The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  Don Roque never raises his eyes from the cards.

  “What an idea to think that I’d get up for the sake of the Chinese!”

  Doña Visi fumbles round in the sewing basket, finds the number of the Missionary Cherub she is looking for, and muttering under her breath, returns to the good parlor, which is so cold that it is hard to stay there.

  The sewing basket gapes open after Doña Visi’s search, and from between the mending cotton and the button box—a box that had held cough lozenges in the year one—timidly protrudes another of Doña Visi’s magazines.

  Don Roque leans back in his chair and picks it up.

  “Here he is, that character!”

  “That character” is the miracle-working priest from Bilbao.

  Don Roque begins to read in the magazine: “Rosario Quesada (Jaen), for recovery of her sister from acute colitis: 5 pesetas.

  “Ramón Hermida (Lugo), for several favors granted to him in the course of his business: 10 pesetas.

  “María Luisa del Valle (Madrid), for the disappearance of a small lump which she had on one of her eyes without her having to consult the oculist: 5 pesetas.

  “Guadalupe Gutiérrez (Ciudad Real), for the cure of a nineteen-month-old baby from injuries caused by a fall from a first-floor balcony: 25 pesetas.

  “Marina López Ortega (Madrid), for the taming of a domestic pet: 5 pesetas.

  “A most pious widow (Bilbao), for the recovery of a package containing securities which had been mislaid by a servant of the house: 25 pesetas.”

  Don Roque falls into a brown study: “It’s quite incredible. You can’t take it seriously.”

  Doña Visi feels more or less obliged to apologize to her friend. “Aren’t you cold, Montserrat? Some days this house is like an icebox.”

  “No, not at all, Visitación, it’s very cozy here. Your apartment is most pleasant, with much comfort, as the English say.”

  “Thank you, Montserrat, you’re always so sweet.”

  Doña Visi smiles and starts looking for her name in the list. Doña Montserrat—tall, mannish, bony, ungainly, with a mustache, somewhat slow in speech, and short-sighted—puts her lorgnette to her eyes.

  True enough, as Doña Visi had claimed, the names of herself and her three daughters appear on the last page of the Missionary Cherub.

  “Doña Visitación Leclerc de Moisés, for the baptism of two Chinese children with the names of Ignacio and Francisco Javier: 10 pesetas. Señorita Julita Moisés Leclerc, for the baptism of a Chinese child with the name of Ventura: 5 pesetas. Señorita Visitación Moisés Leclerc, for the baptism of a Chinese child with the name of Manuel: 5 pesetas. Señorita Esperanza Moisés Leclerc, for the baptism of a Chinese child with the name of Agustín: 5 pesetas.”

  “Now, what do you think of this?”

  Doña Montserrat expresses her agreement in flattering terms.

  “I find it all excellent, excellent indeed. There is so much work to be done. It is shocking to think of the millions of infidels who are still to be converted. The heathen countries must be swarming like anthills.”

  “I should say so. And these tiny Chinese babies are so pretty! If we did not make some little sacrifices, depriving ourselves of this or that, they would all go straight to limbo. But in spite of our poor efforts, limbo must be chock-full of Chinese, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It gives me the creeps only to think of it. Just imagine the curse hanging over the Chinese. All of them walking round there, locked up and not knowing what to do. . . .”

  “It’s horrifying.”

  “And the little babies, dear, the toddlers who can’t walk yet, will they be stuck there, too, like little worms, always in the same spot?”

  “Indeed they will.”

  “We owe thanks and praise to the Lord that we were born Spanish women. Now, if we’d been born in China, our children might have to go to limbo without reprieve. Think of having children for that! With all one has to suffer before they’re born, and with the trouble they give while they’re small!”

  Doña Visi sighs feelingly.

  ‘‘My poor girls, they’re quite unaware of the danger they escaped. It’s all right for them, because they were born in Spain, but only think how it would have been if they’d been born in China. And it might have happened to them, don’t you agree?”

