“The Old-Fashioned Castilian”
“The Old-Fashioned Castilian”
by Mariano Josée de Larra
THE LITERARY WORK
An anecdotal essay set in Madrid, published in December 1832 in the review El Pobrecito Hablador (The Poor Little Blabbermouth) as “El Castellano Viejo”; in English in 2001.
SYNOPSIS
In this social satire, a poet attends a birthday dinner given by a conservative, ardently patriotic member of the Spanish bourgeoisie, who attempts to appear more refined than he truly is.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
Born in Madrid on March 24, 1809, Mariano José de Larra would later gain renown under the pseudonym “Fígaro.” One of the most critically acclaimed Spanish writers of the nineteenth century, he was only about 19 years old when he published his first newspaper series, El Duende Satírico del Dia (The Satiric Goblin of the Day). His newspapers contained the best examples of the artículo de costumbres, or essay on social customs to date. Larra soon became known as an outspoken social and political critic, penning caustic literary essays that decried the nation’s lack of a progressive social and political vision, the affluent classes’ foppish imitation of everything French, and the modest classes’ blind adherence to outdated Spanish traditions. “The Old-Fashioned Castilian” constituted the eighth issue in Larra’s second self-published paper, El Pobrecito Hablador (The Poor Little Blabbermouth). It is one of the most representative of Larra’s customs essays, painting a colorful portrait of a middle-class household steeped in traditional Spanish values. The essay indirectly critiques those who believed that the solution to all of Spain’s ills could be found only in its own traditions and customs. Satirical and entertaining, it exposes distinct types of Spaniards in early-nineteenth-century society.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
The reign of Fernando VII
By the time Larra wrote “The Old-Fashioned Castilian,” the reign of Fernando VII (1814-33) was coming to an end. The king suffered from failing health, his country from an era of crisis. Fernando had been in power since 1814, when he returned triumphantly from France to reclaim the Spanish throne for the Bourbon dynasty. French forces had been routed at Vitoria the year before in the final large-scale skirmish of Spain’s War of Independence from France, which began on May 2, 1808, when common Spaniards rioted in the streets of Madrid to protest the presence of French troops. Altogether, on both sides of the conflict, there were hundreds of thousands of lives lost. Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who had ruled Spain since 1808 as King Joseph I, barely escaped execution as he fled back into France.
Fernando immediately made null and void the democratic Constitution of 1812, assuming absolute power. The liberal surge that the French invasion had helped to foster was now hindered, but not halted. In 1820 a military uprising in Cádiz under the direction of Colonel Rafael de Riego handed Spain its first pronunciamiento, or change of government imposed by the military, forcing Fernando VII to allow the Spanish liberals to form a parliament and to reestablish the Constitution of 1812. Once the liberals were back in charge, they abolished the Inquisition, a tribunal to suppress deviation from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, and they made the Jesuits leave the country because of their ultra-conservative, iron-fisted grip on the country’s educational system. During this period most of the Spanish American colonies declared independence. The attempt to instill democracy in Spain itself ended abruptly in April 1823, when Louis XVIII of France, with the support of the Holy Alliance, sent an army into Spain to restore Fernando’s absolute authority. This time the common people of Spain did not rise up against France. They backed the French force’s efforts to restore the Spanish crown because it represented Spanish tradition. The average Spaniard was very traditional, believing deeply in the king, the nation, and the Church. The general population did not support the liberals because they represented rapid change, a frightening prospect because it entailed the unknown.
Once restored to power, Fernando ruled Spain with an iron fist. He moved quickly against the liberals, executing, imprisoning, or exiling many of the leaders. He abolished freedom of the press and allowed the Jesuits to return. He did not, however, reestablish the Inquisition, well aware that the French would oppose such a move. Fernando’s iron-fisted rule lasted until his death in 1833, ending a ten-year phase that has become known as the “ominous decade” (1823-33) because of the severe, official repression orchestrated by Fernando VII.
The moderados and the progresistas
Riego’s 1820 coup d’état actually divided Spanish liberals into two camps: the moderados, or moderates, and the exaltados (later to be called the progresistas), or radicals. The moderados advocated slow, systemic change. They were principally men of means who saw a radical revolution as rocking the boat and perhaps spoiling what privileges they had. The exaltados, on the other hand, wanted to fight a revolution for the people. They tended to be urban liberals with less means and property than the moderados, and their calls for civil disorder made many Spaniards very nervous. The group for whom they were supposedly fighting, the Spanish masses, did not understand the radicals’ objective, which was to overturn the existing sociopolitical system through revolution and retain the Constitution of 1812, with its unicameral democracy. Their extremist measures scared the majority of Spaniards. The common people clung to old-fashioned ways of thinking and doing things and vehemently opposed liberal actions. Their Catholic, conservative views supported an absolute monarchy despite the fact that the majority of them lived in miserable conditions. They certainly did not support the Constitution of 1812, which called for limited authority on the part of the crown and a democratic form of government with elected officials. Nor did they support the liberal coup d’etat of 1820-23. When Fernando VII returned from France in 1814 and when he regained power in 1823, the average Spaniard was delighted. The Church played no small part in all of this. It aligned itself with the absolute monarchy and constantly decried the liberal position. Priests preached to their congregations that supporting the Constitution of 1812 might give them voting rights, but it would cost them their salvation (Herr, p. 203).
