16
He was a master of the exquisite art of preserving clothing. He excelled in nosing out cheap tailors in unlikely back rooms who would turn a garment for a pittance; he excelled in knowing how to treat clothes which had to last year in, year out as well, so that they remained whole though threadbare; and in the use of benzene to remove grease marks, in how to iron out the creases with one’s hand, stretch the cloth where it had shrunk and darn it where it had worn at the knees. How long he could make a top hat last must remain a secret. To find the answer, it would not be enough to make a study of the successive fashions in top hats, because the shape of his was so outdated that it had come back into fashion again, and the illusion this created was helped by the way he had nurtured its felt with loving maternal care. His other garments, though equally ancient, could not compete with his hat in concealing their years of service, because as a result of so many remakes and transformations, so much mending and ironing, they were only shadows of their former selves. A threadbare summer overcoat worn at all times was his least ancient garment, and, buttoned right up to the collar, it had the advantage of hiding everything else he had on, except for the lower half of his trouser legs. What he wore underneath only God and Ponte knew.
I doubt if a more harmless person has ever existed – or a more useless one. The fact that he had never been of any use to anyone was borne out by his poverty, which could not be concealed in these sad declining years. He had started out with a small inheritance, had been given several good public appointments and had had no family ties or commitments, remaining a confirmed bachelor. This was, above all, for selfish reasons but also because he had wasted time in search of a marriage of convenience for which his standards had been so high and so exacting that any successful outcome was foredoomed. At a time when the word cursi* had not been invented, Ponte Delgado devoted his life to society, dressing with affected elegance, frequenting the drawing-rooms (the word salon was not yet in general use) of houses of some distinction. There were few true salons at this time and Frasquito, though in his later years he boasted of having belonged to them, never in fact came anywhere near them. It could not be said that he was out of place at the parties and balls that he attended or in the men’s clubs that he frequented, but he did not shine either by intelligence or by that gentlemanly combination of correct behaviour and nonchalance which are the marks of really good breeding. He was always punctilious, very careful of his gloves, his tie and his small feet, and so the ladies liked him but never fell for him. The men tolerated him but just a few genuinely respected him.
It is only in a heterogeneous society such as ours, unhampered by scruples and ideas of caste, that a gentleman of little consequence and few acres, or a medium-grade civil servant, can mix with blue-blooded marquesses and counts and with the moneyed few, in houses that pretend to an elegance they do not in fact possess; those who frequent society for reasons of business or vanity or in search of amorous adventures can hobnob with those who have come to dance and to eat and to chat with the ladies, their only object being finding someone to recommend them for promotion, or to gain the favour of some highly placed person so that they can absent themselves from their offices with impunity. I am not classing Frasquito Ponte with genteel riff-raff such as this as he was somewhat better than they when he was at his peak socially. It was not until ’59 that his decline became obvious; he put up a heroic defence until ’68, but in that year – marked in the tablets of his doom with a thick black line – the unfortunate dandy fell into the slough of extreme poverty, never to rise again. He had spent the last of his private fortune years before. The civil service post which he had obtained from Gonzalez Bravo with the greatest of difficulty was ruthlessly wrested from him by the revolution; he got no pension and had never been able to save. The poor man was left without a penny, his only resource being the kindness of a few good friends who let him eat at their tables. But the good friends died or tired of him and his relatives were unsympathetic. He suffered hunger and cold, and was deprived of all that had made life worth living; but in these great straits his natural delicacy and his pride were like millstones round his neck, dragging him faster down into the deep. He was incapable of importuning his friends by touching them for loans, and only on very few occasions, when he was really in mortal danger of losing the fight against complete destitution, had he ventured to hold out a begging hand, correctly gloved, of course. Though the glove was worn out, yet it was still a glove. Frasquito would have died rather than lose his dignity. He would rather go in disguise to Boto’s eating house for a dish of stew for two reales, than dine luxuriously in a rich house where they baited him with cruel jokes, wounding his self-esteem by taunting him as a sponger and parasite.
The poor man sought anxiously for some means of livelihood, however ill rewarded; but his lack of skills made this harder than ever. He tried so hard that he finally landed some small jobs, not to be compared it is true with his previous occupation, but enough to keep him going for some time without lowering himself. He could at last cover up his poverty with a veneer of respectability. When he managed to get a small income as a substitute teacher in a school or as a clerk in a shoe shop in the Calle de Segovia, making out the bills and despatching the mail, he was really in receipt of charity, but so well disguised that there was no shame attached to it. He eked out a miserable existence for some years, living alone in the southern part of the town, avoiding the centre and north for fear of meeting people he knew who would see him poorly shod and worse clothed; and when these jobs came to an end, he sought others, finally accepting – not without misgivings and a shudder of distaste – the post of traveller on commission for a soap factory, calling from shop to shop and from house to house offering the product and obtaining what orders he could. But he lacked the gift of the gab and the guile necessary for this huckster’s trade, and soon had to give it up. Then quite recently luck had brought him a gift in the shape of some old ladies of the Costanilla de San Andrés, who wanted him to keep the accounts of a wax-chandler’s business that they were liquidating, selling off their stock in small lots to parish churches and convents. There was very little work involved, but it provided him with two pesetas a day, and with these he worked the miracle of keeping himself alive, getting out of it the cost of board and lodging – but not a home, for in fact he no longer had a home.
