“No, woman, no, not any more. I know all about it,” continued La Burlada, clutching the air with her claws. “You can’t fool me. I’ve been making enquiries. She lives in Cuatro Caminos, where she owns a farmyard. There she keeps – if you’ll pardon the word – a pig. Speaking without prejudice, it is the best pig in Cuatro Caminos.”
“Have you seen the hunchback girl who comes to fetch her?”
“Yes, of course I’ve seen her. Casiana thinks we’re idiots. That’s her daughter, and what’s more she’s a dressmaker, y’know, and uses her hump as an excuse for begging too. But she sews and earns money for the household. As I said, they’re rich, God help me, filthy rich and shameless too, cheating us all and the Holy Apostolic Church. And what’s more, she spends nothing on food, because she gets great pans of stew every day from several different houses, like the glory of God!”
“Yesterday,” said Demetria, taking her child from her breast, “I saw what they brought her.”
“What was that?”
“A rice dish with clams in it – enough for at least seven people.”
“Fancy that! Are you sure there were clams in it? Did it smell good?”
“I should say! The sacristan keeps the stewpans at his place, the people come there and fill them up and then they take it all off to Cuatro Caminos.”
“Her husband,” said La Burlada, her eyes flashing, “sells kindling and parsley, he was a soldier once and wears seven plain crosses and one with five coins on it. Quite a family, eh? Yet look at me, I’ve only eaten a crust of bread today and if Ricarda doesn’t let me stay at her place in Chamberí tonight, I shall have to sleep out in the open. What’s that you’re saying, Almudena?”
The blind man was mumbling to himself. Asked a second time, he spoke in a harsh, halting voice: “You speak of Piche? I know him. Him not husband Casiana in marriage, him hated, God in Heaven, him hated.”
“What? Do you know him?”
“I know him, him bought two rosaries off me, rosaries from my country, and a lodestone. Him money, much money. Him soup-boss up at Sacred Heart. Him push about all poor people with big stick, up in Salamanca district. Big boss, bad, very bad, won’t let us eat. Him serve government, bad Spanish government and bank people, where all money kept in boxes underground. Him keep it, him starve us to death.”
“Well, that’s the limit,” said La Burlada, bursting with righteous indignation, “if these money-grubbers really have cash in the bank vaults too!”
“Fancy that, now,” said Demetria, beginning to feed her baby again, which had started to wail. “Stop it, greedy!” she added to the child.
“Gracious me! Suck, suck, suck, I wonder how you can keep going, girl. And what do you think, Benina?”
“Me? About what?”
“Do you think they’ve got money in the bank or not?”
“What’s it got to do with me? It’s their bread and butter, let them eat it.”
“It’s our bread they’re eating, with a slice of ham on top, too, ha, ha?”
“Keep quiet, I tell you,” called out the cripple who sold The Catholic Week. “We’re all here for the same thing – and we must all behave.”
“We’ll be quiet, man, we’ll be quiet. Anyone would think you were Victor Emmanuel – the one that locked up the Pope.”
“Quiet, I tell you, and show more respect for religion.”
