The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  Macario smiles inwardly and very nearly smiles outwardly as well. Macario is an undernourished sentimentalist who celebrated his forty-third birthday a few days ago.

  Seoane stares vaguely at the customers of the café and thinks nothing. Seoane is a man who prefers not to think. All he asks for is that the day may pass rapidly, as quickly as possible, to be over and done with.

  Half past nine strikes on the old clock with its tiny figures that shine like gold. The clock is an almost sumptuous piece. It was brought here from the Paris Exhibition by a harebrained, penniless young marquis who courted Doña Rosa ‘way back in 1905. The little marquis, whose Christian name was Santiago and who was a grandee of Spain, died in his early youth of consumption, in El Escorial; and the clock stayed on the wall above the café counter, as if in remembrance of the hours that passed without bringing a man for Doña Rosa and a daily hot meal for the man who died. Such is life.

  At the other end of the café Doña Rosa has words with a waiter, waving her arms about. Somewhat treacherously, the other waiters watch the scene in the mirrors, with hardly any interest.

  Within half an hour the café will be empty. It will be like a man who has suddenly lost his memory.

  Chapter Two

  NOW scram.”

  “Good-by and thank you. You’re very kind.”

  “You’re welcome. Now off with you. And we don’t want to see you here again.”

  The waiter tries to make his voice sound stern and awe-inspiring. He has a strong Galician accent that robs his words of any sting of authority or violence and sweetens even his sternness. When external pressure drives a meek man to asperity, his upper lip begins to tremble as though brushed by an invisible fly.

  “I’ll leave you the book if you wish.”

  “No. Keep it.”

  Martin Marco, pale and skinny in his threadbare jacket and frayed trousers, takes leave of the waiter by touching the brim of his greasy, dismal gray hat.

  “Good-by and thank you. You’re very kind.”

  “No matter, you scram. And don’t come near us again.”

  Martin Marco peers at the waiter and would like to say something memorable.

  “Count on me as a friend.”

  “All right.”

  “I shall know how to repay.”

  Martin Marco straightens his wire-rimmed glasses and starts walking. A girl passes him whose face seems familiar to him.

  “Good night!”

  The girl looks at him for a second and continues on her way. She is very young and very pretty. She is not well dressed. Probably she is a milliner. All milliners have an air that borders on distinction. Just as all good wet nurses come from Asturias and all good cooks from the Basque provinces, the girls who make pleasant mistresses, manage to dress well and hold their own wherever you may take them, are usually milliners.

  Martin Marco drags himself slowly down the boulevard in the direction of Santa Barbara.

  The waiter hovers for an instant on the pavement before pushing open the swing door.

  “There he goes, without a penny in his pocket!”

  The people hurry past, muffled in their greatcoats, fleeing from the cold.

  Martin Marco, the man who has not paid for his coffee and who looks at the city with the eyes of a sick and harassed child, pushes his hands into his trouser pockets.

  The lights in the square glitter with a baleful, almost offensive brilliance.

  Don Roberto González raises his head from the fat ledger and speaks to the boss.

  “Would you mind letting me have fifteen pesetas in advance? Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday.”

  The boss is a kind-hearted and decent man. He deals on the black market like every mother’s son, but there is no gall in him.

  “That’s quite all right, it makes no difference to me.”

  The baker takes a fat calfskin wallet from his pocket and hands Don Roberto twenty-five pesetas.

  “I’m very pleased with you, González, the bakehouse accounts are in good shape. Here you’ve ten pesetas extra so you can buy a little something for the kids too.”

  Señor Ramón pauses briefly, then scratches his head, and mumbles:

  “Don’t say anything to Paulina.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Señor Ramón stares at the tips of his shoes.

  “I’ve my reasons, you see. I know you’re a reliable man and won’t let your tongue run away with you. But it might happen, after all, that you somehow let the cat out of the bag, and then we wouldn’t hear the end of it from her for the next fortnight. You know I’m the boss here, but you also know what women are like. . . .”

