INFANCY: SOMBRE VESTIBULE OF LIFE
Archæologists guard those curious, twice-written documents called
palimpsests as carefully as though they were so much gold. They are
parchments from which the first inscriptions were erased years and years
ago, to be substituted by others. More recently, assiduous investigators
have learned how to bring the erased characters to light, to decipher
them, and to read them.
The idea of those strange documents came to Quentin’s mind as he thought
about his life.
Eight years of English school had apparently completely erased the
memories of his early childhood. The uniformity of his school life, the
continual sports, had dulled his memory. Night after night Quentin went
to bed overcome with fatigue, with nothing to preoccupy his mind save
his themes and his lessons; but his removal from the scholarly
atmosphere, and his return to his home, had been sufficient to reawaken
memories of his childhood--vaguely at first, but daily growing stronger,
more distinct, and more detailed.
The erased inscription of the palimpsest was again becoming
comprehensible: memories long dormant were crowding Quentin’s mind: of
these recollections, some were sad and gloomy; others, and these were
very few, were gay; still others were not as yet very clear to him.
Quentin endeavoured to reconstruct his childhood. He remembered having
passed it in a house on the Calle de Librerías, near the Calle de la
Feria and the Cuesta de Luján, and he went to see the place. It was on a
corner of the street: a rose-coloured house with a silversmith’s shop on
the lower floor, two large and pretentious balconies on the main floor,
and above them, two rectangular windows. On top of the roof, was a
diminutive azotea surrounded by a rubble-stone wall.
“That is where I was as a child,” said Quentin to himself.
He remembered vaguely that hedge-mustard used to grow between the slabs
of the azotea, and that he had a white cat with which he used to play.
He peeped into the shop, and there came to his mind the picture of a man
with white hair whom his mother tried to get him to kiss--something she
never succeeded in doing.
“I must have been a little savage in those days,” thought Quentin.
He strolled along the Calle de la Feria and recalled his escapades with
the little boys of the vicinity of La Ribera and El Murallón where they
used to play.
His memory did not flow smoothly. There were large gaps in it: persons,
things, and places were blurred confusedly. His vivid recollections
began in the Calle de la Zapatería, where his parents established their
first shop. From there on, the incidents were linked together; they had
an explanation, a conclusion.
Quentin was taken to school when he was very young--three or four years
old--because he was in the way at the store. As a very small child he
was distinguished as a dare-devil, a rowdy, and a swaggering boaster;
and many times he returned from school with his trousers torn, or a
black eye.
Once he had a fight with one of his schoolmates who came from a town
called Cabra (Goat). For this reason, the others used to poke fun at
him, calling him a “son of a goat,” and making rude derivations from the
name of his home town. Quentin was one of the most insulting, and one
day the tormented lad answered him:
“You’re a bigger son of a goat than I am, and your mother is living with
a silversmith.”
Quentin waited for his comrade to come out of school, and then punched
his nose--only to be thrashed by his victim’s older brother afterwards.
This affair gave origin to a continual series of fights, and nearly
every day Quentin was crippled by the beatings he received.
“Why, what’s the matter with you?” his mother once asked.
“They told me at school that my mother was living with a silversmith.”
“Who told you?”
“Everybody,” replied Quentin with a frown.
“And what did you do?”
“Fought ’em all!”
His mother said nothing more, but she withdrew Quentin from that school
and took him to another, which was presided over by a dominie, and
attended by a couple of dozen children.
The dominie was a secularized monk by the name of Piñuela--an old fossil
full of musty prejudices. He was a strong partisan of the ancient
pedagogic principle, so much beloved by our ancestors, of “La letra con
la sangre entra” (Learn by the sweat of thy brow).
Dominie Piñuela was a ridiculous and eccentric individual. His nose was
large, coarse, and flaming red: his under lip hung down: his great eyes,
turbid, and bulging from their sockets like two eggs, were always
watery: he wore a long, tight-fitting frock coat, which was once black,
but now with the passage of time, covered with layers of dirt and grease
and dandruff; narrow trousers, bagging loosely at the knees, and a black
skull-cap.
Piñuela’s only store of knowledge consisted of Latin, rhetoric, and
writing. His system of instruction was based on the division of the
class into two groups, Rome and Carthage, a book of translations, and a
Latin Grammar. Besides these educational mediums, the secularized monk
counted upon the aid of a ferrule, a whip, a long bamboo stick, and a
small leather sack filled with bird-shot.
