“The Guadalquivir is my scarf of saffron; the orange blossoms sing the chant of my flesh; the sky is a mantón of rose and purple on my white shoulders. Church and God, love, blood and death are castanets! I am Real. I am the dancer. I am Isbilíya.”
“The Guadalquivir is my scarf of saffron; the orange blossoms sing the chant of my flesh; the sky is a mantón of rose and purple on my white shoulders. Church and God, love, blood and death are castanets! I am Real. I am the dancer. I am Isbilíya.”
. . . . . .
Sierpes, chief street of the town, is a bit of a way with a crick in its middle: too narrow for horses and mules: the lines of shops and clubs face each other across a slender sidewalk. When the good weather comes the doors open; the clubs and cafés pile chairs pell-mell upon the street. And Seville sits down and looks at herself. Drinks coffee, Manzanilla wine, and looks at herself. Eats mariscos and looks some more at herself. Athwart the Sierpes, other streets are a maze of tiny shops: shops small and delicate like toys, shops secret and uncommercial like the good Majas[7]who keep them, shops with too deep modesty to display their wares and too little will to have much wares to display. Reticent, charming shops likethe hearts of simple folk, so full they are of warm darkness. In such a passage, crammed with stores (for these central streets are merely passages), in the very heart of a world of dolls, lottery tickets, pastries, newspapers, umbrellas, fans and pipes, is a Chapel. It is open to the street and it reveals within a long recess its garish bower of candles. The throng crowds by. Dark clad, the women; drab, the men with wide stiff hats and a clank to their high heels. They talk of little things; eyes hold to the unconscious rhythm of the throng. And as they pass, they shift their talk an instant into prayer; or they make the sign of the cross; or they kneel. So Seville prays to herself.
In the Parish church of San Gil, there is the figure of a woman. Is it some crude artisan’s idea of a prosperous Maja? The dress is modern on La Macarena—idol of Our Lady. And La Macarena is the most vaunted, the most puissant goddess in Seville. At Semana Santa, in her garish dress, she parades the town. The Majas of Seville throw themselves before her; and sing; and pray. And as the Doll, who is both Mary and Maja, moves through Seville, the streets are paved with the breasts of the Sevillanas, loving their own image.
The Gardens of Alcázar are a geometric maze of tiny verdant patios. Each stands at its own level, a gradual step lowering with the flow of water. Each is a little bower with tiled floor, an intimate garden holding to its charm in the great sum of gardens. The patios make a mosaic. The design is severe; it is a heritage of the analytic Moslems. But in Seville, the mathematic form is snared into an idyll.
Hundreds of churches in Seville. Many of them are bleak rococo monsters and their interiors gross piles of gilt and scarlet. They are not bad taste in Seville. Murillo is not bad taste in Seville. They are parts of a ceremonial. Seville’s love is great enough to hold and to transform them. So, in the compas of the Convento de Santa Paula, a noble Gothic portal stands with a palm tree; so the rococo dome of Santa Catalina blazes to ceramic; so thePlaza Santa Cruz becomes a faëry quarter, its rows of ancient houses painted like the flowers and the birds that hang from the low casements; so, even the Casa de las Dueñas, home of the bloody Dukes of Alba, winds behind its iron gates into quaint patios and palms and archways.
Each street has its garland of self-praise. A color of façade, a jewel of ceramic, a tiny unsuspected court elbowed between the blank backs of two houses, from which oak doors lead into other courts—communities of painters, artisans, teachers of the dance. And each season has its pretext for self-song. The Semana Santa and the Feria are the most famous rites: in Holy Week, the spirit of Seville meets Seville’s body in orgasmic climax. But other seasons have not less typical embraces. The Velada de San Pedro comes in summer. There are no foreigners and the rich townsfolk are north in the Basque country. Night follows a day’s fever. And now the people open their doors, throw wide their canopies and go into Seville. The servants carry great hampers offiambres: cold sea food, mostly, with jars of Jérez and Manzanilla. They proceed to the popular squares, Alameda de Hiércules, Plaza de León, Plaza Encarnación, near the Mercado where with cool night comes the stir of odors ... greens, fruits, cheeses. They spread themselves, the good folk: they eat and play.
