The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  Everywhere I have seen

  long caravans of sadness,

  haughty and melancholy

  drunkards of somber cast,

  and standing aside, the pedants

  who watch, say nothing, and think

  they know, because they never

  drink of the wine in taverns.

  Bad people, who fill the roads

  and are a plague on the earth.

  And everywhere I have seen

  people who dance or play

  when they can do it, and till

  their little plots of ground . . .

  They are good people, who live,

  work, and pass by, and dream,

  and one day, like all the others,

  go to their rest in the earth.

  The depressing ugliness of life as Cela saw it in Madrid (and that is an ugliness which would escape a tourist or visitor bent on seeing the color and vitality of Spain) may have turned him into an escapist, in his peculiar way, since he could not have turned himself into a revolutionary. Certainly he escaped into a static world on his journey to the Alcarria. But then he came back to write of the hungry present and to work out the intricate pattern of his novel, penetrating from this present to the human essence underneath—no escapist task, but no flat realism either.

  I imagine that somewhere behind the buzzing drones of “the hive” Cela visualizes the heraldic figure of the sturdy old tramp he met (or dreamt of) in the Alcarria, a Sancho Panza grown old, wise and patient. “The old man has white hair and brilliant blue eyes. He goes in tatters, his flesh poorly covered, but he does not look a beggar. . . . The old man has a nourishing smell, a warm, mellow smell that makes for good sleep.” The two slept together under the stars one night, sharing their blankets. Afterwards the old man said: “And if we’ve slept under one blanket for a night, it’s that we’re friends.” His donkey, old, mangy, saddle-sore, and wise like his master, had the incongruous name of Sparrow. The old man had no other possessions, but worried about the donkey’s fate after his death. He had dictated the words “Take me, my master is dead,” to a village apothecary who wrote them in a copperplate hand on a slip of paper, as the old man’s last will. This paper was hidden in the donkey’s harness; as soon as his master was to feel his own death near, he would send the donkey off, to a new, unknown master. In the meantime, man and donkey were tramping the dusty roads before daybreak, without haste, serenely alive. The old man would take small jobs when he needed a little money. Cela later met him emptying a septic tank, and the man offered him half his earnings because they were friends: no poverty and no external humiliation could impair this secure human dignity.

  The profound bitterness of The Hive is centered in the loss of human dignity. But this is not the whole story, not even in Spain today. Cela’s own way of telling a fraction—an important fraction—of the disturbing truth is an act of revolt and an act of faith in spite of everything. This, as much as his art, deserves our response.

  A Note on the Translation

  The Spanish use of surnames and titles of address is often confusing to non-Spaniards and requires explanation, especially in connection with a book in which the author lays great store on mapping out the exact inter-relationships and social status of his characters.

  Every Spanish man and woman carries legally a surname consisting of the father’s family name followed by the mother’s family name. A man called Ramiro López Puente thus carries the name of his father, López, and that of his mother—and her father—Puente. It would be perfectly correct to call him Mr. López, and quite wrong to call him Mr. Puente. An occasional “y” inserted between the two surnames is nothing but a frill adopted by some families, especially if they want to stress their illustrious descent; and very long names, in which three or four different families appear in sonorous glory, are not infrequent in the aristocracy. All this explains why characters introduced by the author with their complete, composite and long-winded surnames may be called only by the first—the father’s—name a few lines further down.

  Women do not lose their maiden name on marrying, and legally they never acquire their husband’s name, although they may add it, for convenience’s sake, by means of the particle de, which has nothing to do with the French de indicating a title of nobility. Isabel Montes de Sanz is the widow of a man called Sanz, but her acquaintances would always speak of her as Doña Isabel Montes, which is her only legal name, or as ‘‘the widow of Sanz.”

  Another source of confusion is the use of Señor, Señorito, Don and Señora, Señorita, Doña. Señor corresponds, of course, to Mr., Señora to Mrs., Señorito to Mr. or Young Master, Señorita to Miss; used without an added name, they figure in everyday speech exactly as “sir,” “madam” and “miss” do in English. In addition, however, servants often address their master and mistress by the more affectionate diminutives Señorito and Señorita respectively. Unmarried women are always Señoritas, unless age and position earn them the courtesy title of Doña.

  Don and Doña are always used with the Christian name which may or may not be followed by the surnames. To call a man Don Pérez—Don Smith or Brown—is as much of a solecism as to speak of Sir Smithers, and the same applies to Doña. Strictly speaking, these titles should be reserved to people of a certain social or professional standing, much in the same way as Esquire used to be. In practice, Spanish custom has changed, but there are still certain limits to the use of Don and Doña. Workers and peasants are called Señor or Señora with the Christian name, but not the surname, if they are given a title at all. If somebody hitherto known as Señor Juan is suddenly addressed as Don Juan, it can only mean a rise in social position, or in wealth, or a form of irony. Thus, a whole pattern of social inter-relationships can be expressed by the use of various modes of address.

