“Yes, ma’am, I’ve seen and spoken to him,” replied the gypsy, showing two rows of perfectly preserved and regular white teeth, which appeared between enormous dark purple fleshy lips. “I met him on the bridge, and he told me that he had moved into the Houses of Ulpiano last night and that – I’ve forgotten what else. Move aside, good woman, for this is a nasty beast and it kicks.”
Benina jumped aside, seeing how near the hind legs of an enormous donkey were. Two rough fellows were beating it to test its reactions and to teach it how a gypsy donkey should behave. She made off in the direction the man with the perfect teeth showed.
A narrow winding street branched off in the direction of the Puente de Segovia from the embankment. At the beginning of this stood the tenement block, a vast hive of cheap rooms at six pesetas a month; then the walls of an estate or farm called Valdemoro. There were a number of very old, dilapidated houses on the right with interior courtyards, rusty window bars and dirty walls which made a group as quaint, antiquated and tumbledown as can be seen anywhere in town or country. On some of the doors there were attractive glazed tiles with the image of San Isidro and the date of the building, and on the humpbacked roofs there were attractively worked iron weathercocks. When Benina arrived here, seeing that someone was looking out of a barred window on the ground floor, she decided to ask her way. It turned out to be a white donkey with unusually long ears, which protruded beyond the bars when Benina approached. She went into the first paved courtyard she came to, which was deeply rutted. Rooms led off it with doors of varying size and lean-tos or shanties with rusty tin roofs. On the only white (or rather, the least dirty) wall, a ship had been drawn in red ochre, in a childish hand, a three masted frigate, with a funnel and curves of smoke. Near this, a sickly-looking woman was washing ragged garments in a trough: she was not a gypsy, she was a baya, as the gypsies say. She explained that the gypsies lived in the left hand part, together with their donkeys, all in one sharing community, both beasts and humans all bedding down on the ground, with the feeding troughs as pillows for the latter. On the right hand side, in other stables also intended for donkeys, and just as filthy, many of the poor people of Madrid came to sleep at night. For a penny they could have a place on the floor – no more than that. When Benina described Almudena, the woman said that he had slept there the night before, but like the rest of the poor lodgers he had gone off very early, for bedrooms such as these were not conducive to late rising. If Madam had any message for the blind Moor, she would be glad to give it, provided he came to spend the night there again.
Thanking the poor creature, Benina left and continued along the lane, peering as she went to left and right. She hoped to see the figure of the Moor, basking in the sun or lost in his melancholy thoughts on some bald hillock by the wayside. Once past the Houses of El Ulpiano, there was nothing to be seen on the right hand side but arid stony slopes, tips for rubbish, waste and sand. About a hundred yards from the embankment there was a curve or rather a hairpin bend, which led up to the Pulgas railway station, recognisable from below by the coal-stained earth around it, the fence enclosing the track and a mixture of smoke and steam blanketing everything. Near the station, on the eastern side, a stream of sewer water, as black as ink, descended the slopes in an open channel, crossed the road in a culvert and watered the market gardens before flowing into the river. Here Benina stopped, scanning with her sharp eyes the gully down which the foaming and filthy water rushed, and the market gardens reaching down to the river on the left, planted with chard and lettuces. She went even further, knowing how Almudena liked the country and being exposed to wind and weather. It was a mild day: the brilliant light accentuated the vivid green of the chard and the purple of the red cabbages, and flooded the whole landscape with joy. The old woman continued to walk, stopping from time to time, gazing at the market gardens which gave solace to her eyes and her spirit, and searching the sterile hillsides but she saw nothing like a blind Moor basking in the sun. She returned to the embankment, went down to the river’s edge, and searched through the washing places and the huts which flanked the wall of the embankment, without finding any trace of Mordejai. Disappointed, she climbed back up into the city proper, intending to repeat her search the following day.
