Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the Peninsula—part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the Berbers—the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent of Ideas—Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew—and bent to the tragic fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque quite simply kept on being himself.

His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no word for God, no word for spirit. This is a people rooted to the earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.[27] Not alone had the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none for animal. There is a Basque word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none for tree. A most excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business, there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance the bland aurrescu.

The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay—blue as a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.

The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves. They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual exercise—not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense into the already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....

Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men—one with a drum, two with dulsínya or chistu (a shrill metallic pipe which bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)—march through the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town, incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are wider. The tune of the chistu interweaves with the plang of drum, and makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.

. . . . . .

The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour of cena. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat. The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have a full firmness—like her breasts—that bespeaks valiance in emotion.

The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse, their arms rise and fall.

These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them without accompaniment. Many have sad themes. But even as tragedy invades the brightest fado of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people. It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music stranger to that of Spain—to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of Spain.

It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque remains one. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song—trilling, skipping, flashing in color and light—is a music of intimations, rather than of experience.