  “Don’t worry and many thanks. I shan’t talk, in my own interest.”

  Don Roberto lowers his voice. “Many thanks again.”

  “No reason to thank me. All I want is that you go on being happy in your work.”

  The baker’s words touch Don Roberto to the quick. If the baker were to be lavish with his kind phrases, Don Roberto would do his bookkeeping for nothing.

  Señor Ramón is between fifty and fifty-two. He is sturdy, with a ruddy complexion and a mustache—a man healthy in mind and body, who leads the decent life of an old-fashioned craftsman, rising at dawn, drinking red wine, and pinching the servant girls’ bottoms. When he first came to Madrid at the beginning of this century, he carried his boots slung over his shoulder so as not to wear them out.

  His biography can be told in a few lines.

  When he came to the capital, he was not yet ten years old. He took a job in a bakehouse and saved his earnings till his twenty-first year, when he had to do his military service. From the moment he came to the city to the moment he was called up he spent not as much as a centimo; he saved all his money. He ate bread, drank water, slept behind the counter, and never had a woman. When he went off to serve the king, he left his money at the Post Office Savings Bank; when he was released from the army he drew it out and bought a bakery; in twelve years he had saved twenty-four thousand reales, six thousand pesetas, all that he had ever earned, which was at an average of little over a peseta a day. In the army he had learned to read, write, and do sums, and he had lost his innocence. He opened his bakery, married, had twelve children, bought himself an almanac, and sat down to watch the days go by. The ancient patriarchs must have been very much like Señor Ramón.

  The waiter enters the café. Suddenly he feels his face go hot; he would like to cough, but rather softly, as though to get rid of the phlegm which the cold of the street has brought into his throat. Afterwards it might be easier to talk. On coming through the door he has noticed a slight pain in his temples; he has also noticed, or thought he did, that Doña Rosa’s hairy upper lip is aquiver with lascivious joy.

  “Come here!”

  The waiter goes up to her. “What is it, madam?”

  “Did you kick him?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “How often?”

  “Twice.”

  “Where did you kick him?”

  “Where I could. On the legs.”

  “Well done. That’ll teach him. Another time he won’t try to steal decent people’s good money.”

  A shiver runs dawn the waiter’s spine. If he were a determined man, he would throttle the proprietress; fortunately he is not. The proprietress is laughing on the sly, a cruel little laugh. There are people whom it amuses to see others having a bad time; to get a close view of it they haunt the slums, they take battered old things as gifts to dying people, to consumptives huddling under a vile blanket, to anemic little children with swollen bellies and soft bones, to girls who have become mothers at the age of eleven, to whores in their forties, eaten up by pustules and looking like Red Indian chiefs with the scab. Doña Rosa doesn’t even come up to this category. She prefers her emotion at home, she prefers that quiver.

  Don Roberto smiles contentedly. The poor man has been worrying because his wife’s birthday might have caught him with nothing in his pocket. It would
have been rotten luck.

  “Tomorrow I’ll get Filo some chocolates,” he thinks. “Filo’s like a kid, exactly like a little child, like a child of six. . . . With the ten pesetas I’ll buy some little thing for the children and stand myself a vermouth. . . . A ball is what they would like best. . . . You can get quite a decent ball for six pesetas. . . .“

  Don Roberto is thinking slowly, with a certain enjoyment. His head is filled with good intentions and mental dot-dot-dots.

  Harsh, shrill, jarring notes from a cheap, vulgar flamenco song drift through the panes and wooden slats of the skylight. To begin with, nobody could tell whether the singer is a woman or a young boy. Don Roberto is scratching his lips with the penholder when the concert catches his ear by surprise.

  On the opposite pavement, at a tavern door, a little boy is howling fit to burst his throat:

  “Unhappy he who takes

  From a stranger’s hand his bread,

  Ever watching the face

  If it bodes good or bad.”