La Plaza de San Juan Bautista de la Palma is not as large as it sounds. A dozen families fill it: it is a pretty stage for the Sevillan drama. Overhead are the crisp stars. The houses, painted cream, blue, pink, fade in unlighted shadow. In the center is a pavilion cut into tiny booths forchurros,pasteles,bombones,patas,mariscos,bocadillos,fiambres,vinos,cervezas,gaseosas—myriad tidbitsde media noche. Nearby sit three men and a woman. They play the guitar, the mandolin, the fiddle; and the woman sings. She wears a buff shawl that is caught tight over one shoulder and tighter still under the other armpit. Rondures of breast and stomach press the lashed silk. She is agitana: she comes of an immodest race, but ere she goes among thecrowd for coppers she will place a black shawl over the revealing buff one. Each of a dozen groups has its place in the Square. They eat, drink, dance and court within their private precinct. They are as unconcerned as if they were in their own private compas. But their gayety is richer; this open sharing of a public place is the sharing of a rite.
You have seen a young girl in some peasant road stependimanchéefrom her house to the sun. The velvet bosom of her bodice rises. A jewel at her neck, a ring on a finger, an eye gleam brighter than the jewel make of her a song that runs with the Spring sun and the grass. You know that the peasant girl loves and is loved. Love has wrought this miracle on her flesh. And so, in Seville: the miracle of her streets is the same alchemy. She is adance with the magic of fondness; she is gay in a perpetual Spring of self-delight.
. . . . . .
Near the Guadalquivir and not far from the Torre de Oro, a dodecagonal relic of the Moors who built their castle on the waterfront, there is a baroque structure. It is theHospital de la Caridad. In the seventeenth century Don Miguel de Mañara was a caballero in Seville; a knight so dissolute that legend makes him the Burlador, the true Don Juan. This the nuns of the Caridad deny. But the day came when the Lord miraculously spared his life from the assault of a noble seeking to avenge the honor of his sister. Don Miguel avowed the will of God and his sins; and caused to be built this Charity as witness, through perpetual good works, of his atonement.
Above the chapel there is a chaste stone hall; a stair, spreading from above like the train of a regal robe, leads to the carved door of the Consistory. Here hangs the portrait of Don Miguel de Mañara. The face is darkly sensual and brooding. The chin is obtrusive, the eyes have the rigidity of a madman’s. He sits at a table, and behind him in the room there opens a fantastic landscape. It is radiant and nubilous, a landscape of vapors rather than ofearth. And on the floor beside the table and at Don Miguel’s feet, squats a boy and looks at him and smiles. Pedro Salinas, the poet, has a theory about this portrait. Don Miguel is mad, says he: the landscape, so amazingly like the “spirit paintings” of our day, is his vision of madness. The boy is the sane boy—the Sancho Panza—laughing at the madman.
Whatever the painter meant, whatever the historical connection of Don Miguel with the legended Don Juan, here at least is his true interpretation. Don Juan is the most conspicuous symbol of Seville. Since Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century made a play from the old ballad and folklore sources of Don Juan, poets and playwrights of many lands have retold his story.[8]The modern mood has freshened him again with new psychology into a modish legend. But it is futile to approach Don Juan save through the spirit of his town. The Don Juan of Tirso, the first, remains the greatest. For Tirso placed his hero in the proper setting. Tirso was no analyst, but he was a poet ... a great dramatic poet. And his plastic presentation needs no analysis to reach the truth.
Seville—auto-erotic, self-rapt goddess—has a god. Her streets, her churches, her festivals bring you her lord. Don Juan is not the full-grown lover. The true lover dwells within the spirit and body of his woman as within a world holding heaven but earth too and hell: and he enfeoffed to them all for that they all are the true world which he loves. The true lover is constant; he has seen his woman so deep that he has found infinitude within her; and how could he desire to transcend it? What holds him to her is not pleasure: pleasure is but a moment in this eternity of love. Anguish, anger, the black shades of disappointment are also in his woman and he accepts them also. The true lover is rare, rarer than genius. But Don Juan isone who loves in woman his own senses, his own victory, and seeking ever these fleet constants of himself moves ever on from breast to breast. The true lover is rare because the full-grown man is rare. Don Juan is common because infancy is common: the state of seeking only oneself, of taking life as a flowered highway along which appetite and ease run gayly in pursuit of their own image.
