Social life in a mountain town—Moslem traditions—The etiquette of betrothal—Wedding presents—The trousseau—Little tragedies of Spain—Dramatic Carmencita—Compensations for the Countess.
Social life in a mountain town—Moslem traditions—The etiquette of betrothal—Wedding presents—The trousseau—Little tragedies of Spain—Dramatic Carmencita—Compensations for the Countess.
If I were to describe the scene of the wedding where it actually took place, it is just possible that some of those concerned, if they happened to see this book, might recognise themselves. I will therefore transfer it to the picturesque mountain town of Ronda, which, although frequented by tourists, and boasting two really comfortable hotels, still preserves some peculiar local customs.
Of these perhaps the most noticeable is the Moslem tradition of the separation of the sexes. The numerous travellers, both native and foreign, who spend a day in the town on their way to or from Algeciras in the spring or autumn, have as yet made no impression on the conservatism of the Rondeños, and one has only to stroll up and down the Paseo de la Merced on a Sunday night in summer to see that social customs in Ronda are quite unaffected by contact with the outer world.
The heat of the day being over, and a cool west wind rustling the leaves of the avenues of planes, the purple peak of La Liba, which forms theclouof acharming picture, is suddenly blotted out as the electric light is switched on. In the matter of street lighting Spain is by no means behind the age. The Spanish love for a blaze of light out of doors probably accounts for the strides made by the electric lighting industry during the last few years. It is true that often even well-to-do people are still content to illuminate their houses with a cheap paraffin lamp, or even with acandilof brass with its tiny wick fed with olive oil. But once these lovers of display realised that a few arc lamps hung along the Paseo turned night into day, and that electricity would enable the gilded youth to display his new straw hat of the English shape, his beautiful red tie, and his shiny brown boots at least as well at midnight as at noon, the towns found money for street lighting without apparent difficulty, and now there is hardly a village, even in the plains where there is no water-power available, that is not lit by electricity. I have seen electric lamps at every street corner in a place to which there is no means of access save a mule track, and no contact with the outer world save a visit from the postman on his donkey two or three times a week, if there happen to be any letters to deliver.
Ronda with its wonderful Tajo, through which the Guadalevin rushes in a torrent during the winter rains, was provided with electric light when I first visited it ten or eleven years ago. At that time the power used to fail ignominiously in the summer, at which season all the water of the shrunken river has to be turned into the irrigation channels, as hasbeen the legal right of the numerous market gardeners in the valley from Arabic times. Now steam has been brought in to supplement the water-power, and the lighting of the principal hotels, and above all of the Paseo, is as brilliant as any one can desire.
In summer it is too hot to stroll about with comfort in the daytime, and the youth of both sexes had little opportunity of contemplating each other’s charms at that season until artificial light came to the rescue. Now, especially on a Sunday night, the whole town crowds into the Paseo, where under powerful arc lights the young people can admire each other to their hearts’ content.
One of the curious customs of the place is that all the pretty girls march up and down, from two to six or seven together, while their portly mothers and aunts sit and fan themselves on the stone benches and chairs ranged along both sides of the walk. The young men also march up and down, also in groups, but carefully confining themselves to either side of the broad space in the centre occupied by the girls. Each town in Spain is socially a law to itself, and it seems to be contrary to Ronda etiquette for the men to walk with the girls under any condition whatever, although in other places the presence of a duenna makes it quite correct.
Engaged couples may enter the Paseo together (of course properly chaperoned) but they must not join in the promenade. They may only sit under the trees with the mother or the aunt, and console themselves for their enforced retirement by squeezing each other’s hands under cover of the shadowscast by the overhanging boughs. But if the girl happens to come late, her fiancé gets a chance to show himself. Then he may walk up and down as much as he pleases in the midst of the swarm of girls, pretending to be looking for his sweetheart. I watched Carmencita’s elderly lover at this performance one Sunday night, and every time he got well into the focus of one of the arc lamps he stopped short with the light full on him, glancing this way and that with assumed anxiety as to the whereabouts of the lady, although he knew, and she knew, and all their friends and acquaintances knew, that his charmer would not appear till the band began to play at ten o’clock.
