The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  Don Miguel de Mañara was once thought to be the original of Don Juan. The idea was mistaken. He was not born when the original play portraying the character was written. Mañara was a rake who repented but, in truly Sevillian fashion, he was not content with an ordinary act of remorse. He had to make the exorbitant gesture and enact the awful scene. From wealth, lust and riot he turned suddenly to the contemplation of death. Pursuing a veiled woman in the street at night, he pulled the veil off her face and a death’s head stared at him. He encountered a funeral in the street and, lifting the cloth of the bier, saw that the corpse was himself. When he came to repentance, it was in the great manner. He built a splendid Charity Hospital for the Poor which still exists and there at the entrance one can see the stone of a Sevillano who was an actor for ever. The inscription reads: “Here lies the body of the worst man who ever lived.” The worst! Nothing less would satisfy him as a curtain line.

  It would be fanciful to see Seville only through its past fantasies, its amorous brawlers, its thousands of witty barbers and its dangerous cigarette girls and its penitents; it was once a Roman capital and, after the discovery of America, Seville produced also that reserved and grave masculine character, the Empire-builder; so that often in Seville one sees examples of those reserved, dignified and grave Roman types, excellent in the saddle, family-proud and conscious of occasion, who look like southern forerunners of the imperial kind of Englishman turned out by Dr. Arnold. Even the clubs of Seville recall those of London, except that the windows are wide open, so that the members are in the front row of the stalls. No one ever reads a book in these clubs, twice as many members are fast asleep as in any club in Pall Mall and the waistline is more abandoned. Trousers have to be cut high and wide to accommodate the great globe below; a belt would expose all that owning bull farms and olive estates can do to the figure. But even these men, stunned by the blessings and martyrdoms of obesity, will get to their feet about midday, proceed like slowed-down planets to the barbers to be clipped, shaved and oiled, to hear what rascalities Figaro has to tell them; or will stand in the Sierpes where no traffic ever runs, and argue dramatically with their friends. Roman Seville is full of the old Andalusian Adam. A street scene, in the perpetual play, is what they love to enact or watch. The last time I was in Sierpes I saw a small procession of youths and children and a couple of police moving towards me. Its centre was a young drunken American who, happily, spoke some Spanish, for he was able to put on quite a show for the crowd who were teasing him. A little girl of ten was having a battle of wits with him. He stood up to them all so well that they accompanied him like an admiring and mischievous court. Reluctantly the police gave up; they had to keep a point with their sergeant elsewhere. All occurrences are revered, the small and the very great.

  So it is fitting that at Corpus Christi, the choirboys should dance their medieval dance before the high altar of the Cathedral; it is fitting that when this cathedral was built to celebrate the triumph of Spain in freeing Western Europe from Islam it was made the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. And today it is natural that the processions of Holy Week should have been the most extraordinary religious spectacles to be seen in Europe since the fourteenth century. Thousands of foreigners come to see it, but they are swallowed up by the whole population of the city, nearly 400,000 people, who are out in the streets for a week, living and acting the whole display. Spectacle is in the blood. What the State occasion is to the British, what the historical pageant is to the Germans, and the parade to Americans, the religious pageant is to the Spaniards and to the Sevillano most of all.

  The first distinctive quality of Holy Week in Seville lies in the Sevillano and the Sevillana themselves. They do not think of themselves as simply natives of the place or as a number of separate creatures who happen to live and work there. Each one feels himself to be the whole city. All Spaniards feel this about their native place, but the Sevillano carries it to a point at once exquisite and absurd. His feeling is rhetorical, yet, even more, his sense of the city is intimate and domestic. All Seville is his house. The streets are the living quarters, the squares are where he meets his friends, the little baroque churches are his gilded drawing-rooms. It is extraordinary, if one happens to visit or stay in one, how silent and empty-seeming the houses are. A face at a window, a servant going upstairs, a figure alone in rooms darkened to keep out the sun—there is not much more sense of habitation than that. People eat there and sleep there, they water flowers on the balcony—but not there, one supposes, do they live. And so, when the processions of Holy Week begin, the Sevillano is no spectator; he is of them. They are part of his personal drama.

