Mazurka for Two Dead Men

by Camilo José Cela

  “Was he an aristocrat?”

  “So we all thought until a pair of Civil Guards led him off in handcuffs for swindling a tobacconist in Orense.”

  “For goodness sake!”

  “As true as I’m here! His real name was Toribio Expósito, that name Toribio de Mogrovejo is the name of a saint, not his own name: St. Toribio de Mogrovejo, Archbishop of Lima, Peru, who zealously spread the faith and ecclesiastical doctrine throughout Latin America.”

  “Well I never!”

  “I got the full story from the secretary, you see.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The name Bustillo del Oro he took from his home town in Zamora. It seems there were various suits filed against him in several courts.”

  “For different offenses?”

  “More than likely.”

  To return to our story: Toribio de Mogrovejo, the Casandulfe Raimundo, and Robín Lebozán were embroiled in a lofty argument, the rest held their tongues not daring even to voice their opinion. The positions were as follows: Toribio de Mogrovejo believed both in God and in priests, he had the best developed argument, while the Casandulfe Raimundo believed in God (although preferring the term the Supreme Maker) but not in priests, that smacks of Free Masonry, and Robín Lebozán, apparently so as not to let the conversation flag, believed in priests though not in God.

  “What a load of baloney!”

  “Indeed.”

  The dispute was interrupted by the pair of Civil Guards, it was after one o’clock in the morning. Toribio de Mogrovejo blanched when the Civil Guard pounced on him with:

  “Are you Toribio Expósito?”

  “At your service.”

  “You are under arrest!”

  Toribio offered no resistance, he let himself be handcuffed and disappeared off into the night along the main road with a Civil Guard on either side of him.

  “It’s cold.”

  “Walking will soon warm you up.”

  Doña Rita made up her mind that Father Rosendo should not escape her clutches and she got her way, perseverance yields results. Doña Rita launched her attack upon the priest by means of his stomach (through his lust she already had him in the palm of her hand), his vanity, and avarice for Father Rosendo was greedy, lustful, and avaricious.

  “Here, take this gold watch that belonged to my idiot of a late husband, you might as well have it since you’re more of a man than he was.”

  “Thanks, I’ll have the date on which you gave it to me engraved upon it.”

  One day Doña Rita made so bold as to say:

  “I’m not going to beat about the bush. Goodness me! But if you ditch your habit and come and live with me, I’ll give you a million pesos. It’s up to you.”

  Father Rosendo said yes, of course he would, and that was that, he took the million pesos and went to live with the widow. The scandal that followed was monumental, but Father Rosendo merely smiled.

  “The fuss will soon die down and in the meantime the money stays put. Rita and I are very happy, and as soon as I can sort my situation out, we’ll get married. What more does the Good Lord ask than for his creatures to be happy?”

  In the Santa Rosiña de Xericó graveyard the mandrake grows, both male and female, the attributes of which can be seen in the roots to which a dog is tethered. Any woman who touches the mandrake becomes with child, sometimes just to catch the whiff of it is enough, and the dog howls when it wants someone to sleep, to tell the truth: I confess to killing with an axe the traveler who decorated his hat with daisies and his beard with butterflies in myriad colors, I killed him because he cast me an evil glance and pulled a fast one on me at half past seven, it doesn’t matter a whit to me if they hang me because I know that God will forgive my sins. I burned the dead man with camellia twigs so that he wouldn’t harbor a grudge against me. The hangman raised the gallows in the Santa Rosiña graveyard, just above the tenderest mandrake shoots for the hanged man to nourish them with life-giving semen, with sustaining, strength-giving blood and the spittle to bind and tell the tale. Luisiño Coot had sensitive eyes and Don Benigno prescribed a cure of mandrake root beaten with oil and wine.

  “And did it cure him?”

  “No, sir, he went blind.”

  If the male organs are to be seen in the mandrake root, any man that passes by the plant will be loved by women until the end of his days, until he is loved to death and priests bury him out of charity. The Civil Guard conveyed Toribio de Mogrovejo y de Bustillo del Oro to Ponferrada by ordinary transport; they took nine days because it’s quite far off, all uphill and down dale. If the female organs are to be seen in the roots of the mandrake, any woman that passes the plant shall be loved by a dapper dwarf with a shock of tousled hair called Mandrake, who feeds on nettles and semolina and speaks without opening his lips.

