Gatherings From Spain

To return to the dying man: if he has the bull, the host is brought to him with great pomp; the procession is attended by crowds who bear crosses, lighted candles, bells and incense; and as the chamber is thrown open to the public, the ceremony is accompanied by multitudes of idlers. The spectacle is always imposing, as it must be, considering that the incarnate Deity is believed to be present. It is particularly striking on Easter Sunday, when the host is taken to all the sick who have been unable to communicate in the parish church. Then the priest walks either under a gorgeous canopy, or is mounted in the finest carriage in the town; and while all as he passes kneel to the wafer which he bears, he chuckles internally at his own reality of power over his prostrate subjects; the line of streets are gaily decorated as for the triumphal procession of a king: the windows are hung with velvets and tapestries, and the balconies filled with the fair sex arrayed in their best, who shower sweet flowers down on the procession just at the moment of its passage, and sweeter smiles during all the rest of the morning on their lovers below, whose more than divided adoration is engrossed by female divinities.

BURIAL DRESSES

To die without confession and communication is to a Spaniard the most poignant of calamities, as he cannot be saved while he is taught that there is in these acts a preserving virtue of their own, independent of any exertions on his part. The host is given when human hopes are at an end, and the heat, noise, confusion, and excitement, seldom fail to kill the already exhausted patient. Then when life’s idle business at a gasp is o’er, the body is laid out in a capilla ardiente, or an apartment prepared as a chapel, by taking out the furniture; where the family is rich, a room on the ground floor is selected, in which a regular altar is dressed up, and rows of large candles lighted placed around the body; the public is then allowed to enter, even in the case of the sovereign: thus we beheld Ferdinand VII. laid out dead and full dressed with his hat on his head, and his stick in his hand. This public exhibition is a sort of coroner’s inquest; formerly, as we have often seen, the body was clad in a monk’s dress, with the feet naked and the hands clasped over the breast; the sepulchral shadow then thrown over the dead and placid features by the cowl, seldom failed to raise a solemn undefinable feeling in the hearts of spectators, speaking, as it did, a language to the living which could not be misunderstood.

The woollen dresses of the mendicant orders were by far the most popular, from the idea that, when old, they had become too saturated with the odour of sanctity for the vile nostrils of the evil one; and as a tattered dress often brought more than half-a-dozen new ones, the sale of these old clothes was a benefit alike to the pious vendor and purchaser; those of St. Francis were preferred, because at his triennial visits to purgatory, he knows his own, and takes them back with him to heaven; hence Milton peopled his shadowy limbo with wolves in sheep’s clothing: —

– “who, to be sure of Paradise,Dying put on the robes of Dominick,Or in Franciscan think to pass unseen.”BURIAL PLACES

Women in our time were often laid out in nuns’ dresses, wearing also the scapulary of the Virgin of Carmel, which she gave to Simon Stock, with the assurance that none who died with it on, should ever suffer eternal torments. The general adoption of these grave fashions induced an accurate foreigner to remark, that no one ever died in Spain except nuns and monks. In this hot country, burial goes hand in hand with death, and it is absolutely necessary from the rapidity with which putrefaction comes on. The last offices are performed in somewhat an indecent manner: formerly the interment took place in churches, or in the yards near them, a custom which from hygeian reasons is now prohibited. Public cemeteries, which give at least 4 per cent. interest, have been erected outside the towns, in which long lines of catacombs gape greedily for those occupants who can pay for them, while a wide ditch is opened every day for those who cannot. In this campo santo, or holy field, death levels all ranks, which seems hard on those great families who have built and endowed chapels to secure a burial among their ancestors. They however raised no objections to the change of law, nor have ever much troubled themselves about the dilapidated sepulchres and crumbling effigies of their “grandsires cut in alabaster;” the real opposition arose from the priests, who lost their fees, and thereupon assured their flocks, that a future resurrection was anything but certain to bodies committed into such new-fangled depositories.

Be that as it may, the corpse in its slight coffin is carried out, followed by the male relations, and is then put into its niche without further form or prayer. Ladies who die soon after marriage, and before the bridal hours have danced their measure, are sometimes buried in their wedding dresses, and covered with flowers, the dying injunctions of Shakspere’s Queen Catherine: —

“When I am dead, good wench,Let me be used with honour; strew me o’erWith maiden flowers, that all the world may knowI was a chaste wife to my grave.”

