A Christian Woman. condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán
the springs of action, little by little, because humanity has always progressed, we’ll no longer have any pretext for so much as living. You know that I am not at all sentimental, but our country is like our family, and there’s no need of poetry or sentimentalism to make us love it and defend it with our lives. You think you settle everything by dragging out that about old-fashioned notions. Well, old-fashioned notions are inevitable and necessary and proper. We live on them. And that old idea about our love of country is not the only one bred in our bones. There are a great many others, my dear fellow, which we’ll not give up for twenty centuries. I believe that in this country, in order to foster the ideas which are to replace the old-fashioned ones, what we must do is to be crossed with other races. All of us who are a bit enlightened—why, let us marry foreign wives!”
Sometimes we got to quarreling over these profundities, and would roar at each other while loitering at the table or even while eating. These disputes usually gave us the greatest eagerness in the play of mind on mind; and even in the midst of our hottest arguments we felt drawn toward each other by the conviction that though our opinions were so antagonistic, we were able to understand each other and to spur each other on.
We had come to be inseparable. We helped each other in our studies; we used to go to walk together, even when Luis was going to promenade before the house of a certain outlandish sweetheart he had discovered; we used to sit at the same table in the Levante Café; when we had a little spare cash we would go together to our favorite resort—the gallery in the Teatro Real. All of us students at Doña Jesusa’s were musical; we were all ready to die for “L’Africaine,” and “Les Huguenots,” especially the Cuban, who had a musical craze. His retentive memory would store up not only the music but the words as well, and we used to amuse ourselves on getting home by making him sing over the whole opera.
“Trinidad,” we would say, for that was his name, “Come now, sing the love duet between Vasco and Selika.” “Trinidad, there now, the poniard scene.” “Come, Triny, sing that about O paradiso. Now about Copre fuoco.” “Triny, sing the Protestant psalm. Now, the violins start in—now come the oboe’s notes, when Marcelo appears.” The mocking-bird would sing all we called for, reproducing with astonishing exactness the slightest details of the instrumentation, until at length fairly worn out, he would exclaim, beseechingly:
“Let me go to bed. I see you are making a fool of me.”
CHAPTER III.
One morning, or, rather, afternoon, almost at the end of the term, we rushed out of school, almost running from Turco Street to Clavel Street. You must remember that from eight o’clock, when we took our muddy chocolate, until half-past one, the hour when our drawing-class closed, our recitations came along one after the other; and we had nothing to sustain our strength, but now and then a sausage which we would surreptitiously purchase from the janitor, or some scrap which we would filch at the boarding-house and carry along. Smelling our lunch from afar, we mounted two steps at a time, and on entering the dining-room, I came face to face with my Uncle Felipe, who said to me, abruptly, “You must lunch with me to-day at Fornos’s. I imagine that eatables are scarce here.”
“I should be glad to go, but I have so much studying to do just now,” I answered, affecting reluctance.
“Bah, you’ll not lose a year’s time if you don’t study to-day. Come along, for we must have a talk—a talk about a great many things,” he added, with an air of mystery.
The truth is—and it would do no good to conceal it, because it will be made very evident in the course of this story—that I had not merely no affection or respect for my Uncle Felipe, but not even any sort of attachment or as much as gratitude for the favors he was conferring upon me. Quite the contrary. I know it does me no credit to say so, and that ingratitude is the ugliest of faults; but I know, also, that I am not naturally ungrateful, and in order to justify, or at least explain myself, I will sketch in silhouette my Uncle Felipe’s physical and moral characteristics, to do which I must allude to some matters that are of the nature of family secrets.
My baptismal name is Salustio, my paternal surnames are Meléndez Ramos, my maternal, Unceta Cardoso. That name Unceta indicates plainly that my mother’s father was a Basque, and came from Guipuzcoa, to be more exact; and Cardoso—that’s where the mischief comes in. It seems that the Cardosos of Marín—I was born in Pontevedra, and my mother’s family came from the little seaport of Marín—were a broken branch of the Portuguese trunk of Cardoso Pereira, a Jewish trunk, if there is such a thing. How did the fact come to my knowledge that my mother’s ancestors were Jews? Just find out if you can who tells these things to children. One day when I was nine or ten, unable to restrain my curiosity any longer, I asked my mother:
“Mamma, is it true that we belong to the Jewish race?”
With fire flashing from her eyes, she lifted her hand and cuffed my ears soundly, crying:
“If you say that again, I’ll break all the bones in your body!”
That chastisement left the impression in my mind that to be a Jew was a sore disgrace; and two or three years later, when one of my school-mates at Pontevedra threw it in my face, calling out,
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