THE WIND BLEW into the two hundred pairs of breeches and filled them. To me they looked like fat men without a head, swinging from the clothes-lines of the drying-yard. We boys ran along the rows of white trousers and slapped their bulging seats. Señora Encarna was furious. She chased us with the wooden beater she used to pound the dirty grease out of her washing. We took refuge in the maze of streets and squares formed by four hundred damp sheets. Sometimes she caught one of us; then the others would begin to throw mud pellets at the breeches. They left stains as though somebody had dirtied his pants, and we imagined the thrashing some people would get for behaving like pigs.
In the evening, when the breeches had dried, we helped to count them in tens. All the children of the washerwomen went with Señora Encarna up to the top story of the washhouse. It was a big loft with a roof like a V turned upside down. Señora Encarna could stand upright in the middle, but her top-knot nearly touched the big beam. We would stand at the sides and bang our heads against the sloping roof.
Señora Encarna had in front of her the heaps of breeches, sheets, pants, and shirts. The pillow-cases were apart. Everything had its number. Señora Encarna sang it out and threw the piece to the boy in charge of the set of ten to which it belonged. Each of us looked after two or three groups, the “twenties,” or the “thirties,” or the “sixties,” and had to drop each piece on the right heap. Last of all we stuffed into each pillow-case, as into a sack, one pair of breeches, two sheets, one pair of pants, and one shirt, all marked with the same number. Every Thursday, a big cart drawn by four horses came down to the river to fetch the two hundred bundles of clean linen and leave another two hundred of dirty washing behind.
It was the linen of the men of the Royal Horse Guards, the only soldiers who had sheets to sleep in.
Every morning, soldiers of the Guards rode over the King’s Bridge escorting an open carriage in which the Prince of Asturias used to sit, or sometimes the Queen. But first a rider would come out of the tunnel which led to the Royal Palace, to warn the guards on the bridge. They would chase away the people, and the carriage with its escort would pass when the bridge was empty. As we were children and so could not be Anarchists, the police let us stay while they went by. We were not afraid of the Horse Guards, because we knew their breeches too well.
The Prince was a fair-haired boy with blue eyes, who looked at us and laughed like a ninny. People said he was dumb and had to go for a walk in the Casa de Campo every day, between a priest and a General with white mustaches. It would have been better for him to come and play with us by the river. And then we would have seen him with nothing on when we were bathing, and would have known what a prince looks like inside. But apparently they did not want him to come. Once we discussed it with Uncle Granizo, the owner of the washhouse, because he was friends with the head keeper of the Casa de Campo, who sometimes spoke to the Prince. Uncle Granizo promised to see to it, but later he told us that the General would not give his permission.
Those military were all alike. A General who had been in the Philippines often came to visit my Uncle José. He had brought back with him an old Chinese who was very fond of me, a pink wooden walking-stick, which he said had been the spine of a fish called the manatee and was the death of anyone who got a whack with it, and a cross which was not a real cross but a green star with many rays, which he wore everywhere, embroidered on his vest and shirt and as an enamel button in his coat-lapel.
Every time this General came to visit my uncle, he grunted, cleared his throat and asked me whether I was already a little man. He would at once begin to scold me: “Keep quiet, boy, a little man mustn’t do that… Leave that cat alone, boy, you’re a little man now.” I used to sit down on the floor between my uncle’s legs while they talked about politics and the war of the Russians and Japanese. The war had finished long before, but the General liked to speak of it because he had been in China and Japan himself. When they talked about that, I used to listen, and every time I heard how the Japanese had beaten up the Russians I was glad. I could not stand the Russians. They had a very nasty king who was the Tsar and a police chief called Petroff, Captain Petroff, who was a brute and lashed people with his whip. My uncle bought me a new number of the Adventures of Captain Petroff every Sunday. They threw a lot of bombs at him, but he never got killed.
When they stopped speaking of the war they bored me and I went to play on the dining-room carpet.
That other General who was with the Prince must have been just the same. He had to teach the Prince how to make wars when he became king, because all kings must know how to make wars, and the priest taught him how to speak. I didn’t understand that. How could he speak if he was dumb? Perhaps he could, because he was a prince; but the dumb people I knew could only talk by signs. And it was not for lack of priests.
It was a nuisance that no ball came floating down, when we needed one to play with that evening.
It was quite easy to fish a ball. There was a small wooden bridge in front of Uncle Granizo’s house. It was made of two old rails with planks on top and a railing, all painted green. Underneath flowed a black stream which came out of a tunnel; and that tunnel and that stream were the big sewer of Madrid. All the balls which the children of Madrid dropped into the gutters came floating down there, and we fished for them from our bridge with a net made of a stick and the wire guard of a brazier. Once I caught one made of rubber; it was painted red. Next day at school, Cerdeño took it away from me and I had to keep my mouth shut because he was bigger than I was. But I made him pay for it. In the corrala, the square in front of the school where we used to play, I threw a stone at his head from the top of the railing, so that he went about with a bandage for two days and they had to sew up his brain with stitches. Of course, he did not know who had done it. But I carried a sharp stone in my pocket after that, just in case, and if he had tried to beat me, they would have had to sew him up a second time.
Antonio, the one who limped, once fell from the bridge and nearly drowned. Señor Manuel, the handyman, pulled him out and squeezed his tummy with both hands until Antonio began to spit up dirty water. Afterwards they gave him tea and brandy to drink. Señor Manuel, who was a tippler, took a good swill out of the bottle because his trousers were all wet and he said he was cold.
Nothing doing, no ball came down. I went to dinner, my mother was calling me. That day we had our meal in the sun, sitting on the grass. I liked it better than the cold days with no sun, when we had to eat at Uncle Granizo’s. His house was a tavern with a tin-covered bar and some round tables which were all wobbly. The soup would spill over and the brazier stank. It was not really a brazier, but a big portable stove, with an open fire in the middle and all the stewing-pots of the washerwomen placed round it. My mother’s was small, because there were only the two of us, but Señora Encarna’s pot was as big as a wine-jar. There were nine of them, and they ate out of a washbowl instead of a plate. All nine sat on the grass round their bowl and dipped in their spoons in turn. When it rained and they had to eat indoors, they sat at two tables and divided their stew between the washbowl and a very big earthenware casserole which Uncle Granizo used for stewing snails on Sundays. For on Sundays the washhouse was shut and Uncle Granizo cooked snails. In the evening, men and women came down to the river and they danced, ate snails and drank wine. Once Uncle Granizo invited my mother and me, and I stuffed myself. The snails were caught in the grass round there, especially after the rain, when they came out to sun themselves. We boys collected them, painted their houses in many colors and let them run races.
The cocido tasted better here than at home.
First you cut bread into very thin bits and poured over them the soup of the stew, yellow with saffron. Then you ate the chick-peas, and after them the meat together with fresh tomatoes cut in half and sprinkled with plenty of salt. For dessert we had salad, juicy green lettuce with tender hearts such as you could not have got anywhere in town. Uncle Granizo grew the lettuces on the banks of the sewer, because he said that they grew better on sewage water. And it was true. It sounded nasty. But people spread dung on the corn-fields and chickens eat muck, and in spite of all that, bread and chickens are very good.
The chickens and ducks knew our meal-time. They arrived as soon as my mother turned over her washing-board. A big, fat earthworm had been underneath and now it wriggled. One of the ducks saw it at once. He ate the worm just as I used to eat thick noodles: he dangled it in his bill, sucked—plff—and down it went. Then he plucked at the feathers of his neck, as if some crumbs had fallen there, and waited for me to throw him my piece of bread. I would not give it him in my fingers because he was a brute and pinched. He had a very hard bill and it hurt.
With the washing-board for a table we ate, my mother and I, sitting on the grass.
My mother’s hands were very small. As she had been washing since sunrise, her fingers were covered with little wrinkles like an old woman’s skin, but her nails were bright and shining. Sometimes the lye would burn right through her skin and make pin-prick holes all over her fingertips. In the winter her hands used to get cut open; as soon as she took them out of the water into the cold air, they were covered with sharp little ice crystals. The blood would spurt as though a cat had scratched her. She used to put on glycerine, and her hands healed at once.
After the meal we boys went to play at Paris-Madrid Motor Races with the wheelbarrows used for the washing. We had stolen four of them from Señor Manuel, without his noticing, and kept them hidden in the meadow. He did not like us playing with them, because they were heavy and he said one of us would have his leg broken one day. But they were great fun. Each barrow had an iron wheel in front which screeched as it rolled. One boy would get into a wheelbarrow and another would push it at top speed until he had enough of it. Then he would suddenly tip up the barrow, and the passenger would topple out. One day we played at train-crashes, and lame Antonio squashed his finger. He was always unlucky. He was lame because of a thrashing his father had given him. He fell into the sewer, too. As he wore out one of his shoes more quickly than the other, his mother made him wear both shoes of a pair on both feet, changing them each day, so that he used up the two equally quickly. When he wore his left shoe on his right foot, which was the sound one, he limped with both legs and it was very funny to see him hopping on his crutches.
I had seen the real Paris-Madrid races in the Calle del Arenal, at the corner of the street where my uncle lived. There were many policemen lined up so that people should not get run over. The cars were not allowed to finish in the Puerta del Sol as they had wanted to, and the goal was at the Puente de los Franceses. Three or four cars crashed there. I had never seen a racing-car before. All the cars in Madrid looked like carriages without their horses, but those racing-cars were different. They were long and low and the driver crouched right down in them so that you saw nothing but his head—a fur cap and goggles with big glasses like a diver’s. The cars had thick pipes which let off explosions like cannon-shots and puffs of smoke with a horrid smell. The papers said they could go up to fifty-five miles an hour. The train to Méntrida, which is thirty-five miles from Madrid, took from six in the morning till eleven, so that it was not surprising if some of those racing men smashed themselves up on the road.
But I liked driving very fast. In our quarter we boys had a car of our own. It was a packing-case on four wheels, and you could steer the front wheels with a rope. We used to race it down the long slope of the Calle de Lepanto. At the bottom we went so fast that we kept on rolling along the asphalt of the Plaza de Oriente. The only danger was a lamp-post at the corner there. Manolo, the son of the pub-keeper, ran into it one day and broke his arm. He yelled, but it was not really bad; they put his arm in plaster and he went on driving with us as before. Only then he was afraid. When he got to the bottom of the slope he always braked with his foot against the curb.
The meadow where we had our races that day was called the “Park of Our Lady of the Port.” The grass was thick, and many poplars and horse-chestnut trees grew in it. We used to peel the bark off the poplars; it left a clear green patch which seemed to sweat. The chestnut trees grew prickly balls with a chestnut inside which you could not eat, because it gave you a tummy-ache. When we found any of those balls we hid them in our pockets. Then, when one of the boys stooped, the rest of us would throw chestnuts at his behind, and the prickles would prick him, and he would jump. Once we split one of the green balls open, took out the chestnut and stuck the shell under the tail of a donkey grazing in the meadow. The donkey went crazy, rushed all over the place, kicked, and would not even let his master come near him.
I never knew why the meadow was named after Our Lady of the Port.
There was a Holy Virgin in a little chapel; a fat priest lived there who used to take his walks in the meadow and sit down under the poplars. A very pretty girl lived with him. The washerwomen said she was his daughter, but he said she was his niece. One day I asked him why the place was called “Our Lady of the Port,” and he told me that she was the patroness of the fishermen. When they were shipwrecked they prayed to her and she saved them. If they drowned, they went to Heaven. But I could not understand why they kept this Holy Virgin in Madrid instead of taking her to San Sebastian, where there was the sea and fishermen. I had seen them myself two years before, when my uncle took me along in the summer. But here in the Manzanares were no boats and no fishermen, and nobody could have drowned there, because the water reached just to one’s waist in the deepest spot.
It seemed that the Virgin was there because of all the men from Galicia who lived in Madrid. Every August, all Gallegos and Asturians went to this meadow; they sang and danced to their bagpipes, ate, and got drunk. Then they carried the Virgin round the meadow in a procession, and all the bagpipes went along. The boys from the orphanage came down too and played in the procession. They were children without father or mother who lived there in the Home and had to learn music. If one of them played his trumpet badly, the teacher would knock it up with his fist and break the boy’s teeth. I had seen a boy who had no teeth left, but he blew the trumpet beautifully. He could even play the couplets of the jota all by himself. The others would stop playing, and he would blow the copla on his trumpet. The people clapped and he bowed. Then the women and some of the men gave him a few centimos, but secretly, so that the Director should not see it and take them away. For the orphans were paid for playing in the procession, but the teacher took the money and the boys got nothing but the garlic soup in the Home. They all had lice and an eye-sickness called trachoma, which looked as though their eyelids had been smeared with sausage meat. And the heads of some of them were bald from mange.
Many of them had been dumped in the foundlings’ home by the mothers when they were still infants-in-arms. That was one of the reasons why I loved my mother very much. When my father died, there were four of us children, and I was four months old. People wanted to make my mother put us into the foundlings’ home—so I was told—because she would never be able to keep all of us alive. My mother went down to the river as a washerwoman. I was taken in by my Uncle José and Aunt Baldomera. On the days when my mother was not washing she worked as their servant; she cooked for them, did all the housework, and at night she went back to the attic where she lived with Concha, my sister. José, my eldest brother, at first got his meals in the Escuela Pía. When he was eleven, my mother’s eldest brother took him into his shop in Cordova. Concha got her meals at the nuns’ school. My second brother, Rafael, was a boarder at the college of San Ildefonso, which is an institution for orphan boys born in Madrid.
Twice a week I slept in the attic, because my Uncle José said I was to be the same as my brothers and sister and should not think myself the young gentleman of the family. I did not mind, I enjoyed myself better there than in my uncle’s flat. Uncle José was very good, but my aunt was a grumpy old bigot and would not leave me alone. Every evening I had to go with her to Rosary in the Church of Santiago; and that was too much praying. I believed in God and the Holy Virgin. But that did not mean that I wanted to spend the day at prayer or in church. Every day at seven in the morning—Mass at school. Before lessons began—prayers. Then the lesson in religion. In the afternoons, before and after school—prayers. And then, when I was quite happy playing in the street, my aunt would call me to go to Rosary, and on top of it she made me pray before I went to sleep and before I got up. When I was in the attic, I did not go to Rosary, and I did not pray either in the evening or in the morning.
As it was summer then, there was no school. Every Monday and Tuesday I went to the attic; those were the days when my mother went down to the river to wash, and I went with her to play in the fields. When my mother had finished packing up her washing, we went home uphill, up the Cuesta de la Vega. I liked that road because it passed under the viaduct, a high iron bridge which spanned the Calle Segovia. It was from the top of this viaduct that people threw themselves down if they wanted to take their own lives. I knew a stone slab in the pavement of the Calle Segovia which had cracks because a man had smashed his head on it. His head was squashed like a pie, and the stone broke into four pieces. A little cross was engraved on the slab, so that people should know and remember. Each time I passed under the viaduct, I looked up to see if someone was not just about to jump down. It would have been no joke if anyone had squashed my mother or me. If he had fallen on the sack of washing which Señor Manuel carried home for my mother, it would have hurt no-one. The sack was huge, bigger than a man.
I knew exactly what was in it, because I had helped my mother to count the linen: twenty sheets, six tablecloths, fifteen shirts, twelve nightshirts, ten pairs of pants—a great many things. Poor Señor Manuel had to stoop under it when he wanted to get through the door of our attic. He let the sack slide down gently so that it should not burst, and leaned against the wall, breathing very fast, with sweat running down his face. My mother always gave him a very full glass of wine and asked him to sit down. If he had drunk water he would have died, for it would have stopped him sweating.
He would drink his wine, and then draw a handful of stubs and big coarse cigarette papers out of his blouse, and roll himself a fat, untidy cigar out of the stubs. One day I stole one of Uncle José’s good cigars with a gold band and gave it to Señor Manuel. He told my mother, and she scolded me and told my uncle about it. He scolded me too, but then he gave me a kiss and took me to the pictures, because he said my heart was in the right place. After that I did not know whether it had been right or wrong to give Señor Manuel a cigar. I thought it was right, though, because he had been very happy. He smoked it after his meal and kept the stump which he cut up to roll a special cigarette from it. Afterwards my uncle gave me a cigar for Señor Manuel from time to time, and he had never done that before.
The viaduct was all of iron, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, only not so high. The Eiffel Tower was a huge iron tower built by a French engineer in Paris for an exhibition, in the year in which I was born. I knew that story very well, because my uncle had the old numbers of La Illustración with photographs of the tower and the engineer, a gentleman with a long beard like all Frenchmen. Apparently they never managed to take the tower to pieces after the exhibition was over, so they left it standing so that it should fall down by itself. For one day it would fall into the Seine, the river which flows through Paris, and destroy many houses. They said people in Paris were very much afraid of it; a lot of those who lived in the neighborhood had moved away so as not to get crushed.
It was just the same with our viaduct: it was sure to fall one fine day. When soldiers had to ride over it, they went very slowly, and even so the whole bridge trembled. If you stood in the middle, you could feel it swaying up and down, like in an earthquake. My uncle said the bridge would crack if it vibrated less; but naturally it would have to break if it vibrated too much, and that was what would happen one day. I thought I would not like to be standing underneath just then, but that it would be interesting to look on. The year before, on Inocentes Day, the A.B.C., which always had very good pictures, published a photograph of the viaduct in ruins. It was an All Fools’ joke that time, but many people went to look with their own eyes, because they thought it had to be true when there was a picture of it. Afterwards they were angry with the paper; but I thought it was the same with them as with me: they were angry because it was not true.
At each end of the viaduct was a policeman on patrol, to keep people from throwing themselves over. If anyone wanted to do it he had to wait until late at night, when the guards were asleep. Then he could jump. The poor men must have got terribly bored, wandering round the streets until they could kill themselves. And then they still had to climb over the railing. The viaduct was no good for old people because they could not climb. They had to hang themselves or jump into the big lake in the Retiro Park, but someone nearly always pulled them out from there and massaged their stomach, like lame Antonio’s, until they spat out the water and did not die.
My mother said they wanted to kill themselves because they had not enough money to buy food, but I would not have killed myself for that. I would have stolen some bread and run away. They could not have put me in prison as I was a child. But if people did not want to do that, why didn’t they work? My mother who was a woman worked. Señor Manuel worked too, and he was a very old man. He carried the heavy sacks with the washing, although he had a rupture through which his bowels stuck out. Once he carried a big bundle of linen up to the attic and when he got upstairs he felt very ill. My mother put him on the bed and pulled down his trousers. She had a great fright and called for Señora Pascuala, the concierge, and both together quickly pulled off his trousers and pants. He had a swarthy belly full of hairs which were nearly all white, and a bulgy lump rather like a bullock’s was hanging down from his parts. My mother and Señora Pascuala pushed this lump back into his belly with their fists and fastened his truss over it, a kind of belt which had a pad over the hole where his bowels slipped out. Then Señor Manuel dressed and drank a cup of tea and a glass of brandy. Señora Pascuala boxed my ears because I had been watching, and said children should never see such things. But I was glad because now I would know how to push Señor Manuel’s bowels back again if ever they slipped out while I was alone with him. The worst would be if it happened in the street and his bowels fell right out, for then he would have to die.
Now, Señor Manuel, who had a ruptured belly and smoked nothing but fag-ends, had no wish to kill himself. He was always cheerful and played with me. He used to let me ride on his shoulders and tell me that he had grandchildren like myself in Galicia. He smoked stubs so that he could visit them every year. My uncle used to get him what they called a charity ticket, and he traveled almost for nothing. When he came back he always brought butter in a round pig’s bladder for my uncle. It was sweet, fresh butter which I liked to spread on my bread and sprinkle with sugar. Once I asked him why he did not commit suicide, and he said he wanted to die at home in Galicia. I wondered whether he would kill himself there one summer, but then I thought he probably would not. Besides, he said that people who commit suicide go to hell, and everybody else told me the same.
Our attic was in a large house in the Calle de las Urosas. The ground floor was all stables, with more than a hundred fine carriages and their horses. The boss of the stables was an old man with a queer, flattened-out nose. My mother said he had picked it like I did, and because his nails were dirty, the tip of his nose started rotting one day. They had to cut it off and take a piece off his behind to sew on it instead. Once I wanted to make him angry and asked if he really had a piece of his behind sewn on to his nose, and he threw a scotch at me: one of those heavy wooden wedges which keep the wheels from running backwards on a slope. It missed me and struck the printing-shop opposite. There it hit a rack on which they kept their little boxes with letters and knocked one of them over. The A’s and T’s got mixed up, and all the boys of our street sat and sorted them out into little heaps.
The gateway of our house was so big that we could play with tops, and at hopscotch and ball there, when Señora Pascuala was not about. Her lodge was very small, squeezed in under the staircase, and the stairs were as big as the gateway; they had a hundred and one steps. When I went down, I jumped them three at a time. Sometimes I used to slide down the banisters; but once I lost my seat and was left dangling outside the railing over the second floor. Nobody saw it, but it gave me a fright so that I thought my heart would burst, and my legs trembled. If I had fallen then, the same would have happened to me as to our water jar. There was no running water in our attic and we had to fetch it from the stables. My mother had bought a very big jar, and even when I went down with it, it was heavy; but when I carried it upstairs filled with water, I had to rest at every landing. And once I dropped it from the second floor and it exploded like a bomb down there. It was from the same spot that I nearly fell myself. When I passed it afterwards, I always kept away from the banisters.
Upstairs there was a large round window with small panes, like some church windows. When the powder-magazine at Carabanchel exploded, the glass broke and was strewn all over the stairs. I was very small then, but I remember how my mother carried me down and into the street in her arms. She ran, because she did not know what had happened. People were very frightened at that time, because so many things had occurred one after the other: a few years earlier a huge meteor had come down in Madrid. Then Mount Vesuvius, the big volcano in Italy, had an outburst, and afterwards came Halley’s Comet. There was also an earthquake in San Francisco, a city much bigger than Madrid, and another one in Messina. Many people believed that the end of the world would come after the end of the nineteenth century. I saw the Halley Comet myself, but I was not frightened. It was beautiful. My uncle and I watched it from the Plaza de Palacio. It was a ball of fire with a tail of sparks, rushing along the sky. My aunt had not come out with us because she was too much afraid. She kept all the candles burning before a Virgin we had at home and prayed there the whole night. When we went to bed she closed the wooden shutters very tight, and my uncle asked her if she was afraid of the comet entering our balcony. At that time, a ship with dynamite, the Machichaco, had exploded in Santander and blown up half the town. An iron girder had pierced two houses before it stuck fast. Sucesos printed a picture in colors, which showed chunks of the ship and arms and legs flying in the air.
Opposite the round window began the passage which led to all the attic flats. The first belonged to Señora Pascuala, it was the biggest and had seven rooms; then came Señora Paca with her four rooms, and across the passage Señora Francisca who had only one room, like all the rest.
Paca and Francisca are the same name, but Señora Paca was one thing and Señora Francisca another. Señora Francisca was an old lady who had been a widow for many years. As she had no money she sold things for children on the Plaza del Progreso, a whole lot of things for two coppers, such as monkey-nuts, hazel-nuts, jacks-in-the-box, and bengal lights. But she was a lady. The other was a big fat woman who walked about in a dressing jacket so thin that you could see her breasts with very black nipples through it. One day I saw a few black hairs sticking through the stuff of her jacket and afterwards I always had to think of her when I saw bristles on a bacon-rind. It did not matter, because I did not like bacon. Señora Paca always went round shouting and screaming; once Señora Pascuala, who had quite a good voice herself, told her that she would get herself chucked out.
Señora Paca was a washerwoman too, but she did not wash at Uncle Granizo’s place—only at a laundry in the Ronda de Atocha, where there is no river and they had to do their washing in basins filled with water from a tap. I had been there once. I did not like it. It looked like a factory, with rows of basins full of wash, steam hanging in the air over them, and the women jostling each other alongside and screaming like mad. There was no sun and no grass and the linen stank. The drying-yard with the clothes-lines was a bit of waste ground at the back. Tramps used to climb over the hoardings and steal the washing. Of course they sometimes tried to do the same down by the river, but they were less cheeky there because it was open ground, where the women could run and throw stones after them, and they always got caught. In fact, the decent washerwomen were at the river, opposite the Casa de Campo; but from the Toledo Bridge downstream and in the laundries of the Rondas there were only slatterns.
Our passage made a bend, and then came a straight bit, thirty-seven meters long; I had measured it myself, meter by meter, with my mother’s tape-measure. There was a small window in the corner which let the sun through, and a large window in the middle of the ceiling, where the water came in when it rained. It came through the small window too, whenever a strong wind was blowing from the front. That made two puddles in the passage. When a tile was missing on the roof, the rain trickled through into the attic, and you put a pan underneath where it dripped. The passage and the attics were floored with bricks, or rather with tiles of burnt clay which looked like bricks. They were very cold in winter time, but our attic had a rush-mat with straw underneath and so we could play on the floor.
Our attic was Number 9 in the passage. Next door was the attic of the powder-woman who made up rockets and squibs for children. The neighbors said she could make bombs and was an Anarchist. She had a lot of books and was very kind. One night the police came. They went away without arresting her, but they woke up all the rest of us, because they turned her room upside down and threw things about.
In the attic next to hers lived Señora Rosa and her husband. He was a harness-maker and she was shortsighted; she could not have seen seven-on-a-donkey. They were tiny and very thin and loved each other very much. They always spoke in a low, soft voice and you hardly noticed them. They would have liked to have a child, and their room was a refuge for us when we were afraid of a beating. Then Señora Rosa would stand in front of her door and not let anyone in, nor us out, until they promised her not to touch us. She had a very small, very white face, and very light blue eyes with lashes so fair that you scarcely saw them. She wore spectacles with thick glasses and my mother said she could see well in the dark. When she looked at you, her eyes were like a bird’s.
Then there was still another attic, the smallest of all. An old woman lived there, called Antonia, and nobody knew anything about her because nobody wanted to have anything to do with her. She went begging in the streets and came home at eleven at night, just before the front door was locked. She would come up muttering to herself, drunk with gin. Upstairs she would bolt her door and start talking to her cat. Once she was sick on the stairs and Señora Pascuala made her scrub the staircase from top to bottom.
At the end of the passage lived the cigarette-maker. She and her daughter worked together making cigarettes for the Queen. They were very long cigarettes on to which they stuck cardboard holders with a fine brush dipped into a dusty little pot of gum. And that was what the Queen put in her mouth. The little pot was of thick green glass, and as they used to wipe their brush on its rim, it always had some hardened drops of gum sticking to its outside, like the wax drops on church candles. When they ran short of gum, Señora Maria scraped off the dried blobs, put them into the pot and poured some hot water over them. Once, she had no hot water ready and used stock from her stewing-pot; and her cigarettes got spotted with grease.
In a corner of the passage was the lavatory. At night I was afraid of going there, for a lot of fat cockroaches came crawling out and ran about in the passage to feed on the garbage cans which all the neighbors put in front of their attic doors. In summer, when you had to leave the door open, you heard them running about in the passage outside, making a small noise like crackling paper. They did not get into our room because my mother had nailed a strip of linoleum along the bottom of the door, the kind of linoleum rich people had in their houses. But lots of them got into the room of Señora Antonia, the drunkard, because it was next door to the lavatory and had no linoleum. Her cat ate them, and it made you feel sick, because when she crunched them they sounded like monkey-nuts.