  All the neighbors of the deceased Doña Margot forgather in Don Ibrahim’s apartment. The only ones missing are: Don Leoncio Maestre, arrested under the judge magistrate’s orders; Don Antonio Jareño, the tenant of apartment D, mezzanine, who works for the Wagons-Lits and is at present on a journey; Don Ignacio Galdácano, the tenant of apartment B, third floor, who is mad, poor man; and the son of the deceased, Don Julián Suárez, whose whereabouts is not known to anybody. Apartment A on the first floor is let to a commercial academy and nobody lives there. Of the rest, not one is missing; they are all greatly affected by what has happened and have at once followed Don Ibrahim’s summons to an exchange of opinions.

  Those convened scarcely find room in Don Ibrahim’s flat, which is not very large, and the majority have to stand, leaning against a wall or against a piece of furniture, as if at a wake.

  “Gentlemen,” Don Ibrahim begins, “I have ventured to invoke your attendance at this meeting because in the house where we are residents something has occurred that is outside the normal orbit.”

  “Thank the Lord for it,” interrupts Doña Teresa Corrales, the widow with a pension who lives in B on the fifth floor.

  “Amen,” several low voices chime in.

  “Last night,” Don Ibrahim de Ostolaza resumes, “when our neighbor Don Leoncio Maestre, whose innocence we all hope will soon blaze forth with the blinding intensity of the sun—”

  “We mustn’t obstruct the course of justice,” shouts Don Antonio Pérez Palenzuela, a gentleman employed in the National Syndicates who lives in C, second floor. “We must abstain from premature opinions. I am the official responsible for this building, and it’s my duty to prevent any possible pressure on the judiciary.”

  “Be quiet, man,” Don Camilo Pérez, chiropodist, the tenant of D, first floor, intervenes. “Let Don Ibrahim continue.”

  “All right, Don Ibrahim, go on. I don’t wish to interrupt the meeting. All I want is due respect for the proper legal authority and due consideration for its work on behalf of an order that. . . .“

  “Sh! Sh! Let him go on.”

  Don Antonio Pérez shuts up.

  “As I was saying, last night, when Don Leoncio Maestre gave us the bad news of the accident that had befallen Doña Margot Sobrón de Suárez, I lost no time in asking our good personal friend the doctor, Don Manuel Jorquera, here present, to give an exact and precise diagnosis of the state of our common neighbor. Don Manuel Jorquera, with a readiness that speaks well and highly for his sense of professional decorum, placed himself at my disposal, and together we entered the domicile of the victim.”

  Don Ibrahim’s attitude as a champion and tribune reaches the highest level of refinement.

  “I take the liberty of asking you to pass a vote of thanks to the eminent Doctor Jorquera who, together with another eminent physician, Don Rafael Masasana, at this moment compelled by his modesty to seek shelter behind that curtain, honors us by dwelling as a resident in our midst.”

  “Hear, hear,” exclaim, as though with one voice, Don Exuperio Estremera, the priest from C, fifth floor, and Don Lorenzo Sogueiro, the landlord of the Fonsagradino Bar, housed in one of the basements.

  The admiring glances of all those present go from one doctor to the other. It is very much like a bullfight where the matador who pleased the public is called by applause into the center of the ring and takes with him a colleague who had less luck with his bulls and has not pleased the public so much.

  “Well, then, gentlemen,” Don Ibrahim proclaims, “as soon as I realized that the resources of science were unavailing in the face of the monstrous crime that had been commi
tted, I had only two wishes which, as a good Christian, I commended to the Lord: that none of us—and I beg my dear friend Señor Pérez Palenzuela not to read into my words even the faintest shadow of an intent to put pressure on anyone—that none of us, I say, should find himself implicated in this dastardly and shameful affair, and that Doña Margot should not go without those last honors that we all desire to have when the hour strikes, for ourselves, for our agnates, and for our cognates.”

  Don Fidel Utrera, the medical assistant of A on the mezzanine, who is very reckless, almost cries “Bravo!” He has it on the tip of his tongue, but fortunately manages to swallow it down.

  “I propose, therefore, my esteemed neighbors, whose presence within my humble walls sheds so much luster and dignity upon them. . . .”

