How glad I felt to start for Galicia! In Madrid the heat had become
stifling, while at home one could enjoy the pure, fresh air, filled with
the sweet fragrance of the country. It seemed as if I had never breathed
before, and that my exhausted lungs required that moist, balmy, and pure
air in order to perform their functions properly.
I am not one of those Galicians who feel homesickness very intensely,
but, nevertheless, the first group of chestnuts which I recognized in
the distance, appeared to me like a friend bidding me welcome home.
My mother was at Ullosa, so I went there at once, partly by stage and
partly on foot, for one has to make use of all sorts of locomotion to
get there. I arrived at sunset, and my mother came out into the road to
meet me. With joined hands, and arm in arm, we walked over the space
which separates Ullosa from the highway.
After she had wiped away the tears which invariably gather in a mother’s
eyes when she sees her son after a long absence, her first volley of
questions was as follows: “So your uncle has hired a house, eh? Is it
true that he has furnished it very handsomely? That’s what a man does if
he has money. They say that the bridal-bed is sumptuous. What rent does
he pay? Something frightful, I presume, because everything is up to the
sky in Madrid. And do you know whether he has yet secured a servant? It
will be a wonder if he does not hire some horrid jade. That’s the way
the city council’s funds fly off. That’s why they do such mean things.
Don’t say that they don’t, or you’ll drive me wild, Salustio.”
“But, my dear mother, what difference does it make to us?” I exclaimed,
when I could get in a word edgewise. “How am I to blame because my uncle
gets married?”
“Because you said it was all right,” she replied, stopping to take
breath, while her lips quivered like children’s when their little
troubles come upon them.
“You seem to think my uncle would be guided by what I say. You must
make the best of it, dear mother, and try to bear patiently what you
can’t help. I am sure that is the best way to act, on all accounts, even
for our own advantage.”
My mother fixed her eyes on me. She was two years older than Uncle
Felipe, and had kept her good looks remarkably, thanks to her robust
health, to the simple and healthful life she led, and perhaps also to
her lack of serious thought and resulting intellectual weariness. She
was as brisk as a bird, and her excitable and changeable disposition
kept her from getting bilious, and whipped her blood into a more rapid
circulation. Her moral fickleness, her inability to rise to the region
of general and abstract ideas, allowed my mother to keep all her energy
and ability for action. It was her strong will which guided her
thoughts; and the predominance of the emotive and practical elements was
revealed in her smooth, narrow brow, in the capricious play of her lips,
and in the questioning, restless gaze of her ever-watchful eyes.
My mother never went to Pontevedra except in cold weather, or in Holy
Week, or at Easter to take communion. The Ullosa place was kept up the
year round. With all her reviling of the Cardoso stock, my mother had
much of the acquisitiveness, the sordid economy, and the mercantile
spirit which characterize the Hebrew race. How much affection can do,
and how it tangles up logic! Those traits which disgusted me in my uncle
appeared like virtues in my mother, and really were so, if it is a
virtue to make the best of circumstances. With a miserable four or five
hundred, which was the most that could be got out of our property with
the utmost squeezing, it was little short of a miracle to be able to
live as she did with comparative comfort, pay no small part of the
expenses of my education, and even hide away inside of a mattress five
or six _onzas_ for a rainy day. She who could succeed in doing this, was
not an ordinary woman.
My mother always wore the Carmelite habit, to save expense for dresses,
of course. She had linen woven from the flax raised on her land,--that
strong, coarse, brown, Galician linen, which never wears out,--and made
shirts and sheets out of that. Out of a vineyard of sour grapes she made
a little claret with which she would regale me during my vacations; from
the rye raised in her fields, she made the bread she ate; a couple of
pigs, fattened at home, kept her pot full all the year round; she raised
chickens, to furnish her with eggs; she got her wood from a bit of a
grove; she kept a cow, and sold it at the fair at a good profit when it
no longer gave milk; other cattle she used to have in partnership with
her tenants, making some small gains in that way; she distilled brandy
from the grape-skins, and preserved plums in it,--in fact, she did
everything possible to get the juice out of her money and her property,
thus accomplishing those prodigies of good management and frugality,
which a woman is only able to perform when she lives alone. Forced by
her sex to confine her business undertakings within narrow limits, she
made up for it by looking carefully after the smallest details, and not
wasting the value of a pin. Healthy, high-spirited, indefatigable, she
passed every moment of the day in some useful occupation; and I even
suspect that she sometimes did sewing or embroidery, in a secret way,
for other people.
“I shall be as proud as a queen the day you finish learning your
profession, and begin to earn money,” she would say, when I used to
express my amazement at seeing her so eager and so busy.
So I studied with greater zest, desiring to be able to make the last
years of my mother’s life easy and tranquil. But that was a mistaken
idea; for, even if my mother were to have heaps of money, she would be
just as active, given her temperament and disposition. She was so
overflowing with life, and was so energetic and determined to get what
she could out of the world, that far from inspiring compassion, she
should have excited envy in those of us who dwell much within ourselves,
and finally make of our imagination a prison cell.
My mother’s disposition was of the kind that makes people happy and
strong, and arms them against the friction and disappointments of life.
It was singular, but when I did not see my mother, I idealized her, and
gave her credit for certain traits and weaknesses associated with her
sex, which she was far from possessing. For example, I was strongly
persuaded that she had passionate religious convictions, and sometimes I
would respond to the profane jokes of my companions, or exclaim when I
gave utterance to some audacious assertion: “Heaven grant that my mother
may never know it.” If I ate meat in Holy Week, or remembered how long a
time had passed without my going to church, I would say to myself: “I
hope my mother wont find it out.” But the fact is that my mother, in
spite of her Carmelite habit, attended to her church duties only
perfunctorily, and never displayed any great concern for the welfare of
my soul.
