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THE VENTORILLO

The “ventorrillo” is a lower class of venta– for there is a deeper bathos; it is the German kneipe or hedge ale-house, and is often nothing more than a mere hut, run up with reeds or branches of trees by the road-side, at which water, bad wine, and brandy, “aguardiente,” tooth-water, are to be sold. The latter is always detestable, raw, and disflavoured with aniseed, and turns white in water like Eau de Cologne, not that the natives ever expose it to such a trial. These “ventorillos” are at best suspicious places, and the haunts of the spies of regular robbers, or of skulking footpads when there are any, who lurk inside with the proprietress; she herself generally might sit as a model for Hecate, or for one of the witches in Shakspere over their cauldron; her attendant imps are, however, sufficiently interesting personages to form a chapter by themselves.

SPANISH ROBBERS

CHAPTER XVI

Spanish Robbers – A Robber Adventure – Guardias Civiles – Exaggerated Accounts – Cross of the Murdered – Idle Robber Tales – French Bandittiphobia – Robber History – Guerrilleros – Smugglers – Jose Maria – Robbers of the First Class – The Ratero – Miguelites – Escorts and Escopeteros – Passes, Protections, and Talismans – Execution of a Robber.

AN olla without bacon would scarcely be less insipid than a volume on Spain without banditti; the stimulant is not less necessary for the established taste of the home-market, than brandy is for pale sherries neat as imported. In the mean time, while the timid hesitate to put their heads into this supposed den of thieves as much as into a house that is haunted, those who are not scared by shadows, and do not share in the fears of cockney critics and delicate writers in satin-paper albums, but adventure boldly into the hornet’s nest, come back in a firm belief of the non-existence of the robber genus. In Spain, that pays de l’imprévu, this unexpected absence of personages who render roads uncomfortable, is one of the many and not disagreeable surprises, which await those who prefer to judge of a country by going there themselves, rather than to put implicit faith in the foregone conclusions and stereotyped prejudices of those who have not, although they do sit in judgment on those who have, and decide “without a view.” This very summer, some dozen and more friends of ours have made tours in various parts of the Peninsula, driving and riding unarmed and unescorted through localities of former suspicion, without having the good luck of meeting even with the ghost of a departed robber; in truth and fact, we cannot but remember that such things as monks and banditti were, although they must be spoken of rather in the past than in the present tense.

A ROBBER ADVENTURE

The actual security of the Spanish highways is due to the Moderados, as the French party and imitators of the juste milieu are called, and at the head of whom may be placed Señor Martinez de la Rosa. He, indeed, is a moderate in poetry as well as politics, and a rare specimen of that sublime of mediocrity which, according to Horace, neither men, gods, nor booksellers can tolerate; his reputation as an author and statesman – alas! poor Cervantes and Cisneros – proves too truly the present effeteness of Spain. Her pen and her sword are blunted, her laurels are sear, and her womb is barren; but, among the blind, he who has one eye is king.

This dramatist, in the May of 1833, was summoned from his exile at Granada to Madrid by the suspicious Calomarde. The mail in which he travelled was stopped by robbers about ten o’clock of a wet night near Almuradiel; – the guard, at the first notice, throwing himself on his belly, with his face in the mud, in imitation of the postilions, who pay great respect to the gentlemen of the road. The passengers consisted of himself, a German artist, and an English friend of ours now in London, and who, having given up his well-garnished purse at once with great good-humour, was most courteously treated by the well-satisfied recipients: not so the Deutscher, on whom they were about to do personal violence in revenge for a scanty scrip, had not his profession been explained by our friend, by whose interference he was let off. Meanwhile, the Don was hiding his watch in the carriage lining, which he cut open, and was concealing his few dollars, the existence of which when questioned he stoutly denied. They, however, re-appeared under threats of the bastinado, which were all but inflicted. The passengers were then permitted to depart in peace, the leader of their spoilers having first shaken hands with our informant, and wished him a pleasant journey: “May your grace go with God and without novelty;” adding, “You are a caballero, a gentleman, as all the English are; the German is a pobrecito, a poor devil; the Spaniard is an embustero, a regular swindler.” This latter gentleman, thus hardly delineated by his Lavater countryman, has since more than gotten back his cash, having risen to be prime minister to Christina, and humble and devoted servant of Louis-Philippe, cosas de España.

