Hidden among them [the waters, fruit, trees, wood] are the farms of the Moors, many in ruins, for the Moorish population is diminishing and it is they who kept everything in order; the Spaniards here, as in other parts of Spain, are not industrious and disdain work.
And Brenan enlarges on the political effects of this economic change:
The shepherds wage a perpetual war on the agriculturalists, whom they regard as their inferiors, whilst both together feel a fierce envy of the city dwellers and cultivators of rich oases. … Now this is a type of society which is not confined to Spain but appears wherever certain climatic conditions prevail. It is strongly developed in Persia and North Africa. One of its chief characteristics is its instability; it alternates violently between a centralized tyranny and an anarchic tribal or local life. With every bad drought or economic crisis there is either a revolution or a wave of religious exaltation, whilst at longer intervals there are great upheavals in which all the energies of the country are poured out in a war of conquest, leaving it inert and exhausted afterwards …. The famous orientalism of the Spaniards is not due to “Arab blood,” but to climate and geography.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were attempts to deal with agriculture on collectivist lines—they were revived under the Spanish Republic of 1931 and abolished by General Franco—but the Napoleonic invasion put an end to reform. By the 1830’s and ’40’s, the sale of the Church land and common lands led to a revival of capitalist agriculture; the land went out of the hands of the small owners into the hands of the large ones; the number of huge estates in Andalusia increased, falling mostly into the hands of a new rich class, who reduced the Andalusian peasant to the level of a labour force, miserably paid, controlled by the bailiffs, and kept down, when they protested, by the Civil Guard. There is a parallel in the condition of England during the industrial revolution. In Spain, likewise, the fortunes of the new middle class were made; a large class of absentee landlords was formed, and if one asks why one’s friend X can spend all day sitting doing nothing in a café in Seville or Córdoba, or lie in bed all day in Madrid, to get up and talk and play cards with his friends all night, the answer is in the rush to buy the Church and common land cheap in the nineteenth century, and the profitable result.
Serfdom is behind the strength of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Andalusia, the periodical riots, crop-burnings, the savage scenes of the Civil War, the fact that the only place in Spain where Communism, also, had a small hold was near Seville. After Córdoba one sees the palm huts or kraal-like villages of the peasants, the slums made of beaten-out petrol tins; the esparto grows where the crops ought to grow. And in this region 41 per cent of the land—and the best—is owned by the big estates, and farther south in Seville and Cádiz the figure rises to 58 per cent. The wages paid to the seasonal labourers are derisory and their conditions of life and work intolerable. The foreigner has only to stop and talk to any working man, especially in the south, to find himself suddenly surrounded by a dozen more and in the midst of a violent political meeting, though such discussions are forbidden under the Franco régime.
In Almería, last year, a group of ten fine fellows, naked to the waist, thin and lithe, put down their picks and rushed at me.
“Why do you come here? To look at our misery? Do people eat well in your country? Here we starve. How can one keep a wife and children on twelve pesetas a day?” (The wages seem to range from 12 to 18 pesetas; say, at the present exchange, about 15s. od. to £1 a week.)
They blow up with mocking rage. Their eyes look not with hostility but with astonished curiosity at one’s respectable clothes. These men are well informed about conditions in other countries. They do not whine or threaten; in their excitability they do not lose human dignity or good manners. Unlike the Russian peasants who lived (or live) under the same conditions, the Spaniards are not soaked in drink, for they drink very little, and rarely spirits. (The aguardiente is the drink of the carters in the roadside taverns, not the drink of the ordinary worker.) Some show of providing social services has indeed been made by the Franco régime, but one of the first steps of Franco was to give back the land to the landlords who had been expropriated under the Republic; and no serious attempt has been made to deal with the terrible fundamental problem: how to support a huge and growing population by farming in a dry climate is the essence of it. The traveller is, of course, told that the condition of Andalusia is due to the idleness of the people in this soft climate, and it is true that in the towns one can see hordes of idle people. They belong to two groups: people content to live on their small rents and the large numbers of unemployed. Those who work are working hard.
