The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy

by Margaret Jull Costa (ed)

  XV - And I remember my mother one very long day, in the sad light of a sunless room with its windows slightly open. She was motionless in her armchair, her hands folded on her breast, still with a lot of cloths wrapped about her head, and her face white. She didn't speak and, when others spoke, she turned her gaze on them, imposing silence. That was a day without hours, immersed in a kind of early evening gloom. And that day ended suddenly, because servants rushed into the bedroom carrying lamps. My mother was screaming:

  `The cat! The cat! Get it off me, it's clinging to my back!'

  Basilisa came over to me and, with a great show of mystery, propelled me towards my mother. She crouched down and whispered in my ear, her chin trembling, the hairs on the moles on her face brushing my cheek.

  `Make a cross with your hands!'

  I did so and Basilisa placed them on my mother's back. Then she said in an urgent voice:

  `What do you feel, child?'

  Frightened, I replied in the same tone of voice:

  `Nothing, I don't feel anything, Basilisa.'

  `Can't you feel her burning?'

  `I can't feel anything, Basilisa.'

  `Not even the cat's fur?'

  `Nothing!'

  And I burst into tears, frightened by my mother's shouting. Basilisa lifted me up and put me out in the corridor.

  `You naughty boy, you must have committed some sin, that's why the evil one isn't frightened of you!'

  She went back into the bedroom. I remained in the corridor, full of fear and anxiety, pondering my childish sins. The shouting continued in the bedroom and servants came and went through the house carrying candles.

  XVI - That long, long day was followed by an equally long night, with candles burning before all the holy images and muttered conversations being held outside doors that creaked as they opened. I sat down in the corridor, near a table on which stood a candlestick with two candles, and I started thinking about the story of Goliath. Antonia, who came by with a scarf pulled low over her eyes, said to me in a shadowy voice:

  `What are you doing here?'

  `Nothing.'

  `Why aren't you studying?'

  I looked at her, astonished that she should ask why I wasn't studying when our mother was ill. Antonia disappeared down the corridor and I returned to the story of that gigantic pagan whom a mere stone could kill. At that time, more than anything else, I admired the boy David's skill with the slingshot. I intended to practise next time I went for a walk by the river. I had a vague, fantastical idea that I would aim my shots at the pale brow of the student from Bretal. And Antonia came by again carrying a small brazier in which she was burning lavender.

  `Why don't you go to bed, child?'

  And again she ran off down the corridor. I did not go to bed, but I fell asleep with my head resting on the table.

  XVII - I don't know if it was one night or many, because the house was always dark and candles were always burning before the images. I remember hearing in my sleep my mother's shouts, the maids' mysterious conversations, the creaking of doors and a small bell being rung out in the street. Basilisa la Galinda came for the candlestick, took it away for a moment and brought it back with two new candles in it that barely gave out any light. On one of those occasions, as I raised my head from the table, I saw a man in shirtsleeves sitting opposite me, sewing. He was very small, with a bald head and a scarlet waistcoat. He greeted me with a smile:

  `So the scholar fell asleep, did he?'

  Basilisa trimmed the candle wicks.

  `You remember my brother, don't you, my dear?'

  Though dragged from the mists of sleep, I did remember Senor Juan de Alberte. I had seen him on certain afternoons when Basilisa took me to visit the cathedral towers. Her brother would be sitting beneath the vaulted ceiling, darning cassocks. Basilisa sighed.

  `He's here so that he can go and call for the holy oils from the Corticela Chapel if they're needed.'

  I started to cry and they told me not to make a noise. I could hear my mother's voice:

  `Shoo the cat away! Shoo it away!'

  Basilisa la Galinda went into the bedroom which was at the foot of the stairs leading up to the attic, and emerged bearing a cross made of black wood. She murmured a few obscure words and made the sign of the cross on my chest, on my back and on my sides. Then, she handed me the cross and took her brother's scissors from him, large, rusty tailor's scissors that made a metallic sound when you opened them.

  `We must do as she asks and set her free ...'

  She led me by the hand into my mother's bedroom; she was still shouting:

  `Shoo the cat away! Shoo it away!'