The First Carlist War
Before dying, Fernando VII had produced with his fourth wife, María Cristina, only one potential heir to the throne: his daughter Isabel, born in 1830. However, Fernando’s brother Carlos, who was the other potential heir to the crown, challenged the legitimacy of Isabel’s inheritance by invoking the Salic Law, which stated that a woman could not rule as monarch of Spain. What Carlos and his ultraconservative supporters, known as Carlists, did not know was that a special session of the parliament in 1789 had repealed the Salic Law (Williams, p. 153). Isabel, then, stood as rightful inheritor of the throne. Fernando VII published the revocation of the Salic Law, or Pragmatic Sanction, which had not yet been done, but Don Carlos refused to accept it or the validity of Isabel’s claim as the next ruler of Spain. His fanatical backers refused as well, igniting a very dangerous spark in the Spanish political landscape. Carlists were the most reactionary segment of Spanish society, and for them, even Fernando VII was too lenient with liberals. They consisted predominantly of rural peasants, the clergy, and ultraconservative monarchists. Carlists believed in the divine right of royalty to have absolute power in the country’s governance. They called for the exile of all progresistas, the abolition of public education and the army because the liberals maintained a strong presence in both, and the reinstatement of the Inquisition, considered essential to the salvation of the Catholic faith. The Carlists furthermore stood ready to place Don Carlos on the throne as soon as Fernando died.
Fernando VII’s death in September 1833 plunged Spain into the First Carlist War, a civil war pitting liberals against reactionaries. It was a long, bloody, and costly conflict that raged on until 1839. More than a dynastic competition, it was, in essence, a fight for Spain’s future, between mostly urban liberals, who sought to shove the nation into the modern era, and primarily rural traditionalists, who ardently tried to hold onto the past. Every segment of the country became embroiled in the conflict: rich and poor, city dweller and peasant man and woman.
Until Isabel II came of age in 1843, María Cristina served as queen-regent in charge of the government. She was bound by a constitution and a parliament and backed by both the moderate and extremist liberals. The liberals wanted to impose on the nation a centralized government that divided the old regions into uniform provinces on the French model. In 1834 a conservative constitution was introduced that granted limited suffrage and bourgeois property rights, and it was supported by both the moderados and the progresistas. However, even a new constitution could not stabilize the government. Ministers came and went, aided by pronunciamientos by the military, in a tug-of-war between the moderates and progressives that would continue for years to come.
Fernando VII’s death in 1833 opened the door for the return of the exiled liberals, most of whom had fled to England and France when he regained
THE BOURBON DYNASTY IN SPAIN
In 1814 Fernando VII inherited the crown of a relatively new royal line in Spain, the Bourbons. Fernando was only the fifth Bourbon king to rule the nation. The line started with his great-great-grandfather, Felipe V, also known as Philippe, Duke of Anjou, who was actually one-quarter Spanish Habsburg, Felipe V became king in 1700 at the age of 16 when the last Spanish Habsburg ruler, Carlos II, named him heir to the Spanish throne on his deathbed. Felipe’s grandfather was Louis XIV of France, and because of him France was able to enjoy extraordinary influence i n the affairs of the Spanish state. During the eighteenth century, the Bourbons set about making Spain more “European,” modernizing and liberalizing the country. The monarchy encountered problems at the end of 1807, when French forces under Napoleon aided the Spanish army in subjugating Portugal. After Portugal was defeated, Napoleon’s forces in Spain stayed on and new ones poured into the country. Carlos IV, king of Spain at the time, was ineffectual and let his wife, Queen María Luisa, and his favorite minister, Manuel Godoy (who was Marfa Luisa’s lover), run the government. Carlos’s son Fernando VII was bitterly opposed to Godoy and his parents. His supporters incited a riot in March 1808 at the royal retreat in Aranjuez (near Madrid), scaring Carlos IV enough to abdicate in favor of Fernando, although he soon tried to make the abdication null and void because it was done under duress. None of this mattered, for Carlos, María Luisa, Godoy, and Fernando were quickly packed off to France by Napoleon. Fernando finally returned and took the throne as king of Spain in 1814, only to become one of the most reactionary and disliked Bourbon kings ever to rule.
control of the government in 1814. From these two advanced countries, they brought back cutting-edge social, political, and literary ideas that would influence generations to come. There was, however, a strong reaction by conservatives to these revolutionary ideas imported from abroad. They ardently believed that the ideas would corrupt the country and spoil its beloved traditions. The return of the exiles fueled the progressive, or extreme liberal, cause; they supported María Cristina and her daughter Isabel against the rising conservative backlash.
During this time of liberal control of the government, anti-clericalism grew to a hysterical level in Spain. By 1835, the Progressive minister Juan Alvarez de Mendizábal, appointed by Maria Cristina to head the government, had enacted a decree closing all religious orders. Later, Mendizabal launched a land-reform initiative that would redistribute land in a process called amortization. He had church property confiscated and offered for sale, despite outcries from the clerical community in Spain and from the Pope. Roughly a quarter of all church properties were auctioned off in the first two years of the program. The amortization plan failed miserably, however, because the intended beneficiaries of the land reform, the poor peasants, could not afford to pay for the properties. Instead, wealthy landlords, speculators, and other bourgeois types snatched up the land and further exacerbated the problem of land distribution. The intended agrarian reform was a flop.
To make matters worse, urban mobs rose up against the clergy, killing priests in the street, sacking and burning churches and monasteries, and defiling anyone who openly opposed their actions. Although Mendizabal and other Progressives were not enemies of Catholicism, Catholics forever linked the unruly mobs’ actions to their political maneuvers. Consequently, a mighty wall went up between the Church and the liberal establishment.
The power struggle between the Progressives and the Moderates caused an intense instability in the governance of the nation. The two different factions of the liberal party did not come to power as a result of democratically held elections that abided by the tenets of a liberal constitutional government. On the contrary, Moderates and Progressives grabbed power through pronunciamientos or through appointment by Maria Cristina. The royal court usually appointed Moderate ministerial governments, causing even more friction between the two factions. In short, the military and the royal court abused their authority in a shameless power grab that would continue for several years after the publication of the essay.
The growth of the bourgeoisie
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the middle class barely existed in Spain. An ascendant but tiny class of merchants, landowners, and professionals constituted the base of the bourgeoisie at that time. However, the majority of Spanish society was divided between the aristocrats, or lucky few who had money, power, and property, and the teeming masses, most of whom were poor, landless, and illiterate. The growth of the middle class in Europe has historically been closely tied to increased trade and industry. Because Spain’s economy was predominantly agrarian well into the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie developed much more slowly here than in other European countries. Still the class had a great deal of impact on society. The small number of middle-class Spaniards belies their import in the progress of Spanish politics. The impetus behind the liberal political victories in 1812, 1820, and in the 1830s came mostly from the bourgeoisie. The conflict concerning absolute versus constitutional monarchy resulted in part from the middle class’s rise to power.
