The Pritchett Century (27 page)

One has only to go to the theatre or to any display of dancing in Spain to see how actors and dancers come onto 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.

(1954)

Take a blind man out of Castile in the spring, put him on the Tierra de María Santissima, the plain of short green corn and rye grass outside Seville and he will know at once he is in Andalusia and on the way to that city. He will know by the smell of the air. The harsh and stinging odours of lavender and thyme have gone. Now he is walking or riding no longer, but is being lifted or wafted towards the city on air that has ceased to be air and has become a languid melting of the oils and essences of orange blossom and the rose, of jasmine and the myrtle. And although in the city itself he will meet again the strong native reeks of Spanish life—something compounded of olive oil, charcoal, cigar smoke, urine, horse dung, incense and coffee—the flowers of Andalusia will powerfully and voluptuously overrule them, the rose and the orange blossom will blow hotly upon his face from walls and street corners, until he reels with the nose-knowledge of Seville.

It is even more dizzying to the eyes. As we come across the hedge-less flat country we see a low-built, oriental city of roof gardens rising innocently like a tray of white china, chipped here and there by tender ochres. We see the tops of the palms sprouting like pashas in the
squares. Inside the city white walls are buried in bougainvillea and wistaria and all climbing flowers, geraniums hanging from thousands of white balconies, great lilies in windows, carnations at street corners, and roses climbing up the walls and even the trees so that all the gasps and hyperbole of pleasure are on our lips. In a minute we are voluptuaries. In two minutes our walk slackens. In three minutes we are looking for a foot of cool shade. And gazing at the oranges on the trees by the trolley bus stop, we ask ourselves how it is that, in a city like this, people do not pick them as they go by, how trains can be got out of the lazy station, lorries unload at the port on the Quadalquivir where ships have come up seventy miles from the sea, or how any of the inhabitants do anything but sigh, sit down or sleep.

Andalusia is the home of Spanish lyrical poetry. Delight, enchantment, all the words suggested by little fountains playing in cool courtyards come almost monotonously to the poets. George Borrow, who saw the Inquisition at every corner of this city, confessed as he stood by the rose walls of the Alcazar that he burst into tears of rapture. His rage had gone. But we need other words than delight, rapture and enchantment to define the city. What is there in the spirit of the Sevillano that breaks the burden of so much sensual beauty and saves him from oriental torpor? Certainly he sleeps in the afternoon and talks half the night, but he is notoriously the liveliest, most sparkling creature, the cleverest monkey, his enemies would say, in Spain. Ask the enemies of Seville to define it. They reply at once: “A city of actors.” Seville is theatre. It is totally and intimately a stage. Lope de Vega, the greatest of the Spanish dramatists, called it “the proud theatre of the world” and in its greatest days when Columbus came back from his first voyage to America and before its 16,000 silk looms had been silenced by the wool trade of Castile and the glut of Pizarro’s gold, there was nothing bombastic in the phrase.

The legendary figures by whom we know Seville are all theatrical: it is the city of Don Juan, of Figaro and Carmen—but we must say this discreetly because it annoys Sevillanos; they have had enough of Carmen. Cervantes, not a native of the city, was in trouble there—as elsewhere—and caught enough of the spirit of the place to get himself thrown out of the cathedral for protesting against a statue. A place—he
saw—for gestures, like Don Juan’s. The painters who were born or lived there—Velazquez and Zurbarán—were respectable; and Murillo, the true painter of the women of the city, caught the softer aspect of it: the flowered, moonlit sweetness. But the legendary figures like Peter the Cruel and Don Miguel de Mañara come straight from the stage. The monstrosities committed by Peter the Cruel are as sordid as any in history; the interesting thing is what the dramatic instinct of the Sevillano did with them. One of his notorious murders occurred at night in a silent street of the labyrinth called Santa Cruz. There was only one witness—an old woman who went to her window, candle in hand, and saw his face for a second. That street is still called the street of the Candlestick—Candillejo. But Mañara comes even closer to our notions of the emotional extremity to which the Sevillian character can run and illustrates how it tends to give men a single purpose which utterly absorbs them for a time and may, at a shock, turn with equal singleness into the opposite direction.

