Mazurka for Two Dead Men

by Camilo José Cela

  Benicia has a visit from Ceferino Gamuzo, Ferret, the priest from Santa María de Carballeda the first and third Tuesdays of every month, a bit of order never goes amiss.

  “Oh, Father Ceferino! You give me greater pleasure each passing day! God forgive me! Don’t be afraid to press harder!”

  Benicia likes to cook in the nip.

  “Doesn’t she spatter the oil?”

  “No, she’s careful.”

  Benicia is a dab hand at frying trout as well as cabbage shoots stuffed with a little chopped pork loin, a bit of ham, a clove of garlic, parsley, onion, herbs, and an egg. It’s a tasty morsel and good, wholesome food, too. Ferret the priest is an angler and he treats Benicia well, anglers are generally very well-mannered. Benicia has blue eyes and she’s like a water mill, she never stops.

  “Will you make room for me over on your side?”

  “I will.”

  Benicia tells the tale that when he was in Barco de Valdeorras, Petín and Rubiana killing Saracens, St. Roldán came across two very beautiful Moorish women, just as he was scrambling up the Enciña de Lastra mountains, but he couldn’t catch up with them even though he galloped after them on horseback, pelting along so fast that it left him winded: cast into despair at the flight of the two beauties, St. Roldán cursed them and turned them both into the White Boulders, those two dazzling white quartz rocks still standing on either side of the road.

  “It was at the Boulders that the ghost of St. Roldán appeared to me and although I wanted to run away I couldn’t, well, I didn’t really want to run away for it was so nice and peaceful there. St. Roldán spoke in a strange way, I’d say he wasn’t all there.”

  “Did St. Roldán address you in Castilian or in Galician?”

  “I think he spoke to me in Latin but I understood every word he said, mind you.”

  Ádega, Benicia’s mother, knows many tales and many mysteries of the country hereabouts, she also plays the accordion with great skill, the Fanfinette polka is what she plays better than anything.

  “Your grandfather had some much talked of affairs which ended in blood. Manecha Amieiros was a fine woman, your grandfather knew what he was doing, very handsome with long legs and hair like silk, they say she was a delight to behold, your grandfather beat Xan Amieiros—Manecha’s brother, and that’s the least of it—to death, that happens at times when two men fight and there’s nobody there to separate them in time, he killed him at the hairpin bend at Claviliño, but he treated Manecha well. The girl went off to the capital, opened an inn and did well for herself. Your grandfather then went off to Brazil for a few years, before leaving he asked his official sweetheart—the one who was later to become your grandmother—will you wait for me, Teresa? She said she would and then off he went overseas. He was over in South America for fourteen years and married upon his return, he hadn’t written a single letter to his sweetheart in all those years, but a man’s word is his bond. Shall I pour you a drop more aguardiente?”

  The mother of Roquiño Borrén, the half-wit who spent five years shut up in a tin trunk painted ultramarine blue, gold, orange, and lettuce green, does not have a charitable nature. Roquiño Borrén’s mother takes it for granted that half-wits are closer to clods of earth than to people or even animals.

  “God made them that way for some reason or another, don’t you think?”

  When she scalds herself, spills oil, or nicks her finger when she’s peeling potatoes, Roquiño Borrén’s mother takes a swipe at her half-wit son to console herself.

  “What are you gawping at, you half-wit? You worse than half-wit!”

  Roquiño Borrén’s mother is called Secundina and she’s as cranky as a bag of cats.

  “What a heavy cross the Good Lord gave me to bear when he sent me this half-wit for my sins! Watch out, Roquiño, for I’ll make you pay for this, just you wait and see!”

  Roquiño Borrén’s mother smokes when there is nobody around to see, she smokes the butts that she gathers up in Rauco’s inn. She’s a friend of Remedios, the landlady; she launders for her, helps with slaughtering pigs, and runs errands, she smokes magnolia leaves, too. Secundina has a dog that eats the rotting butts and is always tipsy and half-crazy, the poor little beast catches it too when his mistress blows her top. They say that Roquiño turned out as he did because when his mother was suckling him she would suckle the serpent by night and the poor devil had to do without. Be that as it may, I maintain that he was born into this world a half-wit for you can generally tell from that look they have about them.

