The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  And to the girl she said: “Look, child, all that Don Francisco wants is just to play. Anyway, it’s got to happen one day, don’t you see?”

  The Moisés family has a gay time at supper tonight. Doña Visi is radiant, Julita all smiles, almost blushing. Inside her head, her thoughts go marching on.

  Don Roque and his other two daughters have caught the infection of gaity, without knowing the cause. Only at certain moments does Don Roque recall the words Julita said to him on the stairs: “From . . . from the photographer’s.” And then the fork trembles between his fingers; until this is over, he dare not look at his daughter.

  * * * *

  After she has gone to bed, Doña Visi takes a long time to go to sleep. Her head seems to be spinning round the one subject.

  “Do you know our girl has got herself a young man?”

  “Julita, you mean?”

  “Yes, and he’s going to be a notary.”

  Don Roque turns over between the sheets.

  “Now, don’t you set the bells ringing yet. I know you’re fond of giving out every piece of news straight away through the town crier. Let’s first wait and see what comes of it.”

  “Oh, but you always pour cold water on everything!”

  Doña Visi’s sleep is full of sweet dreams. After several hours she is wakened by the sound of a small bell that calls a convent of poor nuns to the first prayer at daybreak.

  Doña Visi is in a mood to see in everything good omens, happy auguries, and reliable signs of joy and future blessings.

  Chapter Six

  MORNING.

  Half asleep, Martin hears the stir of the waking city. It is pleasant to listen, lying between the sheets next to a live woman, a live and naked woman, and to hear the sounds of the city, its rioting heartbeat. The carts of the garbagemen coming down from Fuencarral and Chamartín, coming up from Las Ventas and Las Injurias, emerging from the sad, desolate landscape of the cemetery, and passing—after hours on the roads, in the cold—at the slow, dejected trot of a gaunt horse or a gray, worried-looking donkey. And the voices of women hawkers who got up early and are on their way to set up little fruit stalls in the Calle del General Porlier. And the first, distant, indistinct motor horns. And the shouts of children going to school, satchels on their backs and morning snacks, fresh and sweet smelling, in their pockets.

  In Martin’s head the bustle in the house, closer at hand, wakes a kindly echo. Doña Jesusa, who is an early riser and takes a nap after lunch to make up for it, organizes the work of her charwomen, some of them old whores in their decline, but the rest affectionate, meek, domesticated mothers of families. In the mornings, Doña Jesusa has in seven women to help. Her two servant maids sleep till lunch time, till two in the afternoon, in whatever bed it happens to be: a mysterious bed recently left vacant, as a grave may be left, with an entire deep sea of grief caught prisoner between its iron headrails, and with the horsehair of its mattress still retaining the groan of the young husband who, almost unthinkingly, deceived his wife for the first time—and she an enchanting creature—with a common tart covered with boils and sores like a mule. Deceived his wife who was waiting up for him like every other night, knitting by the dying afterglow of the brazier, rocking the baby’s cradle with her foot, reading an endlessly long novel about love, and pondering difficult, complicated economic stratagems that would allow her, with a little luck, to buy a pair of stockings.

  Doña Jesusa, who is orderliness personified, shares out work among her daily help. In her house the bed linen is washed every day; each bed has two complete sets which are most carefully darned on the occasions when a client tears them—perhaps even on purpose, for it takes all kinds to make a world. In these days it is impossible to get bed linen. You may find sheets or material for pillow cases on the junk market, but at prohibitive prices.

  Doña Jesusa employs five washerwomen and two who do the ironing, and keeps them busy from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon. They earn three pesetas each, but the work does not kill them. The two ironers have the daintier hands, and put brilliantine on their hair; they have not resigned themselves to being finished. They have poor health and are prematurely aged. Both started their career on the streets when little more than children, and neither of them ever managed to put money by. And now they have to pay for it. While they work, they sing like crickets and drink whole buckets of wine like cavalry sergeants.