The nobility, on the other hand, saw the handwriting on the wall. In terms of power and money, nobles were losing ground. The more industrialized and mercantilist Spain became, the less power the aristocracy had. In the newly emerging economy, the nobility’s landed estates and titles meant less than they had in prior centuries. Money began to function as a key means to economic, social, and political success. Most of the Ancien Regime did not know how to compete in this new world order and so were eclipsed by those in the middle class (bankers, traders, manufacturers, and business owners) who did. The liberal, predominantly bourgeois regimes that controlled Spain for most of the nineteenth century forced the nobility to the political sidelines. Afterwards, as in the rest of Europe, the aristocrats would never regain power completely.
Just as the bourgeoisie constituted the main threat to the nobility, the pueblo, the masses, stood as an adversary of the middle class (as well as the nobility). Forming the overwhelming majority of the population, they were predominantly poor and illiterate, rural dwellers. During the Bourbon monarchy, the masses first became a serious threat to the more affluent classes and to royal authority in 1766, when Madrid crowds rioted for three days in reaction to food shortages and a ban on traditional capes and hats, which had been imposed by the secretary of finance, the Italian marquis of Esquilache, on the grounds that they concealed the identity of thugs. Riots over food shortages, as well as the cost of bread, spread to 70 other locales. After fleeing from Madrid to Aranjuez, the royal retreat, Carlos III was finally able to restore order, but not without granting concessions. The marquis of Esquilache fled to Italy. A second major threat posed by the masses occurred in 1808, when they took to the streets of Madrid and other cities in open revolt against the French invaders. The War of Independence was for them what the French Revolution was for common Frenchmen.
The Essay in Focus
Contents summary
Very few of Larra’s essays have been translated into English, despite his landmark status in Spanish letters. Due to the lack of accessible translations, “The Old Castilian” has been newly rendered into English for WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times and placed immediately after this summary for easy reference.
One day the narrator, Fígaro, is out for a walk, collecting material for the articles that he writes for the newspaper. He loses himself in thought, mechanically moving his lips as he wanders, muttering soliloquies, head downcast, through the streets of Madrid. Now and again he looks up just in time to avert running head first into someone. Madrileños (residents of Madrid), realizes Fígaro, are not very understanding of poets and philosophers or their scatterbrained soliloquies. They dart mocking smiles his way and stare at him as they pass by.
Just as he thinks this, someone surprises him from behind by landing a huge hand on his shoulder. Before Fígaro can turn around, the person places his hands over the narrator’s eyes in an attempt to play a joke. The man finally reveals himself to be a friend, Braulio, and invites Figaro to his birthday dinner, which will occur the following day. Figaro tries very politely to refuse the invitation, but Braulio insists, insinuating that if Figaro doesn’t attend the dinner, it will be because he thinks he’s too good to attend such a lowly function. Figaro reluctantly accepts.
He then describes Braulio in somewhat unflattering terms as a member of the middle class, holding a second-rate position and making a modest income. Braulio’s patriotism borders on the fanatical; his social manners are overly polite and at times ridiculous.
The next day, as the fateful hour draws near, Figaro dresses slowly, like a condemned criminal, and then he arrives at Braulio’s house fashionably late. When he enters the drawing room, he notices several people with whom he is not familiar. He surmises, based on their sloppy fashion and insipid courtesies and conversations, that they must be fellow employees within the mediocre concern that employs Braulio.
Once the colleagues leave with their wives, children, dogs, and tasteless umbrellas and outfits, the guests are invited not to stand on ceremony but to have a seat. Figaro notes that on days when Braulio and his wife don’t have guests, they are quite content to eat dinner at a low, modest table that resembles a shoemaker’s worktable. He observes that Braulio and his wife are putting on a big production to impress their company.
The dinner is a disaster. Figaro is placed between a child who now and again flicks olive pits at others and a corpulent man who needs two chairs instead of the one he has. One guest insists on carving up the chicken and manages to launch it across the table and knock a container full of broth over onto Figaro’s shirt. A servant, after collecting the escaped fowl, spills grease from the sauce all over poor Figaro’s trousers as she attempts to carry the chicken off. She then bumps into another servant and dishes go crashing to the floor. Meanwhile, Braulio is constantly upbraiding his wife about the inferior quality of food and beverages. To top it all off, Braulio and the other guests insist that Figaro recite some poetry. The poet is the only person of at least some social renown at the dinner and it is a triumph for Braulio’s ego when Figaro does finally recite some verses. For the other guests, who most likely do not frequent such social gatherings with members of the artistic community, it is as much entertainment as anything else. Figaro surmises that the only way to avoid such disasters is to eat and serve oneself decently every day, not, as in Braulio’s case, only when guests are around.
Managing at last to escape the fiasco, Figaro is deliriously happy to breathe the fresh air out on the street once more. He asks God to spare him future dinner invitations hosted by old-fashioned Castilians. As he changes out of his stained clothes back home, he reflects that all men are not the same. Even those of the same country don’t share the same refinement and customs. Figaro ventures out once again, this time to happily rub shoulders with the more refined set of Madrid society. Those who are well bred, he ponders, are few and far between. They are lucky enough to have a good rearing that teaches them to pretend to like and respect one another even when they truly don’t so as not to make each other uncomfortable. Other people (like Braulio’s set) make each other uncomfortable in a grandiose manner, offending and mistreating each other, all the while perhaps truly caring about and respecting one another.
The essay in translation
Below find a translation of the essay under consideration, followed by discussion of its relevance to Larra’s society and of the sources, literary context, and reception pertinent to this work.