At such funerals the coffin is opened in the catacomb, to gratify the indecent curiosity of the crowd; the dress is next day discussed all over the town, and the entierro or funeral is pronounced to be muy lucido or very brilliant; but life in Spain is a jest, and these things show it. The place assigned for children who die under seven years of age lies apart from that of the adults; their early death is held in Spain to be rather a matter of congratulation than of grief, since those whom the gods love die young; their epitaphs tell a mixed tale of joy and sorrow. El parvulo fue arrebatado á la gloria, the little one was snatched up into Paradise: —

“There is beyond the sky a heaven of joy and love,And holy children, when they die, go to that world above.”BURIAL OF THE POOR

Yet nature will not be put aside, and many a mother have we seen, loitering alone near the graves, adorning them with roses and plucking up weeds which have no business to grow there; the little corpses are carried to the tomb by little children of the same age, clad in white, and are strewed with flowers short-lived as themselves, sweets to the sweet. The parents return home yearning after the lost child – its cradle is empty, its piteous moan is heard no more, its playthings remain where it left them, and recall the cruel gap which grief cannot fill up, although it

“Stuffs out its vacant garments with its form.”

The bodies of the lower orders, dressed in their ordinary attire, are borne to their long home by four men, as is described by Martial; “no useless coffins enclose their breasts,” they are carried forth as was the widow’s son at Nain. And often have we seen the frightful death-tray standing upright at the doors of the humble dead, with a human outline marked on the wood by the death-damp of a hundred previous burdens. Such bodies are cast into the trench like those of dogs, and often naked, as the survivors or sextons strip them even of their rags. Those poorer still, who cannot afford to pay the trifling fee, sometimes during the night, suspend the bodies of their children in baskets, near the cemetery porch. We once beheld a cloaked Spaniard pacing mournfully in the burial-ground of Seville, who, when the public trench was opened, drew from beneath the folds the body of his dead child, cast it in and disappeared. Thus half the world lives without knowing how the other half dies.

FUNERAL SERVICE

In the upper ranks the etiquette of the funeral commences after the reality is over. The first necessary step is within three days to pay a visit of condolence to the family; this is called para dar el pesame. The relations are all assembled in the best room, and seated on chairs placed at the head, the women at one end and the men at another. When a condoling lady and gentleman enter, she proceeds to shake hands with all the other ladies one after another, and then seats herself in the next vacant chair; the gentleman bows to each of the men as he passes, who rise and return it, a grave dumb-show of profound affliction being kept up by all. On reaching the chief mourners, they are addressed by each condoler with this phrase, “Acompaño á usted en su sentimiento;” “I share in the affliction of your grace;” the company meanwhile remain silent as an assemblage of undertakers. After sitting among them the proper time, each retires with much the same form.

In a few days afterwards a printed letter is sent round in the name of all the surviving relations to announce the death to the friends of the family, and to beg the favour of attendance at the funeral service: these invitations are all headed with a cross (+), which is called El Cristus. Before the invasion of the enemy, who not only destroyed the walls of convents, but sapped religious belief also, very many books were printed, and private letters written, with this sign prefixed. In our time sundry medical men at Seville always headed with it their prescriptions, the Cardinal Archbishop having granted a certain number of years’ release from purgatory to all who sanctified with this mark their recipes even of senna and rhubarb. Under this cross, in the invitation, are placed the letters R. I. P. A., which signify “Requiescat in pace. Amen.” At the appointed hour the mourners meet in the casa mortuaria, or the house of death, and proceed together to church. All are dressed in full black, and before the progress of paletots and civilization, wore no cloaks: this, as it rendered each man of them more uncomfortable than St. Bartholomew was without his skin, was considered an offering of genuine grief to the manes of the deceased. Uncloaking in Spain is, be it remembered, a mark of respect, and is equivalent to our taking off the hat. When the company arrives at church, they are received by the ministers, and the ceremony is very solemnly performed before a catafalque covered with a pall, which is placed before the altar, and is brilliantly lighted up with wax candles. As soon as the service is concluded, all advance and bow to the chief mourners, who are seated apart, and thus the tragedy concludes. Parents do not put on mourning for their children, which is a remnant of the patriarchal and Roman superiority of the head of the family, for whom, however, when dead, all the other members pay the most observant respect. The forms and number of days of mourning are most nicely laid down, and are most rigidly observed, even by distant relations, who refrain from all kinds of amusements: —

“None bear about the mockery of woeTo public dances or to private show.”ALL SOULS’ DAY

We well remember the death of a kind and venerable Marquesa at Seville just before the carnival, whose chief grief at dying, was the thought of the number of young ladies who would thus be deprived of their balls and masquerades; many, anxious and obliging, were the inquiries sent after her health, and more even were the daily prayers offered up to the Virgin, for the prolongation of her precious existence, could it be only for a few weeks.

