Misericordia E-Book

Benito Pérez Galdòs

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Benina,a 60 year-old servant begs secretly to keep her mistress fed. Crushed by poverty or the weight of their pretensions, the high and low life of 19th century Madrid provides the cast for this enjoyably bleak portrait of a family's decline, fall and recovery. The widow Dona Francisca, reduced from salon to slum, is protected by her servant Benita, who begs and barters in a daily battle with starvation and her mistress's pride. When a sudden inheritance enriches the old crow, Benita is cast aside. Galdos's Spain teems with saints and sinners, corrupted as much by poverty as by wealth. The Sunday Times

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction

From the Author’s Preface to the 1913 edition

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Finale

Copyright

Introduction

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) is generally considered to be Spain’s greatest novelist after Cervantes. He was born in Las Palmas (Canary Islands), the youngest son of moderately affluent middle-class parents, and it was his domineering mother who seems to have contributed most to the shaping of Benito’s timid personality. He never married, distrusting an institution which could only encourage infidelity, but conducted numerous love affairs (always discreetly), the financial strain of which would add to the sorrows of his later years.

When he was 19, Galdós went to Madrid to study law, but by then he had already discovered his true vocation. He abandoned his studies and earned a living as a journalist (helped by the contributions of a sympathetic aunt) while he began to master the craft of writing. After the success of his first book, La fontana de oro (1870), his career was assured. Galdós’ novels can be divided into two great cycles. The largest is the Episodios nacionales, a meticulously researched series which reconstructs Spanish history from Trafalgar to the Bourbon restoration. The first ten novels were written between 1873 and 1875 – an extraordinary rate of production which Galdós was to maintain throughout his life. In the end, the Episodios ran to 46 volumes. Alongside this, Galdós worked on the cycle which remains his greatest achievement; the Novelas españolas contemporáneas, in which he painted a rich and vivid picture of contemporary Spain. Galdós maintained that Balzac and Dickens were the writers who most greatly influenced him (he made the first Spanish translation – from French – of Pickwick Papers), and it was following Balzac’s model that Galdós adopted the method of reintroducing characters in several novels. In this way he came to create an autonomous fictional universe centred on his beloved Madrid, the city of which he is the supreme chronicler. The series of Novelas españolas contemporáneas includes his masterpiece, the four volume Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-7), and it is here too that we find the important late work Misericordia (1897).

The novel tells the story of sixty year old Benina, faithful servant to the widow Doña Paca. Reckless spending has left the mistress penniless, and Benina is forced to beg secretly in order to support her, claiming that the money she brings back comes from one Don Romualdo, a priest whose biography Benina skilfully invents. Amongst a colourful cohort of fellow beggars is the blind Moor Almudena, who encourages Benina’s belief in the possibility of a supernatural solution to her financial difficulty. Then, to Benina’s amazement, Doña Paca informs her that Don Romualdo himself has visited, and has an important message for them. Could it be that Benina has lied so consistently that she has actually brought Don Romualdo into existence? Or is it rather the case, as Benina herself suggests, that “all our dreams have a basis in fact, and truth lies hidden within falsehood”?

Galdós himself, let us not forget, was a man who must have been absorbed to a very high degree in the world which he constructed around himself; the fictional world in which the timid man could speak with such authority and confidence, with such subtle irony and indefatigable humour. In an early story, La novela en el tranvía (1871), the narrator is dozing on a tram while snatches of overheard conversation sink into his semi-conscious mind. Details of recent crimes become confused with memories of his own life, and of the sensational novels he has read, so that when he wakes up he jumps out of the tram and pursues an innocent passer-by, who he is convinced has murdered a countess he once read about. In this humorous tale, Galdós reminds us that the distinction between fiction and reality can be a subtle one. We also see an early manifestation of the interest in madness and delusion which recurs throughout his later work.

In Misericordia the dimension of psychopathology is represented by the neurotic Obdulia, daughter of Doña Paca, and the strange figure of Frasquito Ponte, whose epileptic fit leads to him being brought to recuperate at Doña Paca’s house. Frasquito is a comical dandy, proud of his curly locks” and dainty feet, but he is also a sad figure; a bourgeois fallen on hard times, who still clings longingly to the past – his top hat was fashionable in the 1820s, his hairstyle in the 1850s. He is a remnant of the days before La Gloriosa, the revolution of September 1868 from which the charismatic and ill-fated Juan Prim emerged as Prime Minister. Frasquito’s social descent mirrors the historical events: the revolution robbed him of his civil service post; his pride and unwillingness to “lower” himself only making his slide all the more painful. Prim’s assassination in 1870, Frasquito remembers, coincided with the expiry of his last pair of fine boots.