For after 1880, which was the annus terribilis of the luckless Frasquito, he decided to do without a home of his own, and after a few dreadful days of crisis when he felt like a snail with its house on its back, he came to an agreement with Señá Bernarda, owner of the doss-house in the Calle del Mediodía Grande, who was very well disposed and knew a gentleman when she saw one. For three reales she let him have a bed worth a peseta, and for one extra real only, in deference to his special status, she allowed him to keep his trunk in a tiny inner room, and what’s more, she let him stay there for an hour each morning, sprucing himself up with his lotions, his cosmetics and his hair dyes. He went in looking like a corpse, and came out transformed – clean, sweet smelling and radiant with beauty.
The remaining peseta was for board and for clothing – a major problem, a mathematical impossibility! For all its hardships, the period was one of relative calm for him, because he did not have to suffer the humiliation of asking for money, and when all’s said and done he had a means of livelihood, he could survive, and there was even enough leisure for him to indulge in his daydreams. His innocent relationship with Obdulia, which arose from his connections with Doña Paca and the commercial links between the wax-chandlering old ladies and Obdulia’s father-in-law the undertaker, was a great consolation to him, because of a similarity in their ideas, tastes and interest; but it put him in the difficult position of neglecting to feed himself in order to buy a pair of new boots. His only remaining pair was in an ugly state of deformity, and the poor fellow could bear anything except setting foot ill-shod into the abode of the Ideal.
Note
*cursi
– pseudo-refined
17
The new boots, and other quite unnecessary articles such as pomades, visiting cards and so on, on which he had to spend relatively large sums, created such a terrible deficit in Frasquito’s diminutive budget that he was left with an empty belly and no prospects of filling it. But Providence, who comes to the aid of all good men, found a solution for him here in the house of Obdulia, who from time to time allayed his hunger by inviting him to share her midday meal; and indeed she had little trouble in overcoming his scruples and his diffidence. Benina, who could see from his face that he was starving, was more perfunctory than her young mistress and served him unceremoniously, laughing at the hesitations he affected in order to give his acceptance an air of gentility.
On that day, which had seemed so bleak and which Benina’s arrival had changed into one of exceptional happiness, Obdulia and Frasquito – once they realised that the problem of survival was solved – took off far beyond reality into outer spaces where they could let their spirits soar into the rosy regions of imaginary bliss. Ponte’s ideas were very limited: those he had acquired during the twenty years of his social success had become fossilised: he had retained them intact and picked up no new ones. Poverty had estranged him from his old friends and acquaintances, and his thoughts had petrified just as his body had mummified: they had remained unchanged since ’68 or ’70. Things known to everyone else were unknown to him; he seemed to have fallen out of a nest or out of the sky; he looked at events and at people with innocent eyes. Feelings of shame at his pitiful state and his consequent hermit-like existence were to a large extent responsible for his mental blockage and lack of new ideas.
For fear of being seen looking like a scarecrow, he would spend weeks, even months, without leaving his neighbourhood and unless there was a pressing reason to go into the city centre, he would not go further than the Plaza Mayor: he was possessed by a kind of centrifugal drive and preferred to stray into dark, out of the way streets in which top hats were rare. In such places he would feel calm, the time was all his own, he was alone and in his imagination he could relive the happy past, or people the present with phantoms of his own choosing.
In his conversations with Obdulia, Frasquito continually harped on about his former life in polite society, with interesting details, such as how he was introduced into the at home of Mr and Mrs So-and-So, or of the Marchioness of Such-and-Such; what distinguished people he had met and all about their characters, their way of life and the clothes they wore. He went through the list of the rich houses where he had spent happy hours, in the company of the upper crust of Madrid of both sexes, enjoying pleasant conversation and delightful entertainments. When their conversation turned to the arts, Ponte – who adored music and the Royal Opera House – would hum extracts from Norma and Maria di Rohan, whilst Obdulia listened ecstatically. Sometimes he would burst into poetry, reciting lines from Gregorio Romero Larrañaga and other bards from those fatuous days. The young woman’s complete ignorance was the right soil in which to plant the seeds of a literary education of this sort, because it was all so new to her; she was as delighted as a child seeing toys for the first time.
