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SEVILLE 45
means Christmas at all, but “the lottery”—the great
Christmas lottery.
It is early morning, time of the arrival of mail from
Madrid. Streets and squares are full of people; in the
Calle Sierpes—the Corso of Seville—they stand round
the yard of the post office like a solid wall. And sud-
denly the tension of the last few days is released, en-
gulfing the city with hosts of blind men, women in rags,
half-naked boys; all have their little wads of lottery
tickets in their hands, and the air trembles with shouts
of “Navidad! El gordo! El gordo!” the shouts ris-
ing like rockets on all sides. El gordo means: the
luscious morsel, the fat meat, the big killing!
Here comes a dirty priest, and here a mountainous
female, her face covered with flour dust—each of
them buys a little ticket, paying two hundred dollars
a piece for them. The Commandant of the city comes;
so does the Civil Governor; the Archbishop, the bank
director; so do all the other notables. Each buys his
two-hundred-dollar ticket and makes off for the nearest
church to sprinkle it with holy water. The priest him-
self seems to feel less need of holy water; instead, he
spits on his tickets three times, for luck.
And the shopkeepers come also. They have clubbed
together in groups of ten, because they can raise only
twenty dollars each, and the government will sell only
whole tickets, not, as in Germany or Denmark, half-
tickets, or quarter-tickets, or even one-eighth-tickets.
Among the workingmen, a hundred of them may club
together to purchase a single ticket, and the poor of
the city form stock corporations with a thousand mem-
bers, each investing twenty cents (one peseta).
Soon the government selling stations are all sold
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