  One is called Margarita. Her father, now dead, used to work as a porter at the Delicias Station. When she was fifteen she had a boy friend named José; his Christian name is all she knows of him. He was a young man who frequented the open air dances at La Bombilla to pick up girls; one Sunday he took Margarita into the underbrush in El Pardo, and after that he chucked her. She began to go off the rails altogether and ended by trailing her handbag round the bars in the Plaza de Antón Martín. What came afterwards is a very vulgar story, very vulgar indeed.

  The other’s name is Dorita. She was seduced by a seminarist spending his vacation in their home village. The seminarist, who is no longer alive, had the name of Cojoncio Alba. His Christian name had been a stupid joke of his father’s, who was a great brute. He bet his friends a supper that he would christen his son Cojoncio, and he won the bet. On the day of the boy’s christening, Don Estanislao Alba, the father, and his cronies got roaringly drunk. They shouted, “Death to the King,” and cheered the Federal Republic. The poor mother, Doña Conchita Ibáñez, who was a saint, wept and could say nothing except: “Oh, what a disgrace, what a disgrace! My husband intoxicated on a blessed day like this!”

  Even many years later she would lament, on every anniversary of the christening: “Oh, what a disgrace, what a disgrace! My husband intoxicated on a day like this!”

  The seminarist, who later was to become a canon at León Cathedral, showed Dorita a few gaudily colored stamps depicting the life of St. Joseph of Calasanz, and so enticed her to the banks of the river Curueño, to one of the meadows, where things happened as they were bound to happen. Dorita and the seminarist both came from Valdetejo in the province of León. When the girl went with him she had a presentiment that it would lead to no good, but she let herself be taken along; she walked in a kind of foolish daze.

  Dorita had a son, and on his next vacation the seminarist refused even to see her when he came to their village.

  “She’s a wicked woman,” he said, “the spawn of the Evil One, and capable of dragging the most temperate man to perdition with her artful wiles. Let us avert our eyes from her.”

  Her parents showed Dorita the door and for a while she tramped round the countryside with the baby at her breast. The little thing went and died one night, in one of those caves above the river Burejo in the province of Palencia. The mother told no one anything. She tied stones round the dead baby’s neck and threw it into the river as food for the trout. Afterwards, when there was no longer anything to be done, she began to weep and stayed in the cave five days, seeing nobody and eating nothing.

  Dorita was then sixteen. She had the wistful, dreamy expression of a masterless dog, a stray animal.

  For some time she dragged herself round the brothels of Valladolid and Salamanca, like a battered piece of furniture, until she had collected enough money for the fare and could go to Madrid. Here she worked in a house in the Calle de la Madera, on the left-hand side going down, which was known as the League of Nations because so many of the girls were foreigners: Frenchwomen, Poles, Italians, one Russian, one or the other dark, bemustached Portuguese, but chiefly Frenchwomen—strong Alsatians looking like cowgirls, decent lasses from Normandy who had turned prostitutes to earn money for a wedding dress, sickly Parisiennes, some with a glittering past, who felt deep scorn for the chauffeur or shopkeeper when he fetched his good seven pesetas out of his pocket. She left this house because Don Nicolás de Pablos, a rich villager from Valdepeñas, took her away to marry her at the registrar’s.

  “What I want,” said Don Nicolás to his nephew Pedrit
o, who wrote exquisite verse and studied philosophy and literature, “is a really hot piece who knows how to give me a good time, if you get my meaning, a wench with firm flesh one can hold on to, and nothing flabby about her. All the rest is flimflam and only good for literary games.”

  Dorita gave her husband three children, but all three were born dead. The poor girl gave birth the wrong way round, so that the babies came out feet first and were, of course, smothered on their way.

  Don Nicolás left Spain in ‘39 because he was suspected of being a Mason, and nothing was ever heard of him after. When the little money he had left behind was eaten up, Dorita, not daring to approach her husband’s family, had once more to go out on the streets. Yet although she was very willing and tried hard to please, she could not get a regular clientele. This was at the beginning of 1940, and she was no longer exactly young. Moreover, there was plenty of competition from very attractive young girls. And from many young ladies, who did it for nothing, simply for their own amusement, and so took the bread out of the mouths of others.

