A Night and a Day in Spain

I.

AT THE SEVILLE FAIR.

THERE is a great family likeness in fairs. “ Who pleasure follows, pleasure slays.” The attempt to be amused is too bald, the machinery used too cheap; the methods are amateur methods, and not skilled ones. Certainly they have been at it generations enough in Seville to have made their fête an industry of the place, but they have not succeeded in taking it out of the family of fairs and making it something sui generis.

Seville is flat and hot. — they call it the frying-pan of Europe; but the fair occurs in April, when the fire may be said scarcely to have begun to crackle. I have no objection to Seville in fair-time, but to Seville’s fair as a fair I have a great objection. It is nothing that prices are doubled during the time, for trams and cabs and hotels; if all this made people happy, one would not mind for once. Sixty francs a day for two people in one small room at the Hôtel de Madrid would be well spent in promoting the happiness of a nation or furthering their welfare even for three days, if they were amused. But they are not. They come year after year, and they always think they are going to be amused, I am sure. The love of such pleasure seems inborn, and the belief in its attainment dies hard.

The fair-grounds at Seville are of immense extent, — almost miles, I think. There are acres and acres of bullocks and sheep and horses, and this quarter, of course, smells very nasty, and is not picturesque, as there are no trees, but instead there is a great deal of stifling dust and trampled mud. There are several great avenues laid out, and actually built upon every year. One is a sort of mercantile quarter, where are booths and restaurants and shows. Another is devoted to the children ; cheap toys of every kind are for sale, and hundreds of whistles and trumpets wail the disappointments of as many little bourgeois Spaniards. There is nothing else to be bought that I heard of, nothing characteristic except things to eat, and they are of a character you do not want to eat, and naturally cannot keep.

The principal show of the place is the grand avenue where the high fashion of Seville elects to spend the afternoons and evenings of the three fair-days. Here are hundreds of what look like pasteboard houses painted yellow, without doors or glass in the windows, — decidedly pretty in design for the purpose. They vary in size, but are rather monotonous in color and form. Some of them have balconies, where pots of flowers stand and where vines have been hastily nailed up. Many of the entrances and the windows are draped with pretty chintzes, and the interiors are sometimes gracefully arranged with furniture brought out from the town, pianos, lamps, clocks, vases of flowers, etc. It must be untold trouble. Contractors put up the booths, and take them down at the end of the fair and store them till the next year, but the furniture seems to be brought by the family who lease or own the booth. We drove through the grounds the day before the fair opened, and saw men and maid servants superintending the unloading of carts, and an occasional head of a family casting anxious looks around, and evidently not enjoying that part of it.

All the booths are numbered ; one walks along block after block of monotonous edifices where nothing seems to be going on, people sitting about and looking bored, — no élan, no dash, no anything. Several large and handsome structures, all in the same style of architecture and colored in the same manner, are put up or rented by the fashionable clubs of the city. These are quite the centres of gayety and fashion, they say. I did not see the gayety; the fashion was probably incorporated in the persons of a few petits maîtres who talked with languid voices to some smartly dressed but not beaming women on sofas.

The floor of each booth is some feet above the level of the ground, so that the occupants are on a stage in full view of the masses who drive and walk past all day long, and in the evening crowd up to the very steps to look on at the “ enjoyment ” of their betters. The booth of the Infanta was in no sense more private than those of less important people. The publicity of the whole thing seemed to me odious, and the stereotyped machine-made houses took away all possibility of picturesqueness. I had fancied tents put up on a green field gay with flags and hangings, — Andalusian, individual, characteristic ; dark-haired beauties in mantillas flitting from one to the other; Spanish lovers with lustrous eyes touching the strings of guitar, mandolin, or zither; the sound of castanets half heard ; the rhythm of half-seen dancers from within ; the scent of jasmine and rose filling the air ; the soft glow of hanging lamps mixing with the pale light of stars ; the moonbeams flickering through the trees. Seville, the home of dance and song! Ay de mi Sevillia ! One more illusion gone. I have been to the home of dance and song, and what have I seen ?

