The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  “Yes, sir. I told you so already.”

  “Come and see me tomorrow. Here’s my card. Come in the morning before twelve, say at half past eleven. If you want to, and can do it, you may work for me as a corrector. The one I had was a good-for-nothing, and I had to chuck him out only this morning. He was not exact.”

  Señorita Elvira takes a sidelong glance at Don Pablo. Don Pablo is lecturing a youngster at the adjoining table: “Bicarbonate is good stuff, and perfectly harmless. The only thing is that the doctors won’t prescribe it because nobody goes to a doctor just to be given a prescription of bicarbonate.”

  The youth nods without paying much attention and looks at Señorita Elvira’s knees, which show a little beneath the table.

  “Don’t look over there and don’t play the fool. I’ll explain to you later, but don’t put your foot in it.”

  Don Pablo’s wife, Doña Pura, is deep in conversation with a friend, a stout woman bedecked with jewelry who scratches at her gold teeth with a toothpick.

  “I’m absolutely tired of repeating the same thing. So long as there are men and women in the world, there will always be affairs. Man’s the fire and woman’s the tow, and so things happen. What I told you about the platform of the forty-nine tram is the sober truth. I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

  The stout lady absent-mindedly breaks the toothpick between her teeth.

  “Yes, I agree with you, there isn’t much modesty to be found in these days. It all started with mixed bathing, you may be sure. We weren’t like that before. . . . Now they present a young thing to you, you shake hands with her, and you’re left all of a tremble the whole blessed day. After all, you may catch something you haven’t got.”

  “True enough.”

  “And I think the cinemas are much to blame, too. People sitting there higgledy-piggledy and in the pitch dark, that can’t come to any good.”

  “I quite agree with you, Doña María. What’s needed is better morals, otherwise we poor decent women will pay for it.”

  Doña Rosa picks up the thread where she dropped it.

  “And what’s more, if you’ve got a stomach-ache, why don’t you ask me for a pinch of bicarbonate? Have I ever refused you a pinch of bicarbonate? Anyone would think you haven’t got a tongue in your head.”

  Doña Rosa turns round and raises her shrill, unpleasant voice above all the conversations going on in the café: “López! López! Send some bicarbonate for the violinist!”

  The server leaves his jugs on a table and brings on a plate half a glass full of water, a coffee spoon, and the sugar bowl of nickel-silver in which the bicarbonate is kept.

  “What, have you stopped using trays?”

  “That’s how Señor López gave it to me, madam.”

  “All right, all right. Put it down here and clear off.”

  The server ranges everything on the piano and goes away.

  Seoane fills the little spoon with the powder, throws back his head, opens his mouth, and in it goes. He chews it as if he were munching nuts, and washes it down with a sip of water.

  “Thank you, Doña Rosa.”

  “Now do you see, do you see how little it costs to have manners? You’ve a stomach-ache, I send for bicarbonate, and everything’s all right. We’re here to help one another, but the fact is we can’t because we don’t want to. That’s life.”

  The children who were playing at trains have suddenly stopped. A gentleman is explaining to them that they ought to behave more politely and quietly, and they watch him with curiosity, not knowing what to do with their hands. The older one, Bernabé, is thinking of a boy next door, more or less his own age, who is called Chús. The younger one, Paquite, is thinking that the gentleman smells from his mouth. “It stinks like rotten rubber.”

  Bernabé is tickled as he remembers a funny thing that happened to Chús with his aunt. “Chús, you’re a pig not to change your pants till you’ve got them all mucky. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  Bernabé holds back his laugh on remembering this; the gentleman would be furious. “Oh, no, auntie, I’m not. Dad makes his pants mucky too.” It was enough to laugh oneself to death.

  Paquite spends a little while in deep thought.