Big rats from the stables used to get into the house and sometimes came up to the attics. In the stables they had many rat-traps and dogs of the ratter kind. In the mornings, the traps were taken out into the street, often with four or five live rats in them. Sometimes the neighbors and all the children of our street would make a circle, and they would open the traps and let loose the dogs to chase and kill the rats. At other times they poured paraffin over the rats and burnt them inside the wire traps, but only rarely because it made the whole street smell of burnt hair and roasted flesh. Once a rat bit a dog in the muzzle and got away. A piece was missing out of the dog’s nose after that. He belonged to Señor Paco, the one who had his behind stitched on to his nose. So the two of them looked alike, and the men at the printers’ called them the “pugs.”
We had arrived home, and my mother was very tired. Downstairs the milkman lent her a can to carry her milk, so that we had not to go up and down again for it, and she began at once to cook our supper. We were having fried potatoes with fresh sardines and an egg, and afterwards a little coffee, I with milk, my mother black and boiling hot. I never understood how she could stand it like that. While she was cooking, I sat down to read In Search of the Castaways by Jules Verne. From time to time, I stole one of the potato slices just out of the frying-pan. Then she fried the sardines. They smelled good. But my mother would not let me steal one of them, because they were few.
BY THE TIME my uncle and aunt had walked down from the third floor and reached our front door, I had already raced down the stairs, banged the glass door, got cursed for it by the concierge, run all the way to the entrance of the Café Español, told Angel I would be with him in a moment, and got back in time for my aunt to take me by the hand, so that I could walk the same way over again with them, very decorously.
The gas jet above our house-door burned with an open flame like a small slice of melon. A little farther on, the pipe from a water main, left without its cap, spilt over on the side-walk. I stepped on it and blocked its round mouth with my sole. The water spluttered out and splashed my aunt’s stockings, which made her furious.
It was a clear night with a moon of polished tin plate, which lit up the streets white on black. In the Calle del Arenal, the new street-lamps with their gas mantles seemed to fill the whole street with moonlight. The old jets in our own street looked like the pale yellow flames of matches on the white moonlit side, and on the black moonless side like blobs of quivering light.
When we came to the corner, Angel stopped crying out the evening papers and came up to bid a good evening to my uncle and aunt, cap in hand, his long straight hair falling round his pumpkin-shaped head; he moved like a little old man. He handed my uncle a paper and, as usual, Uncle told him to keep the small change. We winked at each other, Angel and I, because we knew how and when we were going to meet and play.
My aunt was annoyed when I played with Angel, and his mother did not like it during selling hours because then he left off crying out his papers. Our best time was when I had come to the café before the Heraldo was out. By the time the paper arrived all damp and smelly from the press, I had wrung permission out of my aunt to go with Angel, after having driven her into her worst temper. My uncle invariably cut short the dispute by saying: “Oh, let the boy run along!” I would take myself off while she went on grumbling to my uncle about how she was afraid of my being run over and how she hated people seeing me run round with a newspaper boy who was, after all, nothing but a street urchin, a ragamuffin who might teach me the Lord only knew what.
Angel would take the pile of newspapers, while his mother stayed in the doorway of the café shouting “Heraldo!”, and we started on our expedition through the almost deserted streets of the quarter. We ran, because you have to be on the spot if you want to sell your paper before your competitors arrive. Here and there, maids would open a front door and shout through the dark: “Here, an Heraldo!” Angel and I would run across the streets, to and fro from door to door, doubling back on our tracks twenty times. Papers for regular customers had to be delivered to their homes. Angel would enter the front door and run up the stairs, while I waited for him outside. More maids kept coming out of house-doors calling for the Heraldo, and then I had to go, as I was left with the armful of papers. If I had had to sell papers, I should have felt ashamed, but as I was not the newspaper-seller myself, it amused me. Most of the servant-girls knew that I was Angel’s friend, but all new maids were flabbergasted when they saw a newspaper boy in a starched white collar, silk bow tie, sailor blouse with gold braid, and shining patent leather boots. That was how my aunt made me dress up when we were going to the café, because all the people who met there were better class; and it was also one of her reasons against my going with Angel. In daytime, when I played in the street in my drill blouse and rope-soled sandals, she did not mind Angel, who wore a grown man’s jacket given him by one of his customers. It had been taken in to fit him, but it was still too big and the weight of the coppers had pulled the pockets out of shape, so that they dragged along the ground when he stooped.
Our rounds through the quarter by night were an adventure, like the adventures in books. While we were running along, cats would jump up and shoot across the street like bullets, scared by our pounding steps and more scared when we clapped our hands to make them run still faster. They would scramble up a wall and dive into a window. There were garbage heaps at the street corners; the gaunt dogs who burrowed there watched us and growled, so that we went out of their way. Sometimes they would run after us and we had to stop and drive them off with stones. On the steps of the Church of Santiago the tramps were getting their bed-chamber ready; children were bringing up theater bills torn from hoardings, which they used as mattresses. The men sat on the church steps while the boys made the beds. Sometimes they would go into a huddle and send out boys to keep watch on all the street corners. Then they would play cards and the boys had to warn them when the police or the night-watchman were coming. At other times they spread a newspaper on the ground with all the food people had given them, and everybody ate from it. They used their fingers or wooden spoons with a short handle, such as they had in jail or in barracks. In the winter they used to make a bonfire of straw and planks torn from hoardings. They sat round the fire and often the night-watchman or the police patrol would join them for a while to get warm. When it rained very heavily, the big wrought-iron gates of the church would be thrown open and they would sleep under the porch. We never stopped with them, because they often stole children.
Milkmen passed on galloping horses, their milk-cans clattering, and they seemed to us the cowboys of American tales. Sometimes we met the Viaticum. In front walked the priest in his embroidered cope, beside him the sacristan carrying a great square lantern. After them went the neighbors in double file, with burning candles in their hands. There were always a great many old women among them, and all the tramps who had been sleeping at the church gate went along too. They kept the candle-ends they had been given and later sold them to the wax-chandler opposite the church; they bought wine with the money. So the tramps were very pleased when anybody in the neighborhood was dying.
They did very much the same with timber from the hoardings: they tore it off and took it to a bakery in the Calle del Espejo. The master used it to kindle his oven and in exchange gave them great heaps of “crisps”—broken buns and biscuits. As everybody knew that the planks of the hoardings got stolen by the tramps, we boys of the neighborhood tore off planks, too, and took them to the same bakery. And the tramps got all the blame.
That night, the Heraldo was already out and there were no adventures. It was a pity, because the night was very beautiful.
In the entrance to the café, between the outer and the inner door, there was a square space, some two yards by two. Against one of the walls stood a red-painted cupboard with glass panes, full of matchboxes, cigars, packets of cigarettes, and bundles of toothpicks. In the lower half there were two shelves with piles of newspapers. The glass panes of the entrance door were plastered with illustrated papers and instalments of boys’ serials. Señora Isabel, Angel’s mother, sat on a low stool squeezed in between the cupboard and the outer door. In that corner she cooked meals on a spirit lamp, mended Angel’s trousers or her own vests, counted newspapers, and made toothpicks, whittling down small sticks of wood with a very sharp knife which pared off minute shavings like grated cheese. There was hardly room for her in the corner. But when her eldest daughter and her son-in-law visited her, with a baby-in-arms and two toddlers, they all packed themselves in there so as not to block the passage, and they all got in. Angel’s mother was a bundle of nerves; when she was alone she never stopped gesticulating, talking to herself and swearing. When she was angry, she was like a mad cat and Angel would not go near her.
As we passed by her, she greeted us and gave me a whole heap of matchboxes with colored pictures for my collection.
Most of our party was already sitting round our regular table, a table with a round, white marble top, which had room for twelve people: there was Don Rafael, the architect, who was eternally cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief he kept in his breast-pocket. When he got into a discussion, his handkerchief and his spectacles were constantly between his pocket, his nose, and his hands. Don Ricardo—Maestro Villa, the conductor of the Madrid Municipal Orchestra—short, pot-bellied, and always merry, was the only one to drink beer, while the others took white coffee. Then there was Don Sebastian, the father of Esperancita, a little girl who used to play with Angel and me, and Don Emilio, the parish priest of the Church of Santiago, a fat, hairy man; the hairs on his finger-joints were tight little curls which looked like ink-stains, and his stubble pricked my cheeks when he kissed me.
There was Doña Isabel and her sister, Doña Gertrudis. Doña Isabel was the mistress, and Doña Gertrudis her servant, because ever since she had been a widow, she had lived in her sister’s house and been supported by her. Doña Isabel wore bright silk dresses and always had a fur or a feather boa round her shoulders. The other dressed in mourning. Doña Gertrudis had a black scarf round her head, and Doña Isabel a huge hat with dyed plumes of the kind known as pleureuses which danced like a feather duster when she talked or moved her head. Doña Isabel had a round face and a sagging, lumpy skin. She used a lot of white powder with rouge on top of it, and she painted her eyes and lips. Her dresses were cut so low that it left her whole neck free, and her throat hung in a pouch like a pigeon’s crop. The face of Doña Gertrudis was like a church candle, long and yellow. The two sisters had a flat on the same floor as my uncle.
Finally, there were Modesto and Ramiro, the pianist and the violinist of the café; they were paid five pesetas a day, and got their supper and white coffee.
The cleverer of the two was Ramiro, the violinist. He could walk between the tables without using his stick, and when he went up to the piano no one could have told that he was blind. He recognized everybody by their voice and their step, and could tell false money with his fingers. I was very fond of him, but he made me afraid when he took off his dark glasses, because his eyes were like the white of an egg; he wore the spectacles so as not to frighten people. His hands were small and chubby and they seemed to search you. At times he would call me and pass his hands over my head, face, and body. When his fingers touched my eyelashes, nose, lips, ears, neck, and hair, it seemed to me as if his fingertips had tiny eyes which were looking closely into my skin. Afterwards, he used to tell me with great conviction that I was a handsome boy, and I believed him because he never made mistakes. I had two silk bow ties, exactly alike, both with little white spots, but one was blue and the other red; and Ramiro could tell with his fingers which one I was wearing.
Modesto had empty eye-sockets with glass eyes in them; when they looked at you, they made you uncomfortable because they did not move. He was very grave, Ramiro very gay. Modesto was tall and thin, and Ramiro short and round, so the two looked like a blind Don Quixote and a blind Sancho Panza. Modesto often petted me, but he never looked at me with his hands.
My aunt sat down beside Don Emilio, the priest, and began to talk to him about the church. The rest of the men were talking politics and my aunt would not let Don Emilio join in. Whatever she said, he always answered: “Yes, Doña Baldomera… No, Doña Baldomera,” until in the end she left him alone and started discussing the neighbors in our house with Doña Isabel. In the meantime, she was preparing my special cup of coffee, which was one of my aunt’s tricks to save money. The waiter brought a cup for my uncle, another for my aunt, and two glasses of water. I got a thick breakfast-cup of the kind used for chocolate. Manolo, the boy, came with the big coffee-pots and filled my uncle’s cup with black coffee and my aunt’s with milk. Then he poured a little coffee and a little milk into each of their glasses, and my aunt gave him a copper. She got to work with the two cups and two glasses until she had the same mixture in all of them; then she filled my big cup with white coffee and still had two full cups left for my uncle and herself.
As soon as the mixing was over, I gulped down my coffee and went off with Esperancita who had been pinching me from behind my chair because she wanted to play. We plunged into the labyrinth of screens, chairs, and sofas. The sofas ran along the walls, and we loved to scramble on all fours through the sunk lane between their backs and the tables. When we banged our heads against a table and got bruised, we stood up on a sofa to look at ourselves in the big mirrors. Our shoe-soles left marks on the seat and Señor Pepe, the head-waiter, came and scolded us. We tried to wipe out the marks by slapping the sofa, but clouds of dust rose up and our hands left red patches outlined in dusty white. Señor Pepe became angry and cleared away the dust with his napkin, without slapping.
At other times we scratched the red velvet the wrong way and drew letters and faces which we rubbed out by stroking down the pile with our palms. When we made our drawings, the little hairs of the velvet tickled our fingertips as if a cat were licking them, and they turned into a cat’s back when we smoothed them.
The manager of the café was watching us from behind the counter. We slipped away, up the small staircase to the billiard room, opened the green baize door and crept in.
I see it today with eyes I did not then possess:
A huge room with many windows along three of its walls and all the lights out. Yet, coming in through the windows on the one side, the white glare of the arc-lamps in their wire-screened globes, which frightened the moths with the splutters and sparks of their carbon and the sudden crackle of their mechanism, and from the other side the livid flares from the old gas jets in the Calle de Vergara with their hissing, melon-slice flames. In the middle of the room eight massive tables, their square shadows swaying with the shifting, varying lights, their varnish throwing sparks, the blotting-paper of their green cloth sucking in the rays. The long shadows of the window frames, sketching black crosses at broken angles on floor, tables, and walls. All asleep, all silent, and so resonant that a low word wakes murmurs in every corner and the gently pattering noise of a fleeing mouse startles us, as we stand timidly on the threshold. The padded door closes softly behind us.
The sight of the balls, glittering through the netting of their little sacks, encouraged us to carry on our adventure. The sound of the first balls knocking against each other broke the heavy silence, and we snapped out of our tension into mad canters round the tables, snatching all the balls from their pockets, and pouring our booty on to the central table which seemed to us the most dignified, the mother of all the tables. Running round and round its six elephant feet, we jumped through the weaving lights and dipped our hands into the living sea of balls which were running over the green cloth, lighting it up with white and red glints and banging their heads against each other with the dry rap of bones.
The sudden glare from the lamps in the room being switched on all at once, and the black sweep of the manager’s ferocious mustache caught us perched on the top of the green lawn and turned us to stone, while the last balls were still running out their course and knocking against their neighbors just when we wanted them to stop and be silent. We leapt from the table like monkeys in flight and rushed down the narrow staircase up which we had come on tip-toes, jumping the steps three at a time, pursued by the threats of the ogre. We tumbled into the café with faces scarlet from excitement and fright.
My mother had come. When we got near our table, Esperancita ran and hid behind the red curtain over the entrance. I went after her, and through the glass panes saw my mother talking with Angel’s mother and Señor Pepe, the waiter. Esperancita was in on the secret and we talked things over quickly. She ran out from behind the curtain towards the other door of the café, further down the room, and I followed her. Esperancita disappeared behind the curtain of the other door, and so did I, but instead of hiding there we ran out into the street and went round to the front entrance where the newspapers were. My mother was still there in the little lobby. We kissed and hugged each other, and I told her in a rush all about the trick we had invented so that I could come and kiss her without my aunt seeing it.
We ran back the same way we had come, and went on romping all over the café as though nothing had happened. But I explained to Esperancita once again why we so often had to act a little comedy:
“You see, my aunt gets very angry if she sees me kissing my mother. She wants me only to kiss her, and she doesn’t want me to love my mother at all. And when she’s angry she says I’m an ungrateful boy, because it’s she who’s keeping me, and then she has a row with my mother and says my mother’s behaving as if she was afraid of my being stolen from her. So if my mother and I want to kiss, we always hide.”
In the meantime my mother had come in and sat down beside my aunt. Pepe had brought her a cup and a little dish with sugar; I went to their table, just gave her a pat on the shoulder, said “Hullo!” and took one of her lumps of sugar. Then I ran away to go on playing. My aunt was pleased.
We found a set of dominoes on a table near by and began building houses with the stones. I could see my mother quietly drinking her coffee and my aunt talking away to Doña Isabel, probably the same old stories about our neighbors.
My mother was a very small woman, rather plump, with quick movements. Her skin was very fair, her eyes gray like a cat’s, and her brown hair had only a few white strands on the temples; she did not look her fifty-odd years. She was wearing a black skirt, a gray calico blouse, a striped kerchief on her head, and a striped apron.
My aunt was sixty years old. She had a black dress with embroidered flowers and a black veil over her white hair. Her face was old, but it looked like fine porcelain and she was proud of the natural pink of her cheeks and the silkiness of her hands. But my mother had hands as soft as my aunt’s and even smaller. Sometimes that annoyed my aunt who used to put cream on her hands and rub them with lemon and glycerine; she would tell my mother that she did not understand how anyone could keep such hands, working as my mother did.
My aunt was the mistress and my mother the servant, just like Doña Isabel and Doña Gertrudis. She came and sat down to drink her coffee with the others after she had cleared my uncle and aunt’s supper table, scrubbed the pots and pans and swept the dining-room and kitchen. Sometimes she would join in the general conversation, because the others liked her very much and kept asking her questions, but usually she kept silent and waited for an occasion to slip away and have a talk with Angel’s mother or Señor Pepe.
The party broke up at eleven o’clock and we went home, my aunt and I in front, my uncle and my mother behind. It was earlier than usual and we had missed our game with Angel who had just finished selling his papers and looked ruefully after us, for our going meant that he would be alone until closing time. We had to get up very early the next morning, because in the afternoon, my uncle, my aunt, and I were going into the country for the summer holidays. My mother was going to sleep in the flat that night. Although the coach only left in the afternoon, my aunt had to start packing and preparing the food already in the morning. She was sure not to leave us in peace all day with her restlessness. As usual, it would be my mother who would have to put up with her, because my uncle would take me along to see the changing of the guard in the morning and we would not come back until lunchtime. That was his method of getting away from her every Sunday.
When we got home, my cat and I drank my milk together on the dining-room table, as we did every night. My uncle sat down opposite us, while my aunt pottered round in the bedroom next door, preparing the night-light which also had to serve instead of a lamp for her Virgin. Then it suddenly occurred to me to say to my uncle:
“I want to sleep with my mother tonight, because we’re going away tomorrow.”
“All right, go to bed with her.”
My aunt appeared in the bedroom door and burst out: “The child will sleep in his own bed, just as he does every night!”
“But, my dear—” said my uncle.
“None of your ‘my dears’, and none of your ‘buts’! It’s better for the child to sleep alone.”
“But if the boy is going away tomorrow and wants to sleep with his mother for once, why can’t you let him? After all, doesn’t he sometimes sleep in our bed because you happened to have a fancy for it, and I’m sure he must sleep worse in a bed with two people than with one.”
My aunt bridled and began to scold: “I said ‘no,’ and ‘no’ it is! The boy would never have dreamed of wanting to sleep with his mother if she hadn’t put the idea into his head.” And she called shrilly for my mother: “Leonor, Leonor, the child will sleep in his own bed, because I want him to! There’s been quite enough pampering already, and the child gets his own way far too much.”
My mother, who did not know the reason for this to-do, came in looking baffled and said: “Well, his bed’s ready.”
At my mother’s quiet voice, my aunt sank into a chair and began to shed tears on to the table.
“You’re all trying to kill me by breaking my heart! You’re all in league to make me suffer! Even you”—she turned to my uncle—“you’re in the conspiracy with them. Of course, you say ‘yes,’ and then there’s nothing to be done about it. I know what it is—you’ve worked it out between you, and I, poor thing, have to swallow it and say nothing.”
My mother, tense with anger, took me by the arm and said: “Come along, now, say good night to your uncle and aunt, and go to bed.”
My aunt had another explosion:
“So that’s it! Everything’s settled! Well, the child will not go to his bed tonight, he will come to bed with me!”
My uncle banged his fist on the table and got up, furious: “The woman’s crazy and she’ll drive us all crazy.”
I got violently excited, clutched my mother’s skirts and shrieked: “I want to go to bed with my mother tonight!”
The tears and cries of my aunt redoubled, and in the end she got her way with the help of my mother, who restrained her own emotion and pushed me towards my aunt.
In their bedroom I wept, feeling deserted by my mother and hating my aunt who insisted on undressing me between sobs and cuffs, changing from bursts of tenderness, which smeared my face with tears and slavers, to attacks of rage in which she pinched and shook me. In the end my uncle lost what patience he had left and told her firmly to shut up. We went to bed, and I lay between the two. My aunt began to say her Rosary and I had to say it with her, while my uncle read the Heraldo by the light of a candle on his night-table. As usual, my aunt went to sleep before she came to the second decade of the Rosary; her mouth hung half open and showed the gap left by the two front teeth which were swimming in a glass on her night-table. After a while, I turned cautiously to my uncle and whispered:
“She’s asleep now, I want to go to my mother.”
My uncle placed a finger to his lips and very softly asked me to wait. He blew out the candle and we both lay in the semi-darkness of the night-light which threw fearful shadows on the ceiling. After a long while my uncle lifted me carefully out of bed, gave me a kiss and told me to go off without making a noise.
I crept along the passage into my mother’s room, next door to the kitchen, touching the bedclothes in the dark, and said that it was me, so that she should not be afraid. She asked me anxiously to go back. But when I told her that my uncle had helped me to get out, she made room for me in her bed. And there I lay with my back to her, rolled into a ball in the crook of her arm. The cat jumped on to the bed and butted his way under the top sheet, as he always did. The three of us stayed very quiet, so as to fall asleep.
A drop of water fell on my neck and the cat licked my face.
AN HOUR BEFORE the coach was to start, my uncle, my aunt, and I were already sitting in a corner of the taproom, beside us two suitcases and a basket with food and water bottles, for once on the road one could get nothing but well-water. My uncle took his thick silver watch with its tiny little key from his pocket, opened the case and showed the dial to my aunt:
“Now see how unreasonable you are! We’re an hour early.”
“Maybe, but at least I don’t have to worry.”
I went into the doorway of the inn where the coach was standing, still without its mules, the wheels cluttered with lumps of mud from the road. Many of the passengers were waiting there, leaning against the wall, baskets and saddle-bags stuffed with parcels at their feet. All were country people: a fat man, made still fatter by his saddle-bags; a little old woman with a blackish face; a big, stout woman with child, accompanied by a big and a little girl; and a few more men and women. I wondered which of them were going with us in the coach and which had come to see their people off. The grooms led the mules out of the gateway in pairs and harnessed them to the coach. The rear pair had to be backed into their place and were tied to the pole with a lot of tackle. It was interesting, to see how difficult it is for animals to go backwards.
As soon as the mules were harnessed, all the suitcases and parcels were put on the top of the coach and the people began to take their seats. Of course, my aunt had to be among the first to enter the coach and wanted my uncle and me to get in as well. My uncle left her to grumble all by herself and took me to the confectioner’s shop to buy sweets for my cousins in the village. We bought a lot of green peppermint drops which stain your fingers like wet paint and burn your tongue because they are so strong. But the country people like them best of all. We also bought two pounds of paciencias, small round biscuits the size of a copper, of which they gave us a big bagful. We took our parcels to my aunt who at once started to scold because we would not get in; she was afraid the coach would leave without us. My uncle paid no attention to her and went with me to the tavern, to drink beer with lemon fizz.
Among all the people in the tavern, my uncle was the only gentleman from Madrid. Everybody was in country clothes except us: my uncle had his black alpaca suit, his starched shirt, and bowler hat, my aunt wore her embroidered black dress and black mantilla, and I my white sailor suit. That morning my uncle had had a row with my aunt because of our clothes. He wanted to put on an old jacket and an old pair of trousers, and to travel in a cap and carpet slippers, and he wanted me to go in my blouse and rope-soled sandals. But she protested and said that, thank God, we were not beggars. And as usual, she had her way. My uncle, who was stout, already had to push a silk handkerchief under his stiff collar to be less bothered by sweating, and from time to time he took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his bald head. With his starched shirt front, cuffs, and collar, he was cursing the “stupid ideas” of my aunt, as he said. If I had been in his place, I thought, I would have dressed just as I liked, and if she had been angry, she would have had to swallow it. But he was so good that he put up with all her whims rather than annoy her.
When we entered the coach at long last, it was not easy to squeeze in. All the seats except my uncle’s were occupied, and we had to push through all the people to get there. I had to stand between my uncle’s knees and we waited for the coach to start. The heat was unbearable. The people were wedged together and their heads almost touched the low roof of the coach. On the top, the handyman was tying the bundles fast and loading up the last pieces of luggage; and every step of his shook down dust on our heads and sounded as though the boards were going to crack. The coach was completely full and the groom for the mules had to get on to the left mule in the lead, because three women went on the box-seat beside the driver, packed as close as sardines. Two men, who only wanted to go to Campamento, were standing on the footboard; they paid fifty centimos fare.
The coach screeched while we were rolling down the steep slope of the Calle de Segovia. The brakes were put on so hard as almost to stop the wheels from turning, and still the coach nearly ran into the mules. It sometimes happened that the coach overturned half-way down the hill and the journey came to an end.
After crossing the Segovia Bridge, we went uphill again along the Extremadura Road. At the Segovia Bridge, Madrid ended and the country began. To call it country was only a manner of speaking, though, because there was nothing but a few shriveled little trees along the road, without leaves and covered in dust, fields of yellow grass with black patches from bonfires, and a number of shacks built by the rag-pickers out of the sheet-metal from old tins, with big garbage dumps outside the door, which you could smell from the road.
My aunt did what she always did on a journey. As soon as the coach began to move, she crossed herself and started saying the Rosary. Her beads were of olive-wood which had come from Palestine, from the Garden of Olives, and had been blessed by the Pope. At home she had another rosary of silver beads, and a third one of agates which she had brought from France, from Lourdes; its cross had a small crystal set in the middle, and when you looked through it you saw Our Lady in the Grotto.
The road was full of ruts and dust. The coach went bumping along and the dust came in through the open windows so that we were enveloped in a cloud. When you moved your jaws your teeth chewed sand. But the sun was so fierce that we could not have shut the windows without getting stifled. One of the women felt sick. She knelt on the seat and stuck her head out of the window to vomit. In the intervals between vomiting, her head bounced up and down in the window like the head of a stuffed doll. By the time we arrived she would have spat out the lining of her bowels, for she started being sick twenty minutes after we left Madrid, and we still had over four hours to go.
I began to feel hungry. With all that fuss and hurry not to be too late for a seat in the coach, I had not had a bite since lunch. I said so to my aunt, and she got cross with me. She told me to wait until she had said her Rosary, but she was only half-way through. Opposite us sat a fat man. He had taken out a loaf of bread with a tortilla—a potato-omelette—inside, sandwich-fashion. It smelled very good. He kept on cutting off pieces with his clasp-knife and eating them, and it made me ravenously hungry to watch him. I would have loved to beg a bite off him. Again I asked my aunt for something to eat, this time in a loud voice; surely the fat man would let me have a piece of his tortilla if she did not give me anything. And I wanted to make her so angry that she would refuse to let me eat, for she had taken nothing but bread and chocolate along, and what I wanted was the omelette. She did get angry. She pinched my thigh and gave me nothing. The fat man cut off a large chunk of bread and a slice of tortilla the size of half a brick, and offered them to me. My uncle let me take them and scolded my aunt: “Must you always make a fool of yourself?” Then she produced the bread and chocolate, but I did not want them any more. The tortilla was fine, and the man gave me a few slices of dry sausage on top of it. I enjoyed it even more because I had got my way and my uncle had taken my side. He got out the leather bottle with the wine for our supper, accepted the tortilla himself, and so the three of us ate and drank. The two men started discussing me; the fat man took my uncle to be my father.
He told us he had a son who was studying law in Madrid, but had failed in his exams, and now was cramming to have another go at them in September. My uncle said that I was a very good scholar, and the fat man answered that his boy was a young rascal who cost him all the money he was earning from his farm. Then the two went on to talk of the crops. The man had a good deal of land in a village near Brunete and knew our whole family there; he had known my uncle’s father and grandparents.
After the row about the food, my aunt had started telling the woman with the little girl, who was sitting opposite her, all about the worry and annoyance I caused her. I did not want to hear what she said, because otherwise I would have had to answer back and tell all about how she kept nagging me.