  Doña Juana Entrena de Sisemón, a widow with a pension and the tenant of B, second floor, gazes at Don Ibrahim. With what power, with what beauty and precision he expresses himself! Really, he talks like a book. On meeting Señor Ostolaza’s glance, she turns her eyes to Francisco López, who has so often been confidant and comforter in her woes, and who is the owner of the ladies hairdresser shop “Cristi and Quico” which is in C on the mezzanine.

  As their glances cross, there is a mute dialogue, lightning-quick: “Well, what do you think?”

  “Sublime, dear lady!”

  Don Ibrahim continues unmoved: “. . . that we undertake, individually, to mention Doña Margot in our prayers and, collectively, to defray the funeral Mass for her soul.”

  “I’m in agreement,” says Don José Leciñena, the tenant of D, third floor.

  “In complete agreement,” seconds Don José María Olvera, a captain in the Army Ordnance Corps who lives in A, second floor.

  “Are you all of the same mind?”

  Don Arturo Ricote, a clerk in the Banco Hispano Americano and tenant of D, fifth floor, says in his cracked little voice: “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, yes,” come the votes of Don Julio Maluenda, of C, third floor, a retired officer of the merchant navy, whose place is like a junk shop, full of maps, engravings, and ships’ models, and of Don Rafael Sáez, the young surveyor from D, fourth floor.

  “Señor Ostolaza is most emphatically right. We have to provide the offices for the soul of our departed neighbor,” explains Don Carlos Luque, a shopkeeper, tenant of D, second floor.

  “As for me, I agree with everything the others say.” Pedro Tauste, the owner of a shoe-repair shop called “The Footwear Clinic,” has no wish to swim against the current.

  “It is a timely and convincing suggestion. Let’s support it,” says Don Fernando Cazuela, the solicitor from B, first floor, who last night, when he, like all the other tenants, searched for the murderer, found his wife’s lover hiding in the dirty linen basket, all curled up.

  “And I say the same,” contributes as the last Don Luis Noalejo, the Madrid representative of “Casimiro Pons’s Widow & Sons, Threads and Yarns” and tenant of Flat C, first floor.

  “Thank you very much, gentlemen. I see that we are all agreed. We all have spoken and expressed identical points of view. I acknowledge your kind support and pass it on into the hands of our neighbor, the godly priest Don Exuperio Estremera, so that he may arrange the services according to his excellent knowledge of canons.”

  Don Exuperio’s face has an expression of mystic wonder. “I accept your trust.”

  With this, the matter is concluded, and the meeting begins to disintegrate. Some of the tenants have things of their own to do, others, the minority, think that it is Don Ibrahim who is bound to have something to do, and still others—for it takes all kinds to make a world—troop off because they are tired of being on their feet for a full hour. Don Gumersindo López, a clerk of the Petrol Corporation, tenant of C on the mezzanine, and the only person present who has not said a word, wonders as he goes down the stairs in a thoughtful mood: “And that’s what I asked some hours off for?”

  Doña Matilde, back from Doña Ramona’s dairy, talks with her maid.

  “Tomorrow get some liver for lunch, Lola. Don Tesifonte says it’s very good for one.”

  Don Tesifonte is Doña Matilde’s oracle. He is also her boarder.

  “A nice tender bit of liver so we can stew it with the kidneys, with a drop of wine and minced onion.”

  Lola says Yes to everything. Later in the market she gets whatever she happens to see first or feels like buying.

  Seoane leaves his house. Every evening at half past six he starts playing the violin at Doña Rosa’s café. His wife stays at home in the kitchen, mending socks and vests. The couple live in a damp, unhealthy basement in the Calle de Ruiz, for which they pay seventy-five pesetas a month; the best about it is that it is only a step from the café, and Seoane never has to spend a thing on trolley fares.

  “Good-by, Sonsoles, see you soon.”

  His wife does not bother to lift her eyes from her sewing.

  “Good-by, Alfonso, give me a kiss.”

  Sonsoles has weak eyes. Their lids are always red; she looks all the time as if she had just had a good cry. Poor thing, Madrid does not agree with her. As a bride she was handsome, plump, and glowing, a pleasure to look at, but now, though by no means old, she is a wreck. The poor woman’s speculations have gone wrong; she had imagined that in Madrid the streets were paved with gold, married a Madrileño, and now, when there is nothing she can do about it, she realizes that it had all been a mistake. At home in Navarredondilla, in the province of Avila, she had been a young lady and had as much to eat as she wanted. In Madrid she is an unhappy wretch. Most days she goes to bed without any evening meal.