  “You know what a silver coin is good for?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s good for wasp stings.”

  Eleuterio the Britches wears his hair cropped short like a scrubbing brush, his eyebrows meet in the middle and he has a low brow, truth to tell, he’s a miserable looking wretch.

  “Eleuterio, I heard Portuguese Marta wouldn’t go to bed with you because you spat at Gaudencio.”

  “Whoever told you that is a son of a bitch, Don Servando, begging your pardon.”

  Don Servando won’t allow bad language to be used in his presence.

  “Get a grip on yourself, bloody Britches, or I’ll beat the living daylights out of you!”

  Eleuterio got a grip on himself because Don Servando was a deputy for the province. Eleuterio knew when to shut his trap.

  “Eleuterio, run down to the newsstand and buy me a packet of cigarette papers.”

  “What type? Bamboo?”

  “Preferably Indian Rose.”

  What Fina enjoys better than anything is to be mounted like a wild beast and for that sort of business there’s nobody better than a middle-aged priest, neither young nor old. Celestino Sprig, the priest in San Miguel de Taboada, is a past master at taming women in bed. Antón Guntimil, Fina’s late husband, the poor Stutterer killed by a freight train in Orense station, could never quite make it with his wife.

  “The Franciscan friar from the Missions had a prick that was twice the size of yours, dimwit—for that’s what you are, a dimwit.”

  Fina makes delicious rabbit stew, Celestino Gamuzo doesn’t mind that she has her monthlies.

  “That’s neither here nor there, you know that I’m not fussy.”

  The French are Catholics but in their own way of course, not like us Spaniards. Aunt Lourdes got smitten with smallpox and then they chucked her into a common grave, after she died, of course, the French don’t beat about the bush and are quick to look out for number one. Aunt Lourdes died on her honeymoon, from the marriage bed to the icy grave, it’s like the title of a novel by Ponson du Terrail,13 everyone dies at the time and place appointed, the French infected her with smallpox and Uncle Cleto had no choice in the matter but wound up a widower.

  Manueliño Remeseiro Domínguez hatched out a crow’s egg in his armpit, it’s just a matter of keeping still so as not to crush the shell. Manueliño Remeseiro Domínguez is locked up in jail because he thrashed somebody to death, you wouldn’t credit the free-for-alls that go on at romerías, indeed, just one taken up the wrong way is enough to trigger off disaster.

  “And sow the seeds of calamity?”

  “Precisely. And sow the seeds of calamity. Nobody knows what the designs of divine Providence are, for the ways of God are unknown to man.”

  A silence fell and then Don Claudio Dopico Labuñeiro asked:

  “Listen, what you’ve just said, where did you get that from?”

  “What a thing to ask! What the hell does that matter to you?”

  When the crow hatched from its shell, Manueliño Remeseiro Domínguez tended it carefully and now the creature is his constant companion.

  “What’s the crow’s name?”

  “Moncho, just like a cousin of mine that died of whooping cough. Do you like it?”

  “Yes, it’s a lovely name, but I don’t know that it quite fits.”

  “Ah, go on! Why not?”

  In the mornings Moncho slips through the bars of the window and swoops about.

  “I
t’s great to watch him flap his wings; he’s like Old Nick himself, he’s so smart.”

  In the evenings, just before sunset, Moncho returns to the cell, he never flies to the wrong one, and he perches on Manueliño’s head or upon his shoulder.

  “And he always comes back?”

  “Indeed he does. I don’t think he would know to go anywhere else and anyway he always brings me a present of something: a piece of glass, a shell, a chestnut …”

  Manueliño is teaching Moncho to whistle, he already knows a few bars of Ma Petite Marianne, the mazurka that Blind Gaudencio plays only on certain fateful occasions.

  “Will you play that mazurka, Gaudencio?”

  “Shut up, you good-for-nothing!”

  Moncho can also speak a few words, Manueliño would like him to greet folks, Good morning, Don Cristóbal, Good afternoon, Doña Rita, Good evening, Castora, have a good time! Mamerto Paixón, a fellow Manueliño knows, has a crow that can recite the districts of Orense in alphabetical order: Allariz, Bande, Carballiño, Celanova, etc. It’s easier to teach a crow to speak than to learn their language, crows can sense rain, sickness and, death, and they croak with seventy-odd different caws, one for each different thing they sense.

