Mazurka for Two Dead Men

by Camilo José Cela

  Ádega shed two or three tears.

  “When they killed the dead man that killed my old man I thought I would breathe more easily but that isn’t so. Before I hated and now I despise; that is sapping away my strength. Before I held my tongue but now I talk, maybe more than I ought. This business of the accordion is like drinking water at the fountain: some days you are thirsty and other days you aren’t. Despising is the only thing I think I can do well. It was a tremendous effort at the start but now I can despise as well as anybody. I swear. It’s important to know that a body’s head may ache even though it doesn’t really hurt. I’m from this land and nobody will throw me out of here; when I die, I’ll become part of the earth that feeds the gorse. I’ll turn into the golden flower on the gorse bushes, and in the meantime, well, here we are.”

  Ádega fell silent then poured two glasses of aguardiente, one for herself and one for me.

  “Your good health.”

  Behind Miss Ramona’s house the garden stretches down to the river with its reeds and bracken, its pool, its barbel, and its suicides: but three suicides in eleven years are not so very much. This is not a great spot for suicides: the odd homeless old man, a young girl in despair, the occasional married woman eaten up with boredom and remorse, but nobody knows if Miss Ramona’s mother drowned by accident or design.

  “You and I are cousins of the Casandulfe Raimundo, you on your mother’s side and I on my father’s. You and I are relations of relations and maybe, if you scratch a bit below the surface, you’ll find we are related. Hereabouts we are all more or less related, except for the Carroupos that is, who appeared out of the blue and are now getting ahead like a house on fire.”

  Miss Ramona looks about thirty, perhaps a little older, she has a haughty, capricious manner, maybe a little distant, shy and mysterious at the same time. Miss Ramona has big black eyes like Compostela jet and a sallow complexion, maybe she’s half Mexican, the Casandulfes had a grandmother—or was it a great-grandmother?—who was Mexican. Miss Ramona had three suitors but for the sake of her dignity she remained unmarried. Miss Ramona writes poems, plays sonatas on the piano, and lives with two old crocks of manservants and two old crones of maids she inherited from her father, Don Brégimo Faramiñás Jocín, who was a spiritualist and fond of playing the banjo and died a major in the Service Corps. Miss Ramona’s servants are four calamities, indeed four fiascos, but she cannot throw them out of the house to starve and die in destitution.

  “No; stay here until they carry you out feet first in a wooden box. Chances are you won’t last long.”

  “Thank you, Miss. May God reward you for your charity!”

  Miss Ramona also inherited a somber black Packard from her father and an elegant white Isotta-Fraschini but she never takes them out of the coach-house, Miss Ramona can drive, she’s the only woman hereabouts to have a driving license but, even so, she never takes them out of the coach-house.

  “They guzzle too much gasoline. Let them rust!”

  In Miss Ramona’s parlor there hang two portraits by Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor:5 one of her dressed in local costume and one of her mother wearing a Spanish mantilla.

  “There’s a strong family likeness, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I never got to meet your mother.”

  “Well, never mind, all paintings look very much alike.”

  The Casandulfe Raimundo is the son of Salvadora, my mother’s youngest sister, who is a good-looking woman with an education behind her. When Raimundo goes to visit our cousin Miss Ramona he always takes her a present of a white camellia.

  “Here, Mona, so you can see that I love you and never forget you.”

  “I’m so grateful, Raimundo, you shouldn’t have bothered.”

  Miss Ramona has a Pomeranian, an Angora cat, and a huge colorful macaw, a green parrot, a marmoset monkey, a tortoise, and two swans that glide on the garden pond, they sometimes venture as far as the river but they always come back. Miss Ramona is very fond of animals, the only ones she doesn’t like are those that are of some use: cows, pigs and chickens, except horses, of course. Miss Ramona has a bay horse that could be as much as twenty years old.

  “Horses are like men: handsome and vacant, though some are noble in their feelings.”

