Spanish Highways and Byways
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Toward noon we strolled out into the grand plaza before the west façade and found it a multitudinous jam of expectant merrymakers. Even nuns were peeping down from a leaf-veiled balcony. We seemed to have been precipitated out of the Middle Ages into an exaggerated Fourth of July. All the city bells were pealing, rockets and Roman candles were sputtering, and grotesque fire-balloons, let off from a parapet of the cathedral, flourished bandy legs and "Sagasta noses" in the resigned old faces of the carven images. And then, amid the acclamations of all the small boys in the square, sallied forth the Santiago giants. These wickerwork monsters, eight all told, are supposed to represent worshippers from foreign lands. They go by couples, two being conventional pilgrims with "cockle-shell and sandal shoon"; two apparently Moors, with black complexions, feather crowns, and much barbaric finery; two nondescripts, possibly the French of feudal date; and two, the leaders and prime favorites, regular Punch caricatures of modern English tourists. John Bull is a stout old gentleman with gray side-whiskers, a vast expanse of broadcloth back, and a single eye-glass secured by a lavender ribbon. The British Matron, in a smart Dolly Varden frock, glares with a shocked expression from under flaxen puffs and an ostrich-feathered hat. The popular attitude of mind toward these absurdities is past all finding out. Not the children alone, but the entire assemblage greeted them with affectionate hilarity. The giants, propelled by men who walked inside them and grinned out on the world from a slit in the enormous waistbands, trundled about the square, followed by the antics of a rival group of dwarfs from the city hall, and then made the round of the principal streets, executing clumsy gambols before the public buildings.
On the morning after, July twenty-fifth, the great day of the feast, anniversary of the Apostle's martyrdom, these same overgrown dolls played a prominent part in the solemn cathedral service. The Chapter passed in stately progress to the archbishop's palace to fetch his Eminence, and later to the ancient portals where the silver-workers once displayed their wares, to greet the Royal Delegate. At their head strutted this absurd array of giants. The High Mass was superb with orchestral music and the most sumptuous robes of the vestiary. The "King of Censers," the splendid botafumeiro of fourteenth-century date, made so large, six feet high, with the view of purifying the cathedral air vitiated by the hordes of pilgrims who were wont to pass the night sleeping and praying on the holy pavements, flashed its majestic curves, a mighty fire bird, from roof to floor and from transept to transept. It is swung from the ceiling by an ingenious iron mechanism, and the leaping, roaring flames, as the huge censer sweeps with ever augmenting speed from vault to vault, tracing its path by a chain of perfumed wreaths, make the spectacle uniquely beautiful. Knights of Santiago, their white raiment marked by crimson sword and dagger, received from the Royal Delegate "a thousand crowns of gold," the annual state donation, instituted by Rameiro, to the patron saint. The Delegate, kneeling before the image of Santiago, prayed fervently that the Apostle would accept this offering of the regent, a queen no less devout than the famous mother of San Fernando, and would raise up Alfonso XIII to be another Fernando, winning back for Spain her ocean isles which the heretics had wrested away, even as Fernando restored to Compostela the cathedral doors and bell which the infidel Moors had stolen. His Eminence, who is said to have accumulated a fortune during his previous archbishopric in Cuba, in turn besought St. James to protect Catholic Spain against "those who invoke no right save brute force, and adore no deity except the golden calf." In most magnificent procession the silver casket was borne around the nave among the kneeling multitudes. And then, to crown these august ceremonies, forth trotted our friends, the giants, into the open space before the Capilla Mayor. Here the six subordinate boobies paused, grouping themselves in a ludicrous semicircle, while pompous John Bull and his ever scandalized British Matron went up into the Holy of Holies and danced, to the music of guitars and tambourines, in front of the High Altar.
Every day of that festal week the cathedral services were attended by devout throngs, yet there was something blithe and social, well-nigh domestic, in the atmosphere of the scene even at the most impressive moments. Kneeling groups of peasant women caught the sunshine on their orange kerchiefs and scarlet-broidered shawls. Here a praying father would gather his little boy, sobbing with weariness, up against his breast; there a tired pilgrim woman slumbered in a corner, her broad hat with its cockle-shells lying on her knees. Rows of kneeling figures waited at the wooden confessionals which were thick set along both aisles and ambulatory. Several times we saw a priest asleep in the confessional, those who would pour out their hearts to him kneeling on in humble patience, not venturing to arouse the holy father. Young officers, leaning against the pillars, smiled upon a school of Spanish girls, who, guarded by veiled nuns, knelt far along the transept. Pilgrims, standing outside the door to gather alms, vied with one another in stories of their travels and the marvels they had seen.