  As we went in, Basilisa said in a low voice:

  `Go over to her very slowly and put the cross on the pillow. I'll stay here by the door.'

  I went into the bedroom. My mother was sitting up, her hair dishevelled, her hands extended and her fingers clenched like claws. One hand was black and the other was white. Antonia was looking at her, pale and imploring. I walked round her and looked into my sister's eyes - they were dark, deep and dry of tears. I climbed noiselessly onto the bed, and placed the cross on the pillows. Basilisa stood hunched in the doorway. I only saw her for a moment, while I was climbing onto the bed, because, as soon as I placed the cross on the pillows, my mother began to writhe about, and a black cat slipped out from under the blankets and escaped towards the door. I closed my eyes and heard the snip of Basilisa's scissors. Then she came over to the bed on which my mother still lay writhing and carried me out of the room. In the corridor, near the table behind which lay the tailor's dwarfish shadow, by the light of the candles, they showed me two black strips of material that stained his hands with blood and which he said were the cat's ears. And the old man put on his cloak and went off to call for the holy oils.

  XVIII - The house filled with the smell of wax and the confused murmur of people praying ... A vestmented cleric rushed in, his fingers to his lips as if commanding silence. Juan de Alberte guided him through the various doors. The tailor's stiff, dwarfish figure ran ahead of him, looking back over his shoulder, his cloak dragging on the ground, his cap held between two fingers the way artisans do in processions. Behind them came a dark, slow-moving group of people, praying in low voices. They walked through the centre of the rooms from door to door, keeping strictly to that path. Various shapes could be seen kneeling in the corridor, and their heads began to appear one by one. They formed a queue that stretched as far as the open doors of my mother's bedroom. Inside, knelt Antonia and Basilisa, wearing mantillas and each carrying a candle. A few hands appeared from beneath the dark cloaks and pushed me forwards before returning swiftly to the crosses on their rosaries. They were the gnarled hands of the old women who were lined up along the wall, praying in the corridor, their slender shadows cleaving to their bodies. In my mother's bedroom, a weeping woman, clutching a perfumed handkerchief, and who looked to me as purple as a dahlia in her Nazarene habit, took me by the hand and knelt down with me, helping me to light a candle. The priest walked around the bed, mumbling in Latin, reading from his book ...

  Then they lifted the covers and revealed my mother's feet, stiff and yellow. I realised she was dead and stood there terrified and silent in the warm arms of the beautiful woman, all white and purple. I felt like crying out in terror, but I felt too an icy prudence, a subtle tedium, a perverse modesty as I was held between the arms and bosom of that lady all in white and purple, who bent her face to my cheek and helped me hold the funerary candle.

  XIX - Basilisa came to take me from the lady's arms and led me to the edge of the bed where my mother lay stiff and yellow, her hands tangled in the folds of the sheet. Basilisa lifted me up so that I could see the waxen face more clearly.

  `Say goodbye, my child. Say: Goodbye, mama, I'll never see you again.

  She put me down, because she was tired, and then, after taking a breath, lifted me up again, placing her gnarled hands beneath my arms.

  `Take a good
look. Keep the memory for when you're older. Now, my child, kiss her.'

  And she held me over the dead woman's face. I almost touched those still eyelids and I started screaming and struggling in Basilisa's arms. Antonia suddenly appeared on the other side of the bed, her hair wild. She snatched me from the old servant's arms and held me to her, sobbing and choking. Confronted by my sister's desperate kisses, by the gaze of her reddened eyes, I had a sense of great desolation ... Antonia's body felt oddly rigid and there was a strange, stubborn look of pain on her face. Later, in another room, sitting in a low chair, she held me on her knee, stroked me, kissed me again, still sobbing, and then, squeezing my hand, she laughed and laughed and laughed ... A lady fanned her with her handkerchief; another, with frightened eyes, opened a bottle of perfume; another entered carrying a glass of water trembling on a metal tray.