  The translation has tried to render all these shades as faithfully as possible. On one point, however, there can be no satisfactory translation: the Spanish use of the familiar tú and the formal listed, which are inevitably merged in the English “you.” Still, this insoluble problem is not confined to translations from the Spanish, and the translator has frequently been able to indicate the greater or lesser degree of familiarity.

  THE HIVE

  Chapter One

  DON’T let’s lose our sense of proportion, I’m sick and tired of telling you it’s the only thing that counts.”

  Doña Rosa comes and goes between the café tables, bumping into the customers with her enormous backside. Doña Rosa often says “Hells bells” and “I’ll be beggared.” For Doña Rosa her café is the world, and everything else revolves around the café. Some people claim that Doña Rosa’s little eyes begin to sparkle when spring comes and the girls go in short sleeves. I think this is sheer gossip; for nothing in the world would Doña Rosa ever sacrifice a solid five peseta piece, spring or no spring. What Doña Rosa likes is simply to drag her great bulk about between the tables. When she is alone, she smokes cigarettes at ninety centimos the packet, and from the moment she gets up to the moment she goes to bed she drinks ojén anis, whole glasses full of the best. And then she coughs and smiles. When she is in a good mood, she sits on a stool in the kitchen and reads novels or serials, the bloodier the better: it’s all grist to her mill. Afterwards she cracks jokes and tells people about the murder in the Calle de Bordadores or the murder on the Andalusia Express.

  “Navarrete’s father was friendly with General Miguel Primo de Rivera, so he went to him, fell on his knees and said: ‘General, sir, for God’s sake reprieve my son!’ and Don Miguel, though he had a heart of gold, told him: ‘My dear Navarrete, I can’t possibly do it, your son must pay for his crimes on the scaffold.’ “

  “They were men, those fellows,” she thinks. “It takes guts.” Doña Rosa’s face is covered with blotches; it always looks as if she were changing her skin like a lizard. When she is deep in thought, she forgets herself and picks strips off her face, sometimes as long as paper streamers. Then she snaps out of i
t, begins to walk up and down again, and smiles at the customers, whom at heart she loathes, showing her blackened little teeth encrusted in filth.

  Don Leonardo Meléndez owes the shoeblack thirty thousand pesetas. The shoeblack, who is a heron—exactly like a bloated, rickety heron—had been saving money year after year only to lend it all to Don Leonardo in the end. It serves him right. Don Leonardo is a smart fellow who lives on tick and on business projects that never come off. Not that they turn out badly; they simply don’t come off at all. Don Leonardo wears resplendent ties and puts brilliantine on his hair, so heavily scented that you smell it from afar. He has the airs and graces of a grandee and an immense poise, the poise of a widely experienced man. I don’t believe he is so very experienced, but he certainly carries himself like one who has never gone short of a bank note in his wallet. He treats his creditors like dirt, and his creditors smile at him and pay their respects, at least outwardly. Someone or other actually thought of suing him and dragging him to court, but the fact remains that so far nobody has fired the first shot.

  Don Leonardo has two favorite tricks of speech; he likes to use a little French word now and then, such as Madame and rue and cravate, and he likes to say: “We, the Meléndez. . . .”

  Don Leonardo is an educated man who makes it obvious that he knows a good many things. Every day he plays a few games of checkers; he never drinks anything but white coffee. If he sees someone at a nearby table smoking American cigarettes, he asks them courteously: “Could you help me out with a cigarette paper? I wanted to roll myself one, but now I find I’ve run out of paper.”

  Upon which the other confesses: “Sorry, but I don’t use them myself. If you’d like one of these. . . .”

  Don Leonardo then looks doubtful and waits a couple of seconds before answering: “Oh, well, let’s smoke light tobacco for a change. Not that I’m partial to the weed, you know.”

  Sometimes the guest at the other table only says: “I’m afraid I’ve no cigarette papers on me.” And then Don Leonardo is left with nothing to smoke.

  With their elbows on the scaly marble of the round tables, the customers watch the proprietress go past almost without seeing her, while they ponder over this world which, alas, has not been all it might have been, this world in which everything has gone wrong bit by bit, though no one can ever quite understand why; perhaps because of some small thing without the least significance. Many of the marble tops were once tombstones in an old churchyard abandoned long ago; on some, a blind man passing his fingertips along the lower side of the table may still decipher the lettering: “Here lie the mortal remains of Señorita Esperanza Redondo, who died in the flower of her youth” or “R.I.P. His Excellency Señor Don Ramiro López Puente, Undersecretary in the Ministry of Public Works.”

  The customers of cafés are people who believe that things happen as they do because they happen and that it is never worth while to put anything right. At Doña Rosa’s they all smoke and most of them meditate, each alone with himself, on those small, kindly, intimate things which make their lives full or empty. Some lend a vague air of dreamy recollection to their silence; and some review their memories with rapt faces wearing the look of a poor suffering beast, an affectionate, pleading, weary beast: their foreheads resting on their hands and their eyes full of bitterness, like a sea in dead calm.