But at night, walking in the illuminated alameda, where thousands of Japanese lanterns and colored cups of flame made a fantastic fairyland, or dancing their country dances, singing their country songs, practising their country sports, and gazing with tireless delight at the fireworks in the spacious Plaza de Alfonso Doce, the worshippers gave themselves up to frankest merriment. Through the days, indeed, there was never any lack of noisy jollity. From dawn to dawn again cannon were booming, drums beating, bagpipes skirling, tambourines clattering, songs and cries resounding through the streets. Four patients in the hospital died the year before, we were told, from the direct effects of this continuous uproar. But the thunder height of the fiesta is attained toward midnight on the twenty-fourth, the "Eve of Santiago," when rockets and fire-balloons are supplemented by such elaborate devices as the burning of "capricious trees" and the destruction of a Moorish façade built for the occasion out from the west front of the cathedral. At the first ignition of the powder there come such terrific crashes and reverberating detonations, such leaps and bursts of flame, that the peasant host sways back and the children scream. An Arabic doorway with ornate columns, flanked on either side by a wall of many arches and surmounted by a blood-red cross, dazzles out into overwhelming brilliancy, all in greens and purples, a glowing, scintillating, ever changing vision. Soon it is lustrous white and then, in perishing, sends up a swift succession of giant rockets. The façade itself is a very Alhambra of fret and arabesque. This, too, with thunder bursts reveals itself as a flame-colored, sky-colored, sea-colored miracle, which pales to gleaming silver and, while we read above it the resplendent words "The Patron of Spain," is blown to atoms as a symbol of Santiago's victory over the Moors. This makes an ideal Spanish holiday, but the cost, borne by the city, is heavy, there is distinct and increasing injury to the cathedral fabric, and all this jubilee for archaic victories over the Moslem seems to be mocked by the hard facts of to-day.
The Santiago festivities, of which the half has not been told, closed on Thursday afternoon, July twenty-seventh, with a procession through the streets. We waited a weary while for it before the doors where the old jet-workers used to set their booths, amusing ourselves meantime by watching the house maids drawing water from the fountain in the square below. These sturdy Galicians were armed with long tin tubes which they dextrously applied to the spouting mouths of the fountain griffins, so directing the stream into the straight, iron-bound pails. Not far away the market women covered the flags with red and golden fruit. A saucy beggar-wench, with the blackest eyes in Spain, demanded alms, and when we had yielded up the usual toll of coppers, loudly prayed to Santiago to pardon us for not having given her more on this his holy festival. At last out sallied the band, followed by those inevitable giants, and amid mad ringing of bells and fizzing of invisible rockets, forth from the venerable portals issued standards, crosses, tapers, priests in white and gold, and platformed effigies of pilgrims, saints, and deities. Then came bishops, cardinals, and archbishop, ranks of military bearing tapers, the alcalde and his associates in the city government with antique escort of bedizened mace-bearers, a sparkling statue of St. James on horseback busily beheading his legions of Moors, a bodyguard of all the pilgrims in attendance on his saintship, and finally the Virgen del Pilar, at whose passing all the concourse fell upon their knees. Churches in the line of march had their own images decked and ready, waiting in the colonnaded porches to fall into the procession. The market women and the maids at the fountain threw kisses to the Christ Child, leaning in blue silk frock and white lace tucker against a cross of roses, but the boys waved their caps for St. Michael, debonair that he was with blowing crimson robe, real feather wings fluttering in the breeze, and his gold foot set on the greenest of dragons.