November drear, brings in other solemnities connected with the dead, and in harmony with the fall of the sear and yellow leaves, to which Homer compares the races of mortal men. The night before the first of November – our All Hallow-e’en – is kept in Spain as a vigil or wake; it is the fated hour of love divinations and mysteries; then anxious maidens used to sit at their balconies to see the image of their destined husbands pass or not pass by. November the first is dedicated to the sainted dead, and November the second to all souls: it is termed in Spanish el dia de los difuntos, the day of the dead, and is most scrupulously observed by all who have lost during the past year some friend, some relation – how few have not! The dawn is ushered in by mournful bells, which recall the memory of those who cannot come back at the summons; the cemeteries are then visited; at Seville, long processions of sable-clad females, bearing chased lamps on staves, walk slowly round and round, chaunting melancholy dirges, returning when it gets dusk in a long line of glittering lights. The graves during the day are visited by those who take a sad interest in their occupants, and lamps and flower garlands are suspended as memorials of affection, and holy water is sprinkled, every drop of which puts out some of the fires of purgatory. These picturesque proceedings at once resemble the Eed es Segheer of modern Cairo, the feralia of the Romans, the Νεμεσια of the Greeks: here are the flower offerings of Electra, the funes assensi, the funeral torches of pagan mourners, which have vainly been prohibited to Christian Spaniards by their early Council of Illiberis. In Navarre, and in the north-west of Spain, bread and wheat offerings called robos are made, which are the doles or gifts offered for the souls’ rest of the deceased by the pious of ancient Rome.

PURGATORY

As on this day the cemetery becomes the public attraction, it too often looks rather a joyous fashionable promenade, than a sad and religious performance. The levity of mere strangers and the mob, contrasts strangely with the sorrow of real mourners. But life in this world presses on death, and the gay treads on the heels of pathos; the spot is crowded with mendicants, who appeal to the order of the day, and importune every tender recollection, by begging for the sake of the lamented dead. Outside the dreary walls all is vitality and mirth; a noisy sale goes on of cakes, nuts, and sweetmeats, a crash of horses and carriages, a din and flow of bad language from those who look after them, which must vex the repose of the benditas animas, or the blessed souls in purgatory, for whom otherwise all classes of Spaniards manifest the fondest affection and interest.

PROTESTANT BURIAL-GROUND

Such is the manner in which the body of a most orthodox Catholic Castilian is committed to the earth; his soul, if it goes to purgatory, is considered and called blessed by anticipation, as the admittance into Paradise is certain, at the expiration of the term of penal transportation, that is, “when the foul crimes done in the days of nature are burnt and purged away,” as the ghost in Hamlet says, who had not forgotten his Virgil. If the scholar objects to a Spanish clergyman, that the whole thing is Pagan, he will be told that he may go farther and fare worse. In the case of a true Roman Catholic, this term of hard labour may be much shortened, since that can be done by masses, any number of which will be said, if first paid for. The vicar of St. Peter holds the keys, which always unlock the gate to those who offer the golden gift by which Charon was bribed by Æneas; thus, to a judicious rich man, nothing, supposing that he believes the Pope versus the Bible, is so easy as to get at once into Heaven; nor are the poor quite neglected, as any one may learn who will read the extraordinary number of days’ redemption which may be obtained at every altar in Spain by the performance of the most trumpery routine. The only wonder is how any one of the faithful should ever fail to secure his delivery from this spiritual Botany Bay without going there at all, or, at least, only for the form’s sake. It was calculated by an accurate and laborious German, that an active man, by spending three shillings in coach-hire, might obtain in an hour, by visiting different privileged altars during the Holy week, 29,639 years, nine months, thirteen days, three minutes and a half diminution of purgatorial punishment. This merciful reprieve was offered by Spanish priests in South America, on a grander style, on one commensurate with that colossal continent; for a single mass at the San Francisco in Mexico, the Pope and prelates granted 32,310 years, ten days, and six hours indulgence. As a means of raising money, says our Mexican authority, “I would not give this simple institution of masses for the benefit of souls, for the power of taxation possessed by any government; since no tax-gatherer is required; the payments are enforced by the best feelings, for who would not pay to get a parent’s or friend’s soul from the fire?” Purgatory has thus been a Golconda mine of gold to his Holiness, as even the poorest have a chance, since charitable persons can deliver blank souls by taking out a habeas animam writ, that is, by paying the priest for a mass. The especial days are marked in the almanac, and known to every waiter at the inn; moreover, notice is put on the church door, Hoy se saca anima, “this day you can get out a soul.” They are generally left in their warm quarters in winter, and taken out in the spring.

