“But she called the waiter over there a fool.”
“Goodness, that’s nothing. Sometimes she calls us perverts and Reds.”
The customer cannot believe his eyes and ears. “And you don’t mind, then?”
“No, sir, we don’t mind.”
The new customer shrugs his shoulders.
“Well, well. . . .“
The cigarette boy walks off to make another round of the place. The customer is left to his thoughts.
“I don’t know who is worse, that dirty old walrus in her black dress or this bunch of boobies. If they only got together one day and took hold of her and gave her a good walloping, she might see reason. But not they, they wouldn’t dare. In their heads they’re sure to call her names all day long, but outwardly—what we’ve seen just now. ‘Out with you, you fool, you wretch, you thief.’ And they’re delighted. ‘No, sir, we don’t mind.’ I can see it all. My word, what people! That’s the way it goes.”
The customer goes on smoking. His name is Mauricio Segovia and he works at the Central Telephone Exchange. I mention all this because he may turn up again. He is a man of thirty-eight to forty, with red hair and freckles. He lives a long way off, in Atocha, and it was by pure chance he came to this part of the city. He was following a young girl who suddenly turned a corner and disappeared through the first doorway before Mauricio had made up his mind to speak to her.
The shoeblack is calling out: “Señor Suárez! Señor Suárez!”
Señor Suárez, who isn’t a regular customer either, gets up from his seat and goes to the telephone. He walks with a limp, not of the foot but from higher up. He wears a fashionable suit of a light color and a pince-nez. He looks about fifty and might be a dentist or a hairdresser. If one looks closer, one might well take him for a traveler in chemical goods. Señor Suárez has all the signs of an extremely busy man, one of those who say in a single breath: “A café exprès, nothing with it; send me the shoeblack; and, boy, get a taxi for me.”
When these very busy men go to the barber’s they have a shave, a haircut, a manicure and a shoeshine, and a look at the paper. Sometimes, in saying good-by to a friend, they announce: “From such-and-such an hour to such-and-such an hour, I’ll be at the café, then I’ll have a look in at the office, and in the evening I’ll drop in at my brother-in-law’s. You’ll find the numbers in the telephone book. Now I must go, I’ve still a lot of small things to see to.” With such men you can tell at once that they are the conquerors, the outstanding figures, the men used to giving orders.
Señor Suárez talks quietly into the telephone, in the high-pitched, rather affected voice of a pansy. His jacket is a little too short and his trousers are tight-fitting like a bullfighter’s.
“Is that you? . . . Naughty, very naughty! You are a tease. . . . Yes . . . yes. . . . All right, just as you like. . . . Good-by, precious. . . . He, he, you’re always the same. Bye-bye, ducky, I’ll pick you up in no time.”
Señor Suárez walks back to his table, smiling. Now his limp has something tremulous about it, something shivery: it is an almost lustful limp, coquettish and provocative. He pays for his coffee, asks for a taxi, gets up as soon as it arrives, and leaves, holding his head high like a Roman gladiator, oozing satisfaction, radiating bliss.
Some people follow him with their eyes until the revolving door swallows him up. No doubt there are persons who attract attention more than others. You recognize them by the sort of little star that marks their foreheads.
The proprietress makes a half-turn and goes to the counter. The nickel-plated coffee machine bubbles away, producing cups of café exprès ceaselessly, while the cash register, coppery with age, never stops tinkling.
Several waiters with flabby, sorrowful, sallow faces, enveloped in worn-out dinner jackets, are standing there, the edges of their trays resting on the marble, and waiting for the manager to hand them the orders and the small gilt or plate counters which represent the change.
The manager puts the telephone back and hands out what the waiters ask for.
“So you’ve been gossiping again, as if there wasn’t any work to do.”
“I was only ordering more milk, madam.”
“What, more milk? How much did they bring us this morning?”
“The usual, madam, sixty litres.”
“And isn’t that enough?”
“No, I don’t think that will see us through.”
“This place is worse than a Maternity Hospital. How much more did you order?”
“Twenty litres, madam.”