GUARDIAS CIVILES

Possibly this little incident may have facilitated the introduction of the mounted guards, who are now stationed in towns, and by whom the roads are regularly patrolled; they are called guardias civiles, and have replaced the ancient “brotherhood” of Ferdinand and Isabella. As they have been dressed and modelled after the fashion of the transpyrenean gendarmerie, the Spaniards, who never lose a chance of a happy nickname, or of a fling at the things of their neighbour, whom they do not love, term them, either Polizontes or Polizones, words with which they have enriched their phraseology, and that represent the French polissons, scoundrels, or they call them Hijos de Luis-Philipe, “sons of Louis-Philippe;” for they are ill-bred enough, in spite of the Montpensier marriage, and the Nelsonic achievements of Monsieur de Joinville, to consider the words as synonymes.

The number of these rogues, French king’s sons, civil guards, call them as you will, exceeds five thousand. During the recent Machiavelianisms of their putative father, they have been quite as much employed in the towns as on the highway, and for political purposes rather than those of pure police, having been used to keep down the expression of indignant public opinion, and, instead of catching thieves, in upholding those first-rate criminals, foreign and domestic, who are now robbing poor Spain of her gold and liberties; but so it has always been. Indeed, when we first arrived in the Peninsula, and naturally made enquiries about banditti, according to all sensible Spaniards, it was not on the road that they were most likely to be found, but in the confessional boxes, the lawyers’ offices, and still more in the bureaux of government; and even in England some think that purses are exposed to more danger in Chancery Lane and Stone Buildings, than in the worst cross-road, or the most rocky mountain pass in the Peninsula.

THE MURDERED MAN’S CROSS

It will be long, however, before this “great fact” is believed within the sound of Bow-bells, where many of those who provide the reading public with correct information, dislike having to eat their own words, and to have their settled opinions shaken or contradicted. Nor is it pleasant at a certain time of life to go again to school, as one does when studying Niebuhr’s Roman History, and then to find that the alphabet must be re-begun, since all that was thought to be right is in fact wrong. Distant Spain is ever looked at through a telescope which either magnifies richness and goodness, from which half at least must be deducted according to the proverb, de los dineros y bondad, se ha de quitar la mitad, or darkens its dangers and difficulties through a discoloured medium. A bad name given to a dog or country is very adhesive; and the many will repeat each other in cuckoo-note. “Il y a des choses,” says Montesquieu, “que tout le monde dit, parcequ’elles ont été dites une fois;” thus one silly sheep makes many, who will follow their leader; ovejas y bobas, donde va una, van todas. So in the end error becomes stamped with current authority, and is received, until the false, imaginary picture is alone esteemed, and the true, original portrait scouted as a cheat.

EXAGGERATED ROBBER NOTIONS

It has so long and annually been considered permissible, when writing about romantic Spain, to take leave of common sense, to ascend on stilts, and converse in the Cambyses vein, that those who descend to humble prose, and confine themselves to commonplace matter-of-fact, are considered not only to be inæsthetic, unpoetical, and unimaginative, but deficient in truth and power of observation. The genius of the land, when speaking of itself and its things, is prone to say the thing which is not; and it must be admitted that the locality lends itself often and readily to misconceptions. The leagues and leagues of lonely hills and wastes, over which beasts of prey roam, and above which vultures sulkily rising part the light air with heavy wing, are easily peopled, by those who are in a prepared train of mind, with equally rapacious bipeds of Plato’s unfeathered species. Rocky passes, contrived as it were on purpose for ambuscades, tangled glens overrun with underwood, in spite of the prodigality of beauty which arrests the artist, suggest the lair of snakes and robbers. Nor is the feeling diminished by meeting the frequent crosses set up on classically piled heaps, which mark the grave of some murdered man, whose simple, touching epitaph tells the name of the departed, the date of the treacherous stab, and entreats the passenger, who is as he was, and may be in an instant as he is, to pray for his unannealed soul. A shadow of death hovers over such spots, and throws the stranger on his own thoughts, which, from early associations, are somewhat in unison with the scene. Nor is the welcome of the outstretched arms of these crosses over-hearty, albeit they are sometimes hung with flowers, which mock the dead. Nor are all sermons more eloquent than these silent stones, on which such brief emblems are fixed. The Spaniards, from long habit, are less affected by them than foreigners, being all accustomed to behold crosses and bleeding crucifixes in churches and out; they moreover well know that by far the greater proportion of these memorials have been raised to record murders, which have not been perpetrated by robbers, but are the results of sudden quarrel or of long brooded-over revenge, and that wine and women, nine times out of ten, are at the bottom of the calamity. Nevertheless, it makes a stout English heart uncomfortable, although it is of little use to be afraid when one is in for it, and on the spot. Then there is no better chance of escape, than to brave the peril and to ride on. Turn, therefore, dear reader, a deaf ear to the tales of local terror which will be told in every out-of-the-way village by the credulous, timid inhabitants. You, as we have often been, will be congratulated on having passed such and such a wood, and will be assured that you will infallibly be robbed at such and such a spot a few leagues onward. We have always found that this ignis fatuus, like the horizon, has receded as we advanced; the dangerous spot is either a little behind or a little before the actual place – it vanishes, as most difficulties do, when boldly approached and grappled with.