Alas for poor Protestants, who, by non-payment of St. Peter’s pence, have added an additional act of heresy, and the worst of all, the one which Rome never pardons. These defaulters can only hope to be saved by faith, and its fruits, good works; they must repent, must quit their long-cherished sins, and lead a new life; for them there is no rope of St. Francis to pull them out, if once in the pit; no rosary of St. Domenick to remove them, quick, presto, begone, from torment to happiness. Outside the pale of the Vatican, their souls have no chance, and inside the frontiers of Spain their bodies have scarcely a better prospect, should they die in that orthodox land. There the greatest liberal barely tolerates any burial at all of their black-blooded heretical carcasses, as no corn will grow near them. Until within a very few years at seaport towns, their bodies used to be put in a hole in the sands, and beyond low water mark; nay, even this concession to the infidel offended the semi-Moro fishermen, who true believers and persecutors feared that their soles might be poisoned: not that either sailor or priest ever exhibited any fear of taking British current coin, all cash that comes into their nets being most Catholic, so says the proverb, El dinero es muy Catolico.

LUTHERAN BURIALCEMETERY AT MALAGA

Matters connected with the grave have been placed, as regards Protestants, on a much more pleasant footing within these last few years; and it may be a consolation to invalids, who are sent to Spain for change of climate, and who are particular, to know, in case of accidents, that Protestant burial-grounds are now permitted at Cadiz, Malaga, and in a few other places. The history of the permission is curious, and has never, to the best of our belief, been told. In the days of Philip II. Lutherans were counted in many degrees worse than dogs; when caught alive, they were burnt by the holy tribunal; and when dead, were cast out on the dunghill. Even when our poltroon James I. sent, in 1622, his ill-judged olive-bearing mission, by which Spain was saved from utter humiliation, Mr. Hole, the secretary of the ambassador, Lord Digby, having died at Santander, the body was not allowed to be buried at all; it was put into a shell, and sunk in the sea; but no sooner was his lordship gone, than “the fishermen,” we quote from Somers’ tracts, “fearing that they should catch no fish as long as the coffin of a heretic lay in their waters,” fished it up, “and the corpse of our countryman and brother was thrown above ground, to be devoured by the fowls of the air.” In the treaty of 1630, the 31st Article provided for the disposal of the goods of those Englishmen who might die in Spain, but not for their bodies. “These,” says a commentator of Rymer, “must be left stinking above ground, to the end that the dogs may be sure to find them.” When Mr. Washington, page to Charles I., died at Madrid, at the time his master was there, Howell, who was present, relates that it was only as an especial favour to the suitor of the Spanish Infanta that the body was allowed to be interred in the garden of the embassy, under a fig-tree. A few years afterwards, 1650, Ascham, the envoy of Cromwell, was assassinated, and his corpse put, without any rites, into a hole; but the Protector was not a man to be trifled with, and knew well how to deal with a Spanish government, always a craven and bully, from whom nothing ever is to be obtained by concession and gentleness, which is considered as weakness, while everything is to be extorted from its fears. He that very year commanded a treaty to be prepared for the proper burial of his subjects, to which the blustering Spaniard immediately assented. This provision was stipulated into the treaty of Charles II. in 1664, and was conceded and ratified again in 1667 to Sir Richard Fanshawe.

