“Well, my boy,” said Benina when he stopped singing, “I like your music very much – but doesn’t your stomach tell you that it cannot be won over by such verses and that it much prefers good slices of meat?”
“You eat – I sing. I eat with joy of being your friend.”
“You can feed on the fact that I am here? Not much food in that?”
“I love you.”
“Yes, my boy, love me: but think of me as your mother, come to look after you.”
“You pretty.”
“Pretty indeed! I’m older than San Isidro and look a sight with all the poverty I’ve had.”
No less inspired in speech than in song, Almudena told her: “Thou art white as the lily; this thy stature is like to a palm-tree in the desert, like roses and jasmine is thy mouth, thine eyes are like the evening star.”
“Holy Mary! And I never realised how beautiful I was!”
“All thy damsels envy thee; the Almighty made thy hands with rejoicing. The angels praise thee with zithers.”
“Blessed St Anthony! If you want me to believe all this, you must do me a favour: eat what I’ve brought you. When you have a full stomach, then we can talk. You’re not in your right mind now.” As she said this, she took bread, an omelette, cold meats and a bottle of wine out of the basket. She described each item, hoping to get him hungry and as a final argument, added: “If you still won’t eat, I shall get angry and shan’t come to see you any more. You can say goodbye to my ‘rosy mouth’ and my ‘eyes like the stars of Heaven’, unless you do everything I tell you, come back to Madrid and live in our little house as before.”
“If you marry me, yes, if not, no.”
“Will you eat or won’t you? I’ve not come all this way to waste time lecturing you,” declared Benina, with all the emphasis she could command. “If you insist on fasting, I shall leave now.”
“You eat.”
“Both of us. I came to see you, so that we could have lunch together.”
“Will you marry me?”
“How tiresome the man is! Like a small child. I shall have to box his ears. Come on, young fellow, set to and eat, marriage can be discussed later. Do you think that I’m going to take a husband who is as sun-dried and as hard as parchment?”
With these and other arguments she convinced him and he finally conquered his disgust for food. Beginning with titbits, he ended eating voraciously. But he did not give up his obsession and between mouthfuls said: “I marry you. We go my country. I marry in your religion, if you like. You marry in my religion if you want it. I am Israelite. I was baptised by the ladies of the convent: they gave me name Joseph Marien de la Almudena.”
“José Maria de la Almudena,” corrected Benina. “If you’re Christian, don’t talk to me about other, bad religions.”
“There is but one God, one God only, only one,” exclaimed the blind man, seized with mystical exaltation. “He heals broken hearts. He numbers the stars, and calls them all by their names. All the beasts of the earth adore Adonai, and the birds of the air. Alleluia!”
“Yes, let’s sing alleluias, it’ll aid our digestion.”
“The voice of Adonai over the waters, over many waters. The voice of Adonai is strong, is beautiful. The voice of Adonai puts out the flames of the fire, makes the desert tremble. He will make the desert of Kedar tremble, the stags will bow their heads. In his palace all sing his praise. He settled on the waters. He blessed his people with peace.” He went on reciting Hebrew prayers in fifteenth-century Castilian, which he had remembered since childhood, and Benina listened with respect, waiting until he had finished before bringing him back to reality and the burdens of everyday life. They had a short discussion as to whether he should return to the Santa Casilda lodging house, but he did not seem willing to give in on so important a matter until she gave her formal word to accept his swarthy hand in marriage. He tried to explain why, in his present state of mind, he felt such an attraction to the arid rocky places and slag heaps which now surrounded him. He really could not explain it, nor could Benina understand it; but an attentive observer could easily see in that strange longing a case of atavism or instinctive return to antiquity, which made him seek out landscapes similar to the stony solitudes in which the history of his race began. Is this folly? Perhaps not.
29
Despite all her ingenuity and wiles, the old woman was unable to convince the Moor to return to the upper city of Madrid.
“I don’t see,” she said marshalling all her arguments, “how you are going to survive on this pestilential mountain of yours. You are not begging and no one will bring you anything to eat, except me. Although I do have some money now, I shall soon run out completely and have to go back to begging for it, to my shame. Do you expect manna to fall from Heaven?”
“Yes, manna will fall,” said Almudena, with profound conviction.
“Believe that if you must – but tell me one thing, my boy, would there be buried money around here?”
“Yes, much, much.”
“Well, then, see if you can find it, and then you won’t be wasting your time. Anyhow, I don’t believe the stories you tell, or all the sorcery you brought from your pagan country. No, no, there’s no hope for the poor of this world, and all that about finding treasure and being brought cartfuls of precious stones, it’s just talk.”
“If you marry me, I bring you much treasure.”
“That’s as maybe. But get to work and find out where that crock of gold is. I’ll come and dig it up, and if it’s real, they can ring the wedding bells.” Saying this she put the remains of their lunch in her basket and prepared to leave. Almudena complained at her leaving so soon, but she insisted with her usual firmness, saying: “It would be a fine thing for me to go on sitting here in the sun, stretched out like a hide in a tanner’s yard. Tell me, dear boy, how are you going to provide for me out here? And what about my mistress, who is going to feed her?”