“Won’t there be some left over?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What d’you mean, ‘you don’t think’? I’ll be beggared! And if there is some left, eh?”
“There won’t be—at least, I believe so.”
“Yes, ‘I believe,’ it’s always ‘I believe.’ It’s easy enough to say that, but what if there is?”
“You’ll see, madam, there won’t be any left. Look how full the place is.”
“Yes, of course, ‘Look how full the place is, look how full the place is.’ That’s quickly said. But why? Because I’m fair and give good value; if not, you’d see where they’d all go to. They’re a lousy lot.”
The waiters look at the floor and try to escape notice.
“And you there, put a bit more pep into it. There are too many straight coffees on those trays. Don’t people know we have buns and sponge cake and tarts? No, they don’t, and I know why. You’re quite capable of not telling them on purpose. What you’d like is to see me ruined and selling lottery tickets in the street. But you’ll be damned first. I know who I’m dealing with. A nice lot! Now come on, get along. And pray to any saint you like that I don’t lose my head.”
The waiters march away from the counter with their trays. With them, it’s like water off a duck’s back. No one gives Doña Rosa a glance. Not one of them gives Doña Rosa a thought either.
A man of the sort who put their elbows on the table—you remember?—and rest their pale foreheads in their hands, their eyes sad and bitter, their expression almost timorous, such a man is speaking to the waiter. He attempts a meek smile, looking like a lost child that begs water at a house on the roadside.
The waiter wags his head and calls the server. The server goes up to the proprietress.
“Madam, Pepe says the gentleman there won’t pay.”
“Well, it’s up to him to get the cash any way he can. If he doesn’t get it, tell him it’ll come out of his pay packet and that’s all there is to it. It really is the limit!”
The proprietress adjusts her lenses and looks around.
“Which one is it?”
“The one over there, with the steel-rimmed spectacles.”
“What a type! That’s a good joke, that is. And such a face, too. Tell me, what’s his reason for not wanting to pay?”
“Well, you see . . . he says he’s come out without money.”
“Now that’s the last straw! In this country we’ve got more rascals than we need.”
The server speaks in a thin voice without looking Doña Rosa in the eyes: “He says he’ll come and pay as soon as he’s got it.”
The words that come from Doña Rosa’s throat sound like brass.
“They all say that, and then what happens is that for one who comes back a hundred clear out, and out of sight, out of mind. Don’t talk to me. If you breed ravens they’ll peck out your eyes. Tell Pepe he knows what to do: Into the street with the fellow, but gently, and when he’s got him out there on the pavement, two good kicks where it hurts most.”
The server ambles off, when Doña Rosa calls out to him: “Listen, tell Pepe to remember the face.”
“Yes, madam.”
Doña Rosa stays to watch the spectacle. Luis, still carrying his milk jugs, goes up to Pepe and whispers in his ear.
“That’s all she says. For my part, God knows. . . .”
Pepe goes back to the customer who rises slowly. He i
s a small man, stunted, pallid, and feeble, who wears spectacles framed in thin wire. His jacket is threadbare and his trousers frayed. He covers his head with a dark-gray felt hat, its ribbon grease-stained, and clutches a book in a newspaper cover under his arm.
“If you wish I’ll leave you this book.”
“No, no. Look here, get out into the street and don’t make more trouble and upset for me.”
The man walks to the door, followed by Pepe. They both go out. It is cold, and people are hurrying past. Newsboys are crying out the evening papers. A tram comes down the Calle de Fuencarral, clattering sadly, tragically, almost lugubriously.
The man is not a nobody, not one of the hoi polloi, not a vulgar man, one of the herd, an ordinary, standardized human being: he has a tattoo mark on his left arm and a scar in the groin. He is well read and translates a little from the French. He has assiduously followed the trends of intellectual and literary life, and would be able to quote by heart, even now, some of the essays published in El Sol. As a young man he had a fiancée who was Swiss, and he used to write futurist poetry.
The shoeblack is talking to Don Leonardo Meléndez. Don Leonardo says: “We, the Meléndez, an age-old line connected with the most ancient families of Castile, were once upon a time the masters of lands and lives. Today, as you see, we’re practically in the middle of la rue.”
