Part 3 (1/2)
”Education, organization, energy, the modern world.”
I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road down from the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and rest so as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world.
And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work.
That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from a roadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession with candles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swaying cone-shaped figure carried on the shoulders of six sweating men stood poised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamine flowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried, ”_Viva la Virgen de las Angustias!_” And the Virgin and San Miguel both had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the people followed them into the church crying ”_Viva!_” so that the old vaults s.h.i.+vered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some people cried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, and when they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantilla of white lace over the moon, so they went home happy.
Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by an occasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behind them long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair.
Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seash.o.r.e talking of America and the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixote and _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ they call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country elevated on the small gra.s.s-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers, to offer us a gla.s.s of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explained to my friend that in his modern world of America these same people would come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade.
”And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating of life?”
”Of course,” he answered.
”Where?”
”Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _lo flamenco_.”
”But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?”
He shrugged his shoulders. ”Work,” he said.
We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fis.h.i.+ng boats were drawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by th.o.r.n.y aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of sappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and heliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast in ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the last groan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the dark fields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped down through notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, then unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenly in an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction.
”Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work,” and I thought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on the way down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: ”_Ca, en America no se hose na'a que trabahar y de'cansar._”
I had left him at his home village, a little cl.u.s.ter of red and yellow roofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church that hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhile before going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind, and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson against the intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. And the _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joys of going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains for chestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga for tinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing and guitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older, realer G.o.ds were wors.h.i.+pped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of the pale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in the sunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days of travel on stony roads in the mountains.... And I had lain back with my eyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished that my life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and I had shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads of paper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sort of bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his d.a.m.ned burden.
”Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make the road so significant that one needs no destination, that is _lo flamenco_,” said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen looking at the seven white arches of the aqueduct.
He nodded unconvinced.
_III: The Baker of Almorox_
I
The _senores_ were from Madrid? Indeed! The man's voice was full of an awe of great distances. He was the village baker of Almorox, where we had gone on a Sunday excursion from Madrid; and we were standing on the scrubbed tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving wine and figs from his wife. The father of the friend who accompanied me had once lived in the same village as the baker's father, and bought bread of him; hence the entertainment. This baker of Almorox was a tall man, with a soft moustache very black against his ash-pale face, who stood with his large head thrust far forward. He was smiling with pleasure at the presence of strangers in his house, while in a tone of shy deprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's family. Don Fernando and Dona Ana and the Senorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos was no longer little, answered my friend, and Dona Ana was dead.
The baker's wife had stood in the shadow looking from one face to another with a sort of wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this she came forward suddenly into the pale greenish-gold light that streamed through the door, holding a dark wine-bottle before her. There were tears in her eyes. No; she had never known any of them, she explained hastily--she had never been away from Almorox--but she had heard so much of their kindness and was sorry.... It was terrible to lose a father or a mother. The tall baker s.h.i.+fted his feet uneasily, embarra.s.sed by the sadness that seemed slipping over his guests, and suggested that we walk up the hill to the Hermitage; he would show the way.
”But your work?” we asked. Ah, it did not matter. Strangers did not come every day to Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping a woolen m.u.f.fler about his bare strongly moulded throat, and we followed him up the devious street of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses through wide doors of dark tiled rooms with great black rafters overhead and courtyards where chickens pecked at the manure lodged between smooth worn flagstones. Still between white-washed walls we struck out of the village into the deep black mud of the high road, and at last burst suddenly into the open country, where patches of sprouting gra.s.s shone vivid green against the gray and russet of broad rolling lands. At the top of the first hill stood the Hermitage--a small whitewashed chapel with a square three-storied tower; over the door was a relief of the Virgin, crowned, in worn lichened stone. The interior was very plain with a single heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted statue, stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful grace--again of the Virgin. The figure was dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills and ruffles, grey with dust and age.
”_La Virgen de la Cima_,” said the baker, pointing reverently with his thumb, after he had bent his knee before the altar. And as I glanced at the image a sudden resemblance struck me: the gown gave the Virgin a curiously conical look that somehow made me think of that conical black stone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought from Asia Minor. Here again was a good G.o.ddess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin, despite her prudish frills.... But the man was ushering us out.
”And there is no finer view than this in all Spain.” With a broad sweep of his arm he took in the village below, with its waves of roofs that merged from green to maroon and deep crimson, broken suddenly by the open square in front of the church; and the gray towering church, scowling with strong lights and shadows on b.u.t.tresses and pointed windows; and the brown fields faintly sheened with green, which gave place to the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards, and the s.h.i.+ning silver where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond, the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into the yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers were stretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccid cheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, he was saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and there were flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, in May. And he went on to tell us of the local feast, and the great processions of the Virgin. This year there were to be four days of the _toros_. So many bullfights were unusual in such a small village, he a.s.sured us. But they were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best in Castile. Four days of _toros_, he said again; and all the people of the country around would come to the _fiestas_, and there would be a great pilgrimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin.... As he talked in his slow deferential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers, there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world.
First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then his work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of neighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of things half real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived and where politicians wrote in the newspapers,--and _Francia_--and all that was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans, before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much the same, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed, cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought and pa.s.sed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged up to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin had taken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth G.o.ddesses, and the deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love for the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men who had tilled and loved and lain in the cheris.h.i.+ng sun with no feeling of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompa.s.sing hills of their commune, except the G.o.d which was the synthesis of their souls and of their lives.