  Except for the parrot, all Miss Ramona’s animals have names: the dog is called Wilde and he sleeps with her; the cat, King; the macaw, Rabecho; the monkey, Jeremiah; the tortoise, Xaropa; the horse, Caruso; and the two swans, Romulus and Remus. The cat is neutered because one night, when the flesh would out, he left home and didn’t return until the following morning: scruffy, sad, and wounded. Miss Ramona’s response was firm:

  “Poor little mite! This must not happen again—have him neutered!”

  So, of course, they had him neutered and he never escaped again, indeed why would he? The macaw is red, white, and blue, just like the French flag, with a few green and yellow feathers. The macaw lives on a perch, where he is fastened with an ample chain; always weary but dignified and with a look of bored resignation, the macaw hops up and down, unhooks himself and climbs half-heartedly up to his perch. The monkey masturbates and coughs; the tortoise spends its life sleeping and the swans sail elegantly up and down in their boredom. In Miss Ramona’s house, the only animal not down in the dumps is the horse.

  “Don’t poke fun at me, Raimundo! Being alone is not the worst. I’ve been alone all my life and for years now I’ve grown accustomed it … the worst of it is that I spend my days with my mind blank or drifting away in the clouds, as if I were losing my reason. With every day that passes we are all a little farther apart, a little wearier—even of ourselves. Don’t you think I should go and live in Madrid?”

  It rains in a steady downpour upon the sinners of God’s earth and the land takes on the mild, gentle color of the sky as yet unbroken by the wing of the bird. Since I can play neither the fiddle nor the harmonica and, since I can’t find the key of the harmonium where I keep my stamp collection, I spend the evenings in bed with Benicia, reading poems and listening to tangos. Benicia was in Orense the other day and she brought me back a present of a coffeepot, it’s very handy and makes the cups in batches of two: one for me and one for her.

  “Do you want more coffee?”

  “Alright.”

  Benicia is a happy, hearty sinner and has big dark nipples that are hard and sweet. Benicia has blue eyes and she’s surly and forceful in bed. She knows a thing or two about rolling in the hay and she screws skilfully but tyrannically. Benicia can neither read nor write but she laughs with great assurance.

  “Shall we dance a tango?”

  “No. I’m cold. Come here.”

  Benicia is always warm even when it’s cold. Benicia is like a heater and a pleasure machine rolled into one. I’m glad that she can play neither the fiddle nor the harmonica.

  “Give me a kiss.”

  “Alright.”

  “Pour me a glass of aguardiente.”

  “Alright.”

  “Fry me a sausage.”

  “Alright.”

  Benicia is like an obedient sow, she never says no to anything.

  “Stay with me tonight.”

  “I can’t. Ferret Gamuzo, the priest from San Adrián—well, now he’s in Santa María de Carballeda—is coming over to see me. He comes over the first Tuesday of every month.”

  “Go on!”

  Lázaro Codesal was killed by a Moor in the shade of a fig tree, treacherously shot with a flintlock at a time when he should have been farthest from such a sudden death. When death entered Lázaro Codesal through one ear, he had in his mind the figure of Ádega, spreadeagled naked as she sunned herself on a steep bank; we were all young once, I suppose. At the Miangueiro spring, where the lepers wash their sores nowadays, the fig tree is still growing from which they cut branches to whittle into lances so that the Figueiroas6 could rescue from the Moors the seven maidens held in the tower of the Bosom Brothel. Nowadays there’s not a soul left who ca
n recall that story. Marraca, the wood-seller from the Francelos plain, mentioned by a friend of Ádega’s in a book he wrote, had twelve daughters: not one of them reached the age of twelve a virgin and they all earned their living by their sex. Elvirita from Doña Rosa’s cafe in Orense met one of them, Carlota, in Pelona’s brothel. The clear water of the Miangueiro spring is not fit to drink, not even the birds drink it for it washes over the bones, the lungs, the miseries of the dead and brings nothing but grief.

  Blind Gaudencio is well set up and never tires of playing the accordion.

  “A two-step, Gaudencio!”

  “Whatever you wish, sir.”

