The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  After midnight in Madrid, when one has just finished dinner one goes off into those packed, narrow streets lying off the Puerta del Sol in the middle of the city. They are streets of small bars crowded with men roaring away at each other, drinking their small glasses of beer or wine, tearing shellfish to bits and scattering their refuse and the sugar-papers of their coffee on the floors. The walls are tiled and in gaudy colours. The head of a bull will hang there, or some bloody painting of a scene at the bullfight. Through the door at the back of the bar one makes one’s way into a private room, tiled again, like a bathhouse, and furnished only with a table and a dozen chairs. There one can invite a guitarist and singers and listen to cante flamenco.

  Less respectably, one can find some cellar in the same quarter, some thieves’ kitchen which will probably be closed by the police in a week or two, and there one may hear cante flamenco and, even better, the true cante hondo, or deep song, brought up in the last thirty years from the south, and sung not for the traveller’s special entertainment but, as it were, privately, for the singer’s own consolation. For, despite its howling, it is also an intimate music, perhaps for a singer and a couple of friends only. It can be sung in a mere whisper. The dirty room, lit by one weak and naked electric-light bulb, is full of wretched, ill-looking men; the proprietor wanders round with a bottle of white wine in his hand filling up glasses. In one corner four men are sitting, with their heads close together, and one notices that one of them is strumming quietly on the table and another is murmuring to himself, occasionally glancing up at his friends, who gravely nod. The finger strumming increases and at last the murmurer breaks into one low word, singing it under the breath in the falsetto voice of the gypsies. “Ay,” he sings. Or “Leli, Leli,” prolonging the note like a drawn-out sigh, and when he stops, the strumming of the fingers becomes more rapid, building up emotion and tension and obsession, until at last the low voice cries out a few words that are like an exclamation suddenly coming from some unknown person in the dark. What are the words? They are difficult to understand because the gypsies and, indeed, the Andalusians, drop so many consonants from their words that the speech sounds like a mouthful of small pebbles rubbed against one another:

  Cada vez que considero

  Que me tengo que mori

  the voice declaims:

  “Whenever I remember that I must die—”

  wavering on its words and then suddenly ending; and the strumming begins again until the rapid climax of the song,

  Tiendo la capa en el suelo

  Y me jarto de dormi

  “I spread my cloak on the ground

  And fling myself to sleep.”

  The manners of the thieves’ kitchen are correct and unmarred by familiarity. A yellow-haired and drunken prostitute may be annoying a man by rumpling his hair, but otherwise the dejected customers at three in the morning are sober. One night, in a place like this in the middle of Madrid, we sat next to one of these private artists who was murmuring away to his friends. When we nodded our admiration to the whispering singer, he sang a polite love song of delightful conceit to the lady in our party and asked afterwards for “the loan of a cigarette until next Thursday.” He became obviously impatient of a gypsy singer and guitarist who had smelt us out. He objected, on the usual Spanish grounds, that the young singer—who also danced—was not keeping to the rigid requirements of his art, and was introducing un-classical extravagance and stunts in order to show off to foreigners. The criticism was audible. The gypsy, egged on by criticism, scornfully tried to surpass himself. He had a weak chest and was inclined to be wild and raucous on his top notes, but he was not bad. Finding himself still mocked by the quiet man in the corner, the gypsy decided to silence him by a crushing performance, which meant a display of whirling fury. He moved one or two chairs, to make room to dance in: the customers murmured at this move. They were prepared to put up with it and hold their hand. But when the gypsy started taking off his jacket—the supreme symbol of male respectability in Spain—there was that alarming and general shout of “¡Eso no!”—“None of that!”—from everyone in the room, and half the men stood up. The proprietor rushed out at him. The gypsy put back his jacket. He knew he had gone too far.

