The “season of the baths”—Furnished apartments without beds—The amenities of theBalneario—Sea views at a discount—Bathing costumes: flounces and frills—The force of example—Happy swimmers.
The “season of the baths”—Furnished apartments without beds—The amenities of theBalneario—Sea views at a discount—Bathing costumes: flounces and frills—The force of example—Happy swimmers.
The “season of the baths,” as the summer holidays are here called, is a very serious business indeed. In the fashionable seaside resorts such as San Sebastian, Santander, Malaga, etc., it is possible to get a comfortably furnished villa or flat for a few weeks, though only at a ruinous cost; but in the smaller places it was until lately difficult to get any accommodation at all outside of theBalnearioor Hotel for Bathers, unless one took a so-called furnished house and sent the missing necessaries from one’s own home by carrier or train; for the furnishing in such houses generally consisted mainly of more or less rickety chairs.
Personal luggage, of course, goes with the traveller, but things which do not come into that category, and they are many, must be booked and paid for separately. What exactly constitutes personal luggage varies a good deal with the taste and fancy of the booking-clerk. At one station, for instance, they flatly refused to take myjamugas(a folding donkey saddle described on p. 66), and at anotheran obliging porter tied them on to my suit-case and they went through without difficulty. But speaking generally, nothing but portmanteaus, bags, and such like are admitted, with one notable exception. About bedding there is never any trouble. A mattress for each member of the party, with its pillows, sheets, and blankets, will all go as personal luggage, though, as the limit of weight is only 60 lbs. per head, you may have to pay a considerable sum for excess. You can also book your bed and bedding (which it is just as well to take with you to a “furnished house” at any of the smaller seaside places) together with other immediate necessaries, bygrande vitesse, when it is supposed to travel by the same train as yourself, and to be accessible immediately on arrival. But if there happens to be a crowd at the departure station, it is as likely as not that the things booked bygrande vitessewill be left behind.
This happened to some Spanish acquaintances of mine one summer. They had booked everything except the children’s lunch and such trifles as they could take in their hands, and they arrived at the village where they and we were to spend the holidays late at night and dead tired, without any luggage at all. The neighbours set to work and improvised beds for the smallest children, and the mothers, aunts, and sisters sat in rocking-chairs all night.
“What else is to be done?” they said philosophically; “this sort of thing always happens if you go to the baths in the fashionable season, when everybody wants to be there at once.”
None of them were at all cross or depressed,although they were very grateful when we provided a mattress or two for the tired babies to be put to bed on.
Travellers who want to see the Spanish bathing season in full swing may put up at theBalneariowith which every little seaside resort is provided. But they must be prepared to get no sleep or rest as long as they stay there, for the noise is inconceivable. There will be anything from fifty to two hundred men, women, and children—but chiefly children—of all ages, and all agog to make the most of the seven, fourteen, or twenty-one days of bathing prescribed by the family physician. For be it known that we don’t bathe as we please in Spain, but under medical orders and strictly for the good of our health, and many people believe that all the virtue in salt water would be lost did they take one bath too many or too few. And from the moment they wake in the morning until the last frequenter of the hotel bar goes to bed some time in the small hours, the din of voices and the clatter of feet on the brick floors never ceases for one instant.
Most Spaniards have extraordinarily loud voices. Of course it is usual in any country to shout at a foreigner under the impression that he will understand better if you deafen him to begin with. But in Spain it is not only the foreigner who is bawled at, for Spaniards all shout at each other in the bosoms of their families to such a degree that when I first came to live here I got the impression that they were continually quarrelling. Men and women alike have this unpleasant habit, and although many ofthem are aware what a noise they make and remark that it is a bad custom, they seem constitutionally incapable of lowering their voices.
When I am almost driven crazy with the strain on my ears I pretend to be puzzled at what is said, and politely remark—
“I am stupidly ignorant of Castilian, but I shall understand better if you will kindly talk a little slower.”
“Slower” (mas despacito) is a euphemism for “lower,” and the request never fails to elicit a pleasant smile and a comment on the shrillness of Spanish voices, in a half whisper. But in two seconds habit holds sway again, and the din rises higher and higher until one feels that one’s only refuge is flight unless one wishes to qualify for Bedlam.