This reference to the lady and her household awakened in Mordejai the memory of the ‘pretty gentleman’ and as he began to get worked up about this, Benina hastened to calm him down by telling him that Ponte had already left to return to his noble domains, and that neither she nor her mistress Doña Francisca wanted anything more to do with that old rascal, for he had played them a dirty trick by going off without a word and without paying his bills. The Moor swallowed all this with childish innocence; and making his friend swear that she would come back and visit him daily while he continued to carry out his penitential obligations, he let her go. Benina departed, climbing upwards towards the railway station, as it was the easiest and most comfortable route.
When she got home, the first thing her mistress asked her was whether she knew when Don Romualdo was expected back from Guadalajara, to which she replied that there was no definite news of his return. Nothing of note happened that day, except the continued rapid recovery of Ponte, who was delighted with a visit from Obdulia and spent four hours talking with her and her mama on elegant topics and events that had taken place in Ronda forty years before. It is also worth noting that Benina’s money was beginning to run out, for the child ate with them. Some hake had to be added to the usual menu and some dates and pastries for dessert as well. The current expenses, together with her charitable bounty at Las Cambroneras, had rapidly diminished the duros remaining from La Pitusa’s loan, and after pressing debts had been settled, only one duro plus some small change remained when Benina set off on her third trip to the Puente de Toledo neighbourhood the next day.
On this occasion, she came upon Silverio, the same old man she had met on the previous day, and with him, as if advancing in battle order, other wretched dwellers from those slums. It seemed their spokesman was the legless man of nimble tongue, Nature having apparently compensated him this way for the horrible mutilation of his body. He announced, in the name of the beggars’ guild present there, that the lady should distribute her bounty equally among all of them, since all were equally deserving of the fr
uit of her great munificence. Benina answered, in all simplicity and innocence, that she had no fruit or anything else to distribute, as she was as poor as they were. These words were received with blank incredulity and as the cripple could think of no reply, all his rhetoric having been exhausted in his first speech, Silverio took over from him, saying that they hadn’t been born yesterday, that it was obvious that madam was not what she seemed, but a lady in disguise, made up to look like an ordinary beggar, who went about in search of the poor, to help them. They knew all about her disguise, because they recognised her from years back, and when she had come a long time ago, disguised like that, she had helped them all equally. He and others remembered quite well what she looked like and could bear witness that she was the same person, the same as the one they were now looking at and feeling with their hands.
Everyone agreed unanimously with what the ancient Silverio had said, and he then went on to say that they had always reckoned that lady to be a saint, and the one they now beheld to be even more so, despite her disguise, and they would all kneel down in front of her to worship her. Benina replied jokingly that she was no more a saint than her grandmother had been and that they should mind what they said and stop making such a terrible mistake. Indeed, she went on, there had once been a very highborn lady, called Doña Guillermina Pacheco, great hearted and noble minded, who had walked this world distributing charity dressed in humble but decent clothes and revealing the class she belonged to by her dignified bearing. That most worthy lady was no longer alive. God had taken her to Heaven just when she was most needed on this earth. And even if she had still been alive, come now, how could anyone confuse her with poor Benina? You could tell a mile off that Benina was a woman of the people, a servant. If they couldn’t tell the difference between a retired cook and a marquis’s daughter (because, after all, a lady might be in disguise) from her wretched, repaired and darned clothes and her worn-out rope-soled shoes, well then, there were things that couldn’t be disguised, such as her way of speaking, for example. How could anyone who had heard Doña Guillermina speak – she spoke like an angel – mix her up with someone who spoke the common tongue? She, Benina, had been born in a village of the province of Guadalajara; her parents had been farm labourers, and she had entered service in Madrid, when she was only twenty. She found reading difficult, and was so bad at writing that she could only just sign her name, Benina de Casia. Because of this surname, the village jokers used to make fun of her, saying that “she came from Santa Rita”. In short, she was no saint, but very much a sinner and had no connection with the aforementioned Doña Guillermina, who was now in heaven. She was as poor as they were, lived on charity and had to struggle to keep herself and those who depended on her. It’s true that God had made her open-handed, and if she happened to have some money and met people worse off than herself, she soon got rid of it all with no regrets.
Those poor, miserable, Godforsaken people were unconvinced and, holding out their filthy hands, begged Benina de Casia in stricken tones to come to their aid. Dirty ragged children joined the chorus, clinging to her skirts and calling for bread, bread. Touched by so much wretchedness, she went to the shop, bought a dozen long loaves and, dividing each one in half, doled them out amongst the pitiful band. The operation was terribly difficult, because they all made a wild rush at her, each one trying to get his share before the others, some trying to snatch a double ration. At the height of the uproar, there seemed to be double the number of hands, or else others had sprung up from underground. Half-suffocated, the good woman had to buy more loaves, because two or three old women who had got nothing set up a din of howls and squawks which was enough to alert the whole neighbourhood.