  Performances of this kind, in which some players fasten themselves on the tourist and give their performance, are usually paid for with a bottle of brandy and a cigarette or two; or, in smarter surroundings when there is a special invitation, by money. One pays up and hopes for the best, but we had a large, quiet Yorkshireman in our party whose air of Saxon shyness concealed a deep knowledge of the Spanish vernacular and an obstinate respect for correct procedure. Our young gypsy made the error of asking the Yorkshireman a special fee because he was a professional artist giving an unusual performance, and when this was refused there was a characteristic row. It began on the doorstep of the cellar, continued in the street, trailed down to the middle of the Puerta del Sol. It was a hot night; the clock on the Ministry of the Interior coldly struck four, while the gypsy shouted, the Yorkshireman argued back. The gypsy called for witnesses. At four in the morning the recognized authority of the streets is the night watchmen. They came out one by one from their doorways like the Watch of Fielding’s London, and with them the strange night population who sleep out in doorways or the streets. The gypsy stuck out his chest, produced his official papers. The crowd listened. A woman, a lottery-ticket seller, recommended going to the police station, and on the whole the crowd were against us, until the gypsy made a fatal mistake of overplaying his hand. From his papers he picked out some document.

  “I am an artist,” he cried. They nodded sympathetically.

  “I was a soldier of Franco,” he added, showing more papers. They stepped back from him at once.

  “None of that,” someone said politely.

  Among the common people of Madrid one is not likely to get very far with being a soldier of Franco.

  The dispute now left the chest-baring, chest-thumping, and paper-showing stage, to insults like:

  “You are boring me. Go away.”

  “On the contrary, it is you who are boring me.”

  The quarrel trailed off to the police station, but within sight of it the gypsy gave in. It was not the time for face-saving. The gypsy said he had no wish to quarrel. The Yorkshireman said he loved the greatness of the Spanish nation. The gypsy said he loved the greatness of the English nation. A year later I was astonished to see my friends had engaged this gypsy to sing again. He had a young wife now. The gypsy was not at all surprised. Such rows are common in Spain.

  “It is better,” he said, “to begin a friendship with a little aversion.”

  His wife, a little round thing of sixteen, eight months pregnant and with pretty eyes as dark as linseed, sat with the dignity of a little duchess on her chair. She sang with the wit and grace of an angel one moment, and the next could let out the gutter howl of her race and the distorted vowels of her tongue, with the resonance of a hammer on the anvil. Strong, good-humoured and quick to catch the slightest allusion in talk, she had already acquired that matriarchal force, militancy, and content characteristic of Spanish women, and her young husband, ill from the grim night-life of the streets and bars, anxious and excitable, seemed superior to her only in his power of indifference.

  As the singer of cante flamenco proceeds, his friends nod and wait for him to reach the few difficult ornamental notes of the little song, which has been sung entirely for this short crisis of virtuosity. It breaks suddenly, and then the voice flows cleverly away, to the murmurs of Olé, Olé, by his friends. After a long interval, in which all seem to be savouring the satisfaction the song has given them, one of the others takes his turn and so, in this low whispering, like musing aloud or like grief and sobs, they will pass their evenings.

  Cante hondo or cante flamenco is not commonly heard in this quiet fashion. The Spaniards love noise, and the singing is usually done at the top of the voice, but the same collusive demeanour of the party
will be observed. They listen, nodding, seeming to be waiting for some unknown, intimate moment; an audience will go on talking with indifference, at the beginning of a song, for they are interested only in the few bars that test the singer. They react to every syllable of that passage and when the singer has reached it, when the most tortured ornament the voice can utter is before him, they fall dead silent as they do at some high moment of the bullfight. The peculiarity of a cante hondo is that it is sung within “a compass which rarely exceeds the limits of a sixth, which is not composed solely of nine semitones” (I quote from Trend’s translation of Falla’s work on the subject) “as is the case with our tempered scale. By the employment of the enharmonic genus, there is a considerable increase in the number of tones which the singer can produce.” Metrical feeling is often destroyed and one seems to be listening to a sudden, lyrical or passionate statement or exclamation, torn out of the heart of the singer.