Like his mother Seville, Don Juan is restlessly pagan, hunting in countless dramatic scenes a tribute to self-adoration. Each woman is a mirror to himself; love of each woman is a pageant in which he enacts his triumph. When the glance has been enjoyed, what is the mirror for? When the pageant is past, what are its faded garlands? The real is Don Juan! That he may be forever fresh, that his triumph may be forever clear, undulled by custom, there must be new mirrors, new pageants—new women.
Under Don Juan’s lyric words, there is coldness; under his exploits, there is abstraction. His passion is but the spark, ere it has kindled life and made life passion. And his deeds are fantasies, for only he is real and the women whom he meets he never knows, knowing only his desire. Therefore, his deeds like the landscape in the portrait of Mañara are abstract.
All the elements of Don Juan are in Seville. But Seville is greater than her son. His worship of himself in the white bodies of women is true Seville. The constant shift of his deeds, like facets in the crystal of desire, is true Seville. His orgiastic use of blood, of mysticisms, his encounters with statues, necrophiles and ghosts—are Seville of the Semana Santa. His ultimate sinking into the peace of self-absorption is Seville. But the town is ampler, deeper. Don Juan conquers only women. Seville conquers Spain.
This is her ultimate secret. She too—like Córdoba, Toledo, Greco, Cervantes—is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain. But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.
She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking her own image in the water....
Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the hill are caves, the dwellings ofgitanos.
Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments, their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women. Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of appetite and song had worn them.
The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance.
It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds.
Thegitanomusic is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the endless highway. Time becomes a hurryingcrescendothat splits, turns back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in a sensuous complacence. Theystep to the singing men. And the song of the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of the women.
Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight: holds thegitanostogether: is their soul. But this softness and spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to thegitanos, making their faces good. Theoutside of the music is coarse and motley. We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave.
Andalusia is the youngest part of Spain. Its land came last from the receding waters; its Christian culture came last from the receding Islam. Its tongue is the youngest of the many forms of Spanish. Galician, Valencian, Catalan, were sister languages of the Castilian: like the dominant form, they sprang from the medieval Latin and for long were rivals. Andalusian stems, not from the mother tongue, but from the Castilian. It is of a later generation. Immigrants from the north gave birth to the fluid, fresh speech which is still heard from Almería to Cádiz. For in the days when writers like Rojas were consecrating Castilian prose, much of Andalusia still spoke Arabic.
There is a reason therefore for the vigor of this land. The cells that make the newborn body are old as the world. Youth inheres in the fresh fusing. In new environment and combination, they are renewed. So Andalusia, ancient of parts, has this organic youth. In this birth, the great factor is Castile. Castile came down with its fanatic will to make Spain one—to make Spain a theodicy in Christ. Castile turned Moor and Jew into the sea: and replenished the fields with farmers from the north. Coming down to make this youngest Spain, Castile caught the rejuvenation.
The body of Andalusia is bright with morning. The ancient capitals reflect this dawn. But the small town is its best image. Villages in Andalusia are gems of white and orange on the green breast of the huerta. Men and women live in a mirage of which their houses are the crystal setting. They seem to know that any day their Saint (or Our Lady) will lift them into heaven. (These villages would fit well into heaven.) They live—and their stone world lives—in an expectant mood. Life becomes a symbol and a pageant. Passion is the breath of a prayer; blood is the paint of a picture. Thepuebloentire is platform for the Dance.
. . . . . .