At home, nothing new had occurred. Or rather, there was one thing, which might have been classed as a miracle, the work of the subterranean genie, Samdai. Soon after she came in, Doña Paca said to her excitedly: “Guess what happened? I’ve been longing for you to come home so that I can tell you.”
“What, madam?”
“Don Romualdo called.”
“Don Romualdo? You must surely be dreaming.”
“I don’t see why. Is it so strange that he should come to my house?”
“No, but…”
“It certainly set me wondering what had happened.”
“Why, nothing has happened.”
“I thought that something must have happened in the Reverend’s house, something unpleasant that you had done and that he had come to complain to me.”
“Nothing like that has happened.”
“Didn’t you see him leave home? Didn’t he tell you that he was coming here?”
“What an idea! Do you really think he tells me where he’s going when he goes out?”
“Well, it’s very odd.”
“But surely, if he came, he must have told you.”
“How could he have told me anything, since I didn’t meet him? Let me explain. At ten o’clock, one of the shoemaker’s little girls came down to keep me company, as she usually does – Celedonia. She’s cleverer than a wagonload of monkeys. Well, at about a quarter to twelve, ting-a-ling, there was someone at the door. I said to the child: ‘Run and open it, dear and tell whoever it is that I’m not at home.’ Since that rascally shopkeeper made such a scene, I won’t receive any callers if you are not at home. She opened the door and from where I sat I could hear a deep voice, like that of someone important, but I couldn’t hear a word of what he said. Then the child told me that it was a priest.”
“What was he like?”
“Tall, handsome, neither old nor young.”
“That’s him,” said Benina, amazed at the coincidence. “But didn’t he leave a card?”
“No, because he had forgotten his card case.”
“And he asked for me?”
“No, he only said that he wanted to see me on a matter of great importance.”
“Then he’ll come back.”
“Not for a while. He said that he had to leave for Guadalajara this evening. You must have heard about this journey.”
“Yes, I think so. They said something about going to the station, and about a suitcase, and so on.”
“Well, there you are. You can call Celedonia, and she’ll tell you better than I can. He said he was so sorry not to find me in, and that when he came back from Guadalajara he would call again. But it’s strange that he hasn’t said anything to you about this important matter which he has to discuss with me. Or do you know all about it and want to keep it as a surprise?”
“No, no, I know nothing about it at all. And is Celedonia sure of the name?”
“Ask her yourself. He repeated two or three times: ‘Tell your mistress that Don Romualdo has called’.”
Benina questioned the child, who confirmed all that Doña Paca had said. She was very bright, remembered every word that the reverend gentleman had said, and faithfully described his face, his clothes, his manner of speech. Benina, baffled for now by the strangeness of the occurrence, put it at the back of her mind because she had more important things to deal with. She found Frasquito so much better that they decided to get him out of bed. But when he took his first steps round the room and down the passage, the old gallant found that his right leg was just a little bit unsteady; he was sure, nevertheless, that with good food and exercise it would soon recover its use and strength. He would soon be well again. His gratitude to both ladies, and especially to Benina, would
last his whole life. His spirits were revived and he felt new hope, confident that he would soon get a better job which would allow him to live comfortably, have a home of his own, however humble and – in short, he was in great heart, and his unbounded optimism was a medicine which would soon put him on his feet again.
Since Nina saw to everything, and never forgot to attend to the needs of people under her care, she thought it wise to let the ladies of the Costanilla de San Andrés know what had happened, for they must be wondering at the absence of their employee.
“Yes, be so good as to send them a little message from me,” said the old dandy, with admiration at the new evidence of thoughtfulness on Benina’s part. “Say what you think fit and I’m sure it will be the right thing.”
Benina did so early that evening, and bright and early next morning she set off again for the Puente de Toledo.
