EVERY MORNING, when my uncle was going to shave, he hung his mirror on a nail in the balcony frame, tied the loop of his razor strop to the window catch and ranged his bowl of hot water, his brush, cutthroat razor, and the little squares of paper he used to wipe off the lather, on the dining-room table. His razors were German; the mark engraved on their blades showed three little men holding hands, as if they were dancing and singing. The blades were honed so that they curved inwards from back to edge, sat loosely in their horn grip, and were so thin that they looked as though they were going to snap. They had a little curved tail like a dog’s tail, where you put your thumb, and the handle stuck out stiffly.
He smeared his face with the soap which he used to grate himself off a big cake, set the blade at an angle and started to shave. The razor rasped on the hard hairs of his throat, and curly white waves of lather, flecked with fine black lines of cut hair, collected in the hollow of the blade. Whenever the heap grew too big, he wiped it off with a piece of paper. The sun shone through our balcony in the mornings, and when it fell on the paper, the tiny bubbles of the lather turned from white to mother-of-pearl.
I had torn off yesterday’s pages from the three calendars in our house, and as the sun shone on the lather, I twisted a page into a tube, dipped its end into the foam and blew softly. The bubbles grew into a bunch of grapes, they swelled and quivered, and I caught one on the tip of my tube. In the sunlight it turned blue, red, purple, and orange, until it burst and spat little drops on my nose. Sometimes there was a hair on the top of the little globe, and it slid softly downwards as if it was falling.
I watched him while he gravely shaved his throat before the mirror. His hairs puzzled me. Why has he got hairs? Why haven’t women any? I shall have hairs like his one day, but my sister never. Girls don’t grow hairs. Old women often have some on their upper lip or on their chin. When my uncle stands there in his vest, his shirt sleeves rolled up, he has a smell. It is the smell of a man. When people begin to smell like that they grow hair on their faces.
Uncle José stood with his head thrown back, his throat taut, and looked in the mirror out of the corner of his eyes. The up-stroke of the blade cut his hairs with a rasping sound—riss, riss! The noise stopped. Blood splashed bright over the white lather, ran down his throat and painted a river with all its streams on his vest. My uncle stayed with his arm hanging down, the razor dangling as though it were broken, his other hand dabbing at the wound, a cut like a small mouth. You could see the sound of the gurgle, as little blobs of blood came out of the lips of the wound and became a trickle which ran down between the gray hair on his chest and his vest. Uncle José put the razor on the table and sat down in the rocking chair. He let himself drop, and then for the first time I saw how heavy he was. His face was yellow as the wax of a church candle, his hair glued to his temples, his bald head covered with little sweat drops, his mustache limp, his lips purple.
“Call your mother,” he said.
My mother had a shock when she saw his yellow face and the red stream which had made trickles all over his vest. My aunt was at Mass.
“Don’t be scared, Leonor, it’s nothing really. I’ve cut myself, and the sight of the blood made me feel sick.”
My mother washed him. She drew his undervest over his limp arms and left his gray-haired chest bare. In the groove of his chest, the sweat collected in glistening drops. A glass of brandy. My uncle rested in the rocking chair, breathing slowly, his mouth half open, and stroked my head. I was sitting on the curved chair arm. Rocking chairs like ours were made in Vienna; they dipped branches in boiling water, and when the wood got soft, they bent it into any form they wanted.
The steaming hot tea and the brandy revived him, and I could see the drops of blood coming back into his face and his bald pate so that the skin reddened. The cut was no longer bleeding, it was covered with a strip of taffeta and one could not see anything. When my aunt came back, my uncle told her that he had cut himself, as if it were of no importance.
I went into the kitchen and asked my mother in a low voice: “Mother, is Uncle going to die?”
“Silly, don’t you see it was nothing serious? Many people feel sick when they see blood, and so your uncle was a bit sick.”
But I knew he was dead. I didn’t know what it was to die. But I knew he was dead. “Rabbit,” my cat, also knew that Uncle was dead. I had told him so. He mewed very softly, plaintively, opening his mouth slowly, as if he wanted to yawn. I hugged his head and he looked at me with his yellow eyes. Then he went out on the balcony, sat down on his haunches, and began to stare into the darkness, rigid, with his eyes turned inwards.
My uncle had gone to the office, as he did every day, and I stayed on the balcony, for it was a holiday and I was not going to school. The cat was with me, curled up on his little mat. From time to time, he lifted his head, scented the air, and looked as if he were waiting. Inside the house, my mother and my aunt were cleaning up and clattering with their pots. The smell of food seeped out to the balcony.
A carriage turned the street corner, and the cat and I got up to look. The horse came up the short slope and stopped before our house door. A man and a priest got out, they entered our house in a hurry, and came out again with Señor Gumersindo, our concierge. The coachman climbed down from his seat. Between the four of them they lifted Uncle José out of the carriage. The black roof of the coach tilted under their weight, and in the sun it looked like a black mirror throwing its glints up into my face. The four carried him into the house, and I ran out of the room and hurtled myself down the stairs.
Watching them, and walking backwards, I climbed the stairs again in front of them. How heavy my uncle was! His legs doubled up against his stomach, head lolling, arms hanging down, shirt open and damp with sweat, foam on his half-open lips. He was breathing hard and blowing out the foam, as if it were he who had to carry the four upstairs, not they him. His eyes were half closed, the whites showing, and the pupils hidden in the inside of his head.
Upstairs, they dropped him on the bed—how heavy he was! My aunt shrieked and wept, my mother ran to the kitchen to fetch tea, to fetch hot water, to fetch I don’t know what. I took one of his hands, it folded up in mine like an empty glove. The cat was restlessly weaving in and out between my feet. Together they dragged off his boots and opened his trousers, his coat, his waistcoat, his shirt. After they had taken off his socks, they lifted him up to take away his clothes from under him, and left him there on the under sheet in his pants and vest. Then they covered him up to his throat, and there his head remained, like Saint Peter’s, with a fringe of gray hair round a bald skull, sweating and snoring. The cat jumped on to the foot of the bed and sat down to look at him with serious eyes. He stayed there because nobody dared to chase him away. I wanted to chase him off, and he looked at me. I left him. My mother wanted to chase him away, and without turning round he bristled his fur and growled softly, as though not wanting to wake my uncle. He showed his fangs and his red tongue.
What is angina pectoris? They didn’t know, or they didn’t want to tell.
In the evening, when the sun had gone and the lamps were not yet lit, the neighboring women came together and sat in a circle, in silence.
“God give him back his health, or whatever may be best for him,” said one of them.
“Our Father which art in Heaven…”
We all prayed, very low, so that he should not hear us, while my aunt pressed herself into the armchair and let her tears run over her face. I prayed—oh, how I prayed! God and the Virgin and all the Saints must hear me! When the old women stopped, I went on praying, very softly and secretly so that they could not see me. God must hear me!
The bedroom was full of strong apothecary smells, of the patter of feet on tiptoe, of the clatter of cups and bottles on the marble tops of the night table. Don Tomás, the doctor, came out and said in a low voice to all of us and to nobody in particular:
“What a man. He is made of iron. Anyone else would have been dead by now.”
Then he stayed in the bedroom clutching my uncle’s wrist, and felt his pulse. My uncle slowly opened his eyes, looked at us, and he stretched out a hand and stroked my neck. Thus we passed the night, he sleeping and breathing deeply, his hand on my neck, and I fighting. If I fall asleep, he will die, I kept telling myself. As they could not get me away, my mother made me drink strong black coffee with a drop of brandy. When I woke up I found myself on my feet, half lying on the pillows, with a blanket wrapped round me and my uncle’s hand on my neck. My mother was sitting on a stool at the foot of the bed and my aunt was sleeping in the armchair. The light of dawn came through the balcony. All my bones were aching. Mother lifted me up as I was, wrapped in the blanket, and carried me to my bed. She began to untie my shoes, but I never knew whether she got them off, for I sank down into blackness.
Then came better days. Uncle José left his bed and wandered slowly round the house, in slippers. But we three, the cat, he, and I, we knew it, he was dead.
One day he started looking for things in the chest of drawers, and called me:
“Take this,” he said. “My silver watch with the two little keys. I’ve tied them with a bit of string so that they shouldn’t get lost. My cufflinks. The walking stick with the golden handle. My signet ring.” He took it off his finger where it sat loosely; he had become much thinner. “Give it all to your mother and tell her to keep it for you.” He kissed me.
I took the things to my mother.
“Why did your uncle give you all this?” she asked.
“I don’t know. He told me you would keep them for me until I’m older.” I did not want to tell her that he was dead. She went to my uncle.
“Why did you give the boy all this?”
“Listen, Leonor, you’re somebody to whom I can tell the truth. I’ll never wear them again. I know it. I’m dead.” And he said it serenely, his gray eyes looking at my mother, at me, and the cat, as if he were ashamed of his dying.
“Don’t talk such nonsense, you’ll soon be well again. You’re very strong and healthy.”
“Maybe you want to deceive me, or maybe you don’t see it, just like the doctor. But it’s true. I know that I’ve very few days left. I feel it inside here.” He gently tapped his chest. “Look, the boy knows it too, don’t you?” And he looked at me. When the cat lifted his head, watching him, he added: “And the cat too. Children and animals feel what we others can’t feel.”
At night I went down to fetch the milk, and in the stables a dog was howling, as dogs do when there is death in the house. Señor Pedro held its muzzle. “Keep still, blasted dog.”
I went back with my milk can and thought of what my uncle has said. The dogs knew it too. My uncle was already in bed. He took a glass of hot milk with some drops of the medicine that smelled so strongly. I sat down on his bed and he spoke to me, but I did not know what he was saying. He had his meal all by himself; then he turned down the wick of the lamp which was mirrored on the oilcloth of the table like a little yellow sun. They sent me to sleep, but first I kissed his face many times; it was prickly. They had given him my bed so that he should have quiet, and I slept in the back room next door on a camp bed.
The cat came with me, crept under the sheet where it folded over the blanket, and fell asleep, purring. We both slept.
The cat woke me. He sat up on the bed and mewed softly. A strip of light shone from under the door of Uncle’s bedroom and all was quiet. The cat and I listened. And suddenly the house was full of cries.
The blood relatives were sitting round the dining-room table. My aunt sat at the head, and I by her side. There they were: Uncle Hilario with his bald mahogany-colored skull, and the wen like a ripe tomato on top of it. Aunt Braulia in the fourteen green, yellow, and black petticoats of her Sunday dress. Uncle Basilio, another brother of my uncle’s, with a big square head on a massive body, squeezed into a suit of thick, black cloth which smelled of moth balls. Aunt Basilisa, sister of my aunt, a very small, wrinkled, grumpy old woman with a mustache of sparse gray hairs like the clipped whiskers of a cat. Her husband, Uncle Anastasio, very impressive in his black suit, like a retired Captain, with black-lacquered mustache and beetling, shoe-polish-black eyebrows. My Grandmother Inés, who was here because my aunt had asked her to come and help her, as Grandmother understood about this sort of thing, being the trustee of Señor Molina’s Estate. And then there was Father Dimas, my aunt’s spiritual adviser, who had heard my uncle’s last confession.
My grandmother and the priest sat next to each other. The two big fat ones together. The priest belonged to the class of flabby fat people who are made of rolls of lard; he was all fat: his many chins, the pouches under his eyes, his wrists, his chest, his stomach and the enormous belly which stretched his cassock and made it look like a shiny balloon. My grandmother belonged to the other class of fat people, who have big solid bones never quite buried in flesh. She had a heavy jawbone, a big, broad nose; the knobs of her bones stuck out of her skin at the wrists and elbows of her colossal arms. The priest was unctuous, Grandmother was sharp and prickly like a hedgehog. Don Dimas did not yet know her, and he would never have imagined that there existed in such a Christian family as ours so deadly an enemy as she was.
Uncle Hilario put his heavy hand, racked by the plow, on the table and asked:
“Well, Baldomera, and what do you intend to do now?”
“That’s why I asked you to come. So that you can advise me. I—I’ve an idea.”
“I’m surprised to hear it,” said my grandmother, who was put out of gear by the presence of the priest and only waited for an occasion to explode.
“Let me speak, Inés,” my aunt went on. “As my poor Pepe fortunately left enough for my modest needs, and as I’ve nobody in the world except the child”—she gave me four kisses wet with tears—“I’d thought of retiring into a Holy Establishment where the Sisters take ladies like myself as boarders; and the child would go to a boarding school.”
Father Dimas tenderly contemplated the nails on his hands which he held folded over his paunch. The country cousins looked at one another without quite taking in what she had said. Uncle Anastasio, who was standing, probably so as not to spoil the creases in his trousers, nervously twisted his mustache.
Grandmother Inés rose heavily from her chair, and from the towering height of her eyes she looked down on all their heads. Then she faced her victim, my aunt:
“Look, Baldomera. Just now I said I was surprised to hear you’d had an idea, and I say it again. Where did you get this idea of yours from?”
“Father Dimas advised it,” said my aunt with bowed head.
“I see. So that’s how you do it, is it, Father Sausage?”
“Madam,” began the Father, red with anger.
“The devil take your ‘Madams.’ Don’t come to me with your sticky sweet stuff. D’you think I’m a suckling? Look, Baldomera, you don’t know this sort and I do. You go into a convent and they treat you very nicely; the Reverend Father—yes, this one here—will visit you piously every day. At the school they will take good care of the boy—from what you just said it wouldn’t be the school he goes to now, would it?”
“No. I had thought of sending him to school at Areneros.”
“Precisely. Father Sausage thought of putting him into Areneros. There you have the whole bag of tricks. The boy to be turned into a Jesuit, and his aunt made to leave a will with the boy as sole heir! And so the whole thing stays within the family—isn’t that so, Father Sausage?”
“Doña Baldomera, I withdraw. This is intolerable. My sacred office forbids me to dispute with a vulgar woman. I was not aware that such persons were to be found in this most Christian household.”
My grandmother caught the priest’s arm and dug in her powerful fingers.
“Of course, his Illustrious Reverence believed there were only fools here, like this poor soul. But you’ve made a mistake, I am here. The boy will not go to the Jesuits’ College, simply because I’m his grandmother and I don’t want him to. Baldomera can go to the convent if she likes, for I’m neither her mother nor her grandmother—if I were, I’d spank her bottom in spite of all her gray hairs. And as to ‘vulgar woman,’ Father Greasebag, it’s the first and last time I’ll let you get away with it, and that only out of respect for the deceased. Next time, I’ll make your fat cheeks swell to double their size.”
The family had by now realized that this was an attempt to get hold of my aunt and make her cut everybody out of her will. Through the story of Don Luis Bahía, they all knew what the Jesuits were like. And all of them shouted agreement with Grandmother, while Father Dimas wrapped himself into his cape, filling the room with whirlwinds. Grandmother carefully opened the door for him. When he was already on the stairs, she could no longer restrain her rage.
“Off with you,” she shouted, “back to your hole, you cockroach!”
And she slammed the door so that the glass cups on the sideboard danced and tinkled like little bells.
My aunt was scared.
“But, Inés, what have you done?”
“What have I done? Swallowed my wish to slap that fellow’s face. Well, that’s that. Now we can talk as a family, without false Fathers.”
Uncle Hilario, that shrewd peasant, spoke up first.
“I think, if nobody else has a better idea”—nobody meaning my grandmother who was watching him with intense seriousness—“you ought, for a time at least, to come with us to the village until you’ve got over your first sorrow. Later on you can stay there in peace without anything to worry you. The girls will do all the work for you and you’ll live like a queen. The boy—well, if you wish he can go on with his studies and visit you in the summer.”
Uncle Anastasio stopped twisting his mustache, placed one hand on the edge of the table, crossed one leg over the other, and started to stroke his chins.
“I’m of a different opinion, from beginning to end. Of course you must be surrounded with warmth and affection. But you can’t hide away in a village. You need distraction, you must see things, go out, meet people. You will have that nowhere better than with your own sister and your niece—your godchild,” he stressed. “You know well what it would be like staying with us. As to Arturo, you simply give his mother whatever is needed for his studies and he can come to our house whenever he likes. I don’t say he can sleep there because there is no room, but he can stay with you the whole day if you like.”
My grandmother kept silent, she looked from one to the other and nobody said a word. My aunt waited for Grandmother to speak, and when she still said nothing, asked her timidly:
“And you, Inés, what do you think?”
“Me? What would I advise, you mean? Now listen, I’m going to tell you, because it will make me sick if I can’t speak out. And let him scratch who feels the itch. What I advise you is not to be a fool. The departed has left you enough cash to lead an easy life. You just stay in your house together with the boy, as you’ve done all your life, keep Leonor to do your work, and you yourself do what you like without asking anybody’s leave. Are you really so silly as not to understand what this pack wants? The priest wants to separate you from the boy and the family. The family wants to separate you from the boy and from other relatives, and all—now get this straight—all of them want to get at your money.”
There was a chorus of protests:
“But, Inés, the only thing we want is her welfare.”
“What you want is her money. If the departed had left her with one old rag in front and another behind, I’d like to see who would be the perfect gentleman and take her into his house, old, bigoted, and touchy as she is. Of all of us who are here, maybe the only one to take her in would be me, because I’ve enough bread left to give her a piece of mine. Listen,” she added and turned to my aunt, “stop asking the family for advice. Families and old junk are all right—at a distance. Ask advice from people who have nothing to do with you, and you’ll see that they tell you that you ought to stay at home and tie the strings of your purse tight to keep off the spongers who will come over you like flies after honey. Do you realize what it means to be a good soul like you, who is foolish out of sheer goodness, with a hundred and fifty thousand pesetas in a family of starvelings? You’ll know in time, only wait.”
Uncle Hilario made a dignified protest:
“There is nobody here who wants to take anything away from her.”
“Is that so? How much did you owe Pepe? Must have been more than five hundred pesetas. And of course, when you heard that your brother had died, you came here with the cash in case Baldomera needed some at once, didn’t you? Yes, and that’s why I had to give her a thousand pesetas yesterday so that she could pay for things without having to worry.”
Uncle Hilario sat down in confusion and grunted:
“That’s no way of discussing things.”
“Of course not. The only thing one can do if one’s got any decency is to open the door and go.”
“That would be rude,” objected Uncle Hilario.
“Well, then swallow your pill. Truth is always painful. And the truth is that you’ve all come here like carrion crows at the smell of death, to see which bit you can carry off for yourselves.”
Aunt Baldomera had begun to weep and to cry, and Grandmother cut short the discussion with a simple recipe:
“Well, the matter is closed. And you stop crying, the departed will not come back for all your tears. Let’s say a Paternoster, perhaps it will do him good—I’ll pray too, though I don’t believe in it—and afterwards every owl back to its own olive tree!”
My aunt began the Paternoster, half smiling, half crying. When the two old women were left alone, they fell into each other’s arms, both weeping. Suddenly Grandmother broke away, opened the balcony doors wide, and said:
“Let’s have some air. It smells of rot in here.”
The gusts of fresh air carried off the smell of many sweaty people, and the clouds of cold cigar smoke, blue in the light of the lamp, drifted out in long thin ribbons.
The days became monotonous. Early in the mornings, my aunt, more pious than ever, used to go to church and did not return before eleven or so. My mother put the house in order and in the afternoons went home to the attic. My aunt and I stayed alone, I reading at the dining-room table, she slumbering in the rocking chair, the cat on her lap. At eleven or twelve at night she woke up with a start, looked at the clock, and we went to bed, my aunt, the cat, and I.
Her affection for me and her jealousy of my mother had sharpened. She would not leave us alone for a minute. On Thursdays and Sundays, when I was free, she would not have me go with my mother, but went out with me herself, to the Plaza de Oriente or the Plaza de Palacio. There she sat on a seat, and every time she would find another old woman to whom she could tell the story of my uncle, and shed some tears. In one of the attics of the house lived Señora Manuela who had a refreshment stand in the Plaza de Oriente; we often went there, my aunt took some refreshment and exchanged with Señora Manuela memories of their respective husbands.
Since my uncle had died, the family showed a fervent love for my aunt. The Brunete family came to town nearly every month. Aunt Baldomera had torn up all the receipts of their debts to Uncle José, because they had had such a bad year. When they arrived they used to bring a couple of chickens and some dozens of big, fresh eggs. When they went, they would take with them 50 or 100 duros. My aunt’s sister, Aunt Basilisa, often came to keep her company in the afternoon; at other times, Baldomerita, my aunt’s godchild, would come and be received with a shower of kisses and hugs. My aunt gave her things, because she herself would not wear them again in her mourning which she intended to wear “until God took her home to her Pepe.” One day she gave Baldomerita her gold and diamond earrings; another, her golden chain; another, her brooch; another, her rings. All the valuable things disappeared one by one, the high tortoiseshell combs, the waving mantillas with their dense lace, the Manila shawl with its ivory Chinese figures, the embroidered silk dresses. Every time the day of a patron saint or another holiday arrived, the family was short of money and unable to celebrate it. And my aunt took a big banknote, folded it quite small and put it in the bodice of her niece’s dress. Late in the afternoon, when my mother had gone or was about to go, Aunt Eulogia would arrive together with her daughter Carmen; they were relatives of my aunt in just the same degree as my mother and I. Each time they found something to do in the house, something to sew or to iron. Between flattery and caresses they got one hundred peseta note after the other out of my aunt.
They all did the same things; they spoiled me and made much of me, and they ran down my mother, fanning my aunt’s dislike of her. The situation between my mother, my aunt, and myself became increasingly tense, the smallest causes produced discussions which stung like needles. My aunt wept in the dining room and my mother in the kitchen. Then the end came; my mother said:
“Listen, Aunt, things can’t go on like this. You and I don’t understand each other. You’ve been very kind to us, but there has to be an end somewhere. I will go back to my attic, you have others who will serve you gladly, and we’ll all live in peace.”
“And the child, what will you do with the child?”
“You will have to decide what you want to do about him.”
I was a mere nothing in their discussion, neither of them asked me what I wanted.
“If you don’t want to stay in my house,” said my aunt, “I won’t force you. The child can stay until he has finished school and then we shall see to it, if God gives me good health, that he makes his career as his uncle wished.”
“Agreed,” said my mother. “You find somebody to help you and as soon as you say the word, I’ll leave the house.”
In the afternoon, Aunt Eulogia and Carmen promised to come from the next day onwards.
“Of course, of course, Baldomera, you’ll see how well we’ll look after you. You and the boy will have everything you need.”
Aunt Basilisa spoke seriously to my aunt:
“What in the world is this? You’re jumping from the frying pan into the fire; you chuck out Leonor and take in Eulogia. Haven’t you burned your fingers often enough? These women are coming here to sponge. What you ought to do is to live with us—after all, I am your sister. If you are worried for the boy’s sake because our house is not big enough to have him there, why, we could come here and live with you; this flat is very big.”
But my aunt had no wish to have Uncle Anastasio in her house and decided for Aunt Eulogia. Carmen would sleep in the flat, her mother would come in the morning and leave at night.
All these conversations went on in my presence. Nobody restrained himself in what he said. Why should they? My aunt was going to make me an engineer. What more could I want? Moreover, they were not concerned about me. Once inside my aunt’s home, they would arrange to get rid of me, sooner or later.
My mother packed her clothes and Señor Manuel came to fetch the big and heavy box. While he went down the stairs, my mother entered the dining room.
“Well, Aunt, I’m going. I hope you’ll keep well. When you need anything from me, send me a message through the boy.”
And then I said—and the tears choked me:
“She can’t send you messages through me, because I’m coming with you.” I turned to my aunt and said in a white fury: “My mother won’t stay here and I won’t either. I’m going with her to the attic and you can keep your money and your career for yourself. I can work. If you’ve had no children, that’s your bad luck. I won’t desert my mother. You can stay here with your Baldomerita and your Carmencita and give them what you like, the mantillas and the money, because you’re a selfish woman. My mother has been your servant for twelve years. That’s what she was, but you talk big and say you’ve kept her and me out of charity, because we were starving. And now these filthy women come and you give them the money, I’ve seen it, and the jewels and the dresses and everything, because they flatter you and kiss you all over.”
I was filled with anger and rage at seeing my mother scorned, rage at losing my career, rage at seeing strangers loot the house, and nobody could have made me shut my mouth.
“Just count your money… Yes,” I was glaring at my aunt, “the money you keep in the notecase in the cupboard. Where you’ve got your five thousand pesetas and the bank receipts. Just count it, and you’ll see what’s missing. Later on they’ll say my mother took it, but I know who filched the money.”
Aunt Eulogia and her daughter were clattering with the pots and pans in the kitchen. My aunt, deeply disturbed, went to the cupboard; five hundred pesetas were missing.
“There you see. My grandmother was right when she said you were a fool. Do you know who took them?”
I dragged Carmen out of the kitchen.
“It was her, she took them yesterday. I saw it, yes, I saw it. I was hiding here”—I hid behind the curtain—“and her mother was on the lookout in case you moved out of the armchair. Go on, now say it’s a lie.”
Carmen, who was hardly older than I, a child herself, started to cry.
“Was it you?” demanded my aunt.
“Yes, Señora. I don’t know anything about it. My mother told me to.”
I took my mother by the arm.
“Let’s go. Now you know.”
We went, my mother shocked, I trembling with rage and excitement and with tears running down my face. When we were down in the street, my mother kissed me. From the balcony my aunt called out:
“Leonor, Leonor! Arturito!”
We turned the first corner of the Calle de la Amnistia and then walked slowly, without speaking, through the sun-filled streets, until we were up in the attic. There my mother began to unpack the clothes from the box. I watched her, without saying a word. She stopped and said gently:
“We must fetch your clothes from your aunt’s.”
“Let her go to hell with them,” I gave back furiously.
And I threw myself on to my mother’s big iron bed, weeping into the pillows so that they got wet, shaken by spasms. My mother had to lift me and slap my face, because I could not speak. Señora Pascuala, the concierge, made me drink a cup of lime-blossom tea with brandy. I lay there like a trussed bundle.
“We’d better put him to bed properly,” said Señora Pascuala.
Between them they undressed me, and I let them. I watched the little square of sunlight under the window. Afterwards I fell asleep.
Mother went to my school with me to say good-by to the Fathers. One after another came and spoke to her. At last, the Father Rector came and joined the Father Prefect and us.
“It’s a pity,” he said. “He’s a particularly gifted boy. Now look. We quite understand your position. We’ll give the boy free tuition and food, because it suits us to, and it would be a pity to lose him.”
“But the clothes, Father,” said my mother.
“Don’t worry, we’ll see to that. The boy will not go without clothes.”
My mother was inclined to leave me in the school. She had borne with my aunt for so many years. What would she not have done for me? The Father Rector ended the discussion:
“Well, we’re going to take the boy as another boarder. Where one hundred are fed, there’s enough for a hundred and one. As to clothing and books, we’ll arrange for them. Don’t you worry.”
And I? Was I nothing? Was the whole world to dispose of me at its pleasure? Everyone wanted to give me charity and then to exploit it. I had to stay in the school, shut up there, always hearing people say that I was there on charity, studying like a mule, so that later on the priests could use my successes in their advertisements in order to attract fathers like Nieto’s who would call me son of a washerwoman.
“I want to go to work,” I said suddenly.
“All right, all right,” said the Father Rector. “Don’t you worry about anything, you will have what you need.”
“I don’t want any more charity. D’you believe I don’t know it?” Through my tears the words came tumbling out: “I know very well what it means to be the son of a washerwoman—I know what it means to be told about the charity you’ve received—I know all about the school prospectus—I know what it means that my mother has to scrub floors in my aunt’s house without being paid for it. I know about the rich and the poor. I know I am one of the poor and I don’t want anything from the rich.”
They brought me a cup of tea from the college kitchen and the Father Rector kept on patting me on the shoulder. Finally, they had to leave me for a long time on one of the plush-covered sofas in the visitors’ hall. The Fathers came one by one to see me and be kind. Father Joaquín sat down beside me, lifted my head and asked me what was the matter with me. I answered him hysterically, but he rapped me over the fingers and said:
“No, no, slowly, as if you were making your confession.”
The Father Rector pushed my mother to the other end of the hall, and we two stayed alone. I told the priest everything; he was holding my hands in his own big hands and squeezed them gently to encourage me.
When I had finished, he said:
“You’re right.” He went up to the Father Rector and my mother, and said gravely:
“You can’t do anything. Between the lot of them they have smashed the boy. The best thing is to let him have a taste of life.”
When we left, he crushed my hand in his, in a handshake as between men, and said:
“Now you must be brave. You’re a man now.”
We walked up the slope of Mesón de Paredes, my mother thoughtful and I proud: I was right. Father Joaquín had said so.
That afternoon, Aunt Basilisa came up to the attic to speak to my mother.
“Baldomera wants to see the boy,” she told her.
Before she could answer, I replied:
“Tell her I don’t want to. And what’s more, you’ve no business to come here to the attic. You’ve managed to get rid of us anyhow. This here is not Aunt’s place. This is my place, and I don’t want you or anybody else to come here. Tell Aunt Baldomera that I won’t come because I don’t want to. It’s as far from us to her as from her to us. If only poor Uncle José could see it!” Again rage blinded me, and I caught her by the arm.
“Off with you, off, out in the street, you old hag, tale-bearer, lickspittle! Out with you, go back and steal your sister’s jewels and money and clothes until she’s left naked! Thief!”
She attempted to shout back. But Señora Pascuala, who knew the whole story and had arrived because of the noise, caught hold of her.
“Go away. The boy’s right, yes, Señora, he’s absolutely right. The best thing you can do is to get out. And don’t give me any of your back-chat! I’m the doorkeeper here, and I won’t stand for any scandals. D’you understand, you beggar? What you’ve got, you toffs, is hunger and greed. And that’s enough of it. Out with you. Out of this house!”
She shoved her along the corridor of the attics, and Aunt Basilisa never dared to say a word. If she had opened her mouth, Señora Pascuala would have beaten her up, what with her old wish to get square with one of these fine ladies.
THE TALL OAK WARDROBE was still full of the clothes which belonged to someone else: the two sailor suits, the blue and the white one, on their curved clothes hangers. The short knickers with the elastic band over the knee, which left a red welt on one’s skin. The row of striped drill blouses, each stripe a chain of tiny checks. The cream colored piqué shirt fronts. The silk neckties. The flat, starched collars. The round sailor caps with their gold lettering and dangling strings. The tartan caps and the beret for the street. The red school folder.
My aunt took out piece after piece and laid everything out on the bed. I recognized them all, one by one, as one recognizes what one has worn on one’s own body, but they seemed foreign things, things that belonged to someone else.
“What shall we do with them?” she asked me.
With the pride of the possessor of a man’s suit made to measure, with no more wrinkles than those round the bulge of my uncle’s silver watch anchored to its plaited gold chain, I answered:
“It doesn’t matter, we’ll find some boy who can make use of them.”
My aunt folded up each piece of clothing and stored it away in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, with moth balls between the folds.
“Well, I think we will keep the things. They may come in handy,” she said.
