The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  For my brother Juan Carlos,

  cadet in the Spanish Navy

  Contents

  Introduction: Arturo Barea

  A Note on the Translation

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Finale

  Introduction: Arturo Barea

  It is a peculiar situation for an émigré writer like myself—or, in plainer words, for an anti-Franco refugee now at home in England—to introduce the work of a Spanish author who not only lives and works in Spain today but also belongs to her ruling caste, having fought on the winning side in the Civil War. If I am doing it with conviction and pleasure, this is in itself proof of the power of Camilo José Cela’s work. To the best of my belief, he is the only eminent writer to emerge within Spain after the Civil War, and this book, The Hive, is the most important novel, both as a work of art and as a social document, so far written behind the invisible wall that still insulates the country. I have used the word “written” because it would not be exact to say “produced”: even for Camilo José Cela in his privileged position it is as yet impossible to have it published inside Spain, and an attentive reader will soon realize why.

  On the dust jacket of the first—Argentine—edition of The Hive, Cela himself explains his literary method:

  “My novel La colmena, the first book of the series Caminos Inciertos [Uncertain Roads], is nothing but a pale reflection, a humble shadow of the harsh, intimate, painful reality of every day. They lie who want to disguise life with the crazy mask of literature. The evil that corrodes the soul, the evil that has as many names as we choose to give it, cannot be fought with the poultices of conformism or the plasters of rhetorics and poetics. My novel sets out to be no more—yet no less either—than a slice of life told step by step, without reticences, without external tragedies, without charity, exactly as life itself rambles on.”

  This particular slice of life is cut out from the everyday existence of people in the Madrid of 1943, a grim year not only for the countries in the grip of war but also for Spain in the grip of a “neutral” dictatorship. Cela uses as main stage for his narrative—if a sequence of brief episodes reminiscent of candid camera shots should be called a narrative—a middle-class café just off the center of Madrid. From there he follows his characters (according to his own count no less than one hundred and sixty) to brief encounters in wintry streets or in mean tenement houses. Without charity and quite without reticence, as he claims for himself, but by no means without comparison, he shows the pitiful content of their lives: hunger, greed, fear, frustration, desire, malice, snobbery, poverty, nausea, and fumbling tenderness, all expressing themselves through small talk and small actions. But hunger is the dominating note, or rather, hunger and fear. It is an abject existence leaving a bad aftertaste, as it were an unclean bitterness, in the reader’s mind, but it also rouses an overwhelming, cleansing pity. No, Cela can certainly not be accused of using the “poultices of conformism.” The life he portrays carries with it an odor of decay, and the generalizing comments he scatters over his pages do nothing to soften the implicit indictment.

  It is, I believe, extraordinarily interesting that precisely this novel, in precisely this technique, should come out of Franco Spain. In his self-explanation in place of a blurb, Cela goes on to say: “I think that today novels can be written—well or badly—only in the way I do it. If I thought the opposite, I should change my profession.” This bold and dogmatic assertion, amounting to the claim that only a “slice-of-life” method of novel-writing is of value today, would be rejected by many other writers, including myself, although I too belong to the realist current. It has, however, a hard core of truth in the Spain of today. There, the surface of life has once more to be discovered and described with all its significant ugliness, before the writers can go on to the exploration of the “inner country”; to put it differently, any modern Spanish psychological novel would be lopsided unless it included the harsh domination of hunger, misery and unsafety in their humdrum forms. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why modern Spanish realism grates on many non-Spanish readers. It sounds to them like an unnecessary crudeness, because their existence, and their literature, belong to a different stage of development. I remember a conversation with a Swedish friend, about a similarly ruthless and “uncomfortable” Spanish novel: this friend said that she personally was just able to sense a general human significance underneath the Spanish scenery, but that the majority of Swedish readers failed to do so “because family life with us isn’t a bit like that any more.” The key word was, of course, “any more.” The hunger and misery of The Hive are no part of the world of English readers any more. Here, the inmost feelings of people are not any more affected by an obsessive longing for a cigarette or a hot meal. Nor by the constant fear of official persecution: not any more in what we like to call the free world.

