THE SOMBRE PEOPLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19846, 21 May 1927, Page 13 (Supplement)

THE SOMBRE PEOPLE

JOYLESS JOY NTW YEAR’S EVE IN MADRID. (By Louis Golding.) I will not say that the snow upon Spanish mountains is less white in winter than in other lands, but it is less gay. It introduces only a sombre ardency into the landscape, not the fantastic gaiety of snow in Italy, in any other land. I begin to understand why these are the sombre people, these Spaniards, why the sombre architecture of the Romanesque builders seems more appropriate in Spain than elsewhere. I perceive also why, when the Spanish builders in the last days of the Renaissance attempted at length to endow stone with the hilarity and variety which builders in all other lands had forced upon it, they could produce nothing but a frozen and contorted mask which only emphasised the quiet severity that lay beneath it. They are sombre even in their games. There is no more grim parade of virtuosity than bull-fighting. They have made even of pelota, that quick bail-game of the Basques, an instrument of harsh gambling rather than an infinitely arduous and exciting exercise of all the muscles. It is when they are at their most joyous, so to speak, that you perceive how sombre they are. So it seemed to me in the turbulent hours that preceded the last moment of last year, which all the bells proclaimed appallingly above the wide boulevards and the reeking alleys of Madrid. It was my fortune to spend these hours in that strange, deliberate city, in that great meeting-place of streets and cradle of revolutions called the Puerta del Sol. Hours before, you heard the great concourse preparing, as it might be a surge of waters chafing across a dam. From every region they came irresistibly, darkly, from those joyless bars of the arid suburb called Cuatro Caminos, from the lanes that straddle on both sides of the Calle di Toledo to the very portals of the Royal Palace. Other New Year Eves. Now at length. I said to myself, 1 shall see Madrid joyous. For what multitude of people gathered together in any city upon earth to celebrate the first moments of a new year has ever resisted the illusion that this year is to be an altogether superior thing to the old, with purses lined more amply, wine less sour, meat less infrequent? My mind recalled vividly in this harsh star-.splintered night of Spain the New Year gatherings of my boyhood, in the friendly murk and muzzle of Albert Square in Manchester. With what unquenchable joy of living the millboys and mill-girls clattered upon their clogs, exchanged caps and shawls, parsed bottles of no ecstatic liquor ecstatically from mouth to mouth! 1 recalled a later New Year's Eve in a Tyrelese city —the little frightened sucking pig that mine host passel from guest to guest to confer gross plenty upon them all for all the new yen. Here the lads shipped their bronzvl, bare knees, how they seized their maidens and twirled them to the roof, what gallons of schnapps were consumed, and what infinite piping-hot At-, lantie cables of sausage were devoured’ And swiftly my mind made one bound farther southward, here in this southern land. I remembered the brightly garbed bands of masqueraders who went seranading the joyous time from house to house, away in Capri, among the hyacinth seas. What discord of instruments, what coughing of callow voices, what quiring of shrill voices—but how all these sounds cohered into rapture in the odorous air! Din and Discord. Discord of instruments! And the sudden banging of a dust-pan lid upon the bottom of a dust-bin, two inches from my ear, annihilated those other memories Manchester, Innsbruck, Capri, —and the sombre people were about me again, filling the air with their raucous irony. There were, indeed, certain other for the making of noise to be obtained for a few centimes at the stalls that lined the gutters, raw trumpets and rattles and an object compounded out of skin and broomsticks. From this last issued a shuddering howl of anguish, such as a creature imprisoned in a tomb might emit. This was almost sombre enough for the taste of the madrileno, but it was the gar-bage-heaps of the suburbs which had yielded him his richest harvest. It was a scavenger’s bacchanalia. Tin-cans, rusty buckets, petrol tins—upon an orchestra of such instruments he produced his symphony of solemn invective. I produce a false impression if it is believed tlhs concourse of sounds was not loud. It was deafening. But it was joyless. There was no-de-light in it, nor in the eyes of these melancholy revellers. Some were drunk. A thousand bottles of the potent liquor i of aniseed passed from hand to grimy hand, but its effect was only to impress a certain stony rhythnj upon the impact of broomstick and dustbin. The New Year Grapes. A few minutes before the stroke of twelve the music had attained the desperate finity of a tom-tom tattoo of cannibals in a swamp of Papua. I wondered what climax the high bell in the civic belfry had in store, what ultimate thunder it would evoke to eclipse its own fateful voice. The first stroke struck. A silence fell upon Madrid. I looked round startled among the swarthy multitude. Now the second stroke struck. Each man, woman, child, devoured his second grape. For this (as I was to understand later) was the crisis of the ceremony—the eating of las doce uvas—the twelve grapes. Sombrely, cynically, to each stroke of the bell each creature there devoured the first, second, the twelfth of his grapes. High on the tower the four figures of the new year flashed upon the blackness. So cynic an uproar greeted them that you might have thought the wires of the electric bulbs must fuse.

They did not. All night long the sombre noise persisted. Dawn trod without rapture at length upon the surrounding melancholy plateau.