Frasquito Ponte is a creature of history – of a past which has little relevance for the materialistic era of the Restoration, the years of political stability and economic growth which had followed the accession of the Bourbon King Alfonso XII in 1875. And it is in the character of the good servant Benina that Galdós embodies the quality which he feels to be most lacking in the Spanish society of his day – compassion; the Misericordia of the title.

Galdós had an uneasy relationship with the Roman Catholic church. A deeply spiritual man, he was nevertheless vigorously opposed to dogma, and the hypocrisy which he frequently perceived in the clerical hierarchy. In Misericordia his portrayal of a “pure heart” is unconventional, and characteristically subtle. Benina happily stole from her mistress in the days when there was something worth taking. Even when the crisis came, and Benina gave Doña Paca her savings in order to try and rescue her, she still secretly kept some money back for herself. An act of selfishness, or of prudence? Then there are her habitual lies concerning Don Romualdo; well intentioned of course, but is this really the behaviour of a saint? Little wonder that few can recognize Benina’s true goodness – when she gives money to some who are no more unfortunate than herself, she is chased away. She cannot be a true saint, since her social status is no higher than that of those she seeks to help. Only the blind Almudena can see her true worth; he falls in love with her – as does Frasquito Ponte, when a further epileptic fit sends him into a bizarre ecstasy. Galdós’ ideal relationship was the Platonic love of an older woman. Benina tells Almudena to treat her as a mother.

Financial rescue does indeed arrive for Doña Paca, and new-found wealth enables her overbearing daughter-in-law Juliana to take control of the household. There will be no room in it now for Benina, and in a further ironic reference to the title of the book, it is generously suggested that Benina should go to live in the Casa de Misericordia – the poor-house. She leaves calmly, a figure who has transcended the pettiness and squalor she has witnessed. She sets up house with Almudena, and when Juliana, tormented by guilt, visits her and asks for forgiveness, Benina’s final enigmatic words of comfort bring the novel to a serene conclusion.

Misericordia was written in the spring of 1897, when Galdós was at the very summit of his powers. The following year saw Spain at war with the United States, a disaster which resulted in the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and brought about a crisis of national identity. A new wave of Spanish writers – the Generation of ’98 – would draw little from Galdós; already his star was setting. A disastrous lawsuit led to financial crisis – writing now became a matter of eonomic survival, and his work suffered accordingly. Stage plays appeared, as well as further hastily prepared volumes of Episodios nacionales, but his finest works were behind him. The end was a sad decline, accelerated by senility and blindness.

Plans to nominate Galdós for the Nobel Prize were thwarted by the machinations of opposing factions within Spain itself. It was a bitter blow. He had seen the great novelists of France, Britain and Russia fêted in their native countries, while his own had failed to appreciate his unique contribution. It was to those other nations that he looked in hope of recognition. How ironic then, that while modern critical opinion in Spain has raised his status to the very loftiest heights, Galdós is still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, a neglected gem of world literature. The appearance of this new translation of one of Galdós’ most important novels is therefore a cause for celebration.

Andrew Crumey

From the Author’s Preface to the 1913 edition

I wrote Misericordia in the spring of 1897. My purpose was to portray the lowest strata of Madrid society, the humblest, the poorest of the poor, the professional beggars, the dissolute vagrants and poverty in general, which is almost always pitiful and, occasionally, rascally or criminal and deserving of punishment.

For this I had to spend long months directly observing and studying on the spot, visiting the haunts of the poor and the villainous who live in the densely populated quarters south of Madrid. I investigated the dosshouses of Calle de Mediodía Grande and Calle del Bastero accompanied by police; to penetrate the foul lairs where the debased devotees of Bacchus and Venus celebrate their disgusting rites, I had to disguise myself as a doctor of the Public Health Department. Not content with this as a means of observing the most tragic scenes of human degradation, I made friends with certain administrators in the slum tenements called casas de corredor, in which the lowest of the proletariat live crowded together: there I met the honest poor, there I witnessed those heartrending scenes of grief and abnegation which abound in populous capital cities. Years before, I had visited Whitechapel, the Minories and other parts of the East End of London, down by the Thames. I find it hard to choose between the poverty I saw there and in Lower Madrid. Ours is undoubtedly more cheerful, because of the splendid sun which shines over all.

