A Christian Woman. condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán
porter who carried my trunk, I explained my emotion to myself in the following words: “This picturesque irregularity, this predominance of feeling and jolly good humor and contempt for serious life, which I observe in Pepa Urrutia’s house and among her boarders, have a certain charm, inasmuch as they make up a kind of romanticism innate in our countrymen—a romanticism which I also suffer from. That dwelling seems like a community founded not on a basis of socialism but on a total lack of common sense and brains. I have met several persons there who are so very good that they are totally devoid of discretion or common sense. I suppose that I shall miss them greatly at first, for that very reason, and shall feel homesick; and as years roll on my imagination will invest everything connected with them with a poetic glamor, even to the episode of the bugs. Nevertheless, I am worth more than what I am leaving behind me, because I am capable of tearing myself away from that place.” My pride consoled me, by whispering to me, that I was better bred and more energetic than Pepa’s boarders.
CHAPTER II.
My homesickness did not last as long as I feared. Everybody prefers his natural element, and I did not find mine in the confusion and rollicking ways of the Bohemian boarding-house.
My new abode was in Clavel Street. It was in a suite on the fourth floor, with plenty of sunshine; the rooms there were not so small as those which are usually furnished for six shillings a day. Our landlady was also a native of Biscay, for half of the boarding-house keepers in Spain come from that province. But she was very unlike Pepa Urrutia. She was as neat as wax, and could make most delicious stews of codfish and tomatoes, as well as stewed tripe and vegetable soup, and other savory messes of our national cuisine, and she had no wastefulness apparently; consequently all the boarders had either to settle their bills in due time, or to leave the house. In Doña Jesusa’s abode—we called her Doña because she was middle-aged—the beds were scrupulously clean, though hard and narrow. She kept the maid scrubbing and cleaning all the time. A caged linnet sang merrily in the passageway in front of the kitchen. On Christmas Eve she regaled us with almond pottage and sea-bream, and there was some kind of humble comfort and domestic peace to be enjoyed there. It is true that everything was scrimped and scanty; and, as our rations were so meager, the five or six students of us who usually dined there, ordinarily left the table unsatisfied. I don’t wish to complain of the chocolate, which was pasty stuff of the color of a brick, nor of the leathery corn-cakes, nor of our dessert of apples and pears, which seemed like wax counterfeits to judge by the way we refrained from touching them.
“At least they ought to give us the dessert of raisins and almonds, which they give to criminals condemned to death,” said Luis Portal, a fellow from my province, who was of a humorous vein.
I will not say much about the maccaroni soup, which Luis classified as “alphabetical” or “astronomical,” according as the paste was cut in the shape of letters or of stars; I will not dwell on the wretched pieces of boiled meat, with a bit of bacon hidden behind a pea, and already served out in portions, so that no boarder should take more than his share; nor will I betray the flabbiness of the beef, nor the maggots we used to find in the fish. At my age it is seldom that one bothers himself much about the pleasures of the palate. Besides, on any boarder’s birthday, or on any great holiday, Doña Jesusa would regale us with some rural dish, upon which she had lavished all her skill, and we would then take our revenge. Doña Jesusa always celebrated the principal holidays, and observed them by having an extra dish on the table; so these extraordinary occasions helped us to put up with her usual parsimony—after the manner of the pleasing alternations between want and plenty in our homes.
Luis Portal was the son of a coffee-merchant in Orense, and as he was very ingenious as well as fond of good living, he conceived the idea that we might enjoy a cup of coffee, mornings and afternoons, without great cost. So he purchased a second-hand coffee-pot in the Rastro, which held enough for six cups; he also bought a second-hand coffee-mill, got some of the best coffee, and two pounds of brown sugar; and, when the cost was divided between us, we found that we had the most delicious coffee at a very low price. If we could only afford half a wineglass of champagne or of brandy! But we were brought to a stand-still there. Our means would not reach thus far, for brandy was ruinously expensive. Portal had a bottle in his trunk which he had brought from home, so we made up our minds to make the most of that by taking only one swallow at a time; and we kept to our resolution so well that in two days we drank it all up.
In fact, one could study in Doña Jesusa’s house. It was quiet and orderly, and there were regular hours for everything. Sometimes the landlady would fall to scolding the maid; but this familiar and expected noise did not disturb us at all. So we all ground away to the best of our powers, trying not to have to say “not prepared” when the professors questioned us. The professor, who taught the principles of machinery, used to frighten us a little by his habit of going a-fishing, that is, asking questions out of the regular order.
I have already said that I was not one of the most diligent in my studies, nor was Luis Portal, either. We both used to fall back on general knowledge, letting our wits float easily unburdened by a great load in the memory, because we feared the particular exhaustion which those arid and hard studies cause in weak brains, and which Luis called “The mathematical topsy-turviness.”
On the other hand, two lads who lived with us were so completely worn out that we were afraid that by the time they finished their course—if they ever did finish it—they would be ready for a lunatic asylum. One of them, a Cuban, was gifted with a prodigious memory. With the aid of this inferior but indispensable faculty, which can so deftly cover the weakness of the intellect, he would fairly devour text-books, and as long as it was not necessary to enlarge upon a subject, nor to add a single word to the text, nor take one away, he would come off with flying colors. But the slightest objection, or the gentlest interruption, anything, in fact, which called for the exercise of mind, would crush him; he would get completely addled, and could not give a straight answer to the simplest question.
Portal used to call him the little parrot, and make sport of his serenity and his languid air; and laughed to see him always shivering, even when close to the fire. When he put away his books, the West Indian was like a bird released from his cage. At such times, in place of the mental vigor to handle the heavy iron weights of science skillfully, the poor exile would display the riches of a brilliant imagination, all light and colors; or to be more exact, all spangles and phosphorescent gleams. The commonest phrase, on issuing from his lips, took on a poetic form; he could make rhymes as unconsciously as a mocking-bird sings, and could talk in rhythmical and harmonious verse an hour at a time.
But the sarcastic Portal used to say that the Cuban’s poetry had precisely the same artistic value as the tunes we compose and hum while we are lathering our faces preparatory to shaving, and had as much meaning read from the bottom up as from the top down.
“We’ll call him the mocking-bird instead of parrot,” he would say every time that the Cuban would display for us his poetical string of glass-beads which usually occurred after he had filled himself with coffee.
The other assiduous student came from Zamora; he had a narrow forehead and an obtuse mind. He had neither father nor mother, and the cost of his education was met by his octogenarian and paralyzed grandmother, who used to say: “I don’t want to die until you are a man, and have finished your studies, and can see your future secure.”
It was but a slight thread which bound the poor old woman to this world, and the lad knew it; so he displayed a silent and savage determination. As the Cuban studied with his memory, the Zamoran studied with his will, always kept tense. His poor mental endowments obliged him to work doubly. He neither took nights off on Saturdays nor had holidays on Sundays, nor any excursions whatever. No correspondence with a sweetheart for him; no—nothing but his books, his everlasting books, from morning till night; an equation here and a problem there, without relaxing his assiduity for a single moment, without being absent for a single day, and never saying “not prepared.”
“Have you ever seen such a fellow? He is always