BANDITTIPHOBIA OF FRENCH TOURISTS

At the same time these sorts of places and events admit of much fine writing when people get safely back again, to say nothing of the dignity and heroic elevation which may be thus obtained by such an exhibition of valour during the long vacation. Peaked hats, hair-breadth escapes from long knives and mustachios, lying down for an hour on your stomach with your mouth in the mud, are little interludes so diametrically opposed to civilization, and the humdrum, unpicturesque routine of free Britons who pay way and police rates, that they form almost irresistible topics to the pen of a ready writer. And such exciting incidents are sure to take, and to affect the public at home, who, moreover, are much pleased by the perusal of authentic accounts from Spain itself, and the best and latest intelligence, which tally with their own preconceived ideas of the land. Hence those authors are the most popular who put the self-love of their reader in best humour with his own stock of knowledge. And this accounts for the frequency, in Peninsular sketches, personal narratives, and so forth, of robberies which are certainly oftener to be met with in their pages than on the plains of the Peninsula. The writers know that a bandit adventure is as much expected in the journals of such travels as in one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s romances; such fleeting books are chiefly made by “striking events;” accordingly, the authors string together all the floating traditional horrors which they can scrape together on Spanish roads, and thus feed and keep up the notion entertained in many counties of England, that the whole Peninsula is peopled with banditti. If such were the case society could not exist, and the very fact, of almost all of the reporters having themselves escaped by a miracle, might lead to the inference that most other persons escape likewise: a blot is not a blot till it is hit.

PSEUDO-BANDIT LOOKS

Our ingenious neighbours, strange to say in so gallant a people, have a still more decided bandittiphobia. According to what the badauds of Paris are told in print, every rash individual, before he takes his place in the dilly for Spain, ought by all means to make his will, as was done four hundred years ago at starting on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; possibly this may be predicated in the spirit of French diplomacy, which always has a concealed arrière pensée, and it may be bruited abroad, on the principle with which illicit distillers and coin-forgers give out that certain localities are haunted, in order to scare away others, and thus preserve for themselves a quiet possession. Perhaps the superabundance of l’esprit Français may give colour and substance to forms insignificant in themselves, as a painter lost in a brown study over a coal fire converts cinders into castles, monsters, and other creatures of his lively imagination; or it may be, as conscience makes cowards of all, that these gentlemen really see a bandit in every bush of Spain, and expect from behind every rock an avenging minister of retaliation, in whose pocket is a list of the church plate, Murillos, &c. which were found missing after their countrymen’s invasion. Be that as it may, even so clever a man as Monsieur Quinet, a real Dr. Syntax, fills pages of his recent Vacances with his continual trepidations, although, from having arrived at his journey’s end without any sort of accident, albeit not without every kind of fear, it might have crossed him, that the bugbears existed only in his own head, and he might have concealed, in his pleasant pages, a frame of mind the exhibition of which, in England at least, inspires neither interest nor respect; an over-care of self is not over-heroic.