28
As she went, she met a ragged old man who used to beg at the Oratory of the Olive Grove with a baby girl in his arms. In tears he told her all about his misfortunes and truly these were enough to make the angels weep. His daughter, the mother of the baby and of another girl who was sick and being looked after by a neighbour had died two days previously “of poverty, ma’am, of exhaustion, of sending her poor kids out for a crust of bread”. What was he to do now with the two children and nothing to keep them on, without enough to keep himself? The Lord had deserted him. None of the saints in Heaven took the slightest notice of him. He only wanted to die, and be buried quickly, yes quickly, so that he couldn’t see the world any more. His only lasting wish was to see the two little girls nicely tucked away in one of those places, and there were lots of them where they took the children of the poor –both sexes. But what bad luck pursued him! He had met a charitable soul, a Reverend, who offered to put the girls into a home, but when he thought it was all fixed up, the devil had spoilt it all. “Tell me, ma’am, do you by any chance know a very fine-looking priest called Don Romualdo?”
“I think I may do,” replied Benina, again feeling greatly confused and giddy.
“Tall, well set up, dressed in fine cloth, neither old nor young.”
“And he says his name is Don Romualdo?”
“Don Romualdo, yes, ma’am.”
“He wouldn’t have a young niece called Doña Patros by any chance?”
“I don’t know her name, but he has a niece and she’s pretty. Let me tell you about my rotten luck: he said he’d give me the details yesterday evening. I go to his house and they tell me that he’s gone off to Guadalajara.”
“Of course,” said Benina, even more confused, feeling that the real and the imaginary were going round and round mixed up in her brain. “But he’ll come back soon.”
“Well, I wonder if he will.” The poor man then told her how he was dying of hunger; that for the last three days he had eaten only a piece of raw dried cod which they gave him in a shop, and some crusts of bread which he had dipped in the fountain to soften them, because he had no teeth left in his head. Ever since St John’s Day, when they stopped doling out soup at the Sacred Heart, he had been doomed; he could find no help anywhere; Heaven didn’t want him, nor did the earth. It had been his eighty-second birthday on the day of the Blessed San Blas, the day after Candlemas, so why should he want to live any longer and what had he got to lose? A man who had served his King for twelve years, and who for forty-five had hewn thousands and thousands of tons of rock in “those blessed quarries”, and who had always been respected and “behaved proper” had nothing left than to ask the grave digger to bury him deep, very deep and stamp down the earth well. As soon as he had found somewhere for the two kids to live, he would lie down and not get up again until late in the evening on the Day of Judgement – he would be the last one to get up! Benina was deeply moved at so much misfortune, the sincerity of which could not be in doubt. She asked the old man to take her to see the sick child, and was soon entering a murky room, on the ground floor of the large tenement building, where half a dozen beggars lived with their offspring, all together, for three pesetas a month. Most of them were in Madrid at the time, searching for a blessed copper or two. Benina saw only one old woman, flat chested and drowsy, who appeared to be drunk, and a paunchy swollen woman, with taut, purple skin like a full wineskin, her face covered with erysipelas, half dressed in rags of different colours. On the ground, on a thin mattress covered in pieces of yellow baize and scraps of a red cloak, lay the sick child, some six years old, her face livid and her fists stuffed in her mouth.
“What’s wrong with that child is hunger,” said Benina, touching its forehead and hands, and finding them stone cold.
“That may be, for we’ve none of us had anything hot since yesterday.” This was enough to cause the kind-hearted old lady’s heart to overflow with the compassion which so abundantly filled her soul, and translating this into action with characteristic promptness she went to the grocer’s shop which stood at the corner of the building straight away and bought the necessary ingredients to start making a stew straight away, and some eggs, charcoal and dried cod as well, for she was never one to do anything by halves. In due course, those unfortunates were satisfied, together with others who joined them, attracted by the smell which had spread throughout the lower part of the crowded building. And the Lord rewarded her for her charity, by sending, amongst the beggars who came to the feast, a legless cripple who walked with arms and who at last gave her accurate news of the last whereabouts of Almudena.