Carmencita’s wedding was fixed for July, partly because the summer, when the boys are home from school and university, is the gayest time here, but mainly because propriety demands that the religious ceremony shall take place within quite a few weeks of that known as “asking for the hand”—in other words, the signing of the marriage contract. Thenoviazgo, which is not strictly speaking an engagement, but rather a protracted courtship which may or may not end in a wedding, sometimes goes on for years and is then broken off, without any blame attaching to the jilt, be he male or female. It is quite an understood thing that there is no moral obligation to marry as long as the hand of the lady has not been formally “asked.” But once this has been done, not by the lover but by some relative of the elder generation, the marriage is regarded as the necessary consequence, and a man or woman whodeclined to fulfil the engagement after that ceremony had been gone through would bemal mirado—badly looked at—which is more or less equivalent to being sent to Coventry.
So when I heard that Carmen was finally engaged I knew it would not be long before I received an invitation to the wedding, which came in due course, printed in silver on a highly glazed card. It was not strictly speaking an invitation at all, for it merely set out at full length the names and titles of the bride and bridegroom and their parents (and Spanish names and titles are as long as a Presbyterian sermon), and announced the day and hour of the wedding without “requesting the pleasure of my company.” The opposite side of the card contained an identical announcement on the part of the bridegroom.
On the day before the wedding I went, by Carmencita’s special request, to see her trousseau, which to the Andalucian bride is even more exciting than the wedding presents.
She received me in a daintybata, a garment which is a cross between a tea-gown and a pinafore, with her hair loose and falling below her waist, and her eyes were so bright and her laugh so gay that I felt sure she was as contented as were her parents with the affluent future before her. She took me to the winter reception-rooms upstairs, which looked as if they were prepared for a sale of work. On a number of tables and chairs were displayed the presents—innumerable sofa cushions, embroidered night-dress cases, crocheted table-covers, antimacassars,lace d’oyleys, and so forth; with the more solid offerings of glass, china and plate from older relatives half lost to sight among the hand-made gifts from Carmencita’s schoolfellows and girl friends.
But the presents were completely eclipsed by the far more important personal outfit of the little bride. Trestle tables filled the middle of the long room from end to end, and looked something like reefs under the froth of breaking waves, so covered were they with house and table linen, towels and side-cloths edged with wonderfully complicatedfleco morisco(“Arabic fringe”), and a fluff and foam of personal wear of fine lawn, lace, and muslin enough to last a lifetime, all made by Carmencita and her sisters and her friends, and all exquisitely embroidered with her initials in an endless variety of interlacing monograms. The wealthiest English or American bride might be proud to wear such lingerie as I saw there.
As soon as her tiny hands can hold a needle, the Spanish señorita is taught by the nuns at her school to sew in this dainty fashion, and from her earliest childhood she devotes the fruits of her labours to furnishing her trousseau; for here the bride brings all the house linen as part of her dowry, and long before she is old enough to have a lover her careful mother will provide the huge quantities of fine linen and lace, and the pounds of embroidery silk and cotton which are required for the proper plenishing of one of those great carved chests in which the daughters of the house have stored their wedding outfits for centuries past.
If the daughter passes out of her teens without being married the chest will be full long before it is required, and indeed sometimes it is never needed at all; for unless a girl is rich, or of distinguished family, or, if poor, remarkably beautiful, it is quite likely that no one will ever ask for her hand.
And sometimes poverty descends on the family, and the daughters, orphaned and penniless when already past their youth and unable to earn any sort of a living, are reduced to selling one by one all the produce of so many years of industry to satisfy the claims of hunger, or, if the old house has been sold, to pay the rent of some wretched little room which in their prosperous days they would hardly have given to a maid-servant. I have witnessed pathetic scenes when ladies of gentle birth have come to me in the dusk of evening to ask if I will buy some dainty embroidery or delicate pillow lace “to help a friend who has lost her money.” And to the end they will try to salve their hurt pride by keeping up this transparent fiction, holding the bedspread or pillow-case upside down, in the hope that until they have left with the money in their pockets I may not notice that the initials worked on it are their own.[3]
But these are the little tragedies that lie beneath the surface, and we must not dwell on them, for we have not done yet with the trousseau of our Carmencita.
