-Iii- · II

At night, after supper, they said the rosary. Staggering like priestesses of Bacchus and rubbing their clenched fists in their heavy eyes, Mariuca and Pepina went off to their beds, which were comfortable and inviting, adorned with gaudy quilts. Soon afterwards a snoring duet of drowsy contraltos began, lasting without interruption until daybreak.

Tanasio climbed up to the garret, and Celipín curled himself up on some ragged blankets not far from the baskets where Nela disappeared.

When the children were thus settled, the parents remained for a time in the main room; and while Centeno, sitting stiffly by the small table with a newspaper in his hand, made a thousand grimaces and contortions indicating a bold attempt to read it, Señana took from the chest a stocking full of money. After counting it and adding or taking away a few coins, she returned it carefully to its hiding place. Then she brought out several twists of paper containing gold coins, transferring a few pieces from one packet to another. At such times broken phrases like these were wont to be heard:

“I took thirty-two reales for Mariuca’s petticoat.... I put back the six reales that were taken from Tanasio.... We are only eleven duros short of five hundred....”

Or like these:

“‘Deputies who voted yes...’ ‘Yesterday a conference was held,’ etc.”

Señana’s fingers added up the sums, while Sinforoso Centeno’s trembling and unsteady finger followed the lines of print, endeavoring to guide his wits through that labyrinth of letters.

Those spoken fragments gradually dwindled into stray words, then into monosyllables; a yawn was heard, then another, and at last all fell into tranquil silence after the lamp was put out, by whose rays the mule overseer had enriched his mind.

One night, when everything had grown quiet, a rustling of baskets was heard in the kitchen. As there was a faint glimmer of light there, since the wooden shutter of the small window was never closed, Celipín Centeno, who was not yet asleep, saw the two topmost baskets, which stood one against the other, part and open like the shells of a bivalve. Through the opening appeared Nela’s little nose and black eyes.

“Celipín, little Celipín,” she said, putting out her hand also. “Are you asleep?”

“No, I am awake. Nela, you look like a clam. What do you want?”

“Take this, take this peseta that a gentleman, Don Carlos’s brother, gave me tonight.... How much have you saved up now?... This is a real present! I never gave you anything but copper coins before.”

“Hand it over; thank you very much, Nela,” said the boy, sitting up to take the coin. “Penny by penny, you have already given me close to thirty-two reales.... I have it here in my breast, safely tucked away in the little bag you gave me. You are a regular treasure!”

“I have no use for money. Keep it safe, for if Señana discovers it, she will think it is for mischief and beat you with the big stick.”

“No, it is not for mischief, not for mischief,” said the boy vehemently, pressing his breast with one hand while supporting his head with the other; “it is to make myself a man of worth, Nela, a man of sense, like many I know. On Sunday, if they let me go to Villamojada, I shall buy a primer to learn to read, since they will not teach me here. By jove, I will learn by myself! Ah, Nela, they say Don Carlos was the son of a street-sweeper in Madrid. All by himself, with God’s help, he learned everything he knows.”

“Perhaps you fancy you can do the same, silly goose.”

“By jove! Since my parents will not take me out of these cursed mines, I will find another way; yes, you will see what Celipín can do. I am not cut out for this, Nela. Just let me scrape together a good round sum, and you will see how I plant myself in the town, and either take the train for Madrid, or catch a steamer to the islands far away, or enter service so long as they let me study.”

“Holy Mother of God! What roguish schemes you have kept hidden!” said Nela, opening the shells of her case wider and sticking out her whole head.

“Do you take me for a fool?... Ah, little Nela, I am in a fury! I cannot live like this; I shall die in the mines. By jove! I spend my nights crying, biting my hands, and... do not be frightened, Nela, nor think me wicked for what I am going to tell you: I say it to you alone.”

“What is it?”

“That I do not love my father and mother as I ought to love them.”

“Come now, if you talk like that, I shall never give you another real. Celipín, for the love of God, mind what you say.”

“I cannot help it. You see how they keep us here. By jove! We are not people, but animals. Sometimes it gets into my head that we are worse off than the mules, and I ask myself if I am any different from a donkey.... Filling a basket with ore and dumping it into a wagon; shoving the wagon to the furnaces; stirring the washed ore with a stick. Oh!... (here sobs choked the wretched boy’s voice). Confound it, anyone who spends years at this work must end by turning wicked, and his brains will turn to calamine.... No, Celipín was not born for this.... I ask my parents to take me away and let me study, and they say they are poor and that I am full of nonsense. No, no, we are just brutes earning day-wages.... But you say nothing to me?”

