“I was, but somehow I feel as full as if I’d eaten all the things you’ve been describing. But make me some lunch anyway.”
“What have you had? Did you heat up the little bit of stew I put to one side for you last night?”
“My dear girl, I just couldn’t face it. All I’ve eaten is half an ounce of cooking chocolate.”
“Come on, now. All you had to do was light the fire, but don’t worry, I’ll do it. Ah, but first things first, I’ve also brought your medicine.”
“Did you do everything I told you to?” asked the mistress as they moved towards the kitchen. “Did you pawn my two petticoats?”
“Of course, and with the two pesetas I got for them, and two more that Don Romualdo gave me because it was his saint’s day, I managed to get everything done.”
“Did you pay for the olive oil you bought yesterday?”
“Naturally.”
“And the lime tea and the sanguinaria?”
“I paid for everything. I still have enough left for tomorrow even after doing all the shopping.”
“And do you think God will grant us a good day tomorrow?” said her mistress in a melancholic tone, sitting down in the kitchen whilst Benina bustled about getting firewood and coal together.
“Of course he will, madam, you can be certain of it.”
“How can you be so sure, Nina?”
“Because I know. My heart tells me so. Tomorrow will be a good day, I’m even tempted to say a great day.”
“I’ll tell you if you’re right tomorrow. I don’t trust your hunches. You’re always saying it will be all right tomorrow.”
“God is good.”
“He’s not very good to me. He deals me blow after blow, barely leaving me time to catch my breath between beatings. A bad day is followed by an even worse one. Year in year out, I wait for some end in sight, but all my hopes turn to disappointments. I’m tired of suffering, I’m even tired of hoping. My hopes are all deceivers, and since they’re always unfulfilled, I daren’t even hope for good things any more, I hope for bad things instead, thinking that perhaps that way things might at least turn out not quite so bad.”
“Well, if I were you, madam,” said Benina, using the bellows on the fire, “I’d put my trust in God and be happy. Look at me, I am. I’m convinced that when we least expect it, we’ll strike it lucky and we’ll be sitting pretty again, looking back at all our troubles and making up for them all with the wonderful future we’re going to have.”
“It isn’t the good life I want any more, Nina,” said her mistress, almost in tears, “The only thing I look forward to now is my final rest.”
“Who’s talking about dying? I’m not. I’m quite happy in this funny old world of ours. I even feel a sneaking respect for the little troubles that come my way. I certainly don’t want to die.”
“You mean you accept this life we lead?”
“I accept it, because it’s not in my power to change it. Anything’s better than death, and if that means a little suffering, fine, so long as we’ve got a crust of bread to eat and the two best sauces in the world to go with it: hunger and hope.”
“But, quite apart from the poverty, can you bear the shame of it, the humiliation, owing money to half of Madrid, never paying anybody, scraping a living by means of endless tricks, swindles and lies, never finding anyone who’ll trust you enough to lend you even a few pence, being pestered on all sides by shopkeepers and salesmen?”
“Of course I can bear it! We all rub along as best we can in this life. It would be nonsense to die of hunger when the shops are all crammed with food. I’ll never do that. God doesn’t want anyone to go hungry and when he doesn’t give us money, I suppose he gives us the brains instead to invent ways of getting what we need, though without stealing. I draw the line at that, because I promise to pay and I will pay as soon as we’ve got the money. They know we’re poor, that we’re decent people, although we’ve nothing else but our decency. Why should we worry because the shopkeepers don’t get their little bit of cash, when we know well enough how rich they are!”
“You have no shame, Nina, I mean no sense of propriety, no dignity.”
“I don’t know if I have or not. What I do know is that I have a normal mouth and a normal stomach, and I also know that God put me on this earth to live and not to die of hunger. Does a sparrow, for example, have any shame? Of course it doesn’t, what it does have is a beak and a healthy appetite. And, looked at realistically, I’d say that God didn’t just create the earth and the sea, he also made the grocer’s shops, the Bank of Spain, the houses we live in and, yes, the greengrocer’s stalls. God made everything.”
“And what about money, who created vile money?” asked her mistress dolefully. “Answer me that.”
“God made that too, since he made the gold and the silver. I’m not so sure about banknotes. But yes, he made those too.”
