Gatherings From Spain

CHAPTER IX

The Rider’s Costume – Alforjas: their contents – The Bota, and How to use it – Pig Skins and Borracha – Spanish Money – Onzas and smaller Coins.

THE rider’s costume and accoutrements require consideration; his great object should be to pass in a crowd, either unnoticed, or to be taken for “one of us,” Uno de Nosotros, and a member of the Iberian family —de la Familia: this is best effected by adopting the dress, that is usually worn by the natives when they travel on horseback, or journey by any of their national conveyances, among which Anglo-Franco mails and diligences are not yet to be reckoned; all classes of Spaniards, on getting outside the town-gate, assume country habits, and eschew the long-tailed coats and civilization of the city; they drop pea-jackets and foreign fashions, which would only attract attention, and expose the wearers to the ridicule or coarser marks of consideration from the peasantry, muleteers, and other gentry, who rule on the road, hate novelties, and hold fast to the ways and jackets of their forefathers; the best hat, therefore, is the common sombrero calanes, which resemble those worn at Astley’s by banditti, being of a conical shape, is edged with black velvet, ornamented with silken tufts, and looks equally well on a cockney from London, or on a squire from Devonshire. The jacket should be the universal fur Zamarra, which is made of black sheepskin, in its ordinary form, and of lambskin for those who can pay; a sash round the waist should never be forgotten, being most useful both in reality and metaphor: it sustains the loins, and keeps off the dangerous colics of Spain, by maintaining an equable heat over the abdomen; hence, to be Homerically well girt is half the battle for the Peninsular traveller.

The capa the cloak, or the manta a striped plaid, and saddle-bags, the Alforjas, are absolute essentials, and should be strapped on the pommel of the saddle, as being there less heating to the horse than when placed on his flanks, and being in front, they are more handy for sudden use, since in the mountains and valleys, the rider is constantly exposed to sudden variations of wind and weather; when Æolus and Sol contend for his cloak, as in Æsop’s Fables, and the buckets of heaven are emptied on him as soon as the god of fire thinks him sufficiently baked.

These saddle-bags are most classical, Oriental, and convenient; they indeed constitute the genus bagsman, and have given their name to our riding travellers; they are the Sarcinæ of Cato the Censor, the Bulgæ of Lucilius, who made an epigram thereon: —

which, as these indispensables are quite as necessary to the modern Spaniard, may be thus translated: —

The countrymen of Sancho Panza, when on the road, make the same use of their wallets as the Romans did; they still (the washing excepted) live and die with these bags, in which their hearts are deposited with their bread and cheese.

These Spanish alforjas, in name and appearance, are the Moorish al horeh. (The F and H, like the B and V, X and J, are almost equivalent, and are used indiscriminately in Spanish cacography.) They are generally composed of cotton and worsted, and are embroidered in gaudy colours and patterns; the correct thing is to have the owner’s name worked in on the edge, which ought to be done by the delicate hand of his beloved mistress. Those made at Granada are very excellent; the Moorish, especially those from Morocco, are ornamented with an infinity of small tassels. Peasants, when dismounted, mendicant monks, when foraging for their convents, sling their alforjas over their shoulders when they come into villages.

Among the contents which most people will find it convenient to carry in the right-hand bag, as the easiest to be got at, a pair of blue gauze wire spectacles or goggles will be found useful, as ophthalmia is very common in Spain, and particularly in the calcined central plains. The constant glare is unrelieved by any verdure, the air is dry, and the clouds of dust highly irritating from being impregnated with nitre. The best remedy is to bathe the eyes frequently with hot water, and never to rub them when inflamed, except with the elbows, los ojos con los codos. Spaniards never jest with their eyes or faith; of the two perhaps they are seriously fondest of the former, not merely when sparkling beneath the arched eyebrow of the dark sex, but when set in their own heads. “I love thee like my eyes,” is quite a hackneyed form of affection; nor, however wrathful and imprecatory, do they under any circumstance express the slightest uncharitable wishes in regard to the visual organs of their bitterest foe.

The whole art of the alforjas is the putting into them what you want the most often, and in the most handy and accessible place. Keep here, therefore, a supply of small money for the halt and the blind, for the piteous cases of human suffering and poverty by which the traveller’s eye will be pained in a land where soup-dispensing monks are done away with, and assistant new poor law commissioners not yet appointed; such charity from God’s purse, bolsa de Dios, never impoverishes that of man, and a cheerful giver, however opposed to modern political economists, is commended in that old-fashioned book called the Bible. The left half of the alforjas may be apportioned to the writing and dressing cases, and the smaller each are the better.

Food for the mind must not be neglected. The travelling library, like companions, should be select and good; libros y amigos pocos y buenos. The duodecimo editions are the best, as a large heavy book kills horse, rider, and reader. Books are a matter of taste; some men like Bacon, others prefer Pickwick; stow away at all events a pocket edition of the Bible, Shakspere, and Don Quixote: and if the advice of dear Dr. Johnson be worth following, one of those books that can be taken in the hand, and to the fire-side. Martial, a grand authority on Spanish hand-books, recommended “such sized companions on a long journey.” Quartos and folios, said he, may be left at home in the book-case —

“Scrinia da magnis, me manus una capit.”