The Moor Almudena or Mordejai, who plays such large a part in the action of Misericordia, is actually based on a real person. A friend of mine who, like me, often spent time idling through the streets observing people and places, told me that at the Oratorio del Caballero de Gracia there was a ragged blind beggar who in face and language appeared to be of Moorish origin. I went to see him and was amazed by the barbaric simplicity of the poor fellow, who spoke an arabised Spanish peppered with frightful oaths and who promised to tell me his romantic life story in exchange for a modest sum of money. I walked with him through the central streets of Madrid, stopping from time to time in various taverns where I invited him to give succour to his wasted body with libations forbidden by the laws of his race. This way, I was able to portray a most interesting character that readers of Misericordia have found to be very true to life. All the truth is due to the picturesque Mordejai himself, for I took little part in creating him. My desire to study him closely took me to the dusty and desolate Injurias quarter. In the miserable hovels near the gasworks, I found the dwellings of the most pathetic of the poor. From there I discovered Las Cambroneras, a relatively pleasant area by the banks of the River Manzanares, where the gypsy population congregate, where humans and donkeys live together in blithe promiscuity and where there may be some danger for the passerby. My study of Lower Madrid was completed by visits to the Pulgas railway station, the Puente de Segovia and the further bank of the Manzanares as far as the house of Goya, where the famous artist had his studio: the whole area was a rich seam of picturesque scenes and linguistic treasures.

Señá Benina, the philanthropic servant, whose character has an almost Gospel-like purity, was borne of the painstaking documentation that I put together to make up the four volumes of Fortunata y Jacinta. From the same source come Doña Paca and her daughter – typical of the ruined bourgeoisie – as is Frasquito Ponte, the hard-up dandy. Some characters in the book originate in earlier volumes, Elamigo Manso, Miau and the Torquemada books; similarly some characters from Misericordia appear in novels I have written since. This is the system I have always adopted, to create a complex, heterogeneous and extremely varied world, providing a broadly-based picture of society at a particular moment of history.

1

Just as some people have two faces, so too does the parish of San Sebastián. Or to be more precise, the church has, although its two faces are interesting rather than pretty. One face looks straight down Calle de Cañizares towards the poorer quarters and the other towards the houses of the commercial grandees of Plaza del Angel. You will have noted a cheery ugliness in both faces, which is pure Madrid, a place where architecture and morality meet in marvellous union. On the south side, there is a rather vulgar doorway crowned by a baroque statue of the martyred saint, depicted in a contorted pose that seems more balletic than religious. On the north side is the tower, bare and unadorned, poor and commonplace, which you could easily imagine standing, arms akimbo, giving the Plaza del Angel a piece of its mind. On either side of these faces or fa~cades there are clearings or courtyards enclosed by rusty railings, areas adorned with large pots containing attractive shrubs and, to delight the eye, a small flowerstall. Nowhere better than here can you experience the charm, the geniality, the ángel as they call it in Andalusia, that is given off, like a faint fragrance by ordinary objects, or rather by some of the infinite number of ordinary objects that inhabit this world. Ugly and pedestrian as a cheap religious print or one of those ballad broadsheets sold by the blind, the overall impression made by this two-faced building with its jovial tower, its small cupola over the Novena chapel, its uneven roofs, its sheer walls thinly daubed in ochre, its flowering courtyards, its rusty ironwork along the street and on the tall belfry, is charming, piquant and, yes, attractive. This small corner of Madrid is one we should preserve with affection, like collectors of antiques, for architectural caricature is also an art. We should value San Sebastián for its very absurdity and crudity, as an heirloom from the past, and we should prize it as if it were an interesting grotesque.

Although, by rights, the main entrance to the church should be via the south door, on weekday mornings and afternoons it is little frequented by the faithful. Almost all the well-to-do enter by the north door, which seems more private, more familiar. Nor is there any need to draw up statistics on how many parishioners use one or the other, for we have an infallible indicator: the poor. There is a far larger and more intimidating band of destitutes at the north door than at the south, lying in wait for alms like customs men levying tolls at a frontier between two worlds, the human and the divine, collecting taxes from uneasy souls in search of purification.

Those who guard the north door occupy fixed positions in the courtyard and at the two entrances leading into it from Calle de las Huertas and from Calle de San Sebastián. These positions have been so carefully chosen that the only way worshippers could possibly hope to avoid them would be by entering through the roof. In bitter winter weather, the rain or the cold may prevent these brave soldiers of poverty from standing out in the open (although a few enjoy miraculous constitutions that allow them to withstand any weather, however inclement), and they retreat in an orderly way to the tunnel-like passageway that gives access to the church, reforming into two ranks, one on either side. This strategy gives them such effective control over the terrain that not a single worshipper escapes them: getting through the tunnel unscathed is as difficult and heroic an undertaking as surviving the pass of Thermopylae. The double rank of warriors numbers at least eighteen and is composed of audacious old men, indomitable old women and the blind of both sexes who will not take no for an answer, usually backed up by a few irresistibly aggressive children (we use these terms, of course, purely in the context of the art of begging for alms). They are there from dawn until lunchtime (for even this army must march upon its stomach), returning with renewed energies for the afternoon campaign. At nightfall, if there is no novena with sermon, holy rosary with meditation and address or nocturnal adoration, the army withdraws, each combatant returning with slow step to his or her particular olive tree. Later, we shall follow with interest the return of one of them to the corner where he ekes out his existence. Meanwhile, let us observe him in his struggle for bare survival on this fearful battlefield, where there are no pools of blood or spoils of war, only fleas and other such ferocious vermin.