Piñuela taught writing by the Spanish method, with the letters ending in
points. To do this one had to know how to cut and trim quill pens; and
few there were who had the advantage of the Dominie in this art.
Besides this, Piñuela corrected the vicious pronunciation of his pupils;
and in order to do so, he exaggerated his own by doubling his z’s and
s’s. One of the selections of his readings began as follows: _Amanezzía;
era la máss bella mañana de primafera_ (Dawn was breaking; it was the
most beautiful day of Spring): and all the children had to say
“primafera” and “fida” unless they wished their lessons to be
supplemented by a blow with the ferrule.
The Dominie walked constantly to and fro with his pen behind his ear. If
he saw that a child was not studying, or had not pointed his letters
sufficiently in his copy-book, according to the principles of
Iturzaeta, he beat him with the stick, or threw the bag of shot at his
head.
“Idling, eh?--Idling?” he would murmur, “I’ll teach you to idle!”
For more serious occasions, the stupid Dominie had his whip; but nearly
all of the parents warned him not to use it on their children--which for
Piñuela was the plainest symptom of the decadence of the times.
At first Quentin felt the profoundest hate for the Dominie: he tormented
him every time he could with unutterable joy; he broke his inkwells; he
bored holes in his writing-desk; and Piñuela retaliated by boxing his
ears. Between master and pupil there began to arise a certain ironical
and joyous esteem by force of beatings from the one, and pranks from the
other. They looked upon each other as faithful enemies; Quentin’s
mischief provoked laughter from Piñuela, and the Dominie’s beatings
wrested an ironical smile from Quentin.
Once the pupils saw Piñuela advancing with his pointer raised on high,
and Quentin running, hiding behind tables, and throwing inkwells at the
Dominie’s head.
One day two old women were gossiping in the shop at home. They were two
street vendors, one of whom was called Siete Tonos, on account of the
seven different tones she used in crying her wares.
“They have hard luck with the little scamp. He’s a wicked little devil,”
said one of them.
“Yes; he’s not like his father,” added the other.
“But El Pende isn’t his father.”
“Ah! Isn’t he?”
“No.”
Quentin waited for them to say more, but the clerk entered the store,
and the gossips fell silent.
El Pende was the nickname of the man who passed for Quentin’s father.
The boy thought about the conversation of the two old gossips for a long
time, and came to the conclusion that there had been something obscure
about his birth. He was proud and haughty, and considered himself worthy
of royal descent, so the idea of dishonour irritated him, and made him
desperate.
One day his mother went to ask the Dominie how her son was behaving
himself.
“How is he behaving himself?” cried Piñuela with ironic geniality.
“Badly! Very badly! He’s the worst boy in the class. A veritable
dishonour to my school. He knows nothing about Latin, nor grammar, nor
logic, nor anything. I’m sure that he doesn’t even know how to decline
_musa, musae_.”
“So you think he is no good at studying?”
“He is a rowdy, incapable of ever possessing the sublime language of
Lacius.”
His mother told her husband what Piñuela had said, and El Pende launched
a sermon at Quentin.
“So this is the way you behave after the sacrifices we have made for
you!”
Quentin did not reply to the charges they made against him, but when El
Pende told him that if he continued his pranks he would throw him out of
the house, the thought that was in Quentin’s heart rushed to his lips.
“It makes no difference to me,” he cried, “because you are not my
father.”
El Pende boxed the boy’s ears; the mother wept; and that night Quentin
left the house and roamed the fields half-starved, until Palomares, the
clerk, found him and brought him to his parents.
The boy began to take notice of things, and made it plain to his mother
that instead of studying Latin, he preferred to learn French and go to
America, as a schoolmate of his--the son of a Swiss watch-maker--had
done.
Accordingly they took him to the academy of a French _emigré_, a violent
republican, who, at the same time that he taught his pupils to conjugate
the verb _avoir_, spoke to them enthusiastically about Danton,
Robespierre, and Hoche.
Perhaps this excited Quentin’s imagination; perhaps it did not need to
be excited; at any rate, one Sunday morning he decided to put into
execution his great _projét de voyage_.
His mother was accustomed to hide the key to the cabinet where she kept
her money under her pillow. While she was at mass, Quentin seized the
key, opened the cabinet, stuffed the seventy dollars that he found there
into his pocket, and a few minutes later was calmly increasing the
distance between himself and his home.