“The way I see it, Nina, the people who’ve already got things hold on to them … and I get the feeling that everybody’s got something, except us. But, hurry up now, I’m feeling faint. Where did you put my medicine? Ah, here it is on the dresser. I’ll take some before lunch. Oh my legs, my legs… instead of them carrying me, I have to carry them.” She got to her feet with great difficulty. “I’d be better off walking on crutches. You see what God has done to me? It’s like some sort of bad joke. He’s afflicted my eyes, my legs, my head, my kidneys, everything, except my stomach! He takes away everything I’ve got and then sees to it that I still have an appetite like a horse.”
“So have I, but I don’t resent it, madam. The Lord be praised, he’s given us the greatest bodily gift of all: hunger, blessed hunger.”
7
This most unfortunate of women, Doña Francisca Juárez de Zapata, was now over sixty years old and known, since her sad decline and with the curt familiarity of the common people, as plain Doña Paca. See how the mighty are fallen, and how steep the slippery slope she had to slide down into the depths of poverty, from the time around 1859 and 1860 when the living was still easy, until now when we find her existing, albeit unknowingly, on charity and suffering countless trials, sorrows and humiliations. Large cities – especially Madrid, where well-ordered lives are almost unknown – are full of examples of such falls from grace, but none equal that of Doña Francisca Juárez, tragic plaything of Fate. But if you look closely at cases such as these, at the rise and fall of people on the social scale, you realise how foolish it is to blame Fate for something that is exclusively the fault of the character and temperament of the people involved. Doña Paca is a good example of this, for she carried the seeds of chaos within her from her birth. As a native of the town of Ronda, she was accustomed from early childhood to the sight of precipitous drops and, when she had nightmares, she always dreamed that she was falling into the seemingly bottomless depths of the steep river gorge known as El Tajo. People from Ronda need a good head for heights and to be able to gaze with equanimity into the most terrifying chasms. But Doña Paca could not cope with heights, she instinctively plunged headlong over the edge. And she was equally bad at the day-to-day running of her life, which is the moral equivalent of a good head for heights.
Francisca Juárez’s vertigo was already chronic when she was married off, at a very early age, to Don Antonio Maria Zapata, a man twice her age. He was a quartermaster-general in the army, a splendid fellow from a well-to-do family, as was his wife, who also owned a large amount of land. Zapata served in the Africa corps, in Echagüe’s division, and after the Treaty of Wad Ras, which put an end to the war there, was transferred home to the divisional headquarters. The couple set up house in Madrid and it took a while for Doña Francisca to make of their home a frivolous and ostentatious establishment. At first, she kept expenditure on fripperies within the limits of their income, but she soon burst the bounds of prudence and in no time, arrears, irregularities and debts began to appear. Zapata was an extremely methodical man, but his wife dominated him to such an extent th
at she even managed to ruin his best qualities, and that man, who was such an efficient administrator of the army’s assets, watched his own disappear, powerless to stop it happening. Francisca knew no restraint when it came to smart clothes, lavish food, the endless round of balls and parties and expensive fads and fashions. The financial tangle was already so great that Zapata, seeing the big crash coming, managed to force himself out of the torpor into which his better half had plunged him and began to do the sums necessary to restore method and reason to the conduct of his affairs. Alas – such was the tragic fate of this family – when he was in the very middle of the calculations he hoped would save him, he caught pneumonia and passed away one Good Friday afternoon, leaving two young children behind: Antonio and Obdulia.
As administrator and owner of all assets and liabilities, Francisca quickly demonstrated her ineptitude in the management of those complex matters and at her side there appeared, like maggots in a rotting carcass, a crowd of people who gnawed away at her, inside and out, mercilessly devouring her. It was during this disastrous period that Benigna entered her service and although she proved herself from the start to be an excellent cook, within only a few weeks she had also shown herself to be the most shameless petty thief in all Madrid. So shameless was she, in fact, that even Doña Francisca, who was blind as a bat when it came to keeping an eye on her own affairs, could not help but notice her servant’s meticulous rapacity and even made up her mind to try and cure it. To be fair, I should add that Benigna (called Benina by her friends and Nina for short by her mistress) possessed excellent qualities, which, when her character was weighed in the balance, partly compensated for that one grave defect: her petty pilfering. She was very clean and so extraordinarily hard-working that she seemed to fit in a miraculous amount into any one hour or day. In addition, Doña Francisca appreciated Benina’s great love for the children, a love that was sincere and, if you like, active, which showed itself in the way she constantly watched over them and lavished care on them in sickness and in health. However, these qualities were not enough in themselves to prevent bitter rows breaking out between mistress and servant and, during one of these rows, Benina was given her notice. The children missed her terribly and wept for their kind, adoring Nina.