One windy, glacial morning in March, when words froze in the mouth and faces were whipped by a dust so cold it felt like particles of powdered snow, the army had retreated to the shelter of the passageway, leaving at the wrought-iron gate that leads into Calle de San Sebastián only an ancient blind man called Pulido, whose body seemed to have been cast in bronze and to have alcohol or mercury for blood, so well did he resist extremes of temperature, remaining strong and healthy, with a complexion that could put to shame the flowers on the nearby stall. The florist had in fact withdrawn to the depths of her hut along with her plant pots and bunches of everlasting flowers and was busy making wreaths for dead children. In the courtyard – which, according to an old inscription on a tile set in the wall above the door, had once been the Cemetery of San Sebastián – there was nobody else to be seen apart from an occasional lady scurrying across on her way to or from the church, covering her mouth with the same hand that held her prayer-book, or else some priest on his way to the sacristy. With his cloak caught up by the wind, he looked like a black bird ruffling its feathers and stretching its wings. He had to clutch his hat at the same time, because you could see that it too wanted to be a bird and to fly away over the tower.

None of those entering or leaving took any notice of poor Pulido; they were used to seeing him standing there, undaunted, at his post, his hand outstretched, as indifferent to snow as to suffocating heat, inadequately swathed in a threadbare cape of dark brown cloth, muttering a litany of sad words that froze upon his lips. On that particular day, the wind kept playing with the white hairs of his beard; they strayed up his nose and clung to his face, which was wet with the tears drawn from his dull eyes by the intense cold. It was nine o’clock and he had still received nothing. It was the worst day of the year. In fact, it had been a disastrous year from Epiphany onwards, for even on 20th January, the day of the patron saint, he’d made only twelve chicas, about half the amount of the previous year; and Candlemas and the novena of our blessed San Blas, which in other years had proved so profitable, this year had brought in a mere seven or even five chicas a day – hardly a fortune! “And it seems to me,” Pulido muttered into his rags, drinking his own tears and spitting out the hairs of his beard, “that our friend San José isn’t going to bring us any better luck either. Now the feast of San José in the first year of King Amadeo, that was a day to remember. But nowadays even the saints in heaven don’t behave as they should. Everything’s gone to the bad, Lord, even the ‘crumbs from the feast’, what some call ‘honest poverty’. It’s all those unscrup’lous men and their pulpit politics, not to mention that business about subscriptions for ‘victims’. If I was God, I’d order my angels to get rid of all those people who write in the papers, inventing all them ‘victims’ to plague us poor people. There is charity and there are good people, but what with the Liberals and the blooming Parley-ment on one side and on the other the ‘congrigations’, the ‘meetins’ and the ‘discursions’ and all this stuff in the newspapers, even the most Christian person can go off the idea. I reckon they want to do away with the poor altogether, and they’ll do it too, mark my words. But who’s going to get them out of Purgatory then, that’s what I’d like to know. Oh yes, all those gentlemanly souls will just lie there and rot, and Christians will simply forget about them, because, say what you like, a rich man’s prayers said on a full stomach, all snug and warm, do him no good at all, so help me God, no good at all.”

At this point in his meditations, he was approached by a short, plump man in a cloak so long it nearly swept the ground. He was about seventy years old and had a neat white beard. Although he was shabbily dressed, his eyes were kind. From a roll evidently containing the money intended for that day’s alms, he placed a coin in the blind man’s hand and said:

“I bet you weren’t expecting anything today, were you? Now tell the truth. Not on a day like today!”

“Yes I was, Don Carlos, sir,” replied the blind man, kissing the coin, “because today is your ‘universary’ and you wouldn’t miss that, not if it froze at zero in the ‘tremometers’.”

“True, true. I never fail. I manage to keep going, thank God, and that’s no mean feat with these frosts and that devil of a north wind. It’s so cold I’m surprised the statue in the Plaza Mayor hasn’t come down with pneumonia. Now you take care of yourself, Pulido. Why don’t you go inside?”

“I’m made of stern stuff, Don Carlos, sir. Not even Death will have me. I’d rather be out here in the cold, than inside hobnobbing with those old chatterboxes … bunch of peasants, the lot of them. What I always say is it’s education what counts, for without education there’s no charity. May the Lord reward you, Don Carlos, and give you glory!”