When one eats the Andalusian gazpacho, that ice-cold soup of cucumber and tomatoes and peppers ground up in vinegar and oil, in the cool, darkened room of the pension in Seville or Córdoba, and after that the fish done in oil, the squids, the hakes and brill, and then the thin steaks or the chicken, one recalls that out in the palmetto kraals the poor man has eaten gazpacho alone; cold in the middle of the day, hot at night, and that the dish will be not much more than bread dipped into a dish of oil and vinegar.
The Andalusians are very different in general character from the Spaniards of Castile. They do not lisp the letter “c” or “z” in their speech; they drop out as many consonants as possible from their words and speak fast in shouting, headlong voices as if their mouths were full of marbles. They are very difficult to understand. They are gay, full of smiles and laughter in their talk, a frivolous and light-hearted people. They pride themselves on verbal wit and an allusiveness so fine and constant that the mind has to work at double speed to keep up with their fancifulness, their hyperbole, their mocking, and their sparkling conceit of themselves. Sedate Castilians regard the Andalusians as buffoons, without gravity or reserve; they are certainly nervous, naïve, easily happy, easily carried up and down by their feeling. They live in the minute. Their effervescence is delightful, their compliments are unending. Everyone seems to be a minor lyrical poet or a storyteller. They are as quick as the Irish with a phrase. Only in Naples—a city long under Spanish dominion, whose dialect is full of Spanish turns of phrase—does one find something like the nature of the people of Seville. Yet Andalusia is also the home of the philosophers. The vice of these people who pride themselves on their gaiety and sparkle is avarice and stinginess. No one parts with a penny more reluctantly. Another weakness is for the cruel or dangerous practical joke; they love horseplay at the expense of strangers. Their religion is almost pagan, and they are less puritan than the Castilians in love. There are vestiges of the Moorish harem system in Andalusian life; it is not very uncommon to find men who have fathered two or three families and who solemnly go the rounds of them—a tolerated manner of living which is rare elsewhere in Spain, though—in true Spanish fashion—the habit is domestic, patriarchal, and connubial rather than licentious.
Deep personal reserve and formality combine, in the paradoxical Spanish fashion, with immediate easy familiarity, in most parts of Spain. In Andalusia the familiarity is more evident than the reserve. The servant slaps the fly on the master’s shoulder, the people in the street call out to the image of the Virgin as it is borne down the street in the processions at Holy Week, as if she were a girl of the neighbourhood; no one can contain the amount of talk that is idling away inside him. One is surrounded by intimates who unbosom at once and pass off, forgetting you and what they said, in a moment.
One knows all the south, and Seville above all, by the slowness of the pace of people walking. Long before midday, when Easter has passed, the awnings are pulled over the streets like Sierpes, where no traffic is allowed to drive, and the cafés and clubs are packed with men. They are drinking sherry and eating prawns and shellfish. The women who regard themselves of any account rarely leave their homes till five in the afternoon, and the horse carriages, with their red-spoked wheels, are nearly as common as the taxis. One is back in the nineteenth century, though the ne
w parts of Seville are modern enough.
In the Barrio Santa Cruz one walks streets that are hardly more than two yards wide, and the white-walled houses have the grille windows, the wrought-iron gates that lead into the cool courtyards where the ferns stand round the fountains. The privacy of these places is mysterious. They are houses made for a life lived in the shade or for the long conversations of the night, and as the year advances, in all of Spain, the long cool night reanimates people. It becomes a country where the whole population of the towns sits under the trees or slowly walks there in the strange solitude of Spaniards or in their loud, shouting, interminable conversations. These barred windows recall the pictures of the cloaked lover standing there and talking for hours to the young woman shut up within. I have not seen this happen for twenty years; the Civil War was a revolution.