The Old-Fashioned Castilian
At my age, very rarely do I like to alter the order of my way of doing things that I established quite some time ago. My reluctance to change is due to the fact that every time I have left the sanctity of my home and broken my routine, my false hopes have been dashed and I have later most sincerely regretted it. However, I am compelled to upset my normal schedule because of the old tradition of social conduct our parents adopted that deems rejection of certain dinner invitations impolite or, at the very least, an absurd affectation of refinement.
A few days ago I was wandering about the streets of Madrid looking for material to use in my articles. Absorbed in my thoughts, I surprised myself several times by laughing like a poor madman at my own ideas and moving my lips mechanically. A few stumbles now and again caused me to look up and reminded me that it’s best not to be a poet or philosopher while walking the cobblestone streets of Madrid: more than a few maligned smiles, more than a few expressions of admiration from those who passed by made me realize that soliloquies should not be carried out in public. Many times I bumped into people as I turned a corner who were as distracted and walking as rapidly as I. These collisions underscored the fact that the distracted do not indeed have elastic bodies; nor are they glorious and impassive beings. In such spirits, imagine what I felt upon receiving a horrible slap from a huge hand connected (so I was soon to find out) to an enormous arm on one of my shoulders which, by the way, are nothing like Atlas’s.
I didn’t want whoever it was to think that I was unfamiliar with this energetic method of presenting oneself, nor did I want to reject the show of affection from the person who had undoubtedly believed that he would make me happy by practically crushing me, leaving me crumpled up for the rest of the day. I only tried to turn around to find out who could have been such a friend as to treat me so badly, but my old-fashioned Castilian is a man who doesn’t know when to stop when he is in a joking mood. After all that, would you believe that he continued to demonstrate his confidence and affection for me? He put his hands over my eyes and grabbed me from behind:
“Who am I?” he yelled, exhilarated with the success of his oh-so-delicate and tasteless joke. “Who am I?”
“An animal,” I was going to respond, but then I suddenly remembered who it might be, and instead said to him, “It’s Braulio.”
Upon hearing me, he removed his hands from my eyes, laughed, and held his sides. He caused everyone in the street to stare with curiosity, making a spectacle of both of us.
“Well, my friend! How did you know it was me?”
“Who could it be but you?”
“Are you just getting back from Vizcaya?”
“No, Braulio, I never went.”
“Never went? Ah, come on—always the same joker. What do you expect? How happy I am that you’re here! Did you know that tomorrow is my birthday?”
“Congratulations.”
“There’s no need for formalities between us; you already know that I am a frank and old-fashioned Castilian. I call a spade a spade. Therefore, I request that you do not congratulate me if you do not want to, but you are invited.”
“To what?”
“To dine with me.”
“It’s not possible.”
“I insist.”
“I can’t,” I persisted, trembling.
“You can’t?”
“Thank you, no.”
“Thank you? Get out of here, friend. Just because I’m not the Duke of F. nor the Count of P.”
Who can resist a surprise strategy like this? Who wants to appear to be arrogant?
“It’s not that, it’s just …”
“Well, if it’s not that,” he interrupted me, “I’ll expect you at two o’clock. At my house we eat a la española: early. I have many people coming; we’ll have the famous X., who will improvise marvelously for us. T. will sing a rondeña [A popular song from Ronda] to us after dinner with his natural grace, and in the evening J. will sing and play a little something.”
His words consoled me a bit, and I had to capitulate. Anyone, I said to myself, can get through one bad day. To keep friends in this world, it’s necessary to withstand their attentions now and again.
“Don’t miss out, or I’ll have a bone to pick with you.”
“I’ll make it,” I replied with a very submissive voice and fallen spirits, like a fox who turns round and round in the trap in which he has let himself get caught.
“Okay then, see you tomorrow,” and by way of farewell he gave me a hard pinch.
I watched him go like the farmer who watches the cloud move away from his planted field, and I remained there pondering how I could continue to let this hostile and unfortunate friendship exist.
My reader will probably have figured out, being as perspicacious as I believe him or her to be, that my friend Braulio is very far from belonging to what is called high and refined society, but he is not, at the same time, a man of inferior class. He is one of those employees of second-class rank who counts among his earnings and estate forty thousand reales of income. He wears a little ribbon tied to his buttonhole and a little cross at the corner of his lapel [indicating that he belongs to a minor social/religious order]. He is a person, in short, whose class, family, and creature comforts in no way kept him from receiving a more refined upbringing and more polished and smooth manners. However, vanity has caught up with him like it has almost always with all or a great part of our middle class and all of our lower class. His patriotism is such that he will trade all the beauty of foreign countries for one eyesore of his own. This blindness makes him adopt all of the short-sighted views of such a thoughtless affection, so that he argues that there are no wines like Spanish wines, and he may be right. He defends the country by positing that there is no upbringing like a Spanish one, about which he very well might not be right. Instead of advocating the blissful purity of Madrid skies, he will say that our lower-class girls are the most charming in the whole wide world. He is a man who, in short, goes from one extreme to the other. His condition is more or less like that of a female relative of mine, who is crazy about humps only because she had a lover who had a fairly visible growth on each shoulder blade.
It would fall on deaf ears if I were to speak to him about polite social customs, mutual respect in public, urbane reservation, and the delicacy of address that establishes a beautiful harmony between men, whereby one says only that which aims to please and always keeps to oneself what might offend. On the contrary, he loves to tell the most humiliating truth to a vain individual, and when he resents someone, he says it to the person’s face. Since he has thrown aside all restraints, he cannot understand why everyone doesn’t know that formalities are simply a fulfillment of social obligation and lack sincerity. He calls urbanity hypocrisy, and decency he calls ridiculous affectation. To everything that is good, he applies a pejorative nickname. Refined language is, to him, little more than Greek: he believes that good breeding is reduced to saying “God keep you” upon entering a room and to add “excuse me” every time he moves; to ask everyone about his entire family and to bid farewell to every last person; all of which he would no more forget than he would a pact with the French. In sum, he is one of those men who do not know how to take leave unless they do it in concert with others; who humbly leave their hats, which they call ’their heads,’ under a table; who, when they find themselves in society without their walking sticks, God forbid, would give anything not to have hands and arms, because in reality they don’t know where to put them nor what to do with them in society.