She was only seventeen when her fate was decided, so her chest was not quite full; but fortunately there were enough nearly finished sheets and pillow-cases and so forth in those of her younger sisters to supply all deficiencies; and every afternoon through the weeks before the wedding the three littlemarquesitasand their girl friends had sat together in their cool patio under the orange and palm trees in the shade of the heavy canvas awning, stitching away for dear life, amid an incessant prattle about clothes and lovers, and a continual munching of chocolates flavoured with cinnamon.
Space for the unknown bridegroom’s initials had as usual been left on all the house linen when it was made, but in this case only the Count’s coronet had to be worked, and a heavy strain on girlish invention was thus avoided, for there is not much variety about a coronet, while it takes a good deal of imagination to vary an initial several dozen times.
Oddly enough, my admiration of some beautifulstitching in this heraldic ornament seemed to upset Carmencita’s equanimity, and in an instant her sunny smile and gay chatter turned into a tempest of sobs and tears.
“You are cruel, barbarous, Doña Elena, to remind me of all I am losing! How can you dream that I am consoled by being a rich Countess for the loss of the wealth of love lavished upon me by my adored Manolo? I am a martyr, a victim to the ambition of my parents! Even now at the last moment I think I shall declare that my heart is Manolo’s and I will never marry any but him!Madre mia de mi alma!how terrible is this life! Better that I had flung myself from the roof, as I wanted to do when they forbade me to see my Manolo: then I should have been spared this torment, this broken heart which will end by dragging me into the grave!”
I was pretty sure that the theatrical outburst was provoked by a more or less conscious desire to play up to the situation and to be consistent to the last: for Carmencita, as I have hinted, had already made me her confidante, and Spaniards are born actors. She would feel better all her life for having dramatically rounded off the play to her audience of one, and I would not spoil the climax by any lack of sympathy.
“True, true, my child,” I answered, “you are indeed a martyr, but it is to duty. Think of the season in Madrid that you will be able to share with your sisters—the theatres, the receptions, the dances! With your birth and the Count’s wealth you willcertainly be received at Court, and what higher destiny could be offered to you than to take Pura and Dolores away from this dreary village into all the delights of the capital? Have courage, my noble girl, and crush the dictates of your heart for their sake, and, believe me, happiness will be yours.”
“True, Doña Elena; how beautiful an ideal you put before me! And I hear that Manolo has gone away and will not be back for six months, so what should I gain by refusing to marry the Count? And it would make a terrible scandal. And then, have you seen my wedding dress? It is too lovely for words! Do you know, it has a train two yards long! Cesar insisted; he says I am so little I must have a train to give me presence. I have never worn a long dress in my life, and I am so afraid I shall stumble over it. How dreadful if I made myself ridiculous in the church, before all Ronda! Doña Elena, did you have a train two yards long to your wedding dress, and did you find it difficult to manage?”
The melodrama was over, Carmencita was once more all smiles and merriment, and my suggestion that she should put the wedding dress on and practise walking up and down the patio in it for my benefit sent her and all her companions into screams of laughter. She had made her little oblation to the god of love, and now was ready to enjoy to the full the material fruits of her sacrifice.
She made me promise that I would come to her house and accompany the wedding party to the church, which is only a few yards from the ancestralhome of the Campos Abandonados. I told her she had better let me efface myself in the back of the church, because I had no wedding garment in my suit-case and should do the party no credit.
“Don’t be absurd,” she retorted, kissing me affectionately. “You look like a Duchess with a black mantilla over your white hair, and if you haven’t got yours here, Mamma shall find one for you.”
Who could resist the pretty creature? And she meant every word of it, at any rate while she was speaking. But she really was sincere in her desire that I should be there as an intimate friend, not a mere acquaintance, and when I arrived shortly before two o’clock on the eventful afternoon I found little ten-year-old Lola, otherwise Dolores, waiting for me at the door, having been ordered by the bride to see that I was taken special care of, “because being a foreigner I might not know exactly where to go, and thus might fail to enjoy myself.”
Such consideration really surprised me. Carmen might well have been excused for forgetting, on this great day of her life, that one of her guests was a foreigner; yet she had not only planned for my pleasure, but, as I found, had asked more than one of her old friends to look out for me and see that I was placed where I could have a good view of the ceremony before the side altar of the Virgen del Carmen, at which she had worshipped throughout her short life.
THE CHURCH WHERE CARMENCITA WAS MARRIED.
THE CHURCH WHERE CARMENCITA WAS MARRIED.