The children of the well-to-do—unlike those of the poor—are quite undisciplined, and are allowed to shriek and scream as they please. Their noise does not worry their parents, who take it as a matter of course, and it never occurs to them that it can annoy any one else. When dozens of children of all ages are collected together in aBalneario, the racket is such as might have inspired Dante with an idea for a tenth circle in his hell. If you suggest that some white-faced, heavy-eyed creature of two or three years old would be better in bed than in the hall of an hotel blazing with electric light at ten or eleven at night, its parents merely reply “No quiere” (He doesn’t want to), which is considered an entirely sufficient reason for letting their sickly infant sit up to all hours.
The children mostly dine at the table d’hôte of theBalnearioin small towns, and when the endless meal is at last over some one begins to thump dance tunes on a cracked piano, and the little girls from six to fourteen swarm into the general sitting-room and start dancing. When midnight approaches and the children drop asleep from sheer weariness, filling the benches and flopping across their parents’ knees, the grown-up young ladies and their attendant swains take the floor, and keep the fun going till 2 or 3 a.m. This is not one night but every night, and not in oneBalneariobut in everyBalneario, throughout the month of August.
I once spent a day and a night in one of these hotels, which are often pretty and sometimes have beautiful sea views and other advantages which should make them really attractive out of the season, did they not all close as soon as it is over. For my sins I was at theBalnearioof Our Lady of the Rosary in the height of the summer. I fled by the earliest train I could get next morning, and the landlord was most willing for me to go, for he had a married couple with three children ready to pack themselves into the tiny room I had engaged, which contained nothing in the way of furniture save a looking-glass, one chair, a small enamelled wash-basin, and one huge bed.
The last thing Spaniards seem to care about in the bathing season is the sea. TheBalnearioof Our Lady of the Rosary looked out right over the Atlantic, whose blue waves washed the foot of the low cliff on which the village stood. I never sawanything more lovely than the sunset over the sea the evening I was there, and the hotel dining-room opened on to a broad terrace supplied with numbers of chairs and tables at which people sat and sippedrefrescos—a mild beverage consisting largely of sugar and water. Of all the people thus engaged I was the only one who turned to look at the sunset. And when after dinner I went out to the post office I found all the occupants of all the nice new houses built by themselves to live in during the brief bathing season, seated on uncomfortable chairs on the footway in the narrow, dirty street, and all with their backs to the sea. Their houses all had terraces running out to the edge of the water at high tide, like that of theBalneario, but as I strolled back to the hotel in the moonlight along the shore I noticed that there was not a single human being to be seen on any of these terraces. I had never imagined such a waste of opportunity, or such a strange idea of enjoying the sea. But I have been at a good many Spanish bathing-places since then, and have always been regarded as a harmless lunatic on account of my preference for sitting with my face to the sea instead of at my street door watching the passers-by.
PINE CONES AND PRICKLY PEARS.
PINE CONES AND PRICKLY PEARS.
The bathing at that village was excellent, the best, I think, that I have ever known, though a trifle dangerous for any but strong swimmers when a stormy day left a heavy roll and undertow. TheBalneario, which had a monopoly of the bathing-houses for about half a mile of beach, provided a sufficiency of buoyed ropes, and a leaky old boatwas anchored a hundred yards out all the summer in case of accidents. This boat was only accessible by swimming, there being no other anywhere within range, and it had no oars, so its precise use on an emergency does not appear. It filled and sank whenever the sea got up, but it was always dragged out, emptied, and replaced in position by the men in attendance, by the time the sea was calm enough for the visitors to bathe again.
Although we never stayed at theBalneario, we spent several summers in the village, where we took a little cottage and furnished it with what our Spanish friends thought very bad taste, for it contained plenty of books and tables and not a single pier-glass. Here we attracted a good deal of attention by sitting out at all hours, when the sun was not too blazing hot, under an awning rigged up on a sandhill facing the sea, where we watched with an amusement equal to their astonishment at our eccentricities, the amenities of Spanish families taking their baths.
