Benito PErez Galdos

LIFE AT A WATERING PLACE.

The young man who was reading this letter was walking while he read, up and down an avenue of tall trees. At one end there was a low building with a pretentious Greco-Roman faÇade, from which a sulphurous smelling vapour came out in tepid gusts, and at the other, one of those phalansteries in which Spaniards congregate during the summer carrying with them into the country all the restrictions, inconveniences, and unhealthy accessories of a town life. Rough slopes, covered with grass and mosses, came down close behind the bath house, as if trying to push it into the stream below; and the torrent itself, striving to make up for its smallness by the noise it made—like some human beings who are Manzanares[A] in size and Niagaras in noisiness—rushed tumultuously past the foundation-wall, swearing and muttering obstreperously that it would carry away the hotel, the promenade and the drinking-bar; the doctor, the inn-keeper and the visitors.

The visitors were limping and coughing in the avenue, or sitting in various groups on the banks of turf under the trees. Whole monographs on every imaginable complaint were being delivered by the sufferers; elaborate calculations as to digestion, past or to come; grotesque diagnosis; narratives of sleepless nights, of spasms, headaches and hiccoughs; inventories of palpitations; dissertations on the irritability of the sympathetic nerve; mysterious hypotheses as to the nervous system, as impenetrably obscure as the arcana of Isis; observations formulated into aphorisms by optimist speculators; forebodings of the apprehensive who thought each cough was a step towards the grave; hopes from the credulous who believed the waters might work miracles and bring the dead to life again; suppressed sighs of these who were in pain; soliloquies of those who were past curing, and glad laughter of the convalescents.

No one who has not lived for some few days in the midst of such a panting and wheezing community—with its sick folks who look quite well and its healthy folks who fancy themselves ill; and men who are dying visibly by inches, eaten up by the diseases of vice—can form an idea of the dulness and monotony of this hotel life, which society has rushed into with such extraordinary unanimity since the invention and extension of railways, and which scarcely ever affords any of the pleasures or peaceful rest of the real country.

Nevertheless there is a certain charm to be found in this invalid community. The constant change of drama; the beautiful faces which arrive every day followed by more satellites than a planet; the luxury, the evening meetings; the delicate ambrosia of gossip, served up constantly fresh and spicy, never satiating and never exhausted in spite of the incessant demand; the flirtations begun or revived; the moral friction, sometimes against the grain but sometimes delightfully soothing; the thousand floating ends, as it were, that get tied or sundered; the little dances; the parties to see this or that grotto or panorama, or heap of ruins, which every one has seen a year ago but which must be once more admired in chorus; the harmless or very venial gambling; the jokes, the plots, the small intrigues, with which some members of this little world are so bold as to disturb the monotony of the common contentment, the common amusement, the common hygiene—for this sort of society is eminently a Commonwealth, and its gaiety and splendour hide a regimen as dreary as that of a hospital—all these accessories make such colonies highly attractive, to a certain class of mind at any rate, and, as it would seem, the commonest. For this reason the whole Spanish nation resort to such spots, some with their own money to spend, and some with that of others; and at the beginning of July, the ‘Governor’ or the money-lender is put under requisition to supply the funds necessary to the attainment of this great desideratum of modern life. It would seem that there is a certain form of dipsomania, a craving to drink of sulphurous waters; and, to slake that elegant thirst, a man is willing to become a sort of hydropathic Anacreon.

The young man who was reading the letter was dressed in deep mourning; having read and folded the three sheets, he was about to continue his walk, but was hindered by the approach and greetings of some of his fellow-visitors. It was now the hour when most of the patients came out to the spring to drink their quantum, and take a walk. Disconsolate and pinched were many of the faces, some old and yellow, others young and hectic, with forced smiles, clouded by a drawn look of suffering; and nothing was to be heard by way of conversation but an incessant flow of questions and answers as to every phase of illness, and manner of being ill.

But pathological small talk is altogether intolerable, and so the young man with the letter seemed to think, being himself on very good terms with Esculapius; for he turned off as if to leave the grounds. He was detained, however, by a party of three persons, two of whom were men of middle age and important appearance; nay, not without a certain dignity.

“Good-morning Leon,” said the youngest of the trio in a tone of confidential intimacy. “I saw you just now from my window, reading the usual three sheets.”

“What! friend Roch, up as early as ever,” cried the eldest who was also the least good-looking.

“Leon, my good fellow, choicest of souls—won’t you walk with us this morning?” said the tallest, a consequential personage, who was walking, as usual, between the other two, so that they looked as if they occupied their place on each side of him for purely ornamental purposes, and to throw his personal and social dignity into the strongest relief. The young man in mourning excused himself as best he might.

“I will return within an hour,” he said walking briskly away. “Au revoir.”

The other three went on along the promenade, and it will be proper here to give some account of this illustrious trio which formed, as the reader must understand, a constellation such as may be seen in Spain at any hour, in spite of the frequent cloudiness of our climate. The reader, like the writer, will of course say at once: We know them—let them pass and disappear. But then, they never disappear. This constellation never sets, is never dimmed by the radiance of the sun, never hidden behind a cloud, never in eclipse. It is always in the ascendant. Alas! yes, it never fails to shine with terrible splendour, and at the zenith of social life in Spain.

Who does not know the Marquis de FÚcar? Flattery speaks of him as an Oasis of Wealth in the midst of the desert of universal poverty; he holds the first place among the stars of the Spanish capital, and is the very Alpha of the society he moves in.

Who, again, does not know Don JoaquÍn OnÉsimo, that beacon light of Spanish bureaucracy, which burns so brightly wherever it shows itself, the central glory of the myriad OnÉsimos who, under different pretexts, fill various offices of the State? “Not a family, but an epidemic,” was said of the OnÉsimos. But there is no doubt whatever—Heaven knows—that if this luminary were to be extinguished, all the precincts of the administration would remain in darkness, and all social order, social institutions—nay, society itself, would revert to primÆval chaos. The third side of this triangle was formed by a polished and well-dressed man, in whose pallid and languid features all the freshness and energy of his two and thirty years seemed prematurely quenched. His manners were insolent, and his whole aspect gave that impression of exhaustion and fatigue which is common enough in those who have wasted their moral strength in politics, their intellect in party journalism, and their physical vigour in vice. The type is peculiar to Spain, and to Madrid—nocturnal in its habits, perfervid, lean; the very incarnation of that national fever which betrays its burning and devouring heat in night work over newspapers, in gambling-houses where the lamps are put out only when the sun rises, in twilight rendezvous, and in mysterious meetings in the corridors of theatres, in the corners of cafÉs and in Minister’s offices. Such a specimen looks strangely out of place in this pure clear atmosphere, under these gigantic trees. It might almost be supposed that he would feel uncomfortable at such a distance from the dens of corruption and wickedness, that there could be no corner in his heart for the glories and graces of Nature, nor a perception of its beauties in his dulled eyes, with their red and swollen lids, heavy and bleared with late hours.

Federico Cimarra—the young man in question—Don JoaquÍn OnÉsimo, who expected ere long to rejoice in the title of MarquÉs de OnÉsimo, and Don Pedro FÚcar, MarquÉs de Casa-FÚcar, after having paced the avenue two or three times, sat down.