The Pritchett Century (28 page)

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.

The civilisation that Seville has inherited is a good deal Arab. Almost all the older things in Seville were built by Arab craftsmen and although modern blocks of flats have gone up, the main domestic part of the city is based on the Arab patio or courtyard. There is a strong white wall, and the rooms open on to a central court. The streets of Santa Cruz wind and tangle. They are built to catch only glancing blows of the terrible Spanish sun, to be channels of cool air, and the names of these streets are set out in the large black classical letters of centuries ago, and are dramatic in their direct and simple evocations. Streets are called, quite plainly: Air, Water, Bread, Straw, the Dead Moor, Glory, Barrabas, Mosque, Jewry and Pepper. No fantastications in that heroic age. The Spaniards of the Reconquest were simple men. In the gypsy quarter of the Triana, the traditional home of bullfighters, dancers and singers, the main street is called Pureza—Purity. It is one of the clues to the character of the Sevillano that even in modern streets he has not changed his lettering. It is superior to that of any city in the world and it emphasises how important place and locality are to the Sevillian temperament. No search for identity here; he is a man and, as Don Juan said when he posted his name on a wall, if anyone wants anything of him, here he is. The streets of Seville are clean; even the poor streets are clean. There is no filth in the Triana. One breathes flower-borne air, as one passes the grilled windows and gates of the houses and looks into the courtyards. From the modest patios to those of the greater houses, the cool ferns stand there on the tiles and
the flowers are massed. These patios are really open rooms, often with chairs and tables in them and under the gallery in the house of some well-off lawyer or family who do well out of the olive oil or the sherry trade, one sees the best pictures of the house and the finest furniture standing virtually in the open. Silent always, mysterious and as if entranced by their own flowers, the patios are little stage sets, little peep-shows in themselves. They display the pride of the family as well as its natural pleasure in living in the open air.

In the
Feria
, those who can afford it hire or build “casetas,” wooden booths or marquees near the Park. The caseta has a “living room” in the front and a kitchen concealed behind it; the living room is separated from the street by a low rail and there many families move elegant pieces of furniture from their houses—armoires, sideboards, handsome dining tables. Pictures hang on the wall. Publicly, with some air of consequence, the family lives in the open for the Fair and takes enormous family pride in keeping open house, inviting the passing stranger as well as their friends to drink with them. There is no rough-and-ready camping about this. They are here to be seen at their best and in abandoned gaiety, drinking and dancing all through the night. In the
Feria
, there is the procession of carriages to watch. Remarkable and luxurious equipages go by, drawn by their teams of fine horses. The great families own them; the less great hire them. At this time one sees the parade of riders, formally dressed in the Andalusian style—the low-crowned Cordoba hat, the short jacket that sets off the waist of the rider, the tight trousers with the florid leather facings and, behind the riders, the girls in their long red-and-white dresses, their combs and the roses or carnations in the hair.

So well known is this, that when the foreigner thinks of Spain, he thinks of this Sevillian scene, hears the castanets and the tambourines and the speed of the tossing music of the Sevillana. Spain is, of course, quite unlike this. It is a purely Sevillian scene and it has spread abroad that legend of romantic Spain which has infuriated so many Spanish writers. There is, one has to say, something very provincial in this city. Its habits and manners are set. The stranger must not get the impression that the gaiety he sees will pass the bounds of formality, even when it appears at its wildest. The very wildness has its rules. Spanish
life is profoundly unromantic. Overwhelmingly it is ruled—as the theatre is ruled—by the strict sense of genre and local style. Things change, of course. Seville has become an important river port. The Vespas roar in the streets, the old grinding yellow trams have gone and have been replaced by the trolley bus. Young girls go in for blonde hair dips. And lovers, sitting among the roses in the park, are bolder. It is now permissible for them to hold hands or put an arm round a waist. Many of those lovely houses in Santa Cruz are let out in flats. The bullfights after Holy Week are rarely good, for this spectacle has its terrible periods of boredom, when the bulls are bad or the torero incompetent. There are plenty of people in the crowd coming away from the bull ring complaining of the enormous prices charged, the commercialisation of the show and the decline of its quality. Foreigners who used not often to go now swarm in and there is a good deal more of showiness than the rigour of the game. Foreign writers who have become fans of the bullfight have a lot to answer for.