It was already _las Ánimas_,[1] as they say in our village.
[1] A certain hour of the evening, when the ringing of bells
admonishes the faithful to pray for the souls in purgatory.
Our village! Ninety leagues from Madrid, a thousand leagues from the
world, nestling in a fold of the Sierra Nevada! I can almost fancy I
see you, brothers, father, and mother!
A huge oak log whistled and crackled in the fireplace. We all sat
together under the vault of the chimney. My two grandmothers, who
spent that night with us, presiding over the household ceremonies,
occupied the corner seats; my father and mother sat next to them,
the rest of the place being occupied by the children and servants;
for on such an occasion we all represented the home, and it seemed
fitting that one fire should warm us all. I remember, however, that
our men remained standing, and that our maids squatted or knelt.
Their respectful humility forbade their occupying a chair. The cats
slept in the centre of the circle, their tails turned to the fire.
An occasional snowflake came fluttering down the chimney,--that
elfin road,--and the wind moaned in the distance and spoke to us of
the absent, the poor, the wayfarers. My father and my eldest sister
played on the harp, and I accompanied them, to their distress, on
a drum which I had contrived that very evening out of a broken
water-jug.
Do you know the song of the Aguinaldos, which is sung in the villages
that lie east of the Mulhacem? Well, that was the music that
constituted the concert. The maid-servants took it upon themselves to
render the vocal parts, and they sang couplets to this effect:--
"To-night is Christmas eve;
To-morrow is Christmas day.
Maria, fetch the jug of wine;
Let's be merry while we may."
And all was happiness and merry-making. Rusks, butter-cakes, pastes
of nuts and honey, sweetmeats made by the nuns, rosoli, and cherry
brandy were freely passed around. There was much talk of going to
midnight Mass, to the Nativity play at dawn, to see the Bethlehem
manger which we boys had constructed in the tower, and also of
making sherbet out of the snow that carpeted the court.
Suddenly in the midst of all this merriment I was struck by the deep
meaning of these words, sung by my paternal grandmother:--
"Christmas comes,
Christmas goes;
But soon we all shall be of those
Who come back--never!"
In spite of my tender age this couplet chilled my heart. All the
melancholy horizons of life seemed to have been unfolded before me in
a flash. It was a burst of intuition, unnatural at my age; it was a
miraculous prescience, the herald of the ineffable tedium of poetry;
it was my first inspiration. I saw and understood at a glance, with
marvellous lucidity, the inevitable fate of the three generations
present. It occurred to me that my grandparents, my parents, and my
brothers were like a marching army whose vanguard was stepping into
the grave, while the rearguard had not yet left the cradle; and these
three generations represented a century; and all past centuries had
been alike, and ours would disappear as they had done, and so would
the centuries unborn.
"Christmas comes,
Christmas goes."
Such is the implacable monotony of time, the pendulum oscillating in
space, the indifferent repetition of events, in contrast with the
brevity of our pilgrimage in this world.
"But soon we all shall be of those
Who come back--never!"
Horrible thought! Cruel sentence, the definite meaning of which was
like a summons to me,--death beckoning me from the shadows of the
future. Before my imagination a thousand Christmas Eves filed by,
a thousand hearths were extinguished, a thousand families that had
supped together ceased to exist,--other children, other joys, other
songs, lost forever; the loves of my grandparents, their antiquated
mode of dress, their remote youth, the memories thereof that crowded
upon them; my parents' childhood, the first Christmas celebration
in our home, all the happiness that had preceded me! Then I could
imagine, I could foresee, a thousand more Christmas Eves recurring
periodically and robbing us of our life and hope,--future joys in
which we should not all take part together, my brothers scattered
over the earth, my parents naturally dying before us, the twentieth
century following upon the nineteenth! The live coals turned to
ashes,--my vanished youth, my old age, my grave, my posthumous
memory, then the complete oblivion of me, the indifference, the
ingratitude of my grandchildren, living of my blood, and who would
laugh and enjoy while the worms profaned the skull in which these
very thoughts were now conceived.
The tears gushed from my eyes. I was asked why I was crying, and as
I did not know or at least could not have defined the reason even to
myself, my father concluded that I was sleepy, and I was accordingly
sent to bed. Here was another motive for weeping, and so it happened
that my first philosophical tears and my last childish ones were
mingled. That night of insomnia which I spent listening to the joyous
sounds of a celebration from which I had been excluded for being too
much of a child, as my parents believed then,--or too much of a man,
as I realize now,--was perhaps the bitterest of my life.
I must have fallen asleep at last, however, for I cannot remember
whether the projects of going to midnight Mass, the Nativity play,
and making sherbet out of the snow in the court fell through or not.