  Dorita tramped round Madrid till she met Doña Jesusa.

  “I’m looking for another reliable woman to do my ironing for me. You can take it on. All you have to do is dry the sheets with the iron and press them a bit. I’ll give you three pesetas, but there’s work every day, and you’ll have the afternoons free. And the nights.”

  In the afternoons, Dorita now accompanies a crippled lady on her walks in the Paseo de Recoletos or to the Café María Cristina to hear a little music. For this she is paid two pesetas and the price of a white coffee by the lady, who herself drinks chocolate. The lady’s name is Doña Salvadora; she used to be a midwife. She has a foul temper and does nothing but complain and grumble. She constantly uses bad language and says that the world is only fit to be burned because there is no good in it. Dorita bears with her and agrees to everything she says; after all, she has to safeguard her two pesetas and her nice cup of coffee in the afternoons.

  The two ironers, each at her own table, sing as they work and bang their flatirons on the patched-up sheets. Sometimes they talk.

  “I sold all my rations yesterday. I don’t want them. I got four-fifty for my half pound of sugar. And three for my half-pint of olive oil. The seven ounces of dry beans I got rid of for two; they were maggoty. But I’m keeping the coffee.”

  “I’ve given my rations to my daughter, I always give her the whole lot. She takes me out for a meal once every week.”

  From the attic room, Martin hears them. He cannot make out what they say. He hears their off-key singing and their thumps on the tables. He has been awake for a long time, but without opening his eyes. He prefers to feel the movements of Pura, who gives him an occasional kiss, taking care not to wake him, and pretends to be asleep so that he should not have to move. He is aware of the girl’s hair on his face, of her naked body under the sheet, of her breath that is at times a faint, almost imperceptible snore.

  In such a manner he lets more time go by; this is his first and only contented night in many months. Now he feels a new man, as if he were ten years younger, a mere boy. He smiles and opens one eye, slowly and gradually.

  Pura, with her elbows propped on the pillow, is contemplating him. As she sees that he is awake, she too smiles.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Very well, Purita. And you?”

  “I did, too. It’s nice with a man like you. You don’t bother a girl.”

  “Never mind. Tell me something else.”

  “Just as you like.”

  They say nothing for a short while. Pura gives him another kiss. “You’re a romantic.”

  Martin smiles, with something near sadness. “No, simply a sentimentalist.”

  Martin strokes her face. “You’re pale, you look like a bride.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Yes, just like a newly wed bride.”

  Pura turns grave. “Well, I’m not.”

  Martin kisses her eyes gently, like a poet of sixteen.

  “For me you are, Pura. Of course you are.”

  The girl, profoundly grateful to him, gives him a smile of wistful resignation. “If you say so. It wouldn’t be so bad either.”

  Martin sits up in bed. “Do you know a poem by Juan Ramón that begins, ‘Lofty and tender image of consolation’?”

  “No. Who’s Juan Ramón?”

  “A poet.”

  “He writes verse, you mean?”

  “Of course.”

  Martin glances at Pura almost in fury, but only for an instant. “Listen:

  ‘Lofty and tender image of consolation,

  Dawn breaking over all my sorrows’ sea,

  Lily of peace, whose scent is purity,

  Divine reward for my long tribulation!’ “

  “How sad that is, and how beautiful.”

  “You like it?”

  “And how!”

  “Another time I’ll tell you the rest.”

  With his body stripped, Señor Ramón is washing in a deep cauldron full of cold water, splashing it over himself.

  Señor Ramón is a strong man with a hard body, a vigorous eater who never catches colds, a man who drinks his wine, plays dominoes, pinches the servant girls’ bottoms, gets up at dawn, and has worked all his life.