Did she think that I would ever put on those clothes again? I glanced at myself in the big looking-glass of the sitting-room, a looking-glass in a gilt frame which reached up to the ceiling and was slightly inclined as though bowing to the floor. In my soft hat I was taller than many men, only I was very thin and the face was the face of a boy.
“I’m going out,” I told my aunt.
“Take care of yourself and be careful where you go and what you do and don’t be late.”
“I’m going to see my friends, and I’ll be back soon.”
When I started walking down the stairs I whistled loudly, as I always did. At the next landing I fell silent. Was it right to whistle and jump down stairs as I did when I went down to play in the street, with my packet of sandwiches in my hand? Señor Gumersindo, the concierge, saw me in the doorway and stopped me:
“You’re looking very smart, young sir.”
He no longer called me Arturito. I was “young sir.” I walked up the street and looked for my friends. The gang was playing at hopscotch in the Plaza de Ramales and having an argument as to whether Pablito, the plasterer’s son, had touched the line or not. My arrival stopped their dispute. I had to tell them all my recent adventures, and all about my soon entering a bank as an employee. The boys were thrilled. When they had enough of listening to me, the boy whose turn it was picked up a pebble, put his hands behind his back, made a few secretive movements, and then held his two closed fists under my nose.
“Come on, say which. Are you going to play?”
I would have liked to be in the game. But how could I play in a grown-up suit, with a silver watch in my pocket, and a gold chain across my waistcoat?
“No,” I said, and added, to tone down my refusal: “You can’t jump in this sort of suit.”
For a while I stayed there, watching their jumps, somewhat shamefaced, for I felt a fool, and then I left with a “See you later” which really meant “never.” I walked down to the sunlit Plaza de Oriente, across the wide yard of the Plaza de la Armería to the balconies which opened on to the Casa de Campo. Boys much bigger than I were playing in the square with bare legs, in blouses and smocks. But I could no longer play. I was a man, I had to be serious. In a few months’ time I would work in the bank. For I was certain to win the competition for the job.
Everything was settled. Don Julian, the man from the bank who always came to the Café Español, was going to recommend me to the directors. He was one of the heads of their Stock Exchange Department and had worked in the bank for thirty years. The directors thought much of him, and with his recommendation it would be quite enough if I passed the entrance test. For this I had to learn simple bookkeeping, which was easy and also arranged for. The Escuela Pía, my old school, had a commercial class for poor pupils, and I was going to take it.
Matters with my aunt were settled as though nothing had ever happened. My mother went there in the mornings and left late in the evenings. She could have slept at my aunt’s, because Concha and Rafael got bed and board where they worked, but she did not want to. She said she had her own home and would not leave it a second time, and I thought she was right.
It was as though nothing had ever happened; but many things had happened. When I wanted to go out, I no longer had to ask if I could go and play. I simply took my hat and said: “I’m going out now.” I no longer had any need to open the sideboard in secret to get at the biscuits, and then to leave the door open and crumbs on the carpet so that my aunt should think that it had been the cat. Now I opened the sideboard, put three or four biscuits on a plate and ate them. Then I poured myself out a glass of strong wine and drank it. My aunt looked on and beamed. When I was going out she asked me if I had any cash with me in case I wanted to buy something, and I always carried two or three pesetas in my waistcoat pocket. Before, it had always been necessary to tell her a long tale before I could get a single peseta out of her.
I had to see Angel. Here on the balcony of the Palace there was nothing for me to do, except to stare at the Campo del Moro and the Casa de Campo like an idiot. It was quiet at the café about that time. I found Angel sitting by himself in the corner of the entrance lobby, making parcels of the papers he had not sold the day before and had to return to the distribution agents. When he saw me I thought his face turned sad.
“Hullo, Arturo, and how are you?”
I quickly told him the story of the last few changes in my life: my aunt, the bank, Don Julian. He listened in silence, with his old man’s face wrinkled. When I had finished he patted me on the shoulder with a hand blackened by coppers and printers’ ink.
“Now we won’t cry out the Heraldo at night any more.”
He dragged a bundle of cheap novels out of the bottom of the cupboard and offered them to me.
“Take all the ones you haven’t read yet.”
I went through the series of the Illustrated Novel and picked out those I did not know. Angel only watched me.
“Well, look, I’m taking these here. Come up to us later on and take all you want of my books.”
“I’m not going up to your place because your aunt won’t like it.”
“You’re silly,” I said. “Now look here. From tonight on you simply bring us the paper upstairs, because I told you to. And then you stay with me for a bit. I’ll arrange everything with my aunt.”
Pepe, the waiter, came out. When he saw me he was surprised.
“Well, well, Arturito, it’s a long time since I saw you last. And now you’re a young man.” He gave me a long look. “And how’s Doña Baldomera?”
“All right. Poor woman, she thinks of my uncle’s death all the time.”
“Poor Don José. Your uncle was a very good man. How time passes. When you came to the café the first time you were still in swaddling clothes and I hadn’t any gray hairs yet. Of course you and your family won’t come here now, but I do hope you’ll come from time to time to see your old friends. Manuel, my boy—you know him—is a young man too by now. He does everything at our little wine shop, together with his mother.”
“But, Pepe,” I said, half amused and half ashamed, “you speak to me so solemnly. Now, are you going to address me as ‘Arturo’ or as ‘sir’ in future?”
“I don’t know, it’s just that I’m used to it, you know. Of course, there it is, you’re used to seeing young Arturo and so you can’t get into a new habit overnight.”
“But I’m what I was, and I want you to go on as before, Pepe.”
The old man embraced me and kissed me on my mouth with his gray mustache, far more affectionately than he had done on the nights I had come with my uncle. Then he sat down on Angel’s stool and wiped his eyes with the white napkin hanging over his sleeve.
I went away with my bunch of books under my arm. I did not want to go home. I wanted to see the quarter, and the boys, and—well, I wanted to play.
In the Plaza de Isabel II, I turned round on my heels and walked slowly home.
“What’s the matter with you, my boy? You look irritated,” said my aunt.
“Nothing’s the matter. Nothing.”
I sat down in a chair to read one of the new novels. The cat was sitting on his square of rug, watching me. There was nothing else on the balcony. But I could not go on reading. I got up and went into the bedroom. There I took a pair of shorts from the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, undressed, and put them on. In shirt sleeves I went back to the dining room, and I noted the coolness of the air on my bare legs.
“I’ve changed, because I didn’t want to crumple my suit,” I told my aunt.
And I threw myself down full length on the balcony floor, an open book between me and the cat. My hair touched the cat’s head and every time I turned a page he stretched out his paw and gave the paper a lightning rap. He wanted to play and turned over on his back, his white belly stretched. I stuck my head into the hollow between his four legs, and he mussed my hair because it tickled him.
Doña Emilia called from the balcony opposite me:
“Arturito, sweetie, so you’ve come back?”
The cat jumped up and ran off. I was ashamed of my childish games. I gave her a brief answer, went inside and shut the balcony door. Then I changed slowly back into the grown-up suit and resumed my reading, sitting at the dining-room table and not taking in a word of what the book said.
The Commercial Class started at ten and lasted till half-past eleven in the morning, and there was a shorthand class in the afternoon. Father Joaquín took the morning class and a parliamentary stenographer of the Senate took the afternoon class.
I went before ten o’clock and called on Father Joaquín in his room. It was open to the four winds as always, there was his music stand, there were his birds fluttering round the window. He was reading a book and said mechanically: “Come in,” when I knocked softly. “Ah, it’s you.” He stood up and hugged me. “So you want very much to start studying again? It won’t be difficult for you. In a few months you’ll have caught up. You will go to the lectures downstairs with all the others, so that you keep in step with them, but I’m going to explain things to you outside class hours, much more quickly and simply than I could do it with the other boys. And then it will be work and earning a living for you, because you’re a man now, aren’t you, boy?”
We went downstairs to the class together. All the boys rose.
“Sit down,” said Father Joaquín.
He went with me to the platform, turned round, and said:
“From today you’re going to have a new classmate who’s known to a good many of you anyhow. He won’t stay with us long, only long enough to study bookkeeping which he needs because he’s already working. Now, all move down and make room for him. As you know there isn’t a first or last pupil in this class, but we’ll have to give him the first place because he’s earned it.”
There I stayed, at the beginning of the first row, and he began with the lesson. It seemed intended to give me an outline of the matters already studied by the class, so that I should be able to follow. I found it easy to pick up the main threads with the help of the syllabus Father Joaquín had given me. The boys watched me and whispered among themselves. Many of them stared at my hat which was hanging on a peg among their caps and berets. None of them spoke to me. They were all poor boys from the quarter. I knew some of them, but when I tried to speak with them they shut up like clams and answered me with a “huh,” a “yes,” or a “no.”
After the end of the lesson I followed Father Joaquín back to his room. “What do you think of it?” he asked me.
“It’s difficult to say.” I found it hard to speak. With my hat between my fingers, I was standing on the other side of the desk, facing him. Father Joaquín rose, walked round the desk, put his hand on my shoulder and drew me gently nearer.
“Now come, tell me. What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know. It’s very funny. Everything seems changed. Even the stones of the cloisters, which I know by heart, one by one. Everybody seems changed to me, the boys, you, the school. Even Mesón de Paredes Street. When I walked through it this morning I found it changed. To me, the men, the women, the kids, the houses, everything—absolutely everything—seems changed. I don’t know how, and I can’t explain it.”
Father Joaquín looked straight into my eyes for a short while.
“Of course, you see everything changed. But everything is just the same as before, only you have changed. Let’s see what you’ve got in your pockets—show me.” I was bewildered, but he insisted. “Yes, I mean it, show me everything you carry in your pockets”
In confusion, I pulled a silk handkerchief out of my breast pocket, then my smart, new leather wallet, the silver watch, the folded handkerchief, two pesetas, a fancy magazine pencil, a small notebook. There was nothing else.
“Haven’t you anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, well. And what have you done with your marbles and your spinningtop? Don’t you carry brass chips, or matchboxes, or printed pictures, or string for playing thieves and robbers? Haven’t you a single torn pocket, isn’t there a button missing somewhere, haven’t you got ink-stains on your fingers?”
I must have made a very silly face. He took the things piece by piece, mockingly, and stowed them back into my pockets.
“Here’s the nice silk handkerchief, to look elegant. So you ogle the girls already, do you? The nice wallet to keep the money safe. There aren’t any banknotes in it yet, but they’ll come, never mind. Everything takes time. Here’s the silver watch so you know the time, and you don’t have to look at the clocks in shops any more and then sprint through the streets because it’s getting late. And you don’t have to wait for the clock in the bell tower to strike any more.”
He put both hands on my shoulders, the two big hands of a man, and again looked straight into my face.
“Do you understand now what has happened to you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“If you go now to see Father Vesga,” he added quizzically, “he’ll tell you that you have lost the condition of purity. I tell you simply that you’re no longer a child.”
I met nobody but my aunt and my mother, and Father Joaquín was the only person with whom I could talk and have discussions. Least of all we spoke of bookkeeping, which came to me very easily indeed. Sometimes we went together to hunt for books in the Prado, or to go to a Museum, and we talked. We talked as though we had been father and son in the flesh. Then one day Father Joaquín said:
“It’s Communion today. Have you already dropped the practice of going to Communion once a month?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course, it’s quite natural. Anyhow, if you feel like it you can come to Communion tomorrow.”
On the following day I went to school and accompanied Father Joaquín into church.
“Now what do you intend doing?”
“I’m going to take Communion,” I answered.
“If you like, stay here and wait for me, and then I’ll hear your confession.”
When I was in the confessional, in front of him, he said: “Now tell me your sins.”
“But what could I tell you, Father?”
What could I have told the man who knew my innermost thoughts, as my mother did not know them, as I did not know them myself, since it was often he who had explained them to me?
“That’s true enough,” he answered. “Let’s pray a Paternoster together for the soul of your uncle.”
We broke fast in his room, with a cup of thick chocolate, buns, and a glass of lemonade.
When I walked home, there was light everywhere.
I was separated from everybody else, except Father Joaquín. I saw this very clearly. The people I knew stopped treating me as a child, but nobody thought of treating me as a man. I realized that there were many things of which they could not talk to me. Yet I needed to talk, I needed people to talk to me, I needed to understand things. The grown-up people never realized that their behavior to me was ridiculous. If they were talking of women when I happened to come in, they stopped and changed the conversation, so that I should not hear that kind of thing, since I was still a child. They did not realize that I knew everything they could have told me. They were hypocrites and fools, all of them. Didn’t they see that I was lonely?
I needed to play. I bought a heap of tools and started to construct a small steam engine. I made the drawings and cut out the pieces from sheet-brass. I had bought a treatise on steam engines and copied its drawings. The book was old and described engines of thirty years ago, but it suited me. I wanted to make a very simple engine. My aunt was annoyed because I stained my hands and made a mess in the flat.
On Sundays I went down to the Rastro, the junk market, to buy the pieces I could not make myself. It was in El Avapiés, near my school.
The steep slope which leads from the Plaza de Cascorro down to the New World is called Ribera de Curtidores, Curriers’ Bank. From the near-by slaughterhouses the hides of all the cattle which Madrid consumes wander into the tanners’ workshops. On both sides of the sloping street are the tan-yards with timber structures of four or five tiers, where the hides hang from rafters to dry in the air and sun which enter freely from all sides. The skins carry an acrid smell of rotting flesh, which fills the whole quarter and clutches at your throat. On that slope, the street-hawkers set up their junk stalls and you can buy everything, except what you set out to buy.
There they sell every used thing people get rid of. There are old clothes worn out fifty years ago, skirts still spread on crumbling wicker hoops, uniforms from the time of Ferdinand VII. There are paintings, furniture, carpets, tapestries, dented musical instruments, pots and pans of all sizes, rusty surgical knives, old bicycles with twisted wheels, absurd clocks, iron railings, tombstones with blurred names, old carriages with broken spokes or a hole in the roof through which the sun shines onto the tattered velvet of the seat. Stuffed cats, dogs and parrots with tow sticking out of their bellies, spy-glasses, a yard long, which fold up like an accordion, ships’ compasses, weapons from the Philippines, old medals and crosses from some General’s chest, books, papers, ink pots of stout glass or glazed pottery, and old iron. A great deal of old iron: twisted bars, of which nobody could guess the purpose, hoops, pipes, heavy pieces of machinery, monstrous cog-wheels which make you think with a shudder of hands crushed between their teeth, anvils with blunted noses, coils of wire covered in ochre rust, and tools. Outworn files with iron dust choking their ridges, fantastically shaped hammers, pincers with chipped jaws, tongs with a broken limb, beheaded chisels, gimlets, and angle irons. Then there are victuals: moldy peppered sausages, maggotty biscuits, raw ham, sweetish cheese, dried up like parchment but sweating honey in large drops like pus, tripe fried in tallow, stale crisps, squashed chocolate grown soft in the heat, shell-fish, river crayfish wriggling in dripping mud, buns with a shiny crust, apples dipped in blood-red caramel. There are hundreds of stalls and thousands of people, looking and buying. All Madrid walks about the Rastro on Sunday mornings.
Down in the Ronda, between the Americas and the New World, were the poorest stalls where the poorest people came to buy. One of the stalls called itself “The Flower of Cuba.” In the center of its planks, two yards long and a yard wide, there was a pile of tobacco, black and evil-smelling, taken from the fag-ends of Madrid streets. To the right there were rows of packets of cigarettes, rolled in coarse paper and tied together with gaudy green ribbon. To the left, in neat, symmetrical files, were cigar-butts in dozens, sorted according to size and quality and with cigar bands to show it. Prices varied. A good stump of a Caruncho cigar, with its band to prove its authenticity, fetched as much as fifty centimos. The owner of the stalls was an eighty-year-old gypsy, with curving silver side-whiskers. Beside him squatted three women who rolled cigarettes with bewildering speed. The loose tobacco was sold by weight: fifty centimos the quarter pound. The establishment was always crowded, with buyers in front and sellers behind the counter. The sellers were street urchins who came with a tin or a sack full of cigarette stubs, already freed from paper, to offer them to the old gypsy. He weighed out quarter-pounds to those in front and those at the back, with hands the color of tobacco, and he took fifty centimos from the buyers and paid twenty-five centimos to the sellers for the same quantity. The tins were emptied on top of the tobacco pile, and the pile never diminished.
Among all that filth I felt happy, for the Junk Market was a huge museum of absurd things and absurd people. Little by little, my steam engine was born out of it.
On Thursday I went alone to the pictures, on Sundays I went with Rafael. Books, the cinema, the steam engine, Father Joaquín, and the classes at school made up my world. Sometimes I went for a walk with my aunt, and once a month she took me in a carriage to the cemetery to put fresh flowers on my uncle’s grave and say a Rosary. There were no more quarrels with my mother, but slowly my aunt began to lose her memory and her mind. She was becoming foolish.
I was going to enter the examinations for the bank at the end of the summer. Don Julian came from time to time and explained things about which I would be asked. It turned out that what I learned in the school would not help me. At the bank they had different, shorter methods of bookkeeping; everything was done with tricks and combinations of figures which had nothing to do with the rule-of-three and the rules of interest. Yet I found it easy and felt that if everything was of the same kind, they would pay me a good salary as soon as I was working in the bank and they found out how good I was with figures. Then my mother would no longer go down to wash clothes by the river.
At half-past six I presented myself at the bank. An old commissionaire who was sitting there went to fetch Don Julian. Behind him I walked up a stairway with a red carpet held in place by gilded rods. Upstairs was a passage covered with waxed linoleum on which one’s shoes slipped, and stout wooden rails on both sides. Behind the rails were clerks such as I had not seen in my life. One of them was very fair, with almost ashen hair, a pipe hanging from his lips, which smelt of English tobacco, and a monocle screwed into his right eye so that the right brow was higher than the left. Another was short and grizzled, with a bald spot above his forehead, a black mustache which looked dyed, and a French goatee. There was a thin old lady with very slender wrists who used a typewriter at incredible speed. A spick-and-span orderly with the initials C.E. embroidered in gold on his blue uniform led us into one of the enclosures behind the wooden rails, which had six or seven tables, each with its typewriter.
Then came a gentleman in a coffee-brown frock coat, gold-rimmed spectacles hanging from a silk ribbon tied to his buttonhole, a gray French goatee and a long amber holder with a burning cigarette. Don Julian greeted him, and the two conversed in rapid French. The gentleman came up to me and asked me which of the typewriters in the place I knew best. I selected an Underwood. He seized the edge of the table, gave a tug, and the typewriter wheeled over, fell back and downwards. At the same time a slab was pushed forward and the desk was smooth and flat, the typewriter had disappeared as if by magic. Below the table was nothing but a sloping board, and the typewriter was invisible.
After this I came to learn my first word of French, destined to follow me throughout my life: dossier. The man with the goatee and the gold-rimmed lenses took a yellow folder with a great number of sheets and said in bad Spanish:
“We shall now start your dossier.”
Christian name, surnames, father, mother, studies, date of birth, and so forth. Then I was given sheets, with the problems I had to answer typed out on top, and space for the calculations left below. I stayed alone and worked out the figures. Don Julian and the Frenchman, whom I later learned to know as the Chief of the Personal Credits’ Department, walked up and down in the linoleum-covered gangway. When I had finished, the Frenchman dictated a passage which I had to type, and another passage which I had to write out in longhand. Then they gave me a page of notes referring to the commercial report of a Lugos firm. From the notes I had to work out a complete report.
When the test was over, Don Julian accompanied me home. On the way he patted my shoulder.
“They liked you very much, only your handwriting is not so good. But that’s something you can quickly improve.”
In the Puerta del Sol we each drank a glass of vermouth. The seltzer-water tickled. I drank it greedily, for my mouth was dry and I still felt dazzled by those wide halls and globes of milky light. And I was going to work there? I was full of pride.
When we came home, Don Julian told my aunt that she could count on my having obtained the job.
Three days later I received a letter—the first letter of my life—in which the board of directors of the Crédit Etranger, 250,000,000 frcs. capital, informed me that Don Arturo Barea Ogazón would start in their service as from the 1st of August 1911.
I had still three months to go until I was fourteen years old, but I was already an employee of one of the biggest banks in the world.
STANDING ROUND THE TABLE, we were rapidly classifying the mail according to the initials in red ink with which each department marked the letters it had dealt with. Every now and again, Medrano went to the desk where the heads of the department sat, and brought back a new heap of letters in place of those we had already classified. Talking was forbidden, but the three of us, Gros, Medrano, and I, were talking in a whisper all the same. Nobody could tell whether we were speaking about our work or about something else.
“Who got you in here?” asked Medrano.
“The Head of the Stock Exchange Department.”
“And me the cashier, who’s an old friend of our family’s. What’s your school?”
“The Escuela Pía—and yours?”
“The Salesians in the Ronda—more or less the same thing. Here we’re at least not bothered with those eternal Masses and Rosaries. That’s to say, Señor Zabala, the Head of Correspondence—the one who’s sitting in the middle over there—is a Jesuit. He wears a scapulary under his shirt and goes every Sunday to hear Mass in the Calle de Cedaceros at the Jesuits’ Residence. The one next to him—Señor Riñon, the little man to his right—is just the same. He’s Head of Spanish Correspondence. The only one who’s all right is the third one, the Head of Foreign Correspondence, Señor Berzotas. You see, he’s done a lot of traveling and so he doesn’t give a fig for priests and friars any more.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“Berzotas.* He plays tennis. On Saturdays and Sundays he goes to play in the sports ground the English have got somewhere in town. And he wants to set up a sports club for our whole staff.”
Just then, Señor Berzotas called me: “Hello, boy—the new one, I mean—come over here.”
“At your service, Señor Berzotas,” I said politely.
He flushed and gave me a very sour look. All the clerks sitting near by grinned, and I felt bewildered.
“So my name is Berzotas, is it? And pray who told you so?”
I had learned at school not to give anyone away, and answered quickly:
“Nobody, I just thought I’d heard somebody saying it.”
“We haven’t got any fat cabbage-head here, because if there were one, we would throw him out into the street and that would be that. My name is Manuel Berzosa.”
He had spoken severely, but when he saw that I was embarrassed to the verge of tears, he patted me on the shoulder.
“All right, never mind. There is something rather cauliflowery about the name of Berzosa. Look, the British gentleman over there, Mr. Clemans, has been calling me Birchosas ever since his first day here, and he won’t change his ways for anything.”
He gave me a bundle of letters to distribute and I went back to our table, furious with Medrano.
“Don’t take it so seriously, we make jokes the whole day round here. You’ll see. And if anyone gets sore about it, so much the worse for him.”
The second practical joke came in the middle of the afternoon. Gros, who was manipulating a copying-press and a heap of damp cloths, said to me:
“Go to the w.c. and fetch two buckets full of water.”
I came back with two buckets which were so heavy that they kept brimming over and splashing my trousers. Gros washed his hands with meticulous care in one of them, and Medrano in the other. Then Gros said:
“Now you can take them back.” And they both spluttered with laughter.
I swallowed the pill, took the two buckets and in passing Gros made one of them rock. The water wetted his trousers the whole way down from above his knees. He turned round in fury.
“Can’t you look out?”
“Sorry, it was a joke. And if you get sore, so much the worse for you.”
In the end the three of us were roaring with laughter, so that Señor Zabala, with his nasty beard fluttering, came up and scolded us in his womanish voice. After that they showed me how letters were to be copied. You first spread out a moistened sheet of thick, close-woven cloth, then you placed a sheet of copying tissue paper on it, and on top you put the letter which had to be copied. The moisture passed through the tissue paper under the pressure of the hand-press with gilt balls on its handle, and the letter was copied. Once you had mastered the technique it was easy. If the cloth was too moist, the print was turned into a single big blob, but if it was too dry, it did not copy at all. Moreover, typewritten letters had to be treated differently from handwritten ones.
And that was all I learned in the course of a fortnight: the correct degree of moisture required for copying a letter.
I was profoundly disappointed. The first day I came to work and was waiting for the Staff Manager to assign my duties to me, I believed that in a few minutes I would be sitting at one of those desks and using a typewriter or making calculations, those miraculous calculations which were being made in a bank. To be prepared for anything of the kind, I had brought along half a dozen of the nibs we called cock’s spur nibs; I wrote best with them, although they sometimes spluttered. While I was waiting, Don Julian came and told me: “They’re going to send you into Correspondence. It’s a very useful section for you. Now do your work well and behave.”
The Correspondence Section—writing letters for the bank! They would surely give me a typewriter to handle. Most of those I saw in use were Underwoods or Yosts, and I had worked with both types. They would soon see what a good typist I was. I had won Yost’s championship for speed on a typewriter with invisible writing and a double keyboard.
When the Staff Manager came, an imposing gentleman in a braided frock coat, white cloth spats, a graying beard and gold pince-nez, I followed him proudly. He introduced me to Señor Zabala. “Here’s your new boy,” he said. Señor Zabala called Gros: “You there, boy, show him things so that he can help you with your work.”
Gros and Medrano took me between them, and there we stood armed with paperknives, at a deal table the black paint of which came off in flakes and which was covered with scratches and stains from ink or gum; we slit open envelopes, took out the letters and put them in a carrier which was sent over to Señor Zabala’s desk.
“Take care you don’t tear one of the letters while you slit an envelope,” Gros warned me. “If you do, Whiskers gets simply livid.”
“So you call him Whiskers?”
“Everybody does, and what’s more, it annoys him more than if he were called a bastard.”
After that I was always paired with either Gros or Medrano and spent my day running up and down stairs. We distributed the mail to various sections and collected letters which had already been answered. We ran up and down the stairs four steps at a time, because everything was urgent. In the evening we copied the hundreds of letters written by all the departments in the course of the day. After that we put the letters in their envelopes, closed them, sealed the registered letters and went to supper. By then it was a quarter to ten. I ate hardly anything and fell on my bed like a piece of lead. My aunt said:
“How tired you are, my poor little boy! Do go to bed quickly.”
The fortnight that followed turned me into a past-master in copying, the cleverest copyist in the bank.
There were sixty boys like myself employed in the bank, who had no wages and were called learners. We were supposed to work a year without pay, after which we might be made employees. But to become an employee we had to collect good marks. No more than two or three vacancies a year turned up among a staff of three hundred employees. This meant that in the course of a year, fifty-seven of the learners were thrown out and replaced by new boys, while three stayed on and were given a permanent job.
The only way in which I could collect good marks was to be the quickest of the sixty learners, which was easy for me with my long legs, and to make myself liked by everybody. And besides, I copied letters particularly well. The three heads of the Correspondence Department noted it. Whenever there was an important letter to copy they called for me, because I did it without a blot and without the slightest stain from the damp cloth. The sheets came out of the hand-press as though they had been printed. It was a talent Gros and Medrano envied me.
Yet all the time it was impossible to let your mind stray for a single moment. Anybody, even simple employees of some standing, had the power to throw out a learner. As fifty-seven had to be weeded out in the course of the year, the Staff Manager, Señor Corachán, stalked the boys, as he did the other staff while they had a smoke in the lavatory. He haunted the place, he skulked behind corners, he hid in the w.c. and suddenly appeared to trap the employees. He used rubber-soled boots, and would come up silently behind you, listening. Suddenly he would put his hand on your shoulder and say:
“Please come upstairs to my office and report to me.”
We called him The Fly, and when he turned up in one of the passages, the employees passed on the warning in a whisper:
“’Ware The Fly!”
Those who were talking shut up and started writing at great speed. Those who were secretly reading a newspaper under the cover of a folder coughed, shut the folder with a casual gesture, pushed it into a drawer and began to write. As the sections were separated only by wooden rails some three feet high, and by glass panels, he could spy on people everywhere. Sometimes he came to the Correspondence Department which was on the first floor and had a rail directly overlooking the big central hall of the ground-floor departments, and from there he watched the employees one by one. Afterwards he went down, took the hidden newspapers out of the drawers and dealt out rows. While he was leaning over the balustrade, you felt like pushing him so that he would fall down, head first.
But there was one man whom he persecuted cruelly: poor Plá. As soon as he saw from the first floor that Plá’s chair stood empty, he hurried downstairs, sat down on it, took out his gold watch and placed it on the desk. When Plá came back, he had to face Señor Corachán who said:
“Señor Plá”—and he said it in a ringing voice so that everybody should hear—“exactly twelve minutes by this watch I’ve been waiting for you in this chair. And you alone will know how long you have been absent from your post in all.”
“But, sir, I only went for a moment to the w.c.”
“Do you call this a moment? A quarter of an hour of your working hours wasted! Moreover, you are supposed to arrive at this place with your needs already attended to. But you use the lavatory as your pleasure ground. You simply stink of tobacco!” Then he rose, straightened his frock coat, shut the lid of the gold watch with a dry click and added: “Sit down, and don’t let it happen another time. This is insufferable!”
Plá looked at him with his short-sighted little eyes glinting behind his huge spectacles and stuttered something, because Plá was not only short-sighted but also a bad stammerer as soon as he was angry or embarrassed. His hands, which did not know what to do with themselves, but dangled like round lumps of fat from the ends of his short arms, rested on his paunch, for Plá was altogether a sweaty round ball, and his excuses dripped spittle over the papers on his desk. When one of those raindrops fell on a letter done in copying ink it made a purple blob.
Although Plá stayed every night until nine or ten, befogged with work because it was his job to deal with people all over the world who wanted to play in the Spanish Lottery, Señor Corachán specially checked his hour of arrival in the morning, shoved his watch under Plá’s nose and was rude to him. Most of the other employees never took notice of Plá except to crack jokes about his blindness and his stutter; but we boys were friends with him. I had to hear the speech which he made to any new boy:
“You’re new here, aren’t you? What’s your name?” (He did not wait for an answer.) “Well, well, I hope you’re going to learn something. Your future is here in this place. Just think of it. A year without wages—sixty boys like you—three vacancies a year, and after twelve years’ work in the place ninety pesetas a month, which is what I earn now.”
At other times he made fantastic calculations.
“There are twenty banks in Madrid, with fifty learners each, which makes a thousand altogether. In Spain there are—let’s say—two hundred banks with an average of twenty learners each, which makes four thousand boys. There are thousands of commercial firms which have learners without wages, so there are thousands of boys who work for nothing, but rob the grown-up men of their jobs.”
“But, Plá,” I told him, “it’s apprenticeship.”
“Apprenticeship? It’s a systematic exploitation of young boys. It’s very cleverly worked out, mind you. When you have been here seven or eight months, they chuck you out some fine day. If you then go to another bank and tell them that you have been here eight months and been given the sack, they won’t take you. If you keep your mouth shut, you may be taken on as a learner for another year, but then you run the risk of again being dismissed after eight months. And you’ll find yourself in the same situation as now all over again. If you try to take a job in an office, they’ll tell you that their business is quite different from that of a bank, but that you can join them as a learner so as to get acquainted with their special requirements. The only chance to break out of this vicious circle is to make use of the time you are still working in the bank to find another job. In that way it’s quite possible that you’ll find a firm which will pay you twenty-five to thirty pesetas a month.”