Our visits in the day had been depressing, but we made light of that, thinking perhaps an evening view would do away with this impression. We all alighted from the tram, and entered what I must acknowledge was a magnificent avenue of lanterns. The street was very broad and of enormous length, and it was entirely arched by strings of lamps ; you walked under a canopy that glowed, and a multitude walked with you. But in such silence ! You heard the tramp of feet on the pavement as it is heard at St. Peter’s on Good Friday after vespers, when there is no music, and of course no speech. A most decorous crowd it was. I admit I should have liked a little indecorum, — a street fight, even, to vary the monotony. The people were generally of the lower and middle classes, —fathers carrying babies, women trudging on behind, lads marching Sulkily along, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left. I do not know how the grand monde got to their booths ; evidently not by this splendid path of light, which we thought the best thing at the fair. The peasants did not wear costumes: the women had print skirts, and shawls and handkerchiefs over their heads ; the men, the worst made common coats and trousers. Too often the girls wore cheap and gaudy hats and jackets that might have been bought in Third Avenue or the Bowery; in the length and breadth of the place, not a white cap, not a bodice, not a sabot. Two or three black Canton crape shawls, embroidered richly in old rose or yellow, worn with an air of inheritance by bareheaded peasant women, were the only suggestions of a costume that I saw. Of course the women of the better class wore mantillas, but one always counts on the peasants for color and pieturesqueness in a crowd.

Well, this sad-faced multitude were only on their way to the fair. When they were actually there, perhaps they would wake up and be jocund. Not in the least. They never woke up, or did anything but pace from end to end of the long avenues, looking as if their legs ached, and as if they wished that it were time to go home. I went drearily from one tent to another, and at last I resolved to stop and centre my powers of analysis upon one booth which seemed to me about an average example of its class. There was dancing going on, and a good many people were collected outside, looking in. So while the rest of the party moved along I sat down in a chair, for which a man promptly invited me to pay twenty centimes. Having satisfied his claims, 1 tried to indemnify myself by studying the Seville fair in an individual development.

The scene in the booth before me was really pathetic. What an heroic attempt to be gay, to realize the traditions of the fair I Around the sides of the room, on sofas and chairs, sat several elderly women, whose well-worn plain black silk gowns, thin hair, and awkward pose showed them to be no longer of a world where song and dance prevailed. It seemed a cruelty to bring them out of the obscure domesticity into which they fitted, and place them under this garish light. Some ungainly boys, compelled by the solemnity of the function, were wriggling uncomfortably on their chairs and casting furtive glances out at the crowd. Two pretty young girls in deep mourning sat just by the entrance ; they did not disguise their ennui, for not a cavalier of any kind had come near them. Before this inspiriting domestic group a dance was going on. At the piano was a woman, whose round and aged back only was presented to us, playing with vigor and spirit and in excellent time one of the Spanish dances. What vim, what determination, she put into it ! They should dance, their booth should be gay. Another, of heroic mould like herself, was dancing, a woman of about thirtyfive, — in her youth no doubt “ a fine figger of a woman,” now, alas, rather stout; and with her a somewhat pretty little girl of twelve in white muslin. The elder dancer wore a well-fitting gown of black satin and a white lace mantilla admirably put on, fastened with a red rose in the hair and three or four on the breast. She danced remarkably well, clapping her castanets with sharp precision, moving with all the grace possihie to such pronounced embonpoint, and catching the very spirit of the music. With eye and murmured admonition she kept her rather lax little partner up to her work. But it was such hard work, — such swimming against the current of fate, of feeling, of years ! It was misplaced valor, a magnificent charge against the inevitable. It was a storming of the fortress of Pleasure, which never has been and never can be carried. Dear lady, if the gates open to you of themselves, go in and thank the gods.

