CHAPTER I
THE WIDOW'S
TAVERNThe morning of that day—it was a Tuesday of the Lenten
season—could not have dawned more promisingly. The sea, off the
Cabañal, was in flat calm, as smooth as a polished mirror. Not the
slightest ripple broke the shimmering triangular wake that the sun
sent shoreward over the lifeless surface of the
water.The fishing fleet had headed, bright and early, for the
grounds off the Cabo de San Antonio; and all the seines were out to
take full advantage of the perfect weather. Prices on the market of
Valencia were running high; and every skipper was trying to make a
quick catch and get back first to the beach of the Cabañal, where
the fisherwomen were waiting impatiently.Toward noon the weather changed. An easterly wind came
up, the dreadlevante, that can
blow so wickedly in the gulf of Valencia. The sea at first was
lightly wrinkled; but as the hurricane advanced the placid
looking-glass gave way to a livid menacing chop, and piles of cloud
came racing up from the horizon and blotted out the
sun.Great was the alarm along shore. In the eyes of those
poor people, familiar with all the tragedies of the sea, wind from
that quarter always meant one of those storms that bring sorrow and
mourning to the homes of fishermen. In dismay, their skirts
whipping in the blow, the women ran back and forth along the
water's edge, wailing and praying to all the saints they trusted.
The men at home, pale and frowning, bit nervously at the ends of
their cigars, and, from the lee of the boats drawn up on the sand,
studied the lowering horizon with the tense penetrating gaze of
sailormen, or nervously watched the harbor entrance beyond the
Breakwater on whose red rocks the first storm waves were breaking.
What was happening to so many husbands and fathers caught with
their nets down off shore? Each succeeding squall, as it sent the
terrified watchers staggering along the beach, called up the
thought of strong masts snapping at the level of the deck and
triangular sails torn to shreds, perhaps at that very
moment!About three o'clock on the black horizon a line of
sails appeared, driving before the gale like puffs of foam that
vanished suddenly in the troughs of the waves to dart back into
view again on the crests succeeding. The fleet was returning like a
frightened herd in stampede, each boat plunging in the combers with
the bellow of the tempest upon its heels. Would they make the lee
of the Breakwater? The wind in devilish playfulness would here tear
off a shred of canvas, there a yard, and there a mast or a tiller,
till a rudderless craft, caught abeam by a mountain of greenish
water, would seem surely to be swallowed up. Some of the boats got
in. The sailors, drenched to the skin, accepted the embraces of
their wives and children impassively, with vacant and
expressionless eyes, like corpses suddenly resurrected from the
tomb.That night was long remembered in the
Cabañal.Frenzied women, with their hair down and lashing in the
hurricane, their voices hoarse from the prayers they shouted above
the howling gale, spent the whole night on the Breakwater, in
danger of being swept off by the towering surf, soaked with the
brine from the biting spray, and peering out into the blackness as
though bent on witnessing the lingering agony of the last
stragglers.Many boats did not appear. Where could they be
...ay Diós, Diós!Happy the women who had their sons and husbands safe in
their arms! Other boys were out in that tumbling hell, driving
through the night in a floating coffin, tossing from white cap to
white cap, dizzily plunging into the yawning trough, while decks
groaned beneath their feet, and gray hills of water curled above to
break down upon them in a destroying surge!It rained all night long. Many women waited out till
sunrise, drawing their soaked cloaks about their shivering bodies,
kneeling in the black mud and coal-dust on the Breakwater,
shrieking their prayers to be sure that God would hear, or, again,
in desperate rage, stopping to tear their hair and hurl the most
frightful blasphemies of the Fishmarket up toward
heaven.And when dawn came, what a glorious dawn it was! As if
nothing at all had happened, the sun lifted a smiling hypocritical
face above the line of a clean horizon, and spread a broad uneasy
glitter of golden beauty over waters that peacefully carried long
streaks of foam from the night's turmoil. The first thing that the
rays of morning gilded was the battered hulk of a Norwegian
barkentine ashore off the Beach of Nazaret, its nose buried in the
sand, its midships awash, its bilges agape and in splinters, while
strips of canvas floated from the rigging tangled about the broken
masts.The ship had carried a cargo of Northern lumber. Pushed
gently along by the lapping waves, timbers and boards were slowly
drifting ashore, where they were dragged out by swarms of black
ants and disappeared as though sunk in the sand. And they worked
hard, those ants. The storm was just what they had been waiting
for. Beach-pirates were whipping up their horses gayly along all
the roads leading to thehuertaof Ruzafa.
