often affronted, and suspects, from the impossibility to him, that such things can be objects of real admiration, that you are laughing at him in your sleeve, and considering his country as Roman, African, or in a word, as un-European, which is what he particularly dislikes and resents.

These ventas have from time immemorial been the subject of jests and pleasantries to Spanish and foreign wits. Quevedo and Cervantes indulge in endless diatribes against the roguery of the masters, and the misery of the accommodations, while Gongora compares them to Noah’s ark; and in truth they do contain a variety of animals, from the big to the small, and more than a pair, of more than one kind of the latter. The word venta is derived from the Latin vendendo, on the lucus a non lucendo principle of etymology, because provisions are not sold in it to travellers: old Covarrubias explains this mode of dealing as consisting “especially in selling a cat for a hare,” which indeed was and is so usual a venta practice, that venderlo á uno gato por liebre has become in common Spanish parlance to be equivalent to doing or taking one in. The natives do not dislike the feline tribe when well stewed: no cat was safe in the Alhambra, the galley-slaves bagged her in a second. This venta trait of Iberian gastronomy did not escape the compiler of Gil Blas.

RECEPTION AT THE VENTA.

Be that as it may, a venta, strictly speaking, is an isolated country inn, or house of reception on the road, and, if it be not one of physical entertainment, it is at least one of moral, and accordingly figures in prominent characters in all the personal narratives and travels in Spain; it sharpens the wit of both hungry cooks and lively authors, and ingenii largitor venter is as old as Juvenal. Many of these ventas have been built on a large scale by the noblemen or convent brethren to whom the village or adjoining territory belonged, and some have at a distance quite the air of a gentleman’s mansion. Their walls, towers, and often elegant elevations glitter in the sun, gay and promising, while all within is dark, dirty, and dilapidated, and no better than a whitened sepulchre. The ground floor is a sort of common room for men and beasts; the portion appropriated to the stables is often arched over, and is very imperfectly lighted to keep it cool, so that even by day the eye has some difficulty at first in making out the details. The ranges of mangers are fixed round the walls, and the harness of the different animals suspended on the pillars which support the arches; a wide door, always open to the road, leads into this great stable; a small space in the interior is generally left unincumbered, into which the traveller enters on foot or on horseback; no one greets him; no obsequious landlord, bustling waiter, or simpering chambermaid takes any notice of his arrival: the ventero sits in the sun smoking, while his wife continues her uninterrupted chasse for “small deer” in the thick covers of her daughters’ hair; nor does the guest pay much attention to them; he proceeds to a gibbous water-jar, which is always set up in a visible place, dips in with the ladle, or takes from the shelf in the wall an alcarraza of cold water; refreshes his baked clay, refills it, and replaces it in its hole on the taller, which resembles the decanter stands in a butler’s pantry: he then proceeds, unaided by ostler or boots, to select a stall for his beast,—unsaddles and unloads, and in due time applies to the ventero for fodder; the difference of whose cool reception contrasts with the eager welcome which awaits the traveller at bedtime: his arrival is a godsend to the creeping tribe, who, like the ventero, have no regular larder; it is not upstairs that he eats, but where he is eaten like Polonius; the walls are frequently stained with the marks of nocturnal combats, of those internecine, truly Spanish guerrillas, which are waged without an Elliot treaty, against enemies who, if not exterminated, murder sleep. Were these fleas and French ladybirds unanimous, they would eat up a Goliath; but fortunately, like other Spaniards, they never act together, and are consequently conquered and slaughtered in detail; hence the proverbial expression for great mortality among men, mueren como chinches.

ARRANGEMENT OF THE VENTA.

Having first provided for the wants and comforts of his beast, for “the master’s eye fattens the horse,” the traveller begins to think of himself. One, and the greater side of the building, is destined to the cattle, the other to their owners. Immediately opposite the public entrance is the staircase that leads to the upper part of the building, which is dedicated to the lodgment of fodder, fowls, vermin, and the better class of travellers. The arrangement of the larger class of posadas and ventas is laid out on the plan of a convent, and is well calculated to lodge the greatest number of inmates in the smallest space. The ingress and egress are facilitated by a long corridor, into which the doors of the separate rooms open; these are called “cuartos,” whence our word “quarters” may be derived. There is seldom any furniture in them; whatever is wanted, is or is not to be had of the host from some lock-up store. A rigid puritan will be much distressed for the lack of any artificial contrivance to hold water; the best toilette on these occasions is a river’s bank, but rivers in unvisited interiors of the Castiles are often rarer even than water-basins. It is, however, no use to draw nets in streams where there are no fish, nor to expect to find conveniences which no one else ever asks for, and those articles which seem to the foreigner to be of the commonest and daily necessity, are unknown to the natives. However, as there are no carpets to be spoiled, and cold water retains its properties although brought up in a horse-bucket or in the cook’s brass cauldron, ablutions, as the albums express it, can be performed. What a school, after all, a venta is to the slaves of comforts, and without how many absolute essentials do they manage to get on, and happily! What lessons are taught of good-humoured patience, and that British sailor characteristic of making the best of every occurrence, and deeming any port a good one in a storm! Complaint is of no use; if you tell the landlord that his wine is more sour than his vinegar, he will gravely reply, “Señor, that cannot be, for both came out of the same cask.”