Far worlds bespeak us, before the dancer herself. The music plays; and in the distance, the click of castanets. These castanets are gypsy; they came to Spain from regions of the Black Sea. The dancer walks quietly forward, playing an obbligato with her castanets, not to the music (she has not been married to the music), but to the march of her feet, to the swing of her hips. She wears a yellow silk mantón: a mantón de Manilla that went from China to the Philippines and thence to Spain to become the Andalusian shawl. Thebailarinabows and listens to the music. In her hair, like the crest of a mythic bird, stands apeinaof tortoise shell. Most Andalusian—this arrogant Gothic comb. She hears a cadence—Andalusian too—whose strain is of the Jews and Arabs. Her body is still; the torso faintly turns and the arms wind upward to her head. There is no mistaking this rigorous control. She has answered Semitic song with a gesture of Castile!
Her dance begins as this response, almost this opposition to the music. Sinew of the north confronts the fluid south. Two dominant forms embrace in warfare: a music, limned like prayer, rhythmed like heartbeat, and this fierce coldness on a woman’s body, which is the Word of Castile. The dancer is a column, articulate of spirit: a live plasticity: with the moods of eye and waving hand flung like a largess to our sense.
There is a pause. The two dominants of the dance (the north and the south) fall momently apart and reveal a third. It is the personality of the dancer herself. She is woman: very woman. She is large, almost heavy. Her arms are full rounded; her head is poised; her bare shoulders are a magnificent molding of firm flesh. From the waist, the skirt thrusts almost at right angles. It is a cascade of gold down to the ankles; and as the dancer whirls it flares out wide, revealing the gray stockingedlegs which are a minor almost girlish note within the sumptuous dress. Her feet stamp; the skirt flows; the torso, lashed in purple, stands heroically still, its silence an articulation not alone of the tempest within but of the will to subdue it. The arms float languidly to the head. The castanets click their dry commentary. Purring, shrilling, silent, they are a gloss subtle as Talmud page, as Arabesque, upon this whirl of sculpted fire which is the dance of Spain.
The castanet came, probably, with the gypsy from the ruined culture of Byzance. It was known to the Greeks and Romans. In the hands of thegitana, it is—as perhaps it was in the Dionysian rites—a heightened bloodbeat to the music: simple, single dimensioned, metronomic. Here it is an instrument subtle as a voice. It is a running, rhyming prose. Like the arabesque—a decoration evolved from the written language—it retains an intellectual power. The line and music of the castanets are apart from the dance. While the arms flow like birds wheeling, while the body becomes a throat of song, here is analysis forever present.
The action in the dance is drama. The bailarina moves in a tiny square. She draws intensity from subtle signals of torso, shoulder, limb, hand: this intensity she transposes to an undulous swing carrying her now far about the platform. She is horizontal and relaxed. She turns her naked shoulders forward; the castanets click almost silently beside her hips that roll in a slow ruminance. She faces about; her caress comes full and forward. The music tears with its down cadence against this mellow mother. Plaint and passion weave a subtle net that draws her forward (the castanets are still). Suddenly, she is held in rigor. The fertile mother of the south is sacrificed to the harsh north. The gorgeous breast, the hips, the arms like songs of love, are tortured in a vise of passionate control. She is the drama of women giving up their sons to the Reconquest, giving the man of their marriage bed to battle with the Moor.... But the mood does not last. Castanets trip lightly. She dances fluidly, widely; her heels strike high; her golden skirt rises and frees her legs. The castanets are become as the chatter of children. From the new relaxation of delight wells more energy, and comes again the tragic transformation. With the emotion, rises the ruthless will locking at last this pleasaunce in its hostile grip. The music is now a battle. Song, body, castanets fuse in the war of passion and will, of nature and of reason breaking on each other. And above this symphony, the dancer’s face is silence.
So do all the motions of this drama converge into a plastic movelessness. The dance itself is not drama; is less kin to the dances of Europe than to the sculpture of Egypt. One thinks of the stones of the Nile in whose unsubtle substance live flame and intricate vision. One thinks of the Maya reliefs of Yucatan whose myriad planes twine to harmonious flatness.
. . . . . .
Since the dance is a true classic art, the need of personal genius to express it is reduced. The true genius here is the tradition. Spain dances. Unlike the other dances of modern Europe, the dance of Andalusia is a norm: and the true dancer is a normal woman.
