by Laurie Lee
It was the time now when the streets were full of such children, when the ragged half-naked urchins from the hovels of Triana came out in force and filled the town with carols. In busy gangs they roamed about, carrying a host of home-made instruments – tambourines, castanets, drumskins, and tins which they scraped with sticks. At a word they would surround one and sing a whole concert for a penny. They were of all ages from four to fourteen, and they threw back their heads and sang with the ease and eagerness of angels, striking clear cool harmonies, and beating out the most subtle rhythms on their assorted instruments. Some blew into water-jars, making deep base notes; some rattled dried peas in boxes; others shook loose tin-lids threaded on a stick. I never tired of listening to them, for I had never heard or seen anything like them before. Their singing was as precise as though they had rehearsed for months, yet naturally spontaneous and barbaric, as though the tidings they brought were new, the joy still fresh.
The night before we left Seville I walked late in the streets alone. It was past midnight; men were repairing an empty road and there was a wet moon over the Cathedral. As I headed at last for home I ran suddenly into another of these gangs. They were sitting in an alley, warming their bare feet round a fire of burning paper. When I called to them they came crowding around me, squealing like starlings, grinning and arranging themselves in order. Their leader, a boy of ten, muttered a few instructions. Then they sang me five ecstatic carols, their smiles wiped away, their faces set in a kind of soft unconscious rapture. Here again, as in the others I had heard, was the same order, expertness and love. A girl of five took a solo, singing through the short tangles of her hair in a voice of such hoarse sweetness one felt shriven of all one’s sins. As she sang, the others watched her with solemn eyes, their lips pursed ready for the chorus. In this shabby street, lit by the lamp above, their bronze heads seemed disembodied, like Botticelli spirits, floating and singing in the air. They sang of a star in the sky; of Christ and the Virgin; of Triana (across the river); and of Bethlehem (across the hill). And looking and listening to this ragged lot, I believed all their bright songs told me. For they lived near the heart of all these things, and knew what it was to sleep on straw in stables.
3. The City of the Sun - Ecija
We came to the city of the sun on the night of a full moon which rose like a tide over the azulejo towers and hollow rat-filled palaces. We had journeyed for five hours from Seville’s December cold, but as we dropped down into Ecija the gusty winds went still, and the moonlight seemed to collect in warm pools along the little streets and to drip off the white walls with a visual texture as smooth and as tender as oil.
The centre of the city, antique and antic now with the social stir of the evening, greeted us with a glare and jostle that owed nothing to neon lights and motor-horns but was all of a natural piece, homespun and roughly local. It was the hour of paseo: boys to their girls called neat-turned adorations; loud cries from gritty throats celebrated the reunion of friends who had not seen each other for at least thirty minutes; lottery-ticket sellers chanted their chances of fortune; and a hoarse town-crier with drum and trumpet, announced a sale of mules. Around the square there were palm trees, white arches and blind secret windows; and it seemed as though the Moors had only left that morning.
It did not take us long to find our footing here. No sooner had we unloaded our bags upon the pavement, than six strong boys surrounded us, and with loud and eager civility promised to carry us to the lodgings of princes. They had tattered clothes, bare feet and the dark shapely faces of Arabs, they shouted and flashed their moonlit teeth and before we knew what was happening each had seized an article of luggage and all made off in different directions.
We were saved from this dilemma by a late arrival on the scene – a porter with a monstrous square head, sad eyes and a capacity for tempestuous rages. Screaming into the night, he called back every boy, stripped each of his load, piled it back on the pavement, checked it and then, with a miraculous arrangement of arms and legs, shouldered the lot and with a crooked smile staggered away before us to the Hotel Comercio, which he represented.
