The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.
It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.
The gitano music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying crescendo that splits, turns back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of the women.
Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight: holds the gitanos together: is their soul. But this softness and spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the gitanos, making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley. We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.
f. Spain Dances
Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish. Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian: like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.
There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make Spain one—to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the rejuvenation.
The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into heaven.) They live—and their stone world lives—in an expectant mood. Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer; blood is the paint of a picture. The pueblo entire is platform for the Dance.
. . . . . .
Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become the Andalusian shawl. The bailarina bows and listens to the music. In her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands a peina of tortoise shell. Most Andalusian—this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a cadence—Andalusian too—whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head. There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic song with a gesture of Castile!