“Religion I have, but not in the Church like you, for I live with hunger. I have to look on and watch you feed yourself and I have to look at the packets of rich food that people bring you. But we don’t envy you, you know, Eliseo, and we’re glad to be poor and die of wind and go all together to Heaven, while you…”
“Go on, while I …”
“Well. But you are rich, Eliseo, you can’t deny that you’re rich, with The Week and what Don Senén and the Reverend give you. Everybody knows that ‘he who divides the spoil’ and so on. I’m not grumbling, God knows. Blessings on our holy poverty, and grant you more of it. No, I can say it out of gratitude, Eliseo. When I was knocked down by that coach in the Calle de la Luna – it was the day they took away that Señor de Zorrilla. I was in the hospital a month and a half, and when I came out you saw I was alone and helpless and you said: ‘Señá Flora, why don’t you start begging in a church, you’ll be out of the wind and weather and under the shelter of religion. Come with me,’ you said. ‘You’ll see how you can earn something day by day without walking the streets and you’ll be with decent poor people.’ That’s what you said, Eliseo, and I burst into tears and came along here with you. And that’s how I got here and very grateful I am for your gentlemanly behaviour. Do you know that I say a Pater Noster for you every day and ask for the Lord to make you richer than you are and for you to sell ever so many Weeks and for them to bring you good broth from the café and the Count’s house, so that you and your wife the barrow-woman can have all you want. What does it matter that Crescencia, poor old Almudena here and I only breakfast at midday on a crust of bread as hard as a blessed paving stone? I pray the Lord that you should always have enough for a nip of spirits, you need it, you’d die otherwise, and I’d die too if you didn’t get it. And I hope your two sons become Dukes! One’s a turner’s apprentice and brings six reales home every week, and the other works in a tavern in Maldonadas and gets good tips from the tarts – if you’ll forgive the expression. May the Lord bless them and keep them and let them grow year by year and I hope to see you dressed in velvet with a new leg made of mahogany and your old woman in a feather hat. I’m grateful. I may have forgotten how to eat, from all the starvation I’ve known, but I’m not one to wish anyone ill, dear, dear Eliseo, and you’re welcome to have what I don’t get; eat, drink and get drunk on it and I hope you get a house with a balcony and bedside tables and iron bedsteads with lace-covered bolsters as clean as the ones in the Royal Palace, and have sons who wear new berets and sandals with leather soles, and a daughter who wears a pink bonnet and patent leather shoes on Sundays, and I hope you get a good stove and good rugs to put beside your beds, and a kitchen with a coke oven, and new wallpaper and hundreds and hundreds of lovely pots and pans, and engravings of Christ at Canaan and Blessed Santa Barbara on the wall , and a chest of drawers full of linen and flowered lampshades, yes, and a sewing machine that doesn’t work but on top of it you can put the pile of Weeks and I hope you have lots of friends and good neighbours and access to big houses round about, with gentry who when they see you’re a cripple give you sweepings from the sugar warehouse and paper bags full of mocha coffee and top quality rice and I hope you have influence with the Ladies’ Conference and that they’ll pay your rent and your identity card and give fine linen to your wife for ironing. I hope you get all this and much more, Eliseo!”
But La Burlada’s wild flow of words suddenly stopped and a terrified silence reigned in the passageway when La Casiana made a sudden appearance at the church door. “They’re coming out of High Mass,” she said and, turning to the chatterbox, pronounced these stern words with all the force of her personality: “Burlada, back to your place, and keep that mouth shut, for we are in the house of God.”
The congregation was beginning to come out and alms were given, but it amounted to very little. It was seldom that anyone went all round giving an equal sum to all and on that day most of the few small coins of five and two céntimos that were produced went into the eager hands of Eliseo and the Corporal, but Demetria and Benina also got something. The rest got little or nothing and Crescencia the blind woman complained that she had had nothing all morning. While Casiana was whispering with Demetria, La Burlada started talking with Crescencia in the corner nearest the door into the courtyard.
“What can she be saying to Demetria?”
“I wonder, maybe it’s just private business.”
“I suspect it’s about food vouchers from the rich funeral we’re having tomorrow. They’ll give Demetria more because she’s recommended by the priest who says early mass. Little Don Rodrigo with the
purple stockings, the one who’s supposed to be the Pope’s secretary.”
“They’ll give her all the meat and we’ll get the bones.”
“Of course, it’s always the same thing. There’s nothing like dragging a few children around for getting bigger share-outs. And decent people are ignored, because these lazybones like Demetria, as well as being sluts, make money out of their immorality. See for yourself, every year a new one at the breast, and next year’s is already in her belly.”
“Is she married?”
“No more than you nor me. No one can say a word against me, because I married my Roque in blessed San Andrés, but he’s in Heaven after falling from some scaffolding. Demetria says her husband’s in the Philippines. He probably makes her babies from there – by letter. What a life! Without a baby, I tell you, you never get anything. The gentry take no notice of a decent woman, they only look to see if there’s a baby at your breast. They take pity on a baby and forget that we who have no baby are more respectable, old and vulnerable and worn out by work. But you try setting the world to rights and getting the gentry to give where they ought to give! People are right when they say the world is topsy-turvey and back to front, and so is Blessed Heaven itself, and Pulido is right when he talks about the great big revolution which is bound to come, when the rich will be poor and the poor will be rich!”
