The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  Nati searches in her bag and feels for Marco’s hand under the table.

  “Here, that’s fifty. Use the change to get me a present.”

  Chapter Four

  THE policeman Julio García Morrazo has been patroling the Calle de Ibiza for a full hour. The light of the street lamp shows him walking up and down, never going very far away. The man walks slowly, as though in deep thought, and seems to be counting his steps, forty down, forty up, and then the same again. Occasionally he adds a few steps and goes as far as the corner.

  The policeman Julio García Morrazo is from Galicia. Before the war he did nothing; he spent his time taking his blind father from one saint’s fair to the other, singing songs in praise of St. Sibrán and playing the small guitar. Sometimes, when there was wine to help, Julio played the bagpipes for a short while, but on the whole he preferred to dance while someone else played the bagpipes.

  When the war broke out and he was called up, Julio García Morrazo—the policeman—was a young man bursting with life like a yearling steer. He had an urge to leap and buck like a wild colt, and was much given to fat sardines, full-bosomed girls, and Ribero wine. One unlucky day on the Asturian front he got a shot in the ribs, and from that time Julio García Morrazo began to lose weight and would not get well; the worst was that his injury was not serious enough to get him dismissed from the service as unfit. He had to go back to the front and never had a chance to recover his health.

  After the end of the war, Julio García Morrazo found someone to recommend him and joined the police.

  “You’re no longer fit for working on the land,” said his father, “and anyway you don’t like working. Now, if they took you on for the Customs Police. . . .”

  Julio García Morrazo’s father felt too old and tired to like the idea of going back to saints’ fairs.

  “I’m going to stay at home. I can get along on what I’ve put by, but it’s not enough for the two of us.”

  For some days Julio pondered, turning the matter over in his mind, and finally, when he saw that his father remained firm, he came to a decision.

  “The Customs Police won’t do, it’s too difficult because all the corporals and sergeants put in for it. But I wouldn’t mind the ordinary police.”

  “All right, that wouldn’t be so bad either. All I say is that there isn’t enough here for both of us. I wish there were!”

  “Oh, well. . . . “

  The policeman Julio García Morrazo’s health improved somewhat, and with the time he put on nearly a stone in weight. True, he was never again the man he had been, but he did not complain: others next to him in the battle line had been left there, stretched on their backs. No need to look further than his cousin Santaguiño who got a shot in the knapsack where he carried his handgrenades; the biggest piece they found of him was not four inches long.

  The policeman Julio García Morrazo is happy in his job. Being able to have free rides on the trolley greatly impressed him from the start. “Of course,” he tells himself, “it’s because I’m part of the authorities now.”

  In the barracks he is well liked by all his superiors because he is obedient and disciplined and has never been too big for his shoes like certain of his comrades, who fancy themselves lieutenant generals. The man does what he is told, never sulks, and finds everything all right; he realizes that this is the only thing to do, and it never occurs to him to have ideas beyond it.

  “As long as I carry out orders,” he says to himself, “they can’t ever tell me off. Anyway, the one in command has got to command. That’s why they have stripes and stars, and I haven’t.”

  The man is most adaptable and wants no complications.

  “As long as they give me hot meals every day and all I’ve got to do is to amble behind black marketeers. . . .”

  At suppertime Victorita has a quarrel with her mother.

  “When will you give up that consumptive of yours? Look here, what do you get out of it anyhow?”

  “I get out of it what I want.”

  “Yes, germs—and one day a big belly.”

  “I know what I’m doing. What happens to me is my own business.”

  “You? A fine lot you know. You’re a little sniveler, that’s all, and don’t know half of what’s what.”

  “I know as much as I need to.”

  “All right, but don’t forget one thing: if he gets you in the family way, you won’t set foot in this house again.”

  Victorita turns white.

  “Is that what grandmother said to you?”

  Her mother gets up and slaps her face twice with great gusto. Victorita never even moves.

  “You hussy! You bad girl! You’re a common slut, that’s what you are. That’s no way to speak to your mother!”