“But I want to be a bank clerk.”
“All right then, but you will have to be very patient.”
We all cherished the hope of becoming members of the staff of the bank and being promoted to a good post. After all, we saw something of the higher officials and knew their history. There was Don Julian, now Head of the Stock Exchange Department, with an income of a thousand pesetas a month. He had entered the bank as a learner, like myself. The same applied to the cashier, who had been an employee for thirty years, and to some of the others. It was true that most of the officials with high salaries had never been learners, and had joined the bank as employees, but they all had some kind of special knowledge. Some of them knew languages, and others were experts at investing the bank’s money so that it produced interest and profit. One of those was Señor Tejada. He had the bank’s Power of Attorney at the Stock Exchange and was above Don Julian; he was the only man who had the right to place orders at the Exchange, and Don Julian did nothing but carry them out and conduct the correspondence with the clients. Señor Tejada made millions for the bank and was paid very well for it. He was one of the people with the highest income, almost as high as that of the directors. And I knew I might get where he was, because it was all rather simple; Don Julian once explained to me how Stock Exchange speculation worked.
The bank could never lose. Those who lost were stock brokers with little capital, and the clients themselves. Moreover, the bank got wind of things before anybody else knew about them, by means of code telegrams which Don Julian had to translate. Gambling on the Stock Exchange consisted in betting whether stocks and shares were going to rise or fall in value by the end of the month. If the bank had many shares of a company in its safe, this was easy; then it was bound to gain either way. It accepted any offers, whether based on a rise or a fall, and at the end of the month it took stock of its purchases. If it found it more useful to raise the value, it offered to buy more of the shares at a higher price. Since the bank already possessed the majority of the shares or else had bought them, there were few of them left on the market and the brokers themselves had to buy them so as to sell them back to the bank. In this way the price was much higher by the end of the next month. But then the brokers who had sold shares to the bank at the beginning of the month were forced to deliver them at a price much lower than the current one, or else to pay the difference. Later the value of the shares went down, but the bank had sold them at the top price and cashed in on the difference. Thus many people were ruined, but the bank made money.
There was another business which brought in still more. It was the great business of the Banco Urquijo, which belonged to the Jesuits, and of the Banco de Vizcaya, which was said to belong to them too. Suppose some industrialists wanted to establish a factory which would cost them five millions, but had not got the capital. In that case, and if the transaction sounded good to the bank, it lent them the money, and issued shares, which it offered to the public. If the public bought all the shares of the issue, the bank got its commission on the loan and on the handling of the shares. If the public did not absorb the entire issue the bank kept the unsold shares and launched them on the market later on, when the factory was already working and the shares fetched a higher price; and then the people bought them. The bank pocketed the difference. It happened frequently that the undertaking was not sound and collapsed after the bank had sold out its shares; then the shareholders never saw a red cent, as all the banks knew that it was better not to touch these shares. In a similar manner the Banco Urquijo and the Banco de Vizcaya had made themselves masters of the Public Utilities of Madrid and of almost all the industries of Bilbao.
Another important branch of the business was the deposit accounts. Many people did not want to keep their money at home but took it to the bank which kept it safe and paid a small annual rate of interest. This money, which did not belong to the bank, was used for loans to business men who took all their drafts to the bank. The bank undertook to collect them and charged a commission for it. But as it did not pay them before it had collected the amount, and as the business man often needed the money at once, they asked for drafts to be discounted when they handed them in. The bank charged the discount rate and brokerage commission. The discount rate was four per cent. The money advanced on the drafts belonged to the people who had deposit accounts and received an annual interest of three per cent for them. The bank cashed in four pesetas on each draft of 100 pesetas it discounted—and it discounted many thousands a year.
For this purpose, they had a special reference department and knew exactly every customer’s credit. In this department girls were typing out copies of all the information collected, and filing them by the hundred every day. The girls were paid two pesetas daily, and many days they had to work twelve hours without looking up from their typewriters. In the Securities Department there were girls too, but they were much worse off than those in Reference, although they had the same pay. I saw them every day, because I had to take round the correspondence to the various sections; sometimes the girls gave me sweets.
Down in the basement there were some rooms all in steel, roof, walls, and floor, tables, and chairs. The doors were steel grilles, and during the night the rooms were protected by another thick door of steel with many bolts and knobs bearing numbers which had to be arranged in certain combinations so as to open the door. There were no windows, and everything had to be done by artificial light. It was there that the girls worked. They had to file the bonds deposited by the clients of the bank, to cut off the coupons of every bond due for payment, and to prepare the invoices for all coupons to be paid inside Spain. They spent the day, scissors in hand or counting packets of a hundred coupons each, and listing them one by one in the invoices for cashing. There was no ventilation and the air was suffocating. All the girls looked pale, and Señorita Magdalena, who was the senior in the service, had to be given three or four days’ leave every month. The only man down there was the head of the department, Señor Perahita, a fat man, very fat and very jolly. He seemed not to be affected by working there, for he grew fatter and redder every day. Near the door of the section there was the engine of one of the lifts, and the smell of the grease came into the room and stuck in your throat.
Then there was the Safe Deposit, yet another steel room with a very stout steel door. It was entirely filled with safes like wardrobes with drawers inside, and every client had a key to one of the drawers. Most of them were jewelers of the district, for the bank stood in the jewelers’ quarter. In the evenings they would come with their cases full of jewelry and lock them up. Other clients, too, kept their jewels, bonds and cash in the safes. One of them had a lot of gold in bars and gold coins; when he opened his safe, it was all shining yellow. The coins and the bars were arranged in piles. One day he showed us a bar which had come from China and was covered with Chinese characters stamped in relief. It weighed at least half a pound.
There was an old lady who kept all her bank notes in the safe and used to come there every morning to take out the money she needed for the day’s shopping. She opened her safe and looked round in all directions to make sure that nobody could see how much money she had. When another client was just opening another safe near by, she waited until he had gone. Once the cashier of the bank asked her why she did not open a deposit account, so that she could draw whatever she needed each time, while saving the rent of the safe and receiving an annual interest on top of it. She replied that every bank went bankrupt sooner or later, and it was impossible to convince her. She always asked Antonio, the chief commissionaire, to accompany her down to the basement, because she was afraid of somebody hiding there to rob and kill her when she opened her safe.
This Antonio was worse than Señor Corachán. He was always spying on the messenger boys and on us, and reported us to Señor Corachán. Thus everybody loathed him, including those of the staff who had started as learners, because they knew he was a lick-spittle. Nobody spoke when he was near and he hated the whole clerical staff. Sometimes it happened that one of the commissionaires or one of the collectors passed his examination and became a clerk in the bank. Then Antonio never spoke to him any more. He lived in the building itself and supervised the night watchmen until midnight or one o’clock, walking silently through the corridors on rubber soles like Señor Corachán. The night watchmen hated him so much that they played him a trick once which made him nearly die of fright.
One of the night watchmen, Señor Juan, hid in a corner and when Antonio had passed by, on tiptoe so that they should not hear him, he suddenly rang all the alarm bells and pointed his revolver at Antonio who was at the bottom of a dark passage. Señor Juan shouted: “Stop or I shoot—hands up!” Antonio was standing with his back to him and wanted to turn round, but the other said: “Don’t turn round, or I shoot.” “But, Juan,” cried Antonio, very scared, “it’s me—Antonio!” “Shut up or I’ll put a bullet through you.” As all the night watchmen were in the plot, they kept him for half an hour standing there, face to the wall and hands up, until some of them came back with the policeman posted in the Calle de Alcalá, who also carried their revolvers in their hands. We were watching, and had great fun seeing Antonio coming out with a frightened face in the midst of people pointing revolvers at him. Then Señor Juan said very seriously: “Well, it’s a pure miracle you haven’t been shot. I see a black shadow creeping about very softly, without making any noise, so I think it’s a thief. If you’d started to run or to make any funny kind of movement, I can tell you, I’d have laid you out.”
The next day the whole bank had a laugh at him, even the directors. Señor Carreras, the assistant director, who liked a joke, cross-examined him in front of us all to get his laugh.
One after the other the boys who had entered at the same time as I had disappeared, until the three of us were left, Medrano, Gros, and I. It was peculiar that we were again three, just as in the Escuela Pía, and I had a hunch that we all would become regular employees. Christmas was drawing near, and then we would learn which way things were going. We were full of hope, because they attached two new boys to us so that we should train them. That meant that we were five and that two of us would be transferred to another section. If they had intended to throw us out they would have done so before and not kept us on to teach two newcomers. But on the other hand the fact that we had only two boys to train meant that one of us three was either to stay on in the section or was going to be dismissed, and so we were all afraid. Each one of us had gone to the person who had recommended him to the bank, and each had been given good hopes, but you never knew what those people were going to do.
On Christmas Eve we were all waiting for the envelopes which had been put on the desk of the Heads of Departments. They were yellow envelopes which contained the Christmas bonus and the month’s salary; in some cases the slip of paper that gave the two sums also carried a handwritten remark which could mean promotion, or else a warning that the directors were not satisfied with the employee’s work. Thus everybody was impatient and nervous, waiting to know his fate.
Señor Zabala called the employees one by one in a loud, sharp voice. Some of them he congratulated even before they had had time to open the envelope. They all thanked him and wished him a Merry Christmas. Then they started to open their envelopes and stood around in groups talking them over, some happy because they had been given a fat Christmas bonus or a promotion, and others very annoyed.
Recalde was banging his fist on the table and cursing. Señor Zabala rose from his chair and called out:
“What’s the matter, Señor Recalde? Come here.”
Recalde came up, his hat pulled down over his forehead, and began to thump on Zabala’s desk.
“It’s a rotten trick! That’s the third year they’ve done the same thing to me. I won’t stand for it any more. The whole bank and all those Jesuit swine like yourself can go to hell! I’ve been working here and nobody can say anything against my work, but of course, the Reverend Father Capuchin’s made up his filthy mind that I mustn’t have a mistress. I’ve got one because I damned well want one.”
Señor Zabala, scarlet with fury and tugging at his beard, cried:
“Hold your tongue or it will be the worse for you. Hold your tongue, I’m telling you!”
“I don’t want to. I’m shouting because it suits me and because I’m leaving this pigsty anyhow.”
He strode out of the room and slammed all the doors along the corridor. A group of clerks clustered round Señor Zabala and consoled him with a lot of flatteries. But another group, those who were discontented, stood round another desk and said that Recalde was in the right.
We three boys were the last to be called. They had given each of us a bonus of twenty-five pesetas and the slip of paper said that Gros and I should transfer to the Records Department and that Medrano was to act as auxiliary correspondent. We were crazy with joy because these transfers meant that our promotion to real clerks was a certainty. We decided to have a glass of vermouth together at the bar of the Portuguese in the Calle de la Cruz.
There we found Plá, a Plá who was a stranger to us. He spluttered worse than ever and his little eyes were watering behind his lenses, he invited everybody to have a drink on him, and showed everybody his slip of paper and the banknotes he had received. It was a happy Plá, who hugged the three of us.
“Have whatever you like, it’s on me. Boy”—he shouted at the lad behind the counter—“give those three a drink, and anybody else who wants one too.”
Then he started once again on the story of his good fortune so that the three of us should know it.
“Granny will go crazy with joy.” Granny was his mother, a tiny old lady, very kind, who sometimes came to fetch him. “You see, I was tearing the envelope open in a bad temper, as every year, and thinking it will be the same old story, they’ll have forgotten me. And then there it was, I found a heap of banknotes and a note saying: ‘As from January the 1st, Head of the Records Department with a monthly salary of 175 pesetas.’ Double what I’ve been earning, less five pesetas.”
“Then Gros and I’ll be with you in Records,” I said, and we showed him our slips.
He hugged us again and invited us to another round. Then we invited him to have drinks on us. More employees of our bank came into the bar and a long row of glasses was lined up in front of Plá. Everybody invited him for a drink, and he invited everybody. He was going to be dead drunk in the end and out of pure joy. We went home. Plá had touched me. I too wanted to see the happiness in the face of my own “Granny” and of my aunt, when they heard the news.
All of us in Records had our hopes and illusions. Plá was happy. Gros and I were happy. Antonio Alvarez, the third boy in Records, was also happy, because they had given him 100 pesetas for a Christmas bonus and he was earning 75 pesetas. He had been no more than four years in the bank. The future was ours. We worked like donkeys day and night.
The former head of the department had been dismissed because he had made “nests.” That is to say, he took bundles of letters, and instead of classifying them and putting each letter in its file, he hid them away in corners. Then the letters were missing. One day they discovered one of those nests of his and gave him the sack on the spot. When we took over the work there were thousands of letters waiting to be classified. Every day we found a new nest. All this had to be cleared up even while the daily correspondence was being filed. We worked from seven in the morning to one at night. The bank paid us a coffee every night. When we came home our fingers were rasped by paper dust and streaked with dry ink in microscopically small grains.
Who was it who had hit upon the idea of making Plá Head of the Records Department? It must have been Corachán. There the poor shortsighted man was, his thick slabs of lenses a-glitter with round specks of light from the lamp which burned day and night just above his head; he was crouched over the counter, his nose almost bumping against the heap of papers in his effort to decipher signatures and letterheads, for hours and hours. Afterwards he suffered from terrible headaches. At midnight they brought us the coffee and Plá drank it greedily. It was thick black coffee with a lot of chicory and gelatine in it, and it left black stains on the filing-counter. Plá took a small bottle filled with cheap brandy from his pocket; it cured his headache. Afterwards he could not sleep and in the mornings he ran round in circles, like a dazed owl, until the snack at eleven, fifteen centimos’ worth of cheese sandwich and a drink of wine, brought him to life again.
We all worked ceaselessly, and Plá was fond of us as though we had been his sons. We had to take a bite of his cheese and a sip of his wine and a whiff from the cigarette he always kept lighted beneath the filing-counter. His little round body hid there; he took a long pull at his cigarette, flapped his hands to disperse the tobacco smoke and keep it from curling upwards, and then emerged with the grave face of a boy who has been naughty.
The counter ran the whole length of the records room, some thirty yards and the whole day long employees of other sections came there to find out about things in the old files. This meant that we had not only to do the filing, but also to answer the queries. When the directors or the Guarantees Department wanted information we had to take the files up to them, which we did for nobody else.
The Guarantees Department was the most aristocratic section of the bank. It was the place dealing with all the rich foreigners who brought letters of credit, and with millionaires, who never had to stand in a queue to cash a check like tradesmen and other people with current accounts. The Department had a staircase of its own with a gilt railing and a thick carpet instead of the linoleum all the others had. All its employees wore frock coats. Its big waiting-room, with enormous leather armchairs and plenty of foreign magazines, was sometimes quite full of millionaires. One of the employees was an Englishman, with a monocle stuck in his eye, who always smoked a light brand of tobacco with a peculiar scent. For in that Department they allowed the employees to smoke; most of them were foreigners who would not have stayed on working in Madrid if they had been forbidden to smoke, but would have gone back to Paris or London.
Everything showed that there were different categories even among the people who had money. It was not as though none of the people with a current account had much money. It was simply because of their social standing. There was an ordinary Juan Perez who owned two million pesetas but had to wait in the queue downstairs in the central hall, and there was His Grace the Marquess of Something-or-other, with hardly 100,000 pesetas to his credit in the account, who dealt directly with the Guarantees Department and came with great airs to cash a check for 500 pesetas and to smoke the cigars supplied in the waiting-room. While everybody addressed him as Your Grace this and Your Grace that, Juan Perez was sitting on the wooden bench downstairs, waiting until the cashier sang out his number, Number 524.
But there were still more influential clients, the directors of the great industrial concerns in Spain and abroad. They were received in the board-room by the director, Monsieur Michaud himself, or by Señor Carreras. One of those men, Don Carlos Mazorra, was one of the greatest men on the Spanish Stock Exchange. He always won. For a long time the bank tried to fleece him like all the others, but when it was found that this was not only impossible, but that he sometimes tricked the bank, they came to an agreement with him. After that the bank informed him of good business in hand, and Don Carlos passed on information to the bank. Sometimes Señor Tejada and he went in together for a deal worth millions and shared the profits.
They did so over the Banco Hispano deal. That bank captured within a short time a great part of all the other banks’ customers. One day all the banks got together and agreed to wreck the Banco Hispano by making its shares fall and producing a run on the bank. They did create a panic; people stood in a queue all along the Calle de Sevilla to withdraw their money. When the bank had no more ready cash to pay them, it applied to the other banks; they, however, refused to lend money on the securities the Banco Hispano had in its safes. Even the Bank of Spain refused to help, and on the following morning the Banco Hispano had to suspend payment. Most of the people who had been able to withdraw their money came to our bank and opened an account with us. But in the end it turned out that the Banco Hispano had more than sufficient funds to continue payments and it did not go bankrupt. During the slump of the shares many people were ruined, but Don Carlos and our bank made fat profits, because they had bought up shares when they were at their lowest.
On August the 1st, exactly a year after I had entered the bank, they made me a paid employee, with a monthly salary of twenty-five pesetas. It was very little. But at least I was no longer afraid of being thrown out. At the same time I was transferred to the Coupons Section of the Securities Department, with Perahita as my chief. It was going to be all right. The bank had just decided that it was impossible to go on working in the steel room, because everyone fell ill there; one of the inner courtyards was being covered with a glass roof and turned into a room. There the Coupons Section was going to work with all the girls, three clerks, and Perahita as the Head.
While the courtyard was being converted, I went to work in the steel room. The little staircase which led up from there ended just by the door of the courtyard where the builders were setting up the roof of steel and glass and painting the walls a cream color. When we came upstairs from that cold steel cellar which was always lighted by electric lamps, we looked at the new quarters which were our hope. With their roof and floor of glass, the light-colored walls, the sun shining down at noon, it made a violent contrast to our cellar and we were happy thinking that we would work there. We kept on asking the masons and painters:
“Will it be much longer?”
“Two or three days, and the time it takes for the paint to dry,” they told us.
Everybody was content, but I wasn’t. The two rooms had made me think. If they had sent me to the Coupons Section a year earlier, I should have passed that year between steel walls. I should not have stood it. Even in the few days I worked there I felt a pressure on my chest, and every time I came out into the Calle de Alcalá, the air seemed different; sometimes I was almost sick. Red sparks from the electric light seemed to stay before my eyes for a long time and I saw dancing spots when I came out into the daylight. If I had worked in the steel room for that year, I would not have been paid and if I had fallen ill they would have sacked me. Now, after a year as a learner, swallowing the dust of the files and running up and down stairs, I earned 25 pesetas a month, less than a peseta a day. This would go on for another year, and then I would follow the career of all the others. After the second year they would raise my salary to 37.50 pesetas a month, and after the third year to 50 pesetas. At twenty years I would earn 100 pesetas a month, if I was lucky, and then I would be called up for the army. In the meantime my mother would have to go on washing clothes by the river to earn her living.
On one of the first days after my transfer to the new department a commissionaire came and told me:
“Señor Barea, you are to go up to the board-room. To Señor Corachán.”
They all looked at me with scared faces and I, too, was scared. Such a summons always boded ill. I climbed the stairs to the top floor with hollow legs and a beating heart. The worst that could happen was that they would dismiss me for some reason, but I could not imagine for what. Still, I wouldn’t lose so very much—twenty-five pesetas a month.
I went into the room with its deep leather chairs and conference tables, with leather folders and agate inkstands. Señor Corachán was sitting near one of the windows, reading some papers. He let me stand there in front of him for a few minutes. I saw clearly that he was doing nothing, not even reading; he was only showing off. In the end he raised his head, looked me over, took a dossier, turned its leaves and asked me pompously:
“You’re the employee Arturo Barea Ogazón of the Coupons Section?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now look here (pause) the Management have agreed (pause) in view of the positive reports in your dossier (pause) not-to-throw-you-into-the-street.” (He stressed each syllable, tapping the pencil on the palm of his hand.)
“But why, sir?” I asked.
“You have—” and now he burst out in anger, “an infernal hand writing! This cannot be tolerated. Do you think you can work in a bank, be employed by a bank, with a hand like yours which looks like spiders’ legs? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! The Management cannot stand for this a single day longer. Take note of this: you are being given a month’s time—one month!—to improve your handwriting. If you don’t, you’ll be dismissed. It is understood that in view of the fact that I am giving you a month’s warning the bank is entitled to consider itself free from any obligation to pay you the month’s salary on dismissal, stipulated by the law. You may go now.”
“But Don Antonio—”
“Not a single word more! The Management cannot enter into discussion with you. Be quiet and go.”
I should have liked to hit the whiskered beast in front of me, his chin quivering with rage and his eyes protruding behind the gold-rimmed lenses which danced on the bridge of his nose.
I told the story to my mother while she peeled the potatoes for supper in the kitchen; my aunt had gone to church to say her Rosary. I cried with rage.
Her gentle fingers stopped peeling potatoes and strayed through my hair.
DON PRIMO, THE NOTARY, had chambers paneled in carved wood, which impressed all the country relations as they sat down, one after the other, in a circle round the huge table. Many of them were sitting on the very edges of their chairs. The men held their round hats on their knees and fingered them, the women put both hands in their laps and kept plucking at the cloth. I had been so often in the room and had spoken so frequently to Don Primo that I was intimidated neither by the place nor by the severe figure of the notary with his black suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, and aristocratic head. When I arrived with my mother and Grandmother Inés, he patted me.
I did not know why all the people who had come to hear the reading of my aunt’s will were looking at me with such resentment. They had split up into groups: Uncle Hilario with his wife and daughters—Uncle Basilio with his wife, sons, and daughters—Aunt Basilisa with Uncle Anastasio, who dared not smoke but was chewing a stinking cigarette stub, and Baldomera whose face was like a daft nun’s—Aunt Eulogia with her Carmen—Uncle Julian, like myself a nephew once removed, with his wife and three small children clutching at her skirts. Why did they all bring their children?
While Don Primo read the will, they stretched out their necks better to listen. Every time a name occurred the named person’s face changed and shone with pleasure at not having been forgotten, and all the others looked at him, annoyed that there was still another with whom to share.
I was the main target of their anger.
Apparently, my uncle and aunt had made their wills at the same time and in agreement. They left the fortune to whichever of them should survive, for free use during his or her lifetime, but whatever remained after the death was divided into two equal parts. Uncle and Aunt had disposed of one part each in favor of their own relations. I was the only one who figured in both wills and had a share in both parts. Otherwise my uncle’s blood relatives inherited from his part, and my aunt’s blood relatives from her part.
They all thought that they, who were either brothers or sisters or direct nephews or nieces of the deceased, had more rights than I, who was only a nephew once removed. When my name turned up in the second will, a general murmur interrupted the reading. Don Primo stopped and looked at them, questioning:
“Would you like to make any comment?”
Uncle Hilario stood up.
“If I’ve got it right, the kid inherits double.”
“Just so,” answered Don Primo, “once under José’s will and once under Baldomera’s will.”
“But that’s all wrong, damn it all. Because I’m the brother of the deceased, his own flesh and blood, and I say it’s all wrong that a stranger should just walk in and carry off the cash.”
Uncle Anastasio, twisting his cigar stub between his lips, intervened:
“That’s just it. And we won’t stand for it. We shall go to law about it.”
Don Primo smiled.
“I think Pepe knew you all very well indeed. When these two wills were drafted, he asked me to add the clause which I’m now going to read to you:
“‘It is our will that any of the heirs who may attempt to enter into a lawsuit concerning our wills shall by this selfsame act lose any right to his or her inheritance which shall thereupon be distributed among all the other heirs in proportion to their inheritance.’”
Grandmother Inés rose gravely from her chair, turned to face the two men and said:
“Well—are we going to law?”
“Nobody asked you to carry a candle in this procession,” said Uncle Anastasio severely.
“Of course not, my lad. But you see, the kid here has been given two big candles to carry, and as I happen to be his grandmother, I’m here to support his weak arms so that he doesn’t drop them. Has anybody anything against it?”
All but myself were upset about the will. The only heirs were the nearest relatives—brothers and sisters—and I. Beyond that, Uncle José and Aunt Baldomera had left various legacies to all nephews and nieces, which meant that those with the greatest number of children came off best. Uncle Anastasio, who had only his Baldomera, and Aunt Eulogia, with Carmen and Esperanza, were angry with Uncle Hilario who had three children, and they were all angry with Uncle Julian who was no heir but received legacies for himself, his wife, and his five children, so that he got more than any of the heirs. When we left the notary’s house we were all enemies.
My mother had the keys of my aunt’s flat, and out of fear that she might take something, the others came after us so that in the end we were all assembled in the flat. The door stayed open and they entered in small groups.
The room in which my aunt’s body had been lying was empty, but it still smelled of flowers and of death, a faint, insidious, clammy smell. A few wax blobs were left on the tiles. It was as though at any moment her slight porcelain figure might come out of the bedroom with short little steps.
They all took seats round the table. All of them. As though anybody who had not taken his place there would forfeit his rights. Grandmother Inés squeezed herself into the rocking-chair below the clock. She had to force the two curved arm-rests apart to get room for her behind. When she had succeeded in sitting down on the plaited cane seat she heaved a sigh of contentment. My mother sat down beside her on the low stool on which my aunt used to sew beside the balcony until the daylight failed her. I threw myself on the floor, on the carpet. I could not have sat down at the table with the others. Stretched on the carpet and watching them all upside down, I felt better. Don Julian had spoken with Señor Corachán and I had been given ten days’ leave from the bank.
The bank seemed no longer to exist. Lying there on the floor I was again a child, and in the end I rested my head on my mother’s lap, between her knees. She had a black skirt which smelled of starch and new cloth and rustled at every movement of my head. One of the legal executors was speaking and explaining what had to be done. It was necessary to make an inventory of everything in the flat, to agree on the value of each item and then to make lots which would be distributed among the heirs. There were eleven lots: nine heirs with one lot each, and two lots for me. Now the disputes started. The lots had to be fixed by value in money, but it was difficult to agree on the big pieces of furniture. As nobody knew who would get each thing, the prices were fixed ridiculously low so as to pay as little as possible in death duties. But suddenly Fuencisla, one of Uncle Hilario’s daughters, said:
“I’ve taken a fancy to the Virgin.”
Carmen gave back at once: “And I too.”
“There is no difficulty about that,” said the Executor. “If all those present agree, we shall put a value to the Virgin and allot it to one of you, deducting the price from the corresponding lot.”
The Virgin was placed on the dining-room table. The figure stood in a wooden case with glass in front and a door, with a little silver key, at the back. The statue was eighteen inches high. The Virgin held the Child Jesus in her arms and both had little gilt flames stuck into their hair. She had an embroidered mantle and the Child a little velvet cape flecked with gold.
“Well,” said the Executor, “what value shall we put on this?”
Nobody spoke.
“Shall we say fifty pesetas?”
They all hesitated in giving their agreement, as though it were a serious problem. Uncle Anastasio, his cigar stub lighted at last, said nothing, went up to the statue, opened the door at the back of the case and touched the wooden face of the Virgin with one finger. He went on sucking at his cigar while he closed the door, and the others looked at him in astonishment. He addressed the Executor with gravity:
“You say, then, that the value of this Virgin will be deducted from the lot of one of those two girls?”
“Certainly. That is to say, if all those present are agreeable that one of them should get it.”
“I’ve no objection to the Virgin’s being allotted to one of them,” said Uncle Anastasio in a throaty voice, “but I cannot permit a carving of the twelfth century—well, or whatever century it is,” he added hastily when he saw the Executor’s dumbfounded face, “to be given away for fifty pesetas. This Virgin is worth at least five hundred pesetas, and that’s modest. Because you won’t deny that it’s carved wood!” He opened the little door once again and rapped a few times with his knuckles on the Virgin’s, face, which sounded like a block of wood.
“Wood, you see, gentlemen, authentic polychrome wood carving. It’s rare nowadays to find one of these Virgins.”
Grandmother Inés grunted from the depth of her rocking-chair:
“And of other virgins, too.”
“I’ve no objection,” said the Executor. “If you think that the Virgin should be put down at a value of 500 pesetas, or at 1,000 pesetas, it’s all the same to me. Only, we’ll have to establish first which of the two…” he stammered a little before he decided on his way of address,“…of the two young ladies is going to get it.”
Both answered at the same time, each claiming the Virgin for herself, but protesting against the price. Five hundred pesetas were five hundred pesetas. For a while there was a medley of voices. In the end the Executor imposed silence and suggested a solution:
“Let us put the Virgin up to auction between these two young ladies.” This time it came pat. “When the bidding is over, the winner will keep the Virgin, provided you all agree to that. If not, it will be added to one of the lots and whoever gets that lot will keep the Virgin.”
“I’m willing to give fifty pesetas, as you said before, if only in memory of poor Aunt who was so fond of it,” said Fuencisla.
“Of course, that’s what you think, you’d get it for fifty pesetas,” retorted Carmen. “I’d give one hundred pesetas, sir.”
The two of them were hopping round the table like a pair of fighting cats, and between them stood the Virgin with her empty smile. They threw figures at each other as though they were chucking stones. Flushed red with rage, Carmen dealt the final blow:
“Eight hundred pesetas!” she bellowed.
Fuencisla burst into tears. Aunt Braulia angrily pinched her arm to stop her from bidding higher. Carmen looked at the lot of them arrogantly. “Yes, sir. Eight hundred pesetas—and I’m not going back on my word.” She screamed it, arms akimbo, just like one of the shameless girls of El Avapiés—which indeed she was.
Grandmother Inés broke out into loud laughter so that her breasts and her belly, which flowed over from the chair, shook and heaved. Carmen turned round and faced her:
“What’s that? Do you mind? Because I can do with my own money what I damn’ well please!”
Grandmother went off into gales of laughter, unable to speak. She coughed, sputtered, and her eyes ran over. When she calmed down, she said between chuckles:
“No, my dear girl, no, I’m not getting angry with you. You can take your Virgin away and read Masses to her. Anyhow, you’ll spit on her more often than you pray to her. And as a consolation, I’m going to tell you that before you were born, Pepe bought it on the Junk Market for ten pesetas one Sunday, and they carried it home for him into the bargain.”
Next day they began breaking up the flat. The relatives from Brunete turned up with their farm carts, the mules harnessed to a wooden yoke on their necks, with the pole sticking out between them. There were still bits of straw clinging to the bottom of the carts and in the esparto ropes which had been used to bundle up the straw. They moved down furniture and broke china in carting it down the stairs. Uncle Julian arrived with his children and two pushcarts. When they had loaded them and dragged them away, the carts almost toppled over. We were the last. We had sold the big pieces of furniture which had fallen to our lot, because there was no room for them in the garret, but we had kept my bed, three wool mattresses, some cutlery, and all the clothes which had come to us. Beyond that there were a few banknotes which my mother had pushed into her black shopping bag. Uncle Anastasio had sold his whole lot. He kept the money and told his wife and Baldomerita: “Now let’s go.” But at the next corner he left them alone and the two came with us, trotting alongside the handcart which Señor Manuel was pushing for us. They lived close by in the Plaza del Angel.