  There are certain evenings when the conversations between the tables die down, conversations about new kittens, or the food situation, or the little boy who died and there is someone who cannot remember him—”But don’t you remember?”—the little boy with fair hair who was very sweet and rather thin, always wore a fawn hand-knitted sweater, and must have been five or so. On those evenings the heart of the café has an uneven beat, like a sick man’s, and the air seems to get thicker and greyer, though now and then a cooler breath pierces it like a flash; no one knows where it comes from, but it is a breath of hope that opens, for a few seconds, a little window in each shuttered spirit.

  Don Jaime Arce, with all his impressive manner, gets bills of exchange presented to him all the time. In the café everything is common knowledge, even though it may not seem so. Don Jaime applied at a bank for a credit, got it, and signed a few bills. Then what happened, happened. He made a business deal, was cheated and left without a penny, the bills were presented for payment, and he said he could not meet them. Don Jaime Arce is undoubtedly an honest man who has bad luck in money matters, simply bad luck. Admittedly he is not a hard worker, but then he has never had a chance. Others quite as lazy as he is, or even worse, have made thousands out of a few lucky coups, met their bills, and are now riding about in taxis the whole day long and smoking good tobacco. Things did not turn out that way for Don Jaime, on the contrary. He is looking round for a job and cannot find anything. He would have taken on any work, the first that came along, but nothing has cropped up that would seem worth while; and so he spends his whole day in the café, his head against the plush back of the seat and his eyes on the gilt scrolls of the ceiling. Sometimes he will hum snatches from a musical comedy, beating time with his foot. As a rule Don Jaime is not thinking of his misfortune; in fact, he usually thinks of nothing at all. He looks at the mirror and asks himself: “Now who invented the mirror?” Or he stares fixedly, almost insolently, at someone and wonders: “Has this woman any children? She may be a virtuous old spinster.” Or: “How many consumptives are in this café just now?” Don Jaime will roll himself a very thin cigarette, no thicker than a straw, and light it. “Some people are artists at sharpening pencils to a point as sharp as a needle, and it never breaks off.” Don Jaime changes his position; one of his legs has gone to sleep. “What a mystery this is: thump-thump, thump-thump, and so on all one’s life, day and night, summer and winter—the human heart.”

  At the back of the café, by the stairs leading up to the billiard room, there usually sits a silent lady who lost her son a month ago. The boy’s name was Paco. He was studying for the post-office exams. People at first said he’d had paralysis, but later it came out that he’d died from something different. He’d had meningitis. It was quickly over, and anyway he lost consciousness at the beginning. He already knew by heart all the place names of León, Old Castile, New Castile, and part of Valencia (the province of Castellón and about half the province of Alicante); it was a great pity he died. Now his mother is left alone, as her other son, the elder one, is knocking about in the world and nobody knows where he is. In the afternoons she comes to Doña Rosa’s café, sits down by the foot of the little staircase, and stays there during the dead hours to warm herself. Since her son’s death Doña Rosa has been very affectionate towards her. Some people get pleasure out of being kind to those in mourning. They seize the opportunity to give advice, or to recommend resignation and fortitude, and have a very good time. Doña Rosa likes to comfort Paco’s mother by telling her that it is better that God took him than it would have been if he had lived on as a half-wit. The mother then looks at her with an acquiescent smile and agrees that, of course, if one comes to think of it, Doña Rosa is right.

  Paco’s mother is a widow by the name of Isabel, Doña Isabel Montes de Sanz. She is still rather good-looking; her short cape is somewhat threadbare. Apparently she comes of a good family. People in the café on the whole respect her silence, and it rarely happens that some acquaintance of hers—mostly one of the women coming back from the ladies’ room—leans over her table and asks: “Well, how is it, are you beginning to buck up?”

  Doña Isabel will smile but hardly ever answer; if she feels a little brighter than usual, she glances up at her friend and says: “You look very pretty today, dear.” Much more frequently, however, she never says a word; a wave of her hand on leaving, and that is all. Doña Isabel knows that she belongs to another class or at least to another walk of life.

  An unmarried woman who is getting a bit long in the tooth calls the cigarette boy: “Padilla!”

  “Coming, Señorita Elvira.”

  “A Triton.”
She searches her bag stuffed with tender, indecent old letters, and puts thirty-five centimos on the table.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  She lights the small cigar and, with a faraway look, puffs out a billow of smoke. Shortly afterwards she calls again: “Padilla!”

  “Coming, Señorita Elvira.”

  “Did you give him my letter?”

  “Yes, Señorita.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, he wasn’t at home. But the maid said I shouldn’t worry, she’d give it to him at suppertime without fail.”

  Señorita Elvira says nothing more and goes on smoking. Today she feels a bit funny, she has the shivers and everything she sees seems to dance in front of her eyes. Señorita Elvira leads a dog’s life, the sort of life that wouldn’t be worth living if one looked closer at it. She is doing nothing, certainly; but because she does nothing, she has nothing to eat either. She reads novels, goes to the café, smokes from time to time a small cigar, and is ready for whatever may fall into her lap. The trouble is that windfalls are few and far between, and nearly always bruised and maggoty at that.

  Don José Rodríguez de Madrid won one of the smallest prizes in the lottery at the last draw. His friends tell him: “You’ve had luck, haven’t you?”