Nela did not answer.... Perhaps she was comparing the sad condition of her comrade with her own, and finding hers infinitely more wretched.

“What would you have me say?” she replied at last. “Since I can never be anything, since I am not even a person, I can say nothing to you.... But do not harbour such wicked thoughts; do not think like that of your parents.”

“You say that to comfort me; but you know very well I am right... and I believe you are crying.”

“Not I.”

“Yes, you are crying.”

“Everyone has her own troubles to weep for,” replied María in a stifled voice. “But it is very late, Celipín, and we must go to sleep.”

“Not yet... confound it!”

“Yes, my boy. Go to sleep, and do not think of those wicked things. Good night.”

The clam shells closed, and all was silent again.

Much has been declaimed against the materialism of cities—a plague that, amid the elegance and splendor of culture, gnaws at the moral foundations of society; yet there is a more terrible plague, and that is the materialism of the villages, which petrifies millions of human beings, killing all noble ambition within them and confining them to the circle of a mechanical, brutal, and dark existence. Society contains dreadful foes: speculation, agiotage, the mercenary greed of cultivated men, commerce; but towering above them all is a monster that quietly works more destruction than any: the greed of the peasant. For the covetous villager there is neither moral law, nor religion, nor clear notions of right and wrong; all these dissolve within his soul into coarse calculations and superstitions, forming an inexplicable whole. Beneath hypocritical simplicity lurks a sordid arithmetic that surpasses in sharpness and subtlety all that the most expert mathematicians ever devised. A peasant who acquires a taste for farthings and dreams of turning them into silver, only to convert that silver into gold, is the most ignoble beast that can be conceived; for he has all the cunning and deceit of man joined to a callousness of feeling that appalls. His soul shrivels until it becomes nothing more than a calculator of quantities. Ignorance, rusticity, and squalor in living complete the abominable portrait, stripping him of all means of concealing his naked, barren interior. Counting upon his fingers, he is capable of reducing the whole moral order, conscience, and the very soul to mere figures.

Señana and Señor Centeno, having found at last, after a thousand hardships, their crust of bread at the Socartes mines, brought together through the labor of their four children an income that would have seemed princely wealth to them in the days when they wandered from fair to fair selling earthen pots. Regarding Señor Centeno’s intellectual gifts, it must be said that his skull, in the opinion of many, rivaled in hardness the steam hammer installed in the workshops; but it was quite otherwise with Señana, who appeared to be a woman of great shrewdness and foresight, managing the household as the wisest ruler might govern his dominions. She pocketed the earnings of her husband and children—a handsome sum—and whenever payday came, it seemed to her as though the Blessed Sacrament Himself were entering the door of her dwelling, so great was the joy that the sight of coin produced in her breast.

Señana afforded very few comforts to her children in return for the fortune their hands were building up; but as they never complained of the degrading squalor in which they lived, and never showed any inclination toward independence or any yearning for a better life more worthy of intelligent beings, Señana let the days slip by. Many years passed before her daughters slept in beds; many more before their sturdy limbs were clad in decent garments. She fed them soberly and methodically, making herself in this a champion of the most approved hygienic rules; but the food in her house was mournful, like fodder dealt out to beasts.

As for intellectual nourishment, Señana firmly believed that with the erudition of her husband, Señor Centeno, acquired through extensive reading, the family had enough and to spare to deserve the name of most learned, wherefore she never sought to burden her children’s minds with the stale teachings dispensed at school. While the elders had attended for a time, the youngest was spared all schoolmasters, and spent twelve hours a day immersed in the brutalizing toil of the mines, whereby the whole family sailed broad and free across the vast ocean of stupidity.

The two girls, Mariuca and Pepina, did not lack charms, the chief of which were their youth and robust health. One of them could read fluently; the other could not; and as to knowledge of the world, one may readily perceive that some rudiments would not be wanting in those who lived among a merry troop of nymphs of various ages and origins, engaged in mechanical toil and endowed with free tongues. Mariuca and Pepina were deep-chested, upright, strong, and stately as Amazons. They wore short skirts displaying half the calf and bare, fleshy feet; and their rugged heads would have looked well supporting an architrave, like the women of Caria. The dust of calamine, which stained them from head to foot as it did all the other workers in the mines, gave them the appearance of colossal figures of unbaked clay.