That is not to say that the high-spirited Galician woman had no positive
beliefs. Doubtless my mother inherited from her Jewish ancestors the
most deeply-rooted of her religious convictions, namely, that God was an
angry, vindictive and implacable being--the God of the Old Testament
who “visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, to the third and
fourth generation.” She believed naïvely that God does all this
punishing unmercifully, right on the spot; and she also imagined that he
was particularly disposed to pour out all the vials of his wrath upon
those who troubled her, Benigna Unceta, for any cause or in any way.
Thanks to her incapacity for general ideas, she concluded that the Deity
was greatly interested in her personal wrongs and resentments. So much
so, that when she stopped on the slope between us and Ullosa, quite out
of breath with climbing and the vehemence of her anger, she exclaimed,
in a prophetic tone:
“You’ll see how God will punish your Uncle Felipe in His own way. You’ll
see. Just wait; he’ll not get off scot-free.”
I protested against this singular supposition, and, as though a heavenly
voice from above joined with me in proclaiming mercy and charity, just
then the _Angelus_ sounded from the little church near by, with subdued
melancholy and great poetic effect.
My mother turned abruptly and inquired:
“Are you going to the wedding?”
“Yes, indeed, and you ought to go also. It is scandalous that you should
not go.”
“Don’t say anything to me, for I have no desire to be present at such a
frightful scene. There never was, and never will be, such an absurd
thing. Heaven grant that your uncle may not get an unfaithful wife! I
wouldn’t wager a copper that he will not, though, marrying at his age! A
nice thing it would be if I got married now!”
I battled against her invincible obstinacy asserting that my uncle was
at a very good age to marry, and that we should appear ridiculous if we
were to get angry at such a natural and proper procedure.
“That’s all bosh!” cried my mother, furiously. “A fine old mummy you are
defending! I know what I say, and I also know what people tell me. God
will square his accounts, though. Don’t imagine that I am crazy. Oh, no;
but he’ll take a tumble, you’ll see! And the girl who marries him, I
tell you, has no decency. I would not have your uncle if he were
covered with gold, and if he were not my brother, I’d----”
My mother gave me for my supper a country dish, which she knew I was
very fond of--corn-meal fritters with new milk. She would take out the
fritters sizzling hot, and let them get cool, and form a crust; then she
would make a hole in the middle, and pour in there the richest of milk
out of an earthenware pitcher. While I was dispatching this delicacy of
Homeric simplicity, she talked and questioned me incessantly, and would
always come back to the starting-point--my uncle. “He is now mixed up
here in an affair, and I don’t know how it will end. They are having a
terrible row, and it seems to me that they’ll settle him this time. It
is another scrape, but much worse than that one about the lots and
houses, though that was bad enough. The trouble now is in regard to the
contract for the provision market; they say that your uncle goes shares
in the profits with the contractor, and that they have allowed him
fearful opportunities for extortion; but that, nevertheless, the man has
not fulfilled a single part of his contract, absolutely not one, so the
municipal authorities are going to sue him. And they are not what they
were last year, your uncle has no hold there. He’ll have to go on a
pilgrimage to the boss----if Don Vicente does not help him out of this
scrape it’ll be all up with him. But he’ll help him; one is as bad as
the other. By the power of Don Vicente’s protection, they can do what
they please in this province. As your uncle is to go to live
in Madrid, they are going to hire his house in Pontevedra for the
post-office--another fat thing for him! Nowadays, everybody has to be
wide awake. A pretty state of things! I am not a man, but if I were, I’d
go on a pilgrimage to the boss’s house, like everybody else. I am saying
this to you confidentially; but be careful what you say anywhere in
public. Don Vicente has a crowd of dependents and powerful friends, and
it would not do for him to take a dislike to you, because he may be
useful to you some day.”
On seeing her so demonstrative, I caught her by the waist and kissed her
on the neck and cheeks, and took the occasion to say, laughingly, “My
dear mother, in order to present myself at Tejo with some show of
propriety, I ought to take a wedding gift to the bride. My uncle may be
as bad as you choose, and may have served us a thousand scurvy tricks,
but anyway, he is now paying a good part of the cost of my education.”
“He doesn’t do it for nothing. Look here, my boy, if we were to claim
what rightly belongs to us,--and who knows if he’ll keep on paying your
expenses?”
“Why, that makes no difference, dear mother; that makes no difference.
Even if he should not, I must have the present.”
“But I haven’t a single cent! Do you think I coin money here? Yes, much
we are coining! It would cost me a pretty penny to do what you want.”
“Well,” said I, resolutely, “then there’s no need of talking any more
about it. I’ll go to Pontevedra to-morrow, and pawn my watch or my
boots, for a present there must be. I have made up my mind to that.”
The next morning my mother came into my room to awaken me. She had a
basket of ripe cherries which she left on my bed for me to eat; and in
her hand were two little gleaming disks, which she held up to the height
of my eyes. They were five dollar gold pieces.
“What do you think of that? I have had trouble enough to scrape this
together. Now go and squander it; throw it away, since you are bound to.
I don’t want you to say that your mother treats you badly, when she
doesn’t need to, in any way whatever.”
I threw my arms around her neck, and gave her three or four hearty
smacks, while she pretended to ward me off, exclaiming: “You clown, you
schemer, go out to walk, little boy!”
With the ten dollars, I bought in the city a brooch with two crossed
anchors and a little Cupid in the center, with a small ruby and two
pearls. It was one of those senseless trinkets which fashion invents,
but which good taste casts aside. But at least, now I was not going to
the wedding empty-handed.