Two o’clock arrived, and as I knew my Braulio as well as I did, it didn’t seem appropriate to dress too elegantly for dinner; I’m sure that he would have been offended if he knew the truth. I did, however, put on a colored tailcoat with a white handkerchief, an indispensable thing in just such a situation and in such a house. I dressed as slowly as possible, like the condemned criminal who wishes he had one hundred more sins to confess in order to gain more time. The invitation was for two o’clock, and I entered the parlor at two-thirty.
I wish not to speak of the countless ceremonious guests who came and went in that house before the dinner hour, among whom were not a few fellow office employees with their wives and children, capes, umbrellas, galoshes, and dogs. I won’t even mention the idiotic courtesies that they paid to the man of the hour, nor of the immense circle with which the motley collection of people adorned the parlor. They spoke about how the weather was going to change and that in winter it’s usually colder than in the summer. But more to the point: the clock struck four, and we guests found ourselves alone with one another. Unfortunately for me, Mister X., who was supposed to entertain us so well and who was obviously all-too-knowledgeable about these kinds of invitations, had managed to become sick that morning. The famous Mr. T. was conveniently unable to get out of a prior commitment. The famous Miss J., who was going to sing and play for us so marvelously, was hoarse, and it surprised even her that anyone could understand a single word that she said. She also had an inflammation on one finger. So many dashed hopes!
“It looks like everybody who’s going to eat is here!” exclaimed Don Braulio. “Let’s sit down at the table, my dear.”
“Just a moment,” his wife replied to him almost in a whisper.
“With so many guests I’ve still got some things to finish up in there, and …”
“Okay, but look, it’s almost four o’clock.”
“We’ll eat in just a bit.”
It was five o’clock before we sat down to eat.
“Gentlemen,” said our host when he saw us squirm uncomfortably in our respective seats, “I demand the utmost frankness from you; in my house there are no formalities. Ah, Figaro! I want you to be completely comfortable. You are a poet, and besides, these gentlemen, who know how tight we are, won’t be offended if I favor you; take off your tailcoat—you might stain it.”
“Why would I stain it?” I asked, biting my lips.
“It doesn’t matter; I will give you a jacket of mine. I regret that I don’t have one for everybody.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“Oh, yes, yes! My jacket, please! Take it, look at it. Hmmm, maybe it’s a little big for you.” “But, Braulio, …”
“I insist; no need to stand on ceremony.”
And with this he took off my tailcoat, like it or not, and I become buried in a requisite striped jacket, from which only my head and feet extend, and whose long sleeves probably wouldn’t allow me to eat. I thanked him. After all, the man thought he was doing me a favor!
When my friend doesn’t have guests at his house, he contents himself with a low table, little more than a shoemaker’s work table, because he and his wife don’t want for more, in his words. From that little table he makes the food rise to his mouth like water from a well, and after a long voyage it reaches his mouth, dripping all the while. To think that these people would have a regular table and be comfortable every day of the year is to think of the impossible. It is easy to imagine that the installation of such a large table for guests was indeed quite an event in that house. Thus, they believed the table could accommodate the fourteen of us when it could barely sit eight comfortably. We had to sit sideways, as if we were going to eat with our shoulders, and the guests’ elbows established intimate relations among themselves with the most fraternal consideration in the world. In order to show their regard for me, they placed me between a five-year-old child, propped up on pillows that had to be adjusted every little bit because they constantly slid to this side or that, thanks to the natural energy level of the young diner. On my other side was one of those men who occupy the space of three and whose corpulence overflowed on all sides the one little chair on which he sat, as if he were seated on the point of a needle.
The napkins, indeed very new as they were props in disuse most days of the year, were unfolded in silence by these good gentlemen and placed in the buttonholes of their coats like gangplanks from their lapels down to the sauces.
“You’ll have to excuse this meager meal, gentlemen!” exclaimed our host once seated. “I don’t have to remind you that we are not in Genieys [the most elegant restaurant in Madrid at the time],” he continued, with a declaration he obviously felt necessary to make. If what he says is a lie, I said to myself, his comment would be quite an affectation; if true, how awkward to have to prepare your guests for a lousy meal!
Unfortunately it didn’t take me long to figure out that there was more truth in Braulio’s words than even he knew. The pleasantries with which we bored ourselves while passing platters of food around the table were interminable and in poor taste:
“Please, serve yourself.”
“Could you pass me… ?”
“Of course.”
“I shouldn’t have that.”
“Pass this to the lady of the house.”
“It’s okay to put it there.”
“Excuse my reach.”
“Thank you.”
“Please, gentlemen, all these formalities aren’t necessary!” exclaimed Braulio.
And he dipped in first with his own spoon. After the soup came a stew stocked with all the delicious ingredients typical of this troublesome yet tasty dish: some meat; vegetables; garbanzo beans; ham; chicken; bacon; and Extremaduran sausage. Next came a dish of veal prepared with thin strips of bacon (may the Lord condemn it), and then another, and others, and others, half brought from the local inn, half made in the kitchen by the regular servant, a Vizcayan helper hired for just this purpose, and the housewife, who on such occasions attends to everything and who, therefore, usually attends to nothing.
“Please pardon this dish,” Braulio’s wife said about the cooked pigeons. “They’re a little burnt.”
“But, honey …”
“Goodness, I stepped away for a moment, and you know how these servants are.”
“Too bad this turkey wasn’t cooked half an hour more! It was put on a little late.”
“Don’t you think this stew has a smoky flavor?”
“What do you want? One can’t be on top of everything.”
“Oh, it’s excellent!” we exclaimed, leaving it on the plate. “Excellent!”
