A lthough my guide, whom I followed in deep silence, carried his. enormous body with difficulty, he did not stop until we arrived at a large arcade with thick adobe and stucco pillars. It supported an arch that had painted on it a monogram of the Virgin and below it what appeared to be the family coat of arms, something like a bull grazing in a field of wheat. The green door was reinforced by nails with large, copper screwtop heads; only the wicket was open. It was through the latter that we went in, once the Father had regained enough of his strength to cross the threshold of the tall, stone arch.
A spacious portico led to the patio, which was surrounded by the first set of rooms of the house. To the right there was a bench built of adobe bricks against the wall, which was the daily seat and nighttime bed of the pongo; above it, on the wall, could be seen a large oil painting of the Archangel St. Michael, his foot on the chest of the rebel and the tip of his spear in the rebel’s mouth. Across from it, on the left-hand wall, there was a single door that opened into the head servant’s, or the majordomo’s, room.
The solitary, silent patio, with the small blades of grama grass growing in the seams between its uneven tiles, looked like a cemetery. To the right there were three doors, separated by three windows, all of which were hermetically sealed—and which I was never to see open—because they had belonged to the gentleman of the house, who had died a few days before. In front of the entrance, a large door gave light and passage to a drawing room that served as a dining room, and which continued on to a passageway leading to the second patio. On the left-hand side there were doors and windows like the ones on the right; these led to a reception room, an antechamber, and a small, private chapel for the lady of the house. The bedrooms, the servant’s quarters, the pantry, the kitchen, and the other rooms could be reached—and were, as I later saw—from the inner patio.
Father Arredondo took me to the first door on the left, which led to the private chapel. This door was open; but inside a vestibule there was another, large door—with a white, plastered face painted on it of a grotesquely shaped angel advising one to keep silent—which was closed.
There the Father stopped once again; he coughed two or three times and finally knocked timidly on the door with the knuckles of his thick hand. We heard cautious steps; then the large vestibule door opened just slightly, only enough for a Negro woman’s head—with thick, reddish, natty tufts of hair that were starting to go gray; a very flat forehead; small, squinting eyes; a flat nose; very prominent cheekbones; and a toothless mouth—to stick out. She spoke the following words, which we barely heard:
“The lady very bad; the sadness, the splitting headache. . . . Your Reverence come in without making noise.”
We followed these directions, walking on our tiptoes. The large vestibule door closed behind us, and left us in the dark.
Once my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, which was provided by a single lamp shining from a Berenguela1 stone hanging from the wall in front of us, I saw that we were in a room that was about eight varas long by six wide, whitewashed and burnished, and that it had a red and yellow socle, and a white curtain on the ceiling, with a star painted in its center, also in red and yellow. The entire wall underneath the vault light was occupied by a retable with stucco and wooden saints dressed in lamé and sparkles of gold, large silver candelabra with multiple arms, and crystal urns with veneered frames, also made of silver. To the left there was a large table, a prie-dieu chair, and two enormous honorary armchairs. To the right one could see another door leading out of the room, and next to it a dais covered with a soft spread and damask-lined cushions.
Resting there was a lady who was neither young nor old, much less obese than the Father, but more than simply fat, with a sickly complexion, gray eyes with a hard look to them, a straight nose, a large mouth almost without lips, a very prominent chin, and an air of extreme pride masked by feigned humility. She was wrapped in a rich estamin, silken shirt, and her head was covered with a black, mourning headdress. She had another mulatta servant kneeling in front of her—handing her a silver brazier in one hand and a cigarette in another—who was not as horrible-looking as the one who had let us in. Finally, a white lapdog, with the hair on the bottom part of his body shaved short, was sleeping on the same cushion where the lady was reclining.
The Father, who undoubtedly had waited like me to become accustomed to that semidarkness, was the first to speak.
“Noble lady, my dear Doña Teresa,” he said, “here is the boy.”