  Blind Gaudencio lives in the same place as he works, he sleeps on a straw mattress in a closet beneath the stairs in Sprat’s brothel, so he saves on lodgings: Gaudencio’s den is warm and cosy. There’s no light, of course, but he doesn’t need one: blind men don’t care a hoot whether they have light or not.

  “You mean they can’t tell the difference?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  In the early morning when he stops playing at about five or half past five, Gaudencio goes to Mass in the Mercy Convent in Misery Street, then he goes to bed until midday. When he died, the prostitutes bought him a wreath of flowers and had several Masses said for his soul; they couldn’t attend the funeral for the police wouldn’t let them.

  “Your grandfather went off to Brazil for several years when he killed Xan Amieiros and reduced Fuco to a pulp, but he gave Manecha fifty thousand reales of the ready stuff—that was a fortune in those days—and another whack in shares in the M.Z.A. Railroad Company, as well as a letter of introduction to Don Modesto Fernández y González the author of Our Grandparents’ Farm, who signed himself Camilo de Cela and also wrote articles in The Spanish and American Enlightenment and in Spanish Correspondence. Manecha went off to Madrid and opened the Orense Inn on San Marcos Street; as she was willing, clean, and not afraid of hard work, she was able to save and make a go of it and wound up marrying a civil servant from the Parliament, Don León Roca Ibáñez, to whom she bore eight daughters, all of whom married well, and two sons, one who became a surveyor and the other a court prosecutor. A grandson of Don León and Manecha’s, the son (by a second marriage) of their fourth daughter Marujita, went as far as undersecretary under the Republic and died in Barquisimeto, Venezuela in 1949. He was a member of parliament for the leftwing Republican Party and when he was alive and kicking was called Don Claro Comesaña Roca. Manecha was a handsome, shapely woman and her children and grandchildren, though perhaps not quite as good-looking as she, also had great presence. A daughter of the Undersecretary, thus Manecha’s great-granddaughter, Haydée Comesaña Bethencourt, was selected Miss Barquisimeto back in the ’50’s.”

  There are fools with luck and fools with no luck, so it has been since the world began and so it will always be. Roquiño Borrén, a fool with no luck, was kept shut up inside a trunk for almost five years so that he couldn’t be a nuisance to anyone: when they took him out he looked like a pale hairy spider.

  “What difference does it make to him? Can’t you see that he’s a simpleton?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am … maybe he would have liked to stretch his legs a bit and take a breath of fresh air.”

  “Well, let him! I’m not stopping him!”

  Roquiño Borrén’s mother thinks that simpletons neither feel nor suffer.

  “They are half-wits, after all …”

  In the old times you could take them out to romerías7 but nowadays there’s so much deprivation that folks don’t even want to lay eyes upon them any more. Folks keep themselves amused with other things nowadays, gossiping in low voices and recounting their sorrows—again in low voices, for there’s no need to raise your voice about these parts. In the sacristan’s vineyard there hangs a garland of strangled varmints, looking like grappling hooks, decomposing in the rain and stinking of rotting flesh. When nobody is looking, Catuxa Bainte, the half-wit from Martiñá, sneaks up to the sacristan’s vineyard to bare her bosom to the dead wild beasts.

  “Here! Take a look at this! Everything is doomed in the end! St. Jude Thaddeus, glorious apostle, turn my sorrows into joy! Here, take a look at this! The rain will wipe out everything in the end. St. Jude Thaddeus up in heaven, bring me solace for my sorrows! The wind will wipe out everything in the end!”

  The sacristan usually sends the half-wit from Martiñá packing with a shower of stones.

  “Clear off, bloody half-wit! Go and show your tits to the devil and leave decent folks in peace!”

  The half-wit covers her breasts and laughs aloud, then she runs off down the path, shrouded by the rain, laughing and glancing back over her shoulder every two or three paces.

  Catuxa Bainte is an outspoken half-wit, not one of those bloody gaping ninnies: she lives hand to mouth and doesn’t exert herself unduly, it would be hard to die of starvation hereabouts. Sometimes she coughs and spits spots of blood but she picks up every year close to midsummer when the skies clear. Catuxa Bainte must be about twenty or twenty-two years of age and what she enjoys better than anything is floundering about in the nip in Lucio Mouro’s millpond.