  XX - I was sitting in a corner, plunged in a state of confused sadness that made my head ache as if I were about to be sick. Sometimes I cried and sometimes I distracted myself listening to others crying. It must have been nearly midnight when the door was flung open and there, at the far end of the room, flickered the flames of four candles. My mother lay in her shroud in a black coffin. I went noiselessly into the bedroom and sat down on the window seat. Three women and Basilisa's brother were keeping vigil round the coffin. From time to time, the tailor would get up and spit on his fingers to trim the wick on the candles. There was a kind of clownish skill in the way that dwarfish, elegant tailor in this scarlet waistcoat nipped the wick and puffed out his cheeks to blow on his fingers.

  I listened to the women's stories and gradually my crying stopped. They were telling tales of ghosts and people who had been buried alive.

  XXI - As day was breaking, a very tall woman, with dark eyes and white hair, came into the bedroom. She kissed my mother's barely closed lids, unafraid of the cold of death and hardly shedding a tear. Then she knelt down between two candles and dipped an olive branch in holy water and sprinkled it over the corpse. Basilisa came in looking for me and beckoned me to her:

  `Look, it's your grandmother!'

  My grandmother! She had come by mule from her house in the hills, seven leagues from Santiago. At that moment, I heard the sound of hooves striking the stones in the courtyard where the mule had been tethered. The sound seemed to resonate in the emptiness of that house full of weeping. My sister Antonia called to me from the door.

  `Come here, child!ff

  Basilisa released me and very slowly I left the room. Antonia took me by the hand and drew me into a corner.

  'That lady is your grandmother. From now on, we're going to live with her.'

  I sighed:

  Why doesn't she give me a kiss?'

  Antonia thought for a moment, while she dried her eyes.

  `Don't be silly. First, she has to pray for Mama.'

  She prayed for a long time. At last, she got up and asked for us, and Antonia led me over to her. My grandmother was now wearing a black shawl over her curly, silver hair that seemed to emphasise the dark fire of her eyes. Her fingers lightly brushed my cheek and I still remember the impression it made on me, that rough, peasant hand, entirely bereft of tenderness. She spoke to us in dialect:

  `Your mother is dead and now I will be your mother. You have nowhere else in the world to go ... I will take you with me because this house is to be shut up. We will set off tomorrow, after mass has been said.'

  XXII - The following day, my grandmother closed up the house, and we set off to San Clemente de Brandeso. I was already outside, mounted on a mule belonging to a peasant who had sat me in front of him on the saddle, when we heard the sound of slamming doors and people calling for my sister Antonia. They did not find her and, their faces contorted with fear, they came out onto the balconies, then went back in again and ran, calling for my sister, through the empty rooms, where the wind rattled the doors. From the cathedral door, a woman spotted her on the roof, lying in a faint. We called to her and she opened her eyes to the morning sun, as frightened as if she had just woken from a bad dream. A sacristan in cassock and shirtsleeves had to use a long ladder to get her down. And as we were leaving, the student from Bretal appeared in the atrium, his cloak buffeted by the wind. He had a black bandage round his head and, beneath it, I thought I could see the bloody wounds left by two lopped-off ears.

  XXIII - In Santiago in Galicia, which has long been one of the world's shrines, people still watch intently for a miracle.

  © Dr Carlos del Valle-Inclan

  Translated by Margaret full Costa

  Ramon del Valle-Inclan (Villanueva de Arosa [Pontevedra], 1866-Santiago de Compostela, 1936) was a novelist, playwright and poet and one of the great literary figures of his day. Apart from brief excursions to Mexico and Argentina, he spent most of his adult life in Madrid writing newspaper articles, short stories, novels and plays and participating vociferously in the literary circles that met in many of the cafes. He wrote novels on a variety of subjects - the Carlist wars, an imaginary Latin American dictator, the corrupt court of Isabel II - but is perhaps best known for the Sonatas (19021905; Spring and Summer Sonatas and Autumn and Winter Sonatas, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus, 1997 and 1998) and for his remarkable plays, particularly, Divinas Palabras and Luces de Bohemia (both 1920; Lights of Bohemia, tr. John Lyon, Aris & Phillips, 1993; Divine Words/Bohemian Lights/Silver Face, tr. M. Delgado, Methuen, 1993). This story is taken from Jardin umbrio (1903), a collection of ghostly tales set in Galicia.