“This fish is spoiled.”
“Well, they told me at the market that the fish had just arrived; the servant is such a brute!”
“Where’s the wine from?”
“About that you are incorrect, because it’s …”
“It’s very bad.”
These short exchanges were accompanied by countless furtive looks on the part of the husband to constantly warn his wife of some shortcoming, making us understand that both of them were very informed about what is considered refined on such occasions. Of course, all of the inadequacies were a direct responsibility of the servants, who never do learn how to serve properly. But these shortcomings were repeated so often, and the looks served such little purpose, that the husband felt it necessary to resport to pinching and stepping on people’s feet. Up until now Braulio’s wife was able to withstand the badgering of her husband, but now her face became red and tears welled up in her eyes.
“Señora, don’t feel bad about all that,” said the person next to whom she was seated.
“Ah! I assure you that next time I will not do all this cooking here at home; you don’t know what it is to have to do all this. Once again, Braulio, we will go to the inn and you won’t have …”
“You, my lady, will do as …”
“Braulio! Braulio!”
An awesome storm was about to break out, although all of the guests completed in trying to placate the dispute, which was the result of an attempt to display an ultimate sense of sophistication. Braulio’s obsession with this played no small part in it; nor did his expression about the uselessness of formalities, repeated again to us, which is what he calls being well-served and knowing how to eat. Is there anything more ridiculous than these people who want to pass as refined when they haven’t the faintest clue about social customs, and in order to please you they force you to eat and drink and bar you from doing what you want? Why do some people only want to eat a bit more decently on their birthdays, instead of every day?
As if this weren’t enough, the child on my left took olives from a plate of ham slices with tomato and flicked them, and one landed in my eye, with which I couldn’t see well for the rest of the day. The corpulent gentleman on my right had taken the precaution of putting his olive pits and poultry bones on which he had gnawed next to my bread on the tablecloth. The guest across from me, who announced that he was quite the carver, had taken upon himself the autopsy of a castrated chicken, that is to say, a rooster—for we never found out which. Whether due to the advanced age of the victim or to the absolute lack of anatomical knowledge on the part of the victimizer, there seemed to be no joints on the bird.
“This chicken has no joints!” exclamed the unhappy carver, sweating and struggling, digging more than carving. “How strange!” On one of his attacks, the fork slipped over the animal as if it had scales, and the chicken, violently discharged, seemed to want to take flight like during his happier times, and landed tranquilly on the tablecloth like on a perch at the henhouse.
The incident shocked everyone and the alarm reached its peak when a container full of broth, with which the flying chicken came into direct contact, spilled all over my very clean shirt. The carver got up quickly at this point in order to hunt down the fugitive chicken, and rushing to get to it, he knocked over a bottle to his right, which left its perpendicular position and spilled an abundant stream of Valdepeñas wine over the chicken and the tablecloth. The wine ran, the uproar increased, and the salt rained down over the wine, poured by everyone in an effort to save the tablecloth. To save the table, the guests inserted napkins underneath the tablecloth until a pile was heaped up. A very flustered servant took the chicken away in its sauce dish. When she passed by me she slightly dipped the dish and down poured an awful rain of grease, leaving eternal pearl-colored spots on my pants like drew upon the fields. The anguish and bewilderment of the servant knew no bounds. She left confused without being able to find a way to excuse herself. Upon turning around, she knocked into a male servant carrying a dozen clean plates and a tray full of wine goblets. The whole tray fell to the floor with the most horrendous crash and confusion.
“By Saint Peter!” shouted Braulio, a deathly pallid color spreading out over his features, while his wife’s face became so red it looked like it was on fire. “But let’s continue, gentlemen; this has been nothing,” Braulio added, recovering his composure.
Oh, respectable houses where a modest stew and a final calamity constitute the daily happiness of a family; flee from the tumult of a birthday invitation! Only by eating and serving oneself well each day can one avoid similar catastrophes.
Could anything else go wrong? Good heavens! Yes, for unlucky me, yes. Dońa Juana, the one with the black and yellow teeth, extended a small gift to me from her plate with her own fork, and it was a must to accept and eat it. The child enjoyed himself by throwing pits plucked out of cherries at the guests. Don Leandro made me try the exquisite Andalusian white wine, which I at first refused because he offered it from his own goblet that had indelible traces of his greasy lips upon it. My fat neighbor was now smoking non-stop and I played the flue for his chimney. At last, (oh, talk about the ultimate in mishaps!) the disorder and conversation grew; people’s voices were hoarse now and they were asking for a poetry recital and there was no other poet there but Figaro (me).
“You have to. You must recite something!” all clamored at this point.
“Give him a verse to get him started; we hope he says a couplet for each person here.”
“I’ll get him started: To don Braulio on this special day.”
“Gentlemen, please!”
“We insist.”
“I’ve never improvised.”
“Don’t be so timid!”
“I’ll leave.”
“Lock the door.”
“You won’t go from here without reciting something.”
And I recited verses at last, and I spewed forth silly things, and they loved them, and the uproar grew, as did the smoke and the hell of it all.
I thanked the good Lord when I was able to escape the pandemonium. At last, I was able to breathe the fresh, clear air out on the street. No longer did I have to put up with dumb people, nor were there old-fashioned Castilians around.
“My Lord, I thank you!” I exclaimed, breathing like a deer who has just escaped a dozen hounds and who now barely hears their baying. “From now on I will not ask you for riches, nor for jobs, nor for honors. What I ask is that you free me from domestic banquets and birthday invitations; free me from these houses in which an invitation to dinner is a big deal, in which they only set the table decently when they have guests, in which they think they are pleasing you when they are mortifying you, in which people do nice little things for you like pass you food they’ve chewed on, in which they recite poetry, in which there are children, in which there are fat people, and in which the brutal frankness of old-fashioned Castilians reigns supreme. If I fall into the temptation of doing something like this again, I hope that I never eat any more roast beef; I hope steak disappears from the earth; that timbales de macarrones [flour dough filled with macaroni, chicken, meat, shrimp, etc.] are eliminated altogether; that there be no more turkeys in Perigueux nor pastries in Perigord; that the vineyards of Bourdeaux dry up; that everyone except me drinks champagne’s delicious foam.”