This was that the Moor slept at the Houses of Ulpiano and spent the days praying ardently, playing on a small guitar with two strings that he had brought from Madrid, never moving from a remote dunghill underneath Pulgas station, on the Puente de Segovia side. Benina made her way there slowly, because her guide’s pace was restricted by the need to walk on his buttocks – which were shod with leather – propelling himself with his hands, in which he held two stumps of wood. On the way, this top-half only man was somewhat critical of the Moor and his outlandish behaviour. He thought that Almudena must be a priest in his own country, that is, a priest of the Long Legged One, and that he was fasting for the Muslim Lent, which according to him involved leaping into the air, eating only bread and water and wetting one’s hands with saliva.
“What he sings to that scratchy guitar of his must be funeral-music from his country, because it sounds sad and makes one want to cry. Well, there you have him, ma’am, lying as it were on his bed of nails, so still that he might have been turned to stone.”
Benina could indeed make out the motionless figure of the blind man in an area of absolute wilderness, on a tip of rubble, slag and refuse which lay between the railway line and the Cambroneras road, for neither tree nor bush nor any vegetation at all grew there. The legless man went on his way, and Benina, with her basket on her arm, scrambled up the rubbish tip with difficulty, because the rubble of which it was composed was inclined to slip. Before reaching Almudena, she announced her arrival by calling out: “My dear boy, what a place to choose for sunbathing! Are you trying to dry yourself out, so that your skin can be used for covering drums? Oh! Almudena, it’s me, climbing up these carpeted stairs! But what’s wrong, my boy, are you crazy, or asleep?”
The Moor made no movement; he faced the sun, like a piece of meat on a grill. The old woman threw small pebbles at him, one, two, three, until she hit him. He jumped up with a shudder, then kneeling down, called out: “B’nina! You! B’nina!”
“Yes, my boy, here I am, a poor old woman come to see you in the desert where you live. Some bright idea you had! What a time I’ve had trying to find you!”
“B’nina!” repeated the blind man, weeping copiously like a child, his hands and feet trembling. “You come from Heaven!”
“No, dear, no,” said the good woman, reaching the top at last and slapping him on the shoulder, “I’ve not come down from Heaven, but risen up from earth by climbing this damned heap of stones. You poor little Moor, what an idea to come up here. Tell me, is y
our country like this?”
Mordejai didn’t answer this question, and they were both silent. He felt her over with his shaking hand, as if trying to see her with his fingers.
“I came,” said Benina at last, “because I thought that it might just be that you were dying of hunger.”
“I not eat.”
“Are you fasting? You might have chosen a better place for it.”
“This is the best, on a holy mountain.”
“Some mountain! What’s its name?”
“Mount Sinai, I’m on Mount Sinai.”
“You’re up in the clouds all right.”
“You come with angels, B’nina, you come with fire.”
“No dear, I’ve not come with fire, nor did I need to, you’re quite charred enough as it is. You’re like a piece of dried cod.”
“Penitence… I must be dry, so I can burn like straw.”
“You would turn into straw if I let you be. But I’ll not leave you, and now we’re going to eat and drink what I have in my basket.”
“I not eat. I become skeleton.” Without waiting for a reply, Almudena held out his arms, searching the ground. He was looking for his guitar, which Benina saw and picked up, brushing its untuned strings.
“Give me, give me.” said the blind man impatiently, gripped with inspiration. Seizing the instrument, he plucked the strings, producing sounds which were mournful and harsh, without any harmonic relation between them. Then he burst into a strange Arabic chant accompanied by short, rhythmic sounds on the strings. Benina listened to this threnody with some absorption, for though she could make nothing of the words, which sounded guttural and extremely harsh, nor find anything in the rhythms in common with ours, she felt that such music grew out of a profound melancholy. The blind man moved his head ceaselessly, as if he were aiming his song at different points in the heavens, and put such fervour and passion into certain passages that the frenzy which possessed him became apparent.
Misericordia (Dedalus European Classics) Page 18
