Performances of this kind, in which some players fasten themselves on the tourist and give their performance, are usually paid for with a bottle of brandy and a cigarette or two; or, in smarter surroundings when there is a special invitation, by money. One pays up and hopes for the best, but we had a large, quiet Yorkshireman in our party whose air of Saxon shyness concealed a deep knowledge of the Spanish vernacular and an obstinate respect for correct procedure. Our young gypsy made the error of asking the Yorkshire-man a special fee because he was a professional artist giving an unusual performance, and when this was refused there was a characteristic row. It began on the doorstep of the cellar, continued in the street, trailed down to the middle of the Puerta del Sol. It was a hot night; the clock on the Ministry of the Interior coldly struck four, while the gypsy shouted, the Yorkshireman argued back. The gypsy called for witnesses. At four in the morning the recognized authority of the streets is the night watchmen. They came out one by one from their doorways like the Watch of Fielding’s London, and with them the strange night population who sleep out in doorways or the streets. The gypsy stuck out his chest, produced his official papers. The crowd listened. A woman, a lottery-ticket seller, recommended going to the police station, and on the whole the crowd were against us, until the gypsy made the fatal mistake of overplaying his hand. From his papers he picked out some document.
“I am an artist,” he cried. They nodded sympathetically.
“I was a soldier of Franco,” he added, showing more papers. They stepped back from him at once.
“None of that,” someone said politely.
Among the common people of Madrid one is not likely to get very far with being a soldier of Franco.
The dispute now left the chest-baring, chest-thumping, and paper-showing stage, to insults like:
“Your are boring me. Go away.”
“On the contrary, it is you who are boring me.”
The quarrel trailed off to the police station, but within sight of it the gypsy gave in. It was now the time for face-saving. The gypsy said he had no wish to quarrel. The Yorkshireman said he loved the greatness of the Spanish nation. The gypsy said he loved the greatness of the English nation. A year later I was astonished to see my friends had engaged this gypsy to sing again. He had a young wife now. The gypsy was not at all surprised. Such rows are common in Spain.
“It is better,” he said, “to begin a friendship with a little aversion.”
His wife, a little round thing of sixteen, eight months pregnant and with pretty eyes as dark as linseed, sat with the dignity of a little duchess on her chair. She sang with the wit and grace of an angel one moment, and the next could let out the gutter howl of her race and the distorted vowels of her tongue, with the resonance of a hammer on the anvil. Strong, good-humoured and quick to catch the slightest allusion in talk, she had already acquired that matriarchal force, militancy, and content characteristic of Spanish women, and her young husband, ill from the grim night-life of the streets and bars, anxious and excitable, seemed superior to her only in his power of indifference.
As the singer of cante flamenco proceeds, his friends nod and wait for him to reach the few, difficult ornamental notes of the little song, which has been sung entirely for this short crisis of virtuosity. It breaks suddenly, and then the voice flows cleverly away, to the murmurs of Olé, Olé, by his friends. After a long interval, in which all seem to be savouring the satisfaction the song has given them, one of the others takes his turn and so, in this low whispering, like musing aloud or like grief and sobs, they will pass their evenings.
Cante hondo or cante flamenco is not commonly heard in this quiet fashion. The Spaniards love noise, and the singing is usually done at the top of the voice, but the same collusive demeanour of the party will be observed. They listen, nodding, seeming to be waiting for some unknown, intimate moment; an audience will go on talking with indifference, at the beginning of a song, for they are interested only in the few bars that test the singer. They react to every syllable of that passage and when the singer has reached it, when the most tortured ornament the voice can utter is before him, they fall dead silent as they do at some high moment of the bullfight. The peculiarity of cante hondo is that it is sung within “a compass which rarely exceeds the limits of a sixth, [which] is not composed solely of nine semi-tones” (I quote from Trend’s translation of Falla’s work on the subject) “as is the case with our tempered scale. By the employment of the enharmonic genus, there is a considerable increase in the number of tones which the singer can produce.” Metrical feeling is often destroyed and one seems to be listening to a sudden, lyrical or passionate statement or exclamation, torn out of the heart of the singer.