  Macario and his fiancée sit close together holding hands on a bench in Señora Fructuosa’s tiny porter’s lodge. Señora Fructuosa is Matildita’s aunt and a portress in the Calle de Fernando VI.

  “For ever and ever. . . .”

  Marujita calls the waiter.

  “A coffee, please.”

  “With milk?”

  “No, black. Tell me, who’s that lady who does all the shouting?”

  “Oh, that’s the mistress. I mean, our boss.”

  “Then ask her to be so kind and come over here.”

  The tray trembles in the poor waiter’s hand. “But do you mean now, at once?”

  “Yes. Tell her I’ve asked for her, would she please come here.”

  The waiter walks up to the counter with the expression of a criminal facing the gallows. “López, one black coffee. Madam, excuse me.”

  Doña Rosa turns round. “What do you want?”

  “I, nothing, madam. It’s that lady over there who’s asking for you.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the ring. The one who’s looking this way.”

  “And she’s asking for me?”

  “Yes, for the proprietress, she said. I don’t know what she wants, but she looks like somebody important, a lady with means. She said to me, she said, ‘Ask the proprietress to be so kind and come over here.’ “

  Frowning, Doña Rosa goes up to Marujita’s table. López puts his hand over his eyes.

  “Good evening. You were looking for me?”

  Matildita and Macario talk in whispers.

  “Good-by, sweetheart, I must go to work now.”

  “Good-by, till tomorrow, my love. I shall be thinking of you all the time.”

  Macario squeezes his fiancée’s hand for quite a while, and then gets up. A shiver runs down his spine.

  “Good night, Señora Fructuosa, and many thanks.”

  “Good night, dear. Don’t mention it.”

  Macario is a very courteous young man; he gives his thanks to Señora Fructuosa every day. Matildita’s hair is reddish like the floss on a corncob, and she is a little short-sighted. She is tiny and graceful, even if she isn’t pretty. When she can get them, she gives piano lessons. She teaches the little girls tangos from memory, which makes quite an impression.

  At home she always lends a hand to her mother and her si
ster Juanita, who embroider on commission.

  Matildita is thirty-nine.

  As readers of the Missionary Cherub are aware, three daughters belong to Doña Visi and Don Roque; all three are young, all three very much alike, rather fresh and a little bit flighty.

  The eldest is called Julita. She is twenty-two and has her hair bleached. When she wears it as a loose and wavy mane, she looks like Jean Harlow.

  The middle one is called Visitación like her mother. She is twenty, has chestnut-brown hair and deep, dreamy eyes.

  The youngest is called Esperanza. She has an official fiancé who comes to their house and talks politics with her father. Esperanza is already getting together her trousseau; she has just had her nineteenth birthday.

  These days, Julita, the eldest, is head over heels in love with a young man who hopes to become a public notary and has turned her head. His name is Ventura Aguado, and for seven years—not counting the war years—he has taken exams to be appointed a public notary, and always without success.

  His father, an almond grower at Riudecola in the district of Tarragona, tells him time and again: “Put in for the registrar’s office at the same time, son.”

  “No, Dad, it’s too much of a bore.”

  “But don’t you see, boy, that you won’t be made public notary ever, not even by a miracle?”

  “You think I won’t get appointed? Why, I can be any day I like. The point is, if I don’t get posted to Madrid or Barcelona it isn’t worth my while. I’d rather stand down, that makes a better impression. With a public notary, the prestige counts for a lot, Dad.”

  “Yes, but all the same. . . . What about Valencia—or Seville—or Saragossa? They aren’t bad places either, I should think.”

  “No, Dad, you’ve got things out of focus. I’ve worked out my plan of campaign. If you want, I’ll drop it. . . .”

  “No, no, my boy. Don’t upset things. You go on with it. After all, you’ve made a start. You know more about these things than I do.”

  “Thank you, Dad, you’re a clever man. I’ve been very lucky to be born your son.”