Our coach was going downhill into the valley of the Guadarrama, a river very much like the Manzanares, with hardly any water, nothing but a bed full of sand and a little stream running through rushes. The road made many bends and twists between the town of Móstoles and the river; there we had to cross a very old wooden bridge, so old that the passengers had to get out of the coach to lessen its weight. And then up another long slope, ending in Navalcarnero.
In the market square of Móstoles there stood a half-finished monument hidden under scaffolding and white sheets. It was a statue of the Mayor of Móstoles, and was meant to be inaugurated the following year, 1908, the Centenary of the War of Independence. That Mayor of Móstoles had been in office when Napoleon tried to conquer Spain. He was an old fellow in a coffee-brown cloak with tiers of shoulder-capes, a big, wide-brimmed hat, and a tall staff. When he heard the French were in Madrid, he called the town-crier and gave him a proclamation to read to all the people of the town. And in it he, the Mayor of Móstoles, declared war on Napoleon. Of course it was foolish to think that a little place like that could make war against the armies of Napoleon. But if Napoleon had come to Móstoles and the Mayor had got hold of him all by himself, he would certainly have beaten him to death with his mayor’s staff. In my History of Spain there was a picture of the Mayor reading out his proclamation, and a portrait of Napoleon in his greatcoat with white lapels, white trousers, and his hand thrust between the buttons of his coat.
Father Joaquín, my history master, a very tall Basque, told us that Napoleon could not conquer Spain because there were many people like the Mayor of Móstoles who were not afraid of him. In Madrid, two artillery lieutenants, Daoiz and Velarde, took a cannon and put themselves at the head of the people. In Saragossa, a woman, Agustina of Aragon, egged on the men and started firing off a cannon against the French. In Bailén, all the goadsmen—the herdsmen who kept watch over the wild bulls, riding on a horse and carrying a goad—got together and went out against the cuirassiers. They had nothing but their wooden goads with steel points, while the cuirassiers had strong lances, a plated steel cuirass and a steel helmet with a feather bush. The cowboys just wore their jackets and their flat-brimmed hats, and there were far less of them than of the cuirassiers. But they gave Napoleon’s cuirassiers such a thrashing that an Englishman called Wellington, who came to Spain to help us, was quite taken aback. The people in his country would not believe him when he told them about it.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a very small child when Napoleon’s soldiers came to those villages. The French killed children with their bayonets, sticking them into their bottoms. So my grandmother’s parents put her in a basket, let her down the well of the house, which had a vaulted side-shaft, and hid her there. Her mother went down to give her the breast whenever the soldiers were not looking. My grandmother was ninety-nine years old now. My brother and sister and I called her “Little Grandmother,” for she was a tiny, wrinkled old woman, her face and hands covered with coffee-colored spots. Our other grandmother we called “Big Grandmother,” because she was much taller than a man and very big. We were going to meet her in Navalcarnero.
The mules were changed at the coaching-inn, and in the meantime the people had supper, either their own food or a meal from the kitchen of the inn. We had hake fried in batter and pork fillets with fried red peppers, and my uncle invited the fat man to eat with us, because we had eaten up his tortilla. We also had black coffee which my aunt had taken along in a bottle wrapped in a thick layer of newspapers, so that it was still hot.
Big Grandmother sat down with us and lifted me on to her lap. It was like sitting in an easy-chair. She and my aunt began to chat, and as usual, they soon quarreled. When both were little girls, they had played together in their village; they still called each other the first thing that came into their minds. My aunt was a bigot, and my grandmother an atheist. When they were both about twelve years old, their parents sent them to Madrid into service. My grandmother served in many houses before she married. My aunt started as a maid with a very old, very pious lady and stayed with her until she married my uncle. It was being with her old mistress which turned her into a bigot for good.
The two were different even in their manner of eating. My aunt ate tiny morsels, and my grandmother tucked in as much as the fat man, who stuffed as though he had never eaten the tortilla and the loaf of bread. And during the meal they discussed me.
“It’s high time the boy got a bit of fresh air and stopped being tied to your apron-strings,” said my grandmother. “You’re turning him into a ninny with all your priests and prayers. Just look what a booby-face he has! It’s a good job he’s going to stay with me for a few days. I’ll soon shake him awake!”
“Well, there’s nothing the matter with the child,” my aunt bridled. “The only trouble with him is that he’s very naughty, and that’s why he doesn’t put on weight. As to his education, I can’t imagine what you can have against it. Except, of course, that you would like the boy to become an unbeliever like yourself. It would be better for you if you remembered your age, as I do, and that you will go straight to hell if you carry on like this.”
“All the better, it’s warmer there. And anyhow, all good-humored people go to hell, and all tiresome bigots like you go to heaven. And I can tell you frankly, I prefer to be with amusing people. You simply smell of wax.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re always saying blasphemous things, and you’ll come to a very bad end.”
“I’ll be damned! If I say anything blasphemous, it’s because somebody’s trodden on my corn in the street, or because I pinch my finger in a door. After all, one’s a woman, and not a carter! What I am not, and what I don’t want the boy to become is a hysterical woman like yourself, who can’t get away from the skirts of the priests and sacristans!”
My aunt started to sob, and then my grandmother felt quite miserable. In the end, they made it up and my grandmother said:
“Now, look here, Baldomera, of course I know that you’re very kind and that the boy has a very good home with you, but all the same, you’re turning him into a fool. You go on praying as much as you like, but let the boy play. Because that’s what you want, isn’t it,” she added, turning to me, “to play?”
I did not want to make my aunt even more annoyed with me, so I said that I liked going to church very much. And then my grandmother exploded:
“You’re a sissy, that’s what you are!” And she squeezed me in her big arms and crushed me against her breasts, and it was as if I was being smothered by a feather-bed. I felt hurt and said nothing, but two big tears ran down my face. And then my grandmother lost her head. She took me in her arms, kissed me, hugged me, shook me like a doll, and made me promise to come and stay with her in September and to give her my word that I wasn’t angry with her. She took me along to the bar-table of the tavern, filled my pockets with monkey-nuts and roasted chick-peas, bewildered me with a stream of questions, and only calmed down after I had assured her again and again that I was not angry, but that I wasn’t a sissy either, and that, if she called me a sissy again, I would not visit her at Navalcarnero.
We arrived in Brunete at ten o’clock that night. I was completely worn out and only wanted to go to bed.
The village was a heap of houses, deep black shadows on very white walls gleaming with the same light as the moon itself. People were sitting or lying in the doorways to get a breath of air, a few chatting, but most of them asleep. When we walked through the village to the house of Uncle Hilario, my Uncle José’s brother, the people got up to welcome us, and some offered us doughnuts and brandy. I didn’t want any, the only thing I wanted was to sleep. The night watchman of the village came up to us, slapped my uncle on the shoulder, patted me and said:
“So, you’re a man now!”
Then he stood on tip-toe, stretching his neck like a cock about to crow, put one hand to his mouth and shouted:
“Eleven o’ the clock, and clear!”
THE SUNLIGHT, speckled with flies, streamed through the small square window over the head of my bed. The room smelled of village, of sundried grain in the corn-loft opposite, of furze burning in the kitchen, of clinging reek from the chicken-coop and of dung in the stables, and of the mud walls of the house, baked dry by the sun and covered with whitewash.
I dressed and went down the stairs, massive logs hewn with the adze.
The ground floor was a huge room floored with small river pebbles; beside the doorway were the water-racks which carried eight big-bellied pitchers of white clay, beaded with moisture; their linen cover had a centerpiece with initials a span long, embroidered in red wool. In the middle of the room stood the table of stout pine planks, white from being scrubbed with sand and big enough to seat the whole family and the farm-hands, some twenty in all. Seeds which had to be sorted out were spread out on it, and when Aunt Braulia ironed the household linen, her ironing blanket covered no more than one of its corners. Along the walls stood a great number of chairs of plaited straw, a heavy mahogany commode, and a chest with a rounded lid covered by a tawny-haired hide and studded with gilt nails and a lock like an old door knocker. Above the chest was the cuckoo-clock, its brass weights hanging from gilded chains, its pendulum running from one side to the other without ever bumping against the wall, a little bunch of flowers painted in each of the four corners of the wooden dial, and above it, the little window of the cuckoo, a small wooden bird which chanted the hours and half-hours. When the hand of the clock was about to reach the full hour, it stopped as though it had found a pebble in its path. Then it made a sudden jump on the dial and one of the weights fell down very fast, setting the whole machinery turning so that it rattled like a box full of nails. The din frightened the cuckoo; he opened the door of his little house and began to sing, curtseying and stretching out his neck to see whether this time the weight had not got smashed on the floor. When he had sung the hour he went back and shut the door until the half-hour, when he came out, but only gave a single cry in a surly way, as if he had been disturbed for something silly which was not worth his while.
The cuckoo-clock always reminded me of the village night-watchman, and the night-watchman reminded me of the cuckoo-clock. The man walked to and fro in the village street the whole night, watching the clock on the church tower and the sky. Every time the clock struck the hour, he had to cry it out and announce the weather: “Two o’ the clock, and clear… Two o’ the clock, and cloudy… Two o’ the clock, and raining.” In times of drought, when people were afraid of losing their crops, neighbors would wake each other up as soon as the night-watchman sang out the hour and “raining.” They would go and stand under their doorways to get wet, and some would go out to their fields to make sure that the water was falling on them and not only on the fields of their neighbors.
At the far end of the room there was the hearth, with the larder on one side and the door to the stables on the other. The hearth was a circle of tiles, flanked by two stone benches. Above it was a bell-shaped chimney lined with soot; you could see the sky through the hole at the top. On the wall hung the pots and pans, ancient copper and iron pots, blue-and-white Talavera jars and kitchen irons, spits, grills, and so on. The wide shelf of the mantelpiece was stacked with dishes, bowls, and crocks, in their middle a big, round platter like a sun. It was an earthenware platter half an inch thick, with dirty blue flowers on a greenish-yellow ground and a rim of metallic blue. This was the oldest piece of crockery in the kitchen. On the back it had a curious sign like a tattoo mark and an inscription in blue old-fashioned lettering which said “Talavera 1742.”
Aunt Braulia used to scour her metal things with lye made from dung ash. Her iron looked like silver and her copper like gold. The ash came from the hearth, for the fire was a big heap of dried dung with a heart of embers smoldering day and night. If you thrust a shovel through the crust you saw a ball of fire red as a pomegranate. You stuck the iron point of a huge pair of bellows into its middle, blew on it, and a flame would leap up. Then you threw furze into the flame to keep it burning, and put the three-legged frying-pan on top of the fire. When you had finished that part of your cooking, you closed the fire-hole with the shovel and nothing was left but the yellow, smoking heap of dry dung and the ring of pots round it, in which the stews were slowly simmering. Red sausages and black puddings were hung inside the bell of the chimney to be dried and cured by the smoke.
When I came down there was nobody in the room but Aunt Braulia, who was sitting on a low stool beside the fire. The first thing she said was that I must be hungry and she would get me my breakfast at once. They were all crazy about my food whenever I stayed in the village. They had got it into their heads that they had to stuff me and fatten me up. But in reality there were far less things to be had in Brunete than in Madrid. In Brunete, the only fruit was grapes from the grape vines on the house walls, and they were not yet ripe. The only meat they ever saw was lamb and pork from the last slaughtering, laid in pickle or smoke-cured. I knew beforehand the kind of meals I would get: fried eggs for breakfast, a stew of chick-peas with bits of red sausage, bacon and mutton at midday, and potatoes boiled with a piece of meat or dried cod in the evening. Occasionally a man with a donkey brought a few cases of sardines or hake from Madrid, but not in the summer, for the fish would have gone bad on the journey. So the only fish they got in the village were dried-up sardines out of the grocer’s barrel, their eyes and bellies yellow with oil, or dried salt cod. There were no green vegetables. Brunete lies in a dry plain without trees or water, where nothing grows but wheat, barley, chick-peas, and vetch. They had to fetch their water with donkeys from two miles away, from a ravine which was just a kind of crack in the ground, petering out in the far distance towards the Sierra.
For food I preferred Méntrida and Navalcarnero to Brunete, above all Méntrida, where my mother’s people lived and where I was going to stay after Brunete. Méntrida had orchards and gardens, game, partridges, and rabbits, and there were fine fish and eels in the river near by, the Alberche. They also got fish by train from Madrid. And the village always had plenty of beautiful grapes and tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. In a place called Valdiguera there were hundreds of very old fig-trees which had round, fat figs with bright red flesh and a taste of honey; people called them melares, “honey-sweets.” Every family owned two or three of those fig-trees, and when I came to visit them, they would all invite me to pick myself figs early in the morning when the chill of the night was still on them.
Méntrida had all those things because it lies in the valley of a little river flowing into the Alberche, which has a strip of poplar-grown meadowland with many garden plots.
Brunete had a few wells, but they were very deep and the water was brackish. In Méntrida, every house had a well of its own, and many had to make a ditch from the well to the street, because the water would overflow in winter. It was very cold, sweet water.
Navalcarnero was different again. It lies on the top of a hill and in the town itself there is nothing, but its fields, which all lie on the slope down to the river Guadarrama, produce grapes, fruit, and vegetables as well. Moreover it is so near to Madrid that it gets most of the things to be had in town.
Yet with all that, it was Aunt Braulia who prided herself most on her cooking. Other people in Brunete had nothing but an onion and bread in the morning before going to work in the fields, a gazpacho—bread, onions, and cucumber in vinegar and water with very little oil—at midday, and a stew in the evening, made just of chick-peas and a slice of bacon. They tasted meat only two or three times a year. But Uncle Hilario, Aunt Braulia’s husband and the eldest brother of my Uncle José, had become one of the richest men in the village.
There had been six brothers, and all escaped when lots were drawn for the call-up, except my Uncle José. At that time, conscript soldiers stayed in barracks eight years. When Uncle José was called up, he was just a yokel like the others and could not read or write. They had been a very poor family, as there were so many children; they only got chick-pea and bacon-rind stews, and at that the poorest chick-peas which they had kept back for seed, because the picked ones fetched more money and they sold them. In barracks, Uncle José learned to read and write. In the meantime his parents died and his brothers worked their land in common and married. Although my Uncle José had left his share of the land to them, they were starving, what with all the wives and the children who soon arrived. In those years it sometimes happened that they had no money to hire mules or donkeys to till their fields, and then the men and women would draw the plow. Aunt Braulia had drawn it many times. But meanwhile Uncle José, who had no intention of going back to the plow, had become a Sergeant and after his discharge he got a post in the War Ministry, because he had beautiful handwriting and was good at figures. Then he began to save up money and to lend it to his brothers, so that they had no more need to beg loans from the village usurer to whom they had to pay a peseta for every five he lent them. And after the wheat harvest they no longer sold the grain to the usurer either, because my uncle sold it in Madrid for them. They all shared in the profits. Then came the Cuban war. My uncle had lent money to other people in the village as well. One day he went there, called all his relations and the older men of the village together and told them that, if they let him have their wheat, he would sell it for them to the army people in Madrid at a much higher price than they got from the usurer. Then they became rich, and my uncle gave them enough money to buy more land and mules. They all worked together under Uncle Hilario, but it was my Uncle José who was in command. The other half of the village lands belonged to the people who were in debt to the usurer.
The usurer was a distant relative of ours, Don Luis Bahía, who had left the village when he was a little boy and later became a millionaire through the Jesuits. He was one of their agents; my Uncle José said he himself really had no money, and the money he lent to people belonged to the Jesuits, who got hold of the land in that way.* I knew him from Madrid, for he had dealings with my uncle and I went along to his office a few times; but he scared me. He was old, bald, with a big head and a very fleshy nose curved like the beak of a parrot, and he watched you out of very cold eyes. His skin was like yellow wax. He always wore a black suit, with black office-sleeves up to his elbows, and a round silk cap with a tassel. His office was papered a dark green and the crocheted net curtains on his balcony windows were green too, so that the whole room was in darkness and his face looked like the head of a slimy beast in its lair. Once, in Méntrida, I had seen a big toad sitting among the water weeds, and I thought of him.
I ate the fried eggs and red sausage Aunt Braulia put before me, and then went out to the threshing-floors.
The village was a single street through which the main road passed. The fields, already cut, were yellow with stubble. In a place where the ground rose lay the threshing-floors. They were flat circular spaces paved with round cobbles, which had to be swept very clean before the sheaves were spread out. Then a stout plank studded with spiky flint-stones, a kind of harrow, dragged by a mule, went round and round the carpet of wheat ears, separating the grain from the straw. The boys rode on the plank, one to guide the mule and all the others as a game. We would jostle and push each other from the rocking plank and tumble on to the mattress of straw. The only risk was of falling in front of the plank and being run over by the harrow. This had happened to one of my small cousins, and it left scarred lines all over his back as though he had been tattooed by Indians.
Farther away on the threshing-floors, men winnowed the crushed straw, tossing it into the air against the wind, so that the chaff was blown away and the heavy grains left. We boys ran into the cloud of chaff, rowing with our arms and shutting our eyes, and our skin got full of tiny needles which stuck and would not let us sleep at night. Then we rolled in the hills of clean wheat until the hard grains filled our ears, mouth, and nostrils, and slipped into our socks and pockets. At least, that was what happened to me. But my cousins’ skin was so tanned by the sun and dust that the straw needles did not prick them, and they had neither socks nor sandals, for they all went barefoot, and no pockets either, such as I had in my blouse. They wore nothing but a shirt and a pair of knickers tied with string round their middle. What bothered me most was the sun. During the first days in the country my skin always went pink, my nose and cheeks peeled, and I kept on changing my skin like a lizard, until I was nearly as brown as my cousins by the time I went back to Madrid. But I never went as brown as Uncle Hilario.
Uncle Hilario was a tall old man with large bones, very much dried-up. He had a completely bald head full of lumps, with a wen on top which looked like a plum; but the skin of his skull was so dark you hardly noticed that he had no hair at all. The skin at the back of his neck was coarse and dry, and seamed by deep wrinkles which looked as if they had been carved with a knife. He used to shave on Thursdays and Sundays, as priests do, and then the shaved part of his face was so much whiter than the rest of his head that it looked as though it had been rubbed with emery paper. Sometimes he took one of my hands, which were rather soft and thin, laid it on one of his own big, broad hands with broken nails, and made a bewildered face. Then he would press my hand between both of his, and I imagined what would happen if he were to rub his hands: he would skin my hand with the hard, calloused lumps on his palms. The wood of the plow-handle shone like the varnished rails of our staircase at home, because Uncle Hilario had rubbed his hard palms over it so often.
At noon the church clock struck twelve, and we all went back to the house to eat. Aunt Braulia had laid the table and put a deep dish in the middle, into which she poured stew from an iron pot over a hundred years old. It had been burned by the fire until it looked like black porous clay. On each side of the table stood a big, long-spouted flagon of wine, but only my uncle, my aunt, and I had glasses. The others drank from the free jet, holding the flagon at arm’s length and tipping the spout. It was the same with the food. The six children all ate from one bowl. The grown-ups ate from the big dish. But as we were there, they had put plates for the three of us, and for Uncle Hilario and Aunt Braulia. The children and farm-hands ate what was left over when we had been served.
After the meal it was too hot to go back to work at once, and all took a short siesta. Some simply lay down on the stones in the doorway which was very cool because the entrances from the street and from the stable were both covered with a thick curtain, so that the sun was shut out but a current of air let through. And the two stone benches by the fire were very cool, for they were in the strong draft that swept up through the chimney.
At two the men went back to the fields, but they left me behind because the sun was too strong for me while I was still not used to it. So nobody woke me, until I wakened by myself at five o’clock.
Both my aunts were standing in the doorway with three other women, telling all the stories of the village since they had been young. I would have liked to play, but my cousins were working now and I was afraid of going out into the street. As there was not a tree in the village and all the houses were white, the street was like an oven and even the stones were too hot to be touched. So I made a voyage of discovery all round the house.
In the corn-loft, which the village people simply called “the loft,” were three big heaps, wheat, barley, and vetch, piled up to the rafters. There were big, dense spiders’ webs, and for a time I amused myself catching flies. I tore their wings off and threw the flies into the spiders’ webs.
A fly got entangled in the web, and the spider stuck her head out of her hidey-hole. After a short while she came running out, her body like a black chick-pea slung high on legs like bent wires. She wrapped a leg or so round the fly and carried it off. When she was running across her web, I thought she was going to jump on me and bite me. I felt sick and scared, so I took a broom and started to smash up all the cobwebs. From one of them a fat yellow spider with a body like a boiled clam fell on to the floor, ran along the boards and came very near to my feet. I stamped on her and ran down the ladder of the loft. Downstairs I wiped my shoe-sole on the hearth stones. Some bits of hairy legs came off it, still jerking.
There were swallows’ nests on the rafters near the doorway. I put a chair on the chest and climbed up to see one of them from close to. I wondered how the Chinese were able to eat swallows’ nests; they were nothing but small bowls of hard mud. Inside they were lined with wheat straw. Nobody would have hurt a swallow, for the swallows eat vermin in the fields, and when Christ was crucified, the swallows picked thorns out of His brow.
Once my Uncle José caught a swallow and tied a thin silver wire round one of her legs, and she came back the next year. But after that she never came back again. She had probably died in the meantime, for swallows have a short life. But storks live very long. It was because of the story of the village stork that Uncle José had tried to find out about the swallow.
On the roof of the church there was a stork’s nest like a heap of firewood. Once the priest who was in the village at the time, a very old man who used to collect wild insects, caught a stork and put a big copper ring with the inscription “Spain” round one of his legs. When the stork came back the next year, he had round his other leg a silver ring with letters nobody could read; but a professor who came from Madrid specially to see it said they were in Arabic and read “Istanbul,” which meant a province in Turkey. Then the priest tied a little ribbon with the national colours to the ring, and the stork came back with a red ribbon instead. That stork died in Brunete, and the priest kept the two rings and seven red ribbons in the sacristy of his church.
There were other birds in Brunete too, but none of them could be eaten. There were the black-and-white magpies which liked to walk about in the road, stepping like little women. There were the crows, a smaller kind of raven, which came in flocks and called “ca-ca-ca-ca.” They turned up when a dead mule had been thrown into the ravine, and ate it. For whenever a mule or donkey died in the village it was taken out to the ravine where the spring was and thrown into a deep hollow there. This hollow was far away from the spring and from the village, but I went there once, and it was full of white skeletons of mules and donkeys. The crows were sitting round the ravine and cackling. They were like malicious old women grousing and grumbling. When you came near they rose into the air and kept flying in circles over your head, cawing and calling until you went away.
There was still another kind of bird, the bats. They came out in the dusk and began to fly through the village street and to bang against the house walls because they were white. We boys hunted them with a tablecloth or other white cloth tied to two sticks which we held over our heads. When the bat bumped against the white cloth, we clapped the sticks together, and the bat was caught in the folds. Then the bats were nailed to a wall by their wings. Their wings were like the thin fabric of an umbrella, but hairy, and tore without bleeding, as easily as an old rag; their body looked like a mouse with a little pig’s snout and pointed ears, like the devil’s. When they were wrapped in their wings, they seemed old women in big shawls, and when they were hanging asleep from the rafters, they seemed little children such as the storks carry in their bills in fairy-tales.
When the bats were stuck on a wall, the men used to light a cigarette and make them smoke it. The bats got drunk with the smoke and made funny movements with their nose and belly and eyes, which filled with water. We laughed a lot. But when I saw them nailed to the wall, drunken with smoke, I was sorry for them and I thought they were a bit human, like a baby that has slipped out of its swaddling clothes, with its little tummy naked. And once I tried to explain to the people what I had learned at school: that the bats eat vermin. But they laughed at me and said they were foul beasts which sucked the blood of sleeping people, biting them behind the ears. And they said a girl had died that way; or rather, not quite died—but she had grown whiter and whiter, with no blood left in her, and nobody knew what was the matter with her until they found a bat in her bed, and a small drop of blood behind her ear. They burned the bat and gave the girl its ashes to eat mixed with wine, on an empty stomach. And she got well. For this reason, they killed all the bats they could, so they said.
But when they grew tired of torturing a bat, one of the lads tore it from the wall, and the poor beast lay on the gutter stones, moving the tatters of its thin wings and wrinkling its little nose, and I could not believe that it had ever been capable of killing anyone.
Brunete was a boring village. Its fields had no trees, and no fruit, and no flowers, and no singing birds, and men and children were rough and taciturn. Now, when the wheat was harvested and they had made some money, was the only time when they had a little fun, at the fairs. But they were the poorest fairs I knew. A few traders set up stalls in the market square, lighted by small oil lamps or candles, where they sold trash for two coppers. But nobody bought anything, so they used to raffle it for what they could get, which was the only way to get rid of their stuff. A fireworks-man came to the fair and let off fifteen or twenty rockets in front of the church every night between ten and twelve, that was all; only on the very last day he lighted five or six Catherine wheels.
The only things that amused those people were the bulls. And even this amusement showed the kind of brutes they were.
The village square was unpaved, full of ruts, with an iron lamppost on a stone base in the middle. Round this plaza people would draw up their carts on the eve of a bullfight; the shaft of each cart was riding on the bottom planks of the next and all of them were roped together so that they should not slide apart. This was a sort of barrier and a gangway with an uneven floor, where people could stand. The village lads and the children would squat between the wheels, in reach of the bull’s head, and from there they would watch the fight or sally to take part in it. The bulls were kept penned up in a blind alley opening into the square, where the butcher had his corral. It was called Christ Alley.
The fiesta started on the first day of the fair with what they called the “Bull of the First Drop,” because he was let loose almost at dawn, at the time when the men took their early morning glass of spirits. The carts filled with women, old men, and children who shouted when the bull came out—a bull-calf, good enough to be played by the village lads.
At first the little bull attacked and threw the lads. But he was so small and young that they managed to hold him by the horns, drag him to the ground, kick him with their heavy boots and beat him with their sticks. At eleven in the morning he reeled on his legs and gave no more fight, but fled from the gang of lads and boys who by then all dared to come out into the plaza. He backed against the wheels of the carts, but from there they pricked at him with knives and the old men held their burning cigar butts against his haunches to make the beast attack again in blind rage. And so it went on till noon.
We watched from the balcony of the Town Hall, where we stood with the mayor, the doctor, the apothecary, and the priest. The mayor and the priest were both fat men, they roared with laughter and slapped each other on the back as they pointed out each detail to one another.
At four in the afternoon the real bulls began. First the village lads fought two young bulls which had learned cunning in other village bullfights and tossed the boys against the carts as though they wanted to avenge the bull-calf of the morning. They stayed in the ring a long time until there was no one left who cared to brave them. Then they were driven back into the corral, and the “bull of death” was released.
He had to be killed by a team of four maletillas, torero-apprentices who went round the villages fighting bulls, and starving. As they did not come from this village, the mayor had bought a huge old bull with enormous horns, taller than any of the little bull-fighters. The poor lads cowered when he came into the square and they saw his bulk, but the village people began to shout and some of the young men jumped into the ring, brandishing their sticks.
It was a pitiful thing to see those lads in their shabby, patched-up bullfighter’s costume, its gold spangles tarnished or missing, running round the bull’s head in little spurts and flicking their cape under his nose, only to flee, and then to clamber up the lamppost when they were driven away with sticks from the cart barrier. But there was worse to come.
The bugle of the band sounded the banderilla tune, and the public bellowed with joy. For now it was not enough to make little dashes at the bull. Now the banderillas had to be placed, and that meant being at the very horns of the bull. And the little toreros knew only too well that their hope of gain lay in this feat, and in the killing.