But all must be in the nature of a gift, and not a conquest. I wanted to put my arms around that middle-aged dancer of the Malagueñas, to take the castanets out of her hand and tell her to go and do something that would give her some enjoyment, and I yearned to escort back to shelter those poor old black silk gowns which looked so “ out of it” under the electric light. I wanted, too, to turn the boys adrift, and give them some money to buy whistles and trumpets to make all the noise they lusted, in the humbler quarters of the fair. As to the two pretty girls in black, who sat like Sally Waters, “ a-wishin’ and a-waitin’ for a young man,” I longed to whisper to them to go home and sit in the chimney-corner, — or whatever answers to the chimney-corner in Andalusian homes, — and to assure them that it was down in the book of Fate he would surely come to them there.

I have never been more depressed by the mistaken efforts of my kind to be happy than I was that damp, warm night at Seville, sitting under the trees, and watching first the dancing in the booths, and then the crowd dragging past me, as if it were Weary-Foot Common they were crossing, and not the land of Beulah.

II.

BEHIND THE SCENES.

The dust lay thick on the properties of the bull-ring in Malaga, the March day on which we went through it. As the bulls do not fight their best till the spring fires their blood, it is generally late April or early May when they are brought from their wide sunny pastures to be penned in the dark toril for a night and a day before they are let loose in the arena. They are driven in by night from the farm where they are bred, a few miles out of the city. I am told by people who live in the Caleta (the pretty suburb of Malaga, where by the sea are many charming villas) that it is quite a thrilling sensation to hear, in the dead of night, the ringing of the bells that announce the approach of the bulls for the next day’s fight. First, far in advance of the cortége, come men on horseback, carrying torches and ringing bells, to clear the way and to warn of danger. Then on a wild gallop come the bulls, — each one guarded on either side by a tame bull,—detachments of mounted picadors flanking them. The rushing cavalcade, the ringing of the bells, the torches flaring in the darkness, the shaking of the ground under the many rapid-beating hoofs, they tell me, is quite dramatic. When the bull-ring is reached, — it stands beside the sea, just outside the city limits, — there are fences which contract gradually up to the gate that leads into the toril. The wild creatures find their midnight gallop suddenly ended at this converging barrier. There is rarely any trouble in getting them in, I believe, for their guardians, the tame bulls, exert the same influence over them that shepherd dogs do over the flocks they guard. The intelligence of these animals is wonderful, and the submission of the untamed brutes of the mountains no less so. In the rare cases when a bull has to lie brought out of the arena, or when anything has gone wrong in the ring, one of these bulls will trot in and bring its refractory charge off the field in the “ gently firm ” manner recommended by Miss Edgeworth. He seems to need only a cap and an apron to look an old bonne sent to bring a kicking, mutinous child back to the nursery. It is a pity that such intelligence should be slaughtered in the shambles or sacrificed in the ring ; for I suppose tame bulls and wild ones are recruited from the same ranks and are capable of the same education.

Once in the toril, they must be incarcerated in their several cells, and this I should think would be the least easy part of the programme. There are eight cells, perfectly dark but for a small latticed trap at the top. Through this, which opens on the bridge above, their keepers deal with them at a safe distance, after they are got in. The door of each is opened by a rope when his hour of fate has struck and he is to be loosed into the ring. From this bridge the keepers let down his food during the night and day that he is in his “ condemned cell ; ” and from here, reaching down, they plunge into him the cruel long dart bearing a gay flaunting rosette which is to decorate him for his début, and to pique him into greater vivacity when he makes his entrée. I fancy the rosette is just now out of fashion : it is perhaps as bad form for a bull to wear a rosette as it was a year ago for a girl to wear a necklace. None of the bulls I saw at Seville a month later had rosettes; and a Seville bull is the glass of fashion and the mould of form.