  And yet, with all its Spanishness Cela’s book is universal as a true work of art. The feelings of the little men and women he reveals in his merciless snapshots may be distorted and poisoned by a specific social atmosphere, but they are human feelings not confined to present-day Spain or the so-called Spanish temperament. For anyone who does not let himself be stopped by the surface descriptions, Cela’s burning anger and compassion will speak an international language.

  Also, the narrative method and style of The Hive might be barriers. Cela weaves to and fro between time levels, he doubles back in his tracks to tell the same incident from another angle, all this in the present tense. He uses current Madrid slang terms and double meanings which often are too local to admit translation—they will have to be guessed. Moreover, Cela is a poet. His prose has certain mannerisms, especially that of repetition, which have as much to do with sound and rhythm as with psychological emphasis. Not all these devices are successful in the Spanish original, but they are so much part of Cela’s style and vision that one would not dismiss them as clumsy or erase them in translation. After all, Cela uses his realistic technique and his half-colloquial style deliberately to show the pattern of life as he understands it, subjectively, personally, or if you want romantically, as the struggle of helpless human beings with the bitter nausea of every day. And if I have repeated words such as “bitter” and “nausea” too often, it is because they are so important in Cela’s own vocabulary, in his own pain-filled poetry.

  * * * *

  Camilo José Cela was born in 1916 in Galicia, Spain’s northwestern corner where the Celtic strain still predominates; his birthplace was the ancient town of El Padron, called Iria Flavia by the Romans. On his mother’s side of the family there is Cornish blood. Before he was twenty, i.e., before the Civil War, Cela wrote lyrics which were obviously influenced by various of the acclaimed younger poets of the thirties. In 1945 he published these early poems in a limited edition under the sub-title “Poems of a Cruel Adolescence” and the title Pisando la dudosa luz del día, which is a quotation from the great Baroque poet Luis de Góngora and means, in flat translation, “Treading the doubtful light of day.” The two themes touched upon in sub-title and title were to dominate all Cela’s writings: the painful cruelty of life and the uncertainty of the visible world. His poems are full of a bitterness and pain that strike a deeper note than that of an adolescent mood. They are peopled with brutal men and gods and with their helpless, delicate young victims. Seen from a distance theirs is a morbid world; but only too much of it had a terrible reality on the eve of civil war:

  “. . . there are damp corpses rotting alone

  in the moonless nights . . .”

  Cela fought in General Franco’s army during the Civil War and he joined the Falangist party. Here and
there in his later prose are bald references to the fighting and to an injury he received, but there is no trace of superficial partisanship. In 1942 he published a novel which made him instantly famous: La familia de Pascual Duarte. Till then he had only published poems and stories in literary reviews, and some articles. Pascual Duarte’s Family was translated into several languages, including English, but nowhere did it achieve, nowhere could it have achieved, the impact it had in Spain.

  The story of Pascual Duarte is in the grimmest tradition of Spanish realism. It is told in the first person singular by a murderer waiting for his execution. Pascual’s life is so filled with senseless violence that the reader is sickened; the brutish poverty in which the boy was reared could not have led to anything but blind, crazy outbreaks, but pity is choked by the piled-up horrors. Yet every detail—though not the chain connecting them—has its counterpart in the starved villages of Extremadura from which Pascual Duarte has sprung. He is a victim of forces he cannot understand, he is mentally in prison long before he is sent to prison. His tale opens with the words: “I am not bad . . .” and Cela, in his guise as “editor” of Pascual Duarte’s last confession, never contradicts this pathetic appeal. There is a tail-piece speaking of the murderer’s ultimate repentance and an introductory note in which the “editor” explains that he publishes the memoirs as a warning example of “how not to act”; but the whole book disavows this glib— or satirical—apology which may well have the same objective as the pious endings of old picaresque novels, that is to say, may be intended as an intellectual alibi before the powers-that-be.