  Cante hondo is the name given to this kind of singing in its pure form. Cante flamenco is the modern popular name for it and covers its more florid variations. The word “flamenco” is a mysterious word, literally meaning Flemish, which has come to mean popular, vulgar, exuberant. A loud and free behaviour—for Spaniards usually comport themselves with gravity and reserve—is called “muy flamenco.” The word is half abusive, half indulgent, and is thought to have come in when Charles V brought his Flemish court to Spain. The Spaniard, who has always derided foreigners and blamed all his misfortunes on them, thought of the Flemings as outlandish. Flamenco singing has been despised in the past and it has only become common all over Spain since Falla held a congress of flamenco singers in Granada in 1922, when he was exploring the history and growth of Spanish folk music.

  What the world outside of Spain regards as “typically Spanish music” was fixed in the 1880’s of the last century by Carmen, a manifestation of the romantic view of Spain fostered by Gautier and Mérimée and other French writers. It really has its roots in the eighteenth century. There is a good deal of street music and the barrel organ in it, but in fact Carmen has one or two indigenous Spanish things to say, as Trend points out. The Spanish idiom came out in the zarzuelas or musical comedies of the century; there are traces of it in the seventeenth century and there are motifs that have been traced back to the songs sung by the shepherds of Castile in the fifteenth century. The interesting thing is that one of the orchestral interludes from Carmen is really an Andalusian polo, and a polo is really cante hondo.

  But cante hondo is not like the rest of Spanish folk music, which recalls the gay, gracious, tinkling folk songs of Russia, and indeed of all European countries. The words often amusingly convey a purely Spanish foible. Cante hondo is Andalusian, but it is not Andalusian folk music which has felt the influence of the Byzantine liturgy and of the Moors. Cante hondo is gypsy; it has a lot in common with Indian singing. It contains the melancholy, the fury, the lyrical and tragic feeling of that wandering race. Though it may be sung at some gypsy feast, with the old gypsy gripping the bars of his chair outside his cave dwelling, as he mouths his way towards the notes, the prolonged and tortured “a’s” and “o’s,” the “l” turned into an “r,” the effect is of soliloquy, an utterance out of loneliness, an utterance of tragic memory, hate, vengeance, or derision. Some are, indeed, called soleares (the Spanish word “soledades” in the gypsy pronunciation), songs of solitude:

  Le dijo er tiempo ar quere:

  Esa soberbia que tienes

  Yo te la castigare

  Let me tell you now we are making love—

  I will punish this pride of yours

  Some, simply coplas, or verses:

  Er tambo es tu retrato;

  Que mete mucho ruio

  Y si se mira por dentro

  S’ecuentra qu’esta basio

  This drum is just like you:

  It makes a loud noise.

  But look inside—it is empty!

  Si la Inquisicion supiera

  Lo mucho que t’he querio

  Y er mai pago que m’has dao

  Te quemaban por judio

  If the Inquisition had known

  How much I loved you

  And the bad coin in which you paid me for it

  They would have burned you for a Jew.

  Falla organized his congress in Granada thirty years ago in order to preserve cante hondo, and spoke of its “grave, hieratic melody.” Hieratic it is; in another form, the saeta, it is sung to convey the agony of religious desire and remorse, as the images of the Christ or the Virgin are borne round the white-walled streets of Seville in the nights of Holy Week. But the modern tendency has been to get away from the severe, classical design of this pattern of sound which seems to cut the southern night like a knife, to stir in one animal feelings of fear, cruelty, and pity. The more florid, rasping, less inhibited flamenco versions are replacing the older form. One hears a good deal too much of the nasal howl let out in a voice that whines and strains the blood vessels. The Spanish voice is harsh, powerful, and dry, as if there were sand in the singer’s throat, in any case. Impatient of restraint, the Spanish popular arts are quickly spoiled by exuberance. Spanish fury, when it is aroused in life or simulated in art, is terrifying, for it is carried to the limit of frenzy. Nothing grips the Spaniards so much as the dancer whirling herself into a state of mad, dishevelled passion, and the gypsies are unsurpassed in these transports and climaxes of abandon.

  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)

  FROM

  Foreign Faces

  SEVILLE

  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, p
eople 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.