Rose for Winter (5 page)

At last, in the centre of a flock of fluttering priests, came the red-capped Archbishop, very old, very slow, loaded with vestments and reverence. Attention, which till then had been fixed upon the glittering face of the altar, upon the stars and haloes which surrounded Christ and the Virgin, now switched to the aged priest. Bent low, he climbed the altar steps, sat himself on a high-backed throne, placed his slippered feet on a gilded footstool, and gave himself up to the complicated ministrations of the serving brethren. In green, gold, scarlet and purple, they massed before him, advanced, retreated, bowed, knelt, touched his robes, kissed his rings and held up the Missal to his trickling eyes. At one moment, four priests eased him gently to his knees, held him in prayer, then restored him to his throne. For the rest he sat like a stiff and ornate doll, without power, it seemed, to command one human gesture – save at the hands of his helpers. So the feast proceeded; the Virgin stood high, remote among the stars; Christ writhed in the flickering shadows; while the rituals revolved more and more about this inert though living image, the Christian Prince of Seville.

We returned several times to the dark echoing spaces of this cathedral, and a week later witnessed the moving ceremony of Las Seises. For hundreds of years on this day in December it has been the custom for a group of young boys to dance and sing on the steps of the high altar for the pleasure of the Virgin. Some say that the occasion reflects the dancing of Samuel before Saul, others that it recalls the boy David. In any case, I doubt whether such a disarming custom could have endured anywhere but in Seville. The boys appeared now, pale and pretty in their miniature elegance, each dressed in fifteenth-century style, with doublets, hose and large cockaded hats. Grave and courtly, they advanced towards the altar, took up their positions on the steps, then moved into a slow and formal dance, weaving chaste patterns like a minuet. They sang, too, in clear innocent harmonies, and their tense, childish movements, revolving beneath the great gaunt images of the altar, were most simple and affecting. Through the years many a Pope has protested against this ceremony, calling it pagan and profane. But none has ever succeeded in suppressing it. For in Seville to dance, even for the Virgin, has never seemed out of place.

Our hotel, just off the main square, was snug, like a tropical hot-house. It had a glass-roofed central well which swam in a perpetual submarine twilight, and on every floor there were potted plants which branched and budded with almost Burmese profusion. Among them sat the innumerable relatives of the proprietor, killing the day-long hours and gazing out through the palm leaves with the unflickering eyes of jungle animals. The place was very clean, and always, somewhere, one saw an old woman scrubbing on her knees.

Paca, our chambermaid, was a beautiful round-faced girl with the ripe dark looks of a Murillo. She was a typical Sevillana, and Murillo, who came from this town, must have seen many like her. Whenever she brought our breakfast in the morning she had the winning habit of entering the shuttered room and awakening us with a soft-sung song. She sang with that warm vocal agility, passionate yet tender, with which every girl in Seville seems naturally born. Her songs were long and sweet, full of regrets and partings, and when her voice in the dark met us half asleep, I lay bemused and could not have wished for a smoother awaking.

Paca earned about thirty-five shillings a month, and she had a lover who was a waiter. She did not know if they would ever get married. She only met him once a week – her single night of freedom. On one such night she came to our room and asked Kati to help prepare her for the meeting. As she sat on our bed in a tight red frock Kati brushed her long hair and pinned it with a flower. Slowly the drab encrustations of work began to drop from her, her limbs began to stiffen and shine, her great eyes to dilate with dark wet shadows, her head to rise and assume the high carriage of a gypsy. Only for these few hours in every week could she leave the imprisonment of beds and brooms and chamber bells, and walk through the dark lanes as a girl in love. The prospect magnified her beauties like a kiss.

Once we talked with her about the women of other nations and how they compared in looks.

‘Chinese women are the most ugly in the world,' said Paca. ‘But that is their fault. They are heathens. They do not love God, as we do.'

What about English women? we asked.

‘Excuse me,' she said, ‘but very ugly. They walk like tired mules, thus' – she rose and slumped across the room, rounding her shoulders, bending her knees – ‘and their feet, so large; and their hair, so short, frizz all round, like scorched straw. And the French – worse, much worse – feísima. And the Germans; fat as pumpkins. But the señorita no' – she turned her glowing eyes on Kati – ‘she is most beautiful. All the house are saying so.'