The good bailarina conforms strictly to the type of the goodandaluza. She is handsomely stout, with broad pelvis, full-developed breast, strong, regular features. She lacks sensual erethism. She is indeed the matron, rather than the prostitute. And the matron is fitted for the classic dance, precisely because of its normality, because it has been purged of the romantic, the brilliant, the superficially sensual—the accidental. A “romantic” Andalusian dance is nonsense.[9]
The classic bailarina is, then, a quiet woman. Her body is splendid without obvious incitements. Her costume is lovely in form and color, but it is too heavy and too complete to be sexually arousing. She conforms to an ideal of plastic motion in which all the romantic elements of the dance—lust, madness, nakedness—are sublimated into social symbols: love, prayer, vision, sacrifice. And all her movements (again unlike the dances of Europe) merge into an almost static mold that has the ultimate finality of sculpture.
The true Andalusian dance is solitary; and except in the special case of thecuadro flamencoit is an æsthetic error for more than a single dancer to occupy the stage. The true Andalusian dancer (with the same exception) is awoman. The true Andalusian audience is aman. The relation, however, is not sexual, save perhaps in a remote Freudian sense: it is matriarchal. And this too is normal, since psychologically, Spain is matriarchal. The dancer is mother, teacher, priestess. She holds the stage alone, and smiles on the men who sit beyond the music. This smile is a physical caress, reticent, unconsciously restrained like the caress of a mother. It must win her men, else her ultimate word as teacher and as priestess of Spain’s mystery will go for naught. The men, with the brutal candor of the Spaniard (and of the child) will turn from her and make a clamor of talk to drown her out. But the trueandaluzawins her men; and gives her message which is the message of all Spain and Spain herself: this quickened fusion of many hostile worlds into a single Beauty.
. . . . . .
The cuadro flamenco is a brilliant dilution of the Andalusian dance.Flamencomeans Flemish, and is applied strictly to Andalusia. The use harks back to the age of Carlos I and Felipe II when Flanders was part of the Theodicy of Spain and the best will of Castile and the best blood of the south went into the wars with the Low Countries. It became Andalusia’s pride to share in this mad religious struggle.[10]
Thecuadrois a “team” of perhaps two men guitarists, four women and one man dancer. The men are clad in trousers that rise like cylinders to a high black band above the waist. They wear white shirts and the coat (which is often absent) is cut in the front like our evening dress, and tailless. The women are soberly gowned. The shawl is brown or black. Only the slippers give a flare of red. The hat is the stiffsombrero anchoof the farmer whose more romantic, more flexible offshoot is our “cowboy Stetson.” The group sit in a half circle. The guitars thrum almost absently. The men and women seem to be examining one another. A woman rises and goes to the center of the group. She dances. The other women and the single man from their chairs with clapping of hand and foot-beat mark a skeletal obbligato.
To the more pigmented music and more volumnear forms of the other Andalusian dances, this dance bears the relation of a steel-engraving to an oil painting. It is a climax of the bare Castilianmotif: the warrior will of the Reconquest which lived on, after the Moor had disappeared from Spain, in the Inquisition, in the Holy War against the Dutch, in the rapt butcheries of Mexico and Peru—in this flamenco. The dance makes saccade angles against the lush weave of the music. It is too graphic, too linear: it remains in the realm of draughtsmanship and drama.
The dancer does not move from her central square. Feet beat intricate tattoos, the body is poised stiffly, the head turns, arms swerve up and down in a sort of wistful memory of ease, while the fingers click an osseous pointillation that is a shadow of the castanets. The lyrical release of the arms is held to the verge of vanishment. The guitars make a music like dry wind in autumn trees. The maternal verdure of the women, fixed in their chairs, issacrificed wholly to the stripped will of the dance. One thinks of fields turned into the desert of Castile. The fertile and the pagan are almost gone. And the protagonist of the flamenco is a man.