  The fate of this novel in Spain is illuminating. Cela himself tells the story in a preface to the fourth edition in 1946. Apparently he had asked the old novelist Pío Baroja to write a prologue for the first edition, and Baroja had not only refused but also told Cela that he had better not publish it at all: “. . . if you want them to put you in prison, go ahead.” Cela says: “I didn’t go to prison, but the novel was withdrawn from circulation.” He does not explain the reasons for this withdrawal, nor the method of it, but the reasons at least should be more than obvious. In the stagnant atmosphere of Franco Spain in the early forties, when a complicated censorship system operated through pressure on publishers and orders to withdraw undesirable books from the market, Pascual Duarte must have had an electrifying effect on those who got hold of it—relatively few, for the editions were small and book prices prohibitive for all but a minority. Here was a novel written in a brutally direct style, uncovering hideous sores at a time when most prose books treated of conventional subjects and were in no way conducive to rebellious thought. It is surely permissible to think that only Cela’s position in the Falangist bureaucracy saved him from greater unpleasantness—which is an understatement.

  In any case, when the book was noticed abroad and copies of the Argentine edition began to circulate in Spain, a new edition was allowed to appear in Barcelona, with an introduction by the influential and famous Dr. Marañon. Also, Cela had in the meantime published less provocative works and had found followers among the younger writers. The battle left its scars on him all the same. Cela dedicated the fourth edition of Pascual Duarte, if only in the second place, to “my enemies who have given me so much help in my career.” He also says in his preface: “I believe the great expectations it [the novel] aroused were due to the fact that I call a spade a spade. If a place smells, the best way to attract attention is not to attempt to have the same smell, only more so, but to change the smell.” This is cautiously expressed, however rough the words, yet it is an unmistakable hint at protest and rebellion.

  Cela’s second novel, Pabellón de Reposo, was published in 1943. It is totally different from Pascual Duarte, a lyrical and elegiac sequence of impressions in a sanatorium where consumptives learn to face their own disintegration without ever quite subduing their horror. I know next to nothing about Cela’s private life, but everything points to personal, not vicarious experience. Yet it is not a successful book; even though some of its episodes are haunting and convincing, the minor key of bitter resignation is not Cela’s proper language. What seems to me most important in this novel is the spiritual experience behind it, the painful detachment that comes from familiarity with slow-moving death, and the pity mixed with fury at the thousand ways in which people hurt each other in addition to the inevitable pain inflicted on each of them by life, by death. These elements of detachment, pity and furious anger permeate the best of Cela’s writings from then onwards.

  I do not count his third novel, Nuevas aventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes, among his best, but Spanish reviewers hailed it with a certain relief. It is a pastiche of the famous picaresque classic Lazarillo de Tormes—already Pascual Duarte had something of a picaresque pastiche—and it tells the adventures of a modern descendant of the prototype in the Spanish countryside, in unchanged, timeless-seeming villages. In the case of this book, tradition hallows the savage detail, the crude words fused into the subtle style, and even the visions of village paupers, so that the recurrent theme of hunger can, with some good will, be taken for a good old Spanish custom—which indeed it is.

  Gerald Brenan has put this more clearly than any other English writer in his preface to his masterly Literature of the Spanish People when he says:

  “It is thus the literature of a people who have scarcely ever known security and comfort. As one reads it one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century the note of hunger runs persistently through the novels. . . .”

  Alas, the note of hunger died not away with the eighteenth century, either in Spanish reality or in Spanish literature. It sounds, hardly softened by genteel manners, through the nineteenth century novels of Benito Pérez Galdós; it speaks from the pages of the young Pío Baroja early in this century; it cries out from the novels of Ramón J. Sender in the twenties and thirties. And it is Camilo José Cela who has sounded it when writing of Franco’s own Spain until it rings like a tolling bell in a small book which, for me at least, is a masterpiece: Viaje a la Alcarria, Journey to the Alcarria.