No step, however, appears to have been taken before 1796, when Lord Bute purchased a spot of ground for the burial of Englishmen outside the Alcalá-gate, at Madrid. During the war, when all Spain was a churchyard to our countrymen, this bit of land was taken possession of by a worthy Madrilenian, not for his place of sepulture, but for good and profitable cultivation. In 1831 Mr. Addington caused some researches to be made, and the original conveyance was found in the Contaduria de Hypothecas, the registry of deeds and mortgages which backward Spain possesses, and which advanced England does not. The intruder was ejected after some struggling on his part. Before Lord Bute’s time the English had been buried at night and without ceremonies, in the garden of the convent de los Recoletos; and, as Lord Bute’s new bit of ground was extensive and valuable, the pious monks wished to give up the English corner in their garden, in exchange for it; but the transfer was prevented by the recent law which forbade all burial in cities. The field purchased by Lord Bute is now unenclosed and uncultivated; fortunately it has not been much wanted, only fifteen Protestants having died at Madrid during the last thirty years. In November, 1831, Ferdinand VII. finally settled this grave question by a decree, in which he granted permission for the erection of a Protestant burial-ground in all towns where a British consul or agent should reside, subject to most degrading conditions. The first cemetery set apart in Spain, in virtue of this gracious decree from a man replaced on his throne by the death of 30,000 Englishmen, was the work of Mr. Mark, our consul at Malaga; he enclosed a spot of ground to the east of that city, and placed a tablet over the entrance, recording the royal permission, and above that a cross. Thus he appealed to the dominant feelings of Spaniards, to their loyalty and religion. The Malagenians were amazed when they beheld this emblem of Christianity raised over the last home of Lutheran dogs, and exclaimed, “So even these Jews make use of the cross!” The term Jew, it must be remembered, is the acme of Spanish loathing and vituperation. The first body interred in it was that of Mr. Boyd, who was shot by the bloody Moreno, with the poor dupe Torrijos and the rest of his rebel companions.

THE SPANISH FIGARO

CHAPTER XIX

The Spanish Figaro – Mustachios – Whiskers – Beards – Bleeding – Heraldic Blood – Blue, Red, and Black Blood – Figaro’s Shop – The Baratero – Shaving and Toothdrawing.

FEW who love Don Quixote, will deem any notice on the Peninsular surgeon complete in which the barber is not mentioned, even be it in a postscript. Although the names of both these learned professors have long been nearly synonymous in Spain, the barber is much to be preferred, inasmuch as his cuts are less dangerous, and his conversation is more agreeable. He with the curate formed the quiet society of the Knight of La Mancha, as the apothecary and vicar used to make that of most of our country squires of England. Let, therefore, every Adonis of France, now bearded as a pard although young, nay, let each and all of our fair readers, albeit equally exempt from the pains and penalties of daily shaving, make instantly, on reaching sunny Seville, a pilgrimage to the shrine of San Figaro. His shop – apocryphal it is to be feared as other legendary localities – lies near the cathedral, and is a no less established lion than the house of Dulcinea is at Toboso, or the prison tower of Gil Blas is at Segovia. Such is the magic power of genius. Cervantes and Le Sage have given form, fixture, and local habitation to the airy nothings of their fancy’s creations, while Mozart and Rossini, by filling the world with melody, have bidden the banks of the Guadalquivir re-echo to their sweet inventions.

SPANISH MUSTACHIOS

To those even who have no music in their souls, the movement from doctors to barbers is harmonious in a land where beards were long honoured as the type of valour and chivalry, and where shaving took the precedence of surgery; and even to this day, la tienda de barbero, the shop of the man of the razor, is better supplied than many a Spanish hospital both with patients and cutting instruments. One word first on the black whiskers of tawny Spain. These patillas, as they are now termed, must be distinguished from the ancient mustachio, the mostacho, a very classical but almost obsolete word, which the scholars of Salamanca have derived from μυστἁξ, the upper lip. Their present and usual name is Bigote, which is also of foreign etymology, being the Spanish corruption of the German oath bey gott, and formed under the following circumstances: for nicknames, which stick like burrs, often survive the history of their origin. The free-riding followers of Charles V., who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood, swore like troopers, and gave themselves infinite airs, to the more infinite disgust of their Spanish comrades, who have a tolerable good opinion of themselves, and a first-rate hatred of all their foreign allies. These strange mustachios caught their eyes, as the stranger sounds which proceeded from beneath them did their ears. Having a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a most Oriental and schoolboy knack at a nickname, they thereupon gave the sound to the substance, and called the redoubtable garnish of hair, bigotes. This process in the formation of phrases is familiar to philologists, who know that an essential part often is taken for the whole. For example, a hat, in common Spanish parlance, is equivalent to a grandee, as with us the woolsack is to a Lord Chancellor. It is natural that unscholastic soldiers, when dealing with languages which they do not understand, should fix on their enemies, as a term of reproach, those words which, from hearing used the most often, they imagine must constitute the foundation of the hostile grammar. Thus our troops called the Spaniards los Carajos, from their terrible oaths and terrible runnings away. So the clever French designated as les godams, those “stupid” fellows in red jackets who never could be made to know when they were beaten, but continued to make use of that significant phrase in reference to their victors, until they politely showed them the shortest way home over the Pyrenees.