Aunt Basilisa began to talk: “It’s a burning shame, my dear, a burning shame, that’s what it is. Those men! And there’s nothing one can do. I would have loved to keep a few of my poor sister’s things, but you see what happened. He put the money in his pocket and off he went. Later he’ll tell us it’s all in the way of business and we shan’t even see a copper. The only good thing is that I was able to save a few things before Baldomera died, because if it hadn’t been for that… Of course, when we get the real money we’ve inherited it won’t happen that way, it’ll have to go into the bank for our girl when she marries, whether he wants it or not.” She stopped for a time while we crossed the Plaza Mayor, walking round it the wrong way because they were repairing the asphalt.
Then she started again: “I tell you, my dear, life is hell. A good thing I’ve got that post as a concierge, it’s a steady two hundred to two hundred and fifty pesetas a month. But him—since they retired him with sixty pesetas a month he’s made himself a very comfortable life. In the mornings he reads the paper and rolls his cigarettes. After dinner he goes to the café. In the evening he comes home for supper, and then he goes to the tavern and gambles away his cash. At the beginning of the month I’ve got to keep my eyes skinned to see that he doesn’t get away with the rent the tenants pay. We wouldn’t see the shadow of a copper otherwise. And it’s no good protesting, because if I do he goes mad and starts knocking furniture about and shouting: ‘After thirty years of honest toil those women won’t let me have a glass of vermouth with my friends. But it’s me who’s master here!’ Well, you know him, Leonor. And then he runs about with those servant wenches. He’s an old man now, but he still goes to bed with any one he can get. It’s a shame, my dear, it’s a real shame, I tell you. He makes up to them on the stairs and then he takes them into the lift and stays with them, because he says they don’t know how to work it. My… it’s because he can squeeze them as much as he likes in there.”
When we said good-by to her, she called out:
“Well, come and see me some time!” and walked away on Baldomerita’s arm, limping because of her rheumatics.
Señor Manuel stacked up the pieces of the bedstead, the mattresses, the clothing, and the small bundles in the garret, and it was quite filled. Señora Pascuala had come up to see everything and pushed her fists into the wool filling of the mattresses, fingered the sheets, and weighed the silver cutlery. I started to set up my own bed. Its gilt rails mocked the two other beds with their green-painted iron bars and creaking springs. Then, only then, did I dismantle my little old bed and unscrew all its rusty screws. The pieces leaned like a green skeleton in a corner where the sloping roof and the floor met. We put the two big mattresses on my mother’s bed, her double bed with curved iron rails at the head and the foot and with two flat panels which had saints painted on them. My bed had its own mattress. And in the angle between roof and floor the two old flock mattresses were left lying, patched and faded.
“What are you going to do with them, Leonor?” asked Señora Pascuala.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to give them away to somebody.”
Señor Manuel scratched his bald head and rolled one of his fat cigarettes made of stubs and twisted like a tree trunk.
“Are you going to give them away as a gift, Leonor?” he asked.
“Well, of course, they’re not good enough to sell.”
He scratched his head again and sucked his cigarette which he had lighted with his tinder rope.
“It’s just… you see… it’s like this…” The words strangled him. “It’s years since… Well—you know I’ve got a landlady who lets me have a room. But for two and a half pesetas a month you can’t ask for much. I’ve got a pallet, fixed it up myself, but it isn’t like a mattress. Not to speak of a bed. I don’t get a bed even when I go home to my village; there I’ve got a good-sized heap of maize straw and that’s a fine thing to sleep on. But if you’re going to chuck it away, well, give it away, then it’s better I should get it. Don’t you think that’s right, Leonor? And then”—he had grown sure of himself in speaking—“let’s make a bargain. You let me take the bed and the mattresses away, and I’ll carry your washing up for you at half price for three weeks. I won’t say that I’ll do it for nothing, because if I lose that fixed amount I couldn’t really manage. What do you think of it?”
He gazed anxiously at my mother and waited for her answer. My mother smiled as she sometimes knew how to smile. Then she turned to me.
“Here you’ve got the heir, he can do as he likes.”
Señor Manuel looked at me with the eyes of a dog who fears that his master is going to abandon him. I was now a young gentleman employed in a bank. For months he had never dared to kiss me or to talk to me as he used to talk before. I filled him with awe and I knew that he talked about me to all the washerwomen as though I were a wonder: “Leonor’s son, you know, he’s working in a bank, he’s become a real young gentleman!” Now he sucked at his foul cigarette and looked at me—looked at me—God, how he looked at me!
“Señor Manuel,” I said gravely. “We’re going to make a deal. I give you the bed and the mattresses, but on the condition that—”
He did not let me finish: “Whatever you like, master, anything you wish. I’ve been working with your mother fifteen years—as many years as you have, master—and she can tell you—”
“I’ll give you the bed, but you must stop calling me master.”
At first he seemed not to understand what I meant. Then he seized me, shook me with his big, strong hands, crushed me in his arms, kissed my face noisily, after flinging away the cigarette he had in his mouth, put his two hands on my shoulders, stood me in front of him, and began to cry.
We had to give him a glass of spirits. Afterwards he made two trips to carry home the old green-painted bed rails and the patched and repatched flock mattresses. When my mother and I were left alone, we put the room in order; from time to time one of the neighboring women came in to see what was going on and to inspect the bed which shone like a jewel in the garret, with its gleaming bars and its heavy crocheted bedspread. At nightfall Señora Segunda arrived, the old beggar woman with her nose half destroyed by cancer.
My mother sorted out the clothes for which she had no use and gave them to her, one after another. Señora Segunda took them, held them to the light of the oil lamp and exclaimed with pleasure. There were my aunt’s chemises, bodices, skirts, underskirts, and petticoats. My mother kept the best pieces for herself and gave her all the rest. She picked up a dark brown winter jacket of thick cloth with a huge tear right across the front.
“I can’t imagine that this could be of any use to you, Segunda.” She pushed her hand through the rent. “Aunt could never bring herself to throw anything away.”
Señora Segunda held up the jacket and the light fell through the tear. “It’ll do for Toby, my dear. The poor thing suffers so much from cold in the winter when we are out begging. I’m going to make a coat for him. Toby! Toby!”
Lazily, the dog got up from beside the brazier where he was lying, sniffed at the jacket and wagged his tail. Señora Segunda insisted on fitting it on Toby’s back, while the sleeves dragged on the floor, and he stood quite still, wagging his tail under the folds. Then he licked her hands and went back to his place in the warmth under the table.
Our life in the garret settled down. My mother was still doing her washing on Mondays and Tuesdays. I went to the bank. On Sundays, my brother and sister came to see us. On weekdays, I read in the evenings and my mother did her sewing by the light of the oil lamp. Sometimes we all went to the pictures on Sundays, in the afternoons, because Rafael had to be back in his shop, and Concha in the house where she was in service, by eight o’clock. I had become somebody. Señora Pascuala addressed me in the old familiar way but she looked at me with a respect mixed with a touch of envy, because her son Pepe was getting nowhere. Everybody else said “Sir” to me.
From time to time I drank a glass of vermouth and smoked a cigarette. Soon I would be getting a few thousand pesetas as the heir of my uncle and aunt. I was the master of the house and of my people and I knew it.
We kept on hearing stories about the other heirs.
In Brunete, the two families, Uncle Hilario’s and Uncle Basilio’s, seemed to have quarreled. After my Uncle José’s death, both had wanted to assume the command of the small community he had created, Uncle Hilario because he was older, Uncle Basilio because he was younger and had sons. Their quarrel started on account of the furniture they had taken out of the estate. Although everything had been distributed by lot, and they themselves had fixed the value of each piece, they were now throwing in each other’s teeth that one piece of furniture was worth more than the other and that both of them had been cheated. The people of the village went to both their houses, and in each said that it had got the better furniture. In the end, they agreed no longer to work their land jointly. Yet when they came to divide the land they had bought under Uncle José’s management, to distribute the mules, the farming implements, the crops stored in the barn, and even the pitchers which were used to bring drinking water to the farm hands, the row broke out in earnest. The women pulled each other’s hair, and the men hit at each other with their sticks. In the end, they went to law to establish their claims to the land, and sought out Don Luis Bahía to advance them money on their inheritance from Uncle José, so that they could cover the expenses of the lawsuit.
Uncle Julian, too, was an odd case. His whole life he had worked as a wheelwright in a workshop, in the Ronda del Toledo. He had learned his craft from my grandfather, and had then come to Madrid as a master in partnership with the owner of the workshop. He and his five children lived in a tenement house in the Calle del Tribulete. When the furniture was allotted, he got the sideboard and the dining-room table. Both were big, heavy pieces of carved oak. He took them home to a flat which had only four small rooms—a dining room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen, while the lavatory was in the passage and used by all the tenants on the same floor—and naturally neither the sideboard nor the table fitted into the flat. But they pushed them in, and then had to squeeze themselves sideways between the table and the wall whenever they wanted to walk about the room. They took the sideboard to pieces. The lower part went into the parents’ bedroom, and the upper part, where the glasses, cups, and platters had been, was hung on a few hooks in the kitchen. Uncle Julian had two grown-up daughters, one of them just about to marry. She asked for the two pieces for her new room. The other sister protested because she too was engaged, and in the end Uncle Julian had to box the ears of each and keep the furniture himself.
Uncle Anastasio’s story was simple. He took the money from the sale of the furniture and went to gamble in El Bilbaino Club in the Calle de Peligros. And he won. He won a few thousand pesetas. He came home with presents for Aunt Basilísa and Baldomerita. For a month or so, they all lived in great luxury, and everything went well. They went to the theater and cinema, they had their fancies and bought cheap trinkets. After that, Uncle Anastasio began to be short of money. He pawned the jewelry he had given to the two women, then the jewelry my aunt had given to Baldomerita, then the Manila shawl, the mantillas and whatever there was. When everything else had given out, he began to pawn household goods, and in the end Aunt Basilísa came in tears to my mother to ask her for twenty-five pesetas.
Carmen’s father, Aunt Eulogia’s husband, had come from Galicia as a young boy. He was a giant. When he was young, he earned money which he used to establish himself as a coal vendor in the New World. He earned a lot, but then he began to drink. He was so strong that he never got really drunk, but as he was ashamed of not getting drunk like his friends, he tried to make himself drunk too, and drank whole bottles of spirits. He ruined himself and had to close down his shop. Then, when he was no longer young, he took on a job as a porter in the most expensive furniture shop in Madrid and carried furniture to the customers’ houses. He had a mate who was as big as himself, and the shop had bought them a very showy livery. They carried the furniture in a kind of litter covered in red plush, with broad leather straps slung across their shoulders. People in the streets turned round and stared at the two enormous men who carried the heaviest furniture as though it were a feather. Once, they carried a piano in this way, and people stopped on the sidewalks. They walked in step, and the piano rocked in its litter like in a cradle. He had good wages and good tips, but he spent everything on drink. One day they carried him home with an attack of delirium tremens. He didn’t die because he was so strong, but he had to stay in bed, a useless invalid, his hands trembling ceaselessly. The doctor let him drink three glasses of spirits a day, for he said that he was bound to die if his alcohol were suddenly cut off.
After he saw all the furniture and clothing which had come to his wife from the inheritance, he dragged himself out of bed one morning when Aunt Eulogia had left the house and he was alone. As he lived in the Calle del Peñón, just behind the Junk Market, he called for a neighbor who was a dealer there and sold him all the inherited furniture and clothes, and some of the things from his own household as well. Then he called a boy and sent him for a two-liter bottle of spirits, got back into bed, and poured it all down. He went mad. The first person to come home was Carmen’s younger sister, Esperancita. She found her father stark naked, smashing up furniture with a knob stick. He tried to kill her, and the girl ran shrieking through the corridors of the house. At that moment, Aunt Eulogia came home, and he struck her on the shoulder. He nearly broke her arm; if the blow had landed on her head, he would have killed her. All the neighbors had to come and truss him up between them with ropes, like a bundle. For three days he had to be kept in a strait jacket, tied to the bed and foaming at the mouth.
My mother went to see him the day before he died, and I went to the funeral. The room was smashed to pieces. The only thing that was left unharmed was the Virgin on top of the chest of drawers, with the little oil lamp inside, which filmed the glass and made soot stains on the top of the case.
It was a radiant Sunday, and I had gone to the Escuela Pía to see Father Joaquín. We had been chatting till lunch time, and I had my meal with the Father in the Refectory. In the afternoon, walking up the Calle de Mesón de Paredes, I went into the house where Señora Segunda lived.
Toby welcomed me in the doorway with his dirty paws, shedding white hairs off his gray, woolly fur all over my trousers. He looked very funny in his cloth coat edged with green braid, which was tied round his neck and under his belly. Señora Segunda was getting ready to go out begging and showed me with pride what she had done with the clothes.
From a short jacket of my aunt’s she had taken off the jet spangles and turned it into a coat for herself. Where the small disks had been there were dark regular spots which looked like embroidery. She had put on an old silk skirt, bright flowers on a dull ground, all grayed over by age. She had made an old mantilla into a loose veil which fell over her forehead and hid part of her dreadful nose. She was about to take her folding stool and Toby in his coat, and go to her regular place in the Plaza del Progreso. In her new costume she looked like a lady who had come down in the world; surely, now that the gaping holes of her nose were hardly visible, people would give her far more alms than before! One by one she showed me her things and explained. “Thanks to your mother, everybody looks at me in a different way now. With my veil and the silk dress, and my face hidden away, people are sorry for me, much more so than before, and I don’t make them shudder now. I’ve been teaching Toby to hold a plate between his teeth and to sit on his hind legs. He does keep still for a while but then he gets tired, poor darling. It’s a pity. Now I always take my coffee without sugar at the café and keep the lump so that I can give it to Toby in small bits to make him stick it out longer. But he’s old, poor thing, and gets tired of holding the plate between his teeth. It’s a pity, though, because while he holds it people give us much more alms. Even men put a copper into the plate and pat the dog.”
She showed me four new sheets which she had made out of pieces of linen my mother had given her. She had sewn them together with tiny little stitches, and everything was white and well ironed.
“Just feel it,” she said. “First I put them in lye for bleaching, because some pieces were whiter than others. But now thanks to the bleaching and the blueing they’re all alike and so fine that it is a pleasure to sleep in them.”
Out of old stockings she had made new ones; she had cut out pieces and knitted them together. Out of bits and snippets of material she had made a blanket for the dog, sewing them on to a length of burlap like loose flower petals.
And since it was necessary to brighten up her home, now that she had new clothes and was earning more money, she had painted her room—that little box shaped like a wedge of cheese—a chalky blue. It made stains on my sleeves, to complete the work Toby had started with my trousers.
On Mondays and Tuesdays I took the tram just outside the bank and went down to the river to have my meal there. I was proud when the washerwomen saw me, and my mother was glad and proud too. She made me put on one of the white smocks of the Municipal Laboratory, so that my suit should not get dirty. She did the washing for Dr. Chicote and all the doctors of the Laboratory. So I could sit down on the grass, with the washing-board upside down as a table, and feed worms to the duck. I was no longer afraid of its bill; sometimes I caught it and held it tight. Then the duck grunted like a pig and flapped its wings in rage. It ran away, waddling and waggling its bottom like a fat woman with bow legs.
Señor Manuel pressed me to visit him in his house. It was a wooden shack which belonged to a widowed woman. She lived there, and he had a small bedroom with walls made of planks. The chinks were pasted over with paper. He had tacked up pictures of politicians, toreros, and dancers cut out of magazines. The floor was beaten earth, but he had covered it with bits of tiles he had found in rubbish heaps and laid out in a mosaic of many colors. There were white lavatory tiles, blue tiles, black-and-white marble tiles, and hydraulic cement tiles, red, or with little flowers, or with colored disks of all sizes.
“That’s what made me sweat most,” said Señor Manuel, “getting this floor even. Well, it looks all right now. The only thing that’s still missing is two big bits of glass for my window.”
The “window” was a rectangular opening in the boards of one of the walls, where he had put a gilt picture frame with discolored flowers and leaves. Half the frame was filled with two pieces of glass stuck together with putty, the other half was covered with greased paper. The frame was mounted on two hinges and closed by a hook. When it was open, the sunlight entered freely. When it was closed the light could only come in through the glazed half, and Señor Manuel wanted a pane for the second half so that he could have sun without having to open his window. He was very sensitive to cold.
“Look at the bed—your bed,” he said.
I did not recognize my old bed. Señor Manuel had painted it yellow, a gaudy yellow with a greenish tinge; he had put on the color in thick blobs and it screamed against the background of the multi-colored tiles. On the head panel of the bed he had stuck a print of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which was full of flames from which the damned souls stretched their arms towards the Virgin, imploring Her to rescue them from Hell. A packing case covered with white cloth was his night table; it had a door, which was really the lid of the case, swinging on two leather straps and fastened with a hook like the window. Inside was a huge chamber pot with a broken handle and in its bottom a painted eye and the misspelled words: “I see you.”
On top of the bed he had put a thick mattress, two sheets, a patched-up blanket and a yellow bedspread.
“Don’t you like it?” Señor Manuel asked me. “When I’m out, Señora Paca (she was the owner of the shack) comes in here and lies down on the bed for her siesta. The poor woman’s got rheumatics, what with living here by the river twenty years and sleeping on a heap of sacking on the ground, and so she’s quite envious of me. I told her she can have the bed when I die. But I’m sure she’ll die before me, and then I’ll be left with the shack. I’m still going strong, I am, apart from this accursed rupture. But I haven’t the heart to let them operate on me. It’s all very well if you die when your hour’s come, but not in the hands of a sawbones.”
He stooped and stroked the bedspread lovingly.
“Do you know, I’ve been doing more work since I’ve been sleeping in a gentlemen’s bed. I’ve got something for you.”
From the depth of a chest filled with rags, old newspapers, and books without covers, with pages missing, picked up God knows where, he fished out a white rag rolled up like a dirty bandage. He unrolled it on the night table and from its last fold produced a minute gold coin. It was a ten peseta piece from the time when the King was a little boy, a centén, as small and bright as a new centimo.
“For your watch chain. It’s the only thing I’ve got left from better times when we earned a lot, and the money wasn’t called pesetas. I’ve kept it as a fancy, but after all, what good is it to me?”
I had to take it away with me, wrapped in a piece of the coarse paper Señor Manuel used for his stick-like cigarettes. On the slope of the Paseo de San Vicente I took the gold coin out of its wrappings and studied it. It was so tiny that I would have to put it on a ring if I wanted to hang it on my watch chain. And I thought that really the happiest among all the people who had inherited were the poorest: we, Señora Segunda and Señor Manuel. Those two had not inherited directly, but they had a share in the inheritance.
The slope of San Vicente has nearly half a mile of iron railing set on a granite base. It was the railing of the Campo del Moro, the garden of the Royal Palace, where nobody was allowed to enter; the soldiers on guard there would have shot anyone who tried to get in. When I was a little boy and walked up the slope with my mother I used the railing to make whistles out of apricot stones. It was easy. You took one of the stones and rubbed it along the granite in walking; so it was whittled down until a small hole with an even rim appeared at its end. You took a pin and fished out the kernel so that the shell of the stone was left empty and then, when you blew sharply on the edge of the hole, it made a whistle which could be heard far away.
If I were to rub the edge of the coin along the granite now it would also be whittled away.
I passed it gently over the stone for a few steps. The edge of the coin was unchanged, but there was a very fine streak on the granite. A streak of gold.
Now who would think of rubbing a gold coin on stone? Is it because I’m still a child? A gold coin. There aren’t any more left in Spain. People used to carry them in their pockets as we carry pesetas. After that only rich people kept them, and also the Bank of Spain, which stored them in steel boxes underground. The Bank of Spain keeps the gold so that people should accept its banknotes. I’ve heard that through the foundations of the bank there flows a stream, the stream of San Lorenzo, and that the boxes with the gold are kept below it. If there were a fire or a robbery in the bank, the watchmen would open the flood-gates and the whole river would pour over the boxes. But all that doesn’t really interest me. What I would like to do is to take a hammer and beat out the centén to see whether it’s true that you can make yards of sheet metal out of five grammes of gold simply by hammering it. Then I’d stick the gold sheet on the wall of our room, and our garret would have a golden wall. It must be true that I’m still a child.
In the Plaza de San Gil, which they now call the Plaza de España, they’re spinning tops and people stand round in a circle to watch. The four who are playing are nearly men, they’re older than I am; the youngest must be seventeen. They have drawn a big circle in the sand and each of the four throws a copper in the middle of the ring. Then one after the other spins the top and tries to make its point push the coppers out of the ring. The tops are spinning well and strongly, because the players are grown-ups. No, they’re not grown-ups, they’re tramps, because grown men don’t play at tops and boys don’t play for money. But then, they aren’t tramps either, they’ve dumped a heap of books beside the ring. They’re Law students from the college near by in the Calle Ancha. They’re men, but because they’re still students they have the right to be boys, to spin tops and to play hopscotch here in the square. They can run after each other, boys and girls, grown-up men and women, and they can play. People watch them and like it: “Oh well, they’re students, it’s all right for them.” And the old men with white beards who sit in the sun of the square come up, stand round while the students are spinning their tops and applaud them when they do it well. I wonder what sort of face Corachán would pull if he came by and caught us spinning a top, Medrano, Gros, and me? He would sack us. He would tell us in his ringing voice that employees of the Crédit Etranger should not behave like children or tramps, and play at tops in public. But Corachán’s son is studying law here at the university. He’s twenty years old. I wonder if he comes here to spin a top?
After supper Concha and Rafael came to stay with us for an hour. Concha was in service in Dr. Chicote’s house and Rafael worked as an apprentice in a shop in the Calle de Atocha. They brought their wages, as it was the second day of the month. I had got mine on the first. My mother put all the money on the table and began to make her calculations and separate it into little piles. There was not much money: five duros from me, six from Rafael, eight from Concha, ninety-five pesetas in all.
“Nine pesetas for the rent, two for Pascuala.”
She put the eleven pesetas in a pile. This was the most sacred money for my mother: the money for the rent.
“Five pesetas for the Society.”
Those monthly five pesetas meant that we all had a right to medical assistance, medicines, and burial.
“Ten pesetas for my washing things.”
My mother stopped and counted her petty debts on her fingers. Then she made another pile of fourteen pesetas. The three of us were watching her in silence, hoping that the big heap would not be diminished much more. In the end she said:
“That’s what we’ve got left to last us until the eighth, when I get my money from the Laboratory.”
Thirty-one pesetas were left. Now our turn came. First Concha.
“I need underclothes—a corset, a chemise, and a pair of stockings.”
“Well, you do look after yourself,” Rafael grunted. “I need boots and a smock.”
“And I need shoes,” I said.
“Of course, the little gent needs shoes. He’s got two pairs, but he needs a third.”
“I’ve got two pairs, but they’re brown and I can’t wear them when I’m in mourning for Aunt.”
“Dye them black.”
“That’s what you say—but you must show off your breasts with a corset!”
We wrangled, all three of us. My mother tried in vain to soothe us down. In the end she took a peseta out of her pocket, put it on the remaining heap of money and divided it into four piles of eight pesetas each. She kept one of them for herself.
Rafael pocketed his eight pesetas. Concha weighed hers in her hand and said: “What’s the good of this to me?”
“Now, look here,” said my mother. “Take a few pesetas out of your savings book and buy whatever you need.”
Each of us had a savings book which caused eternal discussions. Rafael and I had had ours since the time when we were given prizes at school, but we could not withdraw any money while we were minors. Concha started a savings account when she went into service, and she was the only one among us who could take out money whenever she liked. My book showed a balance of over 1,000 pesetas thanks to the money Uncle José had put in for me in the course of the years. Rafael’s had over 500 pesetas; and Concha had saved nearly 1,500 pesetas in her first years of service, while she had no need to spend her wages. But then the household had drawn on her savings every time there was a difficulty, and now they amounted to no more than 200 or 300 pesetas. And so she became as angry as a wild cat whenever there was talk of drawing on her account.
“So that’s why I’ve got to spend my life working myself to the bone? Only so as not to be able to buy myself what I need? Well, it’s just not good enough that way. These two have got their cash safe while I’ve got to carry the whole load. Ever since the death of Uncle José you’ve always taken money out of my book so that the boy there can be a pen pusher and a young gentleman, while I can go on washing up dirty plates.”
“You’re jealous, that’s all,” I cried.
“Jealous? Of whom? But you’ll be more unhappy than any of us. We’re poor, and don’t mind—the children of Señora Leonor, the washerwoman. But of course—you’re a nice young gentleman who’s afraid to say that his mother washes at the river and lives in a garret. I bet I’m right. I’ve brought along my friends and the other girls who serve with me, because I’m not ashamed to bring them to my home. But you—when have you ever brought any of your friends here? Well, there you are. A young gentleman who works in a bank, and then people might find out that you live in a garret and that your mother’s a washerwoman? Oh no!”
Because she was right, I grew furious. Of course they didn’t know at the bank that I was the son of a washerwoman and lived in an attic. They might have given me the sack, they didn’t like having poor people there. The bank clerk’s relatives were people who wore hats and overcoats. It would not have been so good if Concha had turned up in her parlor maid’s uniform, Rafael in his grocer’s smock, and my mother in her apron, with the kerchief tied round her head. But Concha didn’t understand. I talked to her and tried to make her see the future in store for me, when I would earn a lot of money as a bank clerk, and Mother would not have to go down to the river, and we would have a flat with electric light and a big lamp over the dining-room table; but she laughed in my face, shook me and screamed at me:
“You fool! What you’ll be all your life is a miserable starveling—a pen pusher—a gentleman living on bread and water.” She hooted with laughter, but then turned serious and burst out: “A starched-collar slave—that’s what you’re going to be!” And she turned her back on me, sat down in a chair and broke into tears.
Rafael and I went off, out into the street. We bought a packet of fifty, and lit a cigarette each. Then we had coffee with brandy. Then we took a tram and went to Cuatro Caminos where we had a meal of roast lamb and red wine. When we came back, we had spent our sixteen pesetas between us. Rafael said:
“It doesn’t matter. I get my tips. But don’t tell Mother.”
The next morning, when I got up to go to work, my mother had already brushed my suit, as she did every day, and she gave me two pesetas. “Here, take it, you must have some money on you in case you need it.”
She did not ask me what I had done with the eight pesetas of the day before. I felt ashamed as I walked down the stairs.
I FELT A LONGING, for what, I did not know. A longing to run, to jump, to throw stones, to climb trees, to sit in the shade and look. To look without thinking of anything, to look into the far distance. To fill my mind with the country; with those groups of trees, so deeply green that they seemed a black stain far away; with the yellow of the meadows in El Pardo which the King was said to use for agricultural experiments. There was an arid patch with an artesian well in the middle, from which the water leapt up thirty feet. To fill this head of mine with snow and stone, the snow and stone over there in the Sierra de Guadarrama. To shut myself up in the garret, alone, with my mother down at the river or wherever she was. To turn the key in its lock so that Señora Pascuala should not come and see me doing nothing, filling my head with nothing at all.
I walked between the pine trees of the Moncloa. They grew on steep slopes and their needles had carpeted the ground. People preferred the Parque del Oeste, that English park with shorn lawns and fine sand on the paths. The grass looked as though it were tended by barbers with giant hair cutters, who scraped the ground and left it with nothing but side whiskers; they had made a parting in the middle, a runlet with a concrete bed and an edging of rocks full of holes, like petrified sponges, and cascades like the steps of a staircase. The stream bounded down the steps and laughed at the people who watched it foolishly from the height—seven feet high—of the rustic bridges. A mamma said to her child who went near the railing made of crossed branches: “Darling, don’t lean over, you might fall in and drown.” And there were four inches of water. The boy laughed at his mother, because he would have liked to wet his feet, and the stream laughed, and the fishes laughed. The boy saw the stream as a channel of water where he wanted to splash and tumble, and to snatch at the little sleeping fishes, those stupid little fishes they had transplanted there from the Retiro Park. They were so silly that they never dared to follow the current and swim downstream to the Manzanares, because they were afraid of the running water. They were so silly that they stayed in each of the levels of the cascade, swimming round and round in their concrete tub and swallowing the crumbs that fell down from the bridge. The mother saw the stream as a roaring Niagara: “Darling, you’ll drown!” The boy and the stream laughed, but in the end they turned angry, for they wanted to play together.
I hated the Parque del Oeste. I hated it. I hated its symmetrical little lawns, I hated its narrow sand paths and little round pebbles with which the girls used to play. I hated the rustic huts, the faked rough-hewn bridges, the borders of rocks which looked cruel, but which I could have torn up and thrown into the stream. And I hated the stream itself, its belly and bottom slicked with smooth concrete, and its headspring, a cast-iron spout with an inscription in raised letters which said: “Isabella II Canal.”
Moncloa was further away. It was open ground. There the grass grew high and stinging nettles sprouted in it. There were gullies and streams and springs with a hollow tile for a pipe, stuck into the soil by some old shepherd and lined by the years and the water with a thick, green, velvet cushion into which your lips sank when you drank from it. There were springs whose water gushed from the rock like bubbles from a boiling pot; you had to drink out of your scooped hand if you wanted to sip the froth from the cauldron of the earth. Some springs were crystal-smooth pools with sweat drops breaking out at the bottom of the hollows. The sweat of the earth filled the hole, flowed over and trickled away through the grass, unseen. When you drank from these pools the soil grew angry, its dregs rose and stained the clear glass with yellow mud clouds. When you stopped drinking it calmed down and in the end the glass emerged, clear once more.
Here and there in the grass stood trees, thousands of lone trees. Some, at the top of the hills, had bodies that were twisted from resisting the winds, and others were straight and strong. Some, at the bottom of the ravines, clutched at the slope with their roots so as not to fall and lifted their toes out of the ground to dig in their claws more safely. There were bushes, armfuls of spices, which scented the air. And there was a soft, slippery carpet of pine needles, on which it was pleasant to sit, to lie, to roll. I wore canvas shoes with hempen soles, and the pine needles polished the hemp. As though on skates, you could start on the top of the hill and glide down on the pine needles, until you lost your stance on the slope and sat down on the needles which pricked your buttocks. The pine trees chuckled and you laughed and rubbed your behind, and stayed on the spot where you had fallen, sitting among the pines with their checkered trunks.