Tanasio was an apathetic creature. His lack of spirit and ambition bordered on idiocy. Confined to the stables from his childhood, knowing nothing of boyish pranks, or troubles, or pleasures, or sorrows, that young man, who had been born ready to be a machine, had gradually become the coarsest of tools. The day such a being should conceive an idea of his own, the admirable order of all things—whereby no stone can think—would be overthrown.

The relations of this brood with their mother, who ruled the family, were those of absolute submissiveness on the part of the children and sovereign authority on that of Señana. The only one who occasionally gave signs of rebellion was the youngest. Señana, in her narrow understanding, could not comprehend that devilish longing to cease being a stone. Was there, by chance, a happier or more exemplary existence than that of boulders? She would not allow it to be exchanged even for that of a pebble. And Señana loved her children; but there are so many ways of loving! She put them above all things, provided they agreed to toil endlessly in the mines, to knead all their wages into a single trough, to obey her blindly, and to entertain no wild notions—no eagerness for fine clothes, no desire to marry before their time, no hankering after devilish learning or scholarly conceits; for the poor, she said, were meant always to be poor and to conduct themselves as poor folks, not seeking to jabber like the rich and the city people, who were all eaten up with vices and rotten with sins.

We have described the treatment the children received in Centeno’s house so that the reader may understand that which fell to Nela—an abandoned, solitary, useless creature, incapable of earning a day’s wage, without past, without future, without pedigree, without hope, without personality, with no right to anything beyond mere subsistence. Señana gave her this, firmly believing that her generosity bordered on heroism. Repeatedly she said to herself as she filled Nela’s bowl: “How surely I am earning my little seat in heaven!”

And she believed it like Gospel truth. Into her thick skull no other light could enter concerning the holy practice of charity; she could not comprehend that a loving word, a caress, a gentle and tender manner making the small forget their smallness and the wretched their wretchedness, are acts of heroism of far greater worth than the refuse of a poor meal. Was not the same given to the cat? And the cat at least heard the tenderest endearments. Never did Nela hear herself called “pussy,” or “darling,” or “precious creature,” nor any of those honeyed and touching terms with which the cat was favored.

Never was Nela given to understand that she was born of a human being like the other inhabitants of the house. She was never beaten; but she understood that this privilege was rooted in the disdainful pity inspired by her stunted body, and by no means in any regard for her person. Never was she given to understand that she possessed a soul ready to yield rich fruit if cultivated with care, nor that she bore within her, like other mortals, that spark of the eternal wisdom which is called human intelligence, and that from that spark infinite light and beneficent fire might blaze forth. Never was she given to understand that in her diminutive frame she carried the seed of all noble and delicate feelings, and that those tiny shoots might become magnificent and lush flowers under no other cultivation than a kindly glance now and then. Never was she given to understand that she had a right, by the very cruelty of Nature in fashioning her, to certain gentle attentions from which the strong, the healthy, and those who have parents and homes of their own may be exempt, but which by Christian justice belong to the cripple, the pauper, the orphan, and the disinherited.

On the contrary, everything showed her her resemblance to a rolling pebble, which has not even a shape of its own, but only that which is given to it by the waters that wash it down and the kick of the passer-by who disdains it. Everything showed her that her place in the household was lower than that of the cat, whose back received the fondest strokes, and lower than that of the blackbird hopping in its cage.

At least, of these it was never said with cruel compassion: “Poor thing, it would have been better off dead.”

-V-

Labor. Landscape. Figure

The smoke from the calcining furnaces, which had kept watch through the night breathing with a hoarse panting, took on a faint silvery sheen in its most distant coils; a pleasant light appeared along the distant horizons and behind the mountains; and little by little there emerged from the shadow the hills encircling Socartes, the immense scarps of reddish earth, and the black buildings. The bell of the establishment shouted in a shrill voice: “To work!” and a hundred sleepy men came forth from houses, cabins, huts, and burrows. Door hinges creaked; from the stables the mules filed slowly out, heading on their own to the trough; and the works, which a little before had resembled a sepulchral mansion lit by the infernal glow of the furnaces, woke to life, stirring its thousands of arms.