“Praised be God, Your Holy Reverence! God certainly knows how to try our weaknesses, doesn’t He?” she answered in an unpleasant voice, and lit her cigarette.
A long silence followed. The two servants sat on either side of the dais, the Father settled in as best as possible in one of the enormous honorary armchairs, the lapdog growled and went back to sleep, and I remained standing in the middle of the room, turning my hat in my hands. Meanwhile, as the noble lady Doña Teresa exhaled pillars of smoke, the air became saturated with a strong smell of tobacco and anise.
“What torture, Your Holy Reverence!” she finally deigned herself to exclaim. “Only Our Lord has suffered for our sins more than I have!”
“He will know how to reward that suffering and anguish,” the Father replied, “especially now that—”
“Yes, yes,” she interrupted him. “I will be brave. . . .”
And finally, turning toward me, she added:
“What do you know how to do? What have they taught you?”
I felt more given to cry than to reply; but I remembered my teacher’s order and answered:
“Madam, I know how to pray and read, and write, and count, and can serve at Mass in Latin.”
“That’s not bad,” she answered. “The sinner . . . may God have forgiven her! At least she did not neglect the education of the poor boy.”
When I heard her say “the sinner,” a stream of tears sprung from my eyes, and my sobs began to choke me. Somehow I manage to hear the following words:
“He’s very emotional,” the Father said, “he needs nourishment and rest, as he has not done anything other than cry since yesterday.”
“Take him, Feliciana,” the lady of the house then ordered.
But I hurried to open the large vestibule door before her and exit, to go out and breathe, to see the sun, to run out—I know not where—and scream for my mother.
But the Negro woman took me by the arm, and more dragged than led me along the length of the patio. She continued to drag me through the passageway and on through the inner patio, until she finally stopped in front of a small, half-opened door and said:
“You can go in. The lady very sick. . . . I’m leaving!”
I went in. The room which I was to occupy was small; it had a tall, round, completely opened window through which one could see a roof full of yellowish moss and a piece of sky. I was surprised to find there, still unarranged, my small bedstead, the coffer, the table, and the chairs from our small house. I thought of them as old acquaintances suffering just like me; I thought that perhaps they had followed me to talk about Rosita. One of the chairs, which was placed facing the door, seemed to be tenderly offering its arms to me; I knelt down before it, leaned forward on the seat, and cried, completely losing track of time. Night had already fallen when I heard Feliciana’s voice again.
“Dinner is served,” she said.
I followed her mechanically to the dining room; we entered through one of the doors of the inner patio that faced my new room. It was a spacious hall with a burnished ceiling like the one in the private chapel. In the corners there were tall, large wood armoires that were painted red and had gold fillets. In the center there was a long, wide, sturdy table surrounded by chairs like mine, but with more intricate tooling; they were also painted red and gilded in gold, like the armoires. A single, metal oil lamp above the table lighted the completely empty room.
Feliciana left me standing next to the door, went to open another door that led to an antechamber, and repeated her laconic invitation to dinner. A moment later, I saw three other servants enter, one after the other, each bringing in a child. The first I recognized as the mulatta who I had already seen in the private chapel; the boy with her was my age or a little younger, pale, with listless eyes, covered from head to foot in a wool blanket. The other two mestiza servants, both very young still, each carried a smaller child in their arms. The latter were robust, fair, pinkish, and only partially dressed; they were laughing and playing with the braids of the women who carried them. The oldest was carefully placed in one of the chairs; the other two were made to sit on the table itself, on either side of the metal oil lamp. Meanwhile, Feliciana had opened one of the armoires that I mentioned with a small key attached to a large ring that hung from her waist; she removed three biscuits and the same number of bowls and cups, in which she served the children some kind of soup, and milk with sugar.
The mulatta made the child in her care eat with a spoon; the other two ate on their own, with their hands, finally throwing the leftovers on the table or the floor. Once dinner was over, they all left as they had entered.
I was about to do the same, in spite of the hunger I felt, when Feliciana tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, and put a bowl with a spoon in my hands. I went to the table and ate avidly. Nature took over; it was able to ignore the suffering of the soul, which is what happens at that blessed age.