When I left the house at six in the morning on Sundays, I took a black coffee in the Puerta del Sol, in a café which was open day and night. The strong, black coffee savored of night revels. The people who met there were different from the people you saw in Madrid in daytime. Firstly there were those who had been on a spree, some tipsy from a night of wine drinking, their mouths dry and their heads feverish from sleeplessness; they ordered black coffee without sugar. Others were sober, but in a hurry; they had spent the night with a woman and went home, bleary-eyed, to wash in haste, brush their clothes, re-tie their bows and go to their job in an office or workshop. Then there were those who had to be up at that hour because of their profession, night watchmen, telegraph messengers, waiters, newspaper sellers, street cleaners. They drank coffee with brandy or cheap spirits “to kill the worm.” And then there were people like myself, who got up early on Sundays. Many had to catch a train and came with their suitcases, or left their cab in front of the door and came in to warm themselves. They often accompanied little old ladies who were frightened of the journey and of Madrid at dawn and who drank their scorching coffee in little sips, continually looking at their watches. Boys and girls of my age, or slightly older, came in parties on their way to the Retiro, the Moncloa or the Parque del Oeste, where they were going to spend the day. They were on the verge of becoming sweethearts, and while they drank their coffee they nudged each other, joked and laughed at the sleepy drunkards, while they came fresh from a long sleep, their faces scrubbed and clean. The boys pushed the girls against the counter and looked as though they would have liked to squeeze them then and there. Very few were alone like me, and they were only old people or boys close to manhood like me.
The old men, I knew it, would slowly walk up the Calle de Alcalá to the Retiro, sit down on a bench and watch the youngsters play like little animals let loose. They would speak with others of their age class and recall their young years, or they would converse with some lonely little old woman who had also come to see the young people having their fun, to enjoy it and to talk in a slow, slow voice.
We, half-men, half-children, we went further afield, to the pine woods of the Moncloa, with a packet for the mid-morning snack, a tortilla of two eggs between two slices of a loaf, or a cutlet fried in batter with breadcrumbs; with a small bottle in our breast pocket, just enough for a glass of wine after the meal, and a book in our other pocket to read under the pines. But we did not read. We looked. We looked at the bands of young people jumping, running, and chasing each other among the trees. We would have liked to be with them, to kiss and be kissed, but we were shy. And so we despised them from the height of our pine throne and our book. The society of young people did not yet admit us to its freedom. The old people gave us advice and patted our heads, but the young people—the young people laughed at us. The lads called us “shavers” and the girls did not want to have anything to do with us because we were “kids,” or else they treated us maternally and kissed us all over like fake mothers, to get a thrill out of it, because no young man wanted them and they could not find anyone but us, half-men, half-children.
You couldn’t read with all those disturbing images in your mind, so you had to think. On my Sundays in the Moncloa I did nothing but think. Sometimes I hated thinking so much that I did not go to the Moncloa on the following Sunday. Then I went down to my old school, looked for Father Joaquín, but did not know what to say to him. Little by little, I began to speak, and then I poured out all those Sundays full of thoughts and visions. Sometimes he laughed at the things I told him. Sometimes he told me to stop, and began to play his oboe. Then the pigeons from the courtyard and the birds from the roof of the school came to listen. He only told me to stop when I started talking of women; he played the oboe as though in anger, and calmed down with the cries of his oboe and the birds. When I spoke to him of my mother, he listened for hours. One day he took from his drawer a photograph, the portrait of his mother. A big-nosed Basque woman, straight backed and lean, with a handkerchief knotted on the top of her head; behind her his father, taller than she, big and equally lean, with little eyes, his right hand on a hoe. In the background a small house with a balcony running the whole length of its front.
“Now they’ve got a farmstead,” he told me. Then he looked round his cell, at the books, the birds, the music stand like a bleak wooden skeleton in the sun. He looked as though he were missing something.
“They’ve got a farm. And a cow. Father is still working at seventy. The farm’s down there, but you can’t see it in the picture. There’s a valley below the house, and the old man plants his maize there. And then Mother fries it for me when I go to stay with them.” He paused and looked without seeing. “Each grain of maize bursts open with a crack, like a little white flower. When I go back to Madrid, Mother always puts some cobs in my suitcase. But where could I fry maize flowers here?” And he passed his glance round the cell.
Then he heaved his big, elephantine body out of the chair and went to the window, pushing me before him with a hand on my shoulder. He leaned out and looked into the huge school yard where the pigeons and chickens were bickering.
“But you will be a man,” he said.
His words held something mysterious, I did not know what, something of soundless images, of a little house, of a father and mother, of children, of a wife. Something which was not this, not the cell with a number on its door and the courtyard for its horizon. Somebody who was not he in his priest’s frock. I felt that he envied me something which I did not yet know. When I left the school, I was sad for him and for myself, and did not return there for many Sundays.
Once he told me:
“You don’t know why I’m a priest? The parents”—the Basques always say the parents, not my parents—“the parents were poor. They had four girls already when I was born. It seems I was a great eater, worse than the father. At school I was fairly clever so that the parish priest noticed me. One day he said to the mother: ‘Joaquín would make a fine canon.’ I was a hefty lad. At eight years I chopped firewood with my father’s axe, which must have weighed a good six pounds. I carried sackloads of chestnuts on my back, up to half a hundredweight. Every time the father took me out on the field, the priest wagged his head and said to him: ‘Joaquín’—for the father is called Joaquín too—‘let’s make a little priest out of the boy.’ And so they did. When I was eleven they sent me to Deusto. I left it at twenty-three to sing Mass in the village. The mother wept and the father fell round my neck when I’d taken off the chasuble. ‘Now you’re a man as I wanted you to be,’ that’s what he said. The Fathers in Deusto wanted me to stay with them as a teacher, but I couldn’t stand their mangy frocks and heavy old shoes. I couldn’t be a Jesuit. So I joined the Piarists. Here one can live, one’s free and can teach children.”
I listened and saw him in my mind surrounded by children, but not as a priest. By children who were his own children, trampling the fields. I saw him with a hoe, like his father, in a fustian suit—why did I think of fustian?—which creaked on his strong, big body while he walked. I saw him putting an arm—why only one arm?—round a strong, high-colored woman with a red handkerchief tied on the top of her head. He slapped a little boy whose nose was running, and went off to dig. “Uuh—uuh!” Uncle Luis had shouted when I was riding on his shoulders. How Father Joaquín would shout it! If he were to lean out of the window now and shout: “Uuh uuh!” all the windows would be crammed with the heads of priests, and Father Vesga would complain to the Father Rector.
“And what if you had sons, Father Joaquín?”
I blurted it out and watched his face to see what it would say. He looked as though he had been struck by a blow. His mouth twisted downwards, his heavy hands fell on to his frock. He looked at the music stand, the oboe, and the window. He looked outside, at the wall opposite. No, he looked further away. He looked into the far distance beyond the wall, beyond what was behind the wall.
“I can’t have sons.”
Sometimes men seem to speak inwards. The words do not come out of their mouth but sound inside, in the stomach, the chest, the flesh, the bones, and resound there. They speak for themselves alone, but they do not speak. Their whole body hears them. So spoke Uncle José when he told my mother that he was about to die. And so did Father Joaquín speak now. He went on:
“But I have one.”
Then he woke up with a start.
“Don’t take any notice of me. Sometimes one’s so very much alone. I meant the Child Jesus. When I sang my first Mass I was in love with the Child Jesus. I saw Him even in my dreams. That’s why I turned myself into a teacher.”
He was lying; and as he did it badly, he saw that I understood his lie when I looked at him. He fell silent.
You can make canoes out of pine bark. You tear off a strip, one of those deeply lined strips which come off when you push your fingers deep into one of the furrows and pull. The wood is soft and porous, you can work it with a knife like a piece of cheese. First you cut it the shape of a cigar, broad in the middle, pointed towards the ends. Then you make the belly of the keel, either rounded or with two curved flanks meeting in a sharp central ridge. Then you scoop out the upper part. You leave two bits of wood in the middle, the rowing benches where the naked Redskins sit and handle their flat oars. And the puddle in which the canoe floats becomes a lake in the jungle of Brazil or the forests of Canada, with green banks full of snakes or with frozen edges where the wolves howl.
I made canoes on Sunday mornings and set them afloat on a pool at the Moncloa, or sent them to follow the current of a streamlet, four inches wide, and to jump the rapids formed by two stones. Always there was some small boy who would turn up from somewhere and watch the course of the boat in rapt silence.
“May I have it?”
“Take it.”
He kept the canoe. He followed it downstream, he called to his parents and his friends to have a look at it. “A gentleman gave it me.”
I would sit down with my back against a pine tree, angry with the boy. Why had he to come and claim his right as a child? Why did he come to make me ashamed of playing and to claim his right? “May I have it?” Of course I had to let him have it, for it was his by right. How could I go on playing with pine bark canoes when I was already the “gentleman who gave away boats”?
Boy or man? I liked so much to play with boats. I liked so much to look at the legs of the girls with their skipping ropes in front of me.
A man. Yes, I was a man. I had my standing. Employee of the Crédit Etranger. My mother worked down by the river. She must stop working there. I didn’t want to watch her any more climbing the stairs on Mondays and Tuesdays and saying: “Run down and fetch the milk, will you, I’m tired.” I didn’t want any more to smell the dirty linen piling up in our room during the week, with its sour smell like moldy wine. I didn’t want any more to see Señor Manuel leaning heavily against the Wall by the garret door, with sweat bubbles on his forehead after the climb, easing down a six-foot stack of washing, gently, so that the bundle should not burst. I didn’t want any more to count the sheets and the pants of Señor So-and-so and to make out the bills.
I didn’t want to accompany her any more in the evenings, to deliver the bundles of clean linen and collect the dirty washing, and to wait in the doorway for her to come down and say: “They didn’t pay me.” When she came back to our street, my mother went to the baker. “Juanito, please give me a loaf… I’ll pay you tomorrow.” Then to the grocer. “Antonio, give me four pounds of potatoes and half a pound of dried cod… I’ll pay you tomorrow.” And so we had our supper. The gentlefolk didn’t pay her for washing their sweaty, mucky pants with buttons missing, and therefore the washerwoman couldn’t pay for her supper. My mother was pleased because the tradesmen trusted her, I was furious because she had to beg favors and because her patrons hadn’t paid. But I ate my supper. My mother was so glad that I had something for supper although the gentlefolk hadn’t paid her, that I had to eat it.
Afterwards she made her coffee, her own private luxury. She made it in a pot blackened inside like an old Dutchman’s pipe, in which the grounds piled up for days on end. My mother threw in a pinch of newly ground coffee and brought the water to boil; it turned black more from the old dregs than from the fresh coffee. She drank it scorching hot, in little sips. Sometimes she would say: “I couldn’t live without my drop of coffee.” She drank coffee down by the river, too. There was an old woman, a widow with children like my mother, who sold coffee and tea. She came down to the river at seven in the morning, winter and summer, and started up her coffee-urn and tea-urn. For a copper—five centimos—she gave you a glass full of boiling coffee or of tea with a slice of lemon floating on top. Sometimes the washerwomen made room for her on the river bank and let her wash her clothes among them. Then she spread her washing out to dry in the sun and made her round of the other washing places, to come back at ten o’clock and collect her dried things. The washerwomen often told her: “I’ll pay you tomorrow, Señora Luisa,” and she did not mind. She went off, quite happy at having money owed her. Copper upon copper, it mounted until she sat down on a heap of dirty washing one day and said: “They owe me fifty pesetas by now.”
I saw the whole tragedy of this woman who went down to the river at seven every morning, loaded with her urns the size of buckets, and to whom the others owed—copper upon copper—one thousand coppers. But because my mother hadn’t been paid by Señor So-and-so herself, she, too, owed Señora Luisa the money for four cups of coffee. She had been twenty centimos—four coppers—short!
I did not yet earn more than twenty-five pesetas, but I was going to earn more. And Rafael and Concha would earn, too. Or rather, I didn’t know about Rafael. But Concha would do it. She felt herself in duty bound as I did. She had resigned herself to being a servant girl, to washing up plates and sweeping floors. But still she wanted to become something better and worked frantically. Rafael, however, was a rebel against everything and everybody. He had walked out of his shop and when my mother wanted to get him a job in another firm he had walked out of the house and not come back. Only I knew at the time where he was; he slept in the street, on the benches of the Prado. Once a “pansy” gave him fifteen pesetas. Rafael took the money, hit the man in the face and ran away. That night, when I came to our meeting place he invited me to supper. We had two fillets of fried cod in a tavern on the Calle de la Libertad. “Come home,” I said to him. “Mother cries the whole time.” He said nothing, but munched his fried cod and bread, opening his mouth very wide to take big bites, because he was very hungry. Then he answered: “No. I don’t want to be a grocer.” He walked away, up the Calle de Alcalá, and I went home. After the cod I did not feel like having supper.
My mother ate her meal in silence. Between two sips of coffee she lifted her head—the paraffin lamp was on the table between us—and asked me: “Have you seen him?”
I ducked my head down to my cup. “Yes,” I answered. I said no more and she asked no more. How could I tell her that he had eaten supper that evening because he had got money out of a “pansy”? How could I tell her that his white grocer’s overall was torn and chocolate-brown?
“He says he doesn’t come home because he doesn’t want to be a grocer,” I said.
She was silent. She looked into the flame of the lamp. She looked at her hands, those hands fretted by lye.
“Tell him to come home. If he doesn’t want to be a grocer, he can do some other work. Anything but a street vagabond.”
Again she took refuge in the flame of the lamp, white, yellow, red, and smoke-black.
“Tell him to come back. I forgive him. But don’t tell him that. Let him come back as if nothing had happened.”
When Rafael came back, because I made him come, he went to bed. By the time my mother came in, he was asleep. When he woke up supper was ready. My mother called gently: “Rafael—Rafael!” He opened his eyes which were drunk from sleeping in a soft bed. During the meal none of us spoke. When we had finished, Rafael said: “I’m going out.”
“Don’t be late,” answered my mother, and gave me a wink.
“I’ll come with you.”
My mother gave me a five-peseta piece and the key to the flat. “Don’t be late.”
We drank coffee at a stall in the street. I had left a full cup behind at home because I had not wanted to let Rafael go alone. We went to the pictures and afterwards we had a few glasses of wine in the Calle de Preciados. On the way home Rafael walked slowly in my wake. In the Calle de Carretas I told him: “She’ll be fast asleep by now.”
And we both went to sleep in my big bed with the gilt bars.
Sometimes he went away and strolled about, alone, or lingered at the street corners as though he were looking for something. Then Dr. Chicote gave him a recommendation and he found work in the Aguila Brewery. As it was the summer season, he worked till midnight and earned as much as six pesetas a day. When he came home at half-past twelve he sometimes fell into bed without taking off his trousers and slept till six in the morning, heavily snoring. Some days I accompanied him to the brewery which was near the station of Las Delicias in the outskirts of the city. We watched the sun rising and took a cup of tea at a stall in the factory entrance. Then, when the whistle of the brewery sounded at seven, releasing a puff of white steam, he went inside together with two hundred other workers, and I walked slowly up the slope of the Paseo de Delicias, marking time until nine, when I had to start work at the bank. Sometimes I went home and had breakfast there. My mother gave me coffee with milk and a little pat of butter swimming on top of it, and asked: “And Rafael?”
As though she had not seen him for days.
“He’s at the brewery,” I answered.
“It looks as if he was a bit quieter now. God grant it be so.”
Since my aunt’s death none of her acquaintances had kept in touch with us. Even Don Julian no longer treated me as the nephew of Doña Baldomera; I had simply become one of the staff to him, somewhat dangerous, since he felt himself responsible for my conduct. When I started work in the Coupons Section, I had gone to his room and told him: “Don Julian, they’ve transferred me to Coupons.” He had looked at me from behind his spectacles and scratched his little mustache: “Good, good. Now see that you bear yourself well, Señor Barea. I hope you won’t make me look ridiculous.” It was the first time that he had addressed me in this way, and it was decisive. From then onwards I was Señor Barea to him.
I hated him. He was a bastard, a lick-spittle. After twenty years of service in the bank he kowtowed to every head of department. He was ashamed of me. And what had he been? A poor fellow like me, a starved orphan whom his grandmother brought up between the canary, the parrot, and the tame priest who filled her house.
He still went to his grandmother’s every day. He carried sweets for the parrot in his pocket, and his grandmother tittered when the bird picked them out; she kissed her grandson and sometimes gave him a banknote. Whenever the grandmother was not at home or the parrot was alone in the kitchen, Don Julian took a black pin out of his coat lapel, pricked the parrot through the bars of its cage and called it bastard. The parrot screeched, but it learned the word from Don Julian. When he came into the sitting room and the parrot was there, it began to shriek in a hoarse voice: “Bastard, bastard!”
The parrot was right. Bastard, cuckold, swine, dog, slave—he was all that—all that!
But it was not only Don Julian, it was the whole bank. If the learner was afraid of being thrown out into the street before his year of unpaid work was over, the men who were already paid employees were even more afraid. That fear turned them into cowards. They told tales about the cigarettes the others smoked, about their girl friends, if they had one, about their going or not going to Mass, about the times they were late, the mistakes in their work, their visits to the bar of the Portuguese. They told those tales, the subordinate employee to his superior, the higher employee to the still higher one, the still higher one to the head of his department and the head of the department to the Staff Manager, Señor Corachán, all so as to get higher marks. Then Señor Corachán would send for a clerk. “We know that you make a habit of frequenting taverns,” and the clerk would walk down the stairs with weak knees; that Christmas there would be no rise in his salary.
One day Corachán sent for Plá. “The management has learned that you frequent taverns.” Plá stared at him with his short-sighted eyes and answered: “Of course. For two reasons.”
“Two reasons for getting drunk? And pray, what are they?”
“Not for getting drunk, because I don’t. Two reasons for the management to have learned that I frequent taverns. One is that there are plenty of toadies who like telling tales. The second is that with my salary, on which I have to keep my mother and myself, I can only afford wine at ten centimos a glass. I haven’t gone up in the world far enough to drink Manzanilla in elegant establishments such as the Villa Rosa, following your example.”
Corachán swallowed the hint. At Christmas they gave Plá a rise. I wondered whether it was so that he should be able to afford Manzanilla or so that he should keep his mouth shut.
And then there were the girls. In our section there were four women and two men. Three of the girls were old and ugly, and only Enriqueta was young. She was twenty. On some days it was hell. Antonio and I were the only men who counted, for Perahita was elderly and married. But we—there were days when the girls petted us as though we had been babies. Antonio touched their thighs and breasts and they only laughed. They came up to me and dictated figures, and while they did it they bent over the desk, their breasts pushed up on its surface, they leaned on my shoulder, they excited me, and when in the end I stretched out my hand, they squealed: “You naughty boy!”
Perahita laughed at them and at me and made peace. I had to make my excuses.
Enriqueta had a strong smell. Once she pushed the half-sleeve of her blouse up to her shoulder and asked me: “Does it smell? It’s too bad, I wash and wash it every day, just look.” She showed me her armpit, full of little black curls and a hot smell. I came very near it with my face and touched it with my fingertips. Later, when I came back from the lavatory she gave me a glance, her eyes smiled, and she blushed. I felt that I, too, was blushing and could not do my sums.
Once we both went down into the steel room where the section had worked before. We had to collect the coupons of the State Bonds and began to open drawers and take out bundles. She stood on one of the white steel benches, which looked like those in a clinic. I could smell her. Her stockings were stretched tight over her legs. I began to stroke softly along one of her calves and follow it upwards. We kissed, she bending down from the bench, I standing below her, with trembling legs and a burning face. We did not go upstairs together, we would have been too much ashamed. After that we used to caress each other even in front of the others. She would come and stand beside my high desk while I was sitting, and dictate to me. I plunged my left hand under her skirt, she went on dictating absurd figures to me, and my right hand went on scribbling.
These things pleased and repelled me. Once I asked her to come with me to the Moncloa. She said very seriously: “Now listen, I’m a decent girl.” A decent girl—and once when we went to the pictures together she stroked my whole body with her fingers and never had her fill!
Why was it necessary for women to be virgins when they married? She herself said it was so. She said that we could not be together without her losing her virginity, and she would have to marry sooner or later. What we were doing was just a childish game, it did not matter and was not dangerous. “But otherwise it might happen that I became pregnant,” she said. “It’s true that you’re still a boy, but you can already have children.”
What could I have answered? Nothing. The only thing I could do was to make good use of the dark corners where she sought me out. I wanted to stop that sort of thing, but she got so angry that it was impossible.
Perhaps Plá was right. There was no prospect for anyone in the bank until many years had passed and they had found out, not that his work was good but that he was utterly docile. Work? Work at the bank was so organized that anybody could be dismissed on the spot without the slightest disturbance to the whole machine. It was routine work: filling in blanks with stereotyped words, making deductions and sums, always the same, mechanically. Neither Antonio nor I knew French, German, or English, yet every day we credited clients in France, Germany, and England, with their coupons and filled in the printed forms in their own languages. Then the client was bound to acknowledge the great organization of a bank which wrote to him in English and kept a special employee, who knew English, to write to him. Medina spoke English, he had gone to school in England and lived there all his childhood. But he spent his time sitting on a very high stool and making entries in a copper-plate hand on the pages of one of the bank’s daybooks. It was nothing but idiotic copying, which took him endless hours. The only use he made of his English was to buy English magazines at the newspaper kiosk in the Puerta del Sol and to show them off to us, so that we should remember that he knew English. Once the Director himself passed by his desk and noticed one of the magazines. He had a look at it and asked Medina:
“Do you know English?”
“Yes, sir.”
They launched forth on an English conversation. When the Director had gone, Medina was very pleased because he said: “Now they’ll give me a transfer.”
Three days later Señor Corachán sent for him. “The Management has learned that you waste your working hours reading English periodicals.” Later he added: “We had intended to promote you in June, but it is obviously impossible in these circumstances.” Medina came down in such a fury that his eyes brimmed over. The employees all started to pull his leg, asking him: “Do you speak English?” They repeated the English phrase so often that, the way they pronounced it, it became Pickinglis in a few weeks and stuck to Medina as his nickname. New boys, who entered as learners, called him Señor Pickinglis on their first day, and all the others roared with laughter.
He swallowed it, as all of us swallowed things. “If only I had the money to go to England,” he said sometimes. Money—money—that was the key to everything. But I would not have to bother about it much longer. Don Primo was about to wind up my uncle’s estate, and soon we would each be paid out our inheritance. I was to get about ten thousand pesetas. As soon as I had it, I would be able to do as I liked and send the bank and Corachán, that swine, to hell without worrying. We ought to manage with that money. I spoke to my mother about it, because I wanted her to stop going down to the river, but she said that we would discuss all our plans when we had the pesetas in our hands. She was scared of the money. Once Don Primo, who knew how badly off we were, called her to his office and asked her whether she would like an advance, she should ask for whatever she needed. But she did not want it. The Brunete relatives came every other day to ask for advance money. Uncle Anastasio had come several times to ask for 500 pesetas, and had gambled the money away. All the others, too, had come to nibble at their account. But my mother flatly refused. Then she said to Don Primo that she wanted to talk with him and make an appointment for one of the mornings when I was at work. When I asked her why she had gone to see him, she said she had wanted to put a few questions to him, and gave me no further explanation.
I would convince her anyhow as soon as I was paid out the money. With ten thousand pesetas we would be able to live three years, while she would not have to work and I could study. Or, still better, we might buy out some tradesman and live on the shop. This meant risking the money, of course, but quite a number of shops were safe business. My brother and sister and I would work in the shop; I would finish my studies and become an engineer. Then the washerwoman would be Dona Leonor and keep a servant girl to do the housework.
On my way home I went into the Experimental Farm which the Institute of Agricultural Engineers kept in the Moncloa. It had rabbit hutches, chicken coops, cowsheds, and pigsties with every kind of breed, and it had beehives and a breeding station for silkworms. They let me have a packet of fresh mulberry leaves, and when I came home I spent my time watching the assault my silkworms made on them. Concha laughed at my worms and said they were a toy for children, but I was a man now. She made me feel ashamed of them and I almost gave them away. But then I found out at the Experimental Farm that she was quite wrong. They were by no means children’s toys. The silk industry used to be one of the most important industries of Spain, but it had gone to rack and ruin. One of the professors showed me the various breeds of silkworms, their diseases and the cures for them, and the way to extract silk. He gave me a leaflet; I had the right to get free stock from the station and to sell all my cocoons to them, by weight, before they opened and the moths crept out. It might be a good business to breed silkworms. Then the laugh would be on Concha. We could go to Méntrida, where mulberry trees grew along the river, and breed silkworms and chickens. We could do it on the ten thousand pesetas and still have money left to live on for a year. Whenever we wanted to go to Madrid we could do it without difficulty, it was near enough.
One of the Sundays when I went to the station for my mulberry leaves I told the professor my plan. He listened to me very kindly, asked me details about my family, and, when I had explained everything, he said:
“My dear boy, that is all very nice, but you’re still a minor and will have to do what your mother wishes. And she won’t wish to plunge into this maze which needs a lot of experience and a lot of money.”
So my mother can do whatever she likes with the money? I am a minor. Every time one has got something which belongs to one, one turns out to be a minor, but all the others are of age, always, and have the right to snatch away what belongs to one, just because one is a minor. But as far as working is concerned one is already of age. One is a minor when it comes to cashing in. One is paid as a minor. The family has the right to pocket what one has earned; so it happened to Gros, whose father came to the bank and asked for his son’s wages to be paid out to him, because young Gros had spent something out of his pay one month. Even when one wants to buy something people always take one’s age into account. For years I’ve had my suits made by the same tailor. I didn’t want him to make my last suit and asked my mother to give me the money to buy it for myself. I went to a tailor in the Calle de la Victoria. The good man looked me up and down, showed me his patterns, and when I told him to take my measurements, he said most politely that I should ask my papa or my mama to come with me to the shop. “You see, we’re not allowed to serve minors.”
I came back to him with my mother. The tailor was extremely polite to us, took out the cloth I had chosen and showed it to my mother. The two discussed the price between them as though I did not even exist. Then my mother asked: “Do you like it?” “Yes,” I said. “All right, then, will you take his measurements?” The tailor armed himself with his tape: “Would you be so kind as to take off your coat?”
I burst out: “I don’t want to! Put your old suit where there’s a hole for it. That’s the only right I’ve got as a minor, not to have the suit made and to tell you to go to hell.”
My mother was frightfully upset and I was sorry for it afterwards. But I had to tell that fellow what I thought of him.
I went by myself to my old tailor and he made me a suit which I liked.
ONE OF THE MOST UNFORGIVABLE THINGS in a bank is to stay away from work. I had told Perahita that I needed a day off to go to the notary, who had summoned all the heirs for the liquidation of the estate left by my uncle and aunt. Next day Corachán had sent for me. “Your chief has informed me that you require a day’s leave for personal reasons.”
“Yes, sir.”
He surveyed me, leisurely, as though he wanted to examine my person in every detail. If he was going to play me one of his tricks I would leave the bank. I was fed up with this fellow. Then he began to speak, stressing every word.
“And may one know what sort of ‘personal reasons’ demand the young gentleman’s neglect of his duties for a whole day?” He gave every syllable its full value, stroking his beard with his cupped hand and looking at me out of the corner of his little eyes.
“I am to receive an inheritance,” I said, also careful to pronounce each syllable.
“Ah—an inheritance? Well, well… then you are about to leave us, I presume?”
“Leave you? Whom do you mean, sir? The bank? No, I’ll go on working.”
“Oh, is that so? It is a small legacy, then. How much are you going to receive?”
“I don’t know exactly how much it is, something like two—three—four—five thousand duros, sir.”
“That’s not so bad. That’s not so bad.” He stroked his beard again. “And in order to cash five thousand duros—provided that this is more than a fairy tale—you require a whole day off. Are they then going to pay it to you in coppers?”
I was dumbfounded. How was I to explain to this man, to a high official of a bank accustomed to dealing in millions, that to receive a few thousand pesetas and to carry them to a washerwoman’s attic was an event which forbade any work on the day it happened? In the bank, thousand-peseta notes made no impression on me, but when I thought that next day a little bundle of them would be there in our attic and that we two, my mother and I, would have to stay at home to guard them until we had decided what to do with them—when I thought of this I was deeply shaken. Señora Pascuala would come and stare at the big banknotes in the glow of the lamp. “Señora Leonor, do let me look at one of them!” Then the neighboring women from the other attics would come, one after the other, to look at a banknote and to hold it between their fingertips, overawed.
I began to feel a resentment against this grumpy old man who was making a fool of me.
“I don’t think they’ll pay me out in coppers.”
The rough edge to my words made him lift his head and look into my face. Pedantically and frigidly he said:
“And who is going to prove to me that all this is more than merely a tale intended to get you off tomorrow so that you can go on a spree with a friend—or a girl friend?”
I pulled out Don Primo’s note. He read it slowly, folded it and gave it back to me.
“Very well, then. Tomorrow at ten o’clock in the Calle de Campomanes. Good. You will come here to sign on and then you may leave again. You will have the morning off. In the afternoon I myself will check on whether you turn up or not. You may go now.”
I told Perahita about my interview, and he laughed at my indignation. He laughed so much that he had to clutch at the desk with his fat, short-fingered hands as though otherwise his rubber ball of a body would bounce up and down, and he dug his fingers into the desk until his flat nails went white with the pressure. Then he recovered and clapped me on the shoulder.
“Now, there, there, my boy, don’t be upset. You won’t come here tomorrow afternoon.”
“Will you let me off yourself, then?”
“Not me, my boy, not me. You must find someone else to oppose Corachán! But you see, tomorrow is Assumption Day and everything is closed.”
We both burst out laughing, and the whole section with us. Enriqueta came up with a bundle of coupons and installed herself beside me. “Are you going to inherit a lot?” she whispered, and pinched me in the ribs. “You rascal, you do keep things quiet.”
“Pooh, just some four or five thousand duros, or perhaps six thousand.” Magdalena who overheard the figure sighed and gave me an angry look, laden with the rage of an ugly, poor spinster. Calzada stopped writing out bills. “Six thousand duros—thirty thousand pesetas,” he said. He and I shared a secret; he was the son of a concierge who repaired shoes in a hovel, below the staircase of a poor tenement house, and I was a washerwoman’s son. He realized what thirty thousand pesetas meant to us, because he thought of what they would mean to him. Thirty thousand pesetas under the oil lamp where his father hammered at shoe soles, with his spectacles hanging on the tip of his nose. Surely his father would first wash the black dust of old shoe soles from his hands before touching a banknote.
Perahita said: “Well, six thousand duros isn’t much, but it makes you independent. It’s always useful to have something you can fall back on when you’re out of a job or there’s an illness at home. You never know. We’d saved one thousand duros, and thanks to them Eloisa was saved. The doctor asked three thousand pesetas for operating on her kidney. And she’s quite well now, so I’m not sorry. Without those thousand duros I’d be a widower now.”
What would the fat man do without his Eloisa who brushed his suits and ironed his trousers? He went on:
“So then we started putting something by again. During the last two years we’ve saved three thousand pesetas. It’s hard work saving up a thousand duros. But never mind, it’s something towards a rainy day when we have to pay for another operation. At least we haven’t got to worry about it.”
I began to laugh and all the others stared at me.
“I’m laughing because if that’s how you go on saving, you and your wife won’t have a kidney left in eight years, at this rate.”
And the whole gang burst into laughter.