The first year we were there the women all wore heavy serge gowns right down to their feet, mostly edged with a broad frill of the same material. Strange to say, one of them managed to swim, and to swim well, in this most unsuitable garment. Her husband, who was lame and could only walk with a stick, also swam well. He used to fling his stick ashore as soon as he was in the water to his waist, and he and his wife would swim out to the old boat, her flowing robe ballooning largely behind her. Later on we came to know them and theirfamily, and the eldest son, a nice boy of about sixteen, told us as politely as he could how dreadfully shocked the Spanish ladies had been that first summer at our indelicate bathing garments, consisting of blouses with short sleeves, knickers, and a skirt to the knees. No doubt our by no means modern bathing dresses surprised them, although we had no idea of it at the time, for that year even the men wore long trousers, sometimes trimmed with little frills round the ankles, while coats covered their arms to the wrists. True, the men so attired did not attempt to swim, but bobbed up and down with their wives and daughters, all holding on to the rope for dear life and never moving an inch from where the bathing-man had put them, until he returned, when he thought they had been in long enough, with sheets to envelop the ladies and bring them to shore again.
Yes, all the ladies were carefully wrapped in sheets when they came out, although no human eye could discern the form so carefully hidden under their voluminous draperies. The only creatures who were allowed to expose any part of their anatomy to direct contact with the water were the babies. They, poor little miseries, were carried down stark naked to the water’s edge and handed over to the bathing-men. These, no doubt with the best intentions, would take the screaming mite in one hand and dip it head first into a good big wave, using their free hand to disengage the frantic clutch of the terrified creatures when they came up in an agony of fright from their ducking and found themselves,choked and blinded by the salt water, turned upside down for a second dip. Three times was this brutality repeated every day, and if the piteous cries grew less the third time, the parents, watching the proceedings from the shore, would congratulate themselves that the child was beginning to enjoy his bath.
To me it seemed more likely that he was beginning to die from it, and indeed a summer rarely passes without at least one or two small children coming to an untimely end at theBalnearios. But nothing can convince the mothers that such treatment is too violent for babies. They themselves took their first sea baths under those conditions, and so did their parents before them, and therefore it must be the right thing and produce good results in the long-run, no matter how the little one may suffer in health and nerves at the moment.
Infant mortality is always high in Spain. In summer, I understand, it is higher than at any other time, and I do not wonder at it.
That first summer the lame Don Basilio and his wife were the only swimmers except ourselves. But the next year several schoolgirls begged him to teach them to swim, and as the season went on and they made progress in the new accomplishment the flowing skirts were exchanged for trousers, and the trousers gradually grew shorter until a reasonable amount of bare leg was displayed. One or two of the girls managed to swim out to the boat before their twenty-one baths came to an end, and indeed the mystic number was treated with unusualdisrespect that year, and the limit often far exceeded.
And the following year, when we arrived rather later in the summer than usual, we found all the girls wearing bathing costumes which gave their limbs free play as they swam, and the old boat was the daily rendezvous of a crowd of laughing and chattering young people, scrambling on board and diving off again with as much energy as if they had been English.
I always maintain that Spaniards only want a lead to induce them to adopt modern customs and conveniences, for no people are quicker or cleverer at imitating new modes once they see that they are an improvement on the old. The only difficulty is to make them see that any such noveltyisan improvement, and that, I admit, is a difficulty. The Andalucians have a saying against themselves, that they are “muy amarrados à la cola del borrico”—very fast tied to the donkey’s tail—meaning that they go along in a stupid rut of inherited convention which they find it very hard to get out of.
I think, however, that the speedy adoption of swimming knickers in place of flowing skirts, and the rapid shortening of these same knickers as soon as practical experience proved their convenience, argue that the rising generation have more common sense and less conventionality than their elders, and promise well for the future of athletic sports in Spain. But all the same the young people, although they have learnt how to enjoy mixedbathing in the sea on summer mornings, still sit with their parents at their ugly street doors after dinner, turning their backs on the beauty of the sea, the sunset, and the moon, while they watch the passers-by and talk of lovers and frocks.