IDLE ROBBER TALES

It must be also admitted that the respectability and character of many a Spaniard is liable to be misunderstood, when he sets forth on any of his travels, except in a public wheel conveyance; as we said in our ninth chapter, he assumes the national costume of the road, and leaves his wife and long-tailed coat behind him. Now as most Spaniards are muffled up and clad after the approved melodrame fashion of robbers, they may be mistaken for them in reality; indeed they are generally sallow, have fierce black eyes, uncombed hair, and on these occasions neglect the daily use of towels and razors; a long beard gives, and not in Spain alone, a ferocious ruffian-like look, which is not diminished when gun and knife are added to match faces à la Brutus. Again, these worthies thus equipped, have sometimes a trick of staring rather fixedly from under their slouched hat at the passing stranger, whose, to them, outlandish costume excites curiosity and suspicion; naturally therefore some difficulty does exist in distinguishing the merino from the wolf, when both are disguised in the same clothing – a zamarra sheepskin to wit. A private Spanish gentleman, who, in his native town, would be the model of a peaceable and inoffensive burgess, or a respectable haberdasher, has, when on his commercial tour, altogether the appearance of the Bravo of Venice, and such-like heroes, by whom children are frightened at a minor theatre. In consequence of the difficulty of outliving what has been learnt in the nursery, many of our countrymen have, with the best intentions, set down the bulk of the population of the Peninsula as one gang of robbers – they have exaggerated their numbers like Falstaff’s men of buckram; the said imagined Rinaldo Rinaldinis being probably in a still greater state of alarm from having on their part taken our said countrymen for robbers, and this mutual misunderstanding continues, until both explain their slight mistake of each other’s character and intention. Although we never fell into the error of thus mistaking Spanish peaceable traders for privateers and men-of-war, yet that injustice has been done by them to us; possibly this compliment may have been paid to our careful observation of the bearing and garb of their great Rob Roy himself and in his own country, which, to one about to undertake, in those days, long and solitary rides over the Peninsula, was an unspeakable advantage.

But even in those perilous times, robberies were the exception, not the rule, in spite of the full, whole, and exact particulars of natives as well as strangers; the accounts were equally exaggerated by both parties; in fact, the subject is the standing dish, the common topic of the lower classes of travellers, when talking and smoking round the venta fires, and forms the natural and agreeable religio loci, the associations connected with wild and cut-throat localities. Though these narrators’ pleasure is mingled with fear and pain, they delight in such histories as children do in goblin tales. Their Oriental amplification is inferior only to their credulity, its twin sister, and they end in believing their own lies. Whenever a robbery really does take place, the report spreads far and wide, and gains in detail and atrocity, for no muleteer’s story or sailor’s yarn loses in the telling. The same dire event, – names, dates, and localities only varied, – is served up, as a monkish miracle in the mediæval ages was, at many other places, and thus becomes infinitely multiplied. It is talked of for months all over the country, while the thousands of daily passengers who journey on unhurt are never mentioned. It is like the lottery, in which the great prize alone attracts attention, not the infinite majority of blanks. These robber-tales reach the cities, and are often believed by most respectable people, who pass their lives without stirring a league beyond the walls. They sympathize with all who are compelled to expose themselves to the great pains and perils, the travail of travel, and they endeavour with the most good-natured intentions to dissuade rash adventurers from facing them, by stating as facts, the apprehensions of their own credulity and imagination.

SPANISH ROBBER HISTORY

The muleteers, venteros, and masses of common Spaniards see in the anxious faces of timid strangers, that their audience is in the listening and believing vein, and as they are garrulous and egotists by nature, they seize on a theme in which they alone hold forth; they are pleased at being considered an authority, and with the superiority which conveying information gives, and the power of inspiring fear confers; their mother-wit, in which few nations surpass them, soon discovers the sort of information which “our correspondent” is in want of, and as words here cost nothing, the gulping gobemouche is plentifully supplied with the required article. These reports are in due time set up in type, and are believed because in print; thus the tricks played on poor Mr. Inglis and his note-book were the laughter of the whole Peninsula, grave authorities caught the generous infection, until Mr. Mark’s robber-jokes at Malaga were booked and swallowed as if he had been an apostle instead of a consul.