  I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

  Stubb, in Moby Dick

  One April afternoon a few years ago, when my name was still Mempo Lesmes and I was very young and a starving, unknown actor, I got lost in the labyrinthine outskirts of San Anfiero de Granzara and I came across a large mansion surrounded by an overgrown garden, the Villa Nemo. I had no problem getting into the house, there was no lock, no knocker on the door, it was an abandoned house, abandoned, it seemed to me, in the fullest sense of the word, for I found signs that, as well as being abandoned by its owners, it was a house that had also somehow abandoned itself. I was fascinated by the whole idea and I walked in the garden for a long time imagining the house abandoning itself to its own fate in the darkness of the night. In a state of great excitement, walking along one of the galleries open to the winds, I told myself that if, one day, I succeeded as an actor, the first thing I would do would be to buy that house and make of it my residence of choice.

  Some years passed and I became a successful movie actor. A minor (but very meaty) role in The Trunk of Fools shot me straight to stardom. People found the way I gnawed on a toothpick a revelation. My agent was thoughtful and astute enough to change my name to Brandy Mostaza and from then on it was plain sailing. I was signed to star in The Loves of Mustafa, the comedy which, by opening to me all the doors of popularity, wrought a spectacular overnight change in my life. I achieved my greatest success with The Many Moods of Young Brandy, the television series that shone so brightly in the sixties and which now, like everything else I did, has been relegated to the most complete and humiliating oblivion.

  What contributed to my irresistible rise was the extreme, comic thinness of my body (people laughed because when I walked, I looked like a leaf being blown along by the wind), but that same physical quirk was soon to tell tragically against me. I bought Villa Nemo, put the garden in order and restored the house, I built a large swimming pool, I began throwing extravagant parties every Friday night, and the labyrinthine outskirts of San Anfiero de Granzara filled with men and girls who came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. Every Friday, crates of oranges and lemons for the cocktails arrived from a fruiterer in San Anfiero, and every Saturday these same lemons and oranges left Villa Nemo by the back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. I had lots of girlfriends, I danced boleros, I began many beguines, I sang songs to love. But misfortune was lurking in the most brightly lit corner of my
festive garden, and, without realising it, I began to let myself go, to abandon myself. As if there were some secret link between the house and obesity, I gradually began to put on weight, and when I realised what was happening, no diet could stop the irreversible process, the tragic transformation. And so I reached the last Friday of the seventies, all dressed up and with not a girlfriend in sight, transformed into a Brandy Mostaza who was unrecognisable, a monstrous fatso who had lost his comic spark.

  `For some time now, you haven't been able to see the wood for the fat,' my agent warned me that day.

  `What wood?'I asked, pretending that I didn't know what he was talking about.

  `Oh, come on! Just tell me one thing: how long is it since anyone offered you a contract?'

  Since I had earned a lot of money, the fact that people had stopped giving me contracts didn't particularly bother me. I was much more worried, for example, by the sudden, alarming absence of girlfriends and the steadily declining numbers of guests at my parties. I was incapable of seeing that everything, absolutely everything, was indissolubly linked.

  `And tell me,' said my agent, `why do you think no one offers you movies any more, or, if they do, why they only want you for awful minor roles?'

  `Well,' I said, `I suppose it must have something to do with my putting on a few pounds.'

  `You suppose!P

  Baron Mulder, who was quite blatantly and openly eavesdropping on us, joined in the conversation.

  'My friend Brandy's fatness,' he said, toying with his monocle, `is a splendid monument to the flesh, to excess and to human kindness.'

  You might think that he was saying all this because he was even fatter than I was, but I had an inkling too that, for some hidden reason which I could not pin down, he was trying to flatter me in order to gain my sympathy as a preliminary to getting something out of me.

  My suspicions were soon confirmed when, an hour later, I bumped into him again in the garden and he started talking to me about his ancestors, the Mulders and the Roigers, revealing to me that both branches of the family had lived in Villa Nemo at one time and that they had suffered all kinds of misfortunes there. He was a bit drunk and very garrulous, and a shameless doom merchant. From all that he told me (he even had the impertinence to ask if his ancestors' ghosts were quite happy haunting my house) I drew one clear conclusion: Villa Nemo had a baleful influence on all its owners. That was why I was surprised when, as he said goodbye to me that night, he asked how much I wanted for the house.