All the house, in fact, were saying that we were not English at all – that we were obviously music-hall artists of unknown origin. It was a delusion which we met often, and was based partly, I think, on Kati's jaunty looks, and partly on the fact that I always wore a fur-lined overcoat and carried two guitars with me everywhere. We did nothing to discourage it: it seemed to bring us certain privileges, and in consequence we were undercharged at restaurants, cosseted at cabarets, entertained freely at taverns and bars, and never expected to have any money.

But to be in Seville without a guitar is like being on ice without skates. So every morning, while Kati went dancing with the Maestro Realito, I took lessons on the instrument in my room.

My instructor, one of Seville's most respected professors of the guitar, was a small sad man, exquisitely polite and patient, poorly but neatly dressed, and addicted to bow-ties made of wallpaper. Each day, at the stroke of ten, he knocked softly at my door and entered on tiptoe, as though into a sick room, carrying his guitar-case like a doctor's bag.

‘How are we today?' he would ask sympathetically, ‘and how do we proceed?'

Silently, he would place two chairs opposite each other, put me in the one facing the light, sit himself in the other, and then ponder me long and sadly while I played. Infinite compassion, as from one who has seen much suffering, possessed his face while he listened. An expression also of one who, forced to inhabit a solitary peak of perfection, has nowhere to look but downwards at the waste of a fumbling world.

After an hour's examination, during which he tested all my faulty coordinations, he would hand me a page of exercises and bid me take them twice a day. Then, with a little bow, his chin resting mournfully upon his paper tie, he would leave me to visit his next patient.

Sometimes – but only very occasionally – he would relax at the end of the lesson, empty his pockets of tobacco dust, roll himself a cigarette, smile, and take up his guitar and play to me for an hour. Then his eyes would turn inward and disappear into the echoing chambers of his mind, while his long white fingers moved over the strings with the soft delicacy of the blind, lost in a dream of melody and invention. And faced with the beauty of his technique, the complex harmonies, the ease and grace, the supreme mastery of tone and feeling, I would feel like one of the lesser apes who, shuffling on his knuckles through the sombre marshes, suddenly catches sight of homo sapiens, upright on a hill, his gold head raised to the sky.

Spanish bull-fighting is a thing of summer, of heat, dust and sharpest sun and shadow. Quite rightly it belongs to a time of hot light and hot blood, and one does not look for it in winter. Even so, there are occasional out-of-season corridas held for amateurs, for charity or as trial contests for promising boys. And such a one was held on our second Sunday in Seville, organized in honour of the Patron Saint of the Air Force, and we went to see it.

We arrived late to find the gates of the bull-ring locked and a large crowd struggling among a squad of mounted police. A man with a megaphone told them to go home, that the corrida had begun and the ring was full. We were just on the point of turning away when a party of gold-braided officers arrived, we fell in behind them, doors were thrown open, officials saluted us, and in no time at all we found ourselves ushered into a private box high above the arena.

Before us lay the classic scene: the ring of sand, the crescent of sunlight, the banked circle of spectators with dark-blue faces like flints in a wall, and the two almost motionless antagonists below us – the bull-fighter with bowed head, standing in silence; and coughing in the dust, a young bull dying.

We had arrived at the second kill of the afternoon; but we saw four more, the best and the worst – the best magnificent, the worst a crime. In a corrida of this nature one may see anything. The young toreros, eager to establish names for themselves, are often capable of a feverish bravado, but more often suffer from a kind of hysteria which loses them control of both bull and themselves. The bulls, too, are often a green, unpredictable lot, capable of nobility, treachery and excruciating cowardice. Not rarely, in such circumstances, the boy gets killed as well as the bull.

The second bull that afternoon seemed to have been killed with some skill, for as the boy stood there with his blood-stained sword, he received no groans or hisses. A quartet of plumed horses dragged away the body, the sand was raked smooth, and we waited for the entry of the next. This is one of the great dramatic moments of every encounter; the fighters take up their positions, the hushed crowd waits, then the huge doors to the bull-pit are thrown open and the unknown beast charges forth, fresh in anger, into the ring.