He comes from his chair only after each woman has danced and has retired. He is short, neither stout nor slender; there is no gallantry about him. His face and his dark body are stamped with seriousness. He has watched the women through their arid figures with eyes like the eyes of a master. He is no lover: he is the priest of a rite. Now, he stands moveless within the weave of the music. Sudden, his feet break in a shattering tattoo from which his body rises in subtle suppressed waves. Even the lyric holiday of the arms is absent from his dance. They are still at his side, or they are held in fixity near the shoulder. The body is vised; the head does not swerve. Feet and legs make a dance, perpendicular and juiceless: bereft of rhetoric and gesture, they bespeak the hoof-beat of armies, the vigils of the desert, the absolute symbol of the Arab Darwish. All of Spain that is not this male message of Castile has been crushed out....
. . . . . .
The distinction of flamenco is only of degree. The Andalusian dance is impersonal and abstract. All the movements of the soul and body of an intricate race are essenced here into a ruthless form. The appolonian is channeled; the dionysian is mastered; the dramatic is cleansed of episode; the lyrical is exploited as a mere carrier of life to sculptured unity.
The Andalusian dance is the converse of the art of the Russian ballet in which the pure materials of plastic movement are exteriorized and denatured into the melodramatic. In the Russian dance, the means is the art; the end is the personal, the pathetic. The Russian dance is analytic, episodic, realistic. The Spanish dance is organic and essential. It is the one great classic dance surviving in our modern world.
a.The Atomb.The Way of the Atom
a.The Atomb.The Way of the Atom
a.The Atomb.The Way of the Atom
Fromthe Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the north boundary of Spain is mountain. To the east it is called the Pyrenees: a wall of snowy rock that falls, save for a space above the fertile fields of Catalonia, into the desert of Aragon and Navarre. Westward, the wall is lower and has another name: Cantábrico. It too is wild, but the more moderate moisture covers it with pine and its fall southward is but a step to the high meseta of León and Castile. Within this barrier that like a jagged knife cuts Spain from Europe lived the Christian Remnant before the Arabs. And from two fastnesses of this wall—where the Arabs never gained a foothold—went forth at once theReconquistawhich for eight hundred years, thrusting, expanding, retreating, made war upon the Moslem and at last after innumerable shifts of fortune drove him out. The western point of the Reconquest’s birth lies in the perpendicular rocks of the Asturias. This is the cradle of the Kingdom of León, which, thrusting from the Cantábrico, became Castile. To the east, the nucleus of the long “push” south was in the bleakest and highest Pyrenees of Spain: the Ribagorza and Sobrarbe whose hard squat Iberian chieftains were the first kings of Aragon. Not till the last decades of the fifteenth century, at the end of the long battle, did the two Christian forces join and become Spain. During seven hundred years, they had waged war against Mohammed; they had grown great in Spain; they had flung their power northward across the mountains, eastward across the sea to Italy and Greece: but they had lived—Castile and Aragon—separate from each other and for the most part hostile.
Within the Pyrenees—the stratified chaos north ofHuesca and Barbastro—the atom of Aragon lives above the splendor it has given forth. Here, if anywhere, is the aboriginal Spaniard—unchanged as his mountains. The Iberians who were pushed north from the desert or south from Acquitaine into the Sobrarbe and the Ribagorza found themselves in a sort of Continental crow’s-nest, high above invasion. The Romans did not tarry here, nor the Visigoths. The Arabs were beaten back, south of Jaca, and had to veer to the east to enter France. For countless ages, these primeval men beside the river Aragon lived uninvaded, until their atomic energy grew to be explosive and they became invaders.
But they are still the atom. They live in the crannies of mountains, in the steep stretches of valleys torn by torrents. The sky above them is shut in by rock. Northward the Pyrenees stand ordered and columned upon France. But in their southward march they become a delirium of broken walls. They symbolize the cacophony of Spain. The little villages perch on a precipitous bench of mountain or are lost within the immense sweep of a moor. They too are stone. The houses are gathered fragments of the heights. Often there is no wooden door. Windows are tiny apertures of space. The houses huddle so close that they appear to be a single rock, whence rise the blind walls of the church—fortress rather than church—like an irregular edge. Another such obtrusion seems the entire village upon the high face of the mountains. If it is low in a valley, still the monotone is there. For the moor is gray and mournful like a stone; and the furze of summer makes it but faintly fluid as if from the blaze of the sun. The rushing river sends splinters of gray fume over the teeth of its rapids. Stone....