The procession came home by way of the great west doors, opened only this once in the round year. The setting sun, bringing out all the carven beauty of that dark gray façade, glittered on the golden balls and crosses that tip the noble towers, and on the golden staff of St. James and the golden quill of St. John, where the two sons of thunder stand colossal in their lofty niches. A baby, in yellow kerchief and cherry skirt, toddling alone across the centre of the square, pointed with adoring little hand at the mounted image of Santiago, which halted at the foot of the grand stairway, his lifted sword a line of golden light, while the deep-voiced choir chanted his old triumphal hymn. John Bull and the British Matron, stationing themselves on either side as a guard of honor, stared at him with insular contempt. As the chant ceased, St. James chivalrously made way for the Virgen del Pilar, a slender figure of pure gold poised on an azure tabernacle, to mount the steps before him. The bells pealed out to welcome her as she neared the portals, and an ear-splitting explosion of a monster rocket, with a tempest-rain of sparks, announced the instant of her entrance beneath the chiselled arch. Behind her went the penitents, arduously climbing the long stone flights of that quadruple stairway upon their knees. These, too, were but shadows of those mediæval penitents who of old staggered after this procession, bowed under the weight of crosses, or scourging themselves until they fainted in their own trail of blood. Yet it is still strange and touching to see, long after the inner spaces of the cathedral are dim with evening, those kneeling figures making their painful progress about aisles and ambulatory, sobbing as they go, and falling forward on their faces to kiss the pavement that is bruising them.
XXVII
VIGO AND AWAY
Hasta la Vista!
Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, via Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging of Galicia, the blazing heat and the incessant, exhausting warfare against vermin, had begun to tell. That Spanish fever with which so many foreigners make too intimate acquaintance was at our doors, and we found ourselves forced at last to sacrifice enthusiasm to hygiene. The most eccentric train which it was ever my fortune to encounter shunted and switched us across country to Vigo in about the time it would have taken to make the journey donkeyback. Here we tarried for a week or so, gathering strength from the Atlantic breezes, and when, one sunny August day, a stately steamboat called for an hour at Vigo harbor on her way from Buenos Ayres to Southampton, we went up over the side. Our shock of astonishment at the cleanliness around us could not, however, divert our attention long from the receding shores of Spain, toward which one of us, at least, still felt a stubborn longing.
They lay bright in the midday sunshine, those green uplands of Galicia, mysterious with that patient peasant life of which we had caught fleeting, baffling glimpses. Still we seemed to see the brown-legged women washing in the brook and spreading their coarse-spun, gay-bordered garments on the heather; children, with the faces of little Pats and little Biddies, tugging a bleating sheep across the stepping-stones, or boosting an indignant goat over the wall; lean pigs poking their noses out of the low, stone doorways, where babies slept on wisps of hay; girls in cream-colored kerchiefs, starred with gold, bearing loads of fragrant brush or corded fagots on their heads. As the evening should come on, and the sea-breeze stir the tassels of the maize, we knew how the fields would be dotted with impromptu groups of dancers, leaping higher and higher and waving their arms in ever wilder merriment, – a scene pastoral down to the pigs, and poetic up to those gushes of song that delight the listener.
"I went to the meadowDay after day,To gather the blossomsOf April and May,And there was Mercedes,Always there,Sweetest white lilyThat breathes the air.""North-wind, North-wind,Strong as wine!Blow thou, North-wind,Comrade mine!""The Virgin is spreading handkerchiefsOn the rosemary to dry.The little birds are singing,And the brook is running by."The Virgin washes handkerchiefs,And spreads them in the sun,But St. Joseph, out of mischief,Has stolen every one."It was only now and then that we had realized a touch of genuine fellowship with these Galician peasants. I remember a little thirteenth-century church, gray crosses topping its low gray towers, one of which was broken off as if a giant hand had snapped it. In the porch a white-headed woman, in a gold-edged blue kerchief and poppy-red skirt, was holding a dame-school. It took her all the morning session, she told us, to get the fifty faces washed, but in the afternoon the children learned to read and knit and play the choral games. She had ten cents a month for every child, when the parents were able to pay. From a convenient hollow in a pillar of Arabic tradition she proudly drew her library, – a shabby primer and a few loose leaves of a book of devotion. As we talked, the midgets grew so restless and inquisitive that she shook her long rod at them with a mighty show of fierceness, and shooed them out of the porch like so many chickens. Then she went on eagerly with the story of her life, telling how she was married at fifteen, how her husband went "to serve the king" in the second Carlist war, and never came back, and how her only daughter had borne nine children, of whom eight died in babyhood, "angelitos al cielo," having known on earth "only the day and the night." The last and youngest had been very ill with the fever, and the afflicted grandmother had promised that noble Roman maiden, the martyr saint of the little gray church, to go around the edifice seven times upon her knees, if only the child might live. The vow had been heard, as the presence of a thin-faced, wistful tot by the old woman's side attested, but so far only three of the seven circuits had been made. "It tires the knees much." But even with the words she knelt again, kissing the sacred threshold, and began the painful, heavy, shuffling journey around the church, while the baby, with wondering gray eyes, trotted beside her, clinging to the wrinkled hand. When at last, with puffs and groanings, the old dame had reached the carven doorway again, she rose wearily, rubbing her knees.