Boards like that would make such fine houses! And the booty was all
theirs by rights! What did it matter if a girder were stained,
perhaps, with the blood of one of those poor foreigners lying dead
back there upon the shore?Groups of idlers were gathered, with a few policemen,
around some corpses that were stretched out on the beach some
distance from the water. Strong, handsome fellows they had been,
light-haired all; and bits of white skin, soft and smooth, though
muscular, could be seen through the rents in their garments, while
their blue eyes, glassy and staring in death, looked up at the sky
with a mysterious fixity.The Norwegian had been the most sizeable wreck of the
blow, and the newspapers in town gave columns to it. The population
of Valencia turned out as on a pilgrimage to look at the hulk, half
sunken in the shifting sands. No one gave a thought to the lost
fishing boats, and people seemed not to understand the wailing and
lamentations of the poor women whose men had not come
home.The disaster to the fleet was not, however, so great as
they had thought. The morning wore on and several boats came in
that had been given up for lost. Some had made Denia or Gandia.
Others had taken refuge in Cullera Harbor. And each craft that
appeared roused cheers of rejoicing and thanksgiving throughout the
village, which joyfully made vows to all the saints who look after
men of the sea.In the end only one was not accounted for—the boat
oftioPascualo, the most thrifty saver of all the savers in
the Cabañal, a man, decidedly, with an eye for money, a fisherman
in winter and a smuggler in summer, a great skipper, and a frequent
visitor to the coasts of Algiers and Oran, which he spoke of always
as "across the way," as though Africa were on the sidewalk across
the street.Pascualo's wife, Tona, spent more than a week on the
Breakwater, a suckling baby in her arms and another child, a chubby
little lad, clinging to her skirts. She was sure Pascualo would
come home; and every time a fresh detail of the storm was given
her, she would tear her hair and renew her screams for the Holy
Virgin's help. The fishermen never talked right out to her, but
always stopped at the significant shrug of the shoulders. They had
seen Pascualo last off the Cabo, drifting before the gale,
dismasted. He could not have gotten in. One man had even seen a
huge green wave break over him, taking the boat abeam, though he
could not swear the craft had foundered.In alternate spells of desperation and strange
exhilarated hope, the miserable woman waited and waited with her
two children. On the twelfth day, a revenue cutter came into the
port of the Cabañal, towingtioPascualo's boat
behind, bottom-up, blackened, slimy and sticky, floating weirdly
like a big coffin and surrounded by schools of fish, unknown to
local waters, that seemed bent on getting at a bait they scented
through the seams of the wrecked hull.The craft was righted and grounded on the sand. The
masts were off even with the deck. The hold was full of water. When
the fishermen went down inside to bail her out with pails, their
bare feet, entangled in the mess of line and baskets and cordage,
stepped finally on something soft. After a first instinctive cry of
horrified revulsion, the men reached down under water with their
hands and drew out—a corpse.TioPascualo was
hardly recognizable. His body was swollen, green, the belly
inflated to the point of bursting. The decaying flesh was gnawed
away in places by hungry little fishes, some of which, loath to let
go their prey, were still clinging to it by their teeth, wriggling
their tails and giving an appearance of disgusting life to the
horrible mass. The bold sailor's fate was clear. He had been hurled
through the hatchway by a lunge of the deck before the boat had
been lost. Inside there he had lain with his skull crushed. That
boat—the dream of his life, the achievement of thirty years of
penny-saving—had proved to be his coffin!TioPascualo's
widow, in her hysterical weeping, shrank from the repugnant body.
The women of the Cabañal raised their voices in weird lamentation
and trooped in company behind the wooden box that was carried at
once to the cemetery. For a weektioPascualo was the
subject of every conversation. Then people forgot about him, save
that the appearance of his mourning widow, with one child in her
arms and another at her side, chanced to remind them of his
grewsome end.Tona, indeed, had lost not her husband only. Dire
poverty was upon her, not the poverty that is hard but tolerable,
but the poverty that is terrifying even to the poor, the want of
the homeless and the bread-less, the want that holds out a
mendicant hand from the street corner to beg a penny and give
thanks for a crust of mildewed bread.Help came readily while her misfortune was fresh in the
minds of the villagers. A subscription was taken up among the
fisherfolk, and on the proceeds, with other gifts that came in, she
was able to get along for three or four months. Then people forgot.
