The Hive

by Camilo José Cela

  “The boy’s a fool,” says his father. “Goodness knows what will become of him the day I’m gone.”

  The local poet is a pale young lad with long hair who in his mind, is always somewhere else, not noticing what is going on so as not to lose his inspiration—the inspiration which is something like a butterfly, blind and deaf but luminous, a little butterfly flying at random, at times butting against the walls and at times drifting above the stars. The local poet has two pink spots on his cheeks. Occasionally, when he is in the mood, the local poet faints in a café and has to be carried to the lavatory, where he is brought round by the smell of the disinfectant that sleeps in its wire cage like a cricket’s.

  After Trini comes Nati, Martin’s former fellow-student, a girl who dresses very well, perhaps only too well; and after her comes María Auxiliadora, the one who entered a nunnery a short while ago to join her two sisters. The list of the children ends with three calamities: the three youngest. Socorrito ran away with a friend of her brother Paco’s, by the name of Bartolomé Anguera, a painter; the two lead a bohemian life in a studio in the Calle de los Caños, where they must be freezing to death and will one morning be found as stiff as icicles. The girl assures her girl friends that she is happy and that she doesn’t mind anything as long as she can be with her Bartolo, helping him to carry out his work. She pronounces the word “work” with enormous emphasis, as though it were spelled in capital letters; she sounds like a member of the jury that decides on the selection for National Exhibitions.

  “There is no critical standard at the National Exhibitions,” says Socorrito. “They have no idea what they’re about. Never mind, sooner or later they can’t help awarding a medal to my Bartolo.”

  When Socorrito went away, it caused a serious upset in her home.

  “She might at least have left Madrid,” repeated her brother Paco, who has a geographical concept of honor.

  Shortly afterwards her sister María Angustias began to talk of becoming a singer and adopted the name of Carmen del Oro. She had also considered calling herself Rosario Giralda or Esperanza de Granado, but a journalist friend of hers said No, the most suitable name was Carmen del Oro. At that stage, and before her mother had time to get over her shock about Socorrito, María Angustias threw caution to the winds and eloped with a banker from Murcia, called Don Estanislao Ramírez. Her poor mother had no longer any tears left.

  The youngest, Juan Ramón, has turned out a bit of a pansy, and spends his days admiring himself in the mirror and rubbing beauty creams on his face.

  At about seven, between two patients, Don Francisco goes to the telephone. What he says is almost inaudible.

  “Are you going to be at home? . . . Good, then I’ll be there towards nine. . . . No, don’t send for anybody.”

  The girl seems in a trance, with a dreamy expression, a faraway look in her eyes, and a smile of bliss on her lips.

  “He’s so good, Mamma, so good, so good! He took my hand, looked straight into my eyes . . .”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Oh, yes. He came very close to me and said: ‘Julita, my heart is aflame with passion, I can no longer live without you. If you scorn me, my life will have no longer any meaning, I will be like a body drifting aimlessly, at the mercy of fate.’”

  Doña Visi smiles, deeply touched. “Just like your father, pet, just like your father.”

  Doña Visi turns her eyes to heaven and stays in blissful thought, in sweet and perhaps rather wistful repose. “Of course . . . time passes. . . . You make me feel quite old, Julita.”

  Doña Visi is silent for a few seconds. Then she puts her handkerchief to her eyes and dries two tears that have welled up timidly.

  “But, Mamma!”

  “It’s nothing, darling, just emotion. To think that one day you will belong to a man! Let’s pray to God, my darling, that He may grant you a good husband and make you the wife of a man worthy of you.”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “And be very careful, Julita, for the love of God. I implore you, don’t trust him in any way. Men are crafty, they’re out for what they can get. Don’t you ever trust fine words. Remember, men like to have their fun with forward girls, but in the end they marry the respectable ones.”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “Of course, yes, my dear. You must guard what I guarded till my twenty-third year for your father to take. It’s the only thing we decent women without a fortune have to offer our husbands.”

  Doña Visi dissolves into tears. Julita comforts her: “Don’t worry yourself, Mamma.”