  With her handkerchief, Victorita wipes a few drops of blood from her gums.

  “And no way to speak to your daughter either! If my fiancé is ill, that’s bad enough, without your calling him a consumptive all the time.”

  Victorita jumps up and leaves the kitchen. So far her father has not spoken a word. Now he says: “Let the girl go to bed. It isn’t right to talk to her like that. What about it if she’s in love with the lad? Let her. The more you say, the worse you make it. Anyway, the poor chap won’t last long.”

  In the kitchen they can just hear the half-choked sobs of the girl, who has thrown herself face down on her bed.

  “Turn off the light, kid. You don’t need it for sleeping.”

  Victorita fumbles for the bulb and turns it out.

  Don Roberto rings the bell at the door of his apartment. He had left his keys in his other pair of trousers. This always happened to him, although he constantly tells himself: “Take the keys from the other trousers, take the keys from the other trousers.” His wife comes to open the door to him.

  “Hullo, Roberto.”

  “Hullo.”

  The woman does her best to be kind and pleasant with him. He works like a black to keep them afloat.

  “You must be frozen stiff. Put on your slippers, I’ve kept them warm for you next to the gas ring.”

  Don Roberto puts on his slippers and the old jacket he wears at home, a frayed coat of a suit which had once been dark brown with a thin white stripe that made it look smart and in very good taste.

  “How are the children?”

  “Fine. They’re in bed now, the darlings. The baby didn’t want to go to sleep. I don’t know, perhaps he isn’t quite well.”

  The couple go to the kitchen; it is the only room where they can stay in winter.

  “Has that scatterbrain been round?”

  His wife avoids giving an answer. The two may have met in the doorway, and then she would put her foot in it. It happens sometimes that one puts one’s foot in it precisely if one tries to make things go straight and avoid complications, and then there is the devil to pay.

  “I’ve got fried pilchards for supper.”

  Don Roberto is highly pleased. Fried pilchards is one of his favorite dishes.

  “Excellent!”

  His wife smiles at him indulgently.

  “And with a little money I saved by shopping in the market, I’ve bought you half a bottle of wine. You work so hard, and a drop of wine now and then is so good for you!”

  That “beast” González, as his brother-in-law calls him, is a poor little man, a decent father of a family with the worst luck in the world, who is very prone to tenderness.

  “How good you are, darling! I’ve thought it so often. Some days I wouldn’t know what to do, if it weren’t for you. Well, we’ve got to be patient. These first few years till I’ve made my way are the worst. The first ten years. After that it will be smooth going, you’ll see.”

  Don Roberto gives his wife a kiss on her cheek.

  “Do you love me a lot?”

  “A lot, Roberto—you know I do.”

  The pair of them have a supper of soup, fried pilchards, and one banana. After the dessert, Don Roberto fixes his lo
ok on his wife.

  “What would you like me to give you tomorrow?”

  The woman smiles, full of joy and gratitude.

  “Oh, Roberto! I’m so happy! I thought you wouldn’t remember it this year either.”

  “Hush, you silly. Why shouldn’t I remember? Never mind about last year, but this year. . . .”

  “But you see, I don’t think I matter very much.”

  If she were to go on for another moment reflecting on her own insignificance, her eyes would fill with tears.

  “Now, tell me, what shall I give you?”

  “But, dear, when we’re so badly off. . . .”

  Don Roberto stares at his plate and lowers his voice.

  “I asked for a small advance at the bakery.”

  His wife looks tenderly at him, with a touch of sadness.

  “How silly of me! In talking I’ve forgotten to give you your glass of milk.”

  While she goes to the larder, Don Roberto continues: “They also gave me ten pesetas to buy a little something for the children.”

  “You’re so kind, Roberto!”

  “No, dear, that’s just your way of talking. I’m no better than the rest and no worse.”

  Don Roberto drinks his milk; his wife always has a glass of milk for him, to keep him well nourished.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting a ball for the kids. If there’s something left, I’ll have a vermouth. I didn’t mean to tell you anything about it. But there you are. I can’t keep a secret.”