  Even if we go only by the number, length, duration and membership of the processions, we see how completely they pervade. Are all Sevillanos passionately religious? No. Has the Church enemies after the Civil War? Yes, very many. Do some people deplore the processions, pointing to the enormous amount of convent, church and religious monument building of the last twenty years in a poor country that lacks the will or the talent to do more than nibble lazily at its worst social problems? Many do so deplore. Yet, because the processions are theatre, eyes brighten and the arguments vanish. In each parish church there is a cofradia or brotherhood—they are exclusively male institutions—which maintains the elaborate and beautifully carved and golden floats on which the image of the Virgin patroness or the Christ is carried. Some cofradias maintain two or even three of these floats. They are objects of pride, for some of the figures are by the great Spanish sculptors—Montañes, Hito del Castillo, the Roldans, Alonso Cano, are among them—who excelled in the dramatic realism of their work. One or two are masterpieces and, listening to the crowd, one sees that, whether they respond to the religious meaning or not, they respond totally to the work of art and to the expressiveness of the figures in the scenes of the Crucifixion.

  There are something like fifty of these cofradias in Seville. Their membership is large. It is not always easy to become a member. Parents are known to put their sons’ names down for them at birth. Some of the cofradias originate in the guilds of the Middle Ages and their popular trade names have stuck to them: cigarette-makers, bankers, bakers, roadmakers and so on. Beginning on the Monday before Easter, the cofradias in turn bear the floats through the streets from their parish and then along a set route in the centre to the Cathedral; the procession pauses there, and then the return journey begins. Some of the processions are eight or eleven hours on their route and they go on through the night—first a posse of the municipal guard, then barefoot penitents carrying their lighted torches, the standard S.P.Q.R., banners, acolytes swinging the smoking censers and then the image at last, followed by a band. For half a mile the members of the cofradia precede the image, in their conical hats with eye-slits and in robes, carrying their candles. After a week of this the streets are glazed with candle grease. The making of the show is its slowness, for each float is borne on the shoulders of thirty-six men concealed beneath the velvet curtains below. They shuffle forward in the heat only fifty to a hundred yards at a time. They work like galley slaves. The very slowness of the progress means that they effectually occupy the main part of the city and entirely close its centre. The crowds hang about and then suddenly someone shouts “Here comes San Vicente” or “Here comes Santa Cruz” and the neighbourhood of the Cathedral is packed and impenetrable. On Good Friday the climax is reached. Famous images like the Macarena, which excites an extraordinary fervour in the crowd, or the Jesus del Gran Poder, which draws out its admiration, pass into the Cathedral. The Miserere of the composer Eslava is sung in a last orgy of theatrical magnificence and to crown all, a peal of artificial thunder booms and rebounds in the enormous edifice.

  There is nothing more to be said of the stage management of Holy Week; it is the play that counts, its peculiar quality of penetrating into the daily life of the people. The Sevillano, like all other Spaniards, is addicted to the repetitious and monotonous; he wakes up only at the high moments. There,
as in the dance, in the bullfights, in his songs, he is taut and silent and most critical. He is the man of the crisis. In singing or the dance, the guitar mutters away monotonously, playing on the nerves, slackening off in order with dramatic suddenness to deceive and to enhance until the torpor of the audience is broken down and the singer or dancer can electrify him by wit or take him by storm. Something like that occurs in the processions. The high moments occur when the image leaves its church, when it enters the Cathedral, when it leaves and, finally, when, in an uproar of enthusiasm, it returns to the family possession of its parish. That moment of the return, if it should happen, as it often does, to be at two or three in the morning, is superb.