  “Will you love me, beautiful woman?”

  “Shut up, you slobberer! Drop dead!”

  Before uprooting the mandrake from the earth you must draw around it three circles with a sword, while a whore sings psalms and a lay brother dances the cancan hoisting his habit to reveal his privates. It may also be uprooted by tethering a starving dog to it and making it tug without stopping for breath, when the plant shrieks out in pain, the dog dies of fright.

  “Don’t bury it, just leave it for the crows to eat.”

  Doña Rita held Don Rosendo captive by means of his palate and his prick, or by his taste buds and the delicate bud of that other organ.

  “Screw me, isn’t that what I pay you for, you bugger! Don’t you enjoy being well-fed and having your privates fondled? Well, then, put the children to bed and don’t be long about it! Don’t forget to give them your blessing!”

  “Not to worry!”

  Braulio Doade, one of Miss Ramona’s servants (all four of them have one foot in the grave and are half-blind as well as half-deaf, bronchitic, and rheumatic, too) was out in the Philippines when they were still a Spanish colony, Braulio was always very natty and dressed to the nines.

  “Do you remember General Camilo Polavieja’s famous proclamation on the island of Mindinao in which he declared he would castrate every Moor that he caught with a weapon in his hand?”

  “No, I don’t remember that at all. Are you sure you’re not making it up?”

  When Braulio Doade died he was so wizened away that he weighed scarcely anything at all.

  “Shall we have a Mass said for him, Miss?”

  “Pshaw! I think an Our Father will be more than ample.”

  Pigs cannily root up mountain truffles and dogs tear up mandrake roots with their teeth, though it should be a black dog and die afterwards.

  “Shall we turn men into porcupines and women into earthworms?”

  The Devil sells his flying ointment at the fairs of the saints Dionís and Leonís at San Roguiño de Malta, if only Mamerto Paixón had known! It is peddled under license by a witch, maybe it’s the devil himself in disguise, and until sun-up she sells it at half-price so that the poor may also reap its benefits.

  “Fly like the birds of the air and the blessed souls in purgatory! Whoever wishes to fly can do so!”

  The ointment—there’s also a cream, which is thicker—is made from boiling a Moorish or an unbaptised child in a copper cauldron of rose water; when the water has reduced enough you mix the sediment with a widow’s menstrual blood, ground bones from a hanged man, woman’s urine, mandrake roots, and the three plants of Beelzebub: henbane, which helps you fly through the air and relieves toothache, headache, and earache; deadly nightshade, which women and actors use to paint their eyes; and thorn apple with its ghostly, infernal spines, which releases a flood of sweet dreams of death. At San Roquiño the elixir of long life is sold as well as badwives’ syrup at one real a swallow.

  “You want to blot out the horns of cuckoldry or that mole of adultery to fade from your skin?”

  One day when Don Rosendo was too prompt to pull the trigger Doña Rita gave him such a drubbing that the workers from the En
glish Biscuit Factory were forced to intervene, headed by the overseer, Casiano Real, who was always a most responsible person.

  “Easy on, missus! for God’s sake, or you’ll kill him! If Don Rosendo isn’t up to the job, then one of us will finish it off! Take it easy, ma’am, before we come to blows! And cover up your tits, begging your pardon! or you’ll catch your death!”

  In the Santa Rosiña de Xericó graveyard the Civil Guard Fausto Belinchón González, from Motilla del Palancar over Cuenca way, in la Mancha, and Uncle Cleto play checkers, unbelievable though it may be, but it happened for I saw it with my own two eyes.

  “Meanness has a charm of its own, Camilito, the worst is not trampling the mandrake but hurtling and tumbling down hill, just look at Rita Freire, a young woman of means, yet she’s begging along the road to death.”