  Don Mario de la Vega, the owner of a printing works, rings up Doña Ramona Bragado. The man wants some news about a matter she has been pursuing for the last few days.

  “Besides, you’re in the same trade. The girl works at a printer’s, I believe she’s still an apprentice.”

  “Oh, yes? In what firm?”

  “It’s called Tipografía El Porvenir, in the Calle de la Madera.”

  “I know. Good, excellent, so it all stays in the profession. Listen, you really think that . . . ? Well, you know what?”

  “Oh, yes, don’t you worry, that’s my business. Tomorrow when you close, come round to the dairy and call on me with some excuse or other.”

  “Right-oh.”

  “Very well. I’ll have her there for you—we’ll think up some reason. It looks to me as if she’s just about ripe and ready to fall. The young thing’s up to her neck in trouble and fed up with it and she won’t hold out any longer than we wish to leave her alone. She has a young man who’s ill, and wants to buy medicines for him. Those young girls in love are the easiest of all, you’ll see. It’s a sure thing.”

  “I hope it is.”

  “You’ll see for yourself. But listen, Don Mario, I’m not coming down a single penny. D’you get me? I’ve been reasonable enough.”

  “All right, we’ll talk it over.”

  “No, we won’t talk it over. Everything’s been said. Look to it, or I’ll back out.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Don Mario laughs, as though to show that he is a man of wide experience. Doña Ramona does not want to leave any loose ends.

  “Agreed?”

  “Yes, by all means agreed.”

  Returning to his table in the café, Don Mario says to the other man: “You start at sixteen pesetas the day, but I won’t hear of a labor contract, is that understood?”

  And the other replies: “I understand, sir.”

  This other man is a poor lad who has studied a bit but never managed to fit in anywhere. He has neither good luck nor good health. There is a streak of tuberculosis in his family. One of his brothers, by the name of Paco, had been sent back from the barracks because he was done for.

  By now the front doors of the houses have been shut for some time, but the world of night birds continues to send a trickle, ever more slowly, towards the buses.

  When night has fallen, the street assumes a half hungry, half mysterious air, while a little wind, prowling like a wolf, whistles between the houses.

  The men and women who make their way in Madrid at this hour are the real night strollers, who go out for the sake of going out and are possessed by an inertia that makes them stay out the whole night: the moneyed patrons of cabarets and cafés on the Gran Via, places crowded with perfumed, provocative women who sport dyed hair and impressive fur coats, black with a few white hairs here and there; or the night wanderers with a meager purse who stay at a table chatting with old cronies or go boozing from bar to bar.

  The others, the occasional night birds, who frequent cinemas and only go out at night for a set purpose, never at random, have disappeared some time ago, before the front doors are locked. First to go are the patrons of the cinemas in the center of the town; they are in a hurry, they are well dressed and try to get a taxi: the regulars of the Callao, the Capitol, the Palacio de la Música, who pronounce the actresses’ names almost correctly, and some of whom even receive an occasional invitation to see films at the British Embassy in that place in the Calle de Orfila. They know a lot about the cinema, and instead of saying, like the public of the cinemas in the outlying districts, “It’s a marvelous film with Joan Crawford,” they say, as though talking only to initiates, “It’s a pleasing comedy by René Clair, extremely French”; or, “It’s a brilliant drama by Frank Capra.” Not one knows exactly what is so “extremely French” about it, but it does not matter. We live, up to a point, in the age of effrontery, a spectacle which a few pure-hearted people contemplate from the ringside with amazement, without quite understanding what is being played— though it is clear enough.

  The patrons of the outer-district cinemas, the people who never know the film producer’s name, go home somewhat later, when the front doors are already locked; they are in no hurry, are less well dressed and also less harassed, at least at these hours. They walk the whole way, as though on a stroll, to the Narváez, the Alcalá, the Tivoli, the Salamanca, where they see films that are famous, even if their fame may be somewhat flyblown after running for several weeks in the Gran Via; films with beautiful, poetic names, posing tremendous human riddles which they do not always solve.