The trumpet for our third bull duly sounded, the doors were thrown open, the attendant scampered for safety, and we all waited; but nothing happened at all. The attendant crept back and peered cautiously round the corner of the open doorway. He whistled and waved his cap. Then, gaining courage, he began to leap up and down in the mouth of the bull-pit, hooting and capering like a clown. Minutes passed, and still nothing happened. Slowly, at last, and sadly, lost as a young calf, the bull walked into the ring. He looked with bewilderment around him, turned back, found the doors shut and began to graze in the sand. If ever a body lacked a vocation for martyrdom, this sorry bull was it. He had no conception of what was expected of him, nor any inborn anger; all he wished was to be back in the brown pastures under Medina and to have no part of this. And when it came to the point, he put up no fight at all and was killed at last without grace or honour, to the loud derision of the crowd.

Every corrida is run by a President, the formal figurehead who commands the various stages of the ritual, and his box stood next to ours. It was the centre of honour and dedication, to which each torero bowed at the beginning and end of his trial. And this afternoon it was decorated by the presence of four young girls all dressed in the handsome robes of fiesta. White lace mantillas clothed their heads, and over their shoulders they wore rich black shawls embroidered with scarlet flowers. They leaned their bare brown arms on the parapet, and chattered, and turned every so often to flash their teeth at the solemn gentlemen who stood sipping sherries behind them. Silly, self-conscious, but undeniably beautiful, they were not spectators but symbols, the virgins of the feast, flower-soft among the blood, providing that contrast of youth and death so beloved by every Spaniard.

A superb, straight-limbed young man now stepped forward into the ring and a cheer went up, for he had already earned some reputation. He was dressed, not in the heavy gold-embroidered garments of the professional matador, but in Andalusian riding-clothes – a broad black hat, short waistcoat, tight-fitting trousers and high-heeled boots. With cape folded, hat held to his breast, he faced the President's box, bowed, raised his head, and in ringing eloquent tones dedicated the next bull to one of the virgins, whose name was Gloria. Her companions congratulated her rather noisily upon the honour, while she, huge-eyed and delicate as a doll, waved a small hand, and then went pale as death.

The President leaned forward and gave the signal, the trumpet sounded, and the doors opened for the fourth bull. And this time there was no doubt about it. He came in like thunder, snorting and kicking up the dust, his black coat shining like a seal's, his horned head lowered for immediate attack. Two assistants, trailing long capes, ran out and played him first, a formal prologue designed to discover the unknown temper of the bull, his way of charging, which horn he liked using, and so on. Slowly, their job done, they were beaten back towards the barriers, and the bull stood alone. Then Gloria's champion walked out across the sand. He took up his stand, the pale sun gilding his rigid face, gave a loud clear shout to the bull, and from that moment we witnessed an almost faultless combat. Elegant, firm-footed as a dancer, but with cold courage and movements of continual beauty, the boy entirely dominated the bull. He seemed to turn the fury of the beast into a creative force which he alone controlled, a thrusting weight of flesh and bone with which he drew ritual patterns across the sand. The bull charged and charged again, loud-nostrilled, sweating for death, and the boy turned and teased him at will, reducing him at last to a kind of enchanted helplessness, so that the bull stood hypnotized, unable to move, while the young man kissed his horns. Alone in the ring, unarmed with the armed beast, he had proved himself the stronger. He never ran, he scarcely moved his feet, but he turned his cape like liquid fire, and the bull, snorting with mysterious amazement, seemed to adore him against his will, brushing the cape as a bee does a poppy.

After the short barbed lances had been thrust into the bull's shoulders, drawing their threads of blood, the moment for the kill arrived; and this was accomplished with almost tragic simplicity and grace. The boy, sword in hand, faced the panting bull. They stood at close range, eyeing each other in silence. The bull lowered his head, and the crowd roared ‘Now!' The boy raised the sword slowly to his eye, aiming horizontally along the blade; then he leaned far forward and plunged the weapon to the hilt in the bull's black heaving shoulders. Such a moment, the climax in the game, carries with it mortal danger for the matador. His undefended body, poised thus above the horns, is so vulnerable that a flick of the bull's head could disembowel him. It is the moment of truth, when only courage, skill and a kind of blind faith can preserve the fighter's life. But the boy's sword had found its mark, and the bull folded his legs, lay down for a moment as though resting at pasture, then slowly rolled over and died.