Before the old man had finished speaking, Don Carlos had flown off. I use the expression advisedly, for the mighty hurricane had simply seized hold of his great cloak and there he was, his head swathed in wool, tottering and turning like a bale of cloth or a piece of carpet caught up by the wind, until he was hurled at last against the door, which he entered with a clatter and a rush, untangling the cloak from about his head. “What a day, what a terrible day!” the good man was exclaiming, amid the press of beggars, who greeted him there with plaintive, high-pitched cries, while the feeble hands of the old women among them helped him to rearrange and smooth the cloak over his shoulders. He immediately began handing out coins, which he extracted one by one from the roll, rubbing them a little before handing them over, in case two got away from him at once. Then he took his leave of the beggar band with a short sermon which was delivered in nasal tones and exhorted them to patience and humility. At the door that opened on to Calle de Atocha, he put away the roll of money – which contained the coins intended for the beggars – and went into the church.

2

After taking holy water, Don Carlos Moreno Trujillo proceeded to the chapel of Our Lady de la Blanca. He was an extremely methodical man, who had reduced his entire life to an unchanging routine that governed all his acts, both moral and physical – from the most solemn down to the most insignificant, even to the way he moved and the way he breathed. A single example will demonstrate the power of this routine over this saintly man. For, while spending his declining years in a house in Calle de Atocha, he always entered the churchyard by the gate in Calle de San Sebastián, in other words, through the north door, for no other reason than that he used that entrance during the thirty-seven years he had lived in his celebrated commercial establishment in the Plaza del Angel. He invariably left by the door in Calle de Atocha, even if he was on his way to visit his daughter who lived in Calle de la Cruz.

He always genuflected first at the altar of Our Lady of Sorrows and then before the statue of San Lesmes, where he remained a good while in mystical contemplation. In unhurried progress, he visited each chapel and each shrine, in an order that never varied; he then heard two masses, always two, never more never less; he visited each altar once again, always ending up at the chapel of Christ of the Faith, and then went for a while into the sacristy, where he allowed himself a brief chat with the assistant priest or the sacristan about the weather, the “terrible state things are in” or why the water supply from Lozoya was coming through cloudy, and then left by the door in Calle de Atocha where he distributed the last coins in his purse. He was so organised that he rarely failed to bring the exact quantity for the beggars at the two doors: if by some unlikely chance, he was a coin short, the beggar he had missed knew that he would receive it on the following day, and if he had one over he would go straight to the Oratory in Calle del Olivar to find an unfortunate in whose hand he could place it.

On this particular day, as we have seen, Don Carlos went into the church by what we shall call the Door of San Sebastián’s Churchyard and the old women and the blind of both sexes who had just received his charity began to chatter and bicker, for with no one for them to pester on their way in or out, what else could these unfortunates do but while away their long, sad hours of idleness with talk. It is the only sustenance that costs nothing, and which, be it spicy or bitter, was always at hand to satisfy their need? Of this commodity they have as much as the rich. Perhaps they have that advantage over the latter, because when they talk they are not inhibited by the conversational conventions which, by inserting between thought and word a thick layer of etiquette and grammar, deaden the ineffable pleasures of gossip.

“Didn’t I tell you that Don Carlos would come today? And sure enough he did. Was I right or what?”

“I said the same thing. It’s the monthly anniversary, the 24th, the day his wife died. Don Carlos, good soul that he is, never fails to come on that day, even if it’s raining cats and dogs. There’s no more Christian man than he in the whole of Madrid … no offence to anyone else.”

“Well, I was afraid he wouldn’t come, because of the cold. I thought that since it was the special day on which he gives us a whole penny, he might cancel it.”

“He would have given it to us tomorrow, as you well know, Crescencia. Don Carlos is always correct and pays what he owes.”

“He would have given us today’s penny tomorrow, but we wouldn’t have got today’s penny at all! Do you think we can’t count? No offence meant, but I know that two and two makes four, and I know that Don Carlos, when he sees what he owes us mounting up, goes sick for a few days to save himself the money, and I wonder what his dead wife thinks of that?”

“Hold your tongue, you spiteful woman!”

“Me, spiteful! You know what? You’re a toady too!”

“Shut your evil mouth!”

The group chatting together in this way were three women sitting to the right of the entrance and apart from the others. One was blind or extremely short-sighted, the other two could see – they were all dressed in rags, over which they wore black or grey shawls. La Casiana, tall and bony, spoke with a certain arrogance, like someone who has or claims to have authority. Maybe she had, for wherever half a dozen human beings meet together, there is always one who tries to impose his or her will on the rest and, indeed, succeeds in doing so. The blind or near-sighted one was called Crescencia; she always sat hunched up in a ball with only her tiny face peeping out and from the parcel of her huddled body she held out a scrawny, wrinkled hand with long nails. The one employing the bold or insulting expressions in the above conversation was called Flora and nicknamed, for reasons unknown, La Burlada, the Jilted One. She was a tiny old woman, vivacious, bad-tempered and shrewish, who was continually setting the cat among these poor pigeons, making bad blood between them, for she always had something sharp and malevolent to say when the others were sharing out, and rich and poor alike were the butts of her acid strictures. Her shrewd, cat-like, tear-stained little eyes shone with suspicion and malice. Her nose was no more than a little red ball that moved up and down with her lips and tongue as she talked at breakneck speed. Her two remaining teeth seemed to run from one side of her mouth to the other, appearing sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, and when she finished her little speech with a gesture of utter scorn or biting sarcasm, her mouth would shut all of a sudden, and her lips would fold one over the other. But though her tongue was still, her red chin continued to express her thoughts, trembling with scorn.