It was the custom to dedicate each pair of banderillas to one of the rich men of the place. Then, if they had been placed well, that is to say, in the nape of the bull’s thick neck, the rich man would shell out two duros—ten pesetas—or even five duros, and when the team made the round of the carts to collect, people would fill the cape with big coppers and one or the other silver coin thrown in. If the banderillas were not placed, there was no money, and if all banderillas failed, they usually got stones instead of cash.
The lean and hungry little torero takes up his stand at the far end of the plaza. He turns his pallid face and looks back distrustfully at the sticks of the village lads threatening his back, some with a spike and some with a knife tied to their points; and he turns again in panic to look at the savage beast in front of him up to whose horns he must get, so as to raise his arms, stretch his belly and chest in a single movement, and drive home the be-ribboned sticks before the horns are driven into his own body.
And there is the “pass of death.” The matador is as a rule a young lad of seventeen or eighteen, more suicidally inclined than his comrades, with the face of a mystic. He needs an inspired skill to fight bulls in those villages. If he were to kill the bull by a clean sword thrust, so that it is felled without having to be finished off, the people would feel defrauded. He must play the bull for a long time, he must thrust to kill, not once but many times, with art and courage. He must not jab at the bull’s ribs or shoulder blades from the side, but hurl himself at its horns. And only then, when he has demonstrated his valor and made the women shriek with fear ten times over, may he lunge and thrust in his sword, to the hilt, if he can, wounding the bull in its entrails so that it is left standing in the ring on four straddled legs, vomiting blood in dark gushes until it crumples up, turning over on its back, its legs thrashing the air.
Then the public goes mad with enthusiasm. Silver coins, cigars, and pieces of sausage rain down, and uncorked wine bottles pour wine on the people in gushes as the bull had vomited its blood, and the little torero must drink from those bottles to quench his thirst and to bring some color back into his cheeks.
For the occasions when the bull gores young flesh, there is a little door in the Town Hall, which says “First Aid.” Inside is a pine table, scrubbed with sand and lye, and a few pitchers of hot water. On a straw-bottomed chair in a corner lie the doctor’s case with a few old instruments and, for safety’s sake, the butcher’s carving knives and meat saw. The wounded lad is laid on the table, naked, and given a rough and ready treatment. The blood is staunched with wads of cotton wool, soaked in iodine as one might soak sponge-fingers in wine, and pressed on with bare fingers, and the gash is stitched up with thick needles and coarse, twisted silk yarn reeled off a ball, which the old women of the village prepare, just as they prepare the thread to tie the umbilical cord. Then the boy is put on a mattress and taken in a cart to Madrid, along a road full of sun and of dust.
As a quiet little boy, perched on the chair with the doctor’s case, I have seen one of those butcher’s cures done to a lad with his head dangling from the table, his eyes glazed, his hair dripping sweat, whose torero dress had been slit open with a knife, so that they could get at a gash in his thigh so deep that there was room in it for the doctor’s hand.
When the bull-fights are over, the people dance and drink.
THE SQUARE IRON ROD of the axle passed right through the middle of the cart. It had no springs and leapt so violently every time the wheels bumped over a hole or stone in the road that you had to take care not to get a knock. Uncle José and Uncle Hilario sat in the front seats and passed each other the reins of the mule from time to time. My aunt and I sat at the back, facing each other. The small, two-wheeled cart had two lateral wooden seats covered with rush mats, a roof of curved canes with a white canvas tilt, and a pair of canvas curtains in front and at the back. We were going to Méntrida, but Uncle Hilario was going to drive back in his cart that evening so as to sleep at home in Brunete.
When you reach the crest of the hill you see the road-mender’s hut and a whitewashed well with a cone-shaped roof. It has a window with an iron grille that can be locked and inside a bucket and chain so that all who pass by on the road may drink. From there the hill slopes down, and you can see Méntrida.
The yellow and gray fields of the dry earth, without trees and without water, stay behind, and the green land begins. From the mountains of the Escorial, purple in the distance, to the hills of Toledo at the end of a horseshoe of faraway ridges, the land is utterly green, green with trees and green with gardens. The cornfields are yellow patches and the vineyards white patches flecked with green; for the soil of the vineyards is whiter and sandier than that of the wheat lands. Scattered between the vines in many of the vineyards are olive trees, large posies of silver green amongst the bright green of the grape vine.
Méntrida is ringed by a chain of hills, all of them tunneled: they are its wine-cellars. For if Brunete is the land of bread, Méntrida is the land of wine. When you look at the hills from afar they seem pitted with black holes. Each of these holes has a low oaken door with a padlock and above it a small, square window with crossbars through which the wine draws its breath, the wine in the fat-bellied earthen jars standing in the niches of the cave. If you put your face close to one of the little windows, the hill smells drunk.
The streets of Méntrida climb up the hills around the ravine which passes through the middle of the village and is its sewer. On the highest hill, at the far end of a street too steep for carts, stands the church. The house of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was in the little square before the porch, and our cart had to make a loop round the village to get there.
It was a small house. If you looked at it from the church terrace it had one story, and if you looked at it from the street on the hillside it had two stories. If you went in by the front door you had a basement under your feet, and if you walked in by the side door you had a story over your head, so nobody ever quite knew which floor he was on. The door on the hillside was always locked, and the door on to the church terrace was a swing door with a sign-board on top of it, which showed a high ladies’ boot with innumerable buttons and the lettering “Shoemaker.”
The shoemaker was my Uncle Sebastian, a tiny old man with many wrinkles—but not so many as my grandmother had—who was married to my mother’s sister, Aunt Aquilina. Uncle Sebastian made and repaired boots and shoes, but by this time he took in only little work, because he suffered from asthma. Apart from Grandmother, there lived in the house his daughter Elvira with her husband Andrés, and their two children who were much younger than I was. My brother Rafael and my sister Concha were staying there for a time too.
When our cart stopped in the little church square, they all came out of the door, one after the other. Rafael and Concha were first, they came running out to greet Uncle and Aunt to see whether they had brought them anything from Madrid. Then came my two little cousins, shuffling along like two funny little animals. The boy was very thin, with a big tummy and a big head; he was called Fídel and had a yellow face with ears which looked as if they had no blood in them and were of wax. The girl was called Angelita and when she moved, her steel corset and the steel joints of the boots she had to wear creaked. After them came their parents, he a big, strong man and she a woman who was always ailing and limped from an ulcer on her leg. Then Aunt Aquilina and Uncle Sebastian came out arm in arm, a cheery old couple, always happy. And last of all came Grandmother Eustaquia in her black dress, with her nobbly stick, little gray eyes, chin and nose almost touching each other, and a skin like brown parchment, as wrinkled as a dried fig. Next year she would have her hundredth birthday, if she did not die before. But it was more likely that she would bury all the rest. She was up at five every morning, sweeping the house, lighting the fire and making breakfast. She could never keep still for a second and went trotting about from one floor to the other, tapping with her stick so that nobody could go on sleeping. As soon as she saw that our eyes were open, she would chase us out of bed, calling us sluggards and saying that beds were made for sleeping, not for dawdling. And you had to jump out of bed if you did not want to risk a whack from her stick.
Uncle José and Aunt Baldomera were going to spend the night there, but they had to catch the train to Madrid at six in the morning. It was a most boring day, because they were treated like fine folk from Madrid. We stayed in the house all the time, my brother and sister wore their best clothes, and the grown-ups spent the whole afternoon telling each of us in turn to keep quiet and not to quarrel. We would have liked to get out and run about, but as we could not do that, we had a number of rows which all ended with my brother’s and sister’s ears getting boxed, because of course it had to be their fault. Nobody would have dared to smack me in front of my aunt. But my sister pinched me and whispered:
“You just wait till tomorrow, I’ll rub your nose in the dirt for you. You’d better make the best of it while your dear auntie’s here!”
And I made the best of it, of course, by repeating her threats out loud, which earned her some more cuffs. In the end they turned the pair of them out into the street so that we should get some peace. I stayed indoors, very cross because I could not go out with them, and at the same time very pleased because everyone had taken my part.
Andrés was a master mason, and he told my uncle stories about how things were going in his trade. Uncle Sebastian was sitting on his cobbler’s bench and did nothing but cough and grunt. As he liked me very much and I liked him very much too, I went to him and asked him what was the matter.
“This damned cough’s choking me, my boy,” he said between two wheezes, “and your aunt won’t let me smoke, which is the only thing that helps my cough… As though at my age anything mattered anyhow.”
I went to Uncle José and asked him:
“Give me a cigarette for Uncle Sebastian, please.”
They all cried out, but I explained that Uncle’s Cuban cigarettes were so mild that they could not do him any harm. So they let him smoke. He stopped coughing and they had to admit I was right. Uncle José gave him a whole pack of cigarettes. Uncle Sebastian smoked them hungrily, one after the other, and at nightfall he had a very bad fit of coughing, I did not know whether because he had run out of cigarettes and wanted some more, or because he had smoked too many.
Next morning we all went down to the station with my uncle and aunt. It was more than three miles from the village and we had to go in the cart of Old Neira, the mail carrier, who took passengers to and from the station. He also owned an inn and wagons which carted wine to Madrid. It was still night when we got up, for the train passed through at half-past six and we had to make our journey to the station in the dawn.
The truth of it was that I was already waiting for my uncle and aunt to be gone. I would have been glad if Uncle had stayed on by himself, for he left me alone, but my aunt was impossible. On the other hand I was afraid that my brother and sister would get even with me for the cuffs of the day before. At the very last moment my aunt started giving good advice to Aunt Aquilina and me: about the right food for “the child”; about what “the child” liked best and what disagreed with him; about the clothes I ought to put on; about my going to Mass on Sundays and saying my morning and evening prayers; and that they must take great care so that I should not be run over or be bitten by a dog. When the train started moving, I thought they all were glad to see the last of her; she was still leaning out of the window and shouting instructions.
On our way back to the village, Old Neira stopped at a market garden he had by the roadside, and brought us a heap of cucumbers, tomatoes, and purple-skinned, mild onions. He took bread, dry sausages and a leather bottle of wine from his saddlebags, and we had breakfast there in his garden. The cucumbers and tomatoes still had the night chill on them and they were good to eat, sprinkled with salt. If my aunt had seen me, she would have cried to heaven, for I ate five or six cucumbers, and she would have thought I was going to die on the spot.
We had only just got home, when Aunt Rogelia, another of my mother’s sisters, entered in great excitement:
“It’s past belief that you shouldn’t have come to see us yet! It’s one thing that you can’t stand my Luis”—she addressed my grandmother—“but it’s quite another thing that the boy shouldn’t even be allowed to visit his aunt!”
They told her it had not been their fault; that my uncle and aunt had not gone out all afternoon and that we had just seen them off to Madrid; that in any case I should have gone to see all my relatives that day.
My Aunt Rogelia, who was a plump little woman, strong and energetic, took me by the hand and said firmly:
“Well, all right then, he’s coming to eat with me.”
Aunt Aquilina protested, saying she had already prepared a meal, but all her arguments were in vain. I was pleased, because Uncle Luis’s place was wonderful. So we trotted through the village and stopped at every house, because my aunt had to show me off to I don’t know how many relations and neighbors.
When we got to their house, we found my Uncle Luis surrounded by village lads, sharpening plowshares. He did not interrupt his work. We had to step gingerly around the crowd, or we should have risked a knock on the head from one of the hammers they were all swinging. In the little house at the back my two girl cousins were just tidying up, and they hugged me and kissed me. Aunt Rogelia brought out some buns and I ate a couple of them, but then I slipped away to the forge.
My Uncle Luis was the village blacksmith, and his two sons, Aquilino who was nineteen, and Feliciano who was sixteen, were his assistants. He was a big, tall, stout man in a leather apron and rolled-up sleeves. The skin of his arms was very white, with black smudges all over. In one hand he would hold the great tongs which gripped the end of a red-hot horseshoe, and in the other hand a little hammer, with which he beat time for the sledge hammers wielded by Aquilino and the other lads and struck the hot iron when he wanted to shape it. That was always a marvelous thing to me.
He would put a piece of iron in the furnace, and Feliciano and I would pull the chain of the bellows—a bellows big enough to hold the two of us—in a regular rhythm, so that it fanned the coal until the iron was glowing white and throwing sparks. He would place the iron on the anvil and the lads struck one after the other with their heavy sledge hammers, flattening and lengthening the iron which spat glowing chunks and grew first red and then purple. Uncle Luis shifted it with his tongs so that each blow struck the right place. Suddenly he would smite a few light blows on the nose of the anvil which rang like a bell, and start hammering the iron all alone until it changed shape, curved, fined down at the points, and became a horseshoe. Last of all he struck a small flap out of the curve itself, which became the calk for the toe of the hoof. Then he gripped the punch in another pair of tongs, and Aquilino struck it home with his sledge hammer, one blow for each nail-hole. Uncle Luis always had seven holes made, for he said that it brought good luck to find a horseshoe with seven holes, and he wanted to bring good luck to the whole world.
My Uncle Luis belonged to a race of men which has almost disappeared; he was a craftsman and gentleman. He was so deeply in love with his craft that to him the iron was something alive and human. At times he talked to it. Once he was commissioned to make the wrought-iron railings and window-screens for the “castle” as people called the house of the richest landowner in the place. The masterpiece, a screen for a tall window, as large as a balcony, was to be placed in the middle of the façade over the doorway. He took no money for it, so as to have the right to let his imagination run riot with his hammer and to shape the iron to his taste. Into that screen he poured his vision of a fancy world of leaves and tendrils twining round stout bars, perhaps influenced by his visits to the great silver screen in Toledo Cathedral, which he knew by heart.
Physically he was a Castilian of the old breed, a man with a cast-iron stomach. He rose with the dawn and “killed the worm,” as he said, with a glass of brandy which he himself had distilled in a patched and mended copper still, from the crushed grapes out of which he had pressed the juice for his wine. Then he went to work in the forge. At seven he had his breakfast, a stewed rabbit, or a brace of pigeons, or something on that scale, with a big bowl of salad. After that he forged his iron until noon when, with the stroke of the bell, he stopped and went to eat, even if the iron had just left the fire.
His midday meal was either the true Castilian cocido, chick-peas studded with chunks of bacon, red sausage, and ham, with bits of chicken and large, greasy marrow bones, or else a rich potato stew, with more chunks of meat than potatoes. For dessert he ate half a melon—and the average melon weighed four pounds in Méntrida—or two pounds of grapes, or a platter full of sliced tomatoes. At five he had an afternoon snack, as solid a meal as his breakfast, which only whetted his appetite for a supper as substantial as his midday meal. All day long a gallon jar with red, frothing wine stood by his anvil, to spare its master the taste of water which, as he said, “bred frogs.”
He owned a field of wheat, a strip of garden land, a vineyard and six fig trees. In the course of the year he found time and means to till his land, to mill his wheat, to make his wine and to dry his figs in the sun for the coming winter. His house was an ever-full larder. To add to its riches and to please his own palate, he would go out in the dark of night and come home in the small hours, two or three rabbits in his pouch, or his wicker basket filled with fish from the Alberche, still alive.
He had married my Aunt Rogelia against the considered opinion of both their families, for at that time he was half starved and had nothing. The two went to work like donkeys and in time grew more comfortably off than the rest of their relations. The woman, small in stature but strong in body, tackled the job which had fallen to her with inexhaustible energy and gaiety. To cope with his meals alone seemed a miracle, but she also looked after the food and the house, the chickens, and the pigs, she baked the bread and she took care of their four children who arrived one after the other, as though she wanted to waste no time in childbirth. My aunt never took to her bed before giving birth. When she was big with child, she went on washing, scrubbing, and cooking tirelessly, as always. Suddenly she would say to her husband: “Luis, it’s coming.” She would lie down while he called a neighboring woman who understood about such matters. On the following day a cup of chocolate and a good chicken broth, thick as though stirred with flour, put her on her legs again, and she went back to her cooking and scrubbing as if nothing had happened.
They were a happy couple and had no problems. She was woman enough for all the needs of her powerful male, and in their youth, when the two of them were building up the forge between them, it was no rare thing for the door to be locked and the pair to turn a deaf ear to the knocking of customers. When they opened again, he would stand there, filling the doorway with his mighty body, smiling slyly at his neighbors’ jokes. He used to plant his huge hand on her plump shoulder with a smack, wink at the joker, and say: “Just look at her—small and round, but as hot as red pepper!”
When I came to the forge, the men were still hammering away at the broad blade of the plowshare, and Feliciano was pulling the bellows-chain without stopping, so that the second plowshare should be ready when they had finished the first. As I knew that nobody would take any notice of me just then, I took hold of the chain and pulled in time with Feliciano, who slapped my shoulder with his free hand and said: “Hullo, Madrileño!” That was all; his brain could never hold more than three words at a time. He was the stupidest of the whole family.
When they had finished the plowshare we had been heating with the bellows, Uncle Luis lifted the gallon jar with one hand, and filled a tall, thick glass with wine. It made the round of the lads and each wiped his lips with the back of his dirty hand. My uncle drank last, filled the glass again and handed it to me: “Come here, sparrow!”
It was his first word of greeting. He lifted me onto the anvil with only one hand.
“Here, drink it up, you need some blood in you.” He turned to the lads and said: “I don’t know what the blasted hell they give the kids in Madrid to keep them as thin as spooks. Look at the calves he’s got!” He squeezed my leg between his forefinger and thumb until I thought my flesh would split. “You ought to stay here in the forge as my apprentice in your holidays. And no more petticoats for you. What with the old women and the priests, they’ll be turning you into a sniffling sissy.”
I drank down the whole glass of wine, like a man. It was a dry, strong wine which made you feel hot. Aquilino, in a gust of affection, picked me up from the anvil and swung me through the air, round and round, like a rag doll. When he set me on the ground I was half choked with fright and wine.
“This afternoon,” he said, “I’ll buy you a spinning top and make you a point with the lathe.”
Making points for spinning tops was something Aquilino was very proud of, and all the village children ran after him for them.
The points he made had a long, square spike at one end which he stuck red-hot into the wood of the top. The other end he either turned on the lathe until it had the shape of an acorn, or else filed it down to a narrow point with a groove spiraling down it. It was not easy to fix a point. You had to get it right into the center of the top, and then it would hum and “go to sleep,” as we used to say. Otherwise it would wobble and scratch you if you put it on your palm.
I never got bored at Uncle Luis’s. Beside the door of the forge stood a work-bench with a vise, and there were rows of tools on the wall, and odd bits of iron all over the floor. You only had to pick up one, fix it in the vise, and start filing it. I liked mechanics; I was going to be an engineer when I was older. This time I wanted to make a wheel. I made a circle on a piece of sheet iron with the big calipers, and then began to file it down. But my brother and sister turned up. First they went into the house to see our aunt and get their buns, and then they came back for me. Concha took me by the arm and said:
“Come along and let’s play. I’ve told Aunt.”
The forge lay at the end of the village. We only had to climb the slope of a little ravine and were in the open country. Concha went first and I followed. She was very thin and had her hair twisted into a tiny little bun at the back of her neck. Her legs showed under her petticoats; they were sunburned and her muscles moved like cords while she climbed, Rafael came behind me, silent and sulky. When we reached the top we followed the edge of a harvested field along the wall of brambles which bordered it on the side of the ravine.
I knew my brother and sister better than they thought. I knew that the storm was going to break. Concha would shout at me and shake me until she got tired of it. If I answered back, we would come to blows and then I would get it. I was the smallest and weakest. If I gave her time to let off steam, she would not beat me up in cold blood.
And so it was. When we came to the clearing where the old trees stood round the source of the stream which ran through the village, Concha turned round and clutched my arm:
“Well, now we’ve got him, the spoiled little baby. But there aren’t any aunts or nephews here, nor any petticoats to hide under. So you think because we live in the attic and you at the flat, dressed up like a little gentleman, that we aren’t as good as you are? Well, you’d better get it into your head that you’re no better than us. You’re the son of Señora Leonor the washerwoman, and now I’ll bash your mug in so you remember!”
She shook me like an old rag and pinched my arm until it stung. I said nothing and hung my head. Rafael stood watching us with his hands in his pockets. Concha grew more and more excited:
“Look at him, just like a silly old hen. Well, that’s just what he is. Now you’re not crowing any more, are you? Now you’re like a dead fly! Grandmother Inés is right when she says you’re a lying Jesuit. Now you dare to hit me, I’m a girl, you just dare!” And she stuck her fists under my eyes.
“Shall I shake him?” asked Rafael.
Concha looked me up and down contemptuously: “What for? Can’t you see he’s a sissy?”
The insult struck home, coming on top of my grandmother’s insult which I had not forgotten, and I saw red. The three of us rolled on the ground, kicking, hitting, and biting. After a while the big hands of a man cuffed us apart and held my sister and me firmly separated, one on each side of him, while we kicked at one another behind his back. Rafael had become perfectly quiet and glared spitefully at the man. Concha stamped on his foot—he wore only rope-soled canvas shoes—and he swore and boxed her ears. He was my ally then, so I kicked her on the shins. We both wrenched ourselves free and got at each other, I pulling her hair, she clutching my neck. I grabbed handfuls of hair, she dug her nails into me.
The man carried us to the forge, one under each arm, our legs threshing the air. Rafael followed behind us without a word. The man took us in and explained to my uncle:
“Here, take ’em, they’re like a pair of wild cats.”
Uncle Luis looked at us calmly. Both our faces and legs were covered with scratches and we glowered at each other under half-shut lids.
“You do look pretty.” He turned to Rafael and said: “And what have you got to say, Pussyfoot?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“So I see. So it was the two of you against the smallest, was it? You’re a nice pair of heroes.”
“He’s just a nasty, dirty louse,” screamed my sister.
“They’re jealous because I live with Uncle,” screamed I.
“I’ll settle this,” said Uncle Luis. “You make it up now, at once, d’you hear? You’ve got all worked up, but now you’ll be friends again. And the first time I catch you making another shindy, I’ll give each of you such a hiding that you’ll go lame for a week.”
We washed our faces in the water of the trough where the iron was cooled. Uncle Luis put a thick cobweb over a gash in my knee: “Now, leave it on, it stops the bleeding and it’ll heal your scratch.” And so the plaster stayed there, a web full of dust and blood which grew as hard as clay.
We ate stewed rabbit in a dark, strong sauce of garlic and bay leaf cooked with wine, and the meal meant peace. When we left we were friends, the three of us, but I was the master because I had a silver duro in my pocket, and the market square and streets around were full of stalls. A duro was five pesetas or a lot of big coppers, and the things on sale did not cost more than ten centimos each. Village people, who recognized me and knew I had just come from Madrid, called me and bought me so many monkey-nuts, hazel-nuts, and roasted chick-peas that all my pockets were full of them. Concha insisted on buying blackberries and got her mouth and fingers stained with purple. Then she stood there, like a silly fool, with her hands sticky and her fingers spread out stiffly, and could not get at her handkerchief to wipe them clean, for fear of making stains on her white dress. In the end she washed in a puddle at the side of the square and dried her fingers on her handkerchief. Rafael stuffed himself with fresh nuts which were sold in their green shells to make them weigh more. But he and I had the same idea, and Concha was in our way: we wanted to smoke aniseed-and-cocoa cigarettes just as the men smoked their tobacco. If we had said so to Concha, she would have told Aunt Aquilina who would have made a fuss. So at first we tried to think out a way of getting rid of her because she was a nuisance, but then I found a solution.
You could buy little squibs which went off with a loud bang, fifty for ten centimos. I suggested our buying a hundred of them and Concha liked the idea. We would let them off in the streets and throw them under doorways to frighten people. But of course, after we had bought them, we still had to light them before they could go off. Every squib had a fuse, a piece of string soaked in gunpowder. We could have lit them with matches, but that would have meant buying several boxes. I proposed quite innocently that we should buy aniseed cigarettes to light the fuses with. So we bought a packet of ten cigarettes, and Rafael asked a young man for a light. He laughed when he let Rafael have it. We lit ours from Rafael’s cigarette, for Concha wanted to throw squibs too. I had to light a cigarette for her, and she carried it hidden in her hand. She only sucked it now and then, with her face to the wall so that people should not see her. The aniseed tickled your throat and eyes and made you cough, but we smoked like men. Then we began to throw the squibs under doorways. At houses where Rafael and Concha knew the people and said some nasty old woman lived there, we all three lit squibs and threw them inside in a bunch. When the first one exploded, all the women ran out to see what had happened, and then the other two went off and frightened them even more. We laughed, hidden round the next corner, ready to bolt if they came after us.
But all girls are fools. When we were going through a street where there was no one about, Concha had to stick her cigarette into her mouth and puff smoke, and of course a fussy old woman came out of her house and saw us. She smacked Concha’s face so that the cigarette jumped out of her mouth, and raised hell, calling her names—pig, beast, hussy, strumpet, and God knows what else. She would not let go of her arm because she wanted to take her home and tell Aunt Aquilina all about it. And the old meddler did drag Concha along, weeping and trying to get away and yelling for us to come with her. The old woman called us names too and said we were shameless good-fornothings. At every house she passed she told the story to all the women she met, and they all started screaming and slapping Concha’s face and shouting at us. Rafael thought of bashing in the old witch’s head with a stone. When we came to our house they went inside, and we could hear Concha screaming, but we did not go in. Then Aunt Aquilina came out and hauled us in. We did not like it, but we had to go and then we got it. Aunt Aquilina started dealing out cuffs, mainly to Rafael and Concha, for she said it was their fault. Suddenly she saw that Rafael’s pockets were bulging:.
“Where are the cigarettes? Empty your pockets at once, all of them, so I can see what’s there.”
Rafael, who was sometimes malicious, dug his hands into his pockets and brought out hazelnuts, walnuts, and roasted chick-peas. But when my aunt screamed, “The cigarettes, where are the cigarettes?” he pulled out a handful of cigarettes mixed with a lot of squibs and threw them into the kitchen fire. My aunt, who did not notice what it was, kept on: “Throw them all in, all of them!” So Rafael dropped all his squibs into the fire, and I did too. My aunt cried:
“Tonight you’ll not go and see the fireworks!”
But then the fuses of the squibs caught fire, and things got going.
There were bangs, and ashes and burning straw flew all over the room. Grandmother jumped up from her stool, dragging after her the ball of wool with which she was knitting socks. A frying pan on the hearth was blown full of cinders, sparks fell on the chairs and on the curtains of the kitchen shelf, and my aunt could not understand what was happening. The two women shrieked and Uncle Sebastian, who had tumbled to it, stayed behind his shoemaker’s bench and laughed. We ran out into the street and did not go back until late in the evening.
The table was laid and everybody was most serious. Nobody said a word, only Little Grandmother pattered around muttering, and we watched her out of the corner of our eyes in case she tried to hit us with her stick. We sat down at the table and Aunt Aquilina brought the meal:
“No supper for the wicked children tonight,” she said sternly and handed each of us a chunk of bread. “That’s all you’re going to get.”
We said not a word. I was mad with rage. I had never been left without a meal, and my eyes filled with tears of fury. But I did not want to cry. Only my tears trickled down my face, and then Aunt Aquilina saw them and began heaping meatballs on my plate.
“Well, I’ll let you off this once… There’s the fiesta tonight and I don’t want to get angry, but…” and she launched forth into a sermon while she was filling our plates. Uncle Sebastian chuckled and said:
“When all’s said and done, it was a funny trick the children played on us!”
