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BASQUE TOWNS

BY WALDO FRANK

In the north of Spain, 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 and moist. Mountains are clad in forests of oak and pine. Fields of high grass bring to the vales a honied redolence. The peaks are massed on green plateaux above the sea, like low stretches of the Alps brought to the Spanish coast. The land is spotted with stone towns. The houses are gabled, the narrow streets are cobbled: there is a note of sober canniness and of seclusion. These are the towns of the Basque.

When the Romans made a province of Iberia, the Basque lived unconcerned. When the Moslem swept north in the eighth century, the Basque withdrew into the mountains and withstood him. When the Visigoth came down through the passes of the Pyrenees, the Basque stood aside and let him go. When Roland with the troop of Charlemagne followed the Visigoth, the Basque beat him at Roncesvalles. When, finally, the kings of Castile, having cleared the Moor and the Jew from Spain, turned back to subdue the Basque, he submitted only as a vassal bowing the head to a more powerful alien. By decree, Ferdinand VI ennobled all the Basques of the Province of Vizcaya: already, in 1200, the entire population of the Province of Guipúzcoa had been declared hidalgoes.

An indelible people! The Basques seem even to be a race in an exploded, archaic fashion: a race by blood. Spaniards, Chinese, Frenchmen, Jews, are races by culture. But the Basques appear to have had no culture. Their language was unwritten. They possessed no history, no social records. They had no underlying base of ethics, or of religion. If they possessed a culture, it was almost biologic. It persisted in blood, in instinct, rather than in conscious 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 was a turmoil of invasions.

And yet, in their survival they have not become tragic or heroic. Nothing 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 Catholicism. This 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 fanatical devotions. The Basque nature is concrete, light, practical, canny. The Spanish genius is that of confrontation with all that it encounters: this is the genius of tragedy. But the Basque evades; and this is the comedic genius. The Basque supplies the relief of comedy in the tragedy of Spain.

Who they were originally, is not clear: doubtless early dwellers in the Peninsula-part of the peoples whom the Phoenicians found when they first skirted Spain before the days of Tarshish. 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 also suggests kinship with the Berbers-the Riffians of Morocco who still make war on Spain. Their language is inscrutably alone: it bears no relation with any of the family tongues of Babel. But whoever they were originally, this they have kept on being. Their blood in the small towns remains unmixed; and their heads unmixed also. While through the ages Spain has drunk in the torrent of ideas-Roman, Moslem, Christian, Jewish-and bent to the tragic task of fusing Africa, Asia, Europe and America into a single Spain, the Basque has been simply himself.

This is why he brings so light a touch. He is light of content. His virtues are simplicity, conservatism and great power of nonabsorption. The Basque language paints this well. It contains no word for "God," no word for "spirit." This was a people rooted to the earth, which kept to its pastures and farmyards. Not alone had the Basque mind not reached metaphysics and religion when the tongue was formed: even common concepts were beyond it. There is a Basque word for dog, pig, lizard, cow. But there is none for animal. There is a Basque word for oak.

pine, chestnut. But 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 Spanish metaphysics. Concepts of God, time, substance, are drains upon the business of life. And for the interims, 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 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 runs west and east upon the sea wall, girding the Basque villages of the north of Spain. On the one side of the road, the Bay of Biscay-blue as a bluebell: upon the other, the precipice which you can clamber by stone hewn steps that lead to an Alpine verdance of pasture and dingle. The streets of the town are massive. The houses look as if builded for a siege. But they are not forbidding: they are too sure of themselves. They are smiling, even; though they are dense and strong. On the rounded stones of the narrow streets moves a mellow race in immemorial 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 swift 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 hill, 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 in the morning like the cool sun-filaments in dawn. It has the dogged, filagree cadence of a Scottish bagpipe. It is more resolved, however, shriller, less fluid: and its notational dimensions 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. Get you a girl-a novia. And afternoons, when her work is done in shop or field, she and her friends will sing for you till the late hour of cena. We are in the room of Rosa. (Such freedom is unheard of in true Spain.) You might hesitate to call your novia pretty. Her features are a little long. The nose has the Basque droop, the mouth is large, the eyes are resilient and black under the strangely curving brow that gives to the Basque face an Oriental tilt. The hair is a dull surge of chestnut. But you will not hesitate to call her charming. A white kerchief lies on her shoulders, pointed to the low bare throat. The naked arms are bright against the marron velvet bodice; and the breast is caught and divided by a diagonal sash something like the straps of a grenadier. Her hips come out sudden and wide; her legs, stockinged in grey wool, have a full firmness-like her breast-that bespeaks valiance in emotion.

The room is cool and bare, with its high windows through which comes the mellow murmur of the folk walking the rigid street toward the sea or 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 in a subtle graph of emotion.

These songs are older than the tambour and the pipe: the girls sing them without accompaniment. Many have sad themes: there are songs of mariners' widows, of wanting mothers. But even as tragedy invades the brightest fado of Portugal, so here a tripping, flexible gait carries along the deepest pathos of the Basque. 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 housetops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail boat. It is a music of light, of surface patterns of light. Cover the earth, you will not

find a music more alien to that of Spain-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 incisiveness never becomes sentimental. It is not deep music. It remains of the periphery, and its various moods are varieties of reflection, rather than of creation. This indeed is the secret of the Basque. He 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 procession of faith and passion. All of this, the Spaniard has absorbed: all of this the Basque has shut away. So his song trills, skips, plays. It is a flashing of colors and of light. It is a music of intimations, rather than of experience.

This is true, more clearly even, in the dance. One suspects that this pagan people must have been enticed at first to become Catholic because of the many 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 Saint Ignatius de Loyola is one of the great days of the land, for Ignatius Lopez de Recalde, founder of the Society of Jesus and savior of the Church, was a Basque of Guipúzcoa. The day of the author of the ruthless Exercises, of the chronicler of Hell, becomes a 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, in the sense of Europe. 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 and honor. But the pagan Basque is a sportsman. He turns his feast days into sport days. He is incapable of the true carnival spirit. For the genius of carnival (you can see it at its highest in Sevilla) is one of fusion. Worship and lust, churchman and rascal, lady and light-o'-love, life and death, hide behind a single mask, and marry. Carnival is possible only for a people rigorously repressed, who have not the release of sport. So, on this feast day of the great Basque saint, the Church remains aloof. The procession, creaking with brocades and golden images, moves through the sober streets. The gaiety of the folk is irrelevant and free.

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