"A sweet saint!" she said, "but ay de mi! such gravel!"
We ought, of course, to have been impressed in Galicia with its debasing ignorance and superstition, and so, to a certain extent, we were. We went to see a romeria, a pilgrimage to a hilltop shrine, on one of our last afternoons in Vigo, and found a double line of dirty, impudent beggars, stripped half naked, and displaying every sort of hideous deformity, – a line that reached all the way from the carriage-road up the rugged ascent to the crest. We had to run the gantlet, and it was like traversing a demoniac sculpture-gallery made up of human mockeries. We had to push our way, moreover, through scene after scene of vulgar barter in things divine, and when at last the summit was achieved, the shrine of the Virgin seemed robbed of its glory by the ugliness, vice, and misery it overlooked. Spain is mediæval, and the modern age can teach her much. But with all her physical foulness and mental folly, there still dwells in her that mediæval grace for which happier countries may be searched in vain.
Yet Spain is far from unhappy. It is beautiful to see out of what scant allowance of that which we call well-being, may be evolved wisdom and joy, poetry and religion. Wearied as we two bookish travellers were with lectures and libraries, we rejoiced in this wild Galician lore that lives on the lips of the people. The written Spanish literature, like other Spanish arts, is of the richest, nor are its laurels limited to the dates of Cervantes and Calderon. The modern Spanish novel, for instance, as Mr. Howells so generously insists, all but leads the line. But Spain herself is poetry. What does one want of books in presence of her storied, haunted vistas, – warrior-trod Asturian crags, opalescent reaches of Castilian plain, orange-scented gardens of Andalusia? A circle of cultivated Spaniards is one of the most charming groups on earth, but Spaniards altogether innocent of formal education may be walking anthologies of old ballads, spicy quatrains, riddles, proverbs, fables, epigrams. The peasant quotes "Don Quixote" without knowing it; the donkey-boy is as lyric as Romeo; the devout shepherd tells a legend of the Madonna that is half the dream of his own lonely days among the hills. Where Spanish life is most stripped of material prosperity, it seems most to abound in suggestions of romance. This despised Galicia, the province of simpletons, is literary in its own way. The hovel has no bookshelf, but the children's ears drink in the grandmother's croon: —
"On a morning of St. JohnFell a sailor into the sea.'What wilt thou give me, sailor, sailor,If I rescue thee?'"'I will give thee all my ships,All my silver, every gem,All my gold, – yea, wife and daughters,I will give thee them.'"'What care I for masted ships,What care I for gold or gem?Keep thy wife and keep thy daughters,What care I for them?"'On the morning of St. JohnThou art drowning in the sea.Promise me thy soul at dying,And I'll rescue thee.'"'I commend the sea to God,And my body to the sea,And my soul, Sweet Mother Mary,I commit to thee.'"And well it was for this bold mariner that he did not take up the Devil's offer, for everybody knows that those who have signed away their souls to the Devil turn black in the moment of dying, and are borne, black and horrible, to the sepulchre.
In this northwestern corner of Spain are many mountain-songs as well as sea-songs. One of the sweetest tells how the blue-robed Virgin met a young shepherdess upon the hills and was so pleased with the maiden's courtesy that she straightway bore her thence to Paradise, not forgetting, this tender Mary of Bethlehem, to lead the flock safely back to the sheepfold. The love of the Galician peasantry for "Our Lady" blends childlike familiarity with impassioned devotion.
