Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing? Every church festival is a fiesta, a romería for the Basque. The fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque. The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of strength lead up to the climax—the contests in the arts of song and dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor. But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.

An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the Plaza. Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues in vascuence.[28] His theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body. It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings even to the bull fight.

The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of the chistu are thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.

Agura, contrapas, anarxuma, zaspi, trititzka, soka, aguruku, taladera—numberless Basque dance-figures. What distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic form for the soul. These dances are scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an apple dance, an intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a chair dance, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The Siete Saltos is a stylization of the walk—of men walking together. The music is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject: the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke harvest, they enact sexual passion.

In another part of town there is a match of pelota. This game is originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the frontón: a court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side (the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called pala, or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as cesta, or remonte, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth from the front wall to the side and rear ones. There is something of the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.

Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in red boinas line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the players. They are the cobradores, the bookies: the true principals in what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the petits chevaux of wood at a gaming table.[29]

. . . . . .

These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, where Castile has rooted and worked havoc. Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the king and of the intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has destroyed....

The carrera runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst, coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven.

It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.