  “No, it isn’t of rotten rubber his mouth smells. It smells of red cabbage and of feet. If I was that gentleman, I’d stuff a melted candle in my nose. Then I’d talk like cousin Emilita, through the dose; they’ll have to operate on her throat. Mamma says when she’s had her operation she won’t have her idiot face any longer and she won’t sleep with her mouth open. But perhaps she’ll die when they operate on her. Then they’ll put her in a white coffin because she hasn’t got tits yet and doesn’t wear high heels.”

  The two ladies who live on pensions lean back on the seat and have a good look at Doña Pura.

  The two old parrots’ ideas about the violinist still float in the air like roving bubbles.

  “I can’t understand how it is that such women exist—she’s just like a toad. She spends her whole time tearing people’s reputations to pieces, and then she doesn’t even see that the only reason her husband stands her is that she’s got some money left. That Don Pablo there is a twister, a nasty bit of work. If he looks at a woman it’s just as if he was stripping her with his eyes.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “And the other one, that Elvira, she’s got a crust, too. What I mean to say, it isn’t the same as with your girl, Paquita, who leads a respectable life when all’s said and done, even if her papers aren’t in order; that creature over there’s a different thing, she spins round like a teetotum, from one to the next, squeezing a little money out of every one to fill her stomach.”

  “And another thing, Doña Matilde, you can’t compare that nobody, that Don Pablo, with my daughter’s friend who’s a real professor of psychology, logic, and ethics and a perfect gentleman.”

  “Of course I don’t. Paquita’s friend has got respect for her and keeps her happy; and as far as she’s concerned, he’s handsome and agreeable and so she lets him love her, that’s what she’s made for, after all. But these hussies have no conscience and all they know is how to open their mouths to ask for something. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

  Doña Rosa carries on her conversation with the musicians. Her whole fat, bulging little body inflated, she shivers with joy as she makes her speech: she is like a civil governor.

  “So you’ve your troubles? Tell me, and if I can, I’ll fix them for you. So you think you’re doing a good job, standing up here and scratching the fiddle as God meant you to? All right, here I am at closing time to pay you your five pesetas, and we’re quits. Everything’s all right if we’re all friends together. Why d’you think I’m at swords’ points with my brother-in-law? Because he’s a tramp who goes whoring round, twenty-four hours a day, and then comes home to get his free supper. My sister’s a damn fool to stand for it, but she’s always been like that. Now if it were me. . . . For all his beautiful eyes, I wouldn’t let him trail round the whole day lifting skirts and pinching bottoms. Not me! Now if my brother-in-law were to work like I do, and if he were to put his back into it and bring home something at least, it would be another story. But it suits him better to soft-soap Visi, simple fool that she is, and to have a good time without doing a stroke.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “So that’s it. That guy’s a misbegotten drone, he was born to be a pimp. And don’t you imagine I say this only behind his back, the other day I told him just the same to his confounded face.”

  “Well done.”

  “Well done indeed. What’s that beggar take us for?”

  “Is that clock right, Padilla?”

  “Yes, Señorita Elvira.”

  “Will you give me a light? It’s still early.”

  The cigarette boy gives Señorita Elvira a light.

  “You look happy, miss.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Well, it looks like it to me.
I’d have said you’re cheerier tonight than other evenings.”

  “It isn’t all gold that glitters.”

  Señorita Elvira has a weak, sickly, and almost depraved air. The poor girl does not eat enough to be either depraved or virtuous.

  The mother of the dead boy who was studying for the post office says: “Well, I must go now.”

  Don Jaime Arce rises with great courtesy and says, smiling: “Your devoted servant, Señora. Till tomorrow, by God’s grace.”

  The lady moves a chair out of the way. “Good night and keep well.”

  “And the same to you, Señora. At your service.”

  The widowed Isabel Montes de Sanz walks like a queen. In her threadbare little cape, more for show than for use, Doña Isabel looks like an elegant courtesan past her prime who has lived like the proverbial grasshopper and has saved nothing towards old age. She crosses the room in silence and glides through the door. In the glances that follow her there is everything but indifference; there may be admiration, envy, sympathy, mistrust, or tenderness—who knows?