  The public of these cinemas will have to wait for some time before they see Suspicion or The Adventures of Marco Polo or If No Dawn Rises.

  On one of the occasions on which the policeman Julio García Morrazo gets as far as the street corner, he remembers Celestino, the owner of the bar.

  “That Celestino is the very devil. The things he thinks of! But he’s nobody’s fool; he’s a man who’s read a hell of a lot of books.”

  Celestino Ortiz, after recalling that passage about blind anger and the animal state, took the book, his only book, from on top of the vermouth bottles and put it away in the drawer. Strange things do happen. If Marco Martin left the bar without getting his head split open, it was thanks to Nietzsche. If Nietzsche were to come to life again. . . . !

  Behind the net curtains of her mezzanine apartment, Doña María Morales de Sierra—sister of Doña Clarita Morales de Pérez, the wife of Don Camilo, the chiropodist, who lives in the same house as Don Ignacio Galdácano, the gentleman who would never be able to attend a meeting in Don Ibrahim’s apartment because he is mad—says to her husband, Don José Sierra, technical assistant at the Ministry of Public Works: “Have you noticed that policeman? He does nothing but walk up and down, just as if he were waiting for somebody.”

  Her husband does not even answer. He is reading the newspaper, as completely out of reach as if he were living in a mute, foreign world far away from his wife. If Don José Sierra had not attained this perfect state of abstraction, he would never have been able to read the newspaper at home.

  “Now he’s coming back here again. I’d give a lot to know what he’s up to. And this is such a quiet neighborhood, with everybody so respectable. Now, if it were over there, near the building sites in the Plaza de Toros, where it’s all as black as the wolf’s gullet!”

  The building sites in the former bullring are no further than a
few dozen steps from Doña María’s mezzanine.

  “Over there it would be another story; over there they’re quite capable of assaulting you. But here? Goodness me, it’s as calm as a pond. There isn’t even a mouse stirring.”

  Doña María turns round, smiling. Her husband misses her smile, for he is still reading his paper.

  Victorita has been a long time weeping. In her head, plans and projects crowd helter-skelter: taking the veil or going on the streets—anything seems better than to stay at home. She would propose to her fiancé that they should go off together if only he were fit to work; with both of them in a job, it would be odd if they didn’t scrape together enough money to keep themselves fed. But it is only too clear that her fiancé is unfit for anything but to lie in bed, doing nothing at all and hardly speaking. It is fate. Everybody says that his kind of illness is sometimes cured with the help of plenty of food and injections; if people are not cured completely, they at least recover sufficiently to live on for many years, to marry, and to lead a normal life. But Victorita does not know where to get the money. Or rather, she does know, but has not made up her mind; if Paco were to find out, he, with his temper, would chuck her at once. And yet, if Victorita were to make up her mind to do something indecent, it would be for Paco’s sake, not for anything or anybody else. Victorita has moments in which she thinks that Paco would say: “All right, do as you like, I don’t mind.” But she soon realizes that this is untrue, that Paco could not say such a thing.

  By now she is convinced that she cannot stay at home. Her mother makes life impossible for her by preaching the same sermon all the time. Yet to take the plunge, just like this, blindly, without anyone to give her a helping hand, is very dangerous. Victorita has been thinking it out before—she sees all the pros and cons. If everything goes well it is like a smooth glide, but things hardly ever go altogether well, and sometimes they go very badly. It all depends on luck, and on having someone to turn to. But to whom could Victorita turn? Of the people she knows, not one has saved as much as fifty pesetas, not one lives on anything but a daily wage. Victorita is bitterly tired. At the printer’s she has to be on her feet all day long; in the evenings she finds her fiancé worse every time; her mother is like a cavalry sergeant who does nothing but shout; her father is a spineless little man, always half drunk, on whom it is useless to count.