No sooner did she seem to have shaken off these pests than a woman with a monstrous-headed child in her arms called to her in hoarse tones. She immediately recognised her as the one she had met with La Burlada some days before, on her way to the Puerta de Toledo. The woman wanted her to go with her to an upper room of the tenement and show her something indescribably pitiful. Benina agreed, because compassion was always stronger in her than her own convenience and on the staircase the woman explained her unfortunate family’s situation. She was not married, but “under common law” she had had two children who had died of croup one after the other, six days apart. The big-headed child she was carrying was not her own but belonged to a friend of hers who went about with a blind man “with a violin”. This friend was an alcoholic and when occasion presented itself, a thief. The name of the woman who told this tale of woe was Basiliana. She had a father, crippled from the effects of eel-fishing in the river up to his thighs, and a sister Cesarea, who wore a poultice as a result of being beaten up by her boyfriend, a rascal, a loafer and a rat “who spends his nights playing cards at Comadreja’s place, in the Calle de Mediodía Chica. Do you know that establishment?”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Benina, only moderately interested in the story.
“Well, that rascal, as well as beating up my sister, pawned our shawls and petticoats. You must know him, because there’s no greater rogue in all Madrid. His nickname’s Cough-And-Take-It and, for short, we call him Take It.”
“I don’t know him, I don’t deal with such people,” said Benina.
They continued their climb and in one of the smallest rooms of the upper corridor, Benina witnessed the terrible plight of the family. The rheumatic old man seemed out of his mind; in despair brought about by pain, he shouted and blasphemed and Cesarea, sunk in lethargy, was no better than an idiot. She did nothing but spank a blubbering, runny-nosed child, which turned up the whites of its eyes in its continual spasms and yells. In the midst of this uproar, the two women explained to Benina that their worst problem, apart from hunger, was to pay the landlord, who would not let them alone, demanding the last three weeks rent. In great distress, Benina told them she was in no position to solve their problem, as she didn’t have the means to do so and that all she could offer them was one peseta, enough to pay for that day and the next. With an aching heart, she said goodbye to the wretched band and, although the two women expressed their gratitude, it was obvious that they bore her some grudge for not providing the help they had hoped for.
On the stairs, she was stopped by two old hags, who said unpleasantly: “Fancy mixing you up with Doña Guillermina! What clots, what half-wits! Doña Guillermina was an angel disguised as a woman, but this one! This one’s obviously a nobody, swanking about giving alms to the poor. A lady, indeed, what a lady! Stinking of raw onions and hands used to scrubbing floors, that’s what she is. These days saints are greasy and cheap and you can get God’s image for tuppence.”
Our good woman took no notice and went on her way. But in the street, or whatever name can be given to the space between houses, she was molested by a crowd of blind, lame and paralysed, who insistently demanded bread or pence to buy it with. She tried to shake off the tiresome horde but they followed her, harassed her and blocked her way. She had no alternative but to spend another peseta on bread and distribute it hastily. At last, by walking fast, she managed to outdistance the rabble and headed for the hillock where she hoped to find good Mordejai. There he was, in the very same spot as on the previous day, anxiously awaiting her, and when she arrived she took out of the basket the food she had brought with her and they began to eat. But God did not intend things that morning to turn out for Benina the way her good heart and charitable intentions desired, for they had not been eating ten minutes, when she observed on the path just below the hillock a group of villainous looking gypsy girls, a few evil faced cripples and two or three tattered old crones in a state of fury. At the sight of the idyllic pair, Benina and her blind companion, sitting on their slagheap, the rabble below began to shout. What were they saying? It was hard to make out from above. A word here and there was audible, about her being a sham saint, a thief who pretended to be a saint the better to steal, a toady to the priesthood. In short, things were turning nasty, and the proof of it soon came w
ith a stone thrown by a strong hand, which hit Benina, thump, on the shoulder. Soon after, thump, thump, came others. They both jumped up in fear, and putting their lunch back into the basket, prepared to escape to safety.
The lady took her gentleman’s arm and said: “Quick, or they’ll kill us.”
30
Scrambling along the stony slope, continually falling, then getting onto their feet again, grasping each other by the arm, their heads cowed, they fled that terrible bombardment. It became so intense that there was no breathing space between one blow and the next. Benina was hit on her clothing, where no great damage resulted; but Almudena was unfortunate enough to be struck by a pebble on the head when he had turned round to give the enemy a piece of his mind, and this did him considerable harm. When they arrived, panting and aching, at a place out of reach of the terrible storm of stones, the Moor’s wound was gushing with blood, staining his yellow countenance red. The odd thing was that the wounded man said nothing, but the uninjured woman cried aloud to Heaven to bring down thunder and lightning on that evil band. By good fortune, along came a signalman, a gentle and pious fellow who lived in a cabin near the place of the accident, and though he showed that he did not think much of the victims of the attack, as a good Christian moved by compassion at their misfortune he invited them into his humble dwelling. His wife arrived soon afterwards. She too was compassionate, and the first thing that they did was to give Benina water so that she could wash her friend’s wound and they brought vinegar and rags to make a bandage as well. The Moor only said: “My friend, weren’t you hit?”
“No, my boy, only a small one on the back of the head, but it isn’t bleeding.”
Misericordia (Dedalus European Classics) Page 19