The Hotel Comercio was about as commercial as the cave of Ali Baba. Around the vast shadowy patio, shepherds, in fleece-lined coats, sat eating and drinking. Boot-blacks on their knees seized and polished the boots of anyone who stood for a moment near them. Two farmers were tasting each other’s crop of olives and spitting them out with epithets of disgust. And a magnificent gypsy wandered among the throng selling silver Virgins and cures for love. The hotel office was a glass box, set like a fish-tank in the corner of the patio. Enclosed within its shining walls sat a handsome Sevillana to welcome us. She had heavily made-up eyes, a bursting poppy mouth, and hair like two gallons of coal tar. She left her crystal office and showed us to a bedroom full of white pillars, arches and fretted wooden panelling, for which, with food, we were asked to pay the price of one indifferent meal in a Knightsbridge café.
After a supper of squid and goat’s flesh, we went out into the street and watched the moon flashing on the azulejo towers. They stood around in a rich mysterious company, brooding and glittering above the city roofs with ornate, unearthly presences. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all of a similar decayed magnificence, and every few minutes one or other shivered to the stroke of a bell which told one nothing dependable about the time but which filled the night air with a succession of soft feathery sounds as from magical beings who called to each other.
As we walked through the brilliant midnight streets birds on the warm walls sang as though it were day. And little beggar girls came up out of the shadows and smiled at us and asked us our names. Astride their hips each carried a sleeping babe, the body of each was smoke-black under its rags, their dark curls were caught in tangles which only scissors would ever unravel, their feet were bare, their eyes diseased, but their smiles were the roundest in the world.
With them we went to the booths under the arcades and bought cakes, nuts and sunflower seeds. With them we sat round the moon-twinkling fountain and ate a second supper. It was a gay ravenous meal, and the sleeping infants were awakened and forced to share it. Pieces of sugar cake were pressed to their drowsy mouths; with eyes still closed they chewed and swallowed, they groaned and gasped in half a dream, they were coated with sleep like fur. But the young mothers, by shakes and cries and kisses, made sure the little ones knew what they were eating. It would have been improper otherwise.
The next morning was golden with inevitable sun, and Ecija was at last revealed in all its decayed and gilded splendour. Ecija is a small country town between Seville and Cordova. The Romans called it Astigi, the ‘city of the sun’; but Paco, the hotel porter, calls it ‘the frying pan of the world’. Lying in a depression among the hills it is like a lake of sun, a reservoir of heat. It has a river, but never a breeze. In summer it is so hot that the very natives fall dead in the streets. Even this morning, in mid-December, the sun had the warmth of an English May, though faintly water-cooled to give it freshness.
As we walked abroad again and looked about us the daylit towers seemed to be stuck all over with wet violets, a moist and effervescent blue as though they were still sweating from the moonlight they had absorbed the night before. All round the square, under the African palms, old men, wearing black Cordobese hats, sat in stiff rows like figures at a judgement. Late in their life though it may have been, these ancients still had a sharp eye for a pretty woman. As Kati walked by, they looked at her hard from under their hats. ‘Behold!’ said one, ‘how like a ham she is.’ ‘Oh, for a knife and fork!’ cried a second. ‘Silence,’ growled a third. ‘Don’t you see that she is a married woman?’ ‘Ah,’ said the first with a sigh, ‘but that she were a widow for only five hours.’
Soon the beggar children espied us again, and came running across the square, shouting our names and shaking out their verminous black locks. The infants hanging from their hips were now sleepily awake, peering around them with little red eyes. We
all went down to the river-bank and sat by the water, and the children talked about their lives.
Isabela, the eldest, led the conversation, as she led in all things. She was about twelve years old, had a golden grimy face, and a manner of supreme and pretty confidence in the world.
‘Our family is stupendous,’ she said. ‘There are ten of us and we live in one room. We have a table and chair and we cook in the street.’ She began to giggle. ‘We haven’t a bed. We sleep on straw. And for this room we pay four shillings a month.’
She was not complaining so much as asking us to share in a joke. But one of the company, a boy with a diseased skin, considered she was boasting.
‘I pay nothing for my house,’ he said. ‘It is mine.’
‘It’s not,’ said Isabela, ‘it’s your mother’s.’
‘Well that’s the same.’
‘Anyway, it’s not much of a house – all tins and palm leaves.’
‘But it is ours,’ said the boy.