  “What I’d like to do now is raise a goldfinch, they’re fine songsters, but where would I get hold of a goldfinch’s egg?”

  Adrián Estévez, from Ferreiravella in the district of Foz, is a well-known diver, in the Foz estuary he came across a German submarine nestling upon the sea bed with all the dead crew still inside. Adrián Estévez is known as Shark because he’s so daring and swims like a fish. Shark is a friend of Baldomero Lionheart’s and wants him to accompany him to the Antela lagoon.

  “In Sandiás I have a relative who knows as sure as shootin’ where the city of Antioch lies, he’s from around there so he should know. I’ll go with you but I won’t set foot in the water, the only stipulation I make is that you mustn’t kill any frogs because they’re cousins of mine. Laugh if you like, see if I care! but the frogs in the Antela lagoon are cousins of mine, I swear.”

  Baldomero Lionheart has a tattoo on his arm of a naked woman with a serpent coiled about her, the woman is good luck and the serpent represents the three faculties of the soul.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Makes no difference.”

  Shark wants to dive in the Antela lagoon, dodging the blood stains of Decio the Galician’s Romans and King Arthur’s Welshmen, to steal the bells of Antioch.

  “I know that there are three curses on them but it’s well worth the trouble all the same, the bells of Antioch are worth a fortune.”

  One night when the nightingale was trilling, the owl hooting, and the stars twinkling high in the sky, Shark plunged into the water, stark naked, with the Caravaca cross painted in red ochre upon his chest.

  “Will it not wash off?”

  “I don’t think so. This stuff is made to last.”

  Lionheart waited on the shore with a shotgun, there was nobody else with them. Shark would come up every minute or minute and a half for air, then he would dive down again.

  “Are you alright?”

  “For the time being, so long as the cold doesn’t get to me!”

  At the hundredth dive, Shark was overcome with the cold and had to give up.

  “The bells are not so very deep down but they’re quite firmly fastened, on the clapper of the biggest one there is a hanged wolf. What a sight! the fishes have almost devoured him already. Don’t you tell anybody where we went!”

  “Don’t worry.”

  The Venceás family’s mute and nameless maidservant was savaged to death by dogs, it was a stroke of bad luck. Judging from her appearance, the Venceás family’s mute and nameless maidservant might have been Portuguese. Expertly, lovingly, she used to brew a coffee liqueur that nobody could hold a candle to. Dorinda, the mother of the Venceás family, was deeply moved by the death of her maidservant. At a hundred and three years of age she really needed someone to do the chores for her.

  “Shall we head for Orense and go into Sprat’s place to warm ourselves up?”

  “Fair enough.”

  The Venceás family’s mute and nameless maidservant, around about the time of Don Manuel García Prieto’s administration—you know the fellow from La Maragatería?, not that he was really from La Maragatería, he came more from Astorga way, but it’s more or less the same thing—had a child by a corporal from the Civil Guard who used to wear a corset and was called Doroteo.

  “Where was he from?”

  “I don’t know. He claimed to be from around Celanova, or Ramiranes, but to my mind he was from Asturias and didn’t want to let on, some folks are full of notions, you know.”

  Doroteo used to do physical exercises and would recite The Pirates Song by Espronceda in a fine voice:

  With ten cannons a side,

  under full sail before an aft wind….

  Doroteo wasn’t one for frequenting bars or romerías and, when he was on leave, he would stay in the barracks reading verses by Espronceda, Núñez de Arce, Campoamor, and Antonio Grilo. Corporal Doroteo also liked carnal dealings with women, as the saying goes, he had chosen the Venceás family’s maid because she was discreet and wouldn’t tattle, well, the reason she didn’t tattle was because she was mute rather than discreet, not that it makes any difference. Doroteo’s moustache, a magnificent big handlebar moustache, would catch the eye of many a woman. Well, the deaf-mute was crazy about him, head over heels in love—as the saying goes—with Doroteo and when he set her on his lap and groped about, she would break out in strange little grunts of pleasure and delight.

  “Like a rat?”

  “Not really, more like a sheep.”

