XXI Novels of the Mountain
I — “Savour of the Soil”
Fifty years ago, before Zola and the naturalistic school were on the lips of men, a Spanish novelist, José María de Pereda, was beginning to write who can only not be called a naturalist, because of the associations given to the name in France. Humour and frankness run through Spanish literature; there is less artificial refinement and more vigour and broadly human sympathy than in the literature of France. The very language is frank and outspoken rather than subtle and insinuating. And the nobly independent character of Spaniards of all classes counts for much in the admirable sanity of Spanish realism. “Our lowest social strata,” says the Condesa Pardo Bazán, “differ not a little from those described by Zola and the Goncourts.” The Spanish realist has thus no cause to dissect common people and vulgar events from a superior point of view, putting on gloves, as it were, to keep his hands clean. He knows that virtue perches in strange places and learns to see le sublime d’en bas, and there is a wide gulf between French naturalism and Spanish realism. Pereda,110 a hidalgo of the old school, born at Santander on the 6th of February, 1833, spent the greater part of his life in the Montaña, at Santander, or at his country estate of Polanco, only leaving Cantabria to study for a few years at Madrid, and later to sit for a few months in the Cortes as a Carlist. The rest of his life he passed among his family and books and friends in his beloved Montaña.111 His friend in private life, Señor Pérez Galdós, describes him as dark, sunburnt, of medium height, with moustache and pointed beard, of a character fundamentally Spanish, and of very nervous temperament, with a horror of conventionality and pretence. It was about the year 1859 that custom and character sketches from Pereda’s pen began to appear in a Santander paper, La Abeja Montañesa. They were collected in 1864, and published under the title of “Escenas montañesas.” “Escenas montañesas” gives the essence of Pereda’s art, and, though he later wrote long novels and occasionally attained an admirable unity of treatment, the delight is still in the descriptions of fast-vanishing customs and in the characters of his peasants and fishermen rather than in the thread of the action, which is generally slight; and the strength of his novels lies not in their heroes and heroines but in the secondary figures and the side-shows. “Escenas montañesas” shows us life in Santander and the neighbouring mountain-country as it was half a century ago, and as it now lives permanently in Pereda’s art. Scenes and people are presented to us with extraordinary vividness, and only now and then the sketches read almost too much like observations taken directly from the note-book. We have the picaresque sketch of the raquero, the Santander gamin who lives by petty larceny from ships along the quays; the old-fashioned household in a mountain village—by a hereditary privilege Saint John is looked upon as one of the family, and the Saint’s procession raiment figures in the washing list; the wake at a village funeral, with the frequent toast, “to the glory of the dead,” á la buena gloria del defunto; tía Nisca, going her long homeward journey on foot after bidding farewell to her son on a ship bound for “the Indies,” and reproaching the unfertile soil that causes its sons to emigrate, though there is a song that men who go to the Indies in order to get rich would find the Indies at home, were they but willing to work:—
“A las Indias van los hombres
A las Indias por ganar,
Las Indias aquí las tienen
Si quisieran trabajar;”
and especially the noble figure of tío Tremontorio (the first and foremost of Pereda’s long line of masterly portraits in humble life, and the last of that race of hardy fishermen who, with the Basques, rivalled English whalers in the North Seas and made treaties with English kings during the Middle Ages), net-making, or eating his bread and raw bacalao on his balcony in the squalid Calle Alta, or consoling the wives and mothers of fishermen on the Muelle Anaos (in “La Leva”), and dying cheerfully (in “El fin de una raza”), after many hours of battling with the waves, glad to die quietly in his house, although he had nearly perished in the storm owing to his unwillingness to lose an escapulario of the Vírgen del Carmen. “We are all sailors of that further sea,” he says, in his rough language, as he lies dying, “all bound for the same port. If the devil does not block it against us, I to-morrow and you another day will cast anchor there.” “Suum cuique” is the longest and not the least excellent of these Escenas. A poor hidalgo of the mountain, Don Silvestre Seturas, visits a powerful friend at Madrid, and is speedily disillusioned of the capital and only court. His friend in turn accompanies him to his ancestral country-house, and is delighted at first with the country and its idyllic peace. But the rat de ville begins to discover, after some months, that the country has neither peace nor poetry—“Barbarus híc ego sum quia non intelligor ulli”—and returns to Madrid. Several incidents contribute to his change of opinion, incidents which reveal the character of the peasants and illustrate the fact that Pereda, while he makes us love the peasants of the Montaña, is never blind to their faults and weaknesses. The rich madrileño had decided to give a clock for the tower of the village church. But distrust occupies a large place in the character of the villagers, and they fear the rich even when bringing gifts. What hidden intention is there in this unwonted generosity? The Mayor calls the Council together, and the result is a long document for the donor to sign. He is to undertake to place the clock in the tower at his own cost; he is to give an annuity of two thousand reales to meet any expenses connected with the clock; he is to build another tower if the present one falls down “in my time or in that of all the generations and heirs that may come after me”; he is to pay for all lawsuits arising from the clock in the village, or in the neighbourhood. When he tears up the paper, the villagers’ suspicion of some afterthought in his gift is irrefragably confirmed. Lawsuits are the passion of the Mountain. One has continued in Don Silvestre’s family for seven generations, and he himself, having through poverty to choose between remaining a bachelor all his life and giving up the lawsuit, chooses the former without wavering. The last straw in his friend’s patience is a lawsuit drawn up against him because, when he was out shooting, part of a wall of loose stones round a peasant’s fields crumbled down shortly after he happened to have fired at a bird.