La Casiana was quite the opposite of La Burlada: she was tall, thin and bony; it was hard to work out just how thin she was, since (according to the gossips) she wore layers of good clothing beneath her rags. Her face was so long it looked as if it were stretched every day on the rack, so that her cheeks disappeared altogether. It would be hard to imagine a more disagreeable or an uglier face, with its dull, expressionless eyes that bulged and stared, eyes that appeared blind but in fact were not, with its graceless, hooked nose and, a long way below it, a mouth with the thinnest of thin lips, and finally, the long, bony jaw. If human faces may be compared to those of animals and we were to describe La Burlada as resembling a cat that had lost its fur in a fight and then been ducked, then La Casiana would be an old horse, who, when she blindfolded one eye with a slanting bandage (leaving the other free to spy on her colleagues), resembled the horses in the bullring exactly. Just as every country in the world is divided into classes, even amongst the lowest stratum of society, there was no exact equality amongst the beggars either. The old women especially saw to it that the proper distinctions were observed. The old hands occupied the best places and were the only ones allowed to beg inside the church near the holy water stoup. Whenever the sacristan or the assistant priest tried to change this rule for the benefit of a newcomer, they knew what to do: they kicked up such a fuss that it had often proved necessary to call in the police. When alms or charity vouchers were distributed, the old hands claimed the right to distribute them, keeping any extra for themselves if the sum was not easily divisible into equal parts. As well as this, they enjoyed a moral superiority, a tacit authority won over the years, the invisible strength that authority always brings. The old hand is always strong, the novice always weak, except in certain cases where personality comes into play. La Casiana – hard, domineering, utterly selfish – was the oldest of the old hands; La Burlada – rebellious and unruly, quarrelsome and malignant – was the newest of the new, so it goes without saying that the most trifling event or the idlest of remarks acted like a detonator that easily ignited the spark of discord between them.

The little quarrel reported above was cut short by the coming in or going out of worshippers. But La Burlada could not keep her grudges to herself and, at the first opportunity, seeing that La Casiana and the blind man Almudena (of whom more anon) were getting more in the way of alms that day than everyone else, she again directed her insults at the old hand, saying: “God you’re a creep, do you think I don’t know you’re rich, do you think I don’t know you’ve got a house in Cuatro Caminos and loads of hens and doves, not to mention rabbits? We know all about it.”

“Hold your tongue,” said La Casiana, “or I’ll tell Don Senén about you, and let him teach you some manners.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Be quiet, can’t you hear the bell for the elevation of the Host?”

“Ladies, for God’s sake,” said a cripple who was standing nearest the church, “they’re elevating the Blessed Sacrament.”

“It’s her fault, the spiteful bitch,” said La Casiana.

“It’s hers, for bossing us all around,” said La Burlada. “You may be the Boss around here, my girl, but don’t pull the strings too tight: us newcomers deserve to get our share of the cash as well, we’re God’s children too, you know.”

“Be quiet, I tell you!”

“Hark at her. Who d’you think you are, the Prime Minister?”

3

Further in, about half-way along the passageway on the left-hand side, there was another group, consisting of a blind man, seated, a woman, also seated with two baby girls, and next to her, standing silent and motionless, an old woman in a black dress and mantle. A few steps further on, very close to the church interior, Eliseo Martinez, one-legged and one-armed, was leaning against the wall, all his weight on his crutches. He enjoyed the privilege of selling The Catholic Week, and was, after La Casiana, the one who wielded most authority over the band of beggars.

Seven venerable beggars in all, whose portraits I hope are here clearly drawn, with the proper distinctions of face, voice and characters. Now to continue.

The woman dressed in black, prematurely aged rather than old, was, as well as a newcomer, a casual, because she begged only occasionally, for varying lengths of time, only to disappear doubtless having found a good job or some charitable souls who had come to her aid. She answered to the name of Señá Benina (from which it may be inferred that her name was Benigna) and she was the quietest and humblest member of the community – if one may use such a word); she appeared to be well brought up, well-mannered and completely submissive to God’s will. She never pestered the parishioners as they came in or out; however unfair the share-outs she uttered no word of protest, nor did she give the least support to La Burlada’s disorderly mob. To everyone, man or woman, she spoke gently and courteously; she treated La Casiana politely and the cripple respectfully; she only allowed herself some familiarity, though still never overstepping the mark, with the blind man, Almudena, about whom for the moment I shall say no more other than that he was an Arab, from Sus, three days journey from Marrakesh: mark this well.