Aunt and Grandmother went for him like two wasps:
“That’s right, you would go and take their side!”
And a violent row began, so that our poor uncle did not know where to hide from the onslaught. Meanwhile, we finished our meal and got away. We agreed to buy Uncle Sebastian a packet of cigarettes and a roll of cigarette paper. When the fireworks started and everyone had gone to the stone parapet which overlooked the market square, we gave him them in secret. He let me sit on his knee and gave me a kiss, and we watched the rockets burst in the sky. Suddenly he said to Aunt:
“Take the child, I must go to the lavatory.”
When he came back he had a cigarette in his mouth and said a friend had given it him and after all, everybody had to celebrate one day in the year. Aunt grumbled but she left him alone. His eyes sparkled merrily, he winked at us and chuckled behind her back.
The square was full of dancing couples and on the terrace before the church, where we were, was the man with the fireworks, a fat Valencian in a black blouse and round hat, with a cigar in his mouth. In his left hand he held a rocket, which looked like a thick candle, and with his right he put his burning cigar to it. When it spluttered, he suddenly opened his fingers and the rocket went swishing up into the air. We children stood round him in a circle and stared at the sky until we saw it burst into many colored stars. The empty shell of the rocket fell down, its last sparks crackling, and bounced over the rooftops. One year a house was set on fire by a rocket.
That day was the Feast of Our Lady, and our aunt began to dress us up in our best clothes very early in the morning. Mine were the finest in the village, of course, for all the others wore country things, while I had Madrid clothes. Rafael had a suit from Madrid, too, but his was cheap, ready-made, and did not fit him; the cloth was so harsh that he could hardly move. Concha also had a cheap dress from Madrid, starched until it was as stiff as a board, and she looked ridiculous with a big blue ribbon in her plait. Both had heavy boots, Rafael’s with brass toecaps, and they found it hard to walk in them, and they looked with envy at my sailor suit and patent leather shoes. Concha called me Señorito, because she said I was playing the young gentleman again, and managed to give me a kick so that the varnish of my shoe got all scratched. I pulled her plait and untied her ribbon and we had a fight. But then we all went with Uncle Sebastian to look at the auction for Our Lady’s stand.
The Virgin, wrapped in an embroidered velvet cloak and surrounded by burning candles, was carried out of the church on a platform decorated with the heads of little angels painted in natural colors. They stopped with her under the porch and the mayor, dressed in his cape, holding his staff with the gold knob, cried out:
“This year, as every year, we are going to hold an auction for the stand of Our Lady.”
The highest bidders were given the six places at the shafts and the right to carry Our Lady on their shoulders to the hermitage of Berciana, a hill three miles from the village. All the rich men of the place and all those who had made a vow started bidding. The two places in front were the best. One shouted:
“Forty reales!”†
“Fifty!”
This set them going. When only four bidders for the right shaft in front were left, the mayor cried:
“One hundred and fifty reales have been offered. Does nobody offer more?”
After he had repeated it a couple of times, someone offered a hundred and seventy-five, and the bids went up slowly until only two were left who insisted on carrying the Virgin. Then everybody was anxious to see which of the two considered himself the most important man in the place.
“Two hundred and fifty reales,” said one pompously.
“Three hundred,” the other snapped.
“Damnation, three hundred and fifty! Don’t you go and think you’ll carry her off!” the first shouted back.
In the end they quarreled about who was going to carry Our Lady, cursing and swearing and calling each other cuckolds. The priest took the auction money.
After the auction, the procession to Berciana started, with Our Lady in front, behind her the priest in a golden cope and saying Latin prayers. After him came the mayor, the judge, the doctor, the schoolmaster, and, in a double file, all the neighbors who wanted to carry a lighted candle. Then came the rest of the village in a huddle, the men carrying their hats in their hands, the women with a silk kerchief on their heads. They all wore their best clothes, most of them their wedding-dress, which was too tight for some and too big for others.
The funniest of all were the boys and girls. The boys were dressed like the men, in corduroy suits, a shirt with a collar and silk bow, a straw hat and heavy boots. The girls had stiffly starched dresses in loud colors, showing their very white, starchy petticoats and the edging of their panties. They had bright silk bows in their hair, stockings knitted in very thick wool, and boots with toecaps of metal. None of them knew how to move, because they were used to wearing a smock or knickers, and to going barefoot or in rope-soled sandals. Before we were half-way there, most of the children had to be dragged along by their parents, stumbling over each stone in the road.
When we came to the little Berciana river, the procession crossed through the stream instead of passing over the wooden bridge; I wondered whether they did it because they were afraid the bridge would break or because they wanted to make a sacrifice to Our Lady. They all took off their shoes, and turned up their trousers and skirts. Most of the children and many of the grown-ups did not put on their shoes again afterwards. Some said they had made a vow to Our Lady to walk barefoot to the Hermitage, but it was really because their boots hurt them.
The Hermitage was on the top of a hill which rose up from the stream, at its foot a big meadow of short grass where oak-trees grew. Mass was said in the chapel, but most of the people stayed outside because there was no room for them. In the meantime, loaded carts, mules, and bullocks arrived from the village and were installed on the meadow. The people who came with them unpacked, and out of the carts and hampers came frying pans and casseroles, rabbits, chickens, lambs, and pigeons. Someone had taken along a calf, cinnamon-colored, with a white muzzle, which was tied to the back of the cart and strained against the rope round its short horns. Some had brought chairs and set them in a circle in the grass. The best spots were in the shade of the oaks, and people slung ropes between the trees and put blankets on them to get more shade. Away from the trees kitchens were set up, with earthen stewing pots, plates, glasses, and frying-pans. The big wine skins and leather bottles were left in the shade of the tree-trunks; some people dug holes in the ground near the brook, where they buried their bottles to keep them cool.
After Mass the people came down to the meadow. First everybody had to sample the wine and take a drink from the free jet of a leather bottle, or out of a jar filled from a wine skin. Then everyone, children and grownups, collected firewood in the oak copses. The men and women lopped off branches with little axes, and the children carried armfuls of kindling sticks to their own camp fires. Quickly a hundred fires were blazing in the open and the air was full of floating chicken and pigeon feathers. Sheep and rabbits were strung up in trees and skinned by men in shirt sleeves. Tablecloths were spread on the ground and laid with platters of sliced sausages, olives, and gherkins, with tomatoes cut in half and dressed in salt and oil; and everybody had a bite and a drink of wine. We children went from spread to spread and picked out whatever we liked best and drank secretly from the wine jars. Soon all the valley smelled of roast meat and of smoke from burning thyme and broom. People began to feel hungry and to hurry up the cooks.
I remembered the description of the wedding feast of the rich Camacho in Don Quixote de la Mancha and it seemed to me that Don Quixote himself might suddenly appear on the crest of one of those hills, astride Rocinante, with Sancho Panza behind him smacking his lips at the good smell.
The children of the fireworks-man went round selling rockets which burst high in the air with bangs like rifle shots. Wafer-sellers had come from Madrid to the fiesta, young boys from Galicia who made the journey on foot with a tin box full of thin rolled wafers slung round their shoulders, and the people flocked round them trying their luck at the lottery-wheel and smacking the children who wanted to turn the wheel too.
Even the dogs seemed to have got wind of the fiesta, for everywhere you saw village dogs slinking round the bonfires, with hanging heads and their tails between their legs. A few people threw them a bone, others threw a stone or a log at them, and then they ran off to find another group. Sometimes a few dogs chose the same fire and sat down on their haunches, very tense, their noses in the air, their eyes glued to the hands of the woman who did the cooking. When she threw them a bite, the cleverest caught it and the others growled at him.
Little Grandmother had arrived in Uncle Luis’s cart, and both the families joined in one group. We were fifteen in all, and Grandmother began to tell us how one year all her sons with their wives and children, and some with their grandchildren, had come to a fiesta in the village. There had been over a hundred of them. Grandmother had had eighteen children, of whom fourteen were still living. Her eldest son had great-grandchildren at the time of the fiesta, and arrived from Cordova with a family of twenty-odd. Grandmother had married a tailor, and since they did not earn enough money to keep all their children, they had sent them out into the world as they grew up, the girls into service in Madrid, the boys either to Madrid or to Andalusia. One of them went to Barcelona and one to America, but neither of them had ever come back to the village and people knew them only from photographs. The Barcelona one was a man with a broad black beard and a bowler hat, who looked like a secret service agent, and the American was a dried-up man with a clean-shaven face, who looked like a priest. Grandmother had never gone further away from the village than Madrid, and then she had to be taken by cart, because she did not want to get into the train. She said the train was a thing of the devil. And she would die without having been in a train.
Aquilino had fixed up a swing between two trees, and so had many of the others. The girls sat in the swings and the lads pushed them so that they swung high up into the air, shrieking and showing their legs. The lads had their fun out of looking at them, they nudged each other in the ribs, winked and said: “Did you see? A fine lass, eh?” They laughed a lot and sometimes they pinched the girls’ legs or bottoms. Some girls laughed and shrieked and some turned angry. After the meal, when all of them were stuffed and full of wine, the lads pinched more and the girls shrieked less.
That was how courtships started, and quarrels. In the middle of the afternoon they were all a little drunk. The older men stretched themselves on the ground to take their siesta, and the young lads tumbled themselves down beside the girls who were sitting on the grass, but not to go to sleep. The girls played with the lads’ hair, and sometimes they slapped at them, if one had touched a girl’s leg or thigh or breast. Later, when the sluggishness of digestion had passed, they danced, and danced on into the night. Many of the couples went for a stroll on the other side of the hills.
One couple walked off, their arms wound tightly round each other’s waists, and Andrés shouted good advice after them, such as telling them not to drink from the stream because it made big bellies. And everybody laughed.
My Uncle Luis had slept through his siesta and awakened with a parched throat, he said. As a little refreshment he ate a bowl of salad and half a dozen oil doughnuts, solid and floury. Then he tucked me under his arm like a parcel and took me for a round.
We went to the top of the hill. The valley with the picnickers disappeared and the land was lonely. Far away you saw the white snow peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama and the towers of the monastery of El Escorial.
Suddenly Uncle Luis, who was walking behind me, gave a wild howl:
“Uh-huh-huuuh!”
I turned round, frightened. A couple came out of a little gully, she with her blouse unbuttoned, he with his jacket dangling. Uncle Luis held his sides and laughed so that his belly heaved with the laughter. He lifted me on to his shoulders and ran through the gullies, howling his howl. Couples dashed out of thickets and hollows and fled down to the valley, pursued by our shouts and laughter.
When we came back to the crowd, Uncle Luis swung me from his shoulders and lifted a full jar to his mouth, and again his laughter burst out so that the wine spluttered. Everyone turned towards him. He caught the little round figure of Aunt Rogelia in his arms and plastered her face with kisses. Then he lifted her up on his hands, stretching his arms as though he meant to fling her far into the air.
“Huh-huh-huuuh!” he shouted, and his chest and shoulders resounded.
At his cry all the valley fell silent and the echo answered beyond the darkening hills.
IT’S GOOD TO BE HERE. My head between my mother’s knees, on the softness of her thighs under the soft linen of her apron. To look at the flames twisting and dancing in the air. My mother is peeling potatoes at the side of the kitchen fire and talking to Grandmother. She tells her about her life in my uncle’s flat, her work and her worries, and about how my aunt is jealous of her because of me. And I watch her face from below, without her seeing me. Her face in the red glow of the flames. Her face tired from work and worry. I bury my head in her apron like a cat. I would like to be a cat. I would jump on her lap and roll myself into a ball there. I’m sick of everybody, sick of my aunt, of school, sick of all the stupid people who think I am only a child, while I know I’m more than they and see everything and swallow down everything and keep it to myself. Jump on her lap, roll myself into a ball, doze, hearing my mother talk without listening to her words, feeling her warmth and the glow of the fire and the smell of burning broom. Stay there quiet, so quiet.
“How tiresome the child is—go and play with your brother and sister.”
“I don’t want to.”
I curl up more tightly, trying to get still closer to her. My mother is stroking my head, my tousled hair, my unruly cowlick, and her fingers pass idly over my head, but I feel them inside me. When her hand lies still, I take it and look at it. So very tiny, so thin, worn by the water of the river, with small tapering fingers, the fingertips pricked by the lye, with twisted blue veins, nervous and alive. Alive with warmth and blood, alive in quick motion, always ready to leap and fly, to scrub vigorously, to stroke gently. I love to press them to my cheeks and rub my skin against them, to kiss and nibble her fingertips, here where I have no need to hide behind a door when I want to kiss my mother, with my aunt shouting:
“Where are you, child?”
“Here in the kitchen, Aunt.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’m going to the lavatory.”
And in the meantime my mother clattering with the pots and pans and I slamming the lavatory door…
What rights has my aunt over me? She keeps me in her house, but then my mother is her servant. Why hasn’t she had children? For she is jealous because she has no child of her own, and she would like to take me away from my mother. But not my uncle. My uncle loves me, but he doesn’t want to take me away from my mother. Why can’t he be my father? My aunt could die, and then my uncle would marry my mother just to be my father. He said so once as a joke, but I think it’s true. He too is fed up with my aunt, with her prayers and her crotchets. Once my aunt was cross and said: “I ought to be dead, then you would be rid of me!” “Fine,” said my uncle, “when you’re dead I’ll marry Leonor and become the boy’s papa. What do you think of it, Leonor? Do you accept my snow-white hand?” He said it to my mother with a laugh, and she answered smiling: “Well, let me think it over in the meantime.” My goodness, what a row! My aunt sobbed and wept, clutching me to her, and I cried too. My uncle furious at my aunt’s stupidity, my mother trying to calm her down and bearing with her affronts. “You ungrateful person, that’s the reward I get from all of you for my goodness! That’s what you would like—me to go to my grave so that the three of you can do what you like,” And so on. We had no evening meal and did not go to the café. And we were in bed before ten. The day after, everyone went round with sour faces.
Here in the village we are alone. Sometimes I get hold of her and kiss her hungrily. “Now let go, you wheedling rascal!” she says and pushes me away. But I can see that it makes her happy and that she puts up with my aunt for my sake, so that I can get on well and become an engineer soon, because my uncle will pay for my studies and I want to be an engineer. And nothing is too hard for her as long as I kiss her and love her, and she kisses me and loves me more than anyone else. When I’m grown up she won’t have to go down to the river, and I’ll be rich so that she’s happy and can have all she wants, and she’ll be a grandmother like our Little Grandmother, a tiny little granny with lots of wrinkles, in a black dress, an old woman’s dress, on which I’ll rest my head when I’m tired after work.
Good things do not last. The day before yesterday my mother came, and tomorrow we must both go away, I to Navalcarnero and she to Madrid, back to work.
As the train stopped for a quarter of an hour in the station, I dragged my mother off to look at the engine. It was a small Belgian engine, painted green and almost square, and no good at all. I had been in a big railway engine. Uncle José had a cousin who was an engine-driver at the North Station and always drove the Paris Express. Once he took my uncle and me to Segovia in an engine without a train. The engine was so big that they had to lift me up to the cabin where the driver and stoker were. We went off with nothing but the tender and did not stop at any station until Segovia. The stoker kept on shoveling coal into the open mouth of the furnace so that the flames licked out, and we passed through the country with the track free before and behind us, racing along the rails so fast that it was like flying through the air. In the innards of the engine was a big handle which was the brake. My uncle told me that an engine driver once tried to save his train from crashing into another and turned the handle so hard that he thrust it through his stomach. He saved the train but he died, spiked by the brake. Then there were thermometers and pressure gages and level-tubes with little nickeled taps, and the iron chain of the whistle. When you pulled it the steam whistled and you went deaf with the noise. All the taps were dripping water or oil. There was one which dripped a lot and I wanted to turn it off, but hot oil spurted out in a fan and made spots on all our clothes. When we passed over an iron bridge, everything bounced, the rails, the bridge, and the engine, and I wanted the engine to go faster so that we should be past the bridge when it smashed. We went back by train, but the journey in a carriage was boring.
The train from Méntrida was just as small as its engine. The carriages were matchboxes with dirty wooden seats, full of country people with their saddlebags, baskets, and chickens tied by the legs, which they shoved under the seat. Some carried rabbits with their bowels slit open so that you could see the purple kidneys, and some carried small wine casks or baskets full of eggs bedded in straw. Sometimes, when we came to a station, we saw people running on the road from the village and making signs for the train to stop. The station master always waited for them. Then they tumbled into the carriage, pushing each other and stamping on other people’s feet or knocking them over with their bundles, and slumped down in their seats, sweating after their run with the baskets and saddlebags.
Navalcarnero was the biggest station on the line. It had a goods shed with a zinc roof and three lines for shunting. Just beside the station was the flour mill, and a special siding led to the mill from the station itself, made a curve and passed under the iron factory gate. When the gate was closed it made me think that if they pulled the wrong switch, we would run straight through the railing, train and all, and land inside the mill.
Grandmother Inés was waiting for us in the station. Concha had come along with my mother and me; she and I were going to stay in Navalcarnero until the end of the month. When the train with my mother had gone, Grandmother laid her arms on each of our shoulders, her hands hanging down over our chests, and so she walked to the town, with us glued to her sides.
Grandmother’s hand was as large as a man’s and her arm was a bulky mass. It was right to call her Big Grandmother. She weighed over two hundred pounds and was taller than most men. Her strength was enormous and she ate and drank like a farm-hand. Every time she came to Madrid, Aunt Baldomera invited her to have her meals with us, and she always said no. She used to go to Botin’s, a very old Madrid restaurant, and order roast suckling pig. When none of us was with her, she would eat the suckling pig all by herself, together with a huge bowl of lettuce salad, and drink two pints of wine with it. She would have been a good match for Uncle Luis.
Navalcarnero was different from the other villages. It was very close to Madrid and the market town of its district. Many of the gentry lived there. They would not have been called gentry in Madrid, but they were gentry in Navalcarnero. The town was divided into two races of people: those who dressed as they did in Madrid, and those who wore blouses and corduroy trousers. There were the women in hat or mantilla, and the women with wide petticoats and apron, with a kerchief round their heads. There was a Poor Man’s Casino, a large tavern full of flies, and a Rich Men’s Casino, a kind of café with marble-topped tables. In the church there were two rows of benches in the middle, with chairs placed in front of them. The gentlemen sat on the benches and their ladies on the chairs. The rest of the church was for the farmers and the poor. Farmers with money spread out a round mat of esparto grass and put a straw-covered chair on it for the wife. The poor knelt on the flagstones.
I knew this because I sometimes went to church, although my grandmother never took me there. On Sundays she asked:
“Well now, do you want to go to Mass?”
I usually said yes, for two reasons: first, if I did not go it would be a sin, and secondly, it was an odd experience to go by myself. Mass in Navalcarnero was different from other places. At school all the boys heard Mass together, and we filled the whole church. When I went to church with my aunt, I was tied to her and to her caprices, and she spent the whole time telling me to be quiet, to kneel down, to get up, not to cough, not to sneeze, to keep my hands still, and not to disturb her in her devotions.
Here in Navalcarnero it was quite another thing. I went alone, even when one of Grandmother’s neighbors had asked me to go with her, because I knew what old women were like. I stayed under the porch, in the little yard behind the iron gate and watched the people going in. When they were all inside, I entered, alone. They were all clustering round the High Altar and I came in very softly and stayed at the back of the church between the pillars. I was always afraid that one of the old women might call me and make me kneel down beside her.
The floor, the pillars, and the lower part of the walls of the church were of stone, the rest whitewashed. In the middle was a chandelier shaped like a pear and covered with glass crystals which sparkled like diamonds when the sun shone on them. I did not know why, but that chandelier, which hung on a very long cord from the center of the cupola, was nearly always swinging very slowly from one side to the other. I liked to watch it moving and filling with colored sparks whenever it passed through one of the sunbeams which shone through the windows in the lantern of the dome.
At the entrance there was a Christ on the Cross, naked, very thin, and yellow, almost green, in color. The bloodstains were quite black, because he had not been repainted for many years. His lower parts were covered by a little velvet apron with a gold fringe. Some people lifted the apron and looked underneath. The paint of the toes had peeled off because the women had kissed them so much, and the bare wood showed. There was a black knot in the wood on the big toe of the left foot, which looked like a corn. His head was dangling as if his neck had been broken and he had a dirty, chocolate-colored beard with cobwebs between hair and throat. Tears were running from his eyes, and they looked like the hardened wax drippings on a candle. The only beautiful thing about him were the eyes, blue glass eyes which stared at the peeled toes.
At the side of the Christ was the Holy Water stoup, with a puddle underneath where the yokels stamped with their rope-soles—plff! But the ladies took great care not to step in it and leaned over on tiptoe to dip their fingers into the holy water. Fine people wetted their fingertips, and country folk put their whole hand in. They had made the puddle.
There was a Virgin of solid silver in the church. She was life-size and was standing on a moon, a mass of clouds and many heads of little angels with pigeon’s wings. People said she weighed a ton. One day I watched two old women smearing the Virgin full of metal polish and rubbing her with an old rag until she shone. They got the cheeks and chin bright like glass, but some of the white stuff stuck in the eyes and the mouth, and one of the old women tried hard to polish them, spitting on her handkerchief and wiping the eyes of Our Lady just as people do when children have sand in their eyes. The other old woman was rubbing the angels’ heads as angrily as if she wanted to smack them. But they hadn’t any bottoms.
Up in the choir they had an organ with a keyboard in a very old wooden case, like a barrel-organ. There were two bellows under the keyboard, on which the organist had to pedal; they looked like two old books which had fallen open. Sometimes the organist stepped on one of the books out of time, and then, when he pressed down the keys, there was no sound from the organ but only a blast of air, as when a mule lets off wind. As soon as the blast stopped short, one of the organ pipes mewed out of tune.
Apart from these things the church was nothing but a cold barn where one could stay comfortably only in summer. But it had some real death skulls. When somebody had died and the Mass for the Dead had to be read, they put in the middle of the church a bier covered by a black, silver-embroidered cloth, surrounded by tall candles. On the black cloth they laid a skull and cross-bones. The skull and bones were real. An old, huge chest in the sacristy was filled with skulls and bones which weighed practically nothing because they were hollowed out by worms. They felt like cardboard. When there was a Mass for the Dead, they took out a skull and two long bones. If the dead man had been rich, the priest selected a skull himself, and the sacristan scraped its pate and rubbed it with oil to make it shine. When a skull was cracked they mended it with a drop of wax. One had four or five wax teeth in its jaw. When there was no Mass for the Dead and the priest and sacristan were away, all of us boys who were friends with the altar-boys played with the bones in the little garden behind the church.
I did not like Navalcarnero as much as Méntrida. It lies high on a hill, on the great trunk road from Madrid to Extremadura. From the town, the road leads downhill towards Madrid on one side, and downhill towards Valmojado on the other. Once you came to the foot of the hill on either side there were trees, but the whole hill of Navalcarnero itself had no trees except the few meager little trees in the Station Avenue, many of which were crippled. On the hillside were cornfields, now shorn and dry, and vines laden with black grapes. The wheat was harvested, but they were just gathering in the grapes for the wine. Big, heavy wagons went along the Extremadura Road with baskets full of grapes, high as a man. The grapes at the bottom of the baskets were crushed and the wagons dripped fat red blobs which mixed with the dust of the street and became purple-black little balls.
The people made their wine, pouring their grapes into a big shallow trough of stone or cement and crushing them there; the trough had a hole through which the must ran down into a huge jar in the cellar. Two or three houses had a hand-press for their grapes, and one house had a hydraulic press. The whole town went to look at it.
When we came to my grandmother’s house, we were met by her sister, Aunt Anastasia. She was as tall as my grandmother, but much heavier, for she was older and her legs were swollen from rheumatism. The two sisters were inseparable, but at the same time they could never stay together, for they were both very bossy. Aunt Anastasia lived upstairs and Grandmother on the ground floor. When they had a quarrel, Aunt Anastasia walked up the straight wooden staircase which creaked under her weight, and slammed her door so that bits of plaster fell from the ceiling and the whole house shook. They would not speak to each other for two or three days. Then either Grandmother went upstairs and banged at her sister’s door, shouting that the row was now over, or her sister came down and walked into the sitting-room, asking Grandmother if she wasn’t ashamed of herself for not having been up to see her sister in three days; and saying that she must be dying before Grandmother’s conscience told her to bring her sister a glass of water. So they had to quarrel for another half-hour before they could make peace.
There were also my grandmother’s wards. When my father had died—he was the last of her twenty-five children to die—and my mother had gone to stay with my uncle and aunt, Grandmother went as a housekeeper to Señor Molina, a wealthy man of Navalcarnero who had been left a widower with four children. Grandmother, who herself had been a widow for many years, stayed with him. And in his will he made her the guardian and trustee of his four children.
Each of them was a calamity in himself. The eldest, Fernando, was twenty years old and spent the whole day in the casino; he had a mistress in the town and something on his lungs. The next one, Rogelio, was fifteen, and he was downright bad. He talked of nothing but girls and did all sorts of things. But he had got it into his head that he wanted to become a monk in the monastery of El Escorial and spent his day with the parish priest. Antonio, the youngest, was rickety, and looked like a hunchback, with his head sunk deep between his shoulders. He had small, red-rimmed eyes, always smeared with a yellow ointment. The girl, Asunción, had had smallpox as a child and her face was pitted with marks. The edges of her nostrils were frayed as though birds had pecked them away.
The first thing Grandmother did was to show us where we were going to sleep. Concha had to share a bed with Asunción and I with Rogelio.
My grandmother’s house was the house of big beds. Every room had a tall iron bedstead heaped with two or three mattresses so that you had to climb on a chair to get in. When Grandmother wanted to get into her bed, Asunción and Concha pushed at her behind to help her up, and I laughed when I saw her in her white nightdress: she looked just like a big lumpy mattress herself. When she let herself fall on to her bed, all the springs screeched. They were spiral springs, tapering in the middle, and when they were flattened down they squealed.
From Grandmother’s house we went to Señor Molino’s farm where they were crushing grapes. A ring of men and women, all barefoot, walked round and round in the stone trough and stamped on the grapes so that their legs were spattered with must. We joined them, but I got out quickly because the grape-stalks pricked my feet. The others stayed, I went off with Grandmother.
We crossed the town and came out on the road to Valmojado. Grandmother walked with long steps and slowed down only when we had passed the houses. The road dipped downhill between two steep earth-banks; we sat down on the ridge and watched the wagons with grapes pass below us. Then Grandmother began to talk to herself:
“I’m getting old and they”—she meant Señor Molina’s children—“don’t matter to me. My sister’ll die before me, and then you’ll be the only ones left You’ll become house-owners. You know I’ve got two houses in this town. You’ll have the same trouble with them as I’ve got now, you’ll have to put new tiles on the roofs every year and you’ll never get your rents. And then people say there’s a God. Like hell there is.”
She looked at me and burst out laughing:
“Now I’m perverting the little angel—if your aunt heard me we’d have a fight! But look, whatever your aunt and her priests may tell you, there isn’t a God, except in the collection boxes in church. Well, anyhow, you’ll find that out for yourself, because you can’t deny the blood in your veins. Your father was one of the sergeants of the Villacampa rising, and it was a miracle he wasn’t executed. And I once threw a priest down the stairs because he insisted on his pious tricks and was killing off the only one of your uncles that was left me. When your mother became a widow, all God did for her was to leave her alone in the hotel with two duros in her pocket and your father stiff and cold in his bed. Afterwards God was sorry for her, it’s true, so He turned her into a servant and washerwoman, and found her an attic and a few priests and nuns to ladle out soup to your brothers. And then there are still people who thank God for His mercy!”