We saw the many stalls for the poor doomed horses, and the infirmaries for the wounded ones who have escaped death at the horns of the bull in their first encounter, and who are being nursed up for a second, and it is to be hoped final one. For the managers are thrifty, and use up every shred of horseflesh left over from fight to fight. Therefore it is best for the poor beast to be dead and done with it when once he is enlisted. We also went through the many rooms in which the properties are kept. The plumed hats of the picadors were dusty and shabby, and I hope were renovated before the season opened; the ponderous saddles and the armor of the picadors were hanging in dusty rows from the walls. The weight of one stirrup was as much as I could lift; the spears were like Goliath’s, each heavy as a weaver’s beam. I scarcely remember all the paraphernalia we saw, roomful after roomful. Afterward we went to the little hospital on the first floor, with its sickening array of cot-beds and medicine-chests and stretchers. Except that human nature gets used to everything, I should think it would take the heart out of all the actors on the scene to see this preparation for the possible.

But there was one provision that touched me very much : it was the chapel. A chapel in a bull-ring, — what could be more incongruous ? And yet when one comes to think of it, what could be more humane, more Christian, if you will ? The Church of Rome does all it can to suppress the bull-ring; it has a distinct quarrel with it. Any priest in Spain attending a bull-fight does it under penalty of excommunication, He is willfully committing a deadly sin. The best and most devout of the Catholic laity absolutely refuse to assist at these brutal scenes. But the multitude, the careless, the go-as-near-to-perdition-as-youcan-and-be-saved multitude go, and will go till Spain ceases to be Spain and the world is made over. The Church knows this, and might as well issue an edict against earthquakes as against bull-fights. But she yearns over these poor smallsouled children of hers, and with a motherly care provides for them what she can of eternal safety. There shall always be a priest in attendance behind the scene at every bull-fight, to absolve the dying, to administer the last rites, to say a word of hope, to hear a word of repentance. One remembers the hopeful epitaph on the tomb of the fox-hunting squire cut off in his sins : —

I suppose the same charitable hope may cover the Andalusian as the Anglo-Saxon pleasure-seeker.

I wanted to go through the chapel, into which I could only look from the staircase leading along the bridge above the toril to the infirmary. The keeper, however, tried the door and found it locked. The chaplain, he said, had the key. It was but a poor sort of place, looking down from the stairway. There was a wooden altar, now bare of everything,and above it, in a ruddy haze, the fair face of the Blessed Virgin shone through a transparency. Poor wounded, careless liver, brought in bleeding from the arena to breathe his last breath here, how that face would shine upon him from his far-past innocent youth ; how the “church-blest things” about him would bring back days of first communion and confirmation and his mother’s knee ! Perhaps the time between those happy days and this awful last one may not have been so very sinful as it looks to us virtuous men and women of a more enlightened sphere. There may be good-living toreadors, perhaps, according to their lights, and salvable picadors, it is even possible. Heredity and surroundings count for a great deal in a world where not more than one in sixty thousand lives up to his highest possibility

III.

IN THE RING.

The Seville bull - ring is over two hundred years old, very well built, and whitewashed, like most things made by man’s device in Spain. The bull-fight that I saw in Seville was, I believe, the best thing that Spain could do in the way of a bull-fight. It was the third and last day of the fair. Seville is the social centre of Spain. The three days of the fair are the culmination of the social year in Seville, and the last fight is the culmination of the fair. So, logically, it was the climax of a climax, and as such it was well to have been there, if one wanted to judge favorably of bullfights. The day was perfect. April is the loveliest month in Seville, like early June at home ; neither too hot nor too cold. The whole town was gay with the fair, and all the gayest of the crowd seemed pushing their way toward the Plaza de Toros with us. There were open carriages with black-eyed women in the conventional bull-fight dress, yellow satin trimmed with black chenille fringe, and a mantilla of the same chenille on the head ; there were drags and dogcarts driven by Spanish élégants, and filled with the haute noblesse of Seville ; there were cabs with eager tourists in them ; there were trams stopping before the entrance and disgorging crowds of flushed and hurried heads of families shepherding troops of little children in their holiday clothes; there were dark peasants, oily mechanics, servant-maids, hotel porters, pressing in at the gate where all have to enter, dividing, some above and some below, as indicated by the green or red or blue ticket that each held. There was a zeal about it all. The air and the sunshine, even, were zealous. The light breeze was full of anticipatory thrills.