For the last time in our lives we met together, all of us who had inherited. Don Primo handed each of us a sheet with the statement of account for the final liquidation; we had to sign a receipt and then he paid out the money. No one went away; they all stayed to see how much each one was cashing in and to make sure that the notary had not cheated. As they deciphered the accounts, rows broke out. The first to have an outburst was Aunt Braulia. She went up to the table clutching the sheet of paper and interrupted Don Primo who was just paying the money to Uncle Julian.
“Listen, mister, you read this out to me. Because I’m not learned enough.”
“Just a moment, madam.” Don Primo settled the account with Uncle Julian, took the paper from her and read aloud: “Paid to Don Hilario Gonzalez at his request: 500 pesetas. Paid to Don Hilario Gonzalez at his request: 750 pesetas. Paid…” There followed a series of six advance payments on request. The balance was 1,752 pesetas.
Aunt Braulia listened very attentively. When the notary had ended, she said:
“So it comes to this: a bit of nothing on a salver. This man”—she shot out a swarthy finger at her husband—“has been eating up all the cash. And me in the dark all the while! So that’s why you went up to town so often!”
She stood there, arms akimbo, her four or five skirts and petticoats spreading and swaying, and glared at Uncle Hilario in challenge.
“All right, woman, I’ll explain it all to you, but don’t make a row here.”
“Of course I’m going to make a row here, and they’re going to hear my say from here right to our village.”
Their quarrel gave the signal to all the others. Every wife started to examine the balance sheet and every one of them found that her husband had been up to something. Uncle Anastasio went and signed the liquidation on behalf of his wife and his daughter Baldomerita. The notary was counting the banknotes on to the table, when Uncle Anastasio stretched out his hand with great dignity: “Don’t take the trouble to count them, it’s not necessary.”
He pulled the packet of notes out of Don Primo’s hand and put it in his pocket together with the account. Aunt Basilisa protested: “Well, now, lets see.” Uncle Anastasio bridled:
“Let’s see—let’s see—what d’you mean? There’s nothing to see here. We’ll settle everything at home. Or d’you think I’m like the others and want to cause a scandal in this gentleman’s house? Thank God I’m not a village boor. I’ve got my education, I know how to behave in public. Let us go home.”
Aunt Braulia blocked his path.
“A boor you say—a boor? Proud to be it, you mucky squirt of a gentleman. You’ve done just the same as my man did, you’ve pinched all the cash and now you’re cocky so that we shouldn’t find you out. You’re just as much of a shameless rascal as all the other men, so now you know.”
Aunt Basilisa burst into tears and Aunt Braulia followed suit. They fell weeping round one another’s neck. Uncle Hilario and Uncle Basilio glared at each other. Uncle Julian’s children began to cry. Don Primo turned angry and banged his fist on the table.
“Damnation! You’re in my house, remember!”
They all stopped and fell silent. Then Don Primo called my mother and me. We both signed the liquidation sheet. Don Primo put a hundred-peseta note on the table, a second, a third, and so on up to ten notes. Everybody watched him to see what was going to happen, and I was dismayed when I saw that he put no more banknotes on the table. Then he brought out another sheet and another bundle of papers.
“This is the best thing we could purchase. Here are the certificates and here is the final account. You sign here; there is no need for the boy to sign because you are his guardian.” My mother signed laboriously with her sprawling letters. Then Don Primo handed her a Bank of Spain receipt, I knew it well as I had to handle their bonds daily.
“Here you have the deposit receipt.”
My mother put the banknotes into her purse, folded the receipt and stuck it into her bodice. Then she took my hand.
“Say good-by to Don Primo.”
Just as when I was eight and she had led me by the hand, a child. Just the same. I felt like crying. Aunt Basilisa went up to my mother.
“Nothing, only what Don Primo advised me to do. You see, I’m only the boy’s guardian, so he bought State Loan Bonds for him. I took out a thousand pesetas so that we can settle a few things, and as to the rest, we’ll leave it for the time when he’s a man, then he can do with it whatever he wants to.”
“Tell me, is it a lot?” asked Uncle Anastasio.
“At the present price of State Loan,” Don Primo said, “we were able to purchase 12,500 pesetas nominal.”
When Fuencisla heard the words “12,500 pesetas” she turned on Don Primo like a fury. “So you’ve played tricks, you robber!” she shrieked.
We all gaped. Uncle Anastasio hit the table with his heavy hand and said: “This has got to be cleared up, eh?”
Don Primo, in his black suit, gold-rimmed spectacles, and little beard, looked at though he felt like slapping their faces for them.
“Señora,” he said hoarsely, “I forgive you the insult because after all nobody can be forced to be knowledgeable. I spoke of 12,500 pesetas nominal, and you were aghast at the amount. The present quotation of State Loan is 69 per cent and people are selling out because the paper is not suitable for speculation.”
The country cousins were clustering round the table and staring at him with wide-open eyes. “Quotation”—“State Loan”—“69 per cent”—what did the old man mean?
“Come now, let’s have less fine words,” said Uncle Hilario, “and let’s rather get the facts clear. This young devil (may the wen on your head rot, you thief!) carries off more than two thousand duros and we get a pittance. Why?”
At three in the afternoon we left the notary after a detailed explanation of the division of the estate, of State Loan Bonds and of the reasons why 69 per cent quotation price equaled 100 per cent nominal value. We said good-by at the corner of the street, and it was a very rancorous good-by. The relations from Brunete, the men in their corduroys, sashes and round hats, the women in their swaying skirts and colored kerchiefs, and the children stumbling over their heavy boots, walked on across the square, still carrying on the dispute at the top of their voices. People who passed them stopped and stared after them.
My mother and I went up the Calle del Arenal to the Puerta del Sol. I walked beside her, but not with her. I did not take her arm as I always had done when we went out together. I walked abreast of her, but at two feet’s distance. Neither of us spoke. She went with short steps, the steps of a nervous little woman. I strode out with my long legs, one step for two of hers. I was full of resentment. I started by feeling resentment against some of the others and finished by feeling it against my mother. Nobody was excepted. I resented the relatives because of their suspicious, meticulous scrutiny of the accounts down to the last centimo, their adding up of all the sums, their asking ten times for an explanation of the difference between 69 and 100 per cent, their fingering of the receipts, the certificates, the Bank of Spain deposit receipt, with faces contracted by anger. I resented Don Primo because he acted in agreement with my mother, because they both did as they liked without taking me into account, without even saying a word to me. I did not think it a bad thing for the money to stay in the bank, but I thought it wrong of them to have done it behind my back. “There is no need for the boy to sign.” Why should he? The boy is a boy, and they are grown people who can do what they like with boys. They can make them work and cash in on them, they can buy State Loan Bonds or a new suit, and that’s all right for them. In his time the boy will be a man, and when he is grown up he can protest, if he still feels like it.
No, no, and no. As soon as we are at home there will be a row. I’m going to speak my mind to my mother. If I’m a boy, then let them send me to school, bring me up, and pay for my keep. If I’m grown up, let them treat me as a grown-up. And if I’m neither, then let them go to hell, all of them, but I won’t be played with like a kitten!
I wanted to smoke a cigarette to get over my nervousness. I carried cigarettes in my pocket, my mother knew that I smoked, but I had never smoked in her presence so far, and I did not care to start it now. But so much the better if she gets angry, so much the better. In the Puerta del Sol I made up my mind, pulled out a cigarette and lighted it. My mother looked at me and walked on with short even steps as though it were nothing. I began to feel annoyed because she said nothing. If she had scolded me, I could have exploded. I needed to shout, to quarrel, to get rid of what I felt inside.
In the Calle de Carretas she asked me at long last:
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“So much the better for you.”
“Of course, if the other people do all the thinking for one, what should one think about?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why? You know as well as I do.” I stopped and faced her. “Because I’m fed up with being treated like a child and now you know it.”
We fell back into a sulky silence, and so we came home.
Just as I had imagined, Señora Pascuala followed us along the corridor and came with us into the attic when we opened the door.
“Well, is everything nicely settled, Leonor?”
My mother sighed, took the black handkerchief from her head and sat down.
“Yes, it’s all settled. I’m glad the whole thing is over and done with. I must say, if it hadn’t been for the boy… People go crazy as soon as they see a banknote. I almost thought they were coming to blows in the notary’s office. And what for? Only to snatch at a pittance which isn’t even enough to lift you out of poverty. Now look here. José’s brothers had been working together thirty years. José sold the grain for them, lent them money for mules and land, and made them the wealthiest people in the whole village. Well, because of the inheritance they’ve separated, they’ve gone to law against each other about the mules and the land. The brothers and their children look as if they wanted to knife one another. And they’re all the same. Even he! (She pointed at me.) Here you’ve got him in a fury because I’ve done what I thought best for him. Even the children go crazy when they see money. I’ve been through a lot so that the four of them should get on in life—you know something about it, Pascuala—but for myself I prefer my stew and my warmed-up coffee. So I’ve lived all my life and so I want to die. I’ll be content if they let me die in peace in my bed and not take me to hospital. And that’s not asking for much, I think.”
“I haven’t said anything,” I retorted peevishly.
“No, you haven’t said anything, but don’t you think I’ve got eyes in my head? You walked beside me the whole way like an altar-boy, a few steps apart. And then the young gentleman lights a cigarette for himself in the Puerta del Sol, quite brazenly. What did you expect—that I would make a row? No, my boy, no. You can smoke as much as you like. And now, let’s have it out. What is the matter?”
“You ask what’s the matter?—well, it’s just that I—I’m fed up with being treated like a child or a little boy and having my belongings disposed of without any consideration for me. Who told you to buy State Bonds? You may have your views about the money, but so have I. And after all, it’s my money and nobody else’s.”
“And what are your views about the money?”
“That doesn’t concern anybody but me. You had to collect the money, because they wouldn’t let me have it while I’m a minor, but afterwards we should have thought out together what to do with it. And you shouldn’t have got together with the notary and bought State Bonds. Do you know what State Bonds are? I’m working in a bank, precisely in that department which handles securities, and I must know about them. State Loan! If you’d bought Convertible Loan, then we would at least have a chance of getting a premium. But State Loan, which no one wants! But of course, you think I’m just a little boy who doesn’t understand anything about anything.”
“Of course I do, you silly.” She stroked my tousled hair, her fingers twisted its strands and soothed my taut nerves. “Of course I think it. Listen. I’m your guardian until you stop being a minor. That doesn’t mean that I can do what I like, it means that it’s my responsibility to administer your money and that I must give you an account of what I’ve done the day you come of age. We can’t spend your money now just as you like, because then you might come when you’re a man and ask me: ‘Where’s my money?’ If I then said ‘You’ve spent it,’ you might answer: ‘I? But I couldn’t have spent it, I was a child. You must have spent it yourself, because you were the only person with a right to do so.’ And you could even send me to prison as a thief. No, your money is going to stay in the bank until you can give the order to withdraw it—and then you may spend it as you like, on business or on women, and may it bring you joy. I don’t need anything. I’ve been poor all my life and I’ll die poor. You have your life still before you, and I’m an old woman.”
Her fingers in my hair and her last words dispelled all my anger, and my eyes filled with water.
“Now, d’you see that you’re a little boy and a silly?”
She wiped my face as she used to do when I was a child and kissed me on the forehead. She took out a hundred peseta note and gave it to me.
“Here, treat your friends and buy yourself something, but don’t do anything foolish.”
Señora Pascuala sighed. “Goodness me, these children, Leonor, these children! What they make us suffer! And what are you going to do now?”
“Well, nothing. Just go on as always.”
“I thought you were going to move out. I’ve been saying to myself, as soon as Leonor’s boy gets his money they’ll move. I’ve been sorry, because by now it’s a good sixteen years that we’ve been living side by side, with nothing but a partition between us.”
“Of course we’re going to move,” I said. “I don’t want to stay in the attic.”
“Now look here, my dear, let’s be sensible. This money”—she took up the deposit receipt—“doesn’t make us rich. It gives you exactly one peseta twenty-five centimos interest a day. Do you think that one twenty-five more or less settles all our difficulties? No; here we pay nine pesetas a month and don’t get into debt. If we take a flat we only spend your interest and a bit over. In the end we should be in debt, and then what? When you earn more, and your brother and sister too, then we can see what we can do about it. But, as things are now, you know very well that all of us together just earn what we need to live as we do live. The only thing I’d like to do is to take another attic room, like the cigar-woman’s or Señora Paca’s, as soon as one of them gets empty. I’d like it for your sake because you’re getting older and if Concha comes home to live with us one day we can’t all sleep in one room. We could do that, because the two rooms together would mean twenty pesetas rent a month, and that much we can manage.”
“All right,” I said, “but there’s something I want, and it will be done.”
“Tell me.”
“I want to install electric light in our attic. I’m sick of having my eyebrows singed by the oil lamp every time I want to read for a while.”
The electric light was granted and I promised to arrange it with the company. It would have to be a lamp screwed on in the middle of the sloping ceiling, with a very long cord so that it would light the table, but could be hung on a hook over my head when I was in bed and wanted to read; and it would need a switch in the socket so that I could turn it off without having to get up.
Next day I had to invite all my colleagues at the bank. The commissionaire secretly brought us two bottles of Manzanilla and some pastries. We shut the door of the department so that the others should not see us eating. But then the room smelled of wine and we had to open the door and the panel in the glass roof until the draft swept out the smell.
“How much did you get in the end?” asked Perahita.
“Not much, just a little.”
“All right, keep it secret, we won’t ask you for any of it. Anyhow, you wouldn’t let us have it.”
“Thirty thousand pesetas,” I said.
“Good gracious, and you call that a little? Six thousand beautiful duros! Well, you must be happy! Wouldn’t it be nice if a relative of that sort were to die every day?”
“It wouldn’t be so bad.”
But of course it would have been bad. If Uncle José had not died, I would not have inherited, but it would have been much better for me. I would not have stayed in the attic, I would not have worked in the bank for a miserable salary. I would have been studying to be an engineer. But how could I explain all this? I had to show them that I was happy, very happy, and that I was wealthy, very wealthy indeed, and that as far as I was concerned all my relatives could die and leave me fat legacies.
Plá was the only one to whom I told the truth. We had a glass of sherry together in the bar of the Portuguese, all by ourselves.
“You were right,” he said. “Only, you ought to have told them you’d inherited twenty thousand duros. Then the Director would have sent for you, tendered his congratulations and given you a rise in salary. They’ll give you one in any case, you’ll see. As soon as they find out that you’ve got money they’ll give you a leg up.”
Plá was not mistaken. They increased my salary to 72.50 pesetas. My colleagues were somewhat annoyed. Sadly—for his envelope brought no rise, only a small bonus—Antonio said to me:
“You see, it’s always the same thing. You and I, we’ve done the same kind of work the whole year, I’ve been in the place longer and have a greater claim than you. Well—and they go and give you a rise—and you don’t need it.”
I went home, greatly pleased with my news. Now we would be able to move out of the attic.
My mother was alone, sewing by the light of the oil lamp which had only a few more hours to burn. I gave her the note which announced the rise, and kissed her on the nape of her neck where it tickled her. Then I pushed the low stool to her feet, sat down and put my head on her lap. Now at last things were beginning to go well.
“We can move now, Mother.”
Her small, slender fingers were plaiting my hair.
“You know, Rafael’s been given the sack today. But we shall manage. Dr. Chicote will let me do the whole washing for the Disinfection Service. Señora Paca’ll help me, we’ll do it between the two of us. You see, with Rafael out of work, that means six pesetas a day less. And God knows when he’ll find another job. He hasn’t learned any trade…”
I heard her, watching her face from below, from her knees.
“Tomorrow at ten the electrician will call about the light, Mother.”
He would fit the wooden plug from which the cord and the bulb were going to hang up there, just where the smoke from the oil lamp had made a round patch on the ceiling. The bulb was going to have a switch on its fitting, and when I stopped reading at night, I would turn off the light.
RAFAEL WAS WORKING AGAIN. He had started with a regular profession at last, and was a clerk like myself. He had been taken on at the Head Office of the Fenix Agricola, the insurance company which insured all horses, mules, and donkeys in Spain. The inheritance had helped to get him the job. With the thousand pesetas my mother had taken out in cash we had bought clothes and linen, the two things we needed most urgently. Rafael went to the Fenix in a new suit, armed with a recommendation, and was engaged.
They employed no learners there. Every clerk started with a monthly salary of six duros. One peseta per day. That was the invariable rate. The Fenix staff had made a joke of the facts that the salary was six duros—which is thirty pesetas—and that the offices closed at six-thirty; they called it the Six-thirty Company. The management was absolutely strict in both matters. Everybody was paid thirty pesetas, everybody left the office at six-thirty sharp. At that hour, four hundred employees streamed out into the street, and only some twenty of them had a salary over six duros. Always excepting the Directors, of course, who earned thousands.
The company used its clerks only for filling in forms: insurance policies, descriptions of the horses insured, receipts, premiums. All that was required of the employee was that he should be able to read and write and calculate the percentage of the premiums.
Hundreds of thousands of animals had the mark of the Fenix—a phoenix—branded on their necks. The gypsies called it the Dove Brand and whenever they discovered it on an animal they had meant to steal they kept off it. They knew that they would never get farther than ten miles along the road before meeting the Civil Guard, who would not fail to ask for the certificate as soon as they saw a horse with the Dove Brand led by two gypsies. And although it was easy enough to steal a horse, donkey, or mule, it was far less easy at the same time to steal the insurance certificate of that accursed company which had hit upon a trick to ruin poor gypsies trying to earn an honest living.
For it was a trick. The Company had invented the “Dove” and the “iron.” When an owner insured an animal, the company’s agent pressed a red-hot iron onto its neck, and it was branded with the Dove. Then he drew up a description which enumerated everything from the beast’s height to its missing teeth, so that it could neither be bought nor sold without the change of ownership being entered in the certificate. You couldn’t even ride on its back without risking the Civil Guard’s demanding proof of your ownership, in the shape of the certificate.
The gypsies’ hatred of the Civil Guard was ingrained, but their hatred for the Dove went even deeper. When you mentioned the Dove to a gypsy in the horse-breeding lands of Seville or Cordova, he touched wood or crossed himself. “Don’t make bad jokes, mate.”
Now, in order to fill in certificates, insurance policies, and receipts, the company which gave protection from robbery had set up a perfect administrative system manned by clerks paid at thirty pesetas a month. For its touts and agents it had found a different system; they kept the first premium paid as a bonus. And that was all. The high officials had only to dismiss employees who had had enough of earning thirty pesetas after two or three years’ service, and to engage new ones in their place at the same rate of pay. True, anybody who was discharged received a month’s salary in accordance with the Trade and Commerce Code, Paragraph four hundred-odd; it was a serious firm where work was restricted to exactly eight hours and where the Wages Code was rigorously observed. But it never paid more than thirty pesetas a month to its clerks.
One peseta from Rafael, two pesetas ten from me, one peseta twenty-five interest from the inheritance, and two pesetas fifteen which my mother earned with her washing, made up our daily income. Concha did not count because she earned just what she needed for herself.
When my mother went down to the river in the mornings she left the cocido simmering on the little earthenware stove. Señora Pascuala came from time to time to have a look at it. The chick-peas, the piece of meat, and the bacon, all colored yellow from the saffron, went on cooking under the joint supervision of Señora Pascuala and of Santa Maria de la Cabeza, the patroness of stewing pots. At midday Rafael and I ate the cocido all by ourselves.
For a few days Señora Segunda had looked after our meals, but then one day she failed to turn up. As she lived very near, we went to see her.
She was in bed, between snow-white sheets, the crimped collar of her nightdress—an inheritance from Aunt Baldomera—tied with a piece of ribbon and Toby lying at her feet on his patchwork blanket.
“What’s the matter with you, Señora Segunda?”
Rafael and I hardly had room to stand up straight in her closet. Right over our heads sounded the footsteps of people going up and down the stairs.
“Nothing, my dear boys, it’s just that I’m dying.”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“Has the doctor been to see you?”
“Yes. The doctor was here. He said they would take me to hospital. I said no. ‘But you can’t get well here,’ he said to me. ‘Not in the hospital either,’ I answered. He shut up then, and later he said: ‘That’s true, too.’ He wanted to come every day, but it’s not necessary.”
She spoke as calmly as though she were going to the theater that evening.
“I’m sorry for Toby. But there’s a blind man in our café who’s willing to take him as his guide, and he’s a very good man. You know him, Arturo, it’s Freckle-Face. He’s an honest man even if he’s poor. When I’m dead, you give him the dog.”
Later in the evening we came back with our mother and stayed with her for a while, until Rafael and I went to the pictures. After midnight we went to fetch our mother. “Go home to sleep,” she said, “I’ll stay with her.”
So we, too, stayed. We sat in the doorway, because the little hole was not big enough for the three of us. From time to time we walked out into the Calle de Mesón de Paredes and had a drink. She died at four in the morning.
We paid for the funeral because we did not want her to be taken away in a municipal van, wrapped in a sheet. It was a third-class funeral with two shabby black horses, and a coffin roughly painted with lamp black, and with cotton braid along the edges of the lid. Rafael and I were the only mourners. When we came back from the East Cemetery we had a quick lunch in Las Ventas, a cutlet and roast black pudding, and we kept Toby tied up beside us.
Toby would not take any food and died a few days later of sorrow. Freckle-Face was not able to make him eat, although he bought a whole fillet and fed it to him in the little café in front of all the beggars who never tasted meat themselves, but helped him in his vain attempts to persuade the dog to take it. In the end they fried the fillet in the frying pan used for making crisps, cut it into small bits and ate it between the lot of them.
“Silly dog,” one of the beggars said to Toby. “Can’t you see how nice it is?”
We had been out for a stroll along the Calle de Alcalá, looking at the girls, and when we came home, my mother was getting the supper ready. She had eaten cocido together with Señora Paca at midday. Señora Paca was having supper with us, as she often did lately, because she liked being in our room, where the four of us could sit round the table under the lamp.
“My dear, my room drives me mad. When I’m shut up there all by myself I’ve simply got to drink or I’d never go to sleep.”
When she was with us she only drank a small glass of spirits after the coffee. My mother brewed fresh coffee every day since we had threatened to go out for ours if she went on boiling up the old grounds. We went to bed between eleven and twelve. Sometimes my mother and Señora Paca wanted me to read to them, and listened until Señora Paca began to nod. My mother never dozed. Sometimes when Rafael and I went to the pictures, the two women stayed behind and chatted; then Señora Pascuala usually joined them and we would find them still at it when we came home at three in the morning.
In the afternoons, when Rafael had finished his work at the Fenix and I my work at the bank, we met our friends. We had sorted them out with the course of time. From the bank, there were Calzada, Medrano, and Plá left; from the Fenix came Julian, big, strong, and merry, and Alvarez, a little fellow who never kept still. In the back room of the bar we had two tables to ourselves. There we talked while we ate fried fish hot from the frying pan.
We thrashed out the staff policy at the Fenix and the learner system of the banks. We dug out case histories.
Two steps further along the street lived a man who had made himself rich through child labor. He had set up a firm in the Calle de Alcalá, which he called Continental Express. It was a messenger service which delivered letters and urgent messages to people’s houses. The whole business was built up on a few dozen boys in red jackets and caps, with satchels hanging from their shoulders, who ran round Madrid day and night. He paid them nothing, but they got tips. Some of them earned as much as ten or twelve pesetas a day. Even Ministers gave recommendations to boys who wanted to get into the Continental. Whoever joined the staff was fitted out with the jacket and cap of the boy who had left a vacancy, and off he went. After a time the business petered out, because most of the big stores copied the idea and employed a boy or two, paying him nothing if the store had many customers, or else fifty centimos a day. Now the whole of Madrid was full of young boys of that breed, with a satchel hanging from their shoulder, riding on the tramcar buffers or playing at pitch-and-toss with their tips in the middle of the pavement.
That man was not the only one. A solicitor established a commercial information agency and quickly acquired an impressive number of clients. He sent out hundreds of reports daily. He put advertisements in the newspapers: “Wanted, learners who can type.” He had nearly fifty boys working for him ceaselessly. He walked up and down between the desks, his hands behind his back like a schoolmaster, and when he saw a boy not working at the speed he demanded, he boxed his ears. Later he improved on his business. When he accepted a boy as a learner, he demanded a deposit of five hundred pesetas in guarantee of his honesty. In the end the police were forced to intervene and closed down the firm.
Girls were no better off. Offices and shops had only just begun to employ women, but now they were doing so to an ever-increasing extent. They did not dare to take on girls as unpaid learners, but gave them an average salary of fifty pesetas a month. Yet the girls replaced male clerks and assistants with higher pay. It would not have been possible to man an office or shops with nothing but young boys, but it could be done with women and boys. The stores were sacking their male assistants; some of them had been thirty years with their firm and earned two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty pesetas a month, most of the others earned at least two hundred pesetas and were in a position to support a modest household. Now they were all replaced by young girls who looked very pretty in their black satin uniforms and white aprons, and who sold four times as much as the former shop assistants, but were paid at the most seventy-five pesetas. Hardly anyone was left of the old staff except here and there an old man who would amble through the rooms in a black cap and terrorize the girls by throwing them out on the slightest mistake, or else paw them while they were lifting down boxes in a corner, and they had no right to protest.
As this district was crammed with offices, the customers of the bar were nearly all employees and shop assistants. Day after day more of them came to tell their friends that they had been sacked. The young men had hopes, but those over thirty had to give up any idea of finding a job.
One of them told us his story in the back room:
“I found a good advertisement in the Liberal today. It said: ‘Wanted, an accountant. Steady job.’ I knew that no office starts work before nine, but I went there at half-past eight all the same. There were five before me already. It was a store for surgical goods in the Calle de las Infantas, and the owner was a German. By ten o’clock there were at least two hundred queueing from the office door on the first floor down to the middle of the street. They let the first ten of us in, and we sat down on benches in the hall. On one side was a room with a counter, and the owner of the store took the first applicant in there. The owner had a round head, smooth as a baby’s bottom. He began by asking the man’s name, where he had worked before, and so on. The man answered in a low voice, but even so we all heard what he said. ‘Speak up,’ the old rascal said to him. Then he put him in front of a desk and started dictating calculations, entries in the day-book, problems of compound interest, foreign exchange rates—well, anything under the sun. The man worked well. You could see that he was a clerk who knew his job.
“The German looked over his shoulder while he was writing. After half an hour, when the man had finished his test, the German said: ‘All right, I like you. We’ll check your references and if they’re good we’ll engage you.’ The man’s eyes lit up. Then the German asked: ‘What do you expect to earn?’ ‘Whatever the firm usually pays for the job.’ ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t like to employ people who start by being dissatisfied. You tell me what you want.’ ‘Well, sir, for an accountant of a firm like this, as important as yours, seventy duros would be just about right, I think.’ ‘Three hundred pesetas? You’re mad. Three hundred pesetas! No, my dear fellow, this is a modest firm, not a bank which can afford to throw money out of the window. I’m sorry we can’t come to an agreement. Let’s see the next one.’ ‘But, sir, I could stay even if you paid a bit less.’ ‘No, no, I can’t take you on any condition. You would be discontented from the first day, and I don’t want discontented people among my staff. After three months I would have to give you a rise in salary or you would go. I’m a serious man in my dealings. This is a steady job, but there aren’t any rises in salary to be had.’
“He turned to the next: ‘What salary do you want?’ ‘Two hundred pesetas.’ He simply turned to the third one with a sneer: ‘And you, too, have got your ambitions, I suppose?’ ‘I could manage on a hundred and fifty pesetas. I’ve been out of work for the last three months.’ Then the seventh in the row, an elegant youngster with gold-rimmed spectacles, got up and said: ‘I’m an expert in commercial problems and I know both French and English, which may be of some interest to you. Thank goodness, I don’t depend on a salary for my living. It would be quite enough for me to get the cash to cover my little vices.’ The German made him pass through a lightning test. ‘The vacancy is filled,’ he told us. Then he said to the lad: ‘You can start work tomorrow. I’ll give you one hundred pesetas a month and later we shall see how you get on.’
“The man who had been out of work for three months came up to me and whispered in my ear: ‘I’d like to bash in that damned swine’s mug!’ We walked down the stairs and out into the street together. There he saw the little commercial expert strutting along, and said to him: ‘So you’re a commercial expert, are you?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘You’re a son of a bitch, that’s what you are.’ And he lowered his head and ran it smack into the lad’s face, right on his nose, so that his spectacles were smashed and he slumped down on the ground bleeding like a stuck pig. ‘You won’t start work tomorrow, I don’t think,’ the man said, and ran off like a hare, and the lad had to be taken to the first-aid post if the rest of us had had any guts, we’d have gone up to the store together and chucked that fat German out of his own window.”
Opposite the Banco Hispano a house was being built: the workers came over to the tavern for their meals and for a glass of wine at the bar after working hours. One of them was there when the story was told and said in a very loud voice:
“That’s right. Serves you right for being yellow bastards. I bet our boss wouldn’t dare to take on a mason at four pesetas a day. And he wouldn’t find a builder in the whole of Madrid willing to work at that wage, either. The trouble with you fellows is that you want to be gentlemen and don’t want to be workers. You’re ashamed of saying you’re hungry, because you dress like the nobs. And then every blessed soul among you goes without food when he gets home rather than not wear a tie. Of course, it’s true it cost us a lot of strikes and a hell of a lot of blows from the police and the Civil Guard before we got enough to eat. But how should gentlemen like you go on strike and how should they go to the Puerta del Sol in their starched collars to be beaten up by the police? Well, it serves you right for being a lot of cowardly bastards. And that’s what I think.”
“You’re right, yes, sir,” shouted Plá. “We’re a lot of bastards and cowards.” He thumped his chest. I thought he was a bit tipsy. “Cowards, that’s what we are. But not me, mate, I’ve got my membership card of the Casa del Pueblo!”† He drew a little red book out of his pocket. “But a fat lot of good it does me! There’s just a handful of us and as soon as our bosses find out that we belong to a union they’ll chuck us out. We can’t even form a union of our own. It’s a disgrace, yes, sir. Here in Madrid where everybody is an employee, we’ve got to join the General Workers’ Union because there aren’t enough of us to form a Clerical Workers’ Union! And let someone else make propaganda among that bunch of lick-spittles. Twenty-four hours, and then out with you into the street, and who’s going to fight for you then? Your own union can’t, and the other unions won’t feed you.”
Plá and the mason went on with their discussion and went on drinking wine. When we left the place they were still leaning on the bar with their elbows on the counter.
Next day Plá and I left the bank together at meal time. He lived near our street in the Calle de Relatores and we often met on our way.
“Will you show me the card of the People’s House?” I asked.
“You mustn’t speak to anybody about it,” he answered, and took from his wallet a little book of receipts for two pesetas weekly contributions. It had a rubber stamp which read: “U.G.T.‡ General Trades.”
“Don’t you think that it’s only me. Quite a lot of us are members. As far as I know there are ten of us in the bank. But of course we’re very few, all the same. Not enough to organize a separate union. So they put us into the General Workers’ Union with all the workers who haven’t got a craft or who work in a trade with very few members. Shop assistants are there, too. To tell you the truth, the only thing we get out of it is the Mutual Society.”