“Leave now,” the Negro woman said to me as soon as I had finished my portion. “There’s a stub of candle for you and the pongo will keep you company so you won’t be afraid of the duende.”2
That is what I saw of the primogenital family of Márquez y Al-tamira the first time I entered their house. I believe it is now necessary to finish introducing them to my readers and to say some thing about their customs, so that I may then continue with the humble story of my own life.
Doña Teresa Altamira, whom we left looking so plaintive, wearing her widow’s headdress in her private chapel, had found herself as the sole heir presumptive of the estate of a wealthy primogeniture3 when Don Fernando Márquez—a criollo like her, from one of the illustrious founding families of our town—had asked for her hand. She could not, nor did she want to, refuse the match; apparently, she did not have other options, nor would it have been possible for her to find a more handsome and elegant gallant who could have suited her any better. But there was an obstacle, which she expounded to him, shaking with fear. Her father, Don Pedro de Alcántara Altamira, who had founded the primogeniture in order to lend glory to his family name, demanded that whoever pretended to have the honor of being his son-in-law take the fa-ther-in-law’s name and give it to his children instead of his own, as was the custom.
Don Fernando categorically refused to consummate the sacrifice, and I believe he would have directed his attention elsewhere, when it occurred to Doña Teresa to call to her assistance the most old-fashioned Baccalaureate of those times, Don Sulpicio Burgul-la, who solved the entire affair in the simplest of manners and obtained the greatest triumph of his life.
“Accentus, my dear Don Pedro,” he said to the obstinate father, “est, quo signatur, an sit longa, vel brevis syllaba.”4
“And what about it?” the father implored, not having understood a single word.
“By dropping the accent and changing just two letters, my noble and dear friend, one can change Márquez to Marquis.”
“So that Don Fernando. . . .”
“Would be the Marquis of Altamira!”
“And my grandchildren. . . .”
“Simillime, Lord Don Pedro, per omnia saecula saeculorum!”5
The obstacle removed, the fiancés were joined in facie ecclesiae 6 with grand pomp and circumstance in the chapel of the wealthiest of their estates, with dances by their Indians organized in dance troops, and races and bull runs for their guests. And they received, above all else, Don Pedro de Alcántara Altamira’s greatest blessing, as he was able to give his nunc dimittis,7 as he saw that not only would his family name survive, but that he would have before him, with time, a title of nobility for his grandchildren: the Marquisate of Altamira.
The married couple lived in plenitude and was blessed with three legitimate children. But two weeks before my arrival, Don Fernando was summoned by God, by means of one of the fatal pneumonias that strike in September. And it had struck precisely right after he had been able to thank God for recovering from a wound suffered from a stone thrown during the uprising of the 14th. Doña Teresa wept over him bitterly, without forgiving the «rebels» for that wound that, according to her, had caused such irreparable and eternal misfortune. Furthermore, she said that because of all the love she had felt for him and in order to carry out the request that he had made to her right before he died, she was now consummating the sacrifice of taking into her house and placing next to her own children a vagabond boy who might very well be the Devil himself.
She had always lived withdrawn in her private chapel, but now she only left it at night to go to sleep. In addition to her confessors, she received many visits from her lady friends. Neither her lap dog nor her two favorite servants were ever absent from her side. When the administrators from her estates came for an audience, they would leave their spurs at the door and appear before her briefly in order to receive whimsical orders, which were almost always contradictory. If there was a serious affair, she would send for her confessor and his Honor8 Burgulla in order to consult with them.
In the meantime, the children ran around on their own or were handed over to the care of the servants, over whom the Negro woman Feliciana exercised her tyrannical authority, beginning with her own husband, Don Clemente. The oldest boy, the primogeniture, had the same name as his grandfather, with the preordained additions. As I have already mentioned, he was weak and sickly; he did not even know how to read, and the only thing he thought about was entertaining his tediously vegetative existence by playing with his toys. The second, Agustín, was seven years old, healthy, alert, and lively, undertaking the most inconceivable of pranks, rummaging through everything from the barn to the drawing room, and even invading the private chapel at times. Carmen, the youngest of the three at five years of age, was an enchanting child, playful like Agustín, but obedient and very amiable.