  Señor Ramón is no boy any more. Now that he is a rich man, he no longer watches the sweet-smelling, unsanitary oven where the bread is baked; since the end of the war he stays in the shop all the time. He looks after it with loving care, tries to satisfy all his customers, and has worked out a fanciful but meticulous order of service according to age, standing, circumstances, and even looks.

  “Get up, girl. What d’you mean by staying in bed at this time of the day, like a young lady?”

  The girl gets up without a word and has a quick wash in the kitchen.

  In the mornings the girl has a faint little cough, almost unnoticeable. Occasionally she catches a slight chill, and then her cough sounds more hoarse, as though dryer.

  “When will you give up that wretched consumptive?” her mother asks her on some mornings.

  And then the girl, who is gentle as a flower and, as a flower, capable of letting herself be torn open without a sound, is overcome by a desire to kill her mother.

  “I wish you would die, you poisonous old snake,” she says under her breath.

  In her thin cotton overcoat, Victorita runs along to the printing house El Porvenir in the Calle de la Madera, where she works as a packer and has to be on her feet all the blessed day long.

  There are times when Victorita is colder than usual and feels a need to cry, an immense need to cry.

  Doña Rosa is a fairly early riser; she goes to seven o’clock Mass every morning.

  At this time of the year, Doña Rosa sleeps in a warm nightdress, a flannel nightgown of her own invention.

  On her way back from church Doña Rosa buys herself breakfast fritters, enters her café through the side entrance in the doorway—her café that looks like a deserted cemetery, with the chairs upside down on the tables, and the coffee urn and the piano sheathed in covers—pours herself a large glass of anis, and has her breakfast.

  While she has it, Doña Rosa thinks how uncertain these times are; she thinks about the war, which the Germans seem to be losing, God forbid; she thinks that the waiters, the manager, the server, the musicians, and even the messenger boy all come with more demands, claims, pretensions, and hoity-toity ideas every day there is.

  “But it’s me who’s the boss here, whether you like it or not. If I want, I can pour myself another glass, and that’s nobody’s business but mine. And if I want to I can throw this bottle at the mirror. If I don’t do it, it’s because I don’t want to. And if I like, I can shut up the place for good, and then not another coffee gets served here, not if it were to God Almighty Himself. It’s all mine, and good hard work it cost me to get it going.”

  In the early morning Doña Rosa feels the café more hers than at any
other time.

  “The café is like the cat, only bigger. It’s mine, as much as the cat is. I can give it black pudding or beat it to death, just as I feel like.”

  Don Roberto González has to reckon that it takes him half an hour’s walk from his house to the Council offices. Unless he is very tired, Don Roberto González goes everywhere on foot. By taking a little walk you stretch your legs and you save one-twenty a day, thirty-six pesetas a month, very nearly four hundred in the course of a year.

  Don Roberto breakfasts on a cup of malt coffee with very hot milk and half a small French loaf. The other half he takes along with a little sheep cheese from La Mancha, to have a snack in the middle of the morning.

  Don Roberto does not complain; others are worse off. After all, he has his health, which is the main thing.

  The boy who sings flamenco songs sleeps under a bridge on the road to the cemetery. The boy who sings flamenco belongs to a sort of family of gypsies, the sort of clan in which every member fends for himself as best he can, with complete freedom and autonomy.

  The boy who sings flamenco gets wet when it rains, frozen when it is cold, grilled in August when the meager shade under the bridge gives him scant shelter: this is the old Law of the God of Sinai.

  The boy who sings flamenco has one foot that is slightly twisted. He stumbled over a pile of brushwood, felt a sharp pain, and went limping for some time. . . .

  Purita strokes Martin’s forehead.

  “I’ve got five pesetas or so in my bag. Would you like me to send for something for breakfast?”

  In his contentment Martin has lost his shame. It happens to everybody.

  “Please, do.”

  “What would you like? Coffee and fritters?”

  Martin gives a little laugh. He is very nervy.

  “No, coffee and two buns, don’t you think?”