Take a case in point. We remember calling on a Spaniard who held the highest office in a chief city of Andalucia. As we came into his cabinet a cloaked personage was going out; the great man’s table was covered with gold ounces, which he was shovelling complacently into a drawer, gloating on the glorious haul. “Many ounces, Excellency,” said we. “Yes, my friend,” was his reply—“no quiero comer mas patatas,—I do not intend to dine any more on potatoes.” This gentleman, during the Sistema, or Riego constitution, had, with other loyalists, been turned out of office; and, having been put to the greatest hardships, was losing no time in taking prudent and laudable precautions to avert any similar calamity for the future. His practices were perfectly well known in the town, where people simply observed, “Está atesorando, he is laying up treasures,”—as every one of them would most certainly have done, had they been in his fortunate position. Rich and honest Britons, therefore, should not judge too hardly of the sad shifts, the strange bed-fellows, with which want makes the less provided Spaniards acquainted. Donde no hay abundancia, no hay observancia. The empty sack cannot stand upright, nor was ever a sack made in Spain into which gain and honour could be stowed away together; honra y provecho, no caben en un saco o techo; here virtue itself succumbs to poverty, induced by more than half a century of mis-government, let alone the ruin caused by Buonaparte’s invasion, to which domestic troubles and civil wars have been added.
A QUESTION OF DAYS.
To return, however, to sight-seeing in Spain. Lucky was the traveller prepared even to bribe and pay, who ever in our time chanced to fall in with a librarian who knew what books he had, or with a priest who could tell what pictures were in his chapel; ask him for the painting by Murillo—a shoulder-shrug was his reply, or a curt “no hay,” “there is none;” had you inquired for the “blessed Saint Thomas,” then he might have pointed it out; the subject, not the artist, being all that was required for the service of the church. An incurious bliss of ignorance is no less grateful to the Spanish mind, than the dolce far niente or sweet indolent doing nothing is to the body. All that gives trouble, or “fashes,” destroys the supreme height of felicity, which consists in avoiding exertion. A chapter might be filled with instances, which, had they not occurred to our humble selves, would seem caricature inventions. The not to be able to answer the commonest question, or to give any information as to matters of the most ordinary daily occurrence, is so prevalent, that we at first thought it must proceed from some fear of committal, some remnant of inquisitorial engendered reserve, rather than from bonâ fide careless and contented ignorance. The result, however, of much intercourse and experience arrived at, was, that few people are more communicative than the lower classes of Spaniards, especially to an Englishman, to whom they reveal private and family secrets: their want of knowledge applies rather to things than to persons.
UNCERTAINTY OF SPANISH THINGS.
If you called on a Spanish gentleman, and, finding him out, wished afterwards to write him a note, and inquired of his man or maid servant the number of the house;—“I do not know, my lord,” was the invariable answer, “I never was asked it before, I have never looked for it: let us go out and see. Ah! it is number 36.” Wishing once to send a parcel by the wagon from Merida to Madrid, “On what day, my lord,” said I to the potbellied, black-whiskered ventero, “does your galera start for the Court?” “Every Wednesday,” answered he; “and let not your grace be anxious”—“Disparate—nonsense,” exclaimed his copper-skinned, bright-eyed wife, “why do you tell the English knight such lies? the wagon, my lord, sets out on Fridays.” During the logomachy, or the few words which ensued between the well-matched pair, our good luck willed, that the mayoral or driver of the vehicle should come in, who forthwith informed us that the days of departure were Thursdays; and he was right. This occurred in the provinces; take, therefore, a parallel passage in the capital, the heart and brain of the Castiles. “Señor, tenga Usted la bondad—My lord,” said I to a portly, pompous bureaucrat, who booked places in the dilly to Toledo,—“have the goodness, your grace, to secure me one for Monday, the 7th.”—“I fear,” replied he, politely, for the negocio had been prudently opened by my offering him a real Havannah, “that your lordship has made a mistake in the date. Monday is the 8th of the current month”—which it was not. Thinking to settle the matter, we handed to him, with a bow, the almanack of the year, which chanced to be in our pocket-book. “Señor,” said he, gravely, when he had duly examined it, “I knew that I was right; this one was printed at Seville,”—which it was—“and we are here at Madrid, which is otra cosa, that is, altogether another affair.” In this solar difference and pre-eminence of the Court, it must be remembered, that the sun, at its creation, first shone over the neighbouring city, to which the dilly ran; and that even in the last century, it was held to be heresy at Salamanca, to say that it did not move round Spain. In sad truth, it has there stood still longer than in astronomical lectures or metaphors. Spain is no paradise for calculators; here, what ought to happen, and what would happen elsewhere according to Cocker and the doctrine probabilities, is exactly the event which is the least likely to come to pass. One arithmetical fact only can be reckoned upon with tolerable certainty: let given events be represented by numbers; then two and two may at one time make three, or possibly five at another; but the odds are four to one against two and two ever making four; another safe rule in Spanish official numbers; e. g. “five thousand men killed and wounded”—“five thousand dollars will be given,” and so forth, is to deduct two noughts, and sometimes even three, and read fifty or five instead.
CERTAINTY OF BULL-FIGHTS.
Well might even the keen-sighted, practical Duke say it is difficult to understand the Spaniards exactly; there neither men nor women, suns nor clocks go together; there, as in a Dutch concert, all choose their own tune and time, each performer in the orchestra endeavouring to play the first fiddle. All this is so much a matter of course, that the natives, like the Irish, make a joke of petty mistakes, blunders, unpunctualities, inconsequences, and pococurantisms, at which accurate Germans and British men of business are driven frantic. Made up of contradictions, and dwelling in the pays de l’imprévu, where exception is the rule, where accident and the impulse of the moment are the moving powers, the happy-go-lucky natives, especially in their collective capacity, act like women and children. A spark, a trifle, sets the impressionable masses in action, and none can foresee the commonest event; nor does any Spaniard ever attempt to guess beyond la situacion actual, the actual present, or to foretell what the morrow will bring; that he leaves to the foreigner, who does not understand him. Paciencia y barajar is his motto; and he waits patiently to see what next will turn up after another shuffle.
There is one thing, however, which all know exactly, one question which all can answer; and providentially this refers to the grand object of every foreigner’s observation—“When will the bull-fight be and begin?” and this holds good, notwithstanding that there is a proviso inserted in the notices, that it will come off on such a day and hour, “if the weather permits.” Thus, although these spectacles take place in summer, when for months and months rain and clouds are matters of history, the cautious authorities doubt the blessed sun himself, and mistrust the certainty of his proceedings, as much as if they were ir-regulated by a Castilian clockmaker.
THE SPANISH BULL-FIGHT.