Among the servants, the only ones I have not yet described are Don Clemente and Paula. The former was a sambo, which is to say a mestizo resulting from a cross between an Indian man and a Negro woman; he had the worst traits of both races: he was cunning, base, lazy, selfish, and cruel. Submissive to Feliciana’s orders—who was the one of the two who wore the man’s pants—he in turn tyrannized the others, especially the poor pongo, whom he always tormented without any reason whatsoever. As far as Paula, the cook, I have very little to say about her. I never saw her get involved in anything other than her stews; she did not even live in the same house.
The pongo was, as is known, some unfortunate, miserable, brutish Indian who came every week from the estates to fulfill his duties as a personal servant.
I did not know what the conditions were under which I found myself in that house. The following day I heard them refer to me as the «foundling waif»—in other words, the abandoned child. I was not given any servant duties, but I was also never told what to do. Left to my own devices, I became melancholy, taciturn; I would spend hours on end in my room, at times crying, at others lost in sad thoughts, some of which I could not even remember later. I would be called to eat after the other children had already left the table. I was warned that when night fell, as soon as I heard the ringing of the bells, I was to attend the saying of the rosary in the presence of the lady of the house while Don Clemente sang the melody. Finally, I was ordered not to set foot on the street. In only one person out of all those people, the young girl Carmen, did I inspire a deep sympathy, a feeling of tenderness and, surprisingly, of compassion. In order to amuse myself during the free time I had all day long, I decided to teach her the little that I knew. This stirred up her brothers’ hatred toward me, each of whom, in their own way, wanted me to be «theirs»: one wanted me to be his biggest toy, the other his horse.
Luckily, before long, I made a discovery that made me very happy. Close to my room there was a passageway. To one side of it were the kitchen, the pantry, and the woodshed; to the other were the stables and henhouse, and it ended at a door with a large, simple handle. One day I saw Paula open and go through it and come back out with some printed papers in her hand, which she doubtless needed in order to make some pie in the oven. My curiosity was piqued; I could not keep myself from going to take a quick look at that unknown part of the house. Through the door I found a spacious corridor that faced a small, abandoned garden and led to a wide open room. Continuing my exploration, I saw that the room was full of parchment-bound books. From among these, four volumes that were better bound, in sheepskin, with decorations and gold lettering on the spine, drew my attention. I opened one of them. From the middle of a vignette engraved with figures of captured Indians and the spoils of war, I read the following: “The General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America, Commonly Called the West-Indies, From the First Discovery Thereof, written by Antonio de Herrera, his Majesty’s Chief Chronicler of the Indies, and his Chronicler of Castile.”9 Looking at once through some of the pages, I found engravings and read names that even I knew: Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, and so on.
Those books represented a priceless treasure to me. I therefore decided to take them to my room right away; but in order to avoid Paula’s daily destruction of the books, I stopped at the kitchen door and said to her, so that she would mend her ways, that the lady of the house must not know what she was doing.
“You’re such a fool!” she answered. “Do you think that the lady of the house or the children would waste their time like you waste yours? Don’t you know that my deceased master, Lord Don Fernando, may God keep him in His Heavenly bliss, never opened any of those books of his father’s? And what would you want a primogeniture to do with them?”
Embarrassed, shamed by these explanations, I excused myself as well as I could and hurried back to my small room, while Paula kept laughing at my simplemindedness. The other servants who were gathered in the kitchen, as well as the child Agustín, all began to join in on the laughter. But I had at last something to console my abandonment; from then on I visited the room with the books frequently. With them, I slowly filled my long table, which for many years had only seen upon it the one solitary volume of Cervantes’ novel.