Seis crónicas inéditas - THE EUROPEAN GYPSY

VI ) THE EUROPEAN GYPSY

His Life and Habits and his Influence on Continental Nations

A bright and wretched race is roving European highways, enlivening the roads with variegated costumes and stirring great cities with song. It lives on love and freedom. Its representatives are called Tziganes, Zingari, Gigani, Cygans, Zigeuner, Gitanos, Gypsies, Egyptians, and Bohemians. These names illustrate its development and close relationship with southern races. Where the sun is warm, where flowers bloom, where groves are luxuriant, where savory fruits drop from trees, there the gypsy thrives and flourishes. His tent is a rickety cart; his code the navaja in Spain; the kinjal in Russia a dagger, short and sharp; his garments, rags; his law, nature. He kills an unfaithful wife, and if a woman of the tribe yields to outside enticements she is put to death. The piercing black eyes, luscious lips, aquiline profile, clear-cut chin, rich black hair and swarthy complexion must not be defiled by a foreign admixture. The Chinaman is silent concerning the manners and laws of his nation. His silence is easily maintained, for he has a home far away. The gypsy, however, vicious and effeminate, born in the slums of great cities, speaking their languages, and trading with their inhabitants, clings to his Arabian indolence without uttering a word concerning the laws which he obeys, the gods whom he worships, or the peculiar code of honor which he observes. Stealing brings no dishonor. The most respectable members of the tribe visit the thief in prison. If daggers leap from their sheaths in a forest or a dark street, and are buried in the hearts of irate combatants, the thud of a falling body is followed by its silent burial, and the caravan goes its way. What is life that they should mind it?

This curious race must not be treated lightly. It is nature, beautiful and wild, living face to face with that other nature, conventional and deformed. The gypsy knows nothing of the abstract idea of liberty. In him liberty is instinctive and natural. The earth belongs to man; man has a right to the earth; this is the essence of his religion. The trees have fruit - let us eat them; women have kisses - let us snatch them; the sun is warm - let us bask in it: this is his creed. The true gypsy is the primitive man, imprisoned in the city - a living protest of nature against the men of the day, whom he considers degenerate. He is not the primitive man of the north - fighting bears, digging holes under the snow for shelter, killing wild beasts for food, and felling trees for fuel. He is the nervous man of the south - as shapely as Apollo, as elegant as a woman, and as supple as a deer. He kills his wife with a dagger or a strong embrace. He is always a child; he never grows old. He breathes the freedom of nature. He is the same everywhere. A common type gives him common characteristics. The Russian Tzigane loves sunlight, wanders over the highways dressed in rags, and plays his guitar with the same nonchalance and ease as the Spanish gitano. The gypsy's dances, voluptuous and frantic, his music sparkling and languid, his ruses, his combats, his carelessness, his flashing eyes, are the same in the suburbs of Kieff in the black lands, as at Seville in the golden land. The earth is his mother, pleasure his love, and freedom his religion. Give him a palace and he will return to the cottage. He pretends to obey the laws of the land that gave him birth, and if he violates them, submits to the prescribed punishment; but in his own sphere his only rule of conduct is the simple code of the tribe, and his only authority that of its chief. When driven to the city by want or cold, he settles in a squalid quarter dangerous to strangers. He lives in the street. In the street the women of the tribe arrange their hair, dress their children, and make love to the young men. If pressed by hunger, he rises slowly, mutters a few oaths, casts a jealous glance on his black-eyed wife, sees that the spring which launches the blade of his navaja is in order, seizes a few red and blue kerchiefs, and starts through the streets accompanied by an old toothless mule, his head wrapped in a handkerchief tied at the back of his neck, with the ends fluttering over his robust back. Selling handkerchiefs and mules is an easy occupation. He will never trace a furrow on the ground nor touch the workman's hammer. He considers labor dishonorable. He does nothing but what is indispensable to earn a living. If he steals it is not through love of money, but to escape the necessity of earning money by labor. To him the city is a prison. He loves the country. There he breathes freely and is joyous. He has no house rent to pay. No one asks him whither he is going. The stars are his lamps, the sun warms his cold bones, and food is abundant and free. In the country he asks nothing more than water in the brook, chestnuts on the trees, milk from a stray cow, and roses to adorn the dark hair of his darling. Lying on his back, he sings for hours.

When the brook dries up and the roses fade, when the trees have dropped their fruits and winter approaches, an odd and fantastic life opens for the Zingars. In Russia the merry band resume the sounding guitar, the balalaika. For a cup of tea, a little poor man's beer, or a bowl of gruel they sing wild melodies, weird and sad. They dance ballets, mad and quaint, making the blood of half-drunken peasants and other spectators fairly boil in their veins. These dances are the same on the banks of the Dnieper, on the square of Pesth, at the fair of Novgorod, and at the feria of Seville. The songs are the same in Vienna, Marseilles, and Madrid. It is ever the same sensuous, feverish music, reflecting all the phases of a passionate love - now loud as a shout of joy, anon soft and languid, dying away like a sigh. Liszt did well in writing a book on the music of the gypsies. No nation has expressed its characteristics in song more vividly than the Gitanos. They live to love. Love is the great human passion that modifies, if it does not create, all others. Unbridled passion, boundless love, and the naked son of nature are reflected in music which gushes from the gypsy like water from a spring, and which flashes like flame. The eye of a Gitana is never forgotten. Its gaze pierces the flesh, makes straight for the heart, and, once there, remains. The blood boils under the swarthy skin of the Zingara. Her eyes shine below two long, clearcut eyebrows. Her black hair twisted in a circle at the corner of the eyelids covers her ears, and pierced with a long silver pin, is tied behind her neck. A large silk kerchief is crossed over her bosom, a la Marie Antoinette, and tied behind her slender waist, leaving bare her arms and a part of her bust. She has a bold and fresh voice. It expresses wild cries, smothered sighs, and caresses. She dances the fascinating fandango with slow and skilful motions of the hips, the eye fixed, the arms extended as though unrolling garlands of roses, the bosom heaving apparently with mad desires, and the small heels gliding or stamping on the sonorous board. She discloses her charms with a rapid motion, and conceals them with another no less rapid. She twirls and whirls, throwing her glances like harpoons and her arms like a net. When the spectator closes his eyes he sees golden showers, and he feels a warm and voluptuous breeze. The songs will ring in his ears for days, and he will hear them in his dreams.

The gypsy race leaves its imprint on humanity. Its strong appreciation of the beauties of nature, its love of pleasure, and its ungoverned sensuality weaken the morals and unnerve and corrupt the tastes of nations of a vivid imagination or a romantic nature. The Hungarians preserve in a museum the portrait and the violin of a great Tzigane, Bihary, who died nearly blind, forgotten, and wandering through the streets. In his youth he had been an artist of great talent and reputation. At one time he cast a covetous eye on the beautiful Empress Maria Theresa. She applauded him with her white hands, and with her generous heart forgave his folly.

In Spain the race wins the heart of the people. It enters the abodes of the nobility, and even the palaces of kings, through a sub-race, the product of miscegenation with the lower classes. Such are called flamencos. The flamencos have a theatre in Madrid. The people go crazy over them. They frequent the cafés to hear their stories of adventure. They lionize them, fall in love with their wives and daughters, repeat their songs, and spend with them the earnings of the week, while the wife and little ones at home shiver before a fireless hearth. The flamencos give soirées at the mansions of the wealthy, to which only a favored few are invited. Dainty countesses dance the fandango; young ladies sing fearlessly and comment shamelessly on their songs, always spicy. The poison filters into the veins. Everybody becomes a gypsy. At the theatre a drunkard who sings malagueñas is applauded by the noblest dandies and the most charming marquesas of Madrid. The latter go there gorgeously attired, and with their children witness from their boxes those licentious dances. The high nobility crowd the parquet, and curious strangers, toreros, idlers, rogues, young boys and girls inhale the poison of sensuality. Such is the Theatre de la Bolsa.

The wife of a pure Gitano has only one desire, that of her husband; one subject, to make him happy; one dream, to take him out of prison when he is confined. If he is imprisoned for stealing, she will steal to procure him money. If she, herself, falls in the clutches of the law, the son and daughter will steal for the parents. The wife sells flowers and picks up rags; the husband, a musician in the country, has in the city no equal as a horse trader. The Gitano alone can make a blood horse out of a jaded and useless animal. They clip and fatten him, and by means known only to themselves they infuse into him a fictitious and temporary life and teach him a jaunty pace, which the poor animal forgets as soon as the sorcerer disappears. The gypsy thinks of stealing another horse only when his money is all gone, his wife half nude, and his children starving.

Deadly combats among them are of frequent occurrence. If the cause is just, the gypsy king attends the duel. If there be no good cause, and the king is apprised, he comes between the two combatants, unrolls a long silver chain from his belt, and tosses a dagger, the symbol of his authority, in the air. The fight ceases instantly. Sometimes jealousies arise. The chiefs hate each other. Parties are formed. Fights are planned. Before a horrified population, at the beginning of a bull fight, ere the police can prevent it, hostile groups of Gitanos leap into the arena, long blades flash in the air, groans are heard, gash after gash is made with lightning rapidity, the women goad their relatives to the melee, and revolvers, navajas, puñales, scissors, and other weapons are freely used. The police appear at last, but ten minutes have sufficed to strew the arena with human victims. The terrified multitude admires the courage of the combatants. They follow the cart heaped with the dead, and visit the wounded at the hospital. At the point of death the gladiators exchange kisses with their wives, who are with them to the last. The dying men are proud of their living wives, and the living wives are proud of their dying husbands. Five years ago we witnessed such a scene at the hospital in Zaragoza. But after these slaughters the women, if in Spain, rest at their fireside listening to the strains of the guitar.

In Hungary the Gitana is called "Eva;" in Spain, "Concha;" in Russia, "Galoubchick." If the officers of the law, who always keep a sharp lookout for them, inquire about their family, they answer with a smile: "My father is a crow, my mother a magpie." If they wish to dazzle the suspecting officer they sit at the door of an Austrian cottage, or of a Russian isba, and play with wild fury or flowing harmony a lassan, a frishka, or a czardas. If they observe suspicion still lurking in the mind of a Hungarian gendarme they strike up the march of Rakotizy, that Marseilles hymn of the brave Magyars. In the pangs of hunger a kiss consoles them. If the hand of grief lays heavy in the cottage, music wipes away their tears. Of their chiefs, of their customs, of their secret laws, which are written in their memories, no one knows anything. When questioned about them they smile. They die as they live, as they are born - in the woods, in the streets, in rags, singing, smiling, loving, free, and proud.

The Sun, September 26, 1880