He went on in answer to my unspoken question.
“Yes, that’s our only benefit from it, and it’s the only possible justification for our membership in the eyes of the employers. Sometimes they accept it and sometimes they don’t. You see, we’ve got a medical assistance society which is called the Workers’ Mutual Help Society, and it’s the best of its kind in Spain. They give you everything, the best doctors, a dispensary and a clinic for operations. They even pay you benefit if you lose your wages through illness. But you must first be a member of the U.G.T. before you can become a member of the Society. So, if they find out that I belong to the U.G.T., I can always say that I had to do it because I wanted to have the right to a doctor and medicines through the Society. But we’ll get further than that in time. Sooner or later we’ll have our own union, and then we’ll settle accounts with these rascally employers. And don’t they know it! They wanted to steal a march on us and set up a Catholic Friendly Society, but nobody wants to be a member there. Quite a lot of people would join us if they weren’t so frightened. Because, you see, if you’re caught with the membership card in your pocket it may well be that they’ll throw you out and you won’t get any other job. When your former employers are asked for a reference, they’ll say that you were a good worker, but a Red and a rebel who belongs to the People’s House crowd. And that’s quite enough for them to let you starve to death. I know a fellow who worked for Pallares, and he was sacked after fifteen years with the firm, for being a union member. When he applied for a job in another firm, the manager said: ‘I hear you’re a Socialist.’ ‘Oh no, sir.’ ‘Well, I hear from your former employers, Pallares, that you’re a member of the People’s House.’ ‘Well, yes, sir, I joined them because…’ And he was going to tell the story about the Mutual Society. The manager wouldn’t let him go on and said: ‘Stop, stop, I don’t need your explanations. D’you believe I want an employee in my firm who doesn’t believe in God, and parades through the streets behind a red flag, shouting threats against the Government? My firm is no hotbed of Anarchists. You can turn yourself into a Freemason and spend your time planting bombs, but this is a respectable firm!’”
I pondered over these things for days. Of course I knew what the Socialists were. But I was not really interested in political questions. It was like this: every day they fought in the Cortes, Maura, Pablo Iglesias, and Lerroux.§ People painted the words: “Maura—No!” in pitch upon the walls. Others sometimes scrawled in red ochre underneath: “Maura—YES!” I knew that those who wrote No were workers, and those who wrote Yes upper-class people. Sometimes the two groups met, each with their pot of paint; they would chuck the pots at each other and start a free fight. Sometimes a group of young gentlemen would appear in the Calle de Alcalá towards nightfall, when it was crowded with people, and shout: “Maura—Yes!” At once a group of students and workers would form and take up the cry: “Maura—No!” People would run away. Many took the cue and left the café terraces without settling their bills. The police charged, but they never touched the young gentlemen.
In the Calle de Relatores where Plá lived, Lerroux’s crowd had one of their centers. They called themselves the Young Barbarians and it was they who made the greatest noise. The supporters of Maura used to come to their door and shout, and then there would be a row. Lerroux himself came and spoke at the center; he said that priests should be castrated and nuns made pregnant. The crowd got excited by his speeches and formed to march to the Puerta del Sol. They never got there, though. At the Calle de Carretas the police waited for them and dispersed them with their sabers.
The Socialists started a new strike every day. Sometimes it was the bakers, another time the masons, still another time the printers. They were sent to prison and beaten up, but in the end they got what they wanted. They were the only ones who had an eight-hour day and the only ones who were paid the wages they demanded. In their workshops there were no learners, and boys like myself who had to work, earned two pesetas fifty a day from the start. Their leader was Pablo Iglesias, an old printer who said aloud in Parliament whatever he thought right. The workers called him Granddad. He had been to prison I don’t know how many times, but he went on trying to turn all workers into Socialists.
I would have liked to be a Socialist. But it was a problem as to whether I was a worker or not. It sounded a simple question but it was difficult. Certainly I was paid for my work and therefore was a worker; but I was a worker only in that. The workers themselves called us señoritos, nobs, and did not want to have anything to do with us. And obviously we could not march through the streets with them, they in their blouses and rope-soled canvas shoes, and we in our suits made to measure, shining boots and hats.
I persuaded Plá to take me along to the People’s House; one day, when he was going to pay his monthly contribution, I accompanied him. The building had innumerable small rooms for the various secretariats. In each room were one or two fellow-workers behind a desk, and a treasurer with sheets of receipt stamps and a cash box. From everywhere came the clatter of money. The corridors were crowded with workers, in front of many doors there was a queue.
“Today’s Saturday,” said Plá. “You see, most of the organizations get their contributions weekly. Some unions are very strong. The builders’ trade union, for example, must have millions, enough money to see their strikes through and to help out others when they go on strike. They pay their people unemployment relief, too, but there aren’t ever many of them out of work. There’s always work in the building trade.”
He took me to the two meeting rooms, one big and one small. In the big hall, the printers of Rivadeneyra’s had a meeting. Rivadeneyra’s was a big publishing firm in the Paseo de San Vicente. There were over three hundred workers present. One of the men sitting on the platform stood up and came forward. The chairman rang a bell and everyone was silent.
“Fellow workers,” said the speaker, “we will now take a vote for and against a strike. All those who are in favor of the strike, please stand up.”
In a wave of noise from clattering benches and trampling feet many people got up. Others followed more slowly. In the end four or five were left sitting. The others stared at them, and one by one they rose. In the first row one man remained seated, alone.
“The vote is unanimous, in favor of the strike.”
“I want to say something,” said the man who had kept his seat.
He walked up to the rostrum and began to shout. He did not agree with the strike. Strikes were no good. Another kind of action was needed—direct action. Get rid of a number of bosses and set the workshops on fire. He was like a madman. The others kept silent, and when a murmur started, the chairman’s bell cut it short. A group of people seemed swayed by the speaker. Finally, purple in the face, he said: “I’ve finished,” and gulped down a big glass of water.
Another rose to reply.
“We’re not Anarchists here, we’re decent men who want to do a decent job of work. We’ve no need to kill anybody. What—smash up the machines? But the machines belong to the workers, they’re sacred to us!” Suddenly he grew heated and shouted: “If I saw this comrade here, or any other comrade, lifting a hammer to smash up my Minerva, I’d smash his skull for him!”
The three hundred cheered him. The Anarchist crouched in his seat and grunted.
Then we went to the theater; for the People’s House had a theater which was used for staging plays, showing films and holding meetings. Throughout the corridors we met nothing but men in blue or white blouses. When we opened the little door to the stage, a man waiting in a queue said: “Hullo, what’s this? We’ve got tourists here!” All the others laughed and I felt ashamed of my suit, my boots, and my hat. So I turned to face the man who had spoken and cried:
“Tourists to hell! We’re workers just like you, and perhaps more than you.”
“Sorry, comrade,” he said. “I’ve put my foot in it all right, but you see, we don’t get many gents—I mean to say—comrades dressed like gents here…”
I let myself be carried away by a violent impulse.
“Well, then—in spite of our suits and our soft hands and anything you like, we’re workers. And what sort of workers! One year as a learner, then five duros a month, with twelve or fourteen hours of work a day…” And I spoke on, pouring out all my resentment. When I finished another of the men in the queue said:
“Good for the kid!”
“What the devil d’you mean by kid? I’m as much of a man as you are, and maybe more.”
An old man clapped me on the shoulder.
“Keep your shirt on, they didn’t mean to hurt you. As soon as you start working you’re a man!”
While we tried to find our way out of the maze of passages, I looked defiantly at all the blue and white blouses we met. I would have liked somebody else to call me a gent. I would have called them together in the big hall and shouted into their faces that we, the gentlemen employees, really were; for I saw clearly that they did not understand, that they despised us. They thought that to be a bank clerk meant sitting in a well-heated room in winter and near a ventilator in summer, reading a newspaper and drawing a salary at the end of the month.
Before we left the building, I joined the General Workers’ Union.
THAT’S A FINE WOMAN! If I walk a little faster I can overtake her and see what her face is like. She might be ugly. But from behind she looks all right. Her bottom shows very clearly through her skirt. The backs of her thighs are a bit curved, you see it when she walks and one of her legs moves forward, while the other is left behind so that the skirt clings to it. How well she moves her hips. Of course, you fool! She’s just like the other, exactly the same. And the woman in front of me too.
People say young men like their women plump, and it must be true. I was right yesterday, anyhow. I liked that Maña better than the other girls, who were younger but thin. One of them was very pretty, with blue eyes and a face like the Virgin and she liked me too. But I preferred that Maña. She’s a bit fat, it’s true, but her flesh is firm and white.
What would Aunt Baldomera say if she were alive? “Jesus! Jesus!” If anybody told her that her little Arturo had slept with a woman, with one of those bad women…
That Maña has a short little chemise, rose colored, which doesn’t reach as far as her thighs. The embroidered hem rides up on her buttocks. They look just like the croup of a plump little nag.
Not to mention Father Vesga’s face if he knew about it. “You have lost your purity,” that’s what he would say. What about his own? That obsession of his with the Sixth Commandment—thou shalt not fornicate. I believe that sometimes he just couldn’t contain himself on those wooden boards he had for his bed. Now I realize why he always looked at females as he did.
There was a woman who kept a shop in the Calle de Mesón de Paredes, who had him for her Father Confessor. She was tall and big and had a splendid bosom. Father Vesga, tiny as he was, must have felt quite smothered by her in his confessional box. When confession was over, she always went to say her penitential prayers to the right of the altar beside the boys in rank and file. Father Vesga used to come out, red in the face from the heat in that narrow box, to stand behind her and stare at her hips and the little curls on the nape of her neck. He kept turning his four-cornered biretta round and round in his hands, and then he slapped it smack into some boy’s face. “That’s for talking.” The woman turned her head, smiled, and said: “Don’t be so hard!” The boy stood there, crying silently, and Father Vesga dished out slaps with his biretta all along the file.
In the end the woman rose and walked away slowly, swinging her hips. “Good-by, Father,” she said softly as she passed him, and kissed his hand. “The Lord be with you, my daughter.” He inspected the end of the file to see whether all the boys were listening to Mass, and not playing or squatting on their heels. But in reality he was looking after her, after the tall woman who swayed her hindquarters from one side to the other, like a mule. Afterwards he would kneel beside the altar, pray, and smite his breast. He unfastened his cassock and beat his flesh with his closed fist. I think he sometimes even clawed at it with his nails: once the chain of his small lady’s watch was torn.
What would Father Vesga in his cassock have been like between the thighs of that Maña? The strong thighs of a woman from Aragon. She saw all right that it was the first time I was with a woman, and she made good use of me. Well, why not? But it would be funny to see Father Vesga, after always sleeping on his bare boards, between Maña’s thighs on the soft, sprung bed, with her breasts rubbing against his face, because he is so small that he wouldn’t reach higher. That Maña is very tall, taller than I, and I am taller than most of the men here.
If Uncle José knew it, he would say very seriously: “Well, my boy, I won’t say that you shouldn’t do those things. We’ve all done them. But take care where you go, and above all don’t let your aunt know.” He would give me a duro on Sunday, wink at me and chuckle.
When we were children—when I was a child, that is, because his hair and his mustache were already white—he used to come back from the office with the Imparcial; I threw myself down on the dining-room carpet to read and he would throw himself down beside me. At first he sat on the floor and then he stretched himself out on it. My aunt would cry: “Pepe, have you gone mad?” “Now you shut up, my dear.” He taught me the letters from the headlines, the b’s and the a’s, and taught me to read “ba.” At half-past three he said: “Now let’s go to the pictures, the film starts at four.” And I went out clutching his hand, still dressed in a smock, in my grand overcoat with many big, shimmering mother-of-pearl buttons. That’s how I learned to read.
Uncle Luis wouldn’t be angry either. He won’t be angry—for he at least is still alive. As soon as he comes to Madrid I must tell him about it. Perhaps he’ll burst out into one of his “Uuuh” cries. He’ll say: “Make the most of it, boy, you’ll get old anyhow. Now look at me. I’ve got rheumatics and can hardly move any more. But when I was your age—uuh—I knew what to do with the wenches!” He must have been a rascal. And Andrés too. His wife’s eternally ill with her leg festering; and so he says to my mother every time he comes to Madrid: “Don’t wait for me this evening, I’m going to sleep at the inn.” At the inn, my foot! At the “Lovers’ Inn.” I must go and see the show called Lovers’ Inn or something of the sort. It’s on at the Eslava Theater and the women come on the stage quite naked, and everybody who goes to that inn wants to go to bed with them.
Look at those two sweethearts arm in arm. I’m sure that they want each other, both of them. And that whole story with Enriqueta is over and done with. If she wants to she can sleep with me, and if not we’re through. I can get a woman for a duro. I don’t want any more cuddling in the cinema.
Of course, now I know what it is all about. My cousin, too, made good use of me. I was eight or nine years old at that time. She was in service in the Calle de Vergara, and her masters used to go out for a walk after lunch so that she was left alone in the house. She always kept cakes and sweets for me. It was a place where there were a lot of sweets and cakes. But sometimes my cousin may have bought them to get me there. She also gave me oranges and bananas. I used to go there towards four in the afternoon, and when I came she was always in her chemise. “You woke me up,” she would say. Then she would give me sweets and fruit and lie back on her bed again. “Sit down here beside me, I’m so tired. If you like, take off your things and rest a bit.” Then we romped about on the bed and tickled each other. She became excited and rubbed her body against mine and then she threw herself down, stretched out on her back, quite exhausted. I liked the warmth of her body and its smell, I liked to pull the curly hairs in her armpits. Once I started pulling at the little curls in the other place. She said: “Put your hand here. You’ll see how warm it is. We women aren’t made like you men. Let’s have a look at you,” and kissed me all over so as to tickle me, and then she burst out laughing. “Now look at you,” she said. After that day she amused herself by playing with me and rubbing her body against me.
That was people’s secret, and now I knew what it was. I don’t want to have anything to do with Enriqueta any more. And if my cousin were to come now and rub herself against me, I would teach her something, the dirty bitch! She took advantage of my being a child. But in a way she was right. She couldn’t go to bed with a man without being a tart, and so she consoled herself some other way. Why can’t everybody do as they want? I would like to go to bed with girls, and they would like to go to bed with me, but we can’t. Men have whores for that; but women must wait until the priest marries them. Or they must become whores themselves. And of course, in the meantime, they get excited. If one of them gets too hot, she must become a tart. It would be much better if they could all go to bed with whomever they liked. And why not?
Of course, then I would not know who my father is, and my mother would have been a whore who slept with anyone. It’s funny. I’ve never imagined my mother like that, as a woman who had slept with a man and done the same with him as that Maña with me. But there’s no doubt that if she had not slept with my father, I should not have been born, nor Rafael, nor Concha, nor José.
José! He must be twenty-two now. I’m sure he’s never yet slept with a woman. All those unmarried, bigoted girl cousins won’t let him leave the house except to accompany them. He said in his last letter that cousin Elvira wanted to marry him. They’re sure to cuddle without much on. Elvira saying that she isn’t well, and José going up to her bedroom to visit her. “Come in, come in, it’s all right for you to come in,” she will say, and then the two of them will get all excited. And because it’s getting too much for them, she wants to catch him for good. Perhaps she’ll even get him, because he must be crazy to get a woman. And where else should he go? He hasn’t got the courage to go to a brothel and to take a woman to bed with him. And besides, you can’t do that sort of thing in Cordova as you can in Madrid. In Cordova everybody knows everybody else, and the next day all the world and his wife would know that José had been in such and such a house.
I seem to have turned philosopher. I talk about the facts of life. And why shouldn’t I have the right to think about life? Perhaps because I’m not yet twenty-one and can’t dispose freely of my belongings? Damn it all! What is life? The shutter of a camera. You press the bulb. Pff! A snap. You’ve seen nothing: just a little flash. Like the calves of the girl getting on to that tram. A flash! Are her legs ugly or pretty? I don’t know; but today I like all legs. Oh well, let’s leave the women out of it. What is life? That’s more interesting.
From up here, from the highest spot of the slope of the Calle de Alcalá, I’m seeing life. Sunday morning. The Church of Calatravas, with its sellers of Catholic newspapers, its blind men, its old beggar women, its urchins on the lookout for carriages so that they can open doors and beg for a copper. With its rows of nice young ladies walking beside nice young gentlemen who bend over them and whisper into the curls behind their ears. When the girls hear something pleasant, they shake their earrings, which hang down like big drops, just as horses shake their ears when a motorcar passes. There are the tramcars with their clang-clang and their yellow-and-red bellies covered with advertisements. The solid stone houses, with their windows open or shuttered. The iron tram-rails between the square paving stones a-glitter with mica. The sidewalks of black asphalt, whitened by the dust of shoe soles and studded with cigarette ends. The round marble tables on the terraces, milk white or mottled black. The clock of the Bank of Spain, a grave gentleman who sings out the hours with a voice like an old copper cauldron: boom, boom! The goddess Cybele with her serious face and her bored lions who spit water in all directions. Aquatic lions. Where is the Sahara for those lions? One night, Pedro de Répide wrapped the goddess Cybele in his cloth cape the color of well roasted coffee, and so the dawn found her. She had icicles hanging from her nostrils, but she was sweating under the cape. Pedro de Répide had to pay a fine. Who had asked him to cloak statues? And up there, in the Puerta de Alcalá, the gate with its three arches and the Latin inscription, Carolus Rex…
Is that life?
Of course, in Paris and London and Peking there are streets just like this, ant-heaps where people take their walks or go to Mass. The stories tell that Chinese temples have a lot of pointed roofs, with a silver or even a golden bell on each point tinkling in the wind, and outside the gate, slung on three huge posts, an ancient bronze gong over a thousand years old. When Mass is going to be said—Chinese “Mass,” of course—the oldest of the bonzes—their priests are called bonzes—comes out with a wooden mallet and strikes the gong. It sounds in the far distance like a cascade of quavering “ploms.” The Chinese come with short little steps, bounding on their toes, their hands hidden in their sleeves and the knobs on their skullcaps dancing, and they climb the temple stairs in short little leaps. They kneel down and double up their bellies a thousand-and-one times in front of a grave Buddha with a polished navel. Then they burn strips of paper, which are their prayers. Rather like when Father Vesga told me to copy the Credo a hundred times. When the Chinese grow old, they have pigtails curved outwards and long mustaches that hang down in two lanky strands. But it’s funny: in pictures and photographs I’ve seen a lot of Chinese with white mustaches and beards, but I’ve never seen a Chinese with a white pigtail, and I’ve never seen a Chinese woman with white hair.
But there are so many things in the world. Trains starting punctually, with their punctual passengers and their punctual engineers and station masters. The station master blows a whistle and the train starts. Harbors with ships riding close to the stone walls of the jetties, while people laden with luggage climb up a small wooden gangway and blow kisses to those who stay behind. A bell tolls and a gangway is withdrawn. A whistle blows and the ship begins to move. Some people stay quietly on land, waving their handkerchiefs, and others lean over the ship’s railing. When a ship leaves, everybody has a clean handkerchief, a handkerchief without a snivel, because people would speak badly of anyone who used a dirty handkerchief to wave farewell.
Is that life?
To run up and down the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid, or some other street like it in Paris or London or China. To get on a train, to board a ship. To hear Mass or to burn strips of paper on an altar, before Our Lady or before Buddha’s paunch. To ring great cathedral bells or to strike a bronze gong with a mallet or to let the wind sway little bells.
And that is life?
Old people, grown-up people, teach children what life is like. I am no longer a child. I am working, I am already sleeping with women. But the school still sticks to me as bits of egg shell stick to a chick’s bottom. Let’s sit down here on the bench in the Retiro Park. I’ll review what the old people have taught me about life. Back—back—think. Look into the far distance.
What do you want, you sparrows? I haven’t got any crumbs in my pockets. Don’t flutter up and down in front of me. This is serious, and you’re a lot of little rascals. Let me see whether I can remember the time when I was small, like you, and then I may discover what the grown-up people have taught me about life.
My grandmother told me—but no. Before they told you anything where were you then? Before you understood what they told you, where were you?
First was a morning. It snowed fat flakes, like big white flies tumbling down from high up in a daze. My mother dressed me up in petticoats and woolen stockings which she tied round my middle with white ribbons full of knots. She put on my boots, boots with plenty of buttons, and we went out into the streets. I in her arms, wrapped in a shaggy shawl like a sheepskin that hasn’t been clipped. Beautifully warm, and my nose sticking out of the cowl of the big shawl. A column of steam rose into the air every time I breathed out of my open mouth. I had fun blowing, because it made a funnel of gray air which drifted away in the street like smoke from a cigarette. The trolley of the tram was covered with blobs of ice. In a big portal two soldiers were standing near a huge brazier filled with burning coal. One of the soldiers had his foot on the edge of a dark blanket, the other held its other end and waved it like a fan. The current of air hit the brazier and the coal burst into a shower of sparks which the wind carried down the street and smothered in the snow. They hissed, they squealed because the cold hurt them. Then I felt that my feet were cold. They were sticking out from under the shawl and snow had fallen on them. I laughed, because one of my boots was black and the other brown. My mother looked at my boots and laughed with me. We stayed for a while in the warmth of the brazier and we all laughed, the soldiers, my mother, and I, while the melting snow dripped from my boots. When they stopped dripping, my mother bundled me up, with my feet inside the shawl, and we walked down the street. The snow drifted against our faces.
That is my first clear childhood memory. Then came a black hole from which everything emerged by and by, I don’t know when and how: uncle and aunt, brothers and sister, the attic, Señora Pascuala… one day they came and put themselves into life, into my life. Then they began to fill life for me with “do”s and “don’t”s. “Don’t do this”—“Do that.” Sometimes they themselves didn’t agree. “Do this,” one said; “don’t do it,” said the other.
Once we were in a theater, I don’t know which. I only remember the red velvet of the chair, just like the red velvet of the sofas in the Café Español, and the bright stage where men and women were singing. I wanted to make water. “Uncle, I want to pass water.” He nodded. “All right, come with me.” “What’s the matter with the child?” asked my aunt. “He wants to do his little business.” “He can wait.” “But, my dear, he’s a child.” “He must wait. Arturito, be good.” I wetted the red velvet seat and no one heard the small splash, because the music made so much noise. When the curtain had fallen, my uncle said: “Now come along.” “I don’t need to now,” I answered. They both went on scolding me for days and days.
At that time they all started teaching me when it was right and when it was wrong to make water or the other, when it was right to speak and when it was right to be quiet. When I was crying, they told me: men don’t cry. Then, when somebody died, men and women came in tears to tell us about it. Don’t scream! Children must not say blasphemies! And then grown-up people shouted at each other and most of them blasphemed against God and Our Lady. Uncle, too, swore and said dirty things at times. Even the Fathers at school. There was Father Fulgencio who played the organ and was our chemistry teacher. He used to scribble formulas all over the blackboard, take a few test tubes, mix salts and acids, explain their reactions and then say: “Have you got it?” Hardly any of us had understood it. Then he banged on the table: “You’ve damned well got to understand. What the hell is the use of my teaching you if you don’t understand?” There was a daft boy in the class, another of those sons of rich fathers, I don’t remember his name. One day Father Fulgencio fastened on him: “Have you got this?” “No, I can’t understand the damned thing,” he answered. Father Fulgencio boxed his ears for him. “What do you mean by using bad language? Who taught you such an ugly word? What a rotten life one has with these boys!” One day he sat down at the organ and pressed one of the keys, but the pipe gave no sound. He stopped playing and pushed away at the key. The organ sounded pffff, in a long wheeze, but no more. He got up and marched us off through the cloisters. There he met another of the priests who asked him: “What is it, Brother Fulgencio, why are you in a bad temper?” “Well,” he said, “there’s an f, a bitch of a key, that doesn’t sound at all.” With Chinese ink we painted its name, “Bitch,” on the yellow key. Father Fulgencio went quite mad. “Who’s done this? You shameless rascals!” And he struck the key hard. The organ pipe, thick as an arm, gave back: Pfff!
They taught us the catechism and biblical history before anything else. They taught me to read, and then they taught me to read nothing except what they permitted. They taught me to count, to add, to subtract, to shunt figures and letters, to use the signs of plus and minus, of minus-plus and plus-minus, roots, powers, logarithms. To draw beautiful letters of the kind called English writing, with fat strokes and thin strokes, which you had to write slowly with your hand placed right and your arm placed right and your body poised right and your bottom sitting right in its chair and the sheet of paper in its right place. Then the bank: “This handwriting is no good—discount must be calculated like this—interest must be calculated like that—pounds sterling must be calculated in such-and-such a way.” And the postures for the English script, and the rule-of-three are just good for nothing, and Biblical history too, and the Catechism even more so.
“Be good,” they all said. “Don’t fight with the other boys.” Once I came home with a black eye. The whole family jumped on me: “You little runt, you cry baby, you let them beat you! You ought to have knocked his brains open with a stone, you ought to have kicked him in the belly!” I went away, out into the street, and looked for the boy who had hit me. I was sorry for him, because he was weak and small, and he had hit me in the eye without meaning to while we were playing. But I had a fight with him and hit him with my fists in his face, mainly the eyes, so that they should turn black like mine. A trickle of blood ran from his nose. I threw him on the ground and kicked him in the ribs and loins. He screamed. Then Pablito’s father, the plasterer, came and separated us. First he boxed my ears, then he picked me up and carried me upstairs to our flat, the other boy in front of me, bleeding and with torn clothes. What a row they made! Uncle José slapped me, my aunt pinched me, my mother spanked me. They all shouted at me and called me a savage and I don’t know what else; but they stuffed the other boy with sweets, biscuits, and coppers. He went off grinning and crying, and I would have liked to hit the whole lot of them. “It’s he who gave me the black eye! I kicked him in the belly and smashed his face for him because you told me to. And now you thrash me and give him biscuits!” I cried, tumbled on the dining-room carpet. Uncle José said: “But, my goodness, if you beat somebody you must do it within bounds.”
And so I learned to respect the grownups. Señor Corachán is a grownup man, a “gentleman.” One day he pulled my ears and called me a vagabond. I kept silent, but I would have liked to kick him in the belly, too.
They have all taught me how to live. And nothing they taught me is any good for living. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Not their figures and not their Biblical history. They’ve deceived me. Life is not what they teach it to be, it’s different. They’ve deceived me, and so I must learn for myself about life. Plá has taught me more than all the others. And so has Uncle Luis with his rude words, and Señor Manuel with his innocent laborer’s mind, and my cousin with her hot stuff, and that Maña in her short chemise. But the others who educate boys so as to turn them into “men”—what have they taught me? Only Father Joaquín once told me that I should believe what I felt to be good, and to say that cost him an effort as though he were betraying a secret.
Why rack one’s brains about it?
But I would like to know what life is. I don’t know what my mother was like as a little girl; when she was young she was in service, then she married and my father earned only just enough to keep them going, then he died and she was worse off than ever with her four children. Without my uncle and aunt the five of us might have starved to death. So off with her to wash clothes in the river, the mucky linen of rich people who can pay a washerwoman. The rich people. What are the rich?
Do you know who the rich people are, you sparrow? Of course you know, it must be those who throw you crumbs not of bread but of cake. Those are the rich ones for you. As soon as one of the women who sell buns passes, I shall buy one for you and throw you crumbs. Then you’ll say I’m rich. The rich are people who throw cake crumbs to the birds and bread crumbs to the poor like my mother. You know—do listen, you little fool, don’t fly away, the cake will come afterwards. You know, there’s Señor Dotti, the millionaire for whom my mother does all the washing. He’s married, and his wife once said to my mother: “Leonor, do you know how much we spent this year on toys for the children?” “No, madam,” said my mother. “Twenty-four thousand pesetas, six thousand duros. And still they aren’t content, just imagine, Leonor.”
My mother said: “Madam, with that money we could have lived for a whole year, without my having to go to the river.”
They gave me all the old toys of the year before, so many that I had to make three trips by tram to fetch the things home. There were enough toys for us all. I got an engine which could run by itself; it had a little spirit lamp in place of the boiler and when you poured water in it started running just like a real engine. There were hundreds of lead soldiers, and motorcars with doors which opened and shut, and dolls which could say “Mama” and “Papa.” Concha came home after her washing-up and carried the dolls off. She was already in service, but she was still a little girl. In her spare time she knitted frocks for the dolls. Why did they ever buy dolls for their two boys? Señora Dotti told my mother: “They were keen on them—so what could I do about it?” Then the boys got tired of the dolls and threw them aside. Those old toys are still stowed in a corner of our attic, behind my books. But I don’t feel like having them out. I’m no child any more. Sometimes it amuses me to play with a huge gyroscope, to let it gyrate on the rim of a glass or run along a string stretched across the attic.
Well, that is what being rich means. Señor Dotti has got a telephone in his house, and he has two houses, one in Madrid, one in Barcelona. When he stays in Madrid he rings up Barcelona every morning, and when he stays in Barcelona, he always rings up Madrid. When he’s told that there’s nothing new at the other end, he goes off to the Exchange. There he makes a few thousand pesetas, and goes home again. He puts on a frock coat or a cutaway and invites people home to tea. His boys wash and brush their hair and go in to kiss the hands of the lady visitors. Once one of the boys, Alejandro, was not allowed to sit at table during meals for a week, as a punishment. His father had come home from the Exchange, very pleased with himself because he had made a lot of money. He opened the door with his latchkey, took off his hat, and by chance went into the kitchen. There he found Alejandro sitting on the floor together with the dog, a very beautiful bitch, and the two of them eating the dog’s cocido. For in Dotti’s house a special stew for the dogs was cooked every day, with meat, sausage, and chick-peas; Alejandro used to come to the kitchen and share it with the bitch. When my mother heard the story and how they had punished him, she said to his mother: “Send him to our attic for a week and you’ll see how quickly he gets tired of eating cocido.” That’s how things go with the rich.
One day a few masons were sitting under the arches of the Plaza Mayor and eating saffron-yellow cocido, the kind my mother always cooks down by the river. An elegant carriage stopped in front of them, a gentleman and a lady got out, and he said to one of the workers: “Let me buy your cocido off you.” The mason stared at him and said, “I don’t want to.” “Now look here,” said the other, “my wife is expecting a baby and she wants to eat cocido.” The mason answered: “Well, she’ll have to do without.” But the mason’s wife was there and made him give them the cocido; they carried the pots with the dish to the carriage and gave the worker fifty pesetas. He said to his wife: “I wouldn’t have given it them—perhaps she would have produced a boy with the mark of a stew-pot on his belly.”
And is this life, then? A rich man can afford to spend six thousand duros on toys, and to telephone to Barcelona just to know whether there’s anything new at home, and to buy a mason’s cocido off him?