Tona was no longer the widow of a man lost at sea. She was a pauper
ever on hand with the wail for alms. Many doors were at last shut
in her face, and old friends of her girlhood, who had always
welcomed her with a smile, now looked the other way when she went
by.But Tona was not the woman to be crushed by general
ostracism.Eah!Enough of this bawling! We've got to get out of the
dumps! She was a woman with two arms like any other, and two brats
that could eat and eat and eat!She had nothing left in the world but the wreck of her
husband's boat, in which he had died. It lay rotting out there on
the beach, high and dry, now soaked by the rains, now oozing tar
under the flaming sun, the mosquitos breeding in the muck
inside.Tona suddenly had an idea. That boat might be good for
something. It had killed the father of those tots of hers. Why
should it not help to feed them?TioMariano, a
tight-fisted bachelor, first cousin to the late Pascualo, and
supposed to be quite well off, had taken a liking to the widow's
children; and however much it pained him, he went down into his
pocket and gave her the money to make her start.In one side of the boat a hole was sawed to make a door
and a small counter. Against the wall inside some barrels of wine,
gin and brandy were ranged in line. The deck was taken off and
replaced with a roof of tarred boards, to give head-room, at least,
in the dingy hovel. At the bow and at the stern two portholes were
cut, and two partitions were set up with the boards remaining—one
"stateroom" for the widow, the other for the boys. A shelter with a
thatched roof was raised in front of the door; under it a couple of
rickety tables, and as many as half a dozen bamboo tabourets. The
whole outfit made quite a show. The hulk of death became a beach
café within easy reach of thecasa
del bòus, the barn where the oxen
for beaching and launching the boats were kept, and at the very
place where the fish was brought ashore and where some one was
always around.The women folks of the Cabañal began to rub their eyes.
That Tona was the Devil himself! See what an eye she had for
business! Her gin and brandy went by the barrelful. The men who
used to go to the taverns in town now got their drinks right there
of her. They were always playingtruque y floron the
shaky tables under the shelter while waiting for the boats to put
to sea, brightening up the games with glass after glass
ofcaña, which Tona averred was genuine imported Cuban
rum.TioPascualo's
stranded craft went sailing, wind astern, on a new voyage toward
prosperity. Out there on the rocking sea with the old skipper's
seines, the boat had never earned so much as now under the widow's
charge, though its seams were open and its timbers were rotting
away. Evidence of profit could have been found in the successive
transformations the old hulk kept undergoing. First curtains went
up on the stateroom windows, and if you looked inside, you saw new
coverlets of down, and white sheets. A coffee percolator began to
shine like polished gold on the counter. The shelter outside the
door grew longer and longer, with more tables and better ones. A
dozen hens or more began to cluck about over the white sand, bossed
by a wicked rooster with a tenor voice who was more than a match
for any stray dog that came along looking for trouble. From a pen
nearby echoed the grunts of a hog too fat to breathe without
disturbing the neighborhood. And in front of the counter, outside
the hull, were two stoves with rice and fish sputtering fragrantly
in oil in their respective frying-pans. A going concern, no doubt
of that! Not a question of getting rich, you understand, but a bite
to eat for the boys! And Tona would smile and rub her hands
gloatingly. Not a cent did she owe in the world. The ceiling of the
boat was festooned with drymorcillasand
shinysobreasadas—her favorite sausages; and there were strips of smoked
tunny, and a ham or two sprinkled with red pepper. The barrels were
full of drink. Along the shelves stretched an array of bottles with
liqueurs of every color. And the pots and pans hanging on the walls
could be set sizzling in an instant with all kinds of good
nourishing victuals. Just think of it! A widow starving a short
time since, and now already on Easy Street! Say all you want—but
God looks after decent people!With plenty to eat and nothing to worry about, Tona
seemed to grow young again. Inside her boat there she took on a
glowing well-fed buxomness, and her skin, protected from the sun
and brine, lost that harsh baked bronze of the women who worked
along shore. When serving at the counter her ample breast sported
inevitably one of an endless assortment of colored
handkerchiefs,tomate y
huevo, complicated arabesques of
tomato red and egg yellow worked into thick well woven
silk.She could even afford purely decorative luxuries. Above
the wine casks at the back of the "shop" the whitewashed timbers
screamed aloud with cheap high colored chromos that reduced Tona's
neck-wear to silence, quite. The fishermen drinking outside under
the shelter would look up over the counter and feast their eyes on
"The Lion Hunt," "The Death of the Good Man and the Sinner," "The
Ladder of Life," not to mention a half dozen miracle-workers with
Saint Anthony in the place of honor; and a cartoon showing the lean
merchant who trusts, and the fat one who sells for cash, with the
customary legend: "If you want credit, come back
to-morrow!"Tona could be quite properly satisfied at the relative
comfort in which her young ones were growing up. Business was
getting better and better, and an old stocking which she kept
hidden between the foot board of her bunk and the big mattress
there, was gradually filling with the silverdourosshe had
saved.Sometimes she could contain her happiness no longer;
and to view her good fortune in perspective, as it were, she would
walk down to the fringe of the surf, and look back with welling
eyes at the hen coop, the open-air kitchen, the sonorous pig-pen,
and finally the boat itself, its bow and stern projecting from a
maze of fences, cane-work and thatch, and painted a clean dazzling
white like some bark of dream-land tossed by a hurricane into a
barnyard.Not that life did not still have its hardships for her.