Fifteen days after his escape he was apprehended in Cadiz just as he was
about to set sail for America, and was brought back to Cordova in the
custody of the _guardia civil_.
Then his mother took him to a monastery, but Quentin had made up his
mind to run away from everything, so he attempted to escape several
times. At the end of a month, the friars intimated that they did not
wish to keep him any longer.
To the boys of his age, Quentin was now the prototype of wildness,
impudence, and disobedience. People predicted an evil future for him.
At this point his mother said to him one day:
“We are going to a certain house. Kindly answer politely anything they
may ask you there.”
Quentin said nothing, but accompanied his mother to a palace on the
Calle del Sol. They climbed some marble stairs, and entered a hall where
a white-haired old man was sitting in a large, deep armchair, with a
blond little girl who looked like an angel to Quentin, by his side.
“So this is the little scamp?” inquired the little old man with a smile.
“Sí, Señor Marqués,” replied Quentin’s mother.
“And what do you wish to do, my boy?” the Marquis asked him.
“I!--Get out of here as soon as I possibly can,” replied Quentin in a
dull voice.
“But, why?”
“Because I hate this town.”
The little girl must have looked at him in horror; at least he supposed
she did.
His mother and the old man chatted a while, and at last the latter
exclaimed:
“Very well, my boy. You shall go to England. Get his baggage ready,” he
added, turning to the mother, “and let him go as soon as possible.”
Quentin departed, making the journey sometimes in the company of others,
sometimes alone, and entered Eton School, near Windsor. In a short time
he had forgotten his entire former life.
In the English school the professor was not the enemy of the scholar,
but rather one of his schoolmates. Quentin met boys as daring as he, and
stronger than he, and he had to look alive. That school was something
like a primitive forest where the strong devoured the weak, and
conquered and abused them.
The brutality of the English education acted like a tonic upon Quentin,
and made him athletic and good-humoured. The thing of paramount
importance that he learned there, was that one must be strong and alert
and calm in life, and ready to conquer always.
In the same way that he accepted this concept on account of the way it
flattered him, he rejected the moral and sentimental concepts of his
fellow-pupils and masters. Those young men of bulldog determination,
valiant, strengthened by football and rowing, and nourished by underdone
meat, were full of ridiculous conventions and respect for social class,
for the hierarchy, and for authority.
In spite of the fact that he passed for an aristocrat and a son of a
marquis in order to enjoy a certain prestige in the school, Quentin
manifested a profound contempt for the principles his schoolmates held
in such respect. He considered that authority, wigs, and ceremonies were
grotesque, and consequently was looked upon as the worst kind of a
poser.
He used to maintain, much to the stupefaction of his comrades, that he
felt no enthusiasm for religion, nor for his native land; that not only
would he not sacrifice himself for them, but he would not even give a
farthing to save them. Moreover, he asserted that if he should ever
become rich, he would prefer to owe his money to chance, rather than to
constant effort on his part; and that to work, as the English did, that
their wives might amuse themselves and live well, was absurd--for all
their blond hair, their great beauty, and their flute-like voices.
A man with his ideas, and one, moreover, who followed women--even
servant girls--in the street, and made complimentary remarks to them,
could not be a _gentleman_, and for this reason, Quentin had no intimate
friends. He was respected for his good fists, but enjoyed absolutely no
esteem....
During his last years at school, his only real friend was an Italian
teacher of music named Caravaglia. This man communicated to Quentin his
enthusiasm for Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi. Caravaglia used
to sit at the piano and sing. Quentin listened to him and was much
softened by the music. The _Alma innamoratta_ from _Lucia_, and _La
cavattina_ from _Hernani_, made him weep; but his greatest favourites,
the songs that went straight to his heart, were the manly arias from the
Italian operas like that in _Rigoletto_, that goes:
_La constanza teranna del core._
This song, overflowing with arrogance, merry fanfaronade, indifference,
and egoism, enchanted him.
On the other hand, to his psalm-singing comrades, this merry and
swaggering music seemed worthy of the greatest contempt.
In the farewell banquet which Quentin gave to his four or five
companions, and to the Italian professor, there were several toasts.
“I am not a Protestant,” said Quentin at the last, somewhat befuddled
with whiskey, “nor am I a Catholic. I am a Horatian. I believe in the
wine of Falernus, and in Cécube and his wines of Calais. I also believe
that we mortals must leave the task of calming the winds to the gods.”
After this important declaration, nothing more is known, except the fact
that the diners all fell asleep.