  At the café, Doña Rosa goes on explaining to Señorita Elvira that her bowels are upset, and that she spent the whole night going backwards and forwards between bedroom and lavatory.

  “Something must have disagreed with me. Food isn’t always nice and fresh. If it isn’t that, I don’t know.”

  “Of course, that’s what it must have been.”

  Señorita Elvira, who by now is just like a piece of furniture in Doña Rosa’s café, says amen to everything. It seems extremely important to her to have Doña Rosa for her friend.

  “And did you have gripes?”

  “Oh, my dear girl, did I not! My stomach felt like the box they keep the thunder in. I think I must have had too much for supper. As the saying goes: big suppers—full graves.”

  Señorita Elvira again agrees. “Yes, they say it’s bad to eat a large supper because one doesn’t digest it well.”

  “I should say so. Not well but very badly.”

  Doña Rosa lowers her voice. “Are you sleeping well?”

  Doña Rosa treats Señorita Elvira as the spirit moves her, at times familiarly and at times formally. “Well, yes, I usually do.”

  Doña Rosa jumps to a conclusion. “Then you take very little supper, I’m sure.”

  Señorita Elvira feels embarrassed. “Yes, well, to tell you the truth, I don’t take much for supper. In fact, I eat very little for supper.”

  Doña Rosa leans on the back of a chair. “What did you have last night, for instance?”

  “Last night? Oh, well, not very much, you see. Some spinach and two small pieces of hake.”

  Señorita Elvira’s supper had consisted of a peseta’s worth of roast chestnuts, twenty roast chestnuts, and an orange for dessert.

  “There you are, that’s the secret. To my mind, all that stuffing yourself can’t be healthy.”

  Señorita Elvira thinks exactly the opposite, but she keeps it to herself.

  Don Pablo Tauste, the neighbor of Don Ibrahim de Ostolaza and owner of the shoe-repair shop called “The Footwear Clinic,” sees Don Ricardo Sorbedo come into his wretched little shop. The poor man is an utter wreck.

  “Good evening, Don Pedro. May I come in?”

  “Come right in, Don Ricardo. What piece of good luck sends you to me?”

  Don Ricardo Sorbedo, with his unkempt mane, his faded scarf thrown on haphazardly, his tattered suit, shapeless and full of stains, his limp spotted cravate, and his greasy, broad-winged green hat, is a strange type, half beggar, half artist, who lives, badly enough, on cadging, and on exploiting other people’s kindness and compassion. Don Pedro feels a certain admiration for him and occasionally gives him a peseta. Don Ricardo Sorbedo is a short little man, with a jaunty walk, high-falutin and formal manners, a precise, ponderous way of talking, and a habit of turning out neat, well-sounding phrases.

  “No good luck, my dear friend Don Pedro, since goodness is rare in this base world. It is rather misfortune that brings me into your presence.”

  Don Pedro is familiar with this start, it never varies. Like the gunners, Don Ricardo fires his shots at a high angle of elevation.

  “Do you want a peseta?”

  “Even did I not stand in need of it, my noble friend, I should always accept it in response to your generous gesture.”

  “Here you are.”

  Don Pedro Tauste takes a peseta out of his till and hands it to Don Ricardo Sorbedo.

  �
�It’s little enough.”

  “Yes, Don Pedro, little enough, but your unselfishness in offering it to me is as a gem of many carats.”

  “Well, if it’s like that . . .”

  Don Ricardo Sorbedo is quite friendly with Martin Marco; when they meet, they sometimes sit down on a bench in a park and embark on a discussion of art and literature.

  Until recently, Don Ricardo had a girl friend whom he dropped because he was tired and bored with her. Don Ricardo Sorbedo’s girl friend was a half-starved, sentimental, and somewhat pretentious little tart called Maribel Pérez. Whenever Don Ricardo complained that everything was going to the dogs, Maribel tried to console him with philosophical statements.

  “Don’t worry,” she would tell him, “the Mayor of Cork held out more than a month before he died.”

  Maribel was fond of flowers, children, and animals. She was a fairly well-educated girl and had refined manners.