“Bocetos al temple” (1876), and “Tipos Trashumantes” (1877), show the same power of keen observation. Pereda, who treats the failings of the peasants with unsparing, but withal benevolent humour, becomes merciless and even cruel when dealing with the pretentiousness of the vulgar and the inanity of rich désœuvrés. It has been wittily said of him that “he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer.” Without going outside his province he found matter ready to his hand in the veraneantes, the flâneurs from Madrid, who passed the hot months in Santander.
Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the sabio, the learned man, who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the literato or journalist who, because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation, murmurs, “come corpo morto cade” if he drops his stick or cigar; the barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;—in fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who “has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a montañés who has returned to his country after making a fortune in South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who, after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that he must live como un señor now that he is rich, and dismisses as a temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical, rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned hidalgo, who does not allow the modern use of matches in his household, and who, from the experiences of his own poverty, is not easily misled, when he visits a neighbouring hidalgo, by the excuses for “my wife and daughter at church.” “I see through you,” says Don Robustiano to himself, “no doubt they are hidden away in some corner of the house for lack of clothes.” But especially is the sketch entitled El Amor de los tizones admirable and worthy of Cervantes. It is a description of a rustic gathering or tertulia in the kitchen of one of the poor houses of a mountain village. The peasants—each of them a clearly defined character—enter one by one with the greeting, “Dios nos acompañe” or, “Dios sea aquí,” and round the log fire, the flicker of the flames lighting up their faces against the immense smoke-blackened chimney, they pray a rosario for the dead, or tell stories of brigands, and witches, and enchantments. “Los hombres de pró” (originally published with “Bocetos al temple”) and “El Buey Suelto” (written in 1877) are still collections of sketches, the first of a canvassing for an election in rural parts of Spain, the second, of the miseries of bachelors, and the scenes in both are touched with Pereda’s vividness and humour. Pereda, as a novelist proper, begins with “Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera” (written in 1878), which describes the effects of the revolution of 1868 on a small village of the Mountain, with “De tal palo tal astilla” (1879), an answer to Pérez Galdós’ “Doña Perfecta,” “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (1882) and “Pedro Sánchez” (1883). “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (Savour of the Soil) is a whole-hearted book of the Montaña; its serenity is scarcely disturbed by the frequent village fights and rivalries in which the weapons are stout sticks cut from the mountain-side. The book is filled with a fresh and acrid smell of the earth and autumn scents, and has the peace of still days when not a leaf stirs, and there is no movement in the ripe and yellow maize-fields. It is a life lived and felt by the author and not superficially observed, so that there is no trace of artificiality or false sentiment in the descriptions. Cumbrales and Rinconeda are rival villages, Cumbrales lying high among orchards, Rinconeda lower down on the edge of the plain, in thick oak and chestnut woods. Rinconeda rejoices when the raging ábrego, the south wind, sweeps in furious gusts from the hills and ravages Cumbrales; Cumbrales rejoices when the rain turns every street of Rinconeda into a rushing torrent. The characters of the inhabitants of Cumbrales are drawn with all Pereda’s skill; Juanguirle, for instance, a rich, hard-working peasant, the simple, sensible Mayor of Cumbrales; Baldomero, who “cannot understand how doing nothing, thinking of nothing, troubling about nothing, can be unpleasant to any sensible person”; his father, Don Valentín, “hero of Luchana” and worshipper of Espartero, who, after a frugal meal, says to his son that it is not the part of good Liberals to be so indulging themselves when the Carlists are flaunting “the black flag of tyranny,” to which Baldomero answers laconically that it would have sounded more convincing before the meal. There is an epic fight between the two villages which rages so violently that the Mayor, Juanguirle, in vain attempts to stop it “in the name of la Josticia, in the name of the law, of la Costitución, of God Himself, if necessary, since, for lack of a better, I am now His representative here.” A few moments afterwards sad to relate, Juanguirle, stung by an insult hurled at Cumbrales, is in the very thickest of the fray. In “Escenas montañesas” Pereda had slightly sketched a deshoja, the harvest task of separating the ripe cob of maize from its sheath. A certain number of cobs (from two to six) are set aside from each large basketful for the poor, for the souls in purgatory, and other pious purposes. In “El Sabor de la Tierruca” the scene is described more fully. The workers, over fifty in number, sing songs and slow ballads as the heaps of shining yellow cobs and the heaps of crisp, white leaves grow and grow, and their singing is accompanied at intervals by the noise of torrents of maize-cobs emptied from the baskets. We have, too, a description of a derrota, when flocks and herds are turned out promiscuously to graze, of the game of cachurra, a kind of rustic hockey, and the simple feasts of roasted chestnuts with a bota of wine. Yet all is not “jest and youthful jollity.” The peasants, in their prudent distrust, have a keen eye for witches, and a weak old woman, of few words, poor and lonely, and in league with the Devil, plays a sadly large part in the history of Cumbrales. So in “Tipos y Paisajes,” the witch is feared not only by the boys whom she surprises stealing the grapes in the garden of her hut, but by the whole village. If a cow dies, it is the fault of the witch; if a man spends his days drinking in the tavern, the misery of his family is traced, not to him, but to the witch.