"As I was telling my beads,While the dawn was red,The Virgin came to greet meWith her arms outspread."Her rank in their affections is well suggested by another of the popular coplas.
"In the porch of Bethlehem,Sun, Moon, and Star,The Virgin, St. Joseph,And the Christ Child are."With their saints these Spanish peasants seem almost on a household footing, not afraid of a jest because so sure of the love that underlies it.
"St. John and Mary MagdalenPlayed hide and seek, the pair,Till St. John threw a shoe at her,Because she didn't play fair."Yet there is no lack of fear in this rustic religion. There is many a "shalt not" in the Galician decalogue. One must not try to count the stars, lest he come to have as many wrinkles as the number of stars he has counted. Never rock an empty cradle, for the next baby who sleeps in it will die. So often as you name the Devil in life, so often will he appear to you in the hour of death. If you hear another name him, call quickly, before the Devil has time to arrive, "Jesus is here." It is ill to dance alone, casting your shadow on the wall, because that is dancing with the Devil. But the Prince of Darkness is not the only supernatural being whom Galicians dread. There is a bleating demon who makes fun of them, cloudy giants who stir up thunderstorms, and are afraid only of St. Barbara, witches who cast the evil eye, but most of all the "souls in pain." For oftentimes the dead come back to earth for their purgatorial penance. You must never slam a door, nor close a window roughly, nor kick the smallest pebble from your path, because in door or stone or window may be a suffering soul. To see one is to die within the year. If you would not be haunted by your dead, kiss the shoes which the body wears to the burial.
It is well to go early to bed, for at midnight all manner of evil beings prowl up and down the streets. Who has not heard of that unlucky woman, who, after spinning late and long, stepped to the window for a breath of air exactly at twelve o'clock? Far off across the open country she saw a strange procession of shining candles drawing nearer and nearer, although there were no hands to hold them and no sound of holy song. Straight toward her house came those uncanny lights, moving silently through the meadow mists, and halted beneath her window. Then the foremost one of all begged her to take it in and keep it carefully until the midnight following. Scarcely knowing what she did, she closed her fingers on the cold wax and, blowing out the flame, laid away the taper in a trunk, but when, at daybreak, after a sleepless night, she raised the lid, before her lay a corpse. Aghast, she fled to the priest, who lent her all the relics of the sacristy; but their united power only just availed to save her from the fury of the spirits when they returned at midnight to claim the taper, expecting, moreover, to seize upon the woman and "turn her to fire and ashes."
Sometimes a poor soul is permitted to condense the slow ages of Purgatory into one hour of uttermost torment. Galicians tell how a young priest brought his serving-maid to sorrow and how, to escape the latter burning, she shut herself, one day when the priest was engaged in the ceremonial of High Mass, into the red-hot oven. On his return, he called her name and sought her high and low, and when, at last, he opened the oven door, out flew a white dove that soared, a purified and pardoned soul, into the blue of heaven. The science of this simple folk is not divorced from poetry and religion. The rainbow drinks, they say, in the sea and in the rivers. The Milky Way, the Road to Santiago, is trodden every night by pale, dim multitudes who failed to make that blessed pilgrimage, from which no one of us will be excused, in time of life. When the dust stirs in an empty house, good St. Ana is sweeping there. When babies look upward and laugh, they see the cherubs at play. Tuesday is the unlucky day in Spain, whereas children born on Friday receive the gift of second-sight, and those who enter the world on Good Friday are marked by a cross in the roof of the mouth and have the holy touch that cures diseases. It is a fortunate house beneath whose eaves the swallow builds,
"For swallows on Mount CalvaryPlucked tenderly awayFrom the brows of Christ two thousand thorns,Such gracious birds are they."The Galicians, butt of all Spain for their dulness, are shrewd enough in fact. It is said that those arrant knaves, the gypsies, dare not pass through Galicia for fear of being cheated. Like other unlettered peasants, Gallegos whet their wits on rhyming riddles.
"Who is the little pigeon,Black and white together,That speaks so well without a tongueAnd flies without a feather?""A tree with twelve boughs and four nests on a bough,In each nest seven birdlings, – unriddle me now."In many of their proverbial sayings one gets the Spanish tang at its best. "A well-filled stomach praises God."