As it was our fate to have wandered up and down the Peninsula when Ferdinand VII. was king of the Spains, and Jose Maria, at whose name old men and women there tremble yet, was autocrat of Andalucia, the moment was propitious for studying the philosophy of Spanish banditti, and our speculations were much benefited by a fortunate acquaintance with the redoubtable chief himself, from whom, as well as from many of his intelligent followers, we received much kindness and valuable information, which is acknowledged with thankfulness.

Historically speaking, Spain has never enjoyed a good character in this matter of the highway; it had but an indifferent reputation in the days of antiquity, but then, as now, it was generally the accusation of foreigners. The Romans, who had no business to invade it, were harassed by the native guerrilleros, those undisciplined bands who waged the “little war,” which Iberia always did. Worried by these unmilitary voltigeurs, they called all Spaniards who resisted them “latrones;” just as the French invaders, from the same reasons, called them ladrones or brigands, because they had no uniform; as if the wearing a schako given by a plundering marshal, could convert a pillager into a honest man, or the want of it could change into a thief, a noble patriot who was defending his own property and country; but l’habit ne fait pas le moine, say the French, and aunque la mona se viste de seda, mona se queda, although a monkey dresses in silk, monkey it remains, rejoin the Spaniards.

GUERRILLEROS

Armed men are in fact the weed of the soil of Spain, in peace or war; to have their hand against all mankind seems to be an instinct in every descendant of Ishmael, and particularly among this Quixotic branch, whose knight-errants, reformers on horseback, have not unfrequently been robbers in the guise of gentlemen. During the war against Buonaparte, the Peninsula swarmed with insurgents, many of whom were inspired, by a sense of loyalty, with indignation at their outraged religion, and with a deep-rooted national loathing of the gabacho, and good service did these Minas and Co. do to the cause of their lawful king; but others used patriotic professions as specious cloaks to cover their instinctive passion for a lawless and freebooting career, and before the liberation of the country was effected, had become formidable to all parties alike. The Duke of Wellington, with his characteristic sagacity, foresaw, at his victorious conclusion of the struggle, how difficult it would be to weed out “this strange fruit borne on a tree grafted by patriotism.” The transition from murdering a Frenchman, to plundering a stranger, appeared a simple process to these patriotic scions, whose numbers were swelled with all who were, or who considered themselves to be, ill used – with all who could not dig, and were ashamed to beg. The evil was diminished during the latter years of the reign of Ferdinand VII., when the old hands began to die off, and an advance in social improvement was unquestionably general, before which these lawless occupations gave way, as surely as wild animals of prey do before improved cultivation. These evils, that are abated by internal quiet and the continued exertions of the authorities, increase with troubled times, which, as the tempest calls forth the stormy petrel, rouse into dangerous action the worst portions of society, and create a sort of civil cachexia, as we now see in Ireland.

SMUGGLERS

Another source was, not to say is, Gibraltar, that hot-bed of contraband, that nursery of the smuggler, the prima materia of a robber and murderer. The financial ignorance of the Spanish government calls him in, to correct the errors of Chancellors of Exchequers: – “trovata la legge, trovato l’inganno.” The fiscal regulations are so ingeniously absurd, complicated, and vexatious, that the honest, legitimate merchant is as much embarrassed as the irregular trader is favoured. The operation of excessive duties on objects which people must, and therefore will have, is as strikingly exemplified in the case of tobacco in Andalucia, as it is in that, and many other articles on the Kent and Sussex coasts: in both countries the fiscal scourge leads to breaches of the peace, injury to the fair dealer, and loss to the revenue; it renders idle, predatory and ferocious, a peasantry which, under a wiser system, and if not exposed to overpowering temptation, might become virtuous and industrious. In Spain the evasion of such laws is only considered as cheating those who cheat the people; the villagers are heart and soul in favour of the smuggler, as they are of the poacher in England; all their prejudices are on his side. Some of the mountain curates, whose flocks are all in that line, deal with the crime in their sermons as a conventional, not a moral, one; and, like other people, decorate their mantelpieces with a painted clay figure of the sinner in his full majo dress. The smuggler himself, so far from feeling degraded, enjoys the reputation which attends success in personal adventure, among a people proud of individual prowess; he is the hero of the Spanish stage, and comes on equipped in full costume, with his blunderbuss, to sing the well-known “Yo! que soy contrabandista! yo ho!” to the delight of all listeners from the Straits to the Bidasoa, custom-house officers not excepted.

