Chapter XII The Comedy of the Basque
In the north where the Cantabrian ranges and the Pyrenees rim the Bay of Biscay, lives a peculiar people. Even its land is different from Spain’s. The air is temperate, moist. Mountains are clad in forest. Fields of high grass bring honeyed redolence. The green plateaux come down above the sea, like masses of the Alps brought to the Spanish coast. These lands, so like Europe, so unlike Spain, are studded with stone towns. Houses are gabled, narrow streets are cobbled: there is a note of canniness and of seclusion in the towns of the Basque.
When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned. When the Moslem swept north, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and withstood him. When the Visigoth came through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Catholic Roland with the troops of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, it was the Basque not the “Saracen,” who beat them at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the kings of Castile, having cleared Spain of Moor and Jew, turned to subdue the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more powerful alien. By decree, Fernando VI ennobled all the Basques in the Province of Vizcaya: already in 1200, the entire population of the Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgos.
An indelible, an archaic people! They seem to be a race in an archaic fashion: a race by blood! Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews are a race by culture. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records, no underlying base of ethic, or religion. If they possessed a culture, it was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in concept. A certain haleness of self-sufficiency, a certain gusto for aloofness kept them intact and unique in a land which for three thousand years boiled with invasion.
In their survival they became neither tragic nor heroic. Naught could be farther from the Basque than such other peculiar peoples as the Armenian or Jew. The Basques had no separate Book, no separate God. Very early, they accepted Christ. He did not make them merge with their Catholic neighbors, because their instincts were differently attuned. Spain is a world of Tragedy, of mystic ideals, of devotion to unseen spirits. The Basque is concrete, light, canny. The Spaniard faces all that he encounters: this confrontation is the genius of Tragedy. But the Basque evades: and this evasion is the genius of Comedy.
Who the Basques were is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the Peninsula—part of the peoples whom the Phœnicians found when they first skirted Spain. Their music suggests kinship with the Celt; but this may well be due to the neighborhood of the Celts who named the Spanish province of Galicia. Their music as well suggests kinship with the Berbers—the Rifians of Morocco. Their language is inscrutably alone: it bears no relation with any of the tongues of Babel. But whoever they were they remain. Their blood in the small towns is little mixed; and their heads unmixed also. While through the ages, Spain drank a torrent of Ideas—Greek, Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jew—and bent to the tragic fusing of Africa, Asia, Europe, America into a single Spain, the Basque quite simply kept on being himself.
His virtues, like those of his mountains, are conservatism and power of non-absorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no word for God, no word for spirit. This is a people rooted to the earth and which kept to its pastures and farmyards.27 Not alone had the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when his tongue was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word for dog, pig, cow, lizard: there is none for animal. There is a Basque word for oak, pine, chestnut: there is none for tree. A most excellently defended, anti-platonic people! Their mountains and their mountain-courage warded them free of many floods of races. And their heads kept them clear of metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance are drains upon the business of life. For the interims of business, there is the singing of songs, there is the gathering in eights to dance the bland aurrescu.
The towns of the Basques express them. The little Guipúzcoan village lies between the mountains and the sea. The mountains slope into a level field with cattle and kine growing fat in the lush grasses. The field rolls to a precipitous edge of rock which falls a thousand feet into the Bay of Biscay. The beach is a conch with sand as smooth and white as the heart of a sea-shell. Through the town, a road girding the villages runs on the seawall. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay—blue as a bluebell: on the other, the precipice with stone-hewn steps that lead to an Alpine verdance of pasture and of dingle.
The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves. They are smiling even; though they are dense and strong. Through the narrow streets moves a mellow race in gesture of traffic and trade. Like the houses, these men and women face the world in sober colors. But their eyes are large, and here one reads peace: the lips have the fret of a smile, and there is laughter tingling the cadence of their talk. At night they gather in the Plaza, lined with cafés: and while the old ones drink, the young ones dance. Their dance is a pleasant casual exercise—not far from the usual way of walk and word. It is a hopping and bobbing of couples, a weaving of bodily life and bodily sense into the already existent pattern of their social ease. That is why they dance in the public Square, while the old ones gossip....
Every Sunday morning, as the sun tips over the town, three men—one with a drum, two with dulsínya or chistu (a shrill metallic pipe which bears much resemblance to the pipe of the African Berber)—march through the silent streets, through every street and alley of the town, incessantly playing: so that no Vasco, good or bad, shall oversleep the Mass. This music trills through the morning like the cool sun-filaments through dawn. It has the dogged filigree of a Scottish bagpipe. It is more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notations are wider. The tune of the chistu interweaves with the plang of drum, and makes the houses smile and dance a bit ere they are quite awake.