Here also keep the passport, that indescribable nuisance and curse of continental travel, to which a free-born Briton never can get reconciled, and is apt to neglect, whereby he puts himself in the power of the worst and most troublesome people on earth. Passports in Spain now in some degree supply the Inquisition, and have been embittered by vexatious forms borrowed from bureaucratic France.

Having thus disposed of these matters on the front bow of his saddle, to which we always added a bota– the pocket-pistol of Hudibras – one word on this Bota, which is as necessary to the rider as a saddle to his horse. This article, so Asiatic and Spanish, is at once the bottle and the glass of the people of the Peninsula when on the road, and is perfectly unlike the vitreous crockery and pewter utensils of Great Britain. A Spanish woman would as soon think of going to church without her fan, or a Spanish man to a fair without his knife, as a traveller without his bota. Ours, the faithful, long-tried comforter of many a dry road, and honoured now like a relic, is hung up a votive offering to the Iberian Bacchus, as the mariners in Horace suspended their damp garments to the deity who had delivered them from the dangers of water. Its skin, now shrivelled with age and with fruitless longings for wine, is still redolent of the ruby fluid, whether the generous Valdepeñas or the rich vino de Toro: and refreshing to our nostrils is even an occasional smell at its red-stained orifice. There the racy wine-perfume lingers, and brings water into the mouth, it may be into the eyelid. What a dream of Spanish odours, good, bad, and indifferent, is awakened by its well-known borracha!– what recollections, breathing the aroma of the balmy south, crowd in; of aromatic wastes, of leagues of thyme, whence Flora sends forth advertisements to her tiny bee-customer; of churches, all incense; of the goats and monks, long-bearded and odoriferous; of cities whose steam of garlic, ollas, oil, and tobacco rises up to the heavens, mingled with the thousand and one other continental sweets which assail a man’s nose, whether he lands at Calais or Cadiz! There hangs our smelling-bottle bota, now a pleasure of memory; it has had its day, and is never again to be filled in torrid, thirsty Spain, nor emptied, which is better.

This Bota, from whence the terms Butt of sherry, bouteille, and bottle are derived, is the most ancient Oriental leathern bottle alluded to in Job xxxii. 19, “My belly ready to burst like new bottles;” and in the parable, Matt. ix. 17, about the old ones, the force and point of which is entirely lost by our word bottle, which being made of glass, is not liable to become useless by age like one made of leather. Such a “bottle of water” was the last among the few things which Abraham gave to Hagar, when he turned out the mother of the Arabians, whose descendants brought its usage into Spain. The shape is like that of a large pear or shot-pouch, and it contains from two to five quarts. The narrow neck is mounted with a turned wooden cup, from which the contents are drunk. The way to use it is thus – grasp the neck with the left hand and bring the rim of the cup to the mouth, then gradually raise the bag with the other hand till the wine, in obedience to hydrostatic laws, rises to its level, and keeps always full in the cup without trouble to the mouth. The gravity with which this is done, the long, slow, sustained, Sancho-like devotion of the thirsty Spaniards when offered a drink out of another man’s bota, is very edifying, and is as deep as the sigh of delight and gratitude with which, when unable to imbibe more, the precious skin is returned. No drop of the divine contents is wasted, except by some newly-arrived bungler, who, by lifting up the bottom first, inundates his chin. The hole in the cup is made tight by a wooden spigot, which again is perforated and stopped with a small peg. Those who do not want to take a copious draught do not pull out the spigot, but merely the little peg of it; the wine then flows out in a thin thread. The Catalonians and Aragonese generally drink in this way; they never touch the vessel with their lips, but hold it up at a distance above, and pilot the stream into their mouths, or rather under-jaws. It is much easier for those who have had no practice to pour the wine into their necks than into their mouths, but their drinking-bottles are made with a long narrow spout, and are called “Porrones.”

The Bota must not be confounded with the Borracha or Cuero, the wine-skin of Spain, which is the entire, and answers the purpose of the barrel elsewhere. The bota is the retail receptacle, the cuero is the wholesale one. It is the genuine pig’s skin, the adoration of which disputes in the Peninsula with the cigar, the dollar, and even the worship of the Virgin. The shops of the makers are to be seen in most Spanish towns; in them long lines of the unclean animal’s blown out hides are strung up like sheep carcases in our butchers’ shambles. The tanned and manufactured article preserves the form of the pig, feet and all, with the exception of one: the skin is turned inside out, so that the hairy coat lines the interior, which, moreover, is carefully pitched like a ship’s bottom, to prevent leaking; hence the peculiar flavour, which partakes of resin and the hide, which is called the borracha, and is peculiar to most Spanish wines, sherry excepted, which being made by foreigners, is kept in foreign casks, as we shall presently show when we touch on “good sherris sack.” A drunken man, who is rarer in Spain than in England, is called a borracho; the term is not complimentary. These cueros, when filled, are suspended in ventas and elsewhere, and thus economise cellarage, cooperage, and bottling; and such were the bigbellied monsters which Don Quixote attacked.

