I have often wondered whether Spanish women are stupid because they are kept in such seclusion or whether they are secluded because they are stupid. It is hard to separate the cause from the effect. But certainly the Spanish beauty of song and story is rarer than rubies today; while the animation that gives charm even to an ugly French or American woman is utterly lacking in the Española’s heavy, rather sensual features. I am inclined to think, from the fact that it is saliently a man’s country, she is as he has made her, or allowed her to become. And when you remember that her highest enjoyment is to drive through the rough-paved streets, hour after hour, that she may see and be seen; when you consider that the rest of her day is spent in a cheerless house without a book or a magazine, or any occupation but menial household drudgery, you pity rather than condemn the profound ignorance of the average Spanish woman.
Married at sixteen, the mother of four or five children by the time she is twenty-five, she grows old before her time even as a Latin woman. While by men she is disregarded and treated with a rudeness and lack of respect revolting to the Anglo-Saxon. Her husband precedes her into and out of the room, leaves her the less comfortable seat, blows smoke in her face, and expectorates in her presence; all as a matter of course, which she accepts in the same spirit. Her raison d’être is as a female; nothing more. What wonder that the brain she has is expended in gossip and intrigue and that her husband openly admits he cannot trust her out of his sight?
Like the Eastern women she resembles, she is superstitiously devout; as, indeed, the men are, too, when they remember to be. All the morning, weekdays as well as Sunday, the churches are full; one mass succeeds another. It is a favourite habit of the younger men to wait outside the fashionable churches until the girls and their duenas come out, and then to remark quite audibly on the charms of the former. The compliments are of the most bare-faced variety, but are affably received; even sometimes returned by a discreet retort sotto voce. The blades call the custom “throwing flowers”; and the bolder of the maidens are apt to fling back over their shoulder, “thanks for the flower!”
One can always see this little comedy outside the well-known church of San Isidro—patron saint of Madrid—which, with the more important clubs and public buildings, is in the Street of the Alcalà. The Alcalà connects the Puerta del Sol with the famous promenades of the Prado and the Castellana, which are joined together by an imposing plaza with a fountain, and extend as far as the park of the Retiro.
Spaniards are firmly convinced that the Castellana is finer than the Champs Elysées; but it is, in reality, a rather stupid avenue—broad, and with plenty of trees in pots of water, yet quite flat, and lacking the quaint guignols and smart restaurants that give color to the French promenade. Galician nursemaids, with their enormous earrings, congregate round the ice-cream booths, while their overdressed charges play “bullfight” or “circus” in the allées nearby.
But the Castellana is an empty stretch of sand, for the most part, until half-past six in the evening, when it becomes for an hour or two the liveliest quarter of the city. The mansions on either side of the street open their gates, carriages roll forth, señoras in costumes of French cut but startling hue are bowled into the central driveway, señors in equally impressive garments appear on horseback, and the “paseo”—the event of the day—has begun.
Strangers who have not been asked to dine with their Spanish friends because the latter cannot afford a cook will be repeatedly taken to drive in a luxurious equipage with two men on the box and a pair of high-stepping bays. For a Spanish family will scrimp and save, and sometimes actually half starve, in order to maintain its place in the daily procession on the Castellana. This is true of all classes, from the impoverished aristocracy to the struggling bourgeoisie; and is so much a racial characteristic that the same holds in Manila, Havana, and many of the South American cities. What his house is to the Englishman, his trip to Europe to the American, his carriage is to the Spaniard. With this hallmark of social solvency he can hold up his head with the proudest; without it he is an outcast.
The Madrileños tell among themselves of certain ladies who afford the essential victoria by dressing fashionably from the waist up only. A carriage rug covers the other and well-worn part of their apparel. This is consistent with stories of economy carried into the smallest item of the household expenses—such as cooking without salt or pepper, and foregoing a tablecloth—in order that the family name may appear among the box-holders at the opera. Spanish people look upon these sacrifices, when they know them, as altogether admirable; from peasant to grandee, they are forever aiding and abetting each other at that most pitiful of all games: keeping up appearances. But, however petty the apparent motive, there is a certain tragic courage behind it; the desperate, final courage of the grand artiste, refusing to admit that his day is dead. And under all his burdens, all his bitter poverty, silent, uncomplaining.
Seen in this light, that stately queue of carriages on the Castellana takes on something more than its mere superficial significance—which is to show oneself, and further to show one’s daughters. Officers and civilians walk up and down, on either side of the driveway, or canter along near the carriages, with one object: to stare at the young girls. Far from being snubbed, their interest is welcomed with complaisance, and many and many a marriage is arranged from one of these encounters on the Castellana.
The young man notices the same girl for two or three days, then asks to be presented to her; the heads of the two families confer, finances are frankly discussed, and, if everything is found satisfactory, the courtship is allowed to proceed. Parents are generally easy to satisfy, too, being in frantic haste to marry off their daughters. The old maid and the bachelor girl are unknown quantities in Spain, and an officer with a salary of five pounds a month is eagerly snapped up as an excellent catch.