Don Miguel de Mañara was once thought to be the original of Don Juan. The idea was mistaken. He was not born when the original play portraying the character was written. Mañara was a rake who repented but, in truly Sevillian fashion, he was not content with an ordinary act of remorse. He had to make the exorbitant gesture and enact the awful scene. From wealth, lust and riot he turned suddenly to the contemplation of death. Pursuing a veiled woman in the street at night, he pulled the veil off her face and a death’s head stared at him. He encountered a funeral in the street and, lifting the cloth of the bier, saw that the corpse was himself. When he came to repentance, it was in the great manner. He built a splendid Charity Hospital for the Poor which still exists and there at the entrance one can see the stone of a Sevillano who was an actor for ever. The inscription reads: “Here lies the body of the worst man who ever lived.” The worst! Nothing less would satisfy him as a curtain line.

It would be fanciful to see Seville only through its past fantasies, its amorous brawlers, its thousands of witty barbers and its dangerous cigarette girls and its penitents; it was once a Roman capital and, after the discovery of America, Seville produced also that reserved and grave masculine character, the Empire-builder; so that often in Seville
one sees examples of those reserved, dignified and grave Roman types, excellent in the saddle, family-proud and conscious of occasion, who look like southern forerunners of the imperial kind of Englishman turned out by Dr. Arnold. Even the clubs of Seville recall those of London, except that the windows are wide open, so that the members are in the front row of the stalls. No one ever reads a book in these clubs, twice as many members are fast asleep as in any club in Pall Mall and the waistline is more abandoned. Trousers have to be cut high and wide to accommodate the great globe below; a belt would expose all that owning bull farms and olive estates can do to the figure. But even these men, stunned by the blessings and martyrdoms of obesity, will get to their feet about midday, proceed like slowed-down planets to the barbers to be clipped, shaved and oiled, to hear what rascalities Figaro has to tell them; or will stand in the Sierpes where no traffic ever runs, and argue dramatically with their friends. Roman Seville is full of the old Andalusian Adam. A street scene, in the perpetual play, is what they love to enact or watch. The last time I was in Sierpes I saw a small procession of youths and children and a couple of police moving towards me. Its centre was a young drunken American who, happily, spoke some Spanish, for he was able to put on quite a show for the crowd who were teasing him. A little girl of ten was having a battle of wits with him. He stood up to them all so well that they accompanied him like an admiring and mischievous court. Reluctantly the police gave up; they had to keep a point with their sergeant elsewhere. All occurrences are revered, the small and the very great.

So it is fitting that at Corpus Christi, the choirboys should dance their medieval dance before the high altar of the Cathedral; it is fitting that when this cathedral was built to celebrate the triumph of Spain in freeing Western Europe from Islam it was made the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. And today it is natural that the processions of Holy Week should have been the most extraordinary religious spectacles to be seen in Europe since the fourteenth century. Thousands of foreigners come to see it, but they are swallowed up by the whole population of the city, nearly 400,000 people, who are out in the streets for a week, living and acting the whole display. Spectacle is in the blood. What the State occasion is to the British, what the historical pageant is
to the Germans, and the parade to Americans, the religious pageant is to the Spaniards and to the Sevillano most of all.

The first distinctive quality of Holy Week in Seville lies in the Sevillano and the Sevillana themselves. They do not think of themselves as simply natives of the place or as a number of separate creatures who happen to live and work there. Each one feels himself to be the whole city. All Spaniards feel this about their native place, but the Sevillano carries it to a point at once exquisite and absurd. His feeling is rhetorical, yet, even more, his sense of the city is intimate and domestic. All Seville is his house. The streets are the living quarters, the squares are where he meets his friends, the little baroque churches are his gilded drawing-rooms. It is extraordinary, if one happens to visit or stay in one, how silent and empty-seeming the houses are. A face at a window, a servant going upstairs, a figure alone in rooms darkened to keep out the sun—there is not much more sense of habitation than that. People eat there and sleep there, they water flowers on the balcony—but not there, one supposes, do they live. And so, when the processions of Holy Week begin, the Sevillano is no spectator; he is of them. They are part of his personal drama.