The children all began to flow with information, competing with and contradicting each other. I asked them what their fathers did. They were all dead. ‘Mine.’ ‘Mine, too.’ ‘And mine.’ ‘Yes, it is true. All dead.’ They announced the fact with bright smiles, making gestures of sleeping with their hands. One had died of a cold, one of a fever, another apparently of eating beans. Two had been shot – bang! bang! – but I could not gather by whom. Yet I believed them, for Spain is a country of dead fathers, and today there are a million young widows in that country who will never see a second husband.
Another girl, up to her thighs in the river, was washing her brother’s head. Her dark-brown face was tender and beautiful, and her thick hair, matted with dirt and straw, gave her the ageless look of a bronze sculpture.
‘We sleep in a bed in our house,’ she said. ‘Three at the top and two at the bottom. And if we don’t bring home ten reales every day we are beaten.’
Everybody squirmed with laughter at this. Filthy radiant faces were convulsed. It was obviously a private joke. Only the diseased boy looked solemn.
‘Nobody beats me,’ he said. ‘I buy all my own clothes.’
At the mention of clothes, the girl in the river lifted her dirty coloured dress and began to catalogue the sources of her garments. Behold the torn dress, given; the short tattered vest, given; the canvas rag of shoes, bought from the mother of Carmencita, who died. ‘They are good,’ she said, ‘and I wear nothing else.’
There, by the river, we spent the sunny morning. The thick green waters went slowly by, like summer grasses flowing in a breeze. The girls chattered. And the diseased boy lay back, and gazed up through the eucalyptus trees, and sang in a voice as gentle as a bird’s, over and over again, this pretty song:
How beautiful is my truelove,
How beautiful when she sleeps.
She is like a red poppy
Within the green wheat.
Ecija at noon was a city of black and gold – gold of the roofs and towers in the sun, and black of the shadowed alleys and of the widows passing through them. A breathless provincial quiet hung over the tiny world, choking the young men as they walked like prisoners to the churches. Yet beneath all this, the stones and the flesh, the pagan world lay close. Enrique, the savage old barber in the square, could talk about Astigi as though it were just around the corner. Under the prim paths of the municipal gardens, he told me, lay an elaborate Roman pavement of gladiators, goddesses and leopards. In his youth an old Roman fountain still played in the city square, a thing of erotic beauty with four stone naiads whose naked breasts gushed water. ‘Preciosa,’ he said. ‘More beautiful than the moon.’ These naiads, though loved by all, were condemned at last by a bishop, and taken away and buried in the mountains. ‘But you must see the mosaics in the Town Hall,’ he said. ‘Women and bulls. Gods and tigers. They also are preciosa.’
So we went to the Town Hall with him, and there on the floor of the Council Chamber (once a convent, and before that a Roman villa) lay a mosaic of most voluptuous refinement. Across the neck of a prancing bull reclined a superb Europa, and around them paraded bearded gods, carrying whips and branches of green leaves. There were also nymphs, flowers, animals and birds. The floor was dusty, so a porter came and emptied a bucket of water over it. The colours of the mosaics sprang instantly alive, the nymphs shivered, the flowers opened, Europa seemed to draw in breath and arch her peach-fed body, and the bull’s rich flanks steamed darkly.
‘Ay!’ said the porter, gazing down. ‘Behold that now. Some mornings I come in here, with my mind elsewhere, and I could swear a naked woman lies on the Council floor. I have wanted to cry out. It is like a miracle.’ He sighed, and scratched himself under his smock, and departed, rattling his bucket against his thigh.
After luncheon we walked to the edge of the town to see the bull-ring. It stood in a circle of old white walls surrounded by tinkling goats. We knocked at a door in the wall and entered a small garden, where an old woman was cleaning a brass bedstead with sand. She had a red face like a paper lantern which crumpled when she smiled at us. ‘Enter,’ she said. ‘Look about you, and I will send my sister.’ We climbed some steps and pushed open a crumbling door and passed into the bull-ring. Big, empty, harsh and haunted, for two thousand years this saucer of stone and sand had been dedicated to one purpose, and even in this naked daylight it still exuded a sharp mystery of blood.