Be quiet, you sparrow. Where did you get those grains from? Now look, there’s a whole column of ants crawling backwards, each carrying a grain of wheat. Aren’t you ashamed to eat the grain they carry with so much labor, and perhaps to swallow the ant as well while it sticks to its grain, clutching at it with its horny, black teeth? I wonder where they get hold of corn here in the Park? Perhaps from the ducks. I don’t know whether I ought to make you drop the grain or not. Perhaps there’s a little sparrow in your nest, waiting to swallow the ant and the grain you bring with you. I remember the swallows in the courtyard of the Palace chasing flies and gnats with those shrill hunting cries of theirs, carrying them off and dropping them into the square, wide-open, never-filled beaks of their young. Perhaps you’re right, sparrow, perhaps you have a right to the ants’ grain.
Is this life? To take away each other’s food? To devour each other?
Watch out, sparrow, here’s a little boy with a bun who wants to feed you. Silly, why do you run away and fly off? Now then, do go and eat—closer to him. Look how he smiles and holds out crumbs between his fingertips. He wants you to come and peck at them. That fat crumb is meant to tempt you. Is that life: to give for the pleasure of giving, to take for the pleasure of taking?
People are taking their walks, nursemaids keeping the children in front of them so that they shouldn’t get lost, and screaming as soon as the children go too far away. Lovers leaning against each other. Old women sit there knitting socks on long steel needles, with quick, deft movements and flashes as from sword blades. When they get up they limp from rheumatics, but now while they’re sitting their fingers fly like a conjurer’s. They call to their grandchildren who shovel sand into brightly painted tin buckets. How sad the little boy is, the one over there in the perambulator with rubber tires, kicking his feet and waving his arms and wanting to run about, instead of being stuck among the cushions that keep him from crawling on the ground. Now he starts crying. You fool of a mother, take him out of that black oilcloth box on wire-spoke wheels, put him on the ground, tumbled on his back or his tummy, let him scratch about in the sand or catch ants or splash in the mud and smear his face with black streaks. Don’t you see he’s crying because that’s what he wants? The papa lights a cigar and goes on reading the paper: “Can’t you keep the boy quiet?” “But what shall I do with him?” “Give him the breast and he’ll shut up.” The lady sits down on the fretted iron chair which has produced coppers for so many years, and pulls out one of her breasts. A flabby breast with a big, black nipple which looks as though it were hairy. The kid doesn’t take it. Of course he doesn’t. He wants to stick his fingers in the earth and make mud balls with the palm of his hand. He goes on crying, and the mother doesn’t understand him. You silly goose, you animal, why do you slap and shake him and scream: “Be quiet—be quiet!” Do you think he understands you? You nasty brute. You lay him out in his perambulator as if he were a stuffed sack. I can see it in your face that, if you could, you would throw him away from you, like a dead frog—you would hold him by one leg and dash him on the ground so as not to hear him crying any more. “Now see what a silly fool you are,” says the papa, and he’s right. But he is as much of a silly fool as she is.
Is this life?
The path by the lake is deserted. The sunlight pours down, the sand is scorching hot. Why not bathe in the sun? Why not go where nobody else goes? In the big lake people are rowing boats, but the steam launch which takes children twice round the square basin is anchored. Anchored. No, it’s tied to a rope, ridiculously anchored. There is no tide here. Just now the benches of the launch are clean. When it’s full of children they can stretch out their hands and trail them in the water without fear of sharks biting them. The mammas imagine they are at sea and get sick behind their black mantillas. Then the boatman’s lad, who always sings out the number of boats which have been out for the full half-hour of their hire, takes the ladies by the arm, gives them a cup of tea, gets a peseta’s worth of a tip out of them, and shows off, standing up and walking about in the boats without falling, like a real sailor. “There you see, lady, it’s quite easy, it’s just practice.”
But I’m grown-up now, and this is life. All this, all this together. So much the better. This is life, life is like this. One day I’ll throw crumbs to the fishes or the sparrows, another I’ll get sick in a boat, and still another I’ll fish fishes or shoot birds. Yes, sir, it’s necessary to scold little children when they cry. What, you’ve given him a perambulator and he cries? A perambulator with rubber tires? That couple must be rich. Some day I’m going to have a son, but my wife won’t have black nipples like that woman’s. How can a rich man marry a woman with black nipples? That’s to say, she may be the rich one of the two, and then he’s right, of course. What do black nipples matter if one’s rich? For that is the only thing that counts: to be rich. That’s living.
But perhaps not. We aren’t rich in our attic, but we’re happy.
Oh, there’s Father Joaquín. He must have come here for a walk after Mass. Really, he’s a fine man. I would like to look like that, tall, strong, broad-shouldered, as they say all Basques are. His cassock suits him well, because he’s got no belly and a chest like a barrel. With most other priests the buttons on their cassocks—how many are there, thirty to forty?—mark a curve that sinks in under their chin and protrudes over their belly in a row of shiny dots. But not his. The buttons curve out on his chest and recede on his stomach and then go straight down to his legs, which seem to break out of the cassock as he walks.
I don’t know the people with him. A lady leading a little boy by the hand. The boy is very serious for his age, but strong, much stronger than I had been.
Hat in hand, I walked at Father Joaquín’s side. The woman and the boy came behind us.
“Are you out for a walk, Arturo?”
“Yes, I’ve got one of my attacks. I was thinking.”
“What have you been thinking?”
“Well, I don’t know, really. Stupid things. About life and death and animals. I’ve been laughing over a sparrow and a little boy in a perambulator with rubber wheels. What do I know? My mother says it’s my growing up. I don’t know what it is. And then…”
“Then, what?”
“Nothing… no… Nothing.”
I had gone red, I felt it in my cheeks. But how could I have told him that I had slept with a woman for the first time in my life and that she wore a short pink chemise…
Father Joaquín stroked my head as so often before and turned round to the others, to the woman and the boy who walked so gravely behind us.
He took the woman by the hand and drew her closer. He put his other hand, broad and strong, with fair fluff on the knuckles, on the boy’s shoulder, and pulled him nearer. He placed them in front of me; and the three of us, the woman, the boy, and I, were waiting for something to happen, waiting for something very big.
He only said: “My wife and my son… Here you have Arturo.”
We walked together on the sun-filled path along the lake, silent, without a word, and looked at the water in the square basin so that we should not catch each other’s eyes. We walked slowly and the path had no end.
Then I left them with an awkward good-by, stumbling over my own feet. And I never dared to turn my head so as not to see the three of them looking at each other, looking at me.
EVERYTHING WAS ARRANGED. We four men would sleep in the old attic, Rafael and I once again together in my gilt bed, and Uncle Luis and Andrés in my mother’s double bed with its green frame and the faded saints on sheet-iron panels fretted by the years and insecticides. The women, my mother and Concha, were going to sleep in the other attic which was formerly Señora Francisca’s.
Señora Francisca had died and left behind nothing but a few blackened pots and pans and a basketful of monkeynuts, sweets, and squibs such as she used to sell to children in the Plaza del Progreso. We took over her attic room, as it was next door to ours, and inherited her belongings, the old clothes, cooking pots, goods for sale, and a truckle bed with a black wool mattress. Nobody claimed this inheritance, so we chopped up the bedstead for firewood, and shared the rest with the tenants of the other attics.
Rafael and I moved into the new room. In daytime it was used as the kitchen, because it had a little stove with a chimney pipe in a corner under the sloping roof, and as Concha’s workshop. Concha had left Dr. Chicote’s service and had learned the laundry trade, paying for the training herself, because she did not want to go on working as a housemaid. As my mother was a washerwoman, Concha easily found customers. She spent the days heating her irons in the corner under the roof and ironing clothes or linen on a deal table more than three yards square, which filled the middle of the attic. Now the two women slept by themselves, and so did Rafael and I; sometimes we stayed away for a night, thanks to our independence. Yet at the same time we were together. Besides the two big beds, the round table my father had made, our crockery and our linen were still in the old attic—all our wealth. That day we had to make room for four and needed the big beds, so we changed places with the women.
Uncle Luis and Andrés had arrived together, but each on a different errand. Andrés was on his way to Toledo where he meant to spend three days with his son Fidel, the seminarist; his wife Elvira had stayed behind in Méntrida, bedridden because of her festering leg. Uncle Luis had come, as he often did, to buy the iron for his horseshoes, iron in rods, soft and black, which had never been touched by fire since it left the crucible.
Every time I saw Uncle Luis buying iron I was reminded of the times I had seen him tasting wine. He would make the round of the underground wine cellars of Méntrida with a dipper, and take a small quantity out of each wine jar, just enough to fill half the glass which he had rinsed most carefully. He would look at the wine against the light, take a sip “to wash his mouth,” roll it round his tongue, say nothing, rinse his glass, and try another wine jar. Suddenly he would firmly grasp the glass, plunge it into the jar as though it were the dipper, draw it out filled to the rim, and pour it down his gullet. And so a second time, and a third. The owner of the cellar would ask him: “What do you think of it, Luis?” “This jar here is our Saviour’s own blood, the rest can be poured away.”
He did the same with the iron. He would enter the stores of the Cava Baja, stooping his huge body, and ask for iron, just like that: “I want iron.” All the owners knew him and would get out rods two and four yards long. He would weigh them, stroke them with the tip of a finger, make them ring with his knuckles, and drop them back on the heap, until he came to a heap where he would stop, holding the iron rod high, and ask: “How much?” When he had made the deal, he would double the finger-thick rods with his bare hands, tie them up in a bundle and carry them away on his shoulder, as though he were going to march straight from the Cava Baja to Méntrida and so start forging them then and there. Sometimes he would pat the rods and say: “Pure gold!”
Rafael and I fixed the center leaf of the table so that six of us should have room. My mother produced one of her white tablecloths and started laying the table. At eight both of our guests were back from their business. Andrés arrived laden with parcels, good things to eat and clothing for his boy. Uncle Luis carried a single parcel which he handled like a club. He banged it on the table and guffawed: “It sounds hard, doesn’t it?” Then he unwrapped it and took out a smoke-cured ham, dry and hard as wood. “Give me a knife, Leonor.”
He cut it in the middle to show the almost purple meat, of which he sliced off a strip for each of us. My mother protested:
“Now look, leave that to take home.”
“Never mind, eat and shut up, you never know what will happen tomorrow.”
He filled a glass to the brim with wine and tossed it off: “And now let’s have supper.”
At the beginning of the meal we were all silent, for the slice of ham had made us hungry and anyway we did not know what to say first. Uncle Luis started the ball rolling. He addressed me:
“Well, and what about you?”
“I’m working.”
“He’s settled for life,” said Andrés. “He’s had better luck than my boy who’ll have to stay nine years in that seminary.”
Uncle Luis crunched a chop between his teeth, wiped his greasy lips with the back of his hand, and turned round to Andrés:
“Well, it’ll be funny if in nine years’ time the boy hangs his cassock on a nail and runs after some skirt or other!”
“If the boy does that to me, I’ll kill him. Here I have been sacrificing myself for him all my life, and if he goes and chucks away the priest’s habit and becomes a good-for-nothing I’ll kill him!”
“T-t-t, what d’you call sacrifice? The seminary doesn’t cost you a thing. They’re letting him study free, because they need more silly little priests, and you’ve a mouth less to feed at home. You’ve even got savings by now.”
“But you forget that it’s a sacrifice to be separated from one’s son for eleven years, only because one wants him to become a man.”
“To become a man! Come now, d’you think I’m a silly fool? You may do it because you want him to become a priest, but not a man. Priests can be men, but they can’t act as men. And that’s your doing. When your boy’s grown up he’ll be either a man or a priest, but never both things at the same time.”
“Let’s leave it, Luis, there’s no discussing things with you.”
“Of course there isn’t. I’m such a rough brute that I won’t swallow anything which might hurt me inside. I call bread, bread and wine, wine.” To stress his words he wiped his plate with a chunk of bread big enough to fill his mouth, and poured down another glass of wine. Then, when his plate was clean, he planted both elbows on the table and went on:
“Now listen. You’re wrong, both of you. She here”—he nodded towards my mother—“and you. You’ve got the same bee in your bonnets as all the other starvelings, you want your boy to be a Prince of the Blood. Look at him”—he pointed at me—“so smart and fine, so nice to look at, with his white face, starched collar, silk tie, elegant suit—with two pesetas salary, living in a garret and his mother washing clothes. They’ve taught him to be ashamed of his mother being a washerwoman.”
“I’m not ashamed because my mother’s a washerwoman,” I said.
“Oh no? And how many of your friends at the bank come to visit you here?”
I flushed and gave no answer.
“D’you see it?” Uncle Luis said to Andrés. “Just like you. I bet your boy doesn’t tell it to others in the seminary that he’s a master mason’s son, and I bet you don’t have the guts to turn up at Toledo in your white overall. In Leonor’s case one can still excuse it, because she’s a woman, and because of a lot of other things as well. But what have you got to say? You’re as well off as me. God won’t forgive you—if there’s such a thing as God anyhow. Every man to his trade. My boys are hammering iron now, and when they’re men they can do what they feel like, but they’ll always be able to earn their bread and they won’t be ashamed of being blacksmiths like their father. And if it comes to being well off, you bet they won’t be slow, they’re going to be richer than you and your boy, even if he is made a canon.”
“That’s just what I don’t want,” said Andrés in a slightly hoarse voice. “I don’t want my boy to have to carry pails, mix plaster, and whitewash walls in a blazing sun. What I’m doing is for his good, and one day he’ll thank me for it.”
“And when he sees a pretty girl passing and feels like having a woman, he’ll call his father a bastard, cassock and all.”
“Now come, come, the boy isn’t quite a fool, and when he feels like being with a woman he’ll take one to bed.”
“That’s just it. And you’ll have turned him into a hypocrite or a poor wretch. My boy, Aquilino, already has an eye on the girls. Now he’s hammering iron at the forge, and when a girl passes he tells her she’s pretty. And if she lets him go on, the worst that happens is that the next day he finds the sledge hammer a little heavier than before. But he does his work with more pleasure than ever and eats like a devil and walks with his head high because he’s got nothing to be ashamed of. The boy here’s lucky in that it will be the same with him. But then all he’ll ever be is a pen-pusher, a little gentleman who marries some consumptive girl in a hat, and afterwards the two of them will go crazy with hunger on thirty duros a month.”
“So in your opinion one oughtn’t to worry about one’s children becoming something better?”
“Better than oneself, yes. But not something different. Now I’ve got everything. I’ve got my wife and my children and the smithy, and thank God we’re all in good health. And then there’s my bit of wheat land and my strip of orchard, and the pig and the wine, and the figs for dessert. Well, my boys have got all that too, and later on they can make it more by working hard, just as I did. In my house there’s no God and no King and no nothing. I’m the master there, and nobody’s my master. So why should I want to be richer if I’m my own master and have all I need?”
“What should I have done then?” asked my mother, who had listened to the men, silent and quiet.
“You? You’ve done quite enough by bringing them up and not turning them into priests. Now it’s up to them to take care of you.”
“Well, I work like a donkey,” Concha said.
“What else did you imagine, my dear girl? I work like a horse. And that’s just our lot in this world, to work like beasts. But at least we must have the right to kick now and then,” said Uncle Luis.
Rafael lifted his head for the first time and said:
“All it comes to is that because we’re poor we must put up with things. You’ve got everything settled, and so you’re happy. But I’d like to see you in my office writing out invoices and getting thirty pesetas at the end of the month.”
“Well, d’you know what I’d do? I’d take my cap and shut the door from the outside. The trouble with you is that you’ve got an easy life in your office and you don’t want to work. Come with me to Méntrida to handle the sledge hammer, and I’ll teach you the trade and keep you. Of course you’ll get black, and it won’t wash off, and your hands will get horny.”
Until that moment I had kept out of the discussion because I knew I was near bursting point. But when I found that all of them put things in the wrong way, I cut in.
“I think you’re all wrong. You’re in love with your trade, Uncle, and you’ve been happy at it. But your sons won’t be able to live on your trade, and you know it. Hand-forged horseshoes and wrought-iron grilles are all over and done with. You and I, we’ve seen horseshoes of pressed steel in all sizes, like boots, when we were in the stores of the Cava Baja. The only customers you’ve got left are old friends of yours. Now ask Andrés, who’s a master builder and has built houses, how many orders for wrought-iron grilles he’s given you. He’ll tell you that he buys them from stock in Madrid, cheaper than the iron rods you buy for horsehoes.”
“There’s nothing like a forged horseshoe from the fire straight on to a horse’s hoof. It’s like boots made to measure,” shouted Uncle Luis, and banged on the table.
“Just so,” I answered. “When Uncle Sebastian was thirty he shod the whole village. But today—-today he’s glad if he’s given shoes to sole, because sneakers are cheaper and last longer than half-soles on an old shoe.”
“That’s just what I’m saying,” cried Andrés.
“No, it isn’t. I may be a pen-pusher, but after all I’m doing a job. But your son is a budding priest, and that’s no job. And then, there will always be clerks, but very soon it will be all over with priests. People are getting fed up with feeding loafers who bellow Latin.”
“That’s just being rude. But never mind. There will always be religion.”
“Are you religious?” I asked Andrés.
“Well, to tell the truth, it’s of no matter to me. If I feel like saying a bad word I do it, because it’s a relief.”
“So why do you want your son to become a priest? You don’t believe in God, or you don’t care whether you do or don’t. But you turn your son into a priest so that he can exploit the others with the help of a God you don’t believe in. And the worst of it is that you leave him without having learned any trade or profession, and, as Uncle Luis says, you’ve prevented him from being a man.”
“Now that’s all nonsense. Everybody acts as he thinks best, and my boy will do what I want him to. That’s my good right as his father.”
“You’ve no right at all. Parents have no rights.”
Andrés and Uncle Luis gaped at me. My mother looked at her hands. Rafael lifted his hanging head once again and gave me a sidewise look. Concha put her two fists on the table as though she were going to knock me down. I spoke on, looking round from one to the other.
“Yes, you needn’t all stare at me like that. Parents have no rights. We children of theirs are here, because they brought us here for the sake of their own pleasure. And so they must put up with what had been their pleasure. I never asked my mother to bring me into the world, and so I can’t allow her any right over me, such as you claim over your son. If I had a father and he said to me what you said just now, I’d tell him to go to hell.”
Each of them reacted in his own manner. Andrés said. “You’re a shameless rascal.” Uncle Luis said: “If you were my son I’d break your leg to make you walk straight.” Concha said: “Then Mother ought to have chucked us into the Foundlings’ Home?” Rafael said: “Go on.”
After all the others, my mother said slowly:
“Yes. Having children is a pleasure for which you pay dearly.”
At that I saw tumbling visions of my uncle’s house, of heaps of dirty linen, of her lye-bitten hands and her meek, silent forbearance, a smile forever on her lips. Kisses in the kitchen and behind the curtain of the Café Español. The struggle for centimos. Her falling into a chair, utterly worn out. Her fingers in my rumpled hair, my head on her lap. It all surged up in me and it put me in the wrong, but not the outcries and protests of the others who disputed and shouted.
“Let’s go, Rafael.”
We went downstairs, and out into the street. Rafael said: “You gave it to them.”
I grew indignant and began to speak. I spoke without pause for streets on end, trying to convince him that I was wrong about our mother, that we three, he and I and Concha, had the obligation to take her away from her work by the river, from washing clothes, from breaking up the ice and being roasted by the sun and coming home worn out. That we had to get her away from all this if we had to smash the whole world for it.
Rafael let me speak and then said:
“All right, that’s easy. Tomorrow we’ll ask for a rise, you at the bank and I at the Fenix. We’ll speak to our managers of our mamma the washerwoman, and you may be sure they’ll give us a good salary so we can support her…”
It’s the easiest thing in arithmetic to add up sums, but it’s also the most difficult. To add up ten or twelve sheets of fifty lines with six or seven figures in each is more difficult than to handle the rule-of-three or the table of logarithms. At the end there is always a centimo too much or too little—or a thousand—and you have to start again at the beginning.
I was adding up and never took in what the messenger said, but answered “Coming,” automatically. After a short time he came back, touched me on the shoulder, and said: “Señor Corachán’s waiting for you. I told you a while ago but you forgot.”
I was startled and sprinted up the stairs, since the staff had no right to use the lift which was reserved for customers and the high officials of the bank. What did that old fellow want of me? The commissionaire left me for a long while cooling my heels in the management’s reception room. I used the breathing space to master my agitation and to wonder what the man wanted. Surely nothing pleasant. Anyhow, I would soon know, whatever it might be. I was sitting in a deep leather armchair the seat of which tipped backwards and rocked. For a while I amused myself swaying backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards in see-saw movement. There was a silver box on the polished table in the middle of the room. I opened it; it was filled with Virginia cigarettes. I wavered for a moment, then I took out a fistful and put them away in my coat pocket. The commissionaire opened the door to the office and announced me.
Don Antonio was meticulously scanning a letter, as usual, and spent long minutes over it. Finally he signed it, deigned to raise his head and looked at me through his pince-nez.
“You’re the employee of the Coupons Section who broke the plate glass the day before yesterday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well. This time no strong measures will be taken in view of your past conduct. The Management has decided to deduct the cost of the plate glass from your salary. It amounts to 37.50 pesetas. That is all. You may go.”
I walked slowly down the stairs and went to the washroom to smoke one of the Virginia cigarettes and think the whole injustice over.
Less than a month ago every desk had been covered with a sheet of plate glass. Most of the desks had a centerpiece lined with red or green oilcloth, and a broad frame of varnished wood. They had laid the plate glass directly on the frame, which meant that a hollow space was left under the glass in the center. The backs of the coupons we sent out to the provinces or abroad had to be stamped with the initials of the branch office, to prevent their being stolen and circulated. We had to stamp thousands of coupons with a metal stamp, and there were days when the only noise in the department was that of the stamps hitting the ink pad and the coupons. When the desks were covered with the glass panels, I asked for a rubber sheet, because I foresaw that I would inevitably break the glass. I was told that no rubber sheet was necessary, and had to go on stamping coupons on the glass. The day before yesterday the glass was starred. They put a new one on and I gave it no further thought. And now that nasty old fellow said I had to pay for it. Well, I would pay, but I wouldn’t stamp any more coupons as long as they didn’t let me have a rubber sheet.
When I came down to our section they were all waiting to hear what had happened. The story of the plate glass went round the whole bank immediately. Discontent was general, because the building was full of glass-covered desks and metal stamps; all the employees were afraid that the same thing would happen to them sooner or later. Plá sent for me to come to the lavatory—to our club—and there I found him in the midst of six or seven others, swathed in cigarette smoke. Somebody was keeping watch by the stairs against Corachán’s coming.
“Now come along,” said Plá, “and tell us what happened.”
I reported my interview and told them that the price of the plate glass would be deducted from my salary.
Plá grew angry: “They’re a set of robbers. All that glass is insured, and then they cash in on us when something gets broken. We must protest against it.”
“Yes, but how?” said one of the others. “We can’t just go up to the Management as a protest delegation, because if we do they’ll give us the sack.”
“Well, we must do something. If we let them get away with it we must expect to pay for all broken glass. And besides we must show that gang our teeth. Remember what happened on the 1st of May. They swallowed it and never said a word.”
Years before, the 1st of May had been recognized by law as the Labor holiday. In the morning a procession crossed the city and went to the Premier’s seat to present a paper with the demands of labor. Employers regarded the demonstration as an insult to themselves, and did what they could to make their men work the whole day. The 2nd of May was a national holiday, in commemoration of the 2nd of May 1808, when the War of Independence began with the rising of the people of Madrid against Napoleon’s army of occupation. The employers used the second day to scotch the first. Only workshops shut down on the 1st of May, while the other trades, particularly commerce and the banks, treated it as a normal working day.
That year we had agreed that members of trade unions employed in banks would not go to work on the 1st of May, but take part in the procession, come what might. We felt certain that we should be sacked; but then El Sociolista would start an intense publicity campaign, because we were within our legal rights. There were about a hundred of us from the Madrid banks, who all tried to encourage one another and threatened with reprisals cowards who wanted to shirk. When the procession was marching through the Calle de Alcalá where all the banks have their head offices, the group of gentlemen in starched collars, so conspicuous before, dwindled away and disappeared down side streets. Only a few of us marched on, enough, however, to make the fact known. On the following day we went to work awaiting instant dismissal.
Nobody said anything. Cabanillas, who years later became chief editor of the Heraldo de Madrid, had no occasion to publish the article he had already prepared against the Crédit Etranger, an impassioned article describing the fury of French Capitalism which sacked employees for staying away from work, although they were acting within the law, but then shut up the bank on the 2nd of May and decked the balconies of the building with banners and streamers, as a French firm’s contribution to the celebration of Napoleon’s defeat.
We were very proud of our success, and very much ashamed of the desertions in the Calle de Alcalá, and very much afraid of the reprisals which would later on hit us one by one. If they were going to dismiss us one after the other, taking their time over it, it would have been better if all of us had decided to march through the Calle de Alcalá among the workers, our heads high. Of course, if you asked each member of the group individually, it turned out that none of them had left the files even for a moment, except to take a quick glass of vermouth or to satisfy an urgent physical need.
That was the story of the 1st of May, of which Plá never ceased to remind us.
More employees joined us in the lavatory until the whole space between the basins and the cabins was crowded. Chubby little Plá was submerged in a mass of people, but his fury grew and he kept on shouting:
“We must do something! We must make a big row! If we don’t we’re a lousy lot of bastards!”
One of our more moderate colleagues found a solution.
“It’s quite simple. If we pay for the plate glass between the lot of us, the whole thing is settled. Every time a glass cover is broken we’d solve the problem by paying ten centimos each, and so nobody will be ruined.”
“Your big idea is to avoid any trouble.”
“Of course it is, we’ve got trouble enough as it is. If they had sacked all of us, at one go, on the 3rd of May, the People’s House would have supported us and in the end they would have had to take us back at the bank. But now the first of us to open his mouth will find himself in the street—and can you tell me what he’s going to live on?”
“The trouble with us is that we’re a pack of cowards,” said Plá. He thought a moment and then shouted: “I’ve got it.”
He would not explain, but said: “Wait here a moment.” He ran upstairs, and came back with a sheet of white paper at the top of which he had typed: “Since the Crédit Etranger, with 250,000,000 frcs. capital, lacks the means to pay for a glass pane, value thirty-eight pesetas, its staff have pleasure in paying for it.”
Pressing the sheet against the wall, he put down his signature, all curves and scrolls. “And now—anyone who doesn’t sign this is a yellow bastard!”
The sheet filled sluggishly with signatures. One of the men tried to sneak away, but Plá caught him by the coat tails.
“Now where are you going?”
“Upstairs.”
“Have you signed?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“And you’re a trade unionist? You sign. You sign, God’s truth! The others who are not our comrades have no obligation to sign, but you will do it, or I’ll take away your membership card and slap your face with it! You bastard!”
The timorous man put down a shaky signature. After that the paper was passed in secret from one department to the other. In the end, when it bore over a hundred signatures, one of the Heads of the Department got hold of it in the Deposit Section, and took it up to the Management. Now what? We tried to console each other: “They can’t sack all of us!” Tense hours of waiting passed, while we all watched the big stairs every time a messenger came down. Towards the end of the evening Corachán sent for me. This time I did not have to wait in the anteroom. I went straight into his office. He was sitting under the lamp which made the plate glass on his conference table glitter, turning the pages of a dossier. My dossier, probably. He kept me standing in front of his table for a while, until he said:
“You are the employee of the Coupons Section who broke the plate glass?”
“Yes, sir.”
He had the sheet of paper filled with signatures lying beside him. He spoke in a chilly voice, somewhat hoarsely.
“The Management of the bank has decided not to deduct the price of the plate glass from your salary, because the bank fortunately does not need the money. But since matters of this order cannot be left without appropriate punishment, an entry will be made in your dossier.”
“What entry, sir?”
“What entry—a bad mark, of course. You won’t persuade me that it is possible to smash a sheet of plate glass with a stamp. Plate glass the thickness of this!” He caught the rim of the glass panel on his table between his thumb and forefinger. “The only way to break this is by playing with it, as you did. After all, you’re nothing but young cubs, you people. But I’m no fool.”
“You’re no fool,” I burst out, “but you’re an idiot. With this blotting paper weight, which is of wood”—I lifted the blotter and held it over the glass sheet—“I can smash your glass cover here, and your head, and the head of your bitch of a mother. You’re just angry because of the subscription list. Yes, sir, it’s a shame that the bank should want to take away half my salary to pay for a glass pane which is insured anyhow. You’re a pack of robbers and scoundrels.” Gently, but firmly, Carreras, the Assistant Director, grasped my arm from behind.
“Are you mad, boy?”
“Yes, I’m mad with disgust and rage and contempt! This fellow here in his frock coat who hides in the lavatories to catch employees smoking, because that’s how he shows he’s worth his salary and his job in the Management—this fellow is a swine and the bank is a pig sty!”
I went out, slamming the doors and going on shouting even when I was on the stairs.
At my desk I wrote out a receipt for my salary until that day and asked Perahita to get me a testimonial for my work.
“A clean testimonial, with no black marks, for my three years of hard labor. Tell Corachán that if he refuses I’ll go straight from here to the People’s House, because I’m a trade union member.” I waved my membership card in his face.
The cashier took my receipt and said:
“I can’t pay you out without the endorsement of the Manager.”
“Go up and get it, then.”
“You go yourself, or I can’t pay you.”
“Listen,” I said to him in a low, tense voice, “I don’t want to get you into trouble. Ring up Corachán, do whatever you like, but pay me out, or I’ll make the biggest row there ever was in front of all the clients.”
The man gave in and paid me half a month’s salary, 37.50 pesetas.
Perahita came down on an errand of conciliation.
“I’ve spoken to Corachán, there’s no need for you to leave. All you’ve got to do is to apologize, and you can stay on in the bank without any bad mark in your dossier.”
“D’you imagine I’ll climb these stairs again to lick that man’s bottom? And what for? So that my mother has to go washing clothes by the river? No, my dear friend, no. I’m too much of a man for that!”
I picked up the testimonial and walked to the entrance door. The huge hall of the bank was studded with desks whose plate-glass covers shone like diamonds under the milky globes of electric light.
The Calle de Alcalá was full of noise. Newspaper vendors went by shouting, with enormous sheaves under their arms. People tore the papers out of their hands. The European War had begun.
At home my mother listened to me, sitting on her low chair, a piece of needlework had fallen from her hands, her hands on her lap. I told her what had happened, with a heavy heart. At the end I swallowed and said:
“So I’ve left the bank.”
We were both silent. Her fingers played with my hair, plaiting and unplaiting it. After a short while she said:
“See what a child you still are!”
* This name sounds ridiculous in Spanish, as it means Big Cabbages, from berza, cabbage.—Translator’s Note
† The Casa del Pueblo—the “People’s House”—was the seat of Socialist trade unions and other Labor organizations.
‡ U.G.T.—Unión General de Trabajadores. The central organization for labor unions other than those under Anarchist influence, which were united in the C.N.T. The U.G.T. branches were mainly under Socialist influence.
§ Antonio Maura, conservative leader, repeatedly Premier; Pablo Iglesias, founder of the Socialist Party and leader of the trade unions; Alejandro Lerroux, at that time leader of the Radicals.