We struggled up to our places in one of the best boxes ; we had felt keenly afraid we were to be cheated out of it by some mysterious Spanish method. I do not know why, but travelers always are suspicious of the good faith of Spaniards ; whereas generally I have found they are as dependable as other people who get their living out of the traveling public, — perhaps more so. Their methods are stupid, and they are hot tempered and stubborn, but they seem to me honest. When we had got into our box and settled ourselves in our places, we looked around with delight. What a coup cVceil! Imagine the vast white rim of the building against a deep blue sky, and all the amphitheatre down to the barrier that shuts off the arena ablaze with the color that goes to the clothing and the flesh of twelve thousand people : gay fans, parasols, dresses, hats ; the white shirt-fronts of men, the dark hair and pink cheeks of girls, — all with the slight movement and vibration of a living mass. And the great arena itself, what a glorious circle of color! It was a tawny, smooth ring of yellow sand of a rich and singular tint, brought from the neighboring mountains.

The wide, empty arena so resplendently colored, the massed brilliance of the throng that filled the amphitheatre from top to bottom, the white rim above that framed it, and over all the vivid blue of a cloudless sky struck me as unapproachably fine. No wonder that the Spaniard loves bis bull-fight. So far it is to the credit of his eye and his taste that he does ; and one extends the credit a little further. The entrada is beautiful. When all are wrought up to the highest point of expectancy, the gates in the barrier opposite the royal box open, and the gayly trapped procession winds in. Men on horseback with plumed hats ; the matadors in their beautiful dresses; the picadors, carrying spears, riding their blindfolded horses; the gayly decorated mules, with their bells jangling; the troop of men who manage them, dressed in snow-white blouses,— all this cortége winds through the dark gateway, and delights the eyes of the throng by passing two or three times around the ring. Then a horseman rides forward out of the procession, and, with a deep obeisance, pauses before the royal box and asks for the key of the toril. The key is thrown down to him, and he catches it in his plumed hat, which he holds out. This is the sign for all to withdraw from the ring but those who are to take part in the baiting of the bull. The mules trot off, shaking their bells, followed by their running drivers ; the men on horseback withdraw, and the gates close behind them. There is a sensational silence ; all eyes are fixed on the door of the toril, which differs in no way from the other doors of exit and entrance but by having a bull’s head carved over it. A man goes up to it and unlocks it, and saves himself by jumping over the barrier as the wild creature rushes out from the dark cell in which he has been incarcerated for twenty-four hours. The door is quickly pulled shut from behind the barrier. Poor beast, he looks very bewildered for a moment. He tosses up his head, gazes around amazed at the strange scene and the glare of light. He catches sight of a picador across the ring, sitting motionless on his blinded horse, always headed one way. All the side of the man toward the bull is plated with armor. It is a dastardly sort of business all through. The other side is never presented to the bull, nor does the bull have the least chance to get at it. He always goes straight for the horse, with his head down, plunges his horns into the bowels of the creature, and tosses him over. The chulos (the apprentices) then rush forward, and, by waving flags before him, draw off his attention from the prostrate horse and the picador floundering in his heavy armor. A few moments, and this doughty knight is helped upon his legs, and if his horse is still alive and able to stand, he is put upon it and obliged to ride around the ring, to be ready for another attack as soon as the bull has dispatched the second horse, upon which he is now engaged. Something like fifteen minutes, I believe, is allotted to this part of the taurine drama. Some bulls do more rapid work than others, of course, but one may be sure the thrifty manager will never allow more than the allotted time for the slaughter of the horses lie has bought and paid for. There were fourteen killed that day, and that was rather below the average.