  People in the tavern throw the boy a couple of coins and three or four olives, which he picks up from the ground in great haste. The boy is small, dark, and puny, as lively as a cricket. He goes bare-footed, his chest is naked, and he looks about six. He sings all by himself, clapping his hands to encourage himself and waggling his little bottom rhythmically.

  Don Roberto shuts the skylight and remains standing there in the middle of the room. It has occurred to him to call the boy and give him a copper. One real—twenty-five centimos.

  “No . . .”

  Common sense triumphant, Don Roberto recovers his optimism.

  “Yes, a few sweets. . . . Filo’s like a kid, she’s just like a . . .” In spite of the twenty-five pesetas in his pocket, Don Roberto’s conscience isn’t quite easy.

  “But that’s simply wanting to see everything black in black, isn’t it, Roberto?” a timid, leaping little voice asks in his breast.

  “Just so.”

  Martin Marco stops at the show windows of a sanitary fittings shop in the Calle de Sagasta. The shop glows like a jeweler’s or a hairdresser’s at a big hotel, and the washbasins look as if they belonged to another world, basins in paradise, with shining taps, smooth porcelain, and bright, clear, immaculate mirrors. There are white basins, green, pink, yellow, mauve, black basins, basins of every possible color. The things people think of! There are bathtubs beautifully gleaming like diamond bracelets, bidets with dashboards like a motor car’s, luxurious lavatory bowls with two lids and bellied curves, elegant low cisterns where one surely might rest one’s elbow and even keep a few select, finely-bound volumes: Hölderlin, Keats, Valéry, for occasions when constipation asks for company; Rubén Darío, Mallarmé—but especially Mallarmé—for diarrheas. . . . What filthy nonsense!

  Martin Marco smiles, as if in self-forgiveness, and turns from the shop window.

  “Life,” he thinks, “life is like this. With the money some people spend to do their necessary jobs in comfort, the rest of us might keep fed for a whole year. A nice state of things. It ought to be the aim of wars to reduce the number of people who can do their necessary jobs in comfort, and to let the rest eat a little better. The worst of it is, goodness knows why, that we intellectuals go on eating too little and doing our little duties in cafés. What can one do about it?”

  Martin Marco worries about the social problem. He has no very clear ideas about anything, but he worries about the social problem.

  “It’s a bad thing,” he sometimes says, “that there are rich and poor. It would be better if we were all equal, not too poor and not too rich, but somewhere in between. Humanity needs reforming. A scientific commission should be appointed and given the task to change mankind. At the beginning they would deal with small things such as teaching people the metrical system, but later, when they get into their stride, they would tackle the most important matters. They might even decide to pull down the big cities and build them up again, all alike, with perfectly straight streets and central heating in every building. It would cost rather a lot, but there must be money to spare in the banks.”

  A cold gust blows down the Calle de Manuel Silvela, and Martin is assailed by a suspicion that what he thinks is nonsense.

  “To hell with those nice washbasins!”

  As he crosses the street, a cyclist has to give him a push to prevent a collision.

  “Clumsy ass—I bet they let you out on a ‘conditional’ ticket!”

  The blood rushes to Martin’s head.

  “Stop—listen—stop!”

  The cyclist merely turns his head and waves him good-by.

  A man walks down the Calle de Goya, reading a newspaper. We catch up with him as he passes a small secondhand bookshop that boasts the name “Give Food To Your Mind.” A young servant girl crosses his path.

  “Good night, Señorito Paco.”

  The man turns round.

  “Oh, is it you? Where are you going?”

  “Home, Señorito. I’ve been to see my sister, the married one.”

  “Nice for you.”

  The man looks into her eyes.

  “What about it, have you got a boy friend? A girl like you can’t possibly be without a young man. . . .”

  The girl bursts into laughter.

  “Well, I’m off, I’m in an awful hurry.”

  “Good night, then, and don’t you get lost, my girl. Listen, if you see Señorito Martin, tell him I shall drop in at the bar in the Calle de Narváez at about eleven.”

  The girl walks on, and Paco follows her with his eyes until she disappears among the crowd.