She got little sleep. To begin with, she had to be up at sunrise
every morning, and oftentimes, after midnight, when boats would
make shore late or be leaving before dawn, the fishermen would
start banging on her door and she would have to get up and serve
them. These early morning sprees were the ones that made most
money, though they caused her most uneasiness on the whole. She
knew whom she was dealing with. Ashore for a few hours after a week
at sea, those men wanted all the pleasures of land crowded into
minutes of pure joy. They lighted on wine like flies on honey. If
the older men soon fell asleep with their pipes dead between their
teeth, not so the sturdier boys, aflame from the privations and
abstinence of life at sea. They would look atsiñáTona in ways
that would bring gestures of annoyance from her and make her wonder
how she could fight off the brutal caresses of those Tritons in
striped shirts.She had never been a beauty; but her trace of
fleshiness, her big black eyes that seemed to brighten a clean
brownish countenance, and especially the light wrapper she would
hurriedly throw on to attend to her nocturnal patronage, lent her
charm in the eyes of those healthy youths who laid their courses
toward the Valencian shore with joyous anticipation of a sight
ofsiñáTona.But Tona was a woman of brain and brawn, and she knew
how to handle those fellows. She bestowed no favors. When their
words were over-bold she would answer with disdain. To nudges she
replied with cuffs, and once when a sailor seized her suddenly from
behind, she laid him flat with a well placed kick, tough as iron
and sturdy as a main-mast though he was.She would have no love affairs, even if other women
did! A man would never touch the end of her little finger, no
siree! The idea, besides! A mother of two children, little angels,
sleeping there behind one thickness of boards—you could hear them
breathe, even—and she alone in the world to support
them!The future of the boys was beginning to cause the
mother hours of thought They had been growing up there, on the
beach, like two baby gulls, nesting in the shade of the grounded
boats when the sun burned hotly, or hunting conchas and periwinkles
on the shore uncovered at low tide, their brown chubby legs sinking
deep into the masses of seaweed. The older child, Pascualet, was
the living likeness of his father, stocky, full-bellied,
moon-faced. He looked like a seminary student specializing on the
Refectory, and already the fishermen had dubbed him "the Rector," a
nickname that was to stick to him for life. He was eight years
older than Antonio, a lean, nervous, domineering little fellow who
had Tona's eyes.Pascualet became a real mother to his younger brother.