II — “On the Heights”
In “Pedro Sánchez” Pereda, not without trepidation, travelled outside his native region to Madrid, then, in 1854, “a large tumbledown village, parched, old, and dirty;”112 but Pedro Sanchez is a montañés, and the first part of the book, before he leaves his native Montaña, in style far exceeds the rest. The chief113 works of Pereda, after “El Sabor de la Tierruca” and “Pedro Sánchez,” were “Sotileza” (1885), “La Puchera” (1889), and “Peñas arriba” (1895). “Sotileza” is a novel of the old, now vanished, Santander. Both in the characters and the language it is the most local of Pereda’s novels, and it is perhaps the one which has become most famous. It has an atmosphere of pitch and tar and sea-weed, and in the Calle Alta nets and tattered rags hang from the balconies, fishwives quarrel shrilly, and the strident, piercing cry of the sardine-seller rends the air. Andrés, Muergo, and Cleto are all in love with Silda, and Silda, growing up slight and graceful, and called Sotileza from the name for the thin wire or gut to which the fish-hook is attached, is not naturally prone to let her feelings appear. But Andrés, the son of a prosperous captain in the merchant service, cannot marry beneath him; Muergo, the half-brutish, half-childish nephew of tío Mechelín and tía Sidora, with whom Sotileza, an orphan, lives, is conveniently drowned in a storm; and we leave Sotileza engaged to Cleto, the honest son of tío Mocejón, who, with his wife, la Sargüeta, and his daughter, Carpia, are the terror of the Calle Alta and of el pae Polinar. El padre Apolinar is a charitable, homely priest who receives his poor petitioners with gruff words, but ends by giving them the little that he possesses. One night, as he is writing his important sermon, he is interrupted—not for the first time—by a poor woman whose husband is ill. “Let her go to the doctor,” he exclaims; but when he finds they are starving, “Ave María Purísima,” he cries twice, “and he has three children and a wife, and there is no more honest man.” He orders his old servant to bring the puchero containing potatoes and a little meat—the priest’s evening meal. After sniffing it deliciously, he sends it off to the sick man, and as he resumes his sermon he says to himself: “I have certainly read somewhere that to keep in good health when engaged on so difficult a task as the one I now have in hand, there is nothing better than to go to bed hungry. Well, there is no doubt as to my being hungry, wolfishly hungry, to-night.” Sotileza leaves an impression of wind-driven spray and tossing seas, of manly courageous effort and vigour and zest of living; the difficulty of the language and the roughness of the life described alike contribute to the power and convincing character of the work. Pereda never showed more admirably his capacity to raise the commonest lives, the most vulgar incidents and the language of the street—of the strident Calle Alta from which pae Polinar fled in comical dismay—to the region of high art. There is something epical about his figures, in the clamorous feuds of the fishwives not less than in the serene heroism of the deep-sea fishermen. “La Puchera” is only half a sea-novel. The inhabitants of Robleces only go sea-fishing to eke out the miserable pittance won by cultivation of the soil. Thus in the house of Juan Pedro (called El Lebrato) and Pedro Juan, his son (nicknamed El Josco, from his ferocious shyness), fishing-tackle and oars mingle with agricultural tools. Juan Pedro is a widower, and father and son are entirely devoted to one another, but their house is untidy and uncomfortable for lack of a woman’s care. Pedro Juan is in love with Pilara, Pilara is in love with Pedro Juan, her family encourages the match, his father asks for nothing better, but Pedro Juan cannot break through his timidity and bring himself to speak. At last, however, he is emboldened when Pilara at the haymaking, in scarlet skirt, bodice of striped blue, and headkerchief of many colours, arranging the hay on the cart as he forks it up to her, leaps laughingly from the last hay-cart into his arms. “Pilara, from here to the Church for the señor priest to marry us. Will you agree to it?” And she answers, “We might have been back long ago, hijo de mi alma, if you had been different.” Though the miser of the book, Don Baltasar, is most skilfully drawn, its interest centres more especially in the life of Juan Pedro and Pedro Juan: Juan Pedro, gay and talkative, appearing on festival days with his famous sea-boots, his Cochin-China medal, and a silk necktie; Pedro Juan, who at his wedding, when asked by the priest, Don Alejo, if he will have Pilara to be his wife, answers: “And will I not indeed? She knows well I will, and you know it too.”