Three months later, she called at the house. She could not forget her mistress or the little ones. They were her darlings and she felt attached, drawn to the house itself, its very fabric. Francisca Juárez also found a special pleasure in talking to her again, for something (quite what they did not know) bound them secretly together – some common ingredient in their otherwise remarkably disparate characters. The visits became more frequent. Benina, it seemed, was unhappy in the house where she was then employed. So once again we find her back in Doña Francisca’s service: she thrilled to be back, her mistress equally content and the little ones mad with joy. It was around this time that the family’s financial difficulties and embarrassments took a turn for the worse on an administrative level: the debts were greedily eating into their inheritance; valuable farmland was being lost, passing somehow, through the vile practices of usury, into the hands of the moneylenders. Like precious cargo thrown overboard when shipwreck threatens, the house was stripped of its best furniture, its pictures, its finest carpets – the jewellery was already long gone. But however light the ship became, the family was still in danger of foundering and plunging into the black depths of poverty.
To make matters worse, during that grim period between 1870 and 1880, both children fell seriously ill, the boy with typhoid fever and the girl with convulsions and epileptic fits. Benina nursed them with such skill and loving care that she may well have single-handedly snatched them from the jaws of death. They repaid her solicitude with a fervent affection. More out of love for Benina than for their mother they took their medicine without complaint, kept very quiet and still, sweating uncomfortably in their beds and not eating between meals. None of this, however, prevented further friction and argument between mistress and servant, resulting in Benina being dismissed a second time. In a burst of temper or wounded pride, she stormed out of the house, vowing over and over that she would never again set foot in it and that as she left, she would shake her shoes thoroughly to make sure that not a speck of dust from the mats (for there were no longer any carpets left in the house) remained clinging to them.
However, before a year had passed, Benina reappeared, her cheeks bathed in tears, saying:
“I don’t know what it is about madam or what it is about this house and these children and these walls and everything here, all I know is that I don’t feel at home anywhere else. I’m working for a wealthy family now. They’re good to me, they don’t notice if a few reales go missing here and there and I earn six duros. But I still don’t feel at home, and night and day I do nothing but think about this family, wondering how you all are. They see me sighing and think I must have children of my own to worry about. But I have no one in the world apart from madam and the children, who are my children too, because I love them as if they were my own.”
So Benina was back again in Doña Francisca Juárez’s household, this time as general maid, for the family had gone rapidly downhill during that year and so obvious were the signs of ruin that Benina could not but feel deeply affected. Inevitably there came a moment when they had to move to a smaller and cheaper flat. Doña Francisca, who liked routine and was incapable of making up her mind about anything, wavered. At this moment of crisis, Benina took up the reins, organised the move and they made the leap from Calle de Claudio Coello to Calle del Olmo. In fact, they narrowly escaped being ignominiously evicted, but everything was sorted out with the generous help of Benina, who withdrew all her savings – more than 3,000 reales – from the Monte de Piedad and gave them to her mistress, thus establishing a common interest between them from then on, in good times and in bad. But the poor woman could still not entirely abandon her thieving habits even when making that splendid charitable gesture, for she kept a little back for herself and hid it carefully in her trunk as the basis for a new nest egg. It was something she needed to do and was an essential source of pleasure for her soul.