The prattling old woman was just finishing her tirade when there occurred an event so strange, so amazing, so unheard of, that it could only be compared to a thunderbolt falling in the midst of the beggar community or a bomb exploding, so great was the effect it created in that group of wretches. The old hands had never seen anything like it and the newcomers were baffled. All were struck dumb, perplexed, aghast. And what was it, after all? Nothing at all, simply that Don Carlos Moreno Trujillo, who all his life, ever since time began, had always gone out through the door into Calle de Atocha… well, this time he did not change his established custom, but after a few steps he turned round and re-entered the church, to leave through the door in Calle de las Huertas. This was as extraordinary and absurd as if the sun had started moving backwards.
But the main reason for surprise and confusion was not so much Don Carlos’ unusual choice of exit, but the fact that he stopped when he reached the beggars – who gathered round him expecting him to share out another penny all round – looked at them as if he were reviewing the troops and said: “Which of you elderly ladies is known as Señá Benina?”
“Me! That’s my name!” said Benina coming forward, as if scared that one of the others would claim her name and identity.
“Yes, that’s her,” La Casiana dryly and officiously confirmed, as if her position as boss made it necessary for her to certify the identity of her underlings.
“Well, Señora Benina,” continued Don Carlos, muffling himself up to the eyes before going out into the cold, “tomorrow at half past eight, come to my house. We must have a talk. Do you know where I live?”
“I’ll show her the way,” said Eliseo, with a great show of being obliging both to the gentleman and to the beggar.
“Don’t worry, sir, I’ll be there.”
“At exactly half past eight. Now listen carefully,” he continued, shouting through the layers of damp well-worn cloth that covered his mouth. “If you come earlier, you’ll have to wait, and if you come later, I shall be out. It’s my day for going to Montserrat and then to the cemetery. So you see…”
4
Holy Mary and blessed San José, the things they said in their fever of curiosity, the predictions they made as to what Don Carlos would say! For a few seconds, the very intensity of their surprise took everyone’s breath away. In the recesses of every mind there passed a procession of doubt, fear, envy and burning curiosity. Señá Benina, wishing no doubt to avoid a tiresome interrogation, took her leave affectionately, as she always did, and left. A few minutes later, blind Almudena followed her out. The first fragmentary phrases of surprise and confusion then began to jump like sparks from mouth to mouth: “We shall know tomorrow… It must be to pay her pawn tickets … She has more than forty of them.”
“Everybody here seems to have landed on their feet when they were born,” said La Burlada to Crescencia, “except us. We fell into the world like a couple of sacks.” And La Casiana, lengthening her horse face until it looked quite monstrous, said in a voice of mournful compassion: “Poor Don Carlos, he’s as mad as a March hare.”
Next morning, taking advantage of the fact that neither Señora Benina nor blind Almudena turned up at the church, the beggar band could discuss the matter freely. Demetria suggested shyly that Don Carlos might be wanting to take Benina into his service as she had the reputation of being an excellent cook, to which Eliseo added that in fact she had been a first-class cook, but was now considered unemployable because she was too old.
“And too much of a thief,” said La Casiana, stressing the word viciously. “You should know that she has always been terribly light-fingered, and it’s that vice that’s landed her where she is, having to beg for a crust of bread. She was thrown out of all the houses where she worked for having sticky fingers. If she’d behaved properly in the first place, there would have been plenty of houses where she could have ended her days in peace.”
“I tell you,” declared La Burlada with bitter scepticism, “that if she’s reduced to begging it’s because she’s honest. Thieves can save up for their old age and become rich, and there are plenty of those, I can tell you! Riding in a coach, even, I’ve known them!”
“We speak no ill of anyone here,” said La Casiana.
“I’m speaking ill of no one. Why, it’s your ladyship who’s casting aspersions, Madame Prime Minister!”
“Who me?”