Benina had a soft voice and a certain gentility in her manner. Her dark-skinned features had been interesting and still had a certain charm, though, now withered by age, they had faded until they were almost unrecognisable. She had kept more than half her teeth. Her large, dark eyes were only faintly ringed with red from old age and cold mornings. Her nose was less inclined to drip than her colleagues’, and her hands, though wrinkled and swollen-jointed, did not end in nails like talons. Her hands were those of a washerwoman and she had taken care of them. She wore a tight black band around her head and over it a black scarf; her dress and mantle were black and rather more carefully mended than those of the other old women. With this appearance and the soulful, sweet expression on her still handsome face, she looked like a Santa Rita of Casia walking the world as a penance. Only the crucifix and the wound on her brow were missing, but she had a round wart in the middle of her brow, bluish in colour and the size of a chickpea, which could be taken as a substitute for the latter.

At about ten o’clock, La Casiana went out into the courtyard to visit the sacristy, where as an old hand, she had great influence, to speak to Don Senén about some matter unknown to her companions and one which consequently caused much comment. No sooner had the Corporal left, than La Burlada ran off to the other group, looking like a parcel rolling along the passageway. She sat down between a woman called Demetria with the two baby girls and the blind Moroccan, and her tongue – sharper and more lethal even than the ten talons on her black snapping fingers – began to wag.

“Well, don’t you believe me?” she began, “The Corporal is rich, really rich, and no mistake about it. Everything she gets here is stolen from the real genuine poor ones like us, who have nothing in the world but what we stand up in.”

“Doesn’t she live over there, by the river bank with the Paules?” asked Crescencia.

“No, woman, no, not any more. I know all about it,” continued La Burlada, clutching the air with her claws. “You can’t fool me. I’ve been making enquiries. She lives in Cuatro Caminos, where she owns a farmyard. There she keeps – if you’ll pardon the word – a pig. Speaking without prejudice, it is the best pig in Cuatro Caminos.”

“Have you seen the hunchback girl who comes to fetch her?”

“Yes, of course I’ve seen her. Casiana thinks we’re idiots. That’s her daughter, and what’s more she’s a dressmaker, y’know, and uses her hump as an excuse for begging too. But she sews and earns money for the household. As I said, they’re rich, God help me, filthy rich and shameless too, cheating us all and the Holy Apostolic Church. And what’s more, she spends nothing on food, because she gets great pans of stew every day from several different houses, like the glory of God!”

“Yesterday,” said Demetria, taking her child from her breast, “I saw what they brought her.”

“What was that?”

“A rice dish with clams in it – enough for at least seven people.”

“Fancy that! Are you sure there were clams in it? Did it smell good?”

“I should say! The sacristan keeps the stewpans at his place, the people come there and fill them up and then they take it all off to Cuatro Caminos.”

“Her husband,” said La Burlada, her eyes flashing, “sells kindling and parsley, he was a soldier once and wears seven plain crosses and one with five coins on it. Quite a family, eh? Yet look at me, I’ve only eaten a crust of bread today and if Ricarda doesn’t let me stay at her place in Chamberí tonight, I shall have to sleep out in the open. What’s that you’re saying, Almudena?”

The blind man was mumbling to himself. Asked a second time, he spoke in a harsh, halting voice: “You speak of Piche? I know him. Him not husband Casiana in marriage, him hated, God in Heaven, him hated.”

“What? Do you know him?”

“I know him, him bought two rosaries off me, rosaries from my country, and a lodestone. Him money, much money. Him soup-boss up at Sacred Heart. Him push about all poor people with big stick, up in Salamanca district. Big boss, bad, very bad, won’t let us eat. Him serve government, bad Spanish government and bank people, where all money kept in boxes underground. Him keep it, him starve us to death.”

“Well, that’s the limit,” said La Burlada, bursting with righteous indignation, “if these money-grubbers really have cash in the bank vaults too!”

“Fancy that, now,” said Demetria, beginning to feed her baby again, which had started to wail. “Stop it, greedy!” she added to the child.

“Gracious me! Suck, suck, suck, I wonder how you can keep going, girl. And what do you think, Benina?”

“Me? About what?”

“Do you think they’ve got money in the bank or not?”

“What’s it got to do with me? It’s their bread and butter, let them eat it.”

“It’s our bread they’re eating, with a slice of ham on top, too, ha, ha?”

“Keep quiet, I tell you,” called out the cripple who sold The Catholic Week. “We’re all here for the same thing – and we must all behave.”