The dance, the smile, the song are never absent. Afternoons, when work is done in shop or field, the girls will sing till the late hour of cena. Rosa is not pretty. Her face is a little long and has a tilt which is not of Europe. The nose droops, the mouth is large, the eyes are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow. But Rosa is charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the throat. The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet of the bodice; the breasts are caught by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a grenadier. Rosa’s hips are wide; her legs, stockinged in gray wool, have a full firmness—like her breasts—that bespeaks valiance in emotion.
The room is cool and bare: through the high windows comes the mellow murmur of the folk walking the rigid street, between the sea and the mountain. The girls are a warm fragrance in the room. They sing. The songs warm them: they dance. Their heads sway, their throats pulse, their arms rise and fall.
These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them without accompaniment. Many have sad themes. But even as tragedy invades the brightest fado of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people. It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music stranger to that of Spain—to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of Spain.
It is good music: its mobile patterns are abstracted into grace and hardness: its swiftness never blurs, its poignance does not become sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. The Basque remains one. What varies is the circumstance of life; so he wards it off, he holds it well outside him. Through a hundred ages, Spain has moved in a processional whose faiths and passions the Spaniard has absorbed. But the Basque shuts out. So his song—trilling, skipping, flashing in color and light—is a music of intimations, rather than of experience.
Was this pagan people first enticed to become Catholic, because of the occasions offered by a Calendar of Saints for singing and for dancing? Every church festival is a fiesta, a romería for the Basque. The fiesta of San Iñigo de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for Iñigo Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque. The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of Hell, becomes a day of merriment: foot races, water races, trials of strength lead up to the climax—the contests in the arts of song and dance. The Spaniard is no sportsman. His bull fight is an ordeal and an art. His games are pretexts for gambling. His Carnival is a means of fierce release for the instincts repressed by morality, caste and honor. But the Basque is a sportsman. He is incapable of the true carnival spirit. He turns his feast-days into sport-days.
An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the Plaza. Under a bower of gilt, the priest harangues in vascuence.28 His theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the hellish lust which hides in the laborer’s appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far off.) On one side of the Square is the summer palace of an Andalusian Duke. His balconies are hung with great mantones; gorgeous splotches of gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng is aloof from the priest in his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the Duke’s palace, aloof even from the sea. It is a packed, resilient body. It is waiting to play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings even to the bull fight.
The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowds circle the platform for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of the chistu are thin and cool. The drummer weaves a tattoo that becomes the matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is moving precisely because it is so unemphatic, so subhumanly cool, so pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are brief. Here is grace in line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses of dance and music, ever unceasing the weave of the drum. The elves also of the Atlas are around the corner: but Spain is miles away.
Agura, contrapas, anarxuma, zaspi, trititzka, soka, aguruku, taladera—numberless Basque dance-figures. What distinguishes them is that they are all social: that they are stylized from details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is a plastic form for the soul. These dances are scenes of bodily acts. Their stuff is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an apple dance, an intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a chair dance, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The Siete Saltos is a stylization of the walk—of men walking together. The music is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social comedy which in France produced Molière. But also, it has a purity of abstract line which recalls the classic dance of the Pueblo Indians or of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject: the dances of the “savage” are elemental, they call rain, they invoke harvest, they enact sexual passion.
In another part of town there is a match of pelota. This game is originally Basque; its pure form of sport lives still in the Basque village where boys play on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the frontón: a court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side (the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called pala, or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as cesta, or remonte, shaped a little like the curved beak of some bird, scooped and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our handball which may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of three walls for the rebounds of the fast ball, achieves an extraordinary brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth from the front wall to the side and rear ones. There is something of the delicacy of billiards, the grace of tennis: and there is a spill of sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of the Spaniard, all this becomes minor.
Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in red boinas line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the players. They are the cobradores, the bookies: the true principals in what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the shifting of odds, the placing of bets continue: the players themselves serving as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the petits chevaux of wood at a gaming table.29
These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, where Castile has rooted and worked havoc. Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the king and of the intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has destroyed....
The carrera runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst, coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven.
It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.
The town is stifled and somber: it is like an apple rotted by this old church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has not turned his saints’ days into merry making. The church has conquered: the Empiry of Castile.
But more significant than such invasions of the end of old Spain upon the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of Spain. While the Spaniard gave himself to crusades and conquest, the Basque held aloof with his energy untapped. To resist invasion of body and of spirit took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but Spanish spirit locked in the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque with his reserve of virgin power. He had no culture but the most primitive; no world for the expanding of his might save a strip of rocky soil. Spain offered a profound culture and the sea, and worlds beyond the sea. Now the Basque passes from his spiritual sleep—passes into Spain, through the door which Spain herself had battered open....