Done with my mental supplication, I ran to my room to take off my shirt and pants, ruminating that all men aren’t the same, since those of the same country, even perhaps of the same persuasion, can’t possibly share the same customs, nor the same refinement, when they see things in such a different way. I dressed and tried to forget such an ill-fated day, making my way out among the scarce number of people who think, who live subject to the sweet yoke of good breeding, unencumbered and vast. At least they pretend to esteem and respect each other so as not to make themselves uncomfortable, while old-fashioned Castilians make an ostentatious display of making themselves uncomfortable and offending and mistreating one another, perhaps truly caring about and respecting each other all the while.
(trans. Mehl Penrose)
Costumbrismo
Fígaro’s comments on the customs and habits of his friend, Braulio, and of Braulio’s guests reveal the general intent of the essay. It satirizes the conservative, ardently patriotic bourgeoisie who try too hard to seem more refined and wealthy than they are. From their point of view, being perceived as traditionally Spanish, even if it means they must maintain flawed ways of thinking and behaving, is the best compliment one could pay them.
As a member of the middle class, Larra seems to be poking fun not only at the conservative members of the middle class, but also at himself. Larra was, in effect, laughing at himself for his own pretensions of grandeur, especially as they pertained to his writing career. His alter ego, Figaro, also a bourgeois character, is shown to be smug in his conviction that he is somehow superior to the people with whom he dines. He is furthermore ridiculed in the story, when it reduces him to reciting idiotic verses for people whom he believes have no appreciation for refined art.
Larra’s portrayal of the customs of his fellow Spaniards categorizes the essay as costumbrista but, as explained later, Larra gives it a satiric twist that other costumbristas did not include. Costumbrismo, a submovement of Romanticism, traditionally tends to seek out and describe local types, extolling their traditional Spanish virtues and manners. It started in Spain in response to the many published stories and diaries circulated elsewhere in Europe, mainly in France, England, and Germany, by non-Spanish travelers who wrote rather exaggerated depictions of Spaniards. Romantic writers north of the Pyrenees saw Spain as the perfect setting for their stories, considering the country much more traditional, even backward, in comparison to the advanced countries like France and England. One writer even stated that Africa began at the Pyrenees mountain range, which separates Spain from France. Travel writers, seeking to paint a verbal portrait of exotic Spain moved in their writings from region to region, capturing the local color of ordinary Spaniards, helping other Europeans get a better glimpse of life, albeit in an exaggerated form, on the Iberian peninsula.
Many Spanish Romantic writers took issue with this foreign picture of their country. They considered it inaccurate and took offense at its image of Spaniards as inferior and backward. Some of them, like Ramon Mesonero Rómanos and Serafín Estebanez Calderon, retaliated with vivid, accurate descriptions, generating a few of the most illustrative examples of costumbrismo. Mesonero Romanos wrote about the people and customs of mostly middle-class Madrid, and Estébanez Calderón focused on the people and local color of Andalusia. Writings by both were very popular. It is clear from their essays that these writers approved of a traditional Spain, one free of foreign influence, a Spain that clung to and celebrated its customs of yore. However, the attempt of these writers to depict quaint and pure Spanish customs had the exact opposite effect than intended. Because Spanish society was so much more traditional than the advanced European countries, and because many sections of the country were very isolated, their depictions of Spaniards seemed to confirm what the foreign travel writers were saying about Spain. It was indeed an exotic country, full of colorful customs not found in other European countries. In the end, costumbrismo romanticized Spain to the rest of the world and even to Spaniards themselves.
The essay of customs and manners was already very much in vogue in France when Mesonero Romanos, Estébanez Calderon, and Larra began to create their own Spanish versions of it. France’s Etienne de Jouy was achieving popular success at the time for his portrayal of French customs and manners. Each of the three Spanish authors considers Jouy a major influence on his own writing.
As much as Larra admired Jouy and the costumbrismo movement in general, he decided to take it in a new direction. Instead of describing traditional customs as vital for conserving the culture of Spain, Larra poked fun at many customs and lambasted what he considered a national penchant for regressive thinking. In essence, he turned the costumbrista essay into a satirical weapon, acerbically criticizing all that he saw in Spain as a hindrance to the nation’s social and political development. One of his targets is the kind of Spaniard, like Braulio, who believes Spain is perfect the way it is and should never be changed. Larra took issue with this self-righteousness because he saw many egregious flaws in his nation’s character. Having lived in France as a boy and having later traveled to France, England, and other parts of Europe, he was amazed by those countries’ progressive vision. Larra, however, did not want to simply imitate foreign social, political and cultural models. As a matter of fact, he lampooned affluent Spaniards who slavishly imitated English and French fashion and ways of being simply because it was stylish to do so. He condemned poor Spanish imitations of foreign literary works, and he spoke out against producing French theatrical works translated into Spanish because the average Spaniard did not understand the foreign cultural context in which the plays were created. Larra sought instead to advance the country by bringing to the fore the best
JOUY
Unequivocally the leader of the modern “customs and manners” movement, the Frenchman Victor Joseph Etienne (1764–1846), whose pseudonym was Jouy, gained a popular following in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He wrote amusing descriptions of French people and their way of life in newspapers and magazines, in essence holding up a mirror to French society, especially the middle class. His work inspired many other writers in this genre, including Mariano José de Larra, Ramon Mesonero Romanós, and Serafín Estébanez Calderón, three of the greatest costumbrista writers of Spain. One of Jouy’s most famous works was L’Hermite de la Chausée d’Antin, a collection of “customs and manners” essays.