“We’ll be quiet, man, we’ll be quiet. Anyone would think you were Victor Emmanuel – the one that locked up the Pope.”

“Quiet, I tell you, and show more respect for religion.”

“Religion I have, but not in the Church like you, for I live with hunger. I have to look on and watch you feed yourself and I have to look at the packets of rich food that people bring you. But we don’t envy you, you know, Eliseo, and we’re glad to be poor and die of wind and go all together to Heaven, while you…”

“Go on, while I …”

“Well. But you are rich, Eliseo, you can’t deny that you’re rich, with The Week and what Don Senén and the Reverend give you. Everybody knows that ‘he who divides the spoil’ and so on. I’m not grumbling, God knows. Blessings on our holy poverty, and grant you more of it. No, I can say it out of gratitude, Eliseo. When I was knocked down by that coach in the Calle de la Luna – it was the day they took away that Señor de Zorrilla. I was in the hospital a month and a half, and when I came out you saw I was alone and helpless and you said: ‘Señá Flora, why don’t you start begging in a church, you’ll be out of the wind and weather and under the shelter of religion. Come with me,’ you said. ‘You’ll see how you can earn something day by day without walking the streets and you’ll be with decent poor people.’ That’s what you said, Eliseo, and I burst into tears and came along here with you. And that’s how I got here and very grateful I am for your gentlemanly behaviour. Do you know that I say a Pater Noster for you every day and ask for the Lord to make you richer than you are and for you to sell ever so many Weeks and for them to bring you good broth from the café and the Count’s house, so that you and your wife the barrow-woman can have all you want. What does it matter that Crescencia, poor old Almudena here and I only breakfast at midday on a crust of bread as hard as a blessed paving stone? I pray the Lord that you should always have enough for a nip of spirits, you need it, you’d die otherwise, and I’d die too if you didn’t get it. And I hope your two sons become Dukes! One’s a turner’s apprentice and brings six reales home every week, and the other works in a tavern in Maldonadas and gets good tips from the tarts – if you’ll forgive the expression. May the Lord bless them and keep them and let them grow year by year and I hope to see you dressed in velvet with a new leg made of mahogany and your old woman in a feather hat. I’m grateful. I may have forgotten how to eat, from all the starvation I’ve known, but I’m not one to wish anyone ill, dear, dear Eliseo, and you’re welcome to have what I don’t get; eat, drink and get drunk on it and I hope you get a house with a balcony and bedside tables and iron bedsteads with lace-covered bolsters as clean as the ones in the Royal Palace, and have sons who wear new berets and sandals with leather soles, and a daughter who wears a pink bonnet and patent leather shoes on Sundays, and I hope you get a good stove and good rugs to put beside your beds, and a kitchen with a coke oven, and new wallpaper and hundreds and hundreds of lovely pots and pans, and engravings of Christ at Canaan and Blessed Santa Barbara on the wall , and a chest of drawers full of linen and flowered lampshades, yes, and a sewing machine that doesn’t work but on top of it you can put the pile of Weeks and I hope you have lots of friends and good neighbours and access to big houses round about, with gentry who when they see you’re a cripple give you sweepings from the sugar warehouse and paper bags full of mocha coffee and top quality rice and I hope you have influence with the Ladies’ Conference and that they’ll pay your rent and your identity card and give fine linen to your wife for ironing. I hope you get all this and much more, Eliseo!”

But La Burlada’s wild flow of words suddenly stopped and a terrified silence reigned in the passageway when La Casiana made a sudden appearance at the church door. “They’re coming out of High Mass,” she said and, turning to the chatterbox, pronounced these stern words with all the force of her personality: “Burlada, back to your place, and keep that mouth shut, for we are in the house of God.”

The congregation was beginning to come out and alms were given, but it amounted to very little. It was seldom that anyone went all round giving an equal sum to all and on that day most of the few small coins of five and two céntimos that were produced went into the eager hands of Eliseo and the Corporal, but Demetria and Benina also got something. The rest got little or nothing and Crescencia the blind woman complained that she had had nothing all morning. While Casiana was whispering with Demetria, La Burlada started talking with Crescencia in the corner nearest the door into the courtyard.

“What can she be saying to Demetria?”

“I wonder, maybe it’s just private business.”

“I suspect it’s about food vouchers from the rich funeral we’re having tomorrow. They’ll give Demetria more because she’s recommended by the priest who says early mass. Little Don Rodrigo with the purple stockings, the one who’s supposed to be the Pope’s secretary.”

“They’ll give her all the meat and we’ll get the bones.”

“Of course, it’s always the same thing. There’s nothing like dragging a few children around for getting bigger share-outs. And decent people are ignored, because these lazybones like Demetria, as well as being sluts, make money out of their immorality. See for yourself, every year a new one at the breast, and next year’s is already in her belly.”