  Don Jaime Arce no longer thinks of mirrors, or of virtuous old spinsters, or of the number of people with T.B. within the café (approximately 10 per cent), or of artists at pencil-sharpening, or of blood circulation. In the last hour of the evening Don Jaime Arce falls prey to a sleepiness that bemuses him.

  “What are seven times four? Twenty-eight. And six times nine? Fifty-four. And nine times nine? Eighty-one. Where is the source of the Ebro? At Reinosa in the province of Santander.”

  Don Jaime Arce smiles, satisfied with his self-examination; while his fingers pull cigarette stubs to shreds, he repeats under his breath: “Ataulph, Sigerich, Walia, Theodored, Turismond. . . . I bet that imbecile there doesn’t know the list of the Visigoth Kings!”

  That imbecile is the young poet who emerges, white as chalk, from his rest cure in the W. C.

  “As running water blurs the gentle gleam. . . .”

  Doña Rosa has gone in mourning, no one knows for whom, ever since she was a very young girl, which was many years ago; she is dirty and is hung with diamonds worth a fortune. Every year she grows a little fatter, nearly at the same rate at which she accumulates money.

  She is a very rich woman. She owns the house with the café, and in the Calle de Apodaca, the Calle de Churruca, the Calle de Campoamor, and the Calle de Fuencarral dozens of tenants tremble like schoolboys on every first of the month.

  “The more you trust them,” she likes to say, “the more they take advantage of you. They’re wasters, regular wasters. If there weren’t honest judges in the world, I don’t know what we’d come to.”

  Doña Rosa has her own ideas about honesty.

  “Straight accounts, my dear, straight accounts, and no tempering.”

  She has never let anyone off a penny and never admitted payment in installments.

  “Why is there such a thing as a law of eviction,” she would say, “unless it is applied? The way I see it, the law exists so that it is respected by everybody, first of all by myself. Anything else would be the Revolution.”

  Doña Rosa is a shareholder in a bank, where she drives the whole board mad, and according to the gossip in the district, she has trunks full of gold hidden away so carefully that they weren’t found even during the Civil War.

  The shoeblack has finished cleaning Don Leonardo’s shoes.

  “Here you are, sir.”

  Don Leonardo looks down at his shoes and gives him a cigarette from a ninety centimos packet.

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  Don Leonardo pays no fee for the service, he never does. He permits his shoes to be cleaned in exchange for a small gesture. Don Leonardo is so mean that he rouses abject admiration in imbeciles.

  Each time the shoeblack wipes Don Leonardo’s shoes he remembers his thirty thousand pesetas. At bottom he is delighted to have been able to help Don Leonardo out of a fix. On the surface it irks him a little, next to nothing.

  “The gentry are the gentry, that’s as clear as daylight. Nowadays things are a bit upside down, but you can still tell a gentleman-born at the first glance.”

  If the shoeblack were an educated man, he would no doubt be a reader of Vásquez Mella’s traditionalist writings.

  Alfonsito, the messenger boy, is back from the street with the newspapers.

  “Now look here, kid, wherever have you been to for the paper?”

  Alfonsito is a sickly child of twelve or thirteen with fair hair and a constant cough. His father, who was a journalist, died two years ago in King’s Hospital. His mother, who used to be a finicky young lady before her marriage, took to cleaning offices in the Gran Via and having her meals in the soup kitchen of Auxilio Social.

  “There was a queue for it, madam.”

  “Of course, a queue! It’s simply that people now queue up for the news, as if they hadn’t anything more important to do. Come on, give me the paper.”

  “They were out of Informaciones, madam. I’ve brought you Madrid.”

  “Never mind. What d’you get out of them anyway? Tell me, Seoane, do you understand why there’s so much government fuss and bother all over the world?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Now listen, there’s no need for you to pretend. If you don’t want to say anything you don’t. Goodness me, all that secrecy!”

  Seoane smiles, with the bitter face of a dyspeptic, and says nothing. Why speak?