Cante hondo is the name of these songs—now said to be purely Iberian. Cante flamenco is the modern popular name for it and covers its more florid variations. The word “flamenco” is a mysterious word, literally meaning Flemish, which has come to mean popular, vulgar, exuberant. A loud and free behaviour—for Spaniards usually comport themselves with gravity and reserve—is called “muy flamenco.” The word is half abusive, half indulgent, and is thought to have come in when Charles V brought his Flemish court to Spain. The Spaniard, who has always derided foreigners and blamed all his misfortunes on them, thought of the Flemings as outlandish. Flamenco-singing has been despised in the past and it has only become common all over Spain since Falla held a congress of flamenco-singers in Granada in 1922, when he was exploring the history and growth of Spanish folk music.
What the world outside of Spain regards as “typically Spanish music” was fixed in the 1880’s of the last century by Carmen, a manifestation of the romantic view of Spain fostered by Gautier and Mérimée and other French writers. It really has its roots in the eighteenth century. There is a good deal of street music and the barrel organ in it, but in fact Carmen has one or two indigenous Spanish things in it, as Trend points out. The Spanish idiom came out in the zarzuelas or musical comedies of the century; there are traces of it in the seventeenth century and there are motifs that have been traced back to the songs sung by the shepherds of Castile in the fifteenth century. The interesting thing is that one of the orchestral interludes from Carmen is really an Andalusian polo, and polo is really cante hondo.
But cante hondo is not like the rest of Spanish folk music, which recalls the gay, gracious, tinkling folk songs of Russia, and indeed of all European countries. The words often amusingly convey a purely Spanish foible. Cante hondo is Andalusian, but it is not Andalusian folk music which has felt the influence of the Byzantine liturgy and of the Moors. Cante hondo is gypsy; it has a lot in common with Indian singing. It contains the melancholy, the fury, the lyrical and tragic feeling of that wandering race. Though it may be sung at some gypsy feast, with the old gypsy gripping the bars of his chair outside his cave dwelling, as he mouths his way towards the notes, the prolonged and tortured “a’s” and “o’s,” the “l” turned into an “r,” the effect is of soliloquy, an utterance out of loneliness, an utterance of tragic memory, hate, vengeance, or derision. Some are, indeed, called soleares (the Spanish word soledades in the gypsy pronunciation), songs of solitude:
Le dijo er tiempo ar queré:
Esa soberbia que tienes
Yo te la castigare
Time said to lovemaking,
I will punish this pride of yours
Some, simply coplas, or verses:
Er tambo es tu retrato;
Que mete mucho ruio
Y si se mira por dentro
S’ecuentra qu’esta basio
This drum is just like you:
It makes a loud noise.
But look inside—it is empty!
Si la Inquisision supiera
Lo mucho que t’he querio
Y er mal pago que m’has dao
Te quemaban for judio
If the Inquisition had known
How much I loved you
And the bad coin in which you paid me for it
; They would have burned you for a Jew.
Falla organized his congress in Granada thirty years ago in order to preserve cante hondo, and spoke of its “grave, hieratic melody.” Hieratic it is; in another form, the saeta, it is sung to convey the agony of religious desire and remorse, as the images of the Christ or the Virgin are borne round the white-walled streets of Seville in the nights of Holy Week. But the modern tendency has been to get away from the severe, classical design of this pattern of sound which seems to cut the southern night like a knife, to stir in one animal feelings of fear, cruelty, and pity. The more florid, rasping, less inhibited flamenco versions are replacing the older form. One hears a good deal too much of the nasal howl let out in a voice that whines and strains the blood vessels. The Spanish voice is harsh, powerful, and dry, as if there were sand in the singer’s throat, in any case. Impatient of restraint, the Spanish popular arts are quickly spoiled by exuberance. Spanish fury, when it is aroused in life or simulated in art, is terrifying, for it is carried to the limit of frenzy. Nothing grips the Spaniards so much as the dancer whirling herself into a state of mad, dishevelled passion, and the gypsies are unsurpassed in these transports and climaxes of abandon.