When my grandmother spoke like that in earnest she made me very sad. I wanted to believe in God and the Virgin, but the things she said were true. If God can do everything, He could have treated us more kindly, because my mother was very good. Really, He might have treated my grandmother worse instead, for she was always saying blasphemous things, but still she was rich and had what she wanted.
Grandmother was silent for a while and changed the subject:
“Well, you’ve come here to have a good time and not to hear sermons. But—don’t forget, the priests are scoundrels!”
She took me by the hand and we walked back to town, she striding ahead and I trotting behind. When we came to the market square she gave me two pesetas and said: “Run along, and when you hear it strike twelve, you come home for the meal.” And she walked down the street in the middle of the gutter, straight-backed and muttering blasphemies, or so I thought.
Here in the market square of Navalcarnero was a house that belonged to me. Or rather, it was going to belong to me when Grandmother died. It had three stories and a portico with heavy wooden posts which were greasy from the backs of the men who leaned against them. Each post had a square stone base, and the roof of the portico was made of smoke-blackened beams. There the butcher had his shop, with the carcass of a cow, half covered by a white cloth with bloodstains on it, and cuts of meat, liver, and lungs in white china dishes, set out on little marble slabs. In one dish there was the whole heart of a cow. The butcher’s daughter chased the flies away with a duster made of long, colored paper strips; and at the back of the shop hung a whole pig with a tin pail fastened to its tusks, to catch the blood which dripped from its snout.
The butcher called me:
“Hello, Madrileño, have you come for the grape-harvest?”
When I entered his shop I knocked against the pig which was swinging heavily on its hook and it hit me with its greasy back. I pushed it away with my hand; its fatty bacon-flesh was loathsome.
“Come in, come in, I’ll give you something for your granny to fry for you.”
He gave me three thick, black blood-puddings shiny with fat, which made grease stains in the newspaper he wrapped round them so that you could read the printed letters on the other side of the sheet. I had to take the warm, flabby parcel, which I hated having to grip with my fingers, and on top of it I had to submit to a kiss from the butcher and another from his wife, both of whom were as fat and greasy as their pig and their black puddings. Their daughter stood in the doorway; she was a very pretty girl with a delicate face, and she stroked my hair, but did not kiss me. When I went out of the butcher’s shop I felt greasy all over.
Next door in the portico was the tavern, where they invited me to have some sweets and a peppermint soda. The tavern smelled of wine, of the pitch of wine skins, and of the tobacco and sweat of the men who drank at the tin-sheathed bar table. Some who knew me explained to the others that I was the grandson of “Old Anés.” They did not pronounce it Inés. One of the men said he did not know her, and the tavern-keeper cried:
“But you must know her, she’s known in all Spain! Now look, you’ll remember who she is at once if I tell you she’s the fattest woman in town, the only one who doesn’t go to Mass, and the owner of this house.”
Then a little old man who was sipping from a half-pint jar, said:
“Hell, she was a fine lass, she was, when she was come twenty. We were all after her, and she boxed all our ears for us. There wasn’t one of us who could have said he’d pinched one of her teats. Before you lifted your hand, she whipped round and slapped your face and left you all of a daze. Then she married old Vicente who was a wagon-maker along the road. He was a good soul—a short little man—and he liked a good meal better than working with his plane. When they were married, Anés plunked herself down in his workshop, and then Vicente worked as if he’d been paid by the hour. It wasn’t that she said anything to him, she just sat there on a chair and sewed, but old Vicente wouldn’t look up from his pegs. So the workshop went up and up like foam. But Anés had a child every year, or I should say every ten months, and it was lucky they all died off, because if they hadn’t she’d have filled the town with them.
A good breeding doe, she was. When the two got older, Vincente just died, like a little bird, I should say because he couldn’t cope with so much woman.”
The church bell rang twelve and the men went home to eat. The little old man said I should greet Grandmother from him and told me a few times: “She was a fine lass, she was!”
After the siesta, Concha went with Asunción to visit her girl friends and I went out with Rogelio. We passed through the town and walked downhill through the harvested fields, following the little footpaths along their edges, towards the river Guadarrama. Rogelio said to me:
“You’ll see what fun we’ll have. All the boys meet here by the river.”
When we came to the stream, whose water did not reach to one’s ankles, there were seven or eight boys rolling naked in the sand or splashing in the pools. They were burned black as cinders from the sun and spurted sand and water at us. Rogelio and I got out of our clothes and joined them. I felt funny with my white skin among all those nigger-boys. Rogelio was the biggest, his under-belly was already grown with black hair. Some of the other boys had hair growing there too, and they were very proud of looking as hairy as men.
When we were tired of playing and running, Rogelio called us together and took the photograph of a naked woman out of his jacket, and showed it to me before the others.
“Fernando gave it to me. He says she’s been his girl, but I don’t believe it, he’s such a liar.”
I did not believe it either, for it was simply the picture of an undressed artiste, such as you could see often in Madrid, a woman with one foot on a stool so that you saw her thighs, and nothing on but an embroidered chemise, black stockings, and her hair in a coil on the top of her head. The picture went from hand to hand among the boys, but we were watching Rogelio, who was stroking his member with one hand. The bigger boys were in the same way. The photograph did not do anything to me, nor to the little boys; but it seemed ridiculous to us not to be like the older boys, so we began to play too. We laughed, but we felt nervous and watched one another to see what happened. When the big boys came to the end, they jeered at us because we could not do what men did. When we dressed we were all very tired and very sad.
On the way back to the town we bound ourselves by an oath not to tell anybody, and Rogelio swore he would break the head of the first boy who said anything. Then he explained to us about women, and the blood mounted to my head with shame and suffocation. In the street, when the other boys went away to their houses, Rogelio told me in confidence:
“Tonight we’ll have fun together, you and I alone.”
I felt a mixture of shame at what had happened in the afternoon, and of curiosity about what Rogelio wanted to do that night. I was absent-minded and did not look anyone in the face, least of all Grandmother. At supper she noticed it and asked me whether I was ill. I said no, but I knew I was getting scarlet in the face, because I felt my cheeks burning. She got up, put her hand on my forehead, and said:
“You’re very hot. In a little while you’ll go to bed, because you must be tired after the journey.”
After supper, Fernando, the eldest, said he was going to the casino, and Grandmother made a row. To keep her quiet he got hold of Rogelio and me and said he would take us along, he was only going to have some coffee and would come back with us at once. As it was very early, Grandmother let us go. On the way, Fernando told us what he had in mind:
“You come along and have something, coffee or whatever you like. Afterwards I’m going to see my girl, and you go home and tell Anés that old Paco’s come to see me and I’ve stayed with him to settle about the grapes.”
I thought we were going to have coffee in the lounge with the marble-topped tables, but Fernando took us up a small, steep wooden staircase at the back. Before I could ask he explained to me:
“The lounge is only the public bar. There’s another room upstairs for us members.”
The room upstairs was as big as the lounge; it had two billiard-tables with patched-up tops, a few round marble tables and some square tables with a green cloth where people played cards. At the back, a number of people were huddled round yet another table, under two green-shaded lamps, where you heard the rattling of money. Fernando went straight there.
The table was covered with the same kind of green cloth, and two men were seated there on high stools, one at each side. One held a pack of cards, and the other had big heaps of cash and banknotes in front of him. Rogelio said:
“They’re playing Monte.’ The man with the cards is the banker and the other with all the money is the cashier. You see, the banker puts four cards on the table, and everyone places his bet on one of them, whatever he likes. The card which comes out first when the pack is dealt wins, and all the others lose.”
The banker spread out four cards and said: “Make your bets!”
All hastened to put their pesetas and duros by the side of the card they favored, and then the banker said: “Nothing more goes!”
He began to deal cards from the pack which he had turned face upwards, until one of the four cards on the table came out. Then the other man, the cashier, raked in most of the money and paid the people who had bet on the winning card as much money as they had staked. Fernando lost two duros. When the banker spread another four cards on the table, Fernando again bet two duros. And so he went on losing duros. Suddenly he turned round and said we should drink some coffee. Rogelio called the waiter who gave us two glasses of very bad coffee. Fernando kept losing, and Rogelio asked him to let him play instead; but Fernando did not listen to him. He called me:
“Come here, you, Madrileño!”
He put a heap of money in front of me, sat me on his knees and said to me, while the banker spread out his four cards:
“Take as much of this money as you want and put it beside the card you like best.”
There was a knave of spades. I took a peseta and put it on a corner. Fernando said:
“Don’t be afraid, put duros, or put as much as you want.”
So I took a heap of duros, four or five, and put them beside the knave. All the men round the table watched me, but I was sure that the knave would come out first. Many who had already laid their bets took them away from their own cards and put them beside mine. The banker said grumpily:
“Now, have we all finished? Nothing more goes.”
He turned the pack face upwards, and there was a knave. Fernando got paid three times as much as I had laid, and the banker, in a very bad temper, had to pay all the others. He turned to Fernando and said:
“Now look here, children can’t play.”
Everybody protested, but the banker insisted that I could not play, or he would take away his cards and leave the others to carry on alone. Rogelio and I had to sit down at a little table in the corner, bored and annoyed.
After a long while Fernando and a fat man whom I did not know came to our table. They started talking about land, vineyards, and promissory notes. The fat man told Fernando that he had already given him a lot of money although he was a minor. Fernando answered:
“What does that matter to you? If I give you a note post-dated for when I come of age, there’s no hitch in it.”
The fat man said:
“But supposing you die in the meantime? Because, you know you’ve got the face of a man with T.B., and one can’t be sure of you.”
“You needn’t be afraid of my dying. A sick cat never dies,” answered Fernando with a grin.
The fat man took banknotes and a stamped form from his pocket. Fernando signed, and the man gave him the money. It astonished me that there was nothing else written on the paper. Fernando said to the fat man:
“You see I trust your word!”
“Now, when have I ever cheated you?”
Fernando went back to the gaming table and the man started to give us explanations:
“You’re the grandson of Inés, aren’t you? You’re already a man now. Here, buy yourself something.” He gave me a duro. “Are you jealous?” he asked Rogelio. “Here’s one for you, too. Fernando’s a good lad. We had to settle this affair with the grapes, and it’s all settled now. Your father was a fine man.” He put a hand on Rogelio’s shoulders: “A nice lot of duros we made together, your father and me, my boy. But when he took that Inés into his house, it was all over. She had a grouch against me, because your grandmother”—he nodded towards me—“never could stand me, and so in the end your father and I quarreled. She knew which side of her bread was buttered all right.”
Rogelio stared into the man’s face.
“Give me five duros,” he said suddenly.
“But what do you want five duros for, shaver?”
“You give me five duros, or I’ll tell Inés that you’re giving Fernando money. I’m not a child like him”—he meant me—“and either you give me the money or I’ll tell Inés. Everybody knows that you lend money and then seize people’s lands.”
“Boy, those are things one doesn’t say out loud. You must show respect for your elders and betters. Here’s another duro and shut up. And you too,” he said to me. “Here’s another for you—and don’t say anything to your grandmother.”
He got up angrily and pulled Fernando away from the table. They began to dispute, first in a low voice and then loudly:
“Go to bed with children, and you wake up mucky,” said the man.
“If only you hadn’t brought those babes along! Especially that grandson of hers. It’s not so bad with your brother, after all; you give him a duro and he keeps his mouth shut. But I don’t trust that little leech. As soon as he gets home he’ll tell his grandmother and we’ll have a row.”
Fernando answered:
“Don’t you worry—what does he know?”
He turned to us and sent us away.
“And remember—I’m staying here because I’ve got to buy grapes.”
Outside in the street, Rogelio said:
“I get a duro out of that fellow every time, it’s a good trick. But don’t say a word to Anés, or she’ll take all the money away from us.”
I promised silence and we tied our duros into our handkerchiefs so that they should not clink. When we came home, Grandmother grumbled and groused because Fernando was not back, and then we went to bed.
We slept in a whitewashed room with cross beams, an enormous bed, under it a chamber pot almost as big as the bed, two chairs and a chest with a rounded lid. The huge window that gave on to the street had an iron grille with a close leaf pattern. The room was chilly, the sheets damp; the stone tiles of the floor were icy cold and sweated moisture. We undressed in haste and clambered on to the bed, which was as high as ourselves. Inside the sheets we slowly got warm, but then it soon became intolerably hot under the blanket. Rogelio asked me:
“Are you hot?”
“I’m almost in a sweat.”
“We must take off everything.” He pulled off his pants and undervest and stayed quite naked.
I felt ashamed. But if we had bathed without anything on, why shouldn’t we lie without any clothes now? So we both stayed naked in the bed. Rogelio pressed himself against me. His skin burned. He passed his hand over my body and said:
“You’re so cool.”
He began to stroke my sexual organs. I pushed his hand away, but he insisted: “Let me, don’t be silly, you’ll see how much you’ll like it.”
I let him go on, dazed with shame, burning hot. Suddenly something happened in me, I did not know what; but I went mad with rage and kicked him furiously in his ribs, while he clutched and pulled at my member in the greatest excitement, without letting go. I jumped out of bed. I had hung my belt over the iron bedrail. Now I seized it and started hitting out at his head, sides, buttocks, and belly. He yelled and rolled in the bed. A little trickle of blood ran down his forehead over one eye. Grandmother came into the room in her nightdress, a candlestick in her hand, and big slippers on her feet. She caught us as he was writhing on the bed and I lashing out at him, blind with fury, anger and loathing. Grandmother boxed my ears and I crumpled up in a corner, weeping.
Then, while she stood there in her nightgown and we in our nakedness, came the explanations. Rogelio sat in a chair and did not say a word. I talked and talked, mixing everything up.
“You see, Grandmother, he’s a pansy. He’s been touching me and wanting to do dirty things. And his brother’s a gambler. And all the boys here play with themselves when they’re together. He’s got a post card with a naked woman…”
I cried and fumbled for my trousers, to haul the duros out of my pocket, hiccoughing. Grandmother took the money and carried me to her own bed, wrapped me up, let me lie in the curve of her belly, and there I went to sleep. But before that she had given Rogelio a kick on his naked bottom, and her slipper had come off and sailed through the air. I had laughed through my tears.
I woke when the outer door slammed. Fernando was back. It was dawning, and Grandmother shouted at him from the top of her bed. Fernando was drunk.
“Now there, there, Anés. Leave me alone. I’m too sleepy.”
He sat down in the dining room, drank a glass of brandy and fell asleep on the dining-room table. Grandmother got up in her nightgown, lifted him in her arms and carried him to his bedroom. It was funny to see my grandmother in the half light of the morning, big as she was, her white nightgown billowing down to her feet, carrying Fernando on her arms like a stuffed doll. I heard him fall on to his bed like a sack, and snore so that you heard it through the whole house.
A wagon passed by in the street, and all the window panes rattled. The carter was singing. And my grandmother came back into her bed, gathered me in her arms, laid my head on her breast and began to hum a tune.
MADRID SMELLS BETTER. It does not smell of mules, or of sweat, or of smoke, or of dirty farmyards with the warm reek of dung and of chickens. Madrid smells of sun. On the balcony of our flat, which is on the third floor, you can sun yourself in the mornings. The cat stays in a corner of the balcony on his square of rug, peers down into the street over the edge of the board placed against the foot of the railings, and sits down and sleeps. From time to time, he opens his golden eyes and looks at me. Then he shuts them again and goes on sleeping. In his sleep he twitches his nostrils and smells everything.
When they water the street below, the fresh scent of moist earth rises up to the balcony just as when it is raining. When the wind blows from the north you smell the trees in the Casa de Campo. When the air is still and the whole quarter lies quiet, the wood and plaster of the old houses smell, the clean linen spread out on the balconies, and the sweet basil in the flower-pots. The old walnut and mahogany furniture sweats beeswax; you smell it through the open balconies while the women are cleaning. In the basement of our house is a smart carriage yard, and in the mornings, when the lacquered carriages are taken out into the street, sluiced and brushed, you can smell them. The horses, white and cinnamon brown, come out for their walk covered with a blanket and they smell of warm hair.
Near our house is the Plaza de Oriente with its bronze horses in the middle and the stone kings round it, with its two marble basins full of water, and of frogs, toads, tadpoles, and fishes, and with two little public gardens at the sides. The whole square smells of trees, water, stone and bronze. Farther on is the Royal Palace with its square courtyard, the Plaza de Armas, carpeted with sand, treeless, flanked with a row of balconies. The sun beats down on it from sunrise to sunset, and it is like a sandy beach without its sea. Two cannon point their muzzles towards the open country, and a soldier with white leather straps and shining black cartridge-cases paces between them day and night. The balconies are on the further side of a vaulted gallery with six stone arches, and after crossing the sun-filled yard, you feel as if you were in a cold cellar. The fresh air from the Campo del Moro and the Casa de Campo sweeps through the balconies and cools the sand of the courtyard.
When you look out from one of the balconies, everything is green; when you turn your back to it, everything is yellow. The lawns and woods are green, the grains of sand and the stone blocks are yellow.
There is a clock, so old that it has only one hand, because at the time it was made people did not yet count the minutes. Above the clock is a small turret with the bells and hammers hanging free in the air, always ready to strike the hours. Just under it are sentry boxes of thick stone with slits for windows and a roof like a colander. And there are three great gates which no one ever enters except ambassadors and foreign kings. Then the soldiers, who are on guard in their sentry boxes so that nobody should pass, let them through and present arms.
Swallows swoop and chatter over the heads of the sentries. There are thousands of them. Every corner of the hundred windows of the façade holds a nest, or even two or three, glued to each other, each with its little opening as if it were a pocket. There are so many of them that the swallows who came later because they were born after the others had to pile their nests into the arches of the two stone galleries. On summer evenings when the sun is setting, they make you giddy as they flash in and out. They return a thousand times to their nests where their broods shrill, waiting with wide-open beaks for their mothers who in passing leave an insect as though it were a kiss.
Once a day, at eleven sharp, the soldiers come marching into the courtyard in slow step, in full-dress uniform. At the head of the infantry walk the four sappers, their nickeled shovels and picks on their shoulders, then the drummers, the buglers, and the band with their brass instruments sparkling and shining in the sun, and then the commanding officer, sitting very straight on his horse with his decorations and his sword, and behind him the flag. The cavalry in silver plated cuirasses or fur dolmans, in metal helmets or shaggy busbies with death-head badges. Last of all come the two guns drawn by eight square-crouped horses, the iron gun-carriages loaded with cannon balls, their muzzles covered with a leather cap shined with blacking. On the other side of the yard, the soldiers who are coming off guard are lined up. The two flags salute one another across the empty square and the two officers ride slowly forward, meet in the middle and whisper to each other the secret password of those who may enter or leave the palace. They salute each other with their naked swords, raising them to their foreheads and lowering them to their feet, filling the square with flashes of light. Then those who are coming off guard march through the courtyard in the same order as those who had come on, and the sound of their bugles dies away in the streets. The people stream into the yard once more, and the new soldiers play with the nursemaids and the children.
During the night, the square stands empty, the heavy clanking iron gates are closed, the birds go to sleep and everything turns white in the moonlight. From outside the railings you hear the steps of the sentries on the flagstones of the entrance sounding across the huge courtyard. The street lamps on the wide pavements of the Calle de Bailén dazzle with their white light the hundreds of hawk-moths that come up from the parks.
Our quarter—for this was our quarter—stretched farther on through a maze of old alley-ways as far as the Calle Mayor. They were narrow, twisting streets, as our forefathers had built them for some reason or other. They had wonderful names: the names of saints, like Saint Clara and Saint James; then heroic names of wars like Luzon, Lepanto, Independence; and lastly fancy names—Street of the Mirror, of the Clock, of the Stoop—which were the oldest and most winding alleys, those which were best for playing at “Thieves and Robbers.” There were bits of waste ground with broken hoardings and ruins inside, old houses with empty doorways, stone courtyards with solitary trees, little squares narrower even than the streets. They twisted and intertwined so that it was easy to hide and to escape in them.
There we used to play at “I spy.” The one who was left over waited until he heard the shouts of the gang which scattered into the alleys. “I see you-oo-oo!”
He would start to run and behind his back the boys who had been crouching in the corners came out from the doorways, calling: “Past and safe!”
He would run on, smelling out the holes like a dog until he caught one of the boys squatting on the ground or behind some worm-eaten door: “I spy!”
Sometimes they both shouted at the same time, and then a quarrel would start and end in blows.
We had our quarter and our law. At times, the gang of a neighboring quarter invaded our territory, and then we defended our right with stones which ricocheted from the corners. The war usually lasted for days, and cost bumps and bruises. In the end, the attackers would get tired and leave us in peace. At other times, we ourselves attacked a neighboring quarter because the boys there were stinkers or because they had beaten up one of our gang who was passing through their territory.
Everything in our quarter was ours: the holes in the street where we played marbles: the railings of the square where we played hopscotch: the frogs and the toads in the fountain of the Plaza de Oriente: the right to the planks of the hoardings which we could exchange for broken biscuits at the pastrycook’s in the Calle del Espejo: the right to catch the hawk-moths round the street lights of the Calle del Arenal, to chuck stones at the gas lamps, to jump down the high steps leading up to the Church of Santiago, and to light bonfires in the Plaza de Ramales.
That was our law.
Our council meetings took place in the doorway of the plasterer’s yard. Pablito was the son of the plasterer, and the doorway belonged to him. We sat down, and the plaster fallen from the sacks made our trousers white all over. Pablito was very fair, very thin and very small, but he was the brainiest of us. Eladio, the son of the tavern keeper of the Calle de la Independencia, was the strongest brute. Between the two of them they settled all our problems, and organized our games and our pranks. Sometimes one of them undid what the other had started, because they were opposites.
In the Calle de Lemus was a piece of waste ground with a broken fence. In the ground were the cellars of a tumbledown house which nobody looked after. One day Eladio dared us all: “I’m going in there. I won’t be beaten until I say I am. But I tell you, don’t cry if I bash somebody’s head in—and you can bash in mine for all I care.”
He slipped through one of the holes in the fence and disappeared in the cellars, where the grass was growing and bricks piled up together with the muck of all the people who used them as lavatories. We laid a plan of attack. He was the bandit Vivillo and we were the Civil Guard. When we tried to get in through the holes in the hoarding, Eladio received us with a shower of stones which knocked against the planks; we retreated and fetched a supply of bricks and rubble. People went to the other side of the street so as not to get hit by our stones, and shouted at us. Eladio defended himself in his holes like a hero, and each time we invaded the waste ground we had to get out again, because he hit hard, with all the strength of the son of a tavern keeper from the hills of Asturias.
Pablito sat down behind the fence and started thinking. He got a clue from the Adventures of Dick Navarro. We quickly lit a bonfire in the street and wrapped our stones in smouldering paper. When the paper began to burn we threw the stones at Eladio who called us cowards, so as to dare us to invade his territory. The ground was littered with old paper, rags, straw, and rubbish thrown in by the neighbors, and soon bonfires flared up all over the place. Some of us threw stones wrapped in burning paper, some just threw stones, thick as hail, and Eladio paid us back by throwing whole bricks and bounding between the flames in a great fury. In the end we entered in a pack, our pockets full of stones, and carrying burning planks torn from the fence.
Eladio surrendered, and the neighbors kicked us out of the grounds. The ruins of the house had begun to catch fire, and the butcher, the coal merchant, the milkman, and the tavern keeper had to hurry up with pails of water. Our blouses were full of holes burned by sparks. Eladio screamed at the neighbors from behind the next corner: “Dirty pigs, bastards!”
Then we showered all the stones we were carrying in our pockets on the men, and the whole quarter was in an uproar, with doors and balconies banging while they were chasing us. The French baker from the Calle del Espejo came after us with a knobstick and thrashed Antoneja, who was always unlucky.
The next day, the ruins were full of mud and smoke fumes. The Frenchman’s loaves got a broadside of horse droppings. We collected them in the stables of the house where I lived, and then our whole gang chucked them on to the rolls and buns heaped on the counter. The Frenchman caught a boy and gave him a hiding with one of the sticks of broom which he used for heating the oven. The boy’s mother made a frightful row, she came down with a knife and wanted to kill the Frenchman. All the women and some of the men in the quarter wanted to storm the baker’s shop.
“That dirty Frenchie dared to hit my boy!”
We boys bombarded the shop with stones, and the people cheered. Nobody remembered about the ruined house. An old woman said to a man:
“You know, my father—God grant he’s in heaven now, poor man—used to tell us that the French stuck their bayonets into schoolboys’ bottoms and carried them round the streets like that.”
The baker did not lose his customers, because he baked the best bread in the quarter. But for weeks he had to put up with people handling his rolls and loaves, and saying: “Christ, this loaf’s not baked through—and that’s burned—I want a decent loaf of bread.”
We made peace with the baker when he got a cartload of broom for his oven. The branches were hung with pointed little seeds which danced just like a teetotum. We swarmed up the stack of scented, sticky broom, took all the sticks we wanted and filled our pockets with the tight, resinous, acorn-like pods. The man let us do it without interfering, and after that we went back to his shop to buy rolls warm from the oven, and told him it had all been our fault.
It was only a few days till my school term, and I spent them with Uncle José. In the mornings he took his stick with the silver knob—he had another one with a gold knob—and brushed his silky bowler hat with a tiny brush of very soft bristles, which he passed gently over the rounded crown and the stiff, curved brim. Then he walked slowly in the sun up the Calle de Campomanes and talked. He told me stories of when he was a boy. I could not imagine him as a child, I thought that he had always been as I was seeing him then.
“When I was your age, I was earning my bread. At eight years I was just like the boys you have seen in Brunete. I clambered on to the croup of a donkey and went to the spring to fetch water. I took their meals to my father and my elder brothers, to where they were working in the fields, and looked after the water jars so that they always had fresh water. Of course, I couldn’t handle the plow, but I drove the harrow on the threshing floor and weeded the fields with a small hoe. I mowed with a sickle and tied the sheaves which the men left in a heap for me to tie. At night I got up by starlight and went out into the corral. The well bucket was so big that there was nearly room enough for me to sit in it, and it stood on the curb of the well. I had to let it down the well and haul it up when it was full. It bumped against the wall and was so heavy that I was sometimes afraid the rope would drag me down into the well shaft. When the bucket was at the height of the curbstone I dragged it on to the edge, and then I tipped it and filled the pails for the cattle which were waiting for me in the stable and turning their heads. When it was very cold I picked up my blanket from the hearthstone and lay down between the mules until dawn.”
As I listened to him, I thought this was a marvelous life for a boy, a great game.
He used to speak slowly of men and things, with the leisurely, inexorable, measured pace of an old Castilian accustomed to see the hours pass by with the flat lands before him, forced to seek knowledge from the swaying grass blade and the leaping insect.
“When I was a small boy, I already worked like a man. Our food was bad. There were many of us, and my father used to pick out the black chick-peas, and the ones yellow with rust, for us to eat. He left the good ones for seed, and they were rosy chick-peas with a skin like the dry skin of a man. Our best meals were the cool gazpacho in the summer and potato stew in the evenings. None of my brothers were called up to the army, but I was, and then, when I was twenty, I started to do what you are doing now: I started studying. I had big clumsy fingers stiff with horny skin, and I wept with rage because I couldn’t write. The penholders slipped through my fingers, until I made one for myself. At that time only rich people used pens as you know them. The others had quills which had to be sharpened with a penknife, and I couldn’t write with them. We also used canes trimmed like quills. I took a stout cane and made myself a pen that didn’t slip through my fingers. I studied hard, but I never came so far as to know half of what you know already now. I learned about figures, but I never could learn algebra.” He added, as though speaking to himself: “How is it possible to add up letters?”