From these stone towns come the creatures who have built them. Small weazened men they are, with heads like nuts and eyes like iron. They have no sensuality and no art. Indeed, they too are fragments of the fragmented mountains: atoms of rock who have detached themselves and learned to walk about. They are silent, impenetrable.They have the mineral virtues. They are strong, they are steadfast, they are inexpugnably honest, they are brave. To dislodge them from the inertia of their world is as hard as to lodge an idea in their heads. And as they walk about, their slow and clumsy gait perfects the sense that they are walking stones: that this human venture is a masquerade: that presently they will cast their uncouth manhood and go back into the eternal mountain sleep.
They wear black leathern breeches slashed at the side and ending well above the knee. In the split at the side and below, the drawers bulge white or gray. The calf is enclosed in heavy leggings of white wool, doubly lined with buttons. The feet are wrapped in a cloth and shod in a sole of wood or wool that is thonged with leather, and bound about the ankle. About the waist is a huge sash—faja—coming down thick on the buttocks and serving as the pocket. The jacket is short. The aboriginal Aragonese wears no hat: a handkerchief slanted athwart his head absorbs the sweat of his labor and leaves the cropped crown free. When he wears a hat, it is an adaptation either of theboinaof the Basque or a lumpish variant of the pie-shaped hat of Castile. His invention has not gone so high as his head.
The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly. The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of masquerade persists. This man is a stone—an atom of the horizons. With his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still too mineral to need a hat.
His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth—dark brown and gray—from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the savageand swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes.
Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him along.
They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity has come. They build monasteries—mountain fortresses for God. Strife has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains, nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights. But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....
The valley of the Ebro—Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her bloods—is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The wall of the Pyrenees,in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but drops, not as northward upon smiling France—drops to desolation. Aragon which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro trickles. The soil is still subaqueous: marl, clay, gypsum, alkalis make its sterile surface. Salt lies free on it. Even the heather and grass of the upland moors do not live here.
But the Aragonese lives here: and here is the second stage of his progression. Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay. There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.
This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. And its dwellers are worthy of their weather. They are not degenerate like the inbred natives of Las Hurdes between Extremadura and León. Nor are they spiced and strained with eastern bloods, like the cave-dwellers of Murcia and Almería. They are simple human stock extraordinarily coarsened. Dull-eyed, crude-lipped, slow-moving, slow-talking: they lack the mineral sheerness of the mountain men. The air that they breathe is not snow-swept. Their flesh has no crystal tarn for neighbor. They live in a roadway of unleashed elements. Dust, clay, salt, drug their air and clog their pores. But there is something else. There is the roadway, and the mobile spirit of the roadway. Movement and action infuse this brutish people.
The men of the mountain and the desert store up great energy within their core: the outer world harries, arouses: the virgin force grows aggressive. East of Aragon are two rich and fluid lands: the Christian Principality of Catalonia, the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. Frankish Barcelona rivals Marseilles and Venice, in ships. (Ramón Lull, Spain’s most original schoolman, lived here: he wrote in Latin, Catalan and Arabic, books on love and wisdom. Chasdai ben Crescas, Spain’s most original Jewish thinker, lived here: he founded a new Prophetic lineage which three centuries later grew to be Spinoza.) Farther down the coast are the lush huertas of Valencia: a great port facing south as Barcelona east, a seat of Moorish culture.
As Rome once the subtle nations to her east, tough Aragon comes to control these affluent worlds. When in 1149 Ramón Berenguer IV of Barcelona wedded the daughter of Ramiro II of Aragon, the mountainous kingdom did not lose its sway. Catalonia became part of Aragon: and the currents of its open life the veins of the uncouth inland realm. A century later, Jaime I of Aragon with Catalonian help conquered Valencia. Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death, the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys, Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win it—for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples—in the name of Aragon again.