Spanish ideas, or at least by adapting advanced ideas and models from the rest of Europe to Spanish cultural norms. Spaniards, he argued, were not ready for a Romantic writer such as Alexandre Dumas, famous in his native France for Antony, among other works. In a two-part review of Antony, Larra “combats what he sees as an extreme, exacerbated Romanticism, the kind in which the individual erects his own standards and norms without taking into consideration his fellow citizens, that is, society” (Schurlknight, p. 80). Larra believed that Spain was not developmentally ready for such avant-garde literary works, and therefore Romanticism in Spain had to be written by and for Spaniards.
Larra took a unique position in terms of the debate raging over Romanticism in Spain at the time. He clearly did not align himself completely with the exiled Spanish writers, who had returned from places like England and France with very progressive ideas. These writers saw Dumas and others like him as Romantic models, and they were ready to create literary works within that liberal vein. On the other hand, Larra refused to side with the conservative Romantics, such as Mesonero Romanos and Estébanez Calderon, because he firmly believed that in order to progress, Spain had to do more than look to its past. In his eyes, Spain needed to embrace the future and to prepare for it. He believed that his nation had to acknowledge its weak points and attempt to overcome them. It had to adapt the most forward-looking ideas coming out of Europe to a Spanish context, instead of simply adopting those ideas wholesale like many Spanish liberals advocated. Many returning exiles, for example, wanted to copy the political and economic systems they saw in France and England, which were advanced by any measure. Larra felt that it was imprudent to do so because Spain was not ready for such rapid change in so short a period of time. He believed in reforming, among other things, the Spanish political system with its constitutional monarchy instead of, as had happened in France, engaging in revolution that would oust the monarchy altogether. He wanted to incorporate the European democratic ideals that Spain could absorb at that moment in time and reject those that it couldn’t. Larra argued that Spain also desperately needed to generate its own ideas in an attempt to create a stronger nation. As much as he liked the progressive attitudes of England and France, Spain would be no more than a follower unless it sought its own direction.
Sources and literary context
As a major costumbrista literary figure, Larra was inspired principally by Jouy, whom he read in French and whom he often quoted. His other major sources of literary inspiration from France were Mercier, a “customs and manners” writer, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (who wrote The Marriage of Figaro; hence Larra’s pseudonym, Fígaro) and the satirist Nicolas Boileau. Sources of literary inspiration on his own home ground included Spain’s eighteenth-century authors José Cadalso, Tomás de Iriarte, and Baltasar Melchor Gaspar Maria de Jovellanos, and its Golden Age authors Francisco Gómez Quevedo, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (see The Swindler and Don Quixote , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and PortugueseLiteratures and Their Times). Of all his Spanish predecessors, the eighteenth-century authors probably influenced Larra the most. His works all contain at least a hint of the prior Enlightenment movement, which placed great importance on the use of reason and took a more or less didactic approach in conveying a text’s message. Larra, however, was writing at the height of Romanticism (an aspect of which was the celebration of national customs), and for all intents and purposes is considered a Romantic writer.
“El Castellano Viejo” stands out because it is one of the best examples of social satire that Larra produced. It is also one of the best examples of costumbrismo itself due to its brilliant portrait of the conservative bourgeoisie. Because of Larra’s sharp criticism of Spain and its people in essays such as this, his works are remembered as the finest examples of costumbrismo ever written, although they are certainly not the most typical or “pure” costumbrista sketches.
Reception
The Spanish public reacted well to “Old-Fashioned Castilian” as well as other articles by Larra, especially in Madrid. By the time he began writing for La Revista Española (The Spanish Review,) under the pseudonym Figaro, Larra was quite well-known and was the best-paid journalist of his day. (As shown, in “The Old-Fashioned Castilian,” Larra’s narrator is also named Figaro; Larra did not distinguish between the “writer” and narrator of his stories—they were the same.)
Larra’s importance as a literary figure would only grow. The novelist Pérez Galdos (see Fortunate and jacinta , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times) was inspired by Larra in writing his realist novels, and the so-called Generation of 1898 writers saw him as one of their greatest sources of inspiration. His profound impact was due to his love of Spain and his earnest attempt to improve it, clearly evident in his texts, despite his severe criticism. Larra was a master at identifying the problems that afflicted Spain. He “described Spain as the country of casi (which means “almost” or “not quite”). Something was always missing, from institutions recognized by “not quite” the whole nation to canals “not quite” finished and museums “not quite” arranged (Williams, p. 158). In the end, Larra took his own life—“what was picturesque [about Spain] for foreign romantics finally drove Larra to suicide” (Williams, p. 158). In his lifetime, he urged his readers to take up his calls for reform, and eventually those calls were heard, especially by the writers of the Generation of 1898. Just as Larra would have wished, Spain did march forward, slowly and painfully reinventing itself by way of its own ideas and resources.
—Mehl Penrose
For More Information
Alvarez Junco, José, and Adrian Shubert, eds. Spanish History since 1808. London: Arnold, 2000.
Herr, Richard. “Flow and Ebb: 1700-1833.” In Spain: A History. Ed. Raymond Carr. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kirkpatrick, Susan. “Spanish Romanticism and the Liberal Project: The Crisis of Mariano Jose de Larra.” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 451-71.
Martin, Gregorio C. Hacia una revision critica de la biografia de Larra (nuevos documentos). Porto Alegre: Editora Meridional EMMA, 1975.
Montgomery, Clifford Marvin. “Early Costumbrista Writers in Spain, 1750-1830.” Philadelphia, 1931.
Schurlknight, Donald E. Spanish Romanticism in Context: Of Subversion, Contradiction and Politics (Espronceda, Larra, Rivas, Zorrilla). Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998.
Shaw, Donald L. A Literary History of Spain: The Nineteenth Century. London: Ernest Benn, 1972.
Sherman, Alvin F., Jr. Mariano Jose de Larra: A Directory of Historical Personages. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.
Ullman, Pierre L. Mariano de Larra and Spanish Political Rhetoric. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.
Williams, Mark. The Story of Spain. Puebla Lucia, Spain: Mirador Publications, 1992.