  You have been hanging about in some bar drinking beer in the heat of the night and presently in the crowd outside there is pushing and scrambling and flurry: the sound of drum taps is coming nearer. The streets are narrow—in some of them there is only room for a carriage, many are only alleys—the houses are chalk-white, the starlit sky is black. The breath of the flowers is cool and oily. The street lights are put out and the walls are lit only by the candles of the hundreds of penitents in their hoods and robes and by the scores of candles on the image. The windows are crowded. People stand along the roof gardens. The simple façade of the church, with its baroque scroll, looks like a strong gracious face, for, though they may be like drawing-rooms inside, the churches of Seville have those well-found and noble walls which Spaniards still have the custom and art of building. The candles round the Virgin flutter and her affecting, doll’s face shines out of her headdress and her jewelled velvet robes. She stands, certainly like a Queen, under her canopy. Eyes sparkle in the crowd. The prettiness, the peep-show prettiness, delights the Sevillano. They have an almost childish excitement before pretty things. And now, before the image is carried in, there is sudden silence. The small voice of a singer rises. He is singing a saeta, one of those weird and traditional “deep songs” which seem to be the music of a man in complete solitude, a personal cry of strangled passion and loneliness, and whose words are a naïve mingling of self and religion, Arab lyricism and the love of the city. The falsetto voice, whinnying and gulping its minutely broken syllables, is half Arab but also half gypsy, for the final vowel is drawn out into that curious grunting “aun” of the gypsy singing. The pauses in the song are there so that we shall be astonished by a sudden cruel heightening of crisis which breaks at last into the downhill rush of fulfilment. The words are not hard to catch. They are essentially declarations of love: the singer is singing his personal praise of the Virgin, saying that she is the prettiest of all and the pride of the proudest and most beautiful city on earth. It is said that in recent years the saetas have become more extravagant and have travelled a long way from traditional simplicity. The tendency in all Spain in the last twenty years is to “pile it on” in a manner one can’t but think decadent. (I notice old bullfight fans complain that whereas the crowd in Seville was once unique in Spain, in freezing into contemptuous silence—no whistles, no catcalls—when the torero made some ghastly mistake or lost his nerve, now it has lost the classical dignity and shouts with the worst.) Even so, if the modern Spanish tendency is to overdo things and run into vulgarity, there is no doubt that dramatic extravagance is in the Sevillian nature.

  But the high moments of the processions that pervade the city in this week are few. The night scene before the Cathedral is magnificent. Floodlighting turns this tremendous domed, buttressed and towered building, where the stained glass blazes at night, into something fabulous. The smoking incense and the candlelight transform the crowd. All this is high drama. But when one looks at the whole thing, hour by hour, one notices that the normal character of the processions is slack, dawdling and familiar. An American will be shocked by the slowness, a German by the lack of precision, an Englishman by the absence of dignity. There is nothing of the rehearsed occasion. The penitents lounge, their candles and hoods at all angles, the bands play popular waltzing marches—I noticed again and again that they play a slow military version of the Maiden’s Prayer—the crowd pushes through the ranks. Even in the Cathedral, where an inured Protestant like myself expects a certain tenue, I have seen one or two penitents get and answer messages from the congregation: “See you at So-and-so later on”; and in bars I have seen a thirsty young penitent pull off his hood, gulp down a beer and rush back to his place. Occasionally young boys appear in the processions and one will see an anxious mother and a father on his dignity go up to their son and put his hood straight. And when the image is set down for a rest the sweating bearers beneath naturally lift the curtains and squat on the ground getting a breath of air. The water-sellers crowd round them with jars, people give them cigarettes and wives or sisters will rush up to give them sandwiches or a cup of coffee. In the meantime the bearers are grinning and cursing and making wisecracks at the crowd, for the Sevillano does not miss an opportunity in this game. This easy familiarity is not only delightful but it is of the very essence of the popular spirit which the Spanish have preserved to an extent I have seen nowhere else in the world. The proudest of all people, they are the most at ease with each other and quite classless—in the ordinary relations of life the most classless people I know.