WhilesiñáTona was busy with the tavern, during the earliest days
which had been the hard ones, the good-natured boy had carried the
baby around with the tenderness of a nurse and had played with the
young torments of the water front with that snarling squirming brat
in his arms, who would bite and scratch when anything did not suit
him. At night, in the cramped "stateroom" of the tavern-boat,
"Tonet" would stretch out full length in the most comfortable
place, letting his fat brother curl up in a corner where he might,
provided he did not disturb the little devil, who in spite of his
smallness ruled his elder brother like a tyrant.The two boys would fall asleep to the lullaby of the
waves which on days of spring-tide reached almost to the tavern;
and in winter, when the cold wind would try to make its way through
the seams in the old boat's walls, they would snuggle close
together under the same coverlet. Some nights they would be wakened
by the uproar from the drunken sailors in the tavern, and hear the
angry words of their mother, or the slaps she would rain on
impudent cheeks. More than once the frail partition of their
bedroom had threatened to give way as some staggering body fell
against it. But then they would go to sleep again, with the
carefree innocence of children, with no suspicions, and without
alarm.SiñáTona had an
unjust weakness for her younger son. In the first days of her
widowhood, when she saw the two little heads sleeping side by side
in the narrow cabin, resting perhaps on the very timbers that had
crushed their father's skull, she had felt an equal tenderness for
them both, as though the deadly bark were to destroy them as it had
killed Pascualo. But when prosperity came, and the memory of the
tragedy grew dim with the years,siñáTona showed
unmistakable fondness for Tonet, a child of feline shrewdness, who
treated everybody with imperious petulance, but for his mother
always had the speculative fondness of a sly cat.What a joy Tonet was for her, a beach vagabond at
seven, spending the whole day away from home with one gang or
another, and coming back at night with his clothes soaked and torn,
and his pockets full of sand! The older boy, meanwhile, now that
his brother had been weaned from him, would be in the tavern,
washing dishes, waiting on customers, feeding the hens, or
watching, with grave responsibility written on his features, the
two frying-pans that were crackling on the
stoves.The mother, sometimes, on suddenly waking from a doze
behind the counter and finding Pascualet in front of her, would
start with violent surprise. Pascualo, for all the world! Just as
she had known him as a boy, before their marriage, when he was
"cat" on a fishing vessel! The same round jolly face, the same
stout square-shouldered body, the same stubby sturdy legs, the same
expression of an honest simpleton with a gift for plodding work
that stamped him in advance as a steady reliable chap,
anhombre de bien. And the same inside, as well! Good-natured, too
good-natured if anything, and bashful! But a bull-dog when it came
to hanging on to money; and a mad fondness for the sea, prolific
mother of men of courage, strong enough and brave enough to earn
their living from her bosom!By the time he was thirteen, the tavern had become
quite uncongenial to "the Rector," as he gave to understand with a
word dropped here and there, or with one of those occasional
half-finished and incoherent sentences, which were all that ever
came out of that hard head of his. He had not been born to the
tavern business! Something altogether too tame for him! That might
do for Tonet, who didn't like real work overwell. As for himself,
he was a man of muscle, and he loved the sea. No, he must be a
fisherman like his father!WhensiñáTona heard such
remarks the terrifying thought of the catastrophe of that Lenten
Tuesday would come back to her mind. But the boy held his ground.
Things like that didn't happen every day. And since he felt a
hankering for it, the profession of his father and his grandfather
was good enough for him; andtioBorrasca, an old
skipper who had been a great friend oftioPascualo,
thought so too.One year when the drag-net season came around,
thepesca del bòu, as the Valencians say, where two boats worked in
team, Pascualet shipped withtioBorrasca as
"cat,"gato de
barca, for his keep, and all he
might make, in addition, from thecabets, the small
fry, shrimp, sea-horses and so on, that came up in the nets from
the bottom along with the big fish.His apprenticeship started auspiciously. Up to that
time Pascualet had gotten along on the old clothes his father had
left. ButsiñáTona wanted him to begin his new trade with real
dignity; so she closed the tavern, one afternoon, and went off to a
ship chandler's bazaar at the Grao. The boy remembered the
excitement of that visit to the stores for years and years. What
gorgeous things, those blue coats, those yellow oilskins, those big
rubber boots—only captains could afford them, surely! But he was
proud, withal, of his own helper's outfit—two shirts of mallorquin,
as stiff and prickly and rough as so much sand-paper, a sash of
black wool, a set of glaring yellow overalls, a red cap to pull
down over the back of his head in bad weather, and another of black
silk to go ashore in. For once in his life he had on clothes that
fitted him. He was through struggling with those old coats of his
father that on blowy days filled like mainsails and made him trot
down the wind in spite of himself. Shoes had been out of the
question. Those nimble feet of his had never known the torment of a
leather casing.And a real calling it was that the boy felt for the
sea. The boat oftioBorrasca was
more to his taste than the grounded hulk on shore there with its
grunting hogs and cackling hens. He worked hard; and to supplement
his wages he got a few kicks from the old skipper, who could be
gentle enough on land, but once with a deck under him would have
made Saint Anthony himself toe the mark. He could run up the mast
to set the lantern or clear a line as spryly as a cat. When the
time came tochorrar, to haul
the nets, he would take his hand at the ropes. He scrubbed the
decks, stowed the baskets of fish in the hold, and kept the fires
going in the galley, so that the men of the crew never had a chance
to complain. And what luxuries in reward for all that enthusiasm!