“It’s quite easy, Uncle,” I answered. “Just as you add up figures.” Proudly I began to give him a lesson in elementary algebra.
He listened, but he did not understand. He strained himself to follow my reasoning, and I grew almost angry when he would not understand such simple things. He dropped my hand and put his own hand on my shoulder, stroking my neck.
“It’s no good. We can’t do anything about it, you and I. What you don’t learn as a boy, you won’t learn as a man. It’s just as if one’s brain got hardened.”
The Plaza de Callao was full of bookstalls. Every year before the opening of the school term, there was a book fair and Madrid was littered with stalls. The greatest number of them was here, in the booksellers’ quarter, and at the Puerta de Atocha, where they filled the Paseo del Prado. My uncle and I liked to go from stall to stall looking for bargains. Between the fairs we went into the bookshops of the Calle de Mesonero Romanos, the Calle de la Luna, and the Calle de la Abada. Most of the shops were just wooden sheds set up on empty building sites. The biggest bookshop was at the corner of the Calle de la Luna and the Calle de la Abada, a green-painted wooden shed as big as a coach mews. The owner, an old man, was a friend of my uncle’s and had worked on the land like him. They always started to talk hard about old times and the land. Meanwhile I burrowed in the books and put those I liked in a heap. They were cheap: most of them cost ten or fifteen centimos. Every time my uncle saw the heap of books he grumbled, but I knew very well that the bookseller would not let me go away without them, and would not let my uncle discard half of them either. If my uncle did not buy them, the bookseller would give them to me. At times, though, he would take away books which I ought not to read yet, as he said. The only bad thing about it was that I could not sell those books to him afterwards. When I had read them, we took them back to the bookseller and let him have them for nothing. I also bought books in the Calle de Atocha, but the book-sellers there bought them back for half the price I had paid.
There was a Valencian writer called Blasco Ibáñez who had written all these books. The priests at my school said that he was one of the worst Anarchists, but I did not believe it. Once he had said that nobody read books in Spain because the people had not enough money to buy them; and I thought he was right, because our school books were very expensive. Then he said: “I will give the Spaniards something to read.” And he opened a bookshop in the Calle de Mesonero Romanos and started making books. Not his own books, since he said that would not be fair, but the best books you could find in the world, and every copy was sold at thirty-five centimos. People bought them by the thousand and when they had read a book, they sold it to the second-hand bookstalls where the children and the poor bought them. That was how I had read Dickens, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Dumas, Victor Hugo, and others.
People started at once to imitate Blasco Ibáñez. The publisher Calleja, who used to print all the school books and fairy tales, began a series called “The Novel of Today”—La Novela de Ahora—so as to fight against Blasco Ibáñez’s series which was called “The Illustrated Novel”—La Novela Ilustrada. In that series Calleja published many adventure stories by Mayne Reid and Salgari, as well as Spanish classics. The two firms were fighting each other, but most people bought the issues of both every week. Then the Catalans became jealous and the publisher Sopena started printing very thick volumes on very bad paper, but with a brightly colored cover. They found less buyers, because there were not many people who could afford to spend one peseta, which was the price of a volume. The masons who were the workers with the highest wages since the strike organized by Pablo Iglesias—one of the revolutionaries like Blasco Ibáñez—earned no more than four pesetas per day at the most, that is to say, if they were skilled workers, and 1.75 pesetas if they were simple laborers. Of course many of them bought books at the secondhand shops, but only books at fifteen centimos.
As it was a long way from our house to school, I always took with me two or three novels to read and to exchange afterwards with the other boys. But we had to take care because of the Fathers at the school. If they caught us with a book of the “Illustrated Novel” series, they took it away and tore it to bits. We were only allowed a “Novel of Today” or one of the thrillers for a few coppers.
I had a funny experience because of this. Both series published one and the same book by Balzac, the “Illustrated Novel” under the title of Eugenie Grandet and the “Novel of Today” under the title Los Avaros de Provincias. I showed them both to Father Vesga, the most bigoted of all our teachers, and asked him whether I ought to tear up this “Illustrated Novel” edition as well, although it was the same book as the other one. He got as angry as a wild cat, punished me, and confiscated both books. After that he mounted the dais, banged his fist on the table and on the two books, and explained:
“Here you see how they poison the minds of young children! Yes, gentlemen! So as to make people confuse this edition of Calleja, as you all know, a Christian firm which would never lower itself to printing such filth as Blasco Ibáñez publishes in his dirty ‘Illustrated Novel,’ that man, who was excommunicated by the Holy Father, dares to copy the same work with another title! No, gentlemen, it is not permitted to buy a single volume of the ‘Illustrated Novel,’ whatever it may be, because that only means furnishing arms to Satan! And if by misfortune you should find books of this kind at home it is your duty to talk to your parents about it and tear them up, even if your parents get angry.”
At this the priest had a fit of mad rage; I believe he would have killed Blasco Ibáñez if he had been there. He spoke of him as of a monster who murdered people. In the end he turned to me and said “You”—he used “you” in place of “thou” only when he was furious—“you will stay on your knees in the classroom for a fortnight, and by then you will have learned not to read such books!”
We went to my uncle’s office which was in the building of the church of San Martín in the Calle de la Luna. That church owned an ancient cemetery in the grounds of Amaniel, in which the members of the Confraternity of San Martín used to be buried. Later on the State decreed the closing of the cemetery and prohibited any more burials there, as it was already full. Then many of the people whose relatives were buried there had them dug up and removed to another cemetery, so that they all could be buried in the same grave. Since my uncle was in charge of the cemetery office, people came to him to get the permit to dig up their father or mother or grandfather and take them to another place. It was a very expensive business, because as soon as you fiddled with a dead body, everyone cashed in. You had to pay dues to the State, to the Madrid Town Council, to both cemeteries, the one from which the body was removed, and the other in which it was going to be buried; to the Church of San Martín, to the parish in which the relatives lived, to all the parishes through which the coffin would have to pass; the cost of the exhumation, the fee of the forensic doctor who had to attend the opening of the grave, and the price of the new grave site. Thus it cost more than a thousand duros, or five thousand pesetas, to transfer a body.
People gave gratuities up to five hundred pesetas to my Uncle José so that he would speed up the dispatch of the necessary papers. He ran round to the Town Council, the cemeteries, and the parish offices for them and settled everything.
Often, when my school was closed, I went with him and listened to the conversations; many of them were very curious. Most removals were to the cemeteries of San Isidro and San Lorenzo. In the cemetery of San Lorenzo there was a very fat and jolly chaplain who exclaimed every time we arrived: “Hullo, Pepe—how many new lodgers are you bringing me?” Then he would produce a bottle of old sweet wine and some biscuits. “Well, let’s drink to the health of the dead!” He would fill his glass first, drink it, smack his tongue, thump my uncle on the back, and say: “That’s the good one, you know, the one I use at Mass! You see, we’ve always got a few crazy old women who give me things. They pay the three pesetas for the responsories, and then from time to time they bring a little bottle as well to make the recommendation of the defunct to Divine Mercy more effective!”
When we said good-by to him the bottle was always empty, although my uncle and I had drunk only a small glass each.
My uncle’s office was at the end of a very dark corridor which began at a side door of the church and ran alongside a garden neglected for many years. The garden was full of odd plants which grew between the grass and entangled your feet. Some of them had climbed the trees and the walls, and the trees and the walls were covered with leaves. In the middle was a round basin which must have been a fountain once upon a time. The rain water had collected there and it had rotted the stone. Plants had grown in the broken fountain and hung over its rim down to the ground; and from the ground, plants had climbed up, twined with the others, and crept into the basin, so that you did not know which were growing from the fountain. In spring every corner of the garden was full of flowers. On the walls, on the trees, and in the basin of the fountain bells opened, white or purple with yellow pistils. There were red and orange poppies and there were roses of a very dark red, difficult to pick, because they had thorns like hooks. After rain, snails covered the garden. They came up in thousands, and I never understood from where they came and where they went. There were green lizards a foot long, and from the office window we could see rats big as small cats crossing the garden. The church was full of rats.
In autumn the trees turned yellow and the leaves heaped up in the garden. When you walked on them they crackled like old paper. After the rains they rotted, and then the ground of the garden was as soft as a thick carpet. The trees were very old and very big, and hundreds of birds lived in them; all the birds from the whole quarter, because the children never went into the garden. I was the only one to go there, I and a very old priest who had belonged to the church for many years and who liked to sit in the garden reading his breviary. In winter he used to sit in the sun and at times he fell asleep there. As the black cloth of his robes grew very hot, the small lizards sometimes climbed on to his knees. When he woke and saw them, he stroked them gently and they lifted their heads as though they were looking into his face.
Once there was a new parish priest who wanted to tidy up the garden, and the old priest made a row in the sacristy, shaking his stick and crying aloud:
“Damnation, if he touches the garden I’ll whack him!”
He was so old that they left his garden as he wanted it. Whenever he saw me, he called me and told the story. “Those fools,” he would say, “they think they can do better than God. Wouldn’t this garden be nice with a few little pebbled paths and a few small trees with their hair trimmed as if the barber came every morning? You see, all those gardeners only want to correct the works of God, and so they clip the leaves off the trees until they look like a wedding cake. What’s your opinion?” he would ask me.
“You see, Father Cesareo, for me this is the best garden in the world. Here I can walk on the grass and pick the flowers I like, but in the Retiro where the trees are trimmed as you say, you mustn’t walk on the grass or take a flower. If you do the park keeper beats you with his stick, or if you are with a grown-up he fines you five pesetas. And then there is barbed wire, and if you don’t take care your legs get all torn and scratched. That’s why I like going to the Moncloa, where you can run about on the grass and there are flowers and pines, or coming here to this garden.”
But not all priests were like Padre Cesareo. In the sacristy they used to quarrel over the Masses and the confessional. There was a big priest who had a very bad temper; he liked playing cards so much that whenever he had to stay on duty in the church, he went to my uncle’s office to play Tresillo. He always boxed the altar boys’ ears and had rows with everybody. He quarreled even with the women who came to the sacristy to bring candles for the altars. When the candle was thin, he took it between the tips of his fingers and said: “Madam, this is just a match stick. Either you’ve very little piety, or very little money. But I suppose it’s little piety you have, because you’ve got money enough for trinkets and paint.” When the candle was thick, he grew just as angry: “Where do you want us to place this pole? Of course, you buy a fat taper so that it should last on the altar many days and you can point it out to all your neighbors and say: ‘Do you see that big, tall candle in the middle of all the small ones? That’s my candle!’ So you have a good reason for a little gossip and for showing off. What you’re spending on wax you ought to give to our Church, which is in sore need of it.”
The funny thing was that in this way he squeezed money out of everybody. Then he would show the duro or the two pesetas to the other priests and say: “See what idiots you are. The only argument that helps with these people is a good kick in the pants. With your ‘Madam this’ and ‘Madam that’ and kissing hands you don’t get money out of them. If you want to milk a cow you’ve got to pull her teats.”
He kept the money for himself and the others never dared to say anything. Only once Don Rafael, a small timid priest, went out of his way to tell him that those donations should go into the common pool. The other looked him up and down as if he were going to hit him, and pulled a duro out of his cassock. He flicked it on the palm of his hand and said: “It’s me who’s earned this duro. Everyone who likes duros can earn them for himself. It would be a nice thing for me to fill your pockets! Nequaquam!” And he put the duro back into his cassock.
There was a seat attendant in the church who was also the janitor of the sacristy and the offices, a kind of watchman. During services he walked about in the church among the people with a collecting box and made everybody pay the five centimos for his seat. It was a good job, because many people gave him ten centimos or more for keeping a prie-dieu instead of a straw-bottomed chair reserved for them, and others gave him letters or messages for their sweethearts and tipped him a peseta or two. Then, when the girl came to hear Mass, he went to her to cash in the copper for the chair, winked, and gave her the letter; and so he would get another tip. The priests took the money out of the collecting boxes by opening the padlock, but the seat attendant kept on filching money. He did it with a corset whalebone. He stuck a little pellet of hot pitch on the point of the bone, pushed it through the slit of the box and left it inside to let the pitch cool. Then the money stuck to it, and he fished out the coins one by one.
In the afternoon, when my uncle left his office, we went to the Callao Cinema. It was a big, ugly shed of wood and canvas. In the entrance stood a barrel-organ with many drums, flutes, and trumpets, and some figures dressed up as pages, which turned round and round on one foot, nodded their heads to make a bow, and struck an instrument with their hands. One of them had a drum, another a lyre with little bells, and a third a tambourine. Highest of all stood a figure with a baton which conducted the music. Behind them was the machinery; there was a tall box with a very long strip of paper covered with holes, which passed over a cylinder and then fell into another box alongside. When the roll ran over the cylinder, which was also covered with holes, the air passed through the holes of the paper into the hollow inside and made the instruments of the organ sound.
The shed was filled with wooden benches, and at the far end was the screen and the speaker. The speaker was a very amusing man who explained the whole film and cracked jokes at the things which appeared on the screen. The people applauded him very much, especially when one of Toribio’s films was running. They called him Toribio, but in reality he was a French actor by the name of André Deed, who always did things that made you laugh. They also gave Pathé films about animals and flowers, which showed you how animals live and how flowers grow. Once I saw a hen’s egg with its white and yolk, so large that it filled the whole screen. It began to move slowly and to change its form. First something like an eye appeared, and then the little chick began to shape, and in the end it was already formed, pecked at the shell of the egg, broke it, and came out with a bit of the shell stuck to its behind. You also saw films of the King and Queen looking at horse races, and of foreign kings and lots of other people.
The owner of the cinema knew us; he was a very kind man who had lived in France for many years. His name was Gimeno. On Thursday afternoons, when there was no class, he did not charge the boys more than five centimos for a ticket. When he saw a boy hanging round the organ he asked him why he did not come in. The boy would say: “I haven’t got the money.” Then Gimeno would take a look at him, and if he wasn’t a ragamuffin he would say: “Come on, get in.” Other boys who had no money begged for it from the people who were passing by, and many bought a five-centimo ticket for them. So the cinema filled with boys on Thursdays; even the passages were full of those who could not squeeze on to the benches. Grown-ups disliked going there on Thursdays because of the row going on, with all the boys squealing and making noises. But Señor Gimeno enjoyed the Thursdays more than any other day, and so did the speaker; on Thursdays he cracked more jokes and told more crazy stories than ever.
Sometimes my uncle and I went to other places in Madrid, to the Retiro Park, when the band was playing there, or to the gardens of the Buen Retiro outside the Park. There in the gardens another band used to play and usually a circus with animals was set up there in summer. A lion-tamer called Malleu, a Spaniard, who was said to be the best lion-tamer in the world, had a lion into whose cage nobody else ever dared to enter. The Circus Parish had another lion-tamer, and Malleu offered him 1,000 pesetas if he dared to enter the cage of his lion. We went sometimes to the Circus Parish, but only when there was no dangerous show on. Once a young girl called Minna Alice who turned somersaults in a wooden hoop mounted on a car had got killed, and my uncle did not want me to go to anything where I might see someone killing himself.
It is difficult to turn back.
You look into the sky, and see cloud cavalcades heaped up by the air which never tires of giving them new shape, or you see but the blue dome aquiver with sunlight. It is the same at night, although the sun is hidden and the light comes only from the stars and the moon. Invisibly, the waves ride on in that sky by day and by night.
All over the earth voices and songs are thrown into the air at random, mixed, massed as the clouds are massed by the wind. A copper wire slung across the roof of a house catches them all, and its frail thread of a body shudders at the impact. An anode and a cathode hurl those voices and songs at each other, as they arrive in mingled surging waves, and the patient hand of the listener regulates the mad leap of the electrons so as to single out a voice or a symphony. But there is always one strain of sound which dominates everything else, a wave more tenacious than the others, to which you have to listen.
Old Madrid, the Madrid of my childhood, is a great surge of clouds or of waves, I do not know which. But beyond all those whites and blues, beyond all the songs and sounds and vibrations, there is one predominant strain:
EL AVAPIÉS.
At that time it was the frontier of Madrid. It was the end of Madrid, and the end of the world. With that critical instinct for the right word, which two thousand years since earned the tag of vox populi, vox dei, the people had baptized the limits of El Avapiés; there were the Americas and there was El Mundo Nuevo, the New World. It was another world indeed. So far civilization and the city reached, and there they ended.
There began a world of abstruse things and beings. There the city cast its ash and spume, and so did the nation. The seething waters of Madrid threw their scum from the center to the periphery, and the scum of the seething waters of Spain was sucked from the periphery to the center. The two waves met and formed a belt which spanned the town. Only the initiated, the Civil Guards, and we children penetrated into that live barrier.
Gullies and slopes bearded with rough ears of grass eternally yellow, dry, and harsh. Fumes from factory chimneys and evil-smelling trickles from stables. Allotments with lumpy soil, black and putrid; foul streams and parched cracks in the earth. Epileptic trees, hostile thistles and thorns, gaunt dogs with angular ribs, dusty telegraph poles with their white china cups broken, goats browsing on waste paper, empty rusted tins, huts sunk to their knees in the ground. Gypsies with bold side-whiskers, gypsy women in motley, grease-stained petticoats, beggars with abundant beards and lice, children all bottom and belly, filth trickling down their legs, the navel button protruding from their dusky paunches. This was called the “Quarter of the Injuries.”
It was the lowest rung in the social ladder that began at the Plaza de Oriente, in the Royal Palace with its gates open to plumed helmets and diamond-spangled décolletés, and ended in El Avapiés, which then spewed out the last dregs and deposited them in the other world, in the Americas and the Mundo Nuevo.
Thus El Avapiés was the pointer of the scales, the crucial point between existence and non-existence. One came to El Avapiés from above or from below. Whoever came from above had stepped down the last step left to him before the final and absolute fall. Whoever came from below had scaled the first step upwards, which might lead to anywhere and anything. Millionaires have passed through El Avapiés before crossing the outer belt of the Rondas and turning into drunken beggars. Rag-pickers, collectors of cigarette stubs and waste paper, filthy from spittle and trampling feet, have climbed the step of El Avapiés and come to be millionaires. In El Avapiés, all the prides exist side by side, the pride of having been everything and no longer wanting to be anything, and the pride of having been nothing and wanting to be everything.
If those tremendous and wantonly cruel forces were to clash, life would be impossible. But the two waves never break against each other. Between them lies a firm, calm beach which absorbs the impact of both and converts them into currents which ebb and flow: all Avapiés works.
In its houses built with prison galleries running round their courtyards, passages open to the winds, a single lavatory for all the inmates, a door and a window per cell, live the plasterer, the smith, the carpenter, the newspaper vendor, the blind beggar from the corner, the bankrupt, the rag-and-bone man, and the poet. In those courtyards with their pavement of rounded pebbles, a dripping water-tap in the middle, all the tongues of one language meet: the refined accent of the gentleman, the shameless talk of the pimp, the slang of thieves and beggars, the high-flown rhetorics of the budding writer. You hear horrifying blasphemies and exquisitely tender phrases.
Every day during many years of my childhood I walked from the gates of the Palace down to the gates of the New World, and scaled the slope on my way back. At times I went into the Palace and watched from the marble galleries guarded by halberdiers the pageant of the royalty, the princes and the grandees of Spain. At times I crossed the frontier into the no-man’s world beyond the New World and watched naked gypsies squatting in the sun and killing the lice which the swarthy fingers of their mother or sister plucked from their hair, one by one. I watched the rag-pickers separating the mountain of refuse into heaps of food for themselves and their animals, and heaps of rubbish which they would be able to sell for a few coppers.
I fought battles with stones against the brats of the gypsies and the rag-pickers, and I played decorously at quoits or at hopscotch with boys in braided sailor suits, with curled hair and white collars and silk scarves.
If El Avapiés still resounds in me through all the echoing strains of my life, there are two reasons:
There I learned all I know, the good and the bad, to pray to God and to curse Him, to hate and to love, to see life crude and bare as it is, and to feel an infinite longing to scale the next step upwards and to help all others to scale it. That is one of the two reasons.
The other is that my mother lived there. But this reason is my own.
I MADE MORE FRIENDS among the other boys of our form, among the rich boys, than the two other scholarship pupils. Although Sastre and Cerdeño came to school with better suits than before they had gone to class upstairs, I was still better dressed than either of them. Also, they lived in tenement houses in El Avapiés, while I lived in a wealthy quarter and knew many things they did not know. Sometimes they accused me to my face of avoiding them so as to be with the others. And it was not true. What really happened was that I could get on with the rich boys and they could not, because they remained what they were, street urchins of the slums. When I was with the rich boys, I felt more as if I was with my own kind. When I was with the other two, it always annoyed me that they did not realize we were no longer downstairs and could neither say nor do the same things as before. They came to school with their pockets full of green wheat ears and nibbled them during the lessons and told stories of how they had been throwing stones together with the Ronda gang in a battle against the boys of the New World, how the Civil Guard had come riding and how all the boys had got together, two hundred of them, to throw stones at the Civil Guard. One day Cerdeño arrived with his hands blackened, and when Father Joaquín asked him why he hadn’t washed them, he said that the day before, a Sunday, he had been gleaning at the “Flea Station.” The Flea Station was what they called the shunting station of Las Delicias—The Delights—on the suburban line, where the trains from the North Station were linked with trains from the South Station. The children and women of the quarter went there to the coal dumps with little baskets and collected bits of good coal from among the cinders of the railway engines. They also used to pinch what real coal they could get, and burn it at home or sell it. Cerdeño went there because it was fun for him.
It sometimes happened that he and Sastre produced gallinejas for break at eleven: cow’s tripe fried in tallow at street stalls and put between two chunks of bread. Whenever they were eating them, they stank from the smell of hot grease. And apart from all that, it was impossible to teach them not to speak as people spoke in El Avapiés; they still used any kind of bad word that came to their mind.
It was difficult for me. When I was with the two of them, I was more at my ease, but they looked at me as though I were different. When I was with the others, I found it more pleasant, but they knew that I was different from them, that I was the son of a washerwoman, that I was with them only because I had won the scholarship and the priests paid for my studies. So it happened that when they wanted to insult me, the rich boys called me “Washerwoman’s Son,” and the poor boys “Little Gentleman.”
The oddest thing was that there were many poor boys who were not poor and many rich boys who were not rich. In the non-paying forms there were sons of tradesmen from the quarter, whose fathers had a very good business, and in the forms upstairs there were sons of civil servants whose fathers had to starve themselves so that their boys could shine at school among the rich pupils. And these two groups showed off most, one as being poor and the other as being rich.
It was a Sunday. After Mass I went with Father Joaquín up to his room to collect some books he wanted to lend me. Then we walked down to the cloisters on the first floor, where the relatives of the boarders stayed with the boys after Mass until mealtime. That day it was Father Joaquín’s turn to receive the parents and tell them how their boys had done.
Nieto, the Asturian, was with his father, a broad, strong man with the face of a bulldog. Nieto called me, and Father Joaquín and I went over together.
“Look, Papa,” he said, “this is Barea.”
His father looked me up and down with little gray eyes glinting under shaggy eyebrows.
“Oh yes, that’s the son of the washerwoman you told me about. You should learn from him, considering you have cost me good money, only to turn out more of a brute than a washerwoman’s son.”
Nieto went quite pale and I felt that I had grown red. Father Joaquín put one hand on my head and took Nieto by the arm, saying: “Run along for a while.” Then he turned to Nieto’s father, very gravely, and said:
“Here the two of them are equal, or rather, here the son of a washerwoman is more than the son of a mine-owner who pays three hundred pesetas per month.”
He turned on his heel and walked away calmly, without bowing his head. The old man gazed after him and then called his son. The two began a discussion, sitting there on the bench.
I passed by them and said to the boy:
“See you tomorrow.” And I walked on without bowing to his father. Father Joaquín stood by the door. He said nothing to me. I said nothing to him. I kissed his hand and went away.
I went down the steps of the entrance without seeing them, for my eyes filled with water. What Father Joaquín had done was against the rules of the school, where people with money were never treated that way. If he were found out, he would be alone against all the other priests. Because things were like that, he played his oboe for the birds and talked to them.
I was alone as he was. Both of us were different from the others.
Once a month all those of us who had already been to their first Communion went to confession. The priests distributed themselves over the church and the thousand pupils distributed themselves among the priests just as they pleased because nobody could force us to confess to a priest we did not like. Some priests, such as Father Joaquín and Father Fidel, had very long queues waiting at their confessional; by looking at the size of the files you could see which of the priests were liked by the boys. Those who had confessed joined their form in the file in front of the High Altar, to say their penitential prayers, to hear Mass and to take Communion. Thus the Church was filled with the sound of coming and going, of mumbled prayers and the patter of shoe soles. The Father Prefect went round to keep order.
Every month it was the same. Father Vesga was left with no more than the six or eight boys whom he had made promise that they would confess to him. Although he took longer over each confession than any of the other priests, he was always left alone before the others had finished. Then the Father Prefect would go from file to file and ask one or the other boy whether he would not go to Father Vesga for his confession. We liked him so much that he usually collected enough boys to form a queue. That day he had done the trick with me, and I went to Father Vesga because I did not really mind.
Father Vesga put his arm round my shoulder and neared his head to mine. The confession began. The questions about the Commandments came one by one, and I was proud to be able to answer them all.
“Do you love God? Do you go to Mass on Sundays? Do you love your parents? Do you speak the truth?”
We reached the Sixth Commandment. All the priests used to ask us whether we did dirty things or not; as we knew what they meant by that, we answered “yes” or “no,” mostly “yes,” because we all did those things or thought we had been doing them. Then the priests said: “Look here, my son, you mustn’t do that. It’s a sin and very bad for you. Children who do it become consumptive and die.” They told us to say a few penitential Paternosters, and that was that.
With Father Vesga it was different.
“You know what the Sixth Commandment says, my son?”
“Yes, Father. It says: Thou shalt not fornicate.”
“Tell me what ‘fornicate’ means.”
I did not know and could not tell him. I knew that it was a bad thing which was done between men and women, but that was all I knew. Father Vesga turned very grave.
“You must not lie in the Holy Tribunal of Penance. First you tell me that you know the Sixth Commandment, and now you contradict yourself and tell me that you don’t know what fornication means.”
“Fornication, Reverend Father, fornication is—well, things men and women do, which are a sin.”
“So, so. Things men and women do. And what is it men and women do, you shameless boy?”
“I don’t know, Father. I’ve never fornicated.”
“And a nice thing it would be if you had, you shaver. I’m not asking if you have fornicated or not, I’m asking you what it means to fornicate.”
“I don’t know. The boys say that fornication is when a man makes a woman be with child. When they’re married it’s not a sin, and when they’re not married it is.”
“Now, come, what I want you to do is to tell me how men and women make children.”
“I wouldn’t know. They get married and sleep together and then they get children. That’s all I know.”
“So, that’s all you know, eh? What a very innocent babe, it doesn’t know more than that! But what you do know is how to play with your parts.”
“Sometimes, Father.”