  “Look at that little boy with the fair hair, what a pet!” she said to her lover one day when they wandered round the Plaza del Progreso.

  “Just like the rest,” answered Don Ricardo Sorbedo. “The boy isn’t any different from the others. When he’s grown up, that’s to say, if he doesn’t die before, he will be a shopkeeper or a little clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture, or he may even become a dentist—who knows? He might, at that, go in for art and turn out a painter or a bullfighter, and have his sexual complexes, and all that.”

  Maribel did not always understand what her friend told her.

  “He’s a very brainy fellow, is my Ricardo,” she would tell the other girls. “There isn’t much he doesn’t know.”

  “Are you going to get married?”

  “Yes, when we can. But first he says he wants me to keep on the straight and narrow, because this business of being married has got to be tried and sampled, it seems, like a melon you want to buy. I think he’s right about it.”

  “Maybe. Tell me, what’s your friend doing?”

  “Well, as for doing, what you might call a job, my dear, he doesn’t do anything, but he’ll find something, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, something always turns up.”

  Quite a number of years ago, Maribel’s father used to have a modest corsetry in the Calle de la Colegiata, until he sold it because his wife Eulogia got it into her head that it would be better to set up a bar with female service in the Calle de la Aduana. Eulogia’s bar was called “The Earthly Paradise,” and did fairly well until its mistress lost her head and ran off with a guitar player who was always half drunk.

  “It’s a shame,” Maribel’s papa, Don Braulio, used to say. “There’s the missus tied up with that wretch who’ll let her starve!”

  Poor Don Braulio died a little later, of pneumonia, and his funeral was attended by Pepe the Sardine, in deep mourning and full of compunction, who was living with Eulogia in Carabanchel Bajo.

  “Do you think we’re of no account, eh?” said the Sardine at the funeral to a brother of Don Braulio’s who had come from Astorga to be present at the burial.

  “Oh, well . . .”

  “Life is like that, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, that’s a fact, life is like that,” answered Don Bruno, Don Braulio’s brother, while they were in the bus going to the East Cemetery.

  “He was a good man, your brother, God rest his soul.”

  “Of course he was. If he hadn’t been so good he would have taken the hide off you.”

  “That’s true enough, too.”

  “Of course it’s true too. But what I say is that in this life you’ve got to be tolerant.”

  The Sardine gave no answer. He was thinking to himself that Don Bruno was a man with modern ideas.

  “I’ll say he is. He’s a hell of a modern guy. Whether we like it or not, that’s the modern idea, and no mistake about it.”

  Don Ricardo Sorbedo was not very impressed by his girl friend’s arguments.

  “Yes, dear, but the hunger strike of the Mayor of Cork doesn’t fill my stomach, I promise you.”

  “But don’t you worry, my dear, don’t get all excited, it isn’t worth it. Anyway, you know, we’ll all be dead in a hundred years.”

  Don Ricardo Sorbedo and Maribel had this conversation sitting in front of two glasses of white wine in a low bar in the Calle Mayor, opposite the Civil Governor’s offices. Maribel was the proud possessor of a peseta and had said to Don Ricardo: “Let’s have a glass of wine somewhere. I’ve had enough of wandering round the streets and getting frozen.”

  “All right, let’s go where you like.”

  The two were waiting for a friend of Don Ricardo’s who was a poet and sometimes treated them to a white coffee with a bun thrown in. This friend of Don Ricardo’s was a young man by the name of Ramón Maello; he wasn’t exactly swimming in wealth himself, but he couldn’t be said to go hungry. Being the son of a good family, he always managed to have a few pesetas in his pocket. This young man lived in the Calle de Apodaca, above Trini’s drapery, and even though he was not on very good terms with his father, he had not been forced to leave home. Ramón Maello was not at all strong, and if he had left home, it would have cost him his life.

  “Say, d’you think he’ll come?”

  “Yes, my dear, Ramón is a serious lad. His head’s a bit in the clouds, but all the same, he’s reliable and helpful, he’ll come all right, you’ll see.”

  Don Ricardo Sorbedo took a sip and looked thoughtful. “Tell me, Maribel, what does this taste of?”