One has only to go to the theatre or to any display of dancing in Spain to see how actors and dancers come on to the stage, not as artists—even though they may be good artists—but as persons. They recognize friends in the audience, wave to them or smile to them indiscreetly in the middle of their performance, with a slackness and an indolence towards the discipline of their art which is provincial and amateur. It is hard for them to sink the person in the artist; they are incurable and obstinate human beings. Yet the opposite tendency is there—an exact, indeed pedantic knowledge of the castizo or classical canon, and if the singer or the dancer fails in one single particular of what he ought to do, the audience rises at once—and I mean rises—they get to their feet and shout “No” and cry abuse and irony, as they do at the bullfight when the bullfighter makes even a minor error.
Chapter VI
There are two roads to the south: one straight across the tableland of La Mancha, with the sharp mountains burning and floating like crisp blue gas flame on the horizon; the other, the long way round, over the Gredos mountains into the sheep drives, the wilderness, the cork woods of Extremadura, where the great estates begin. The river Tagus lies green as a snake in its deep ravines in this country; in the oasis of Aranjuez it is muddy; at Toledo the river circles the town like some green viper in its gorge.
La Mancha is Don Quixote’s country. Under a sun of brass it is greener than old Castile, for the short vines grow here mile after mile, the pony turns the waterwheel under the trees, and the villages and towns are white, single-storey places. Valdepeñas is a wine town; this wine and the heavier wines of Rioja in the north are the best-known wines of the country. There are no vintages and no châteaux. One takes the wine of the locality, some of it delicate, some of it tasting of the pine cask like the wines of Greece, some of it thin and sour. “This is the best wine in the world,” people say. And they say the same of the water, which is generally pure, crystalline, and excellent. After Valdepeñas the soil reddens. The heat comes down on the earth like a crushing load, the people stare under the weight of the sun, the women fan themselves and sigh. We travel in the strong smell of the earth and its herbs, the scented smell of the soft-coal smoke, sweet human sweat, face powder, urine. In the towns the odours of olive oil, charcoal, and polish stand, almost like persons themselves, in the cold doorways of the hot streets. The olive groves begin, striping and furring the red hills for mile after mile, and in such wealth it is hard to understand Spanish poverty. We see those thin, crumpled-up monkey peasants, those lean and noble-looking people; we see the extraordinary division of Spain between them and the bland, unlined faces of the fat, who carry their bellies like terrestrial globes before them, whose chins appear like motor tyres under the jaws, whose small eyes have the innocence, the surprise, the resignation, and the malice of the obese. It is a country divided between those who eat well and those who do not, and when you talk about the next town to a countryman there is always the gesture of the fingers to the mouth: “There they eat well.” Or “Here we do not eat.” And by “well” they mean quantity. Since the war—“no se come”—there is nothing to eat; how many scores of times I have heard those words! “Eat”—it is the governing Spanish word; mañana is nowhere near it. We are always brought down to the fundamentals of life; he eats well; he does not; here I conducted my love affairs; there I have my family; my parents are dead; my parents are alive; life is sad; life is gay; I am alive; people manage to live. Rich people. Unfortunate people. Lucky and unlucky: the passing words of Spanish life display the primitive dichotomy of good and evil chance. One might be listening to the Bible.
Just as the Pancorbo Pass in the north takes one on to the tableland, so the pass through the Sierra Morena drops one off it into the lower hills and plains of the south and Andalusia, out of the dry tingling air into an air that is softer and sweet as syrup. The mild winter and the early spring give a brief greenness to this country. By June the sun has scorched it up. The dry Spain, where the rainfall is poor, is fertile only by its slow rivers, but here the Guadalquivir crawls to Córdoba and Seville on its green plain. The cactus appear, like thick green cardboard on the roadside, and the spears of the aloes. Grey donkeys trot on the roads. The herds of little black goats tinkle on the wasteland and circle in the shade of the long avenues of eucalyptus. At Córdoba the green oranges are on the trees. Yet although the country looks soft and rich, this is the region of huge estates and casual, wretchedly paid labour. We are in the region of serfdom, the Spanish Russia of the nineteenth century. No people in Spain more gracious, none poorer than the peasantry of large areas of Andalusia; yet none more disposed, by traditional character, to finding the minimum that will support life.