  In a single night the wolves killed three cows and their calves on the St. Cristobo mountain and nobody knew that they were there. Armed with a shotgun, Tanis Gamuzo set out with his dogs to track them down and the following night he killed two wolves, one weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds, it wasn’t the Zacumeira wolf but not far off it; the dog Kaiser was badly wounded and they had to destroy him with a knife, that’s always a terrible pity. Tanis sent the pelts of both wolves, along with three others that he had, for tanning and then presented them to Anunciación Sabadelle, Sprat’s tart.

  “Here, take these and make a coverlet for Gaudencio, they’re good and warm.”

  When my cousins from Corunna sent me the cheroots, I took them along to Marcos Albite.

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “Thanks, I was a bit fed up with chewing Portuguese tobacco, all the good of it goes in the spittle, you’ll give me bad habits.”

  Catuxa Bainte brought Marcos Albite a quart of wine from the inn.

  “Today I’m as I want to be, there aren’t many such days.”

  The man’s voice changed.

  “Forgive me for addressing you so familiarly in front of folks, well, not that Catuxa really counts.”

  It seemed to me an opportune moment.

  “Better that we should use the tú form all the time—before the war we did, you’re a Guxinde, too, indeed as much a Guxinde as I am.”

  “True enough, but I’m a poor Guxinde, a pretty useless Guxinde …”

  Catuxa brought two glasses of wine, one for Marcos Albite and another for me, mine was as clean as a whistle and a delight to behold.

  “Shall I rinse out your piddle can?”

  “Do.”

  Marcos Albite patted his cheroots.

  “You prefer them to the shorter ones?”

  “I couldn’t really say.”

  Something like a flash of hope shot through the sky, maybe it was a dove.

  “I don’t trust a single devil, before I was able to stand up for myself, but look at me now, trapped in this coffin on wheels!”

  The oxcart sings as it rumbles along the track and its squeaking affrights the wolf and alerts the vixen, the world is like a sound box and the crust of the earth like the skin of the drum, just like the taut covering of the drum. Marcos Albite repainted the little star and polished up the tacks which showed his initials.

  “I’ve nearly finished that saint for you, it’s a real humdinger of a St. Camilo, just wait and see, I’ll give it to you next week, all I have to do now is to sand it down a bit.”

  Feliciano Vilagabe San Martiño took his time about getting married; he was sweetheart to Angustias Zoñán Corvacín for twenty-three years and their marriage was shortlived, indeed it can’t have lasted as much as an hour and a half. When the bride and groom came out of the church, she said to him:

  “Shall we go to the graveyard with mamma for a moment to lay a bunch of flowers on my father’s grave?”

  And he replied:

  “You two go. I’ll wait here.”

  When Angustias returned, Feliciano had skipped off like a spring breeze; Remedios, the landlady, stepped out of Rauco’s inn and handed Angustias an envelope.

  “Here! Feliciano left this for you.”

  In a fit of nerves Angustias tore the envelope open, and inside she found a scrap of paper with a message written in a rounded hand: Go to hell! She never heard from Feliciano again, it was as though the earth had swallowed him up, although somebody said they saw him in Madrid, working as a bus conductor.

  “So what did Angustias do?”

  “What could she do? First she waited—she was well used to waiting—she waited for four or five years, and then she became a nun, she didn’t fit the bill for a whore, for that sort of thing you need to be of tender years, well, less of a wrinkled old bag.”

  The Vilagabes are very hoity-toity folks and always were. Truth to tell they were a pretty useless bunch but always very toffee-nosed and finicky, very proper and particular in their tastes and interests. Angustias, on the other hand, was a common conceited little swank full of airs and graces like holding her knife in a horrible way, cocking her little finger in the air when she lifted her cup, and saying “crocrettes” and “just an eensty-weensty bit.”

  “That’s hard to take.”

  “Very hard, it’s even worse than adultery; adultery happens in the best of families, and Angustias’ family are nothing but riff-raff, the whole world is turned upside down these days.”

  “But why didn’t he ditch her while they were still sweethearts?”

  “How would I know? They say he was stringing her along for years.”

  “It would have been worse if he had been boring the pants off her for years.”

  “You’re right there. Just look what might have been!”

  Miss Ramona always held that Angustias was like a block of wood.