When the captain and the men were through eating, the leavings were
for Pascualet and the other "cat," who had been standing by
motionless and respectful during the meal. The two boys would sit
down on the bow with black pots between their legs and loaves of
bread under their arms. They would eat almost everything with their
spoons, but when scooping became too slow, they would begin to mop
the bottoms of the pots with crusts of bread till the metal was
polished and shining. Then they would carefully collect the few
drops of wine that the men had left in their tin cups. Finally, if
there was no work to do, the "cats" would lie down like princes in
the forecastle, their shirt-tails hanging out, their bellies toward
the stars, their faces pleasantly tickled by the breeze, till they
were rocked to sleep by the swaying of the vessel. There was
tobacco a-plenty.TioBorrasca was
always raising a rumpus because he couldn't understand how his
pockets ran empty so soon, now of thealguillaof Algiers,
now of the Havana fine cut—according to the stock of the latest
smuggler to make the Cabañal.That was real life in Pascualet's eyes. Every time he
came in, his mother could see that he had grown, was stronger,
tanned a darker brown, but as good-natured as ever in spite of his
fights with other "cats," husky little hectors who would stop at
nothing, and who always puffed smoke in your face, when you talked
to them, from pipes as big as they were.These rapid visits home were all there was to
remindsiñáTona that she had an elder son at all. The mistress of
the tavern had something else on her mind. She was now spending
entire days alone in her hulk there. "The Rector" was offshore,
earning his share ofcabets, returning
only Sundays to hand over, with a show of pride, the three or four
pesetas that represented his week's wage. The other boy, that lost
soul Tonet, had turned out a regular waster—that was the very word
for him. And he never came home unless he was hungry. He had joined
the ragamuffins along shore, a swarm of wharf rats that knew no
more about their fathers than the homeless dogs who went with them
on their raids. He could swim like a fish, and all through the
summer days he loafed around the liners in the harbor, without a
stitch on his lean sunburned body, diving for the silver coins the
passengers threw overboard. At night he would come home, his
trousers in rags, his face scratched and bleeding. His mother had
caught him several times fondly caressing the brandy keg; and one
evening she had had to put on her shawl and go to harbor-police
headquarters, where her tears and lamentations finally got him
loose on the promise that she would cure him of his ugly weakness
for scraping the bottoms of the sugar boxes stored on the
piers.That Tonet was a limb of the Devil! And,diós mio, where did
he get it, where did he get it! How could two decent honest
parents, such as she and Pascualo had been, ever get to have a boy
like that? With a perfectly good dinner waiting for him at home,
why did he insist on sneaking around the steamers from Scotland,
waiting for the watchman to turn his back so as to be off with a
dried codfish under his arm? No, that boy was to be the death of
her! Twelve years old, no inclination to work, and not the
slightest fear or respect for her, in spite of all the broomsticks
she had broken over his back.SiñáTona usually
confided her troubles to a certain Martinez, a young policeman who
patrolled that part of the shore, spending the noon hours under the
café shelter, his rifle across his knees, his eyes vaguely fixed on
the horizon of the sea, and his ears filled with the running plaint
of the tavernkeeper. A handsome chap Martinez was, an Andalusian
from Huelva, slender and trim of person, natty as could be in the
old service uniform which he sported with a truly martial swagger,
twirling the corner of his blond mustache with an air that people
called "distinguished."SiñáTona admired
the man. After all, breeding will come out! You can tell it a mile
away. How Martinez talked, for instance! You could see from his
choice of words that he was a man of schooling. For that matter he
had studied years and years in the Seminary up his way; and if now
he was only a patrolman, it was because he hadn't wanted to be a
priest—he had quarreled with his family on the subject—preferring
to see a bit of the world by enlisting in the army. The mistress of
the tavern listened open-mouthed to the tales he told about himself
in a heavy Andalusian dialect where every "s" was like "th" in
"thing." In deference to his learning, she answered in kind,
floundering about in an absurd and unintelligible Castillian which
made people in the village laugh."See,siñor
Martines, that jacknape of mine is
driving me mad with all his carrying on. I say to him, I say:
'Anything wrong in this house, jail-bird? Well, then, why go
tearing around with that gang of good-for-nothings, who will die at
the end of a rope, every one of them!' nowosté siñor Martines, you know how to talk in good grammar. You just tell
him what is what. You tell him they'll put him in the lock-up at
Valencia if he isn't a good boy."Andsiñor
Martinespromised to take the little
rogue in hand, and he did, in fact, give him a lecture, which
reduced Tonet, for a moment at least, to cowering in terror in the
presence of that uniform and that heavy gun, which the soldier
would never let go of for an instant. These slight favors gradually
brought Martinez into the family, making his relations
withsiñáTona more and more intimate. He got his meals now at
the tavern, and spent most of his time there; and the mistress
finally had the pleasure of darning his stockings and sewing the
buttons on his underwear. Poorsiñor
Martines! What would happen to a
fine young man like him without a woman around? He would get to be
as shabby and disreputable as a stray cat. And, frankly, no decent
lady could allow that to happen!Summer afternoons when the sun was beating full upon
the deserted beach, turning the baked sand into a fiery furnace,
one scene would always be enacted in the shade of the thatched roof
of the tavern shelter. Martinez would be seated on a reed stool
with one elbow on the counter, reading Perez Escrich, his favorite
author, in bulging grimy volumes with the corners worn down from
having passed from patrol to patrol along the coast.SiñáTona was
convinced at last. That was where he got all those big words and
that moral philosophy which stirred the bottom of her soul; and she
looked at the books with the superstitious awe of an illiterate.