The shoeblack feels admiration for Don Leonardo. The fact that Don Leonardo has robbed him of his savings seems to be something that fills him with awe and loyalty. Today Don Leonardo is affable with him, and the shoeblack takes advantage of this to frisk around him like a little lap dog. There are days, however, when he is less lucky and Don Leonardo treats him like dirt. On those days of misfortune, the shoeblack approaches him submissively and addresses him quietly, humbly.
“Anything new, sir?”
Don Leonardo does not trouble to answer. The shoeblack is not discouraged and persists.
“Terribly cold today, sir.”
“Yes.”
The shoeblack smiles. He is happy and would gladly give another thirty thousand pesetas for the response he elicited.
“A little more polish, sir?”
The shoeblack kneels down, and Don Leonardo, who hardly ever gives him a glance, peevishly puts his foot on the iron footrest of the box.
Not today. Today Don Leonardo is in a good mood. No doubt the draft project for the floating of an important limited company is taking shape in his mind.
“There was a time, mon dieu, when it was sufficient for one of us to look in at the Exchange to make everybody stop buying or selling until they saw what we were doing.”
“That was something, wasn’t it, sir?”
Don Leonardo purses his lips in an ambiguous grimace while his hand draws hieroglyphs in the air.
“Have you got a cigarette paper?” he says to the man at the nearest table. “I’d like to roll myself one with cut tobacco, but I find I’ve run out of papers.”
The shoeblack keeps quiet and pretends not to have heard: he knows his place.
Doña Rosa comes up to Elvira, who has been watching the scene between the waiter and the man who did not pay for his coffee.
“Have you seen, dear?”
Señorita Elvira tarries a little with her answer.
“Poor boy . . . perhaps he’s had nothing to eat all day, Doña Rosa.”
“What, are you going all romantic on me, too? Then we’ve had it. Nobody could have a softer heart than I have, I assure you, but that’s too much.”
Elvira does not know how to reply. The poor girl is a sentimentalist who took to a loose life so as not to starve to death, or at least not quite so soon. She has never learned to do any work and, what is more, she is neither pretty nor accomplished. At home, as a small girl, she knew nothing but abuse and disaster. Elvira came from Burgos and is the daughter of a dangerous fellow called, in his lifetime, Fidel Hernández. Fidel Hernández killed his wife Eudosia with a cobbler’s awl, was sentenced to death, and garroted by Gregorio Mayoral, the public hangman, in 1909. All he said was: “If I’d done her in with Bordeaux mixture, God himself wouldn’t have known.”
Elvira was eleven or twelve when she was left an orphan; she went to Villalón to live with her grandmother, who went round the parish with the collection box for St. Anthony’s Loaf. The poor old woman had a hard life, and when they had garroted her son, she began to waste away and died soon after. The other village girls had their fun with Elvira, pointing at the gibbet and telling her: “On one just like this they strung up your father, you nasty thing.” One day, when Elvira could stand it no longer, she ran off with an Asturian who had come to sell sugar almonds at the village fair. She stuck to him for two long years, but as he nearly broke her back with the drubbings he gave her, she sent him to hell one day, in Orense, and set up as a whore in the bawdy house kept by La Pelona in the Calle del Villar; there she had a friend, the daughter of La Marraca who used to gather faggots in the field of Francelos, by Rivadavia, and had twelve daughters, every single one a whore. From then on, it was all plain sailing for Elvira, let’s put it like that.
The poor girl is somewhat embittered, but not overmuch. She has good instincts and, timid though she is, a remnant of pride.
Don Jaime Arce, bored with doing nothing but gaze at the ceiling and think sheer drivel, lifts his head from the back of the seat, and explains to the silent lady who watches life pass by from the foot of the curling staircase that leads up to the billiard room: “All humbug . . . bad organization . . . mistakes as well, I don’t deny it. But that is all, believe me. The banks do not function properly and the notaries, with their officiousness and precipitate methods, barge in before the time and create an entanglement that nobody could make head or tail of.”