Writing in the eighteenth century, Cadalso, a Spanish commentator on social customs, said that in general the Spaniards had an “excessive propensity for love.” He was writing in a period of public licence, the time of the cortejos (or cicebeos), when, in imitation of the French, the stern duties of Spanish jealousy were relaxed at any rate in the smart circles of the great cities. The Spaniards have often been credited with this excessive propensity by romantically minded foreigners, and Seville is, after all, the city of Don Juan. Fashions in morals change very frequently and it would be absurd to generalize and invent a “Spanish attitude to love”; but there is no doubt that the Andalusians have a gift for the poetical admiration of women and a considerable vanity in being thought pursuers and admirers. This warmth of temperament is an obligation to self-respect and is possibly a response to the segregation of women. Slowly this segregation is weakening, but even when segregation has ceased, its effect on manners still remains. Don Juan himself is a figure created in response to this separation of the sexes, and has also a sadistic side which perhaps comes from the excesses of the court of Philip IV in the seventeenth century, when some of the convents had fallen into disorder. The love affair with a nun, the murder of a wife whose honour had been perhaps innocently compromised, were popular fantasies of sexual violence. Spanish inhibition or love of extremity created these fantasies. The public scourgings of heretics, infidels, or penitents lasted well into the eighteenth century and indicate the tastes of a violent people.
Don Quixote, the deluded Castilian knight, and Don Juan, the inexhaustible and ruthless Andalusian lover, are the two great mythical figures which Spain has given to the world. Both are armed and warlike men; both are exemplars of the imagination attempting to impose itself upon reality. Don Quixote attempts to impose the vision of the romances of chivalry. He is defeated, and many serious readers have been tempted—as I have already said—to regard the tale as a tragic comment on the Spanish knightly adventure in the Counter-Reformation and the conquest of America. Don Quixote has been called the book that killed a nation by cutting away the illusion that was necessary to its life. The answer to this is that the decay had already begun by the time of Cervantes. Outside of Spain, Don Quixote is seen as an eccentric, a saint, a deluded idealist upon whom the sceptical realism of Sancho Panza makes the irreverent comment of reality. These elements can indeed be perceived in Don Quixote, but there is something subtler in the portrait. Don Quixote enacts not the tragedy of idealism or vision, but the condition of the imagination itself, which both illumines and darkens the mind. The story contains the mind’s knowledge of its own hallucinatory nature. The great heights of the book are reached when the sly shafts of sanity light up the twilight of Don Quixote’s mind, when he appears to know his own folly, but does so only to plunge deeper. Death alone can cure him, and the irony is that it is Sancho, the squire, who returns like a hero, for he at least has governed an island. Yet even he has been deceived: we have seen a parable not of the condition of Spain, but of the condition of human life. The extreme strains of the Spanish nature are celebrated in these two characters: the passionate tendency to fantasy, the fatal reaction into scepticism, realism, and cynicism.
Don Juan, on the other hand, is an example of the imagination imposing itself successfully upon reality, but failing to conquer death, for in the earliest play about Don Juan, by Tirso de Molina, where the character first appears, Don Juan goes down in the cold grip of the Comendador’s stone hand, to eternal torment. In the romantic nineteenth-century play by Zorrilla, he is rescued for heaven by the pure love of Doña Inés. Because Don Juan always succeeds, he is not a character of any complexity, which Don Quixote is—indeed, he is hardly a character at all—but a universal day-dream or myth. He expresses the male desire for inexhaustible sexual vitality, the female desire to be ravished against the will, reason, interest, or honour. He embodies an aspect of male anarchism and the desire for absolute power.