Across the counter, mechanically sewing, without thinking of what
she was doing, she would sit looking at Martinez fixedly, studying
his thin blond mustache for half an hour at a time, then the
elegant lines of his nose for just as long, and finally the
exquisite skill with which he parted his hair, making two
absolutely even plasters of golden locks on either
side.Sometimes, on looking up at the bottom of a page,
Martinez would find the two black eyes ofsiñáTona nailed
upon him; and he would blush and go on reading. Then afterwards the
tavern keeper would be ashamed of herself. The idea! When Pascualo
was alive, she had looked at the fellow casually once or twice,
because she thought his face was interesting. But now she sat there
looking and looking and looking, like a fool! What would people say
if they ever caught her at it! Of course! She liked him! And why
not? So handsome, and such fine manners! And how well he could
talk! But after all, that was absurd. She was well on toward forty,
thirty-six or so, she couldn't just remember. And he, well,
twenty-four at the outside! But then again, and then again! What
difference did a few years make? She was not so bad looking. She
carried her age well. To settle that question, just listen to the
men off the boats who were always pestering her! And if it was all
so absurd, why were people gossiping about it? The other patrolmen,
friends of Martinez, and the fish-women on the beach, were always
teasing them with indirect allusions which, if anything, were too
direct.And the expected happened. To silence her own
misgivings,siñáTona argued that her boys needed a father, and Martinez
was just the man. The courageous Amazon, who would cudgel the
roughest sailor at the slightest flippancy, herself took the
initiative, overcoming the bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy;
and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take
their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in
higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an
automaton.The matter did not remain long secret; nor was Tona
displeased at the talk. She wanted it known that the tavern had a
man in charge. When she had something to attend to in the Cabañal,
she left the shop in care of Martinez, who sat, as he had always
sat, under the shelter, looking out to sea with the rifle across
his knees. Even the two boys understood that something was going
on. "The Rector," on his turns ashore, would look at his mother
with a perplexed expression on his face, and he was timid and
ashamed in the presence of that big yellow-headed youth in uniform
whom he always found about the tavern. Not so Tonet. That rascal
smiled broadly all the time, reflecting the gibes and sarcasms he
had picked up along shore. And he ceased to be at all impressed at
the sermons of the patrolman, which he now rebutted by thumbing his
nose and going off down the beach cavorting and turning
handsprings.Meanwhile Tona was passing through a new honeymoon in
the full maturity of life. In comparison, her marriage with
Pascualo seemed like monotony itself. Into her passion for the
soldier she put all the vehemence of a woman whose youth is sloping
toward sunset, and she paraded her joy in bold indifference to what
people were saying. Let them talk! Let them talk till their tongues
wore out! Many women were worse than she was. Of course the girls
were sore at her carrying off a good-looking fellow right under
their noses!Martinez, for his part, with the usual dreamy
expression on his face, let himself be kissed and pampered as
though he deserved every bit of it; besides his prestige had gone
up not only in his squad but with his superiors. Why not, with a
boat full of the real stuff, not to mention that stocking crammed
with silverdurosthat sometimes stuck into his ribs as he lay d
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