As the bota is always near every Spaniard’s mouth who can get at one, all classes being ever ready, like Sancho, to give “a thousand kisses,” not only to his own legitimate bota, but to that of his neighbour, which is coveted more than wife: therefore no prudent traveller will ever journey an inch in Spain without getting one, and when he has, will never keep it empty, especially when he falls in with good wine. Every man’s Spanish attendant will always find out, by instinct, where the best wine is to be had; good wine neither needs bush, herald, nor crier; in these matters, our experience of them tallies with their proverb, “mas vale vino maldito, que no agua bendita,” “cursed bad wine is better than holy water;” at the same time, in their various scale of comparisons, there is good wine, better wine, and best wine, but no such thing as bad wine; of good wine, the Spaniards are almost as good judges as of good water; they rarely mix them, because they say that it is spoiling two good things. Vino Moro, or Moorish wine, is by no means indicative of uncleanness, or other heretical imperfections implied generally by that epithet; it simply means, that it is pure from never having been baptized with water, for which the Asturians, who keep small chandlers’ shops, are so infamous, that they are said, from inveterate habit, to adulterate even water; aguan el agua.

It is a great mistake to suppose, because Spaniards are seldom seen drunk, and because when on a journey they drink as much water as their beasts, that they have any Oriental dislike to wine; the rule is “Agua como buey, y vino como Rey,” “to drink water like an ox, and wine like a king.” The extent of the given quantity of wine which they will always swallow, rather suggests that their habitual temperance may in some degree be connected more with their poverty than with their will. The way to many an honest breast lies through the belly in this classical land, where the tutelar of butlers still keeps the key of their cellars and hearts – aperit præcordia Bacchus: nor is their Oriental blessing unconnected with some “savoury food” previously administered. And independently of the very obvious reasons which good wine does and ought to afford for its own consumption, the irritating nature of Spanish cookery provides a never-failing inducement. The constant use of the savoury class of condiments and of pepper is very heating, “la pimienta escalienta.” A salt-fish, ham and sausage diet creates thirst; a good rasher of bacon calls loudly for a corresponding long and strong pull at the “bota,” “a torresno de tocino, buen golpe de vino.”

This digression on botas will be pardoned by all who, having ridden in Spain, know the absolute necessity of them. The traveller will of course remember the advice given by the rogue of Ventero to Don Quixote to take shirts and money with him. “Put money in thy purse” said also honest Iago, for an empty one is a beggarly companion in the Peninsula as elsewhere. There is no getting to Rome or to Santiago if the pilgrim’s scrip be scanty, or his mule lame: Camino de Roma, ni mula coja ni Bolsa floja.

Practically it may be said, that there is no paper money in Spain. Notes may be taken in some of the larger cities, but in the provinces the value of a man in office’s promise to pay on paper, is not considered by the shrewd natives to be actually equal to cash; while they will readily give these notes to foreigners, they prefer for their own use the old-fashioned representatives of wealth, gold and silver, towards the smallest fraction of which they have the largest possible veneration. Accounts are usually kept in reales de vellon of royal bullion; and these are subdivided into maravedis, the ancient coin of the Peninsula: there are minor fractions even of farthings, consisting in material of infinitesimal bits of any metals, melted church bells, old cannon, &c., with names and values unknown in our happy land, where not much is to be got for a mite; in Spain, where cheapness of earth-produce is commensurate with poverty, anything, even to an old button, goes for a maravedí, and we have found that in changing a dollar by way of experiment into small coppers in the market at Seville, among the multitudinous specimens of Spanish mints of all periods, Moorish and even Roman coins were to be met with, and still current.

The dollar, or Duro, of Spain is well known all over the world, being the form under which silver has been generally exported from the Spanish colonies of South America. It is the Italian “Colonato,” so called because the arms of Spain are supported between the two pillars of Hercules. The coinage is slovenly: it is the weight of the metal, not the form, which is looked to by the Spaniard, who, like the Turk, is not so clever a workman or mechanist as devout worshipper of bullion. Ferdinand VII. continued for a long while to strike money with his father’s head, having only had the lettering altered: thus early Trajans exhibit the head of Nero. When the Cortes entered Madrid after the Duke’s victory at Salamanca, they patriotically prohibited the currency of all coins bearing the head of the intrusive Joseph; yet his dollars being chiefly made out of stolen church plate, gilt and ungilt, were, although those of an usurper, intrinsically worth more than the legitimate duro: this was a too severe test for the loyalty of those whose real king and god is cash. Such a decree was worthy of senators who were busier employed in expelling French tropes from their dictionary than French troops from their country. The wiser Chinese take Ferdinand’s and Joseph’s dollars alike, calling them both “devil’s head” money. These bad prejudices against good coin have now given way to the march of intellect; nay, the five-franc piece with Louis-Philippe’s clever head on it bids fair to oust the pillared Duro. The silver of the mines of Murcia is exported to France, where it is coined, and sent back in the manufactured shape. France thus gains a handsome per centage, and habituates the people to her image of power, which comes recommended to them in the most acceptable likeness of current coin.