Although a Spanish playwright was the first to create Don Juan, modern Spanish critics deny—with strong reason—that he is a human being and that he is a Spaniard in any special sense at all. There is a paradox in this disowning of Don Juan, and it is interesting to examine it. The character of Don Juan has had a far greater development outside of Spain, in Mozart, in Molière, possibly in Richardson’s Lovelace, obviously in Byron; but whenever the Italians, in their researches into the Italian theatre of Tirso’s time, have claimed him, Spanish patriotism and scholarship are affronted. (See Ramiro de Maeztu’s essay on the subject.) The second thing to notice is that if Spanish intellectuals have rejected Don Juan, the common people have not. The Don Juan they accept is not the original figure of Tirso de Molina, but the romantic, melodramatic, and Frenchified Don Juan of the nineteenth century invented by the dramatist Zorrilla. Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio is played every year on All Souls’ Eve in most Spanish cities, and it has become a popular ritual rather like the annual reading of Dickens’s Christmas Carol at Christmas in England. The packed audience knows the chief lines by heart. The famous moment when Don Juan describes how he nails up his truculent notice on the door of his house, saying: “Here lives Don Juan Tenorio and if any man wants anything of him …” has become a proverbial satire of Spanish defiance. Don Juan’s is an act which, in some form or other, every Spaniard dreams of performing, and in fact in his inner life is doing all the time. He is asserting the exclusive, dramatic rights of the human ego—myself before all other selves, unrepentantly. Yet, though the people respond to this aspect of Don Juan, the intellectual critics are right in pointing out that, even in Andalusia, Don Juan does not embody a specifically Spanish conception. There is little or no literature of gallantry in Spain; there is no book to compare with the Liaisons dangeureuses. In the picaresque story of the Archpriest of Hita, either love is carnal or it is the love of the Virgin, and even the most decorous never think of disguising the carnality of love. As they see everything in black and white, the Stendhalian categories of love are a refinement they ignore or, indeed, reprehend. Whatever else he is, Don Juan is not an epicurean.
It is difficult to know when Don Juan is Spanish—for he was, at any rate, created a Spaniard—and when he is simply a universal wish. Tirso de Molina’s play was written in the very early seventeenth century. It is called El Burlador de Sevilla—the mocker of Seville, not, it will be noted, the lover—for Don Juan is an Andalusian in his love of the preposterous fantasy, of laughing at his enemies, and of succeeding by boast and effrontery and trick. He is a picaresque character turned hero. In the first act of the play we see him in his typical situation. The scene is at night. Don Juan has entered the Duchess Isabel’s room in the Royal Palace at Naples, and, persuading her in the dark that he is her betrothed, has seduced her. Not a very great feat: she had probably never seen her future husband. She longs to see her lover’s face and moves to get a lamp. Don Juan stops her. She suspects at once and asks, in terror: “What man are you?” Don Juan replies: “A man without a name.” She cries for help, and when the King and the guards come in shouting: “Who is there?” Don Juan answers dryly: “A man and a woman—what else could it be?” Male and female: the worl
d narrowed down to sex, to the primitive human situation. It is a sentence that smashes the elaborate Spanish marriage system at a blow. Man, woman, culminating in the sexual act: it is the basic meaning of so many of the Spanish dances, which are patterns not of romantic or gracious beguilement but of the phases of sexual challenge. There is as much hatred as there is love in these incitements, and they create the hallucination by which passion is built up and released. In this episode of Tirso’s play, the most destructive and unflinching male who will stop at nothing has met the most difficult, the least accessible woman. Don Juan owes it to his honour to break the established codes of honour—to attack the royal Duchess, the friend’s betrothed, the bride on her wedding day, the innocent girl who rescues him and saves his life, the novice in the convent. Speed, trickery—he wins easily by simple promise of marriage—the killing of any opponent, and the quick get-away sum up the process. “I’ll have her to-night”—once he has said that, his “I” is committed. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of what he owes to his own pride. He is the national intransigence isolated.
The Don Juan of Tirso de Molina is a liar, a deceiver, a betrayer of friends, a brawler and murderer. He has one virtue: absolute fearlessness. What drives him on is pride and the idea of the greater difficulty. He claims total freedom and unlimited energy for enjoying it; no law of diminishing returns operates upon his desires. And he is good-humoured and a great mocker; his wit and recklessness fascinate his friends—Benavente, a contemporary dramatist, has shrewdly pointed out that Don Juan puts such a lasting spell upon the men to whom he boasts that the women hardly see him—as for the eternal punishment, that is “a long way off.” He is not afraid of the dead and not respectful to sacred places: he pulls the stone beard of the Comendador’s statue in the chapel, and it is he who has murdered the Comendador. Above all, he is a figure of the night. “Why are you in my room at this hour of night!” exclaims one victim. “These hours above all are my hours,” Don Juan replies.
The Spanish Temper Page 11
