My father, Serafín Baroja y Zornoza, was a mining engineer, who wrote
books both in Castilian and Basque, and he, too, came from San
Sebastian. My mother's name is Carmen Nessi y Goñi. She was born in
Madrid.
I should be a very good man. My father was a good man, although he was
capricious and arbitrary, and my mother is a good woman, firmer and more
positive in her manifestations of virtue. Yet, I am not without
reputation for ferocity, which, perhaps, is deserved.
I do not know why I believed for a long while that I had been born in
the Calle del Puyuelo in San Sebastian, where we once lived. The street
is well within the old town, and truly ugly and forlorn. The mere idea
of it was and is distasteful to me.
When I complained to my mother about my birthplace and its want of
attractiveness, she replied that I was born in a beautiful house near
the esplanade of La Zurriola, fronting on the Calle de Oquendo, which
belonged to my grandmother and looked out upon the sea, although the
house does so no longer, as a theatre has been erected directly in
front. I am glad that I was born near the sea, because it suggests
freedom and change.
My paternal grandmother, Doña Concepción Zornoza, was a woman of
positive ideas and somewhat eccentric. She was already old when I knew
her. She had mortgaged several houses which she owned in the city in
order to build the house which was occupied by us in La Zurriola.
Her plan was to furnish it and rent it to King Amadeo. Before Amadeo
arrived at San Sebastian, however, the Carlist war broke out, and the
monarch of the house of Savoy was compelled to abdicate, and my
grandmother to abandon her plans.
My earliest recollection is the Carlist attempt to bombard San
Sebastian. It is a memory which has now grown very dim, and what I saw
has been confused with what I have heard. I have a confused recollection
of the bringing in of soldiers on stretchers, and of having peeped over
the wall of a little cemetery near the city, in which corpses were laid
out, still unburied.
As I have said, my father was a mining engineer, but during the war he
was engaged in teaching natural history at the Institute. I have no idea
how this came about. He was also one of the Liberal volunteers.
I have a vague idea that one night I was taken from my bed, wrapped up
in a mantle, and carried to a chalet on the Concha, belonging to one
Errazu, who was a relative of my mother's. We lived there for a time in
the cellar of the chalet.
Three shells, which were known in those days as cucumbers, dropped on
the house, and wrecked the roof, making a great hole in the wall which
separated our garden from the next.