In 1895 appeared “Peñas arriba” (On the heights), the crown and masterpiece of Pereda’s work. It is a novel of the high mountain, as “Sotileza” is a novel of the sea. Don Celso lives in Tablanca in his ancestral house which holds lordship over a whole valley and has had the honour of lodging two prelates, the Bishops of León and Santander; but Don Celso is old and in failing health, and he so urgently begs his nephew Marcelo to come to him that, against his will, the latter leaves Madrid and his comfortable rooms in the Calle del Arenal. After a long ride on and on over high mountain passes and narrow, precipitous paths and haunts of bears, he reaches Tablanca after nightfall. A whistle from his attendant, Chisco, the barking of dogs, an uncertain light moving to and fro, black shapes round the light, a sound of voices, and Marcelo is received into his uncle’s arms. Next day, from the wide balconies, he discovers the mountains on one side nearly touching the house, on the other a chequer-work of green meadows and yellow stubble-fields of maize against a background of mountains green and brown and grey, and the village among rocks and brushwood and intricate paths. There is a saying in the village that the largest piece of flat ground is the floor of Don Celso’s dining-room. Of the characters of the book Don Sabas belongs to that noble army of humble parish priests described by Pereda—the village priest in “De tal palo tal astilla”; Don Frutos, discreet and talkative, in “Don Gonzalo”; the joyous priest of Robleces, regocijado de humor, in “La Puchera,” whose only vice is to go out to sea twice a week with the fishing-boats; and the incomparable pae Polinar in “Sotileza.” Don Sabas has a passion for the mountain, and, once upon the heights, the exact word and the right phrase come to him in which to express his enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of their plants and animals. To have given him a bishopric in a flat country would have meant death to him. He is fearless and untiring whether he is tracking a bear, or out in a snow-blizzard on the heights to rescue some peasant or herdsman who has not returned to the village, or visiting the sick on a black night of storm. Don Celso is also a noble figure, practical and imposing, and in his immense kitchen of an evening he holds a patriarchal gathering of peasants. We have, too, the splendid Tolstoian figure of the hidalgo of ancient race, Gómez de Pomar, the author of many books, unloading a cart of hay in his simple peasant’s dress. He is a model of noble courtesy—hidalga cortesía, his style is “spirited and vigorous, pure Castilian untainted, as the blood that flows in his veins.” Consciously or unconsciously, it is a self-portrait of Pereda. The book abounds in impressive scenes and characters; it was a subject dear to Pereda’s heart, and he produced a work which ranks among the great novels of the world. There is a certain solidity in Pereda’s writing well suited to describe the stern deep-shadowed mountain-country, while his unlatin love of the wild and desolate rejoices in the hurricanes that tear up trees and whirl the snow-drifts on the mountain-side. “Peñas arriba” represents the whole life and being of the author and gives us a full measure of the true sabor de la tierruca, the savour of the soil. In “Esbozos y Rasguños” Pereda ridicules those mad Cervantists who prove that Cervantes was omniscient, an excellent theologian, a cook, a sailor, a geographer, a freethinker, and who will soon prove that neither is Cervantes Cervantes, nor Don Quixote Don Quixote. But of the true spirit of Cervantes he had imbibed a large part, even though he never attained to his great-hearted tolerance and the wider outlook of those more spacious times. His prose114 is robust and austerely free from foreign idioms, laden with dialect and phrases native to the soil. It has caught the vigorous freshness of the mountain air, and the scent of earth and woods and moors, the rush of the sea and the elemental simplicity of men ennobled by constant contact with earth and ocean. Pereda wrote out of the fulness of his heart, without seeking popularity. His rough grandeur, rugged as the country of “Peñas arriba,” his frequent use of dialect, his untranslatableness, make for few readers. But those who, like Don Sabas, care to leave the level country and climb the mountain height, will find in Pereda a classic, high and steadfast as the hills. Blindly though the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy, it is perhaps not “prodigiously temerarious” to suspect that Pereda may still be read when Zola is forgotten.