  “She moves like a fawn.”

  Paco, Señorito Paco, finds all women pretty, either because he is so amorous or because he is a sentimentalist. The young girl who just spoke to him was indeed pretty, but if she hadn’t been, it would have made no difference: for Paco, they all are beauty queens.

  “Just like a fawn!”

  The man turns round again and thinks vaguely of his mother, who died years ago. His mother used to wear a black silk ribbon round her neck to restrain her double chin and held herself very well. One could see at the first glance that she came of a great family. Paco’s grandfather was a general and a marquis and died in a duel at Burgos. He was killed with a pistol shot by a deputy named Don Edmundo Páez Pacheco who belonged to the Progressist Party, was a Freemason, and held disruptive ideas.

  The girl’s curves had shown under her thin cotton overcoat. Her shoes had begun to lose their shape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, slightly slanting. “I come from my married sister’s.” Tut, tut . . . do you remember that married sister of hers, Paco?

  Don Edmundo Páez Pacheco died of smallpox at Almeria in the year of the great disaster.

  The girl had been looking into Paco’s eyes while she talked with him.

  A woman, a child wrapped in rags on her arm, begs alms, and a fat gypsy woman sells lottery tickets. A few couples love each other there in the cold ‘gainst wind and tide, close to each other, arm in arm, and warming themselves by holding hands.

  Celestino is talking to himself in the back room behind the bar, surrounded by empty casks. Celestino does talk to himself occasionally. When he was a young lad, his mother used to exclaim: “What was that?”

  “Nothing, I was talking to myself.”

  “For God’s sake, boy, you’ll go off your head!”

  Celestino’s mother was not so much of a lady as Paco’s.

  “No, I won’t give them away, I may smash them up, but I won’t give them away. Either they pay me what they’re worth or they don’t take them away from here. I won’t let anyone pull my leg, I just won’t, and nobody’s going to rob me either. It’s sheer exploitation of the businessman, that’s what it is. Either one has got will power, or one hasn’t. That’s clear. Either one is a man or one isn’t. Robbers belong in the Sierra Morena!”

  Celestino pushes his denture back into place and spits furiously on the floor.

  �
��Whatever next?”

  Martin Marco pursues his way, promptly forgetting the affair with the cyclist.

  “If this thing about the miserable situation of intellectuals had occurred to Paco, what a to-do! But no, Paco’s a bore, he doesn’t get ideas any more. Ever since they let him out he runs round like a nitwit without doing anything worth while. Before, he at least wrote verse now and then. But look at him now. I’m sick and tired of telling him, I shan’t do it again. It’s up to him. If he thinks he’ll be left in peace just because he’s doing nothing, he can think again.”

  Martin is shivering with cold and buys himself twenty centimos worth of roast chestnuts—four chestnuts—at the mouth of the underground station on the corner of the Calle Hermanos Álvarez Quintero, that mouth which gapes like the mouth of a man in the dentist’s chair and seems made to gobble up cars and lorries.

  While he eats his chestnuts, he leans against the railing and absent-mindedly spells out the name on the street sign.

  “The brothers Quintero—they were in luck, those two! Here they are: a street in the center of the town and a statue in the Retiro Park. Nothing to sneeze at!”

  Martin has occasional vague fits of respectfulness and conservatism.

  “Damn it all, they must have done something to be so famous. Only—oh, well—who’s the bright lad who dares say it?”

  Like fluttering clothes moths, unruly chips of conscious thought drift through his mind.

  “Yes: an era of the Spanish stage . . . a cycle which they undertook to complete and succeeded in completing . . . theater faithfully mirroring the healthy customs of Andalusia. . . . It all smacks somehow of charity to me, it belongs with suburban life and flag days and all that. What can one do about it? Anyway, nobody will budge them now. Here they are, and not God Almighty Himself can budge them.”

  It perturbs Martin that there exists no strict classification of intellectual values, no tidy list of brains.

  “Everything is the same, everything topsy-turvy.”