At the end of the fifteen minutes a bugle is sounded: some of the picadors ride away on their surviving steeds; those whose horses are killed limp away on their feet. The matadors saunter in, dainty in silk and velvet, the chulos, with their banderillas in their hands, come forward, and then the bull takes his chance of five minutes more or less of life at the hands of these tormentors. One’s sympathies are all with the horses in the first act, and with the bull in the second and third acts. The skill of the men is perfect and their courage admirable, but they are twelve to one, and brain thrown in. Poor bull! He has but a sorry chance for the few minutes’ longer existence that he fights for. He is doomed, but then he does not know it, grâce a Dieu. We saw six killed, that sunny April afternoon, — six splendid bulls, black and glossy, and with courage and intelligence that deserved a better fate.

As each is killed, the mules trot merrily in, shaking their gay bells and the red tassels with which they are bedecked, their white-bloused drivers running behind them, and the dead bull is dragged off the field, as are the dead horses. These last look such pitiful shapes when the life is gone out of them. They are generally poor beasts to begin with, but the unknown attribute which we describe as life makes them such different objects. In a moment, a rack of bones, a heap of hoofs and ribs. The bulls, too, look so poor and shapeless. What is life, after all ? How much longer before the philosophers, who will not let us believe anything that we cannot understand, tell us what it is that goes out, the absence of which glazes in an instant the dead monster ’s eye, and dulls the gloss of his coat, and turns the glorious contour of his limbs into deformity ? We ought to know such a simple thing as that, and to understand it thoroughly, thoroughly, before we believe it.

Of the skill of the matadors one cannot say too much in praise. The hero on this occasion was Espartero. The two others, quite as skillful, perhaps, were Guerrita and Bombita. All three were the foremost men in their profession. Their nerve and their skill were as perfect as their dress, their bearing, and their grace. Guerrita was rather my favorite. He is a slender, well-made, perfectly-proportioned man of thirty-five or forty, agile as a deer, and with a deliberate grace of movement that seems to redeem the bloody work he does from some of its horrors. His features are regular, his expression is thoughtful, his face clean-shaven like a priest’s. One scarcely knows whether to admire him most when vaulting over a bull in midcareer, or planting to a hair’s-breadth the hidden knife in the furious creature’s spine, or standing, with his gorra de torero in his hand, calmly bowing to the vociferous and excited multitude crowding to look down at him.

One of the dramatic moments at a bullfight is when the matador “ pledges ” the bull to the chief person present. On the first day of the fair the personage was the Comtesse de Paris, and to her Espartero “ pledged ” the three bulls which came to his share to slaughter. He killed them all, à merveille, with one stab each, and there was great acclaim. It was said the comtesse would surely send him “something very handsome.” I hope she did, and that his family have it now to console themselves with, for in less than five weeks from that day he was instantly killed in the Madrid ring. People had assured me the whole thing was reduced to such a science that there was literally no danger; that the courage of the matadors was a laughable fiction ; that a man was in about as much danger from a bull as a telegraph operator is from the electric current he works with. This is a very comfortable thought as you watch a bull-fight, but it is about as near to truth as a good many other thoughts with which we solace ourselves. That Espartero, the great master of his craft, died weltering in his blood in the ring where he had had so many triumphs, proves the fallacy of such a theory. Your bull is an unknown quantity. You take your chance. One brute differs from another brute in fury. The wild creatures of the mountains cannot be trained to suit your game. You have to take them as they come. Some time ago a picador was gored to death by a bull who went for him instead of the horse, the body of which always seems his objective point. It was found that the beast had some defect of vision, which caused him to plant his horns a foot or two higher than he meant to do. Therefore the matador takes his chance, and no doubt it adds subtly to the pleasure of the crowd to know it is so grave a one.

Miriam Coles Harris.