Andalusia is what for a century or more the foreigner has understood to be Spain. It is the Spain of the romantic legend, as Castile is the Spain of the “black legend,” la leyenda negra. We see in our mind’s eye the Córdoba hat of the Feria, the women with the high combs, the proud carriage, and the rose or carnation in their hair; we see the dangerous gypsy dancer, the long-toothed, narrow-hipped bullfighter, the figure of Don Juan. We see the cool tiled patios of Córdoba, Seville, and Granada, hear the lazy talking of the guitar, the electric crackle of castanets, as the twisting arms swing down. We are in the heart of the Moorish Kingdom and have one foot in the East. Flowers, singing, sunlight, black shade, and the rustle of water.
Is it like this? Shall we be deceived? No—as always in Spain, if we look at one face it is like this; the face turns and we see the opposite. Romantic Andalusia was an invention of the French, especially of Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, and, later, of Maurice Barrès; the country of “Le sang, la volupté, et la mort,” and in the enchantment of Holy Week in Seville these ideas easily catch the northern imagination. Nor must we underrate them: the French are more intelligent and imaginative than the Spaniards, and have simply prolonged certain Andalusian characteristics into a higher key and turned them into general ideas.
The traveller who goes by the Extremadura road into Andalusia, through Trujillo, where Cortés was born, and on to Plasencia, pretty Cáceres with its garrison, and Badajoz, has a sight of the real army that Castile sent out to attack the economy of southern Spain. He will see the survival of the mesta, the large migratory flocks of sheep slowly moving south or north according to the season. One sits under the cork trees of the wilderness talking to the shepherds. Spare, austere men, they wear tooled leather aprons over their trouser legs and carry the crook and the horn slung on their shoulders. Formed by the lonely life, they speak with majestic yet simple courtliness to strangers in a clear sagacious Castilian of complete purity. It is delivered slowly.
“Man! How are you? And how are your family? Is your wife well? Are your children well? I am glad. You are right to rest in the heat.
If God does not want to send the rain, one may complain above, below, everywhere, but that will not make the rain come.”
“What do you think of life?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. When one eats well, good. When one eats badly—well, good too. One remains living until one is put into the ground. Then nothing, man—nothing.”
The white dust of the flocks clouds on the roads, and before the motor-car came in, whenever one saw a cloud of dust on the Castilian tracks it was made by the flocks of sheep. The flocks of the mesta, the great enemies of the dying farmer, and the enemies of Andalusia, were the sheep charged by Don Quixote when he thought they were an army led by hostile knights. In his madness, Don Quixote was right. When wool ousted silk as the profitable product—and the Arabs introduced the merino sheep into Spain—the famous wool monopoly of the mesta was founded in Castile, and Andalusian ruin was complete.
In his analysis of the condition of Andalusia in The Spanish Labyrinth, Gerald Brenan points out that until the coming of the industrial age the history of Spain can be dramatized as a struggle of the rich agricultural districts of Andalusia and the eastern or Mediterranean regions against semi-pastoral Castile. Córdoba, Seville, Málaga, and Almería—that now forgotten little Manchester frying in the heat of its pothole among the mountains of the coast—were rich industrial cities: the decline began when the cities of northern Europe, waking up from the Middle Ages, set up factories of their own. The semi-pastoral Spaniards of Castile were then able to conquer Andalusia and the south. It is the old story of trade and war. By the seventeenth century, huge tracts of once fertile country had reverted to wilderness. The Venetian ambassador observed the decline in the enormously rich province of Granada only thirty-four years after Granada was taken from the Moors in 1492. He wrote:
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