The prestige of such a theatrical exhibition, like the ‘Robbers’ of Schiller, is enough to make all the students of Salamanca take to the high-road. The contrabandista is the Turpin, the Macheath of reality, and those heroes of the old ballads and theatres of England, who have disappeared more in consequence of enclosures, rapid conveyances, and macadamization (for there is nothing so hateful to a highwayman as gas and a turnpike), than from fear of the prison or the halter. The writings of Smollett, the recollections of many now alive of the dangers of Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common, recall scenes of life and manners from which we have not long emerged, and which have still more recently been corrected in Spain. The contrabandista in his real character is welcome in every village; he is the newspaper and channel of intelligence; he brings tea and gossip for the curate, money and cigars for the attorney, ribands and cottons for the women; he is magnificently dressed, which has a great charm for all Moro-Iberian eyes; he is bold and resolute – “none but the brave deserve the fair;” a good rider and shot; he knows every inch of the intricate country, wood or water, hill or dale; in a word, he is admirably educated for the high-road – for what Froissart, speaking of the celebrated Amerigot Tetenoire, calls “a fayre and godlie life.” And the transition from plundering the king’s revenue, to taking one of his subjects’ purse on the highway, is easy.

FIRST-CLASS BANDITS

Many circumstances combined to make this freebooting career popular among the lower classes. The delight of power, the exhibition of daring and valour, the temptation of sudden wealth, always so attractive to half-civilized nations, who prefer the rich spoil won by the bravery of an hour, to that of the drudgery of years; the gorgeous apparel, the lavish expenditure, the song, the wassail, the smiles of the fair, and all the joyous life of liberty, freemasonry, and good fellowship, operated with irresistible force on a warlike, energetic, and imaginative population.

This smuggling was the origin of Jose Maria’s career, who rose to the highest rank and honours of his profession, as did Napoleon le Grand and “Jonathan Wild the Great,” and principally, as Fielding says of his hero, by a power of doing mischief, and a principle of considering honesty to be a corruption of honosty, the qualities of an ass (ονος). But it is a great mistake to suppose that there always are men fitted to be captains of formidable gangs; nature is chary in the production of such specimens of dangerous grandeur, and as ages may elapse before the world is cursed with another Alaric, Buonaparte, or Wild, so years may pass before Spain witnesses again another Jose Maria.

FIRST-CLASS BANDITS

The Ladron-en-grande, the robber on a great scale, is the grandee of the first class in his order; he is the captain of a regularly-organized band of followers, from eight to fourteen in number, well armed and mounted, and entirely under command and discipline. These are very formidable; and as they seldom attack any travellers except with overwhelming forces, and under circumstances of ambuscade and surprise, where every thing is in their favour, resistance is generally useless, and can only lead to fatal accidents. Never, for the sake of a sac de nuit, risk being sent to Erebus; submit, therefore, at once and with good grace to the summons, which will take no denial, of “abajo,” down, “boca á tierra,” mouth to the earth. Those who have a score or so of dollars, four or five pounds, the loss of which will ruin no man, are very rarely ill-used; a frank, confident, and good-humoured surrender not only prevents any bad treatment, but secures even civility during the disagreeable operation: pistols and sabres are, after all, a poor defence compared to civil words, as Mr. Cribb used to say. The Spaniard, by nature high-bred and a “caballero,” responds to any appeal to qualities of which he thinks his nation has reason to be proud; he respects coolness of manner, in which bold men, although robbers, sympathise. Why should a man, because he loses a few dollars, lose also his presence of mind or temper, or perhaps life? Nor are these grandees of the system without a certain magnanimity, as Cervantes knew right well. Witness his graphic account of Roque Guinart, whose conduct to his victims and behaviour to his comrades tallied, to our certain knowledge, with that observed by Jose Maria, and was perfectly analogous to the similar traits of character exhibited by the Italian bandit Ghino de Tacco, the immortalized by Dante; as well as by our Robin Hood and Diana’s foresters. Being strong, they could afford to be generous and merciful.