“Yes, you. It was your high and mighty excellency who said that Benina was a thief, which is not true, because if she was a thief she’d have money, and if she had money she wouldn’t come here to beg. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“Your big mouth will get you into trouble.”
“It’s not a big mouth that gets you into trouble, it’s being rich and taking alms out of the hands of the genuine poor, the hungry ones with nowhere to sleep.”
“Come now, ladies, we’re in the house of the Lord,” said Eliseo, stamping the ground with his wooden leg. “Be respectful and decent with each other, as the holy doctrine tells us.”
Calm and quiet, so often broken by the violence of a few, was restored and, whining as they begged, yawning as they prayed, they somehow passed the dreary hours.
We must now reveal that it was not a coincidence that Señá Benina and blind Almudena were up and about on that morning; the reason is not without importance in this real-life story and will become apparent in due course. As we have said, they both left the church within a few minutes of each other, but as the old woman stopped for a while at the gate and talked to Pulido, the blind Moroccan caught her up and they set out together along Calle de San Sebastián and Calle de Atocha.
“I stopped to talk to Pulido to wait for you, friend Almudena,” said Benina. “I must talk to you, because only you can help me pay a big debt. None of the other ‘comrades’ from the church is of any use to me at all. You know what I mean. They’re all out for themselves, they have hearts of flint. The ones who have money are hard because they have it, and those who haven’t are hard because they haven’t. They’d let me die of shame and even enjoy seeing a poor beggar woman cast down in the dust.”
Almudena turned his face towards her and one could almost say that he looked at her, if looking is turning one’s eyes towards an object. And though he could not fix his gaze upon her, he listened, utterly intent on her words. Pressing her hand, he said: “My friend, you know that Almudena serve you, serve you like a dog. My friend, tell me, ’bout things of yours, ’bout yours.”
“Let’s go on down the hill, and we’ll talk as we go. Are you going home?”
“Will go where you want.”
“Yo
u seem rather tired. Let’s go quickly. How would it be if we sat a while in the Plazuela del Progreso where we can talk in peace?”
The blind man must have agreed, because five minutes later they were to be seen sitting side by side on the stone base of the railings round the statue of Mendizábel. Almudena had a dark, sallow face, ugly but expressive, with a sparse beard as black as a crow’s wing. It was dominated by his huge mouth which, when he smiled, stretched in a curve that wrinkled the loose skin of his cheeks and ended close to his ears. His eyes were like wounds that had dried up and ceased to have any feeling, but bloodstains surrounded them. He was of medium height, his legs crooked; his body had lost its grace through having to grope its way and through hours spent sitting cross-legged in the Moorish manner. He was dressed relatively decently, for although his clothes were old and grimy, they were ingeniously mended and patched where they were torn or worn. He had heavy black shoes, very worn but still wearable, cleverly stitched and patched. His bowler-hat had evidently done long service on other heads before reaching his and would possibly do further service on others, for the dents in its felt were not such as to leave the wearer’s cranium defenceless. His stick was stout and shiny and the hand that held it was sinewy –its back very swarthy, almost negroid, its palm whitish and soft, reminding one of a slice of raw hake. His nails were neatly pared and his shirt collar as clean as was possible given his poverty-stricken state and vagabond existence.
“Well, as I was saying,” said Señá Benina, taking off her scarf and then putting it on again with a restless and nervous gesture, as if she needed air. “I have a large debt to pay and you, only you, can help me pay it.”
“Tell me, tell me ’bout it.”
“What were you going to do this afternoon?”
“Stay home, much to do; wash clothes, sew much, mend much.”
“You are the most patched-up man in the world! I’ve never known anyone like you. You’re blind and you’re poor, yet you look after your own clothes. You can thread a needle with your tongue quicker than I can do it with my fingers. You sew beautifully, you’re your own tailor, shoemaker and washerwoman. And after begging at the church all morning and in the streets all afternoon, you still have time to go to the café for a while. You’re unlike anyone else and if there was any justice in this world and things were the way they ought to be, you’d get a prize. Well, dear boy, I’m afraid I’m not going to let you work this afternoon, because you have to do something for me, because that’s what friends are for.”
Misericordia (Dedalus European Classics) Page 3