“Well, that’s fornication.” There followed a sermon of which I did not understand a word, or rather, which threw me into endless confusion. Woman is Sin. For the sake of Woman the human race fell from grace, and all the saints suffered the temptations of evil. They had apparitions of naked women with bare breasts and lewd movements. And nowadays Satan does not even spare the children. He comes to drive away their sleep and to show them naked women to sully the purity of their minds. And so on and on for half an hour. He spoke to me of flowing hair, quivering bosoms, lascivious hips, of King Solomon, of obscene dances, of women at street corners, in a torrent of angry words which all went to say that Woman was a sack of uncleanliness and evil, and that men slept with women and therefore went to Hell.
When I got away from the priest to say my penitential prayers, I could not pray. My brain was full of naked women and of the curiosity to know what it was they did with men.
But nobody knew it. I asked my mother, my uncle, my aunt, and they answered my questions in an odd manner. What is fornicating? How are children made? Why do women get pregnant? Some people told me that children ought not to speak of such things, and others said that it was a sin, and a few said I was a shameless boy.
In one of the bookstalls of the Calle de Atocha I found a book which explained everything. It told of a man and a woman who went to bed together and of everything they did. The book made the round of my class and all the boys read it. So as not to be caught by the priests, the boys took it to the lavatory to read and to look at the pictures, which showed the man and the woman fornicating. I read the book many times and it excited me. The same happened to me whenever I saw picture postcards of naked women.
Now I understood why the Holy Virgin had the Child Jesus without doing dirty things with Saint Joseph. The Holy Ghost made her pregnant without their having to do them. But because my father and my mother slept together they had me, and therefore my mother was not a virgin. What I did not know, however, was why my uncle and aunt had no children, although they did sleep together. Perhaps my aunt was so pious that they did not do any dirty things and so could not have children. But they would have liked to have some. On the other hand, God had said: “Increase and multiply.”
I did not understand.
Father Vesga said it was sin to come near a woman. But Don Juan, a very kind priest in the church of San Martín, was once in the sacristy together with a woman. She was sitting on his knees and he had his hands between her breasts. When I came in they both got very red. The priest came up to me and said I should go away, he was just hearing her confession. I told Uncle José about it and he said those were things young children should not discuss and I was on no account to tell my aunt.
Men said things to women in the streets, and women at street corners invited men to go and sleep with them, and the men gave them money.
I was in a terrible muddle about it all and did not know what was good and what was bad.
But there were many other things I found I did not understand. The church of San Martín had many collection boxes, like all churches; it said on them “For the Poor Souls in Purgatory,” “For the Cult of the Faith,” “For the Poor.” The priests opened those boxes every evening, took out the money, made little piles of a duro out of the big coppers and piles of half a duro out of the small coppers, distributed the piles among themselves, and played cards in the sacristy. One day Don Tomás lost all the cash which had fallen to his lot, as well as five duros out of his own cassock. When he got up from the table, he said:
“Today the Blessed Souls have done the dirty on me.”
He took the bottle with sweet strong wine, the sacramental wine, and drank down a big glass.
“One must take life in gulps, as it comes,” he said and went away.
The dead are hallowed and the soil of the cemeteries is holy ground. In the Cemetery of San Martín, the walls of the vaults had crumbled and the coffins with the bones stuck out. The chaplain and the keepers of the cemetery collected the rotten planks and used them as firewood. Often they threw in the bones as well, because they were so worm-eaten than they burned like wood. But when people had arranged for one of the dead to be dug out and transferred to another cemetery, the priest put on his embroidered cope and carried the aspergillum, and the grave-diggers dug most carefully so as not to crush the coffins. They took out the bones, laid them tenderly on a white sheet, the priest said his Latin and the sacristan gave the responses. Then the priest sprinkled Holy Water over the bones and they were carried off to be buried elsewhere, all because the family of that particular corpse had the money to take it away. The other corpses were only good enough for bonfires, and their bones were broken up with a hammer before being thrown to the flames.
On some days more people died than on others. Two women would come to the sacristy and order a Requiem Mass to be said for their husbands, or fathers; their names were noted down on a list, and they had to pay a stipend of three pesetas for the Mass. “Tomorrow at eleven,” said the priest. Then the other women would arrive and ask for another Mass. The priest would note their names and pocket his three pesetas. “Tomorrow at eleven,” he would say. Sometimes three or four families met in church, each in its corner, to listen to a Mass each family had paid for its own departed. When the priest read the oration for the deceased, he reeled off from a slip of paper the names of the three or four people who had died, so that the dead could share the Mass among themselves.
Once an Obsequial Mass was ordered costing two hundred and fifty pesetas; three priests were to celebrate and a black catafalque was to be set up in the middle of the church. It so happened that three more Masses for the Dead were paid and registered for the same day. “Tomorrow at ten,” said the priest to everybody. At ten the church was full of people who listened to the Solemn Mass being sung. But then, when no Requiem Mass was read, the three families went into the sacristy one after the other to inquire about it. The priest asked:
“Weren’t you at the Solemn Mass?”
“Yes, Father,” they all answered.
“Well, that was the Mass for your dear departed. By a coincidence several families came together at the same hour, and as we have not so many priests as to be able to oblige everyone, we agreed to hold a Solemn Mass for the families together. So you have gained by it, really.”
The people walked away through the sacristy corridor and one said with great satisfaction: “Who could have foretold this to poor Juanito? There you see, my girl, he was lucky all his life and even after his death they let him have a whole Solemn Mass for three pesetas.”
And mysteries: everything in religion was a mystery.
A Saint was walking by the sea shore when he saw a child sitting on the sand. The child held a shell in his hand and filled it with water from the sea and then poured the water into a hollow in the sands.
“What are you doing, child?” the Saint asked.
“I am emptying the sea into this hollow,” answered the child.
“That is impossible. How can you expect the water of the sea to find room in this little hollow? It is impossible.”
“It is more impossible to find out why God is One and Three,” replied the child, “and yet you keep on trying to find out.”
At that the Saint realized that he was speaking to an Angel whom the Lord had sent him.
It did not interest me why God was One and Three at the same time. But I wondered why he had to be One and Three to be God. It only seemed to be so as to make things difficult for us.
“How many Gods are there?” asked the teacher.
“One.”
“Yes, but that’s not the right answer.”
“Three.”
“Yes, but that’s not the right answer either.”
The right answer was to say that there were three deities, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but only One True God. Then the teacher was satisfied; but I was not, because I still did not know which was the true God, nor did the teachers.
My aunt wanted to have the Pope’s Benediction. For ten pesetas she got a Benediction which was for her personally, and she put it in a frame. Some years later they gave her another for one hundred pesetas, which was valid for her and all the members of her family down to the fifth generation. She took the old Benediction out of the frame and threw it in the dustbin. Then she put the new Benediction in its place, and so I was blessed by Leo XIII.
The more I learned about religion, the more problems arose. The worst of it was that I could not discuss them with anyone, because my teachers only grew angry and punished me. One day in the Scripture lesson we came to the story of Joshua, who stopped the sun in its course until the end of the battle. I asked Father Vesga how that could be, for our geography teacher had told us that the sun stands still and the earth revolves, and therefore it would be impossible to stop the sun. Father Vesga answered grumpily:
“You should not ask forward questions. This is laid down in the Holy Scriptures and that ought to be enough for you. Faith moveth mountains and detaineth the sun. If you had the right faith you would understand these matters which are as clear as daylight.”
Then I asked Father Joaquín about it. He put his hand on my head and said with a great smile:
“Now, what shall I say to you, my boy? In olden times many odd things happened. As you know, there was a time when the animals spoke and everybody understood them. Doubtless in Joshua’s time the sun moved.”
Father Fidel said more:
“Listen, my boy, what happened was that it was not the sun that stopped, but the earth, only it looked as though the sun had stopped. It’s just like when you are in a train, you think the telegraph poles move and then stop. When the Bible was written, people didn’t yet know that the earth moved, they only saw the sun moving just as we see it now. For that reason they put down that the sun stood still, although it was really the earth.”
“But, Father, according to what we learned in Physics the earth could not stop because if it did we would all be thrown into space. Besides, the earth would burn if it suddenly stopped.”
He looked at me with great seriousness and said:
“But, my dear boy, who told you that it stopped suddenly? It stopped slowly, of course, like a tram stops. And now run away, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Little by little I realized that I was not alone in wanting to know the truth about God and Faith. The books I was reading raised the same questions. The Church put those books on the Index, but it did not answer them. The only person with whom I could speak about them was Father Joaquín, who neither grew angry nor took the books away from me. We had many discussions. Only once did he convince me. I sat at his desk and he stood in front of his music-stand, the oboe in his hand and the birds on the window sill. He looked out into the courtyard, into the sky, as though he were seeing nobody, and he began to speak not to me but to himself.
“None of us knows anything about anything. The only certainty is that we exist. That the earth exists, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the birds and fishes and plants and all things, and that everything lives and dies. There must have been a beginning once, the first hen or the first egg must have arrived, but I don’t know which. The first tree and the first bird. Someone made them. After that everything carried on under a law. This is what I call God and in Him I believe, in Him who rules all this. Beyond God I only believe in goodness.”
He was silent, and then he gave me a book:
“Take it and read it. And believe in what you like. Even if you don’t believe in God—as long as you’re good, it is just as though you did.”
He gave me The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi.
I had a shoe box with holes in the top so that the caterpillars inside could breathe. They were silkworms. I had the Chinese kind, with coffee-brown spots, and the white kind. When I threw mulberry leaves into the box, the silkworms first stayed hidden. Then they began to climb up and nibble the edges of the leaves; they cut out round bits with the two dark teeth at the point of their head, holding on to the edge of the leaf with their legs and moving their head up and down. As they went on eating they made tiny cylindrical droppings. From time to time they wrinkled their forehead between the two little black eyes, and the bluish band running along their body began to undulate from tail to head, as though a blood stream were passing through it. Then they changed their position and found themselves another part of the leaf to nibble. Sometimes two of them came nose to nose while they were gnawing their way through; then they lifted their heads and seemed to be looking and saying something to one another. One of them would wrinkle its forehead and they would change places.
I picked them up in my fingers. They were soft and warm, they twisted their bodies round my finger with their hairy little legs and seemed to sample its skin, quite astonished that there existed such a kind of leaf. Then they noticed the box beneath them, rolled up into a tight ball and let themselves drop to start eating again.
If I put the leaf of any other tree among the mulberry leaves they did not touch it. They stepped across and went to the other leaves. They knew, smelled, and saw it. I wondered if they knew and smelled and saw me. Did they know who I was and what I was like? When I watched them in their box and they lifted their heads, they seemed to look at me. Then I took one, laid it along one finger and passed the tip of another of my fingers over the soft, tender body. It stretched, and raised its head and front legs. Suddenly it wrinkled its forehead. I dropped it into the box, and it resumed eating. But now and again it lifted its head to look at me.
Later on they crept into a corner of the box, fastened their legs to the cardboard and started swiveling their heads round, and a thin thread of spittle dripped out of their mouths. Their bodies became very small and the silk thread wrapped itself round them, until the only thing to be seen was a little shadow still moving its head in the shell of the cocoon. In the end the cocoon-egg lay there, yellow or white, fastened to a corner of the box. Every day I opened another cocoon to see what was inside. The skin of the silkworms had turned hard, as if made of horn, dark as an olive stone, ringed all round, with the snout and the two black teeth left. They were fast asleep and did not waken, and the only thing that moved gently were the rings. Later on they grew real legs, a head, and wings, they turned white and developed two shaggy horns formed like silken half-moons. In the end they bored a hole through the cocoon and crept out on the white cloth I had prepared for them at the bottom of the box. The females fluttered their wings very quickly and flew round and round. Then the male came and they fastened on to each other by their tails. They stuck together for hours. The belly of the female swelled to a ball and she sprinkled the white cloth with minute yellow eggs which looked first golden and later turned black. And then the moths died. They stayed in the box, dried up, their wings sticking to their small bodies as though they had sweated in death.
I kept the white cloth under a stack of sheets. It was full of thousands of eggs. My aunt put apples between the linen, which dried and crumpled like the face of an old woman. Next year the white cloth smelled of apples and out of every little egg came a black thread which turned into a silkworm.
I was sitting on the balcony with the shoe box standing in the sun so that the silkworms should be warm. Beside me I had a heap of books which I picked up one by one to go through them. It was almost June, and I had to pass the examinations for two matriculation courses at the same time, and then to compete for an honors certificate. They were all pushing me: the priests of the school crammed me and occupied themselves with hardly anyone else in the form, examining me about the same things in a thousand different ways. My uncle promised me that I could study engineering if I got through the exams with honors. My poor mother stroked my hair and asked me to make an effort; she could do nothing for me, but my uncle and aunt would do everything if I was a good boy. My aunt dressed me up in my best clothes and took me visiting; she showed me off to her friends as a phenomenon, and bald gentlemen and old ladies, rather like my aunt herself, plied me with silly questions.
“Very nice, Arturito, very nice! And now tell me, how are you getting on with your studies?”
Once Doña Isabel made me so furious with that kind of question that I began to speak at great speed about logarithms, the binomial theory, parabolic curves, and produced a spate of nonsensical algebraic formulas with lots of “a”s and “x”s and symbols and fantastic figures. Doña Isabel stared at me and her chin sagged until I stopped short and said solemnly: “And that’s all I know.”
“What a marvel, Doña Baldomera, what a marvel of a child! Just like my husband. When poor Juan sat down to work with figures he was simply marvelous. D’you know that he did sums in his head? In his head! This boy will go far. Just as my poor Juan would have gone far if he had only lived.”
I felt like calling her idiot, old sow, bitch, beast, and all sorts of things. I would have liked to tear the false plait out of her top-knot and scour her face, covered in butter-yellow face-cream mixed with powder as it was, with a swab soaked in dish-water.
My future! I was going to be an engineer so as to make everybody happy, but above all so that my mother no longer needed to go on washing and to be somebody’s servant. They were all very good to me. They all dished out charity to me. Yet I felt tired and did not want to eat or play. I only wanted to see: to see things and beings as Saint Francis had seen them.
The cat settled down on my knees. He looked at the box with the silkworms and at the books; he looked at me with his golden eyes. Then he turned those eyes inwards, curled up into a ball, his body folded between his legs and his tail stroking his nose, and purred. I thought that he understood me and knew about things. I too understood him. But when he sat there looking at me and looking at things, I did not know what he wanted to say. He said nothing, but I could see in his eyes that his head was as full of thoughts as my own. He slept so as to avoid thinking. The same happened to me. Often I was suddenly so overwhelmingly sleepy that I lay down on the carpet of our dining room, or on the floor of the balcony, and slept.
The two dogs of the coach yard were white and lively. I had seen them when they were just born and small as a fist; they knew me and liked me. When I went out into the street they came up, wagging their tails, barking and jumping. I used to collect lumps of sugar in the café and they always begged for them. I squatted down on my haunches and they thrust their black noses into the pocket of my blouse to get at the sugar. The cat looked down from the balcony through the bars of the railing and saw me playing with the dogs. Then, when I went upstairs, the cat refused to play with me; he was angry. I opened the cupboard and produced a bag of biscuits. We both ate, I sitting on the floor and he sitting between my knees, and made it up. Later on my aunt was annoyed, but she was wrong. The cat and I were right.
People were astonished at the things Malleu could do with his lions in the Buen Retiro Gardens. I was not astonished. He had a large round iron cage which he filled with wooden stools. The lions came filing out, and one after the other jumped on a stool, sat down, its head high, and watched Malleu. He was a tall, lean, green-eyed man with frizzy hair like a Cuban’s. He talked to the lions and they understood. They roared, and people thought they were going to attack him, but Malleu knew that the lions were only answering him, and I knew too. After that they did their tricks, leaping and running through the cage. The biggest lion opened his jaws wide and Malleu stuck his head inside. The others leapt at him and stretched out their paws with thick toes and curved claws, as though they wanted to devour him. But they only wanted to play, because Malleu never beat them.
I watched him while he was feeding them. He did it himself. An assistant brought a wheelbarrow loaded with chunks of meat and Malleu went into the cages. He speared each lump of meat on a big, long fork and fed it to them. Then he scratched their manes just above the eyes and patted them gently on the head. The lions would growl softly and sometimes one of them would throw itself on the floor on its back, waving its paws in the air. I once saw a lion whom he had not patted come growling after him, grumbling because it had been forgotten.
When Malleu left the cage he petted the children outside and asked us boys if we liked lions. He took us to see lion cubs like woolly poodles. They nibbled his hands and scratched him. Some of us stuck our hands through the bars and petted them too. They did not mind us, but when a grown-up man tried to touch them they got angry. They showed their teeth, growled, and put out their claws.
“Brother Wolf—Brother Stone!” said Saint Francis.
I had sown stringbeans in an empty pimento tin and chick-peas in another. I wanted to see them grow. Every day I dug up the earth to take the seeds out, and afterwards I put them back. They sprouted; each threw up a shoot like a little white horn; then they grew small roots; and in the end they had leaves. They grew as if they had understood me and wanted to give me pleasure, by showing me how they were and how they grew.
I hammered a piece of iron and it grew warm as if it felt pain.
Then the examinations were over and I had been entered for the matriculation course with honors. They took me to a doctor. I was very thin and had no appetite. I only wanted to read, to sleep, and to watch animals. The doctor examined my chest and said:
“There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s his age. He’s growing. The best thing is to send him to the country and give him a tonic.”
I went to Méntrida to run about by the river and to take spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, black and thick; it made me so sick that they had to stop giving it me.
I had a prospectus of my school with me; it said that tuition there was so good that in the final examinations of the year the Institute had obtained so-and-so many honors and matriculation certificates. My Aunt Aquilina showed it to all the women in the village: “That’s my nephew, you know, Leonor’s son. He’s very clever.” Then the women stuffed me with cake and gave me small glasses of strong wine to strengthen me.
The best physicians were my Uncle Luis, the schoolmaster of the village, and Saint Francis.
When they told Uncle Luis about my studies, he put his heavy hand on my shoulder and said:
“So what? Have you come to pull the bellows-chain for a bit? What you need is good food and exercise. Come along tomorrow and I’ll teach you the craft.”
So I pulled the bellows-chain, and hammered and filed lumps of iron in the vice at the workshop. I stained my face and hands black with soot. I went shooting with my uncle at dusk. He filled me with food and wine, but I was angry and almost in tears when I was not able to lift the smallest of the hammers with my thin arms.
“Damnation,” said my uncle, “what the boy needs is less school and more play. As it is he’ll get T.B. and then we’ll see what comes of all that cursed school-learning.”
He set out to shoot partridges and rabbits for me and when he did not get any he killed a pigeon. Aunt Rogelia made a broth of it for me alone. I developed an appetite and Uncle Luis was happy when he saw me eat. The rabbits and partridges tasted of the herbs of the hills.
Aunt Aquilina took me to the village school teacher. He was a small, friendly, gay old man. My aunt started explaining, he listened and read the school prospectus. Then he put his hand on my head.
“My poor little fellow—and tell me, what would you really like to do?”
I told him that I was going to be an engineer and that I liked animals and plants. I told him about Saint Francis and he smiled. I spoke to him with all confidence because he listened very attentively, without saying a word, and looked at me all the time as though he wanted to know what was inside me.
When I had finished, he said:
“Come and fetch me tomorrow morning, we’ll go and catch butterflies together.”
There we were in the meadow by the river, the schoolmaster and I. I didn’t know how to catch butterflies, but he ran after them with a gauze net on the end of a long stick and caught them in their flight. Then he took them very carefully between the tips of his fingers and put them into a round tin box. He showed me lizards, little tortoises, and chameleons. We watched green cicadas dry themselves in the sun, escape from their jacket, and fly off, while the old sheath which showed the outlines of legs, wings, and head was left lying on the ground.
He explained the animals to me one by one. He took a lizard and told me what lizards were like, how they ate, how they lived. Then, when I thought he would put it into his tin box too, he stroked its head with one finger. The lizard shut its tiny eyes as though it liked the touch. Then he opened his hand and set it free. The lizard stayed there on the hand, green and glittering in the sun, and instead of leaping to the ground it climbed up the sleeve and rested on the schoolmaster’s shoulder, waving its long tail like a whip. The schoolmaster walked on with the lizard, which poked its head into the hair on his neck from time to time.
When we returned to the village and reached the edge of the meadow, the schoolmaster picked up the lizard, put it on the ground, scratched its back, and said:
“Now be off with you, we’re going. You go home.”
The lizard stayed quietly in the grass and then went slowly away, its head swaying above its forelegs.
I ate a meager cocido in the schoolmaster’s house, with only one piece of meat and one piece of bacon, no sausage and no other dish to go with it, served in old, yellow-and-green pottery bowls. It was very well cooked. The school had a farmyard and there the schoolmaster’s wife, a quiet, clean old woman, shook out the crumbs. The hens and the sparrows came for them; they knew that they got them every day at that hour.
The village priest gave a lecture on Religious Doctrine for young girls and lads every Sunday afternoon. Everybody had to go, because otherwise the priest would have been angry and there would have been trouble with the Mayor and with the farms which employed labor during the wheat and grape harvests. The school teacher had tried to hold daily evening classes for the young people, where they could learn to read and write, which hardly any of them knew how to do. But the priest was furious and the Mayor forbade the classes.
The school teacher stayed on for nothing except to teach the small children how to read. That was all he could do, because after they were seven to nine years old, the children were used to work in the fields. In the summer they even used the little boys of five and six to glean wheat ears and to pull up onions. So the schoolmaster devoted his time to collecting animals in the meadow. He had a collection of cases full of butterflies, moths, and beetles and a few stuffed birds. The neighbors brought him their canaries and their decoy partridges when they were sick or had broken a leg, and he cured them.
I brought him the Life of Saint Francis. He had read it already. He merely said that Saint Francis was made a Saint because he had been that kind of man. But nowadays there were no Saints any more.
When I went alone to the meadow I sat down in the grass and watched. After I had kept still for a while, all the animals moved as though I did not exist, and I looked at them playing and working while I thought.
Up till then I had believed in God as everybody, the priests and my family, had taught me to believe in Him: as a very kind man who saw everything and put everything right. The Virgin and the Saints commended to Him all those who prayed to them in their need, and begged God to grant them the things they wanted.
But now I could not help comparing everything I saw with this idea of an absolutely just God, and I was frightened, for I could not discover His justice anywhere.
Certainly, it was very good that I could stay with my uncle and aunt and become an engineer. But my mother had to go washing down by the river and be the servant of my uncle and aunt, and she had to leave my sister with Señora Segunda and my brother as a boarder in a charity school, because if she had not done that, she would not have been able to support us all, even working as she did. It would have been much easier if my father had not died. They were giving me the chance to study for a career, but I had to pay for it by going crazy with all the books and obtaining honors in the matriculation course so that the school could put it into their prospectus, otherwise they would not give me free education. Then I would be just like all the other boys.
God rewarded those who were good.
Poor Angel got up at five in the morning to sell newspapers in his torn canvas shoes and then, when the sales hours were over at midnight, he went to sleep in the entrance of the Royal Theater so as to be able to sell the first place in the queue. He and his mother together hardly earned enough for their meals, and they worked the whole day long. But Don Luis Bahía owned half Brunete by driving the poor people to whom he had lent money from the land which belonged to them. Not only did God not punish him, but when he came to San Martín, the priests there made much of him and took him to be an excellent man, because he paid for Masses and Novenas. What happened with me at school happened everywhere. The only good people were those who had money, all the others were bad. When they protested, they were told to be patient because they would go to Heaven; therefore all the evil that happened to them in this world did not matter; on the contrary, it was really a merit and their lot was enviable. But I did not notice rich people making themselves into poor people so as to go to Heaven.
I wanted to know things, to know much, because this was the only way to become rich, and if you were rich you had everything, you even went to Heaven.
For money the priests said Mass and gave indulgences for millions and millions of days. If a poor man died and God condemned him to a hundred thousand years in Purgatory, and if his widow could not spare more than three pesetas for a Mass, only two or three thousand days would be taken off his time in Purgatory. But when a rich man died and his people paid for a first-class funeral, it did not matter if God condemned him to millions of years in Purgatory; three priests would celebrate Mass; there would be a choir and the organ and everything, and he would be granted a plenary indulgence. If somebody was lame and had a thousand pesetas so that he could go to Lourdes, he had a chance of coming back on straight legs. But if he was poor and could not go to Lourdes, he had to stay lame all his life, because the Virgin worked miracles only for those who went there.
When the poor people had to go in ragged clothes and one saw their naked skin, just because they had nothing else to wear, they were not allowed into church to pray, and if they insisted the police were fetched and detained them. But the big chests in the sacristy were filled with good clothes and jewels for the Saints, and the wooden images were clothed and decked with diamonds and velvet. Then all the priests would come out, just as in the Royal Theater, in silver and golden robes, while the candles were lighted and the organ played and the choir sang; and during the singing the sacristans would pass round the collection boxes. When everything was over they locked up the church and the poor people stayed under the porch to sleep in their nakedness. Inside was the Virgin, still in her golden crown and velvet mantel, very snug and warm, because the church was carpeted and the stoves burning. The Child Jesus was dressed in gold-embroidered little pants and he also had a velvet cloak and a crown of diamonds. Under the porch was a poor woman for whom my mother had once bought ten centimos’ worth of hot milk because she showed us her wrinkled, dried-up breasts, while her baby was crying, half naked. She sat in the porch of the church of Santiago, on a litter of waste paper, and said to my mother:
“May God reward you, my dear.”
My mother went home and came back with an old shawl which she used to wrap round her waist when she was washing by the river in winter, and the woman bundled her child up in the shawl, for they were going to sleep there in the open all night. The woman said she would cover herself with old theater bills.
On the following day my aunt took me to the Novena and said how beautiful the Virgin was with her mantle and crown and all the candles. I remembered the poor woman of the night before. When we came out of church I told my aunt about her.
“My boy,” she said, “there are many unfortunate people, but God knows what He is doing. Maybe she was a bad woman, because, you see, all the women who walk about in the streets are lost creatures. I suppose she had no milk because she drinks too much.”
The Novena was in honor of Our Lady, the Most Holy Virgin of Mothers’ Milk and Good Delivery.
The meadow by the river was alive with animals which had been coming up softly and slowly while I was thinking. They took no notice of me. Two lizards were playing between the grasses in the sun, moving their tails and flicking their tongues. Frogs were leaping in the stream and chasing each other. There was a black patch of ants which were coming and going with loads of grains for their ant-heap. Dung-beetles had surrounded a heap of droppings and were fabricating little balls out of it. They worked in couples, a male and female together, each pushing their ball, which sometimes toppled and rolled over them. They were all playing and all working, both things alike.
I wished to be like them, I wished all people to be like them. I tried to speak of those matters to Uncle Luis and he listened, trying to follow. After I had explained, he said:
“Now look here, all that’s just a lot of rubbish they’ve put into your head. God once set out to create the world. Every time he had made a little ball, like our earth, and taken it out of his oven still red-hot, he gave it a flick and sent it spinning through the air. From time to time he amused himself making people and beasts, and so he let one of the little balls cool and let all the people and animals on top of it grow. He watched the creatures growing and taught them how to live. One day he got tired of all the worlds, among them our earth, took the lot and kicked them into space. Then he went to sleep and nobody has heard a word from him since.”
Of course he said it to tease me. But I was unhappy because he would not understand that I needed God.
I went back to Madrid, I continued to go to Church, at school and with my aunt. But I could not pray.
* After the death of Don Luis Bahía, a lawsuit, widely discussed all over Spain, was fought over his will by which he left over thirty million pesetas to the Society of Jesus.
—Author’s Note.
† At the time, about 1901, small sums of money were often given in the obsolete coinage of the real. 1 real = 25 centimos.—Translator’s Note