As we have seen, Benina had the vice of subtracting and hoarding small sums of money, a vice which, looked at another way, could also be seen as the virtue of thrift. It was difficult to say, in her case, where the one ended and the other began. The habit of deducting an amount, sometimes large, sometimes small, from the money given her for shopping, the pleasure of salting it away, of seeing how her hoard of pennies slowly mounted up, took pride of place among her other customs, habits and pleasures. Petty theft and hoarding had become almost instinctive, very much like the magpie’s habit of stealing trinkets and hiding them. During this period, between 1880 and 1885, she continued to steal, although she kept it within reasonable limits in line with Doña Francisca’s puny resources. Around that time, the family were hit by a series of disasters and calamities. Two-thirds of Doña Francisca’s pension, which she received as the widow of a quartermaster-general, had been withheld by the moneylenders. Loan followed loan, and in her attempts to extricate herself from one desperate situation she fell immediately into worse entanglements. Her life became one long worry, the anxieties of one week engendering those of the next and days of comparative calm were rare. To relieve the sad hours, they would set aside their fears during the night watches, when tiresome creditors and pressing demands left them temporarily in peace, and comfort themselves with fantastic imaginings. They had to move again to cheaper and ever cheaper lodgings, and from Calle del Olmo they went to Calle del Saúco and from there to Calle del Almendro. From the chance fact that the names of the streets they lived in all bore the names of trees, they resembled birds flying from branch to branch, scattered by the guns of sportsmen or by stones thrown by children.
During one of the major crises of that period, Benina had to have recourse once more to the bottom of her trunk, where she kept her cache or nest egg, the result of her pilferings and ded
uctions. It amounted to seventeen duros. Since she couldn’t tell her mistress the truth, she concocted some story about a cousin of hers called Rosaura, who sold Alcarria honey and had given her a few duros for safe keeping.
“Give me everything you’ve got, Benina,” said her mistress, “and may the Lord grant you eternal glory. I’ll return you double the amount when my Ronda cousins pay me what’s owed on that plot of land. You wait – it’s a matter of days now – you saw the letter.”
And rummaging in the bottom of the trunk amongst countless trifles and bundles of rags, our petty thief produced twelve and a half duros, which she gave to her mistress, saying: “This is all I’ve got, there’s no more, really. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
She couldn’t help it. She even deducted a percentage from her own charitable gift, filched something from her own offer of alms.
8
Believe it or not, all these misfortunes were only a preamble to the one great and terrible disaster that was to overtake the unhappy Juárez family, still poised on the edge of the abyss in which we find them plunged at the time our story begins. When she moved to Calle del Olmo, Doña Francisca was abandoned by the very society that had helped her get rid of her fortune, and in Calles Saúco and Almendro her few remaining friends finally disappeared too. It was during this period that the people of the neighbourhood, the shopkeepers whose bills remained unpaid and others who felt sorry for her, began calling her Doña Paca and, from then on, no one referred to her in any other way. Mean, coarse, thoughtless people frequently added some derisive nickname, such as Doña Paca the Cheat or the Duchess of Taradiddle.
God clearly wanted to try the lady from Ronda, because to all the financial catastrophes He added the bitter discovery that her children, instead of bringing her comfort by being especially good and obedient, merely piled further humiliations on her, like sharp thorns pressed into her heart. Antonio turned out to be an utter rogue, frustrating all his mother’s hopes and rendering null and void the many sacrifices made to give him a good start at school. In vain, his mother and Benina, his two mothers one might say, did their best to rid his mind of evil thoughts, for neither scolding nor cajoling had the least effect. Just when they thought they had won him over by kind words and caresses, he would fool them time and again by feigning submission and then, the minute their defences were down, he would be off, taking with him everything he could lay his hands on. He had a real talent for mischief and was quick to realise that he also had a rare gift for conning other people into forgiving his wayward behaviour. He knew how to hide his guile behind a pleasant mask; at sixteen he could dupe his mothers as easily as if they were babes in arms; he produced false examination certificates; he used his schoolfriends’ class notes, having sold all the books that had been bought for him. By the time he was nineteen, he had fallen into bad company and the scrapes he got into took a serious turn; he would disappear from home for days at a time, get drunk and turn up again, looking nothing but skin and bone. One of his mothers’ main preoccupations became how to hide the little cash they had, preferably in the bowels of the earth, because no money was safe from him. He could extract it with equally remarkable skill from Doña Paca’s bosom and from Benina’s grimy purse. He made off with everything, however little, however much. The two women ran out of hiding-places, exhausted the supply of nooks and crannies in the kitchen or the pantry, where they could secrete their meagre treasures.
Misericordia (Dedalus European Classics) Page 5