  Maribel also took a sip. “I don’t know, I think it tastes of wine.”

  For a couple of seconds, Don Ricardo felt sick to death of his girl friend. “The woman is like a chattering magpie,” he thought.

  Maribel did not notice. The poor thing hardly noticed anything.

  “Look what a beautiful cat! This cat must be very happy, don’t you think?”

  The cat—a black, glossy, well-fed, and well-slept cat—was walking, careful and wise like an abbot, along the ledge of the plinth, a noble, old-fashioned ledge at least the width of a palm.

  “In my opinion this wine tastes of tea, it tastes exactly like tea.”

  At the counter, some taxi drivers also were drinking wine.

  “Look, look, it’s amazing it doesn’t fall.”

  In a corner, another couple were adoring one another in silence, hand in hand, gazing into one another’s eyes.

  “I believe if one’s stomach is empty, everything tastes of tea.”

  A blind man went from table to table, offering tickets for the lottery in benefit of the blind.

  “What a lovely black cat! It looks nearly blue. What a cat!”

  The door opened, and from the street came a gust of cold air together with the even colder sound of the trolleys.

  “It tastes of tea without sugar, the sort of tea people take when they have stomach trouble.”

  Stridently, the telephone began to ring.

  “That cat’s an acrobat; it could get a job in a circus.”

  The bartender wiped his hands on his green-and-black striped apron and picked up the receiver.

  “Tea without sugar seems more suitable to bathe in than to swallow down.”

  The bartender hung up the telephone and shouted: “Don Ricardo Sorbedo!”

  Don Ricardo waved to him. “What is it?”

  “Are you Don Ricardo Sorbedo?”

  “Yes. Is there a message for me?”

  “Yes, it’s from Ramón: he can’t come, his mother’s been taken ill.”

  At the bakery in the Calle de San Bernardo, in the tiny office where the books are kept, Señor Ramón has a talk with his wife Paulina and with Don Roberto González, who has come back today in gratitude for the twenty-five pesetas his boss gave him, to add a few finishing touches to the accounts and clear up a few entries.

  The baker, his wife, and Don Roberto are chatting round a stove burning sawdust, which gives off considerable heat. On the top of the stove a few bay leaves are boi
ling in an old tunnyfish tin.

  Don Roberto feels happy today; he is telling the baker and his wife funny stories.

  “And then the thin one goes and says to the fat one: ‘You’re a pig!’ And the fat one turns round and answers: ‘Now listen, you, d’you believe I always smell like this?’ ”

  Señor Ramón’s wife is dying with laughter; she has the hiccups, puts both hands over her eyes, and cries: “Stop it, stop it, for God’s sake!”

  Don Roberto wants to clinch his victory. “And all that-inside a lift!”

  The woman weeps between guffaws and throws herself back in the chair. “Stop it, stop it!”

  Don Roberto has to laugh himself.

  “The thin man looked as if he had very few friends.”

  Señor Ramón, with his hands folded over his stomach and a cigarette stub hanging from his lips, looks from Don Roberto to Paulina.

  “Don Roberto does come out with funny things when he’s in form.”

  Don Roberto is tireless. “And I’ve still got another one ready, Señora Paulina.”

  “Stop, stop, for Heaven’s sake!”

  “All right, I’ll wait till you’ve recovered, I’m in no hurry.”

  Slapping her stout thighs with her palms, Señora Paulina goes on thinking of the bad smell of the fat man.

  The man was sick and penniless, but he killed himself because of a smell of onions.

  “There’s a foul smell of onions. The smell of onions is horrible.”

  “Oh, do shut up. I can’t smell anything. Would you like me to open the window?”

  “No, it makes no difference. The smell wouldn’t go; it’s the walls that smell of onions. My hands smell of onions.”

  His wife was a model of patience.

  “Do you want to wash your hands?”

  “No, I don’t want to. Even my heart smells of onions.”

  “Now calm down, do.”

  “I can’t. It smells of onions.”

  “Please, try to sleep for a bit.”

  “I couldn’t possibly, everything smells of onions to me.”

  “Would you like a glass of milk?”