The little bent sister arrived to show us round. She had no hair, was courteous and sad, and talked of the greatness of other times. We walked across the silent arena, now overgrown with grass. She showed us where the bulls were herded before battle, eight stalls of stone with heavy doors which could be raised in safety from above. Here, once, came the greatest bulls of the Guadalquivir, and the greatest names fought them. All was decay and desertion now. The stalls were white with the droppings of birds; the door-pulleys were frayed and broken; a wrought-iron bull’s-head over the entrance wore a flaking skin of rust.
‘In summer,’ said the old sister, ‘when it is possible, and if the agriculture is right, and if the campesinos have money – then we hold a corrida.’ Her hairless eyes blinked about her with anxious pride, and the bright sun shone on the broken seats, the weeds and the grass, and on the sagging doorway to the pits through which the huge black bulls once made their thundering entrances. ‘You should have come thirty years ago,’ she said. ‘How precious it was.’ She talked with a faint whispering sadness, her head on one side, half smiling, remembering and listening to the time; hearing again the dead crowds roar on those electric afternoons; sitting once more in her Easter dress, the round flesh back on her shrunken bones, her cheeks flushed from a dedication. She was the shrivelled spirit of the place. She fluttered her hands in sun and shadow. Here men and bulls had died before her eyes. And the flowers in summer were most beautiful to see. There, in that courtyard, they quartered the dead beasts – the best in Spain, the biggest and most barbarous. To that little room, she said, El Chico was carried, blood on his shirt, sweat on his long green face. In her comb and shawl she had run to the well, fetched water for him, and held his hand in his final panic. But he died. Those summers were all hot dust and glory. Would the agriculture ever be right again? Would the farmers ever return from the hills calling again for bulls? She shook her frail head and wondered and locked the great door and took us back to the little garden. There she gave us two sweet oranges from a tree, and wished us good-bye. She would not accept a tip.
On our last night in Ecija came a message from the telephone exchange to say that the Superintendent had killed a pig and that we must go and help to eat it. The Superintendent, an old friend now, was a lady of rare vitality who knew and could sing the whole of ‘The Fair Maid of Perth’. She had six nieces to help her with the telephones, and the exchange was a merry place, much given to gossip, card-playing and long delays. We arrived to find the telephone lines choked, and a great feast of pork, butter-cakes and coñac spread out among the instruments. All the niece
s were screechingly gay, except for the beautiful Lola, whose boy friend, a dentist, was late.
This boy was normally her greatest pride, for he was a youth of some versatility and could, it was claimed, speak English. This was true enough, in a way. But although his voice was perfectly normal when talking Spanish, he spoke English in a faint, high-pitched, tinny whine which was well-nigh indecipherable. This mystified me at first, until I discovered that he had learnt his English from an antique pre-1920 gramophone and could only be said to be suffering from too good an ear.
But this dentist was devoted to Lola, and spent most of the hours of courtship in his surgery gazing into her mouth. They thus enjoyed a unique, almost speechless intimacy. Yet tonight, when he arrived, Lola blazed with fire and fury and would have nothing to do with him. For a while he did card tricks, to try to curry favour, but no one took any notice. Meanwhile the aunt entertained by dancing, dressing up and singing down the telephones. But still Lola’s great eyes glowered above the feast. The aunt wrung her hands in dismay and brought more pork, even photographs of her dead relations. Until the dentist, grown desperate at last, threw down his cards and produced from his pocket a plaster cast of Lola’s teeth. ‘Here you are,’ he said, blushing angrily. ‘I had meant to give it you for Christmas.’ But all was now well. Everyone exclaimed with admiration, and Lola took his arm, laughing deep in her throat, and would not leave his side again for the rest of the evening.
Meanwhile, as the coñac warmed us, there was dancing in the patio, where the pig’s corpse swung white in the moonlight. We danced till three; the nieces did the sevillana; the aunt recited ‘The Siege of Saragossa’; the telephone lights twinkled unheeded; and we ate the whole side of the pig.