  The son of Doroteo and the mute now has a taxi in Allariz and they get by well enough, his wife is a midwife and their three children are studying in Santiago: the daughter, pharmacy; one son, teacher training; and the other, medicine. Manueliño Remeseiro Domínguez wasn’t so fortunate and now he’s deprived of his freedom, in this life some folks have better luck than others.

  “When is he getting out?”

  “That all depends.”

  In the Agrosantiño mountains there lurks a vixen which kills only tender young fryers, she doesn’t like hens for apparently she finds them too old and tough.

  “What an uppity miss of a vixen! In years gone by they were hardier and not so choosy!”

  “Indeed, in years gone by.”

  Don Claudio Dopico Labuñeiro lodges in Doña Elvira’s inn, and has an affair with her in secret, or so it is said. Don Claudio is also doing a line with Castora, the maid, who in turn bestows her favors upon Don Cristóbal.

  “Bestows her favors?”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Besides reciting poetry, Corporal Doroteo plays the harp, waltzes are what he’s best at. Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the ripper who turned into a wolf and savaged folks to death, was saved from garrotting by a Chinese doctor, who was neither a doctor nor Chinese, but an English hypnotist, his name was Mr. Phillips and he taught electrobiology in Algiers: the Chinese doctor wrote a letter to the Spanish Ministry of Justice, which caused a great stir, and when she learned of the advances of science, Queen Isabella II granted the prisoner a reprieve. Wolves respond badly to captivity so, after a year in captivity, Manuel Blanco Romasanta pined away and died for want of his freedom, there are folks who are very sensitive to being penned up and may even die as a result, it’s the same with sparrows, too. In the parish of San Verísimo de Espiñeiros, in Allariz, a Mass was said for the soul of the werewolf every February 29th, that is each leap year, until the custom died out with the Civil War. The bell of San Verísimo de Espiñeiros is so noble and grateful that it peals out when the sun shines upon it, folks who don’t know find it confusing.

  “Uncle Cleto.”

  “What, Camilito?”

  “Will you give me ten reales?”

  “No.”

  “Six, t
hen?”

  “No.”

  The house where my aunts and uncle live is in Albarona, overgrown with ivy and sweet pea, it’s a handsome, spacious house now going to rack and ruin.

  “Do you remember the blackbird that used to steal food from the blind man from Senderiz? He was the worst blind man in the world and then God punished him by sending a bird to steal his food, shortly afterwards he starved to death.”

  Don Claudio Dopico Labuñeiro is a schoolteacher and it seems he is having an affair with Doña Elvira, the landlady, something to that effect has already been mentioned.

  “Castora is a slut, I know, but she’s thirty years younger than me, and that counts for a lot. I don’t chuck her out so as to have a hold over you, will you love me forever?”

  “Forever and ever, Elvira … forever and ever, as they say, but who knows!”

  Doña Elvira and Don Claudio drop the “Don” only in bed, it pays to keep up appearances. It wasn’t easy for Don Claudio to get to bed with Castora, Doña Elvira keeps a close eye on them both, but he was able to squeeze her breasts or stroke her ass when he bumped into her in the hallway.

  “Easy on, Don Claudio! What are you up to? You’ll get what you’re after once Sunday comes.”

  Don Claudio and Castora meet on Sunday afternoons in an imports warehouse on the Rairo road. The owner, a friend of Don Claudio’s, gives him the key, they even have a divan and a washstand. Doña Elvira allows Don Cristóbal a freer rein for she’s not in love with him.

  “You certainly have all the luck, Don Cristóbal, when to go to bed with me all you have to do is push open the door!”

  “Hold your tongue, woman, and don’t be fresh! You mind your own business!”

  Mamerto Paixón, Manueliño Domínguez’s friend, wanted to be a footballer but he destroyed himself with an invention he made so he had to give the idea up.

  “Did you never think of becoming a priest?”

  “No, ma’am, never.”

  Moncho Lazybones is a ferocious liar, by and large men with limps are almighty fibbers, well, not all of them, of course, but as a rule of thumb.

  “When her first husband—Adolfito—was alive, my cousin Georgina used to bathe in the altogether in Lucio Mouro’s millpond, like Catuxa Bainte. There was a trout that would hover motionless staring at her breasts until my cousin left or whatever, my cousin always had fine-looking tits, but what’s odd about it is that a trout should gawp at her like a Peeping Tom.”