  “As if I didn’t know what’s behind all this silence and smiling—as if I didn’t know very well what’s going on here! You don’t want to know? All right, it’s your business. I tell you one thing: it’s the facts that speak. And how!”

  Alfonsito leaves copies of Madrid at various tables.

  Don Pablo produces his coppers.

  “Any news in it?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You’ll see for yourself.”

  Don Pablo spreads the paper on the table and reads the headlines. Over his shoulder Pepe tries to pick out the news.

  Señorita Elvira beckons to the boy.

  “Let me have the house copy when Doña Rosa’s finished with it.”

  Doña Matilde, who has a chat with the cigarette boy while her friend Doña Asunción has gone to the toilet, comments scornfully: “I can’t see why they want to find out about everything that’s going on. As long as we’re left in peace . . . don’t you agree?”

  “That’s just what I always say, madam.”

  Doña Rosa reads the war news.

  “They’re going back a long way, it seems to me. . . . Well, if they come out on top in the end it’s all right. D’you think they’ll come out on top in the end, Macario?”

  The pianist looks doubtful.

  “I don’t know, it’s possible. If they invent something that works.”

  Doña Rosa stares at the piano keys. Her face is sad and has a faraway look, she seems to be talking to herself, thinking aloud.

  “The trouble is, the Germans—who are gentlemen as true as God made them!—the Germans relied too much on the Italians, who are more afraid than a herd of sheep. That’s the long and the short of it.”

  Her voice sounds thick and her eyes, behind her glasses, appear veiled and almost dreamy.

  “If I’d met Hitler, I’d have told him: ‘Don’t you trust them, don’t be foolish, those Italians are frightened of their own shadow.’ “

  Doña Rosa heaves a gentle sigh.

  “What a fool I am! If I’d been face to face with Hitler I wouldn’t have dared to raise my voice, not even that. . . .”

  Doña Rosa is worried about the fate of the German armies. Every day she studies the communiqué from Hitler’s headquarters and associates, through a series of vague forebodings she dare not try to see clearly, the fate of the Wehrmacht with the fate of her café.

  Vega buys himself a paper. His neighbor asks: “Any good news?”

  Vega is an eclectic. “It all depends for whom.”

  The server continues to say “coming
” and to drag his feet along the floor of the café.

  “If I were face to face with Hitler, I’d be frightened out of my wits, he must be a most frightening man. He’s got a look in his eyes like a tiger.”

  Doña Rosa heaves another sigh. For a moment her enormous bosom makes her throat disappear from sight. “He and the Pope must be the two most frightening men there are.” Doña Rosa taps on the piano lid with her fingertips.

  “But after all, he must know what he’s doing, that’s what he’s got his generals for.”

  For an instant Doña Rosa keeps quiet, then her voice changes: “Right.”

  She lifts her head and looks at Seoane: “How’s your wife getting on with her trouble?”

  “She’s pulling through. Today she seems a bit better.”

  “Poor Amparo, and she’s such a good soul!”

  “Yes, it’s true, she’s having a bad time.”

  “Did you give her those drops Don Francisco told you about?”

  “Yes, she’s taken them. The worst of it is that she can’t keep down anything, she throws it all up.”

  “Good Lord!”

  Macario softly touches the keys and Seoane picks up his violin.

  “What next?”

  “ ‘La verbena,’ don’t you think?”

  “Come on.”

  Doña Rosa steps from the platform as the violinist and the pianist, with the expression of resigned schoolboys, break into the din of the café with the familiar old bars, so often—oh, God, how often—repeated and repeated:

  “Where to in your Manila shawl, my pretty?

  Where to in your printed cotton dress?”

  They play without their notes. They don’t need them.

  Like an automaton Macario thinks: “And then I’ll tell her: ‘Look here, my girl, there’s nothing to be done. With a miserable five pesetas for the afternoon and another five for the night, and two coffees—well, I ask you!’ Then she’ll answer, sure enough: ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll see: with your ten pesetas and with a few lessons I can get. . . .’ Really, Matilde is an angel, nothing short of an angel.”