The child as we can’t help calling her, though she was married, albeit to an unsatisfactory partner, never tired of hearing details of society life, for though she had some knowledge of it through vague memories of her own and from what her mother had told her, she found Ponte’s descriptions full of enchantment and poetry. Society in Ponte’s day was clearly more glamorous than in hers, the men were more cultured, the women more gracious and witty. Urged on by her, the fossilised old dandy described the receptions and balls in all their magnificence, the buffet supper or ambigu with all its various dishes and snacks; he recounted the amorous adventures which had caused gossip in his day; he enumerated in minutest detail the rules of good manners which had been de rigueur in such circles and sang the praises of the beauties of the day who were now dead or old and forgotten. Nor did he omit his own little affairs, or rather, hesitant first steps in that direction, and the trouble he had in consequence with suspicious husbands or sensitive brothers. He too had been challenged to a duel, yes! With seconds, conditions, choice of weapons, arguments and the clash of swords – all ending in a brotherly luncheon. As the days went by every incident of his social life emerged, every variation of innocent sensuality, of modest gentility, of honourable frivolity. Frasquito had also been an excellent amateur actor and had played the lead in a number of productions in private houses of Flower for a Day and Maiden’s Tresses. He could still remember whole speeches and snippets from both of these, which he recited with dramatic emphasis and to which Obdulia listened entranced, “her eyes swimming with tears”, to use a phrase of the time. He also described – and this took him two and a half sessions – a fancy dress ball given far back in those good old days by some Marchioness or Baroness. Frasquito would never forget, were he to live a thousand years, that magnificent affair, to which he went dressed as a Calabrian bandit. And he remembered all, absolutely all the costumes and described them in detail, down to each piece of ribbon and braid. Indeed the concoction of his own costume and the ingenuity required to procure the proper garments took up so many of his days and nights that he absented himself from his office for weeks on end, and for the first time he was suspended from duty, and so incurred his first debts.
Frasquito could satisfy Obdulia’s curiosity in another direction, although only within very narrow limits – her desire to travel, even if it was only in her imagination. He had not been round the world but he had been to Paris! And for a dandy that was perhaps enough. Paris! What was Paris like? Obdulia fixed her eyes hungrily on him as he painted in exaggerated colours the marvels of the great city, yes! In the golden days of the Second Empire. Ah! the Empress Eugenie, the Champs Elysées, the boulevards, Notre Dame, the Palais Royal! And, to complete the picture, Mabille and the lorettes. Ponte was only there for a month and a half and had lived very modestly, making good use of his time both day and night so as to see everything there was to see. He spent those forty-five days of freedom in Paris with the utmost enjoyment, and brought back with him to Madrid enough memories and impressions to take three whole years to tell. He saw everything, the large and the small, the beautiful and the grotesque; he poked his little snub nose into everything, and it goes without saying that he dabbled in sin just a tiny bit, to taste the secret delights and seductive charms to which all foreigners succumb, enslaving them to voluptuous Lutetia.
It happened that on that day, while Benina was working away so busily in the kitchen and dining-room, Frasquito was describing Paris to Obdulia, his vivid account ranging from the depths of the sewers to the top of the tower of the artesian well at Grenelle.
“It must be expensive living in Paris,” said Obdulia. “Oh Señor del Ponte, it’s no place for the poor.”
“Don’t you believe it. If you know how to manage, you can live as you please. I spent four to five napoleons a day, and I saw everything there was to see. I soon learned the omnibus routes and for a few sous I could travel long distances. There are cheap restaurants where you can get a good meal for very little. It’s true that you have to spend a lot in tips, which they call pourboires, but believe me it’s a pleasure to give them in return for such politeness. ‘Pardon, pardon!’, you hear it all the time.”
“But with all the thousands of things that you saw, Ponte, aren’t you forgetting the best of all? Did you not see the great men?”
“Well, hardly: as it was summer they had all gone on holiday. Victor Hugo, as you know was in exile at the time.”
“And did you not see Lamartine?”
“By that time, the author of Graziella was already dead. One afternoon, the friends who accompanied me on my walks pointed out the house of Thiers, the great historian, and they also took me to the cafe where in winter Paul de Kock used to go for his glass of beer.”
“The man who wrote comic novels? His books are funny, but I dislike his g
rossness and indecency.”
“I also saw the shoe shop which made boots for Octave Feuillet. And indeed I ordered a pair there, which cost me six napoleons – but how beautifully made they were and what quality! They lasted me till the year Prim died.”
“What did he write?”
“Sybille and other very fine novels.”
“I’ve not heard of him. I think I’m confusing him with Eugene Sue, who wrote – if I remember correctly – The Seven Deadly Sins and Notre Dame de Paris.”
“You mean Mystères de Paris.”
“That’s right. When I read it, it made such a deep impression on me that I fell ill. One identifies with the characters and one lives their lives.”
Misericordia (Dedalus European Classics) Page 11