Aragon of the desert and the mountains has in its stone-like men an energy which informed the mental mobility of the Catalan, the sensuous fervor of the Valencian: prevailed upon them, dominioned them and made them tools at last to its own activity in Europe, to its ultimate partnership with Castile in Spain. Within itself, Aragon has little else. It lacked the elements for the creating of an indigenous culture. Aragon the core remained prehistoric: its history is its power to accumulate forces about it.
But this elemental virtue through its very neutralness served to fuse the diverse natures upon which Aragon worked. The initial urgency was Aragon: and Aragon was the name of the amalgam which resulted. When at the close of the fifteenth century the nation of Spain was born, its eye toward Europe was Aragon. Isabel of Castile was the spirit and the religious motor of that birth. Ferdinand of Aragon, with his infusion of Frankish-Catalan and Jewish bloods, was the diplomat and politician who turned the mystical Castilian dream into a European fact. Aragon took its place in that polyphony of elemental fusions which was Spain. But with this difference. That fusion, in Castile, Galicia, Portugal, Andalusia, had a preponderance of parts native to these provinces. In Aragon the fusion was of outer elements. Aragon was the port of Spain: it had become a power in Europe. But its own integral rôle in the cultural life of the Aragonese nation was that of a catalyst in a solution.
. . . . . .
Although historic Aragon is dead, in the capital city, Zaragoza, the process is revealed. Zaragoza is Spanish: yet its parts speak all of the east, of the south, and of the north. The streets have a dark fluidity which suggests Naples. They are not rigid and bright like the streets of Castile. Their warmth is freeflowing like a blood under the swarthy stones. They brood, they rot: they are not transfixed in contemplation of their unity, nor in rapt service of their own high fate. They are not noble, not inspired streets like the most sordid in Avila or Burgos. Italy’s ageing paganism darklies them: and the Moor’s mobility which lifts Valencia into a dance gives them an elusive charm, a play of light and shadow which Naples lacks.
Upon the dusty shores of the Ebro where the trees bend in a gray burden to the tawny waters, Spain speaks through Zaragoza. Here stand two monsters, the cathedrals. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is a long pile, drear as a Jesuit college, dull as a bull-ring: and from its mournful mass rise suddenly, inappositely, the hugeazulejodomes, their hypertrophic rhetoric gleaming of Andalusia and Morocco. Within is a church in the style of Louis XVI of France! The other cathedral is more mellow, but not less hybrid. La Seo is Gothic. There is a Romanesque window: the façade is rich in Moorish bricks and tiles. The columns are Gothic; the walls are exuberant tissues of plateresque. Yet the whole is harmonious, is impressive. It is Aragon. There is here something at once pagan in mind and Christian in mood. The cathedral indeed is like the Latin Sea: a converted heathen whose thought holds to the limits of youth and from the Christian infinite has taken a boundless and vague melancholy. This crossing of sun and shadow is Aragon. Light is here—in eclipse: storm—sun-tinged. The immutable atomism of the Aragonese shivers in contradiction. The sun of Italy breaks into motes, dancing on a grave: the Spanish burden of death becomes the irrational refrain of a gay song.
In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of France and the east. In thejota, the basic material is Spanish. What is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808 against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of Andalusiancante hondo. The classic southern song becomes romantic. Itsabstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a facile nervousness from Europe—this is the jota of Aragon.
. . . . . .
So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of Aragon has noorganicresponse for these racy cultures. They overwhelm it: they form an amalgamaboutthe rigid core. And the harmony of Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing, evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an impenetrable center.
Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....
These men of the Sobrarbe and the desert have been too ruthlessly hardened by their world to receive the juicesof spirit. Like a steel mirror, they reflected for an hour the suns of Italy, of Araby and Spain. This is the greatness of Aragon—a swift reflection in which affluent worlds were fused in the reflector and took on the form of the reflector’s contour. But the worlds swung past, life shifted: the light no longer fell on Aragon. Its surface becomes dull once more, and unillumined.