Don Jaime’s face expresses a worldly-wise resignation.
“And so things take their course: writs—complications—the bust-up.”
Don Jaime speaks slowly, with a great economy of words and a certain solemnity. He is deliberate in his gestures and takes care to let his words fall one by one, as though wanting to watch, measure, and weigh their impact. At bottom he is not insincere. The woman whose son died, on the other hand, seems like a nitwit with nothing to say; she only listens, opening her eyes wide in an odd fashion, as if she were trying to keep awake rather than to pay attention.
“That’s all, madam. Anything else, let me tell you, is just bilge.”
Don Jaime Arce is a well-spoken man, even though in the middle of a polished phrase he is apt to use unrefined words such as “bust-up” or “shemozzle” or others of the same style.
“And now, as you see—a byword. If my poor old mother were to return to this life now!”
When Don Jaime had reached his “let me tell you,” the woman, Doña Isabel Montes, widow of Sanz, began to think of her dead husband as he was when she first knew him, handsome, elegant, very straight in the back, with a waxed mustache, and twenty-three years old. A misty wave of happiness drifted vaguely through her head, and Doña Isabel smiled, most discreetly, for half a second. Then she remembered her poor little Paco and the foolish look on his face when he had meningitis, and turned sad again, abruptly and even harshly.
When Don Jaime Arce opens his eyes properly, after having turned them heavenwards to reinforce his “if my poor mother were to return to this life now,” he becomes aware of Doña Isabel and asks her gallantly: “Are you not feeling well, madam? You look a little pale.”
“Oh, no, it’s nothing, thank you very much. Just one of those ideas one gets.”
Almost against his will, Don Pablo is always looking at i Señorita Elvira out of the corner of his eye. Though it is all over and done with, he cannot forget their time together. All things considered, she was good, docile, and compliant. Outwardly Don Pablo pretends to despise her; he calls her a dirty prostitute; but inwardly it is different. In his moments of soft whispers and tenderness, Don Pablo used to think: “This isn’t a matter of sex, no, it’s a matter o
f the heart.” Afterwards he forgot this and would have let her die of hunger or of leprosy without a pang. Don Pablo is like that.
“Luis, come here. What’s the matter with that young man?”
“Nothing, Don Pablo, only that he didn’t feel like paying for the coffee he had.”
“You ought to have told me, man. He looked a decent fellow.”
“Don’t you believe it. There are a lot of spongers and rascals about.”
Doña Pura, Don Pablo’s wife, says: “Of course there are a lot of spongers and rascals about, that’s quite true. If one only knew them! What everybody should do is to work as God ordains, isn’t it so, Luis?”
“Yes, maybe, madam.”
“There you are. Then there wouldn’t be any problem. The man who works can have his coffee, and a bun as well if he feels like it, but the man who doesn’t work. . . . Now look here: the man who doesn’t work deserves no pity. The rest of us don’t live on air.”
Doña Pura is very pleased with her speech; it came off very well indeed.
Don Pablo turns again to the woman who had been frightened by the cat: “With those types who don’t pay for their coffee one has to take care, great care. You never know what sort of man you come across. The chap they’ve just put out in the street may be one of two things—a gifted creature, what you might call a true genius, like Cervantes or like Isaac Peral, or an impudent rogue. I, for one, I’d have paid for his coffee. What does a coffee more or less matter to me?”
“Of course.”
Don Pablo smiles like someone suddenly discovering that he has been absolutely right.
“That’s the sort of thing you would never find among the dumb animals. Dumb animals are nobler, they never cheat. A dear thoroughbred cat like the one that gave you such a fright just now—he, he!—is God’s own creature and all it wants to do is to play, only to play.”
A beatific smile lights up Don Pablo’s face. If his breast could be opened, his heart would be found to be black and sticky like pitch.
After a short while Pepe comes in again. The proprietress, her hands in the pockets of her apron, her shoulders thrown back, legs apart, calls for him in a dry, cracked voice sounding like the clatter of a bell with a broken clapper.
The Hive Page 4