  “She’s just like a homemade bedside table hewn from rough mountain pine, if even that. Angustias was always very dim, some women don’t even rank among the human race, and that’s the truth. Angustias is a cow, just like a dun heifer.”

  Everybody gets by as best they can, Feliciano Vilagabe made his getaway, a hard thing to do just right for each case has its own peculiar characteristics.

  “Do you remember Medardo Congos, the Pontevedra vet who had a dick the length of your finger and cheated at cards?”

  “Why wouldn’t I remember him?”

  “Well, he did the very opposite: he didn’t run away, his wife ran away on him and he threw a banquet for over a hundred people to celebrate, it cost him a pretty penny. I don’t think my wife will dare come back after this, he told his friends. If you only knew what peace descended when she packed her bags and left!”

  From his father, who was a lighthouse keeper, Medardo inherited a cage with a stuffed seagull inside.

  “It’s called Dulce Nombre, in memory of a sweetheart my good father had before he entered into marriage with my blessed mother, God rest their souls! Those were proper patriarchal ways not like nowadays, which are the very devil of a debauchery.”

  “Congos, get a grip on yourself!”

  “Pardon me.”

  Teresita del Niño Jesús Minguez Gandarela, the runaway wife of the vet, wears her hair cropped short and smokes in front of men.

  “Brazen hussy! And where did she run off to?”

  “Not too far away, she went to Sarria with an unauthorized attorney who danced the tango and the foxtrot well, apparently she was fed up with the shortcomings of that husband of hers, to tell the truth there are women whose minds it wouldn’t even cross.”

  The Casandulfe Raimundo and I watched our cousin Ramona strolling beneath the trees in the garden, dressed to the nines, all alone and so haughty under her umbrella, she had the little dog Wilde at her side. Raimundo and I watched her for some time without uttering a word, indeed why would we? Our cousin Ramona went as far as the river, fixed her gaze upon the current for some time, then walked slowly back towards the house. I went off and Raimundo pretended that he had just arrived.

  “Here, your camellia as usual.”

  “Thank
s a lot.”

  “Were you out for a stroll?”

  “No, I just went down to the river to watch the water flow past, it’s years ago today that my mother drowned.”

  “That’s right!”

  Our cousin Ramona smiled wistfully.

  “How time passes, Raimundo! When my mother died I was just a little girl, I was thirteen years old and felt that the world was caving in on top of me, but the world never caves in on top of anyone.”

  “No.”

  “We all grow old and all our many airs and graces pass with the years.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And the bees in our bonnets, too.”

  “Those, too.”

  Our cousin Ramona was in a strange mood, to Raimundo she appeared very beautiful.

  “Leave me alone, I just want to weep.”

  In Sarria when she moved in with Filemón Toucido Rozabales, an attorney whose affairs were in a mess, Teresita del Niño Jesús behaved in an exemplary fashion, apparently to pull the wool over the eyes of the folks in the area.

  “We need to organize three societies: clothes for the poor, milk distribution centers, and the encouragement of late vocations.”

  “Yes, of course. And we’ll ask His Holiness for His blessing so that we have everything, it’s important to do things right from the word go.”

  “We could also found an organisation to lead fallen young women back to the straight and narrow from which they should never have strayed.”

  “Naturally. And another for the integration of gypsies within Spanish Christian society in order to cherish them to the bosom of our Holy Catholic religion.”

  Doña Asunción Trasparga de Méndez is known as Sweet Choniña because she’s married to Méndez the candy-maker, Filomeno Méndez Vilamuín. Sweet Choniña shyly enquired:

  “Will we have enough money to get by?”

  “Aw, what a killjoy!”

  When Teresita del Niño Jesús began to feel secure—little by little everybody gets to feel secure, it’s the law of nature—she began to forget all about charitable institutions. To hell with the poor! this business of milk distribution is nothing but a curse! To hell with whoever thinks of joining the priesthood late in life! May the fallen young women have a ball, for life is short! I was just saying that when Teresita del Niño Jesús began to feel secure, she took to whoring like a duck to water. Toucido did his best to console her but with doubtful success.