  The priest from San Miguel de Buciños goes about swarming with flies: there are always at least a thousand flies buzzing around him for apparently his flesh tastes sweet. One day when the priest in San Miguel de Buciños went to Orense to have his photo taken, he had to sit in the dark for half an hour so that the flies would settle down and go to sleep.

  “But why didn’t they douse him with fly-killer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t use it.”

  The priest in San Miguel de Buciños lives with a crippled old house-keeper who reeks of moth-balls and tipples coffee liqueur nearly every day.

  “Dolores!”

  “Yes, Father Merexildo?”

  “This bread is stale—you eat it!”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Years ago Dolores developed a boil—or maybe it was a malignant tumor—on her arm and, in order to avoid further complications, the doctor sent her to hospital to have her arm amputated so, naturally enough, it was amputated.

  “With one arm less you can manage fine: folks are mighty grumblers, clearly she’s not used to working.”

  The priest in San Miguel de Buciños is as big as an ox and belches like a lion.

  “Us proper men have no need to go about making pretenses and putting on airs and graces—leave that to clowns and wimps.”

  “Yes, Father, leave that to clowns and wimps.”

  The priest in San Miguel de Buciños likes to eat and drink heartily.

  “I fast for the whole of Lent as the Holy Church commands—so why don’t they mention that?”

  “That’s just what you would wonder, Father: why don’t they mention that?”

  The priest in San Miguel de Buciños is also fond of other things that there is no need to mention, the flesh is weak and let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

  “There are a lot of shameless gossipmongers around here.”

  “Yes, Father, they let their tongues run away with them, they talk a lot of nonsense and tell a pack of lies.”

  They say that Father Merexildo Agrexán, the priest in San Miguel de Buciños, has some fifteen children, all born on the wrong side of the blanket.

  “Is he to blame if women won’t let him alone?”

  Women run after the priest of San Miguel de Buciñas like bitches in heat; they tattle to each other about his proportions and give him no rest either by day or by night.

  “Pardon me, Father, but why do you put up with them?”

  “Why shouldn’t I put up with them? Poor creatures, when all they want is a little comfort!”

  The upper story of Policarpo’s house in the village of Cela do Camparrón caved in when his father died, it tumbled down from the weight of people that were gathered there. God have mercy upon us! No one was killed but there were many broken bones
and fractured skulls, many a soul was bruised and battered. Apparently the beams gave way, then the floor split in two and we all ended up covered with manure in the stable. The deceased had to be put back into his coffin because the poor man had shot out when he was sent flying through the air.

  “You can’t put him outside—he’ll get wet! Can’t you see he’ll get wet? Set him up against the wall!”

  In the hullaballoo that followed, three of Policarpo’s trained weasels that could dance like clockwork to the sound of the tambourine escaped.

  “They were first-class little beasts, I’ll never find their like again!”

  Policarpo’s father died at the age of ninety after a drinking binge, the old fellow was fond of wine and it can’t have done him that much harm when he lived so long. Nowadays young folks can’t hold as much as they used to in the old times when men really did work and quaffed wine and smoked like fiends yet they could still tackle a wild boar and flay it with one stroke of the knife.

  “Lord, what times they were!”

  “Do you really believe they were better?”

  Policarpo’s father had squandered a fortune living as he pleased. When he was alive, Policarpo’s father was called Benigno Portomourisco Turbisquedo and he was born into this world in a family of means that was later to wind up without two cents to rub together but that’s another story. Don Benigno was full of notions and saw plots against him everywhere. Don Benigno always believed that woman was the most treacherous of all females, serpents included. Don Benigno married Dorotea Expósito, known as la Bagañeira, a pretty, languid, and rather mysterious young maid who worked in his mother’s house. By her he had one son—Policarpo, the last of them—who was not stillborn. All the rest—as many as eleven of them—were either stillborn or miscarried. Dorotea was a woman of great beauty and in his jealousy Don Benigno could see only affairs and lewd indulgences on the side.