  On the face of it, this is the diary of a journey through an almost deserted hill district in New Castile where Moorish castles and Renaissance palaces are crumbling in shrunken little towns, while the villages on the bleak hilltops go hungry and the villages in the valleys can afford to be gay because their soil has water and so they are certain of their daily bread. Cela put down what he saw, in a beautiful, terse, limpid language. He came to know in which villages he could get something to eat and in which inns he would be served a meal, the most important knowledge of all in a starving district. He noted that the people of a village perched on a barren hill were nicknamed “The Squatters” because they were said to sleep squatting so as not to lose a minute’s time in the morning when they hurried back to the heartbreaking work on their meager fields. He recorded the exclamation of his muleteer on their coming to a prosperous market town: “Here’s wealth for you— Sacedón isn’t like other places, here everyone goes to bed with a full stomach, rich or poor.” Cela stayed in Pastrana where Philip II kept his former lover, Ana Princess Eboli, walled up in her own country seat, now a storehouse and office of the National Wheat Board. He forced his way through the tangled weeds into the grotto where St. John of the Cross once lived, and listened to the lament for past glories from the lips of self-important people who had no will to do anything for the present or future. He took a photograph of a handsome old fountain, but only after the Mayor of Pastrana had seen to it that the pipes were unblocked and the water again flowing, because otherwise it would have been shaming for the town; thanks to the advent of a stranger with a camera, women could again fill their pitchers near their homes. . . . He was thrown out of an inn because he had hurt the pride of the owners by a harmless question about a missing electric bulb, which had exposed their poverty. And he had met the herald of progress in the Alcarria, its main link with a world of relative plenty, in the person of a traveler
who rode his bicycle on muletracks between the villages where no bus could have gone and no private car was ever dreamed of.

  Out of all this, Cela made the warp of his tapestry, in somber colors. The woof was woven of his encounters with individuals. A shabby traveler on foot with a rucksack, he was accepted by people as a man, not as a writer from the big city. He met embittered cranks consumed by envy, frustration and primitive snobbery, and gentle cranks who sheltered behind peculiar hobbies, like the village doctor who had counted the species of aromatic plants in the Alcarria—seven hundred. Cela shared the goats’ milk and cheese and, when in luck, the bread of people so obsessed with their strip of land that they could think of nothing but irrigation and the properties of the soil on which their life depended. In men and women worn down by poverty, neglect and loneliness he met a simple strength and resilience he had missed in the capital where “honest people save money for months, perhaps for years on end, to buy a little bedside rug.” As in The Hive, bitter reactions and a desperate sentimentality lie behind Cela’s taut descriptions of his journey in the Alcarria; but it is as if the wind of the rocky hills or the scent of those seven hundred sun-dried herbs had aired them so well that no sour odor clings to them. Like other Spanish writers from Miguel de Unamuno down, Cela seems incapable of finding unspoilt, genuine and strong people anywhere else than in the immutable hills and plains, least of all in Madrid. The contrast between the feeling of Viaje a la Alcarria and that of The Hive is so striking that I thought it necessary to write at this length of the short travel book, in the belief that it might help to get nearer to the complex spiritual world of Camilo José Cela.

  The Hive describes interconnected or casually linked people who bear the stigma of the city, its shuttered houses and its public shams. In each individual lives, more or less strongly, a flicker of some inspiring urge, but the outward existence of each is either aimless or frustrated or morally crippled: such is Cela’s urban world. On his journey in the Alcarria he found people whose lives, however poor and mean, had dignity and purpose. At the beginning of his travel book he quotes from a poem by Antonio Machado, the great poet who died shortly after having crossed into France with the defeated Spanish-Republican soldiers, which in its first part could also serve as a motto for The Hive: