The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

novia wore the festive costume with ribbons of many colours, a richly embroidered apron, and on her head a long mantilla of white cloth which covered her forehead and flowed down her back.
    I shall never forget the jota as I heard it sung and saw it danced at that fiesta at Ansó in the spring of 1954. The setting was in keeping with the Aragonese monuments I had seen in the Cathedral at Jaca and the Monastery of San Juan de la Peña, but when the men and women began to dance I thought of the poet Salvador Rueda, who said of the jota of Aragon that there were in it, ‘helmets and plumes, lances and banners, the roaring of cannon, the neighing of horses and the clash of swords’. The martial jota is vastly different to the collective dance of neighbouring Catalonia, the graceful sardana, which symbolizes the ancient Mediterranean civilization with its Greek elements.
    The jota has no seductive qualities about it, for it is a kind of combat between man and woman. Using their castanets, they advance towards one another and retreat, as though spurring on their aggressiveness and preparing for the fight. They raise and lower their arms and kick out their legs alternately as they throw their weight of the body rapidly first on one foot then on the other. It is the dance of warriors, such as Alfonso I, ‘the Battler’, and characteristic of the rugged folk from Aragon. As I watched this combative heroic jota I thought how closely religion mixes with the Spanish dance. Dancing in Spain is not a mere pastime but part of the ritual of the people, whether they live north, south, east or west. The jota, which was Aragonese in its origin, spread over all Spain at the time of the War of Independence when the people of Saragossa in 1809, inspired by Our Lady of the Pillar, whom they still call La Capitana, resisted triumphantly the French invaders. Then the jota became the symbol of the people of Aragon in their tenacious patriotism and sense of personal independence, and it became transformed in other regions into a number of other jotas, the Moorish jota of Valencia, the statuesque jota of Segovia and so on, but no jota has such ecstatic fury of concentrated muscular tension as that of Aragon.
    Pedrell the great master, Falla’s teacher, said of the jota that it was one of the song-dance forms that had been formed by conglomeration like geological strata, but he did not believe that its origin went back further than the end of the eighteenth century, when the copla with its four-line stanza was introduced. After listening to innumerable joteros singing, and watching them dance, I feel more inclined to agree with the celebrated Asturian folklorist Eduardo Torner, who believes that the jota goes back further than the copla with its four-lined stanza which was relatively modern. Torner, however, does not believe that the jota was invented by the twelfth-century Moor called Aben Jot, who was expelled from Valencia and settled in Aragon, but he is convinced that its musical type originally came from Andalusia, and is celebrated in the copla:

    La jota nació morisca
    y después se hizo cristiana
    (The jota was born Moorish
    and later became Christian) *

    Anyone, however, who has seen the jota danced in Lower as well as Upper Aragon cannot fail to see the enormous difference in the way it is danced in the two provinces. Those from Lower Aragon dance rhythmically with much more subtle footwork, but they hardly raise their feet from the ground, whereas those of Upper and even Central Aragon become acrobatic in the violent movements of their hands and legs, and they poise the whole weight of their bodies on the tips of their toes, a step which they call matar la araña (killing the spider). *
    The musical type of the jota may have come originally from Andalusia, as Torner says, and may be of the same family as the fandango, but the mountaineers of Aragon have completely transformed it and made it into a crusader’s dance, a mixture of religion and war, and in the background we always see the vision of Our Lady del Pilar and a warrior king—Alfonso el Batallador, or Sancho El Mayor.
    After the dance I had to parade with Don Sixto and Raimundo from the tavern to another drinking chiquitos of red wine, toasting the Ansotanos and wishing destruction to the neighbouring Hecho. Next morning I said farewell to father and son, and arranged to meet Raimundo in Compostella.

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

ON THE ROAD

    P ILGRIMS now have an easier