  And this ease of theirs in the great occasion comes out in another way. They know at what points a procession will be prettiest or most dramatic. They know the procession of Santa Cruz is exquisite after it has turned off the boulevard just above Carmen’s tobacco factory—now the university—and passes under the rich trees of the gardens beyond the rose walls of the Alcazar, its candlelight glittering and its incense smoking under the acacias, its music diffused in the gardens. Others know that at points in Sierpes or some other narrow street barely wide enough for the float, it will be set momentarily like a shrine; or that in the square called San Salvador it will stand against the huge dwarfing walls of great churches. They know where the most curious of all, the Silent procession, is best seen. This familiar knowledge of what is felicitous, where the charming moments are, is a sign of how they own their city street by street, knowing the character of each part of it. Once more, we see the Sevillano’s talent and taste for the small pleasures of life, and for thinking the local thing is the one to be cherished most. Smallness is important to them. One can tell that by their speech—wherever they can they use a diminutive: not a glass of wine, but a little glass; not a snack of fried squid, shrimps, sausage or tiny silver eels from the north, with their glass of manzanilla, but a little snack; and if they want more than that, a dish of it, then the dish becomes a little dish, flowers become little flowers, birds singing in their cages on the walls of the patio become little birds; even bulls become little bulls. Smaller and smaller things become in their minds, until they have reached the imaginary tinyness of childish delight.

  Yet, as I said earlier, the people of Seville are not awed spectators of their show; they are part of it. If you go into any of the churches when a particular procession is over, on any of the days following, you will find scores of people coming to admire the floats and particularly those famous as works of art. These churches all have something of the family house about them; there is always something going on and, anyone, any passing stranger, will eagerly show you its curiosities. One morning in the Triana—the gypsy quarter on the other bank of the Quadalquivir—in the Santa Anna, the oldest church in the city, they had put a ladder over the altar and were changing the Virgin’s clothes, tying on her many bodices and petticoats and getting her ready for an ordination service in the afternoon. This church looks like a picture shop. Its choir and organ carvings are good; but it also has the usual haphazard collection of antique oddities. One of the strangest was an image of the Virgin presented in the nineteenth century by the Duc de Montpensier, the patron and friend of Alexandre Dumas. The Spaniards do not care much for French importations and this one embarrasses. The Virgin is portrayed in the fashionable clothes of a society woman at a reception or the races. The verger looked
dubiously at it but, a true Sevillano, he had an eye for the bizarre. By the altar stood a fine grandfather’s clock. Rich Spaniards had a craze for collecting fine English clocks at the end of the eighteenth century and their families have dumped these curiosities on the nearest church. One finds them everywhere. Once more one sees that the churches are one more room in the family life of the city.

  On Thursday of Holy Week, the shops close and now the whole of the city is out and crowds swarm in on the country buses. At five in the afternoon the popular paseo begins, the ritual of walking up and down. Until now the women had been present but inconspicuous. The Sevillana is small and plump and pale, inclined to roundness and heaviness in the face and, until she talks, without light in her eyes. Beside the male, whether of the grave Roman type or the jumping cracker, the lady is placid and demure. But on Thursday the sex suddenly grows a foot taller. They have taken off their flat slippers and shoes—so convenient for the cobbles of this cobbled place—and have put on their high heels, their high combs and their black mantillas. One blinks. Women who were unnoticeable the day before have suddenly become beauties, coolly conscious of a part to play. A hidden pride has come out. They rarely, one notices, deign to talk to their escorts. After Holy Week, in the excitement of the Feria, they will change again. They will be clapping hands, snapping thumbs and fingers, clacking the castanets in the night-long dances that go on in the casetas, the family marquees and avenues by the Park. It will be a new play of whirling and stamping pleasure.