Even if we go only by the number, length, duration and membership of the processions, we see how completely they pervade. Are all Sevillanos passionately religious? No. Has the Church enemies after the Civil War? Yes, very many. Do some people deplore the processions, pointing to the enormous amount of convent, church and religious monument building of the last twenty years in a poor country that lacks the will or the talent to do more than nibble lazily at its worst social problems? Many do so deplore. Yet, because the processions are theatre, eyes brighten and the arguments vanish. In each parish church there is a
cofradia
or brotherhood—they are exclusively male institutions—which maintains the elaborate and beautifully carved and golden floats on which the image of the Virgin patroness or the Christ is carried. Some
cofradias
maintain two or even three of these floats. They are objects of pride, for some of the figures are by the great Spanish sculptors—Montañes, Hito del Castillo, the Roldans, Alonso Cano, are among them—who excelled in the dramatic realism of their work. One or two are masterpieces and, listening
to the crowd, one sees that, whether they respond to the religious meaning or not, they respond totally to the work of art and to the expressiveness of the figures in the scenes of the Crucifixion.

There are something like fifty of these
cofradias
in Seville. Their membership is large. It is not always easy to become a member. Parents are known to put their sons’ names down for them at birth. Some of the
cofradias
originate in the guilds of the Middle Ages and their popular trade names have stuck to them: cigarette-makers, bankers, bakers, roadmakers and so on. Beginning on the Monday before Easter, the
cofradias
in turn bear the floats through the streets from their parish and then along a set route in the centre to the Cathedral; the procession pauses there, and then the return journey begins. Some of the processions are eight or eleven hours on their route and they go on through the night—first a posse of the municipal guard, then barefoot penitents carrying their lighted torches, the standard S.P.Q.R., banners, acolytes swinging the smoking censers and then the image at last, followed by a band. For half a mile the members of the
cofradia
precede the image, in their conical hats with eye-slits and in robes, carrying their candles. After a week of this the streets are glazed with candle grease. The making of the show is its slowness, for each float is borne on the shoulders of thirty-six men concealed beneath the velvet curtains below. They shuffle forward in the heat only fifty to a hundred yards at a time. They work like galley slaves. The very slowness of the progress means that they effectually occupy the main part of the city and entirely close its centre. The crowds hang about and then suddenly someone shouts “Here comes San Vicente” or “Here comes Santa Cruz” and the neighbourhood of the Cathedral is packed and impenetrable. On Good Friday the climax is reached. Famous images like the Macarena, which excites an extraordinary fervour in the crowd, or the Jesus del Gran Poder, which draws out its admiration, pass into the Cathedral. The
Miserere
of the composer Eslava is sung in a last orgy of theatrical magnificence and to crown all, a peal of artificial thunder booms and rebounds in the enormous edifice.

There is nothing more to be said of the stage management of Holy Week; it is the play that counts, its peculiar quality of penetrating into the daily life of the people. The Sevillano, like all other Spaniards, is
addicted to the repetitious and monotonous; he wakes up only at the high moments. There, as in the dance, in the bullfights, in his songs, he is taut and silent and most critical. He is the man of the crisis. In singing or the dance, the guitar mutters away monotonously, playing on the nerves, slackening off in order with dramatic suddenness to deceive and to enhance until the torpor of the audience is broken down and the singer or dancer can electrify him by wit or take him by storm. Something like that occurs in the processions. The high moments occur when the image leaves its church, when it enters the Cathedral, when it leaves and, finally, when, in an uproar of enthusiasm, it returns to the family possession of its parish. That moment of the return, if it should happen, as it often does, to be at two or three in the morning, is superb.