Antoinette Ogden

From the Spanish of Pedro A. de AlarcÓn.

In a beautiful corner of Andalusia

Lies a smiling valley.

God bless it!

For in that valley

Have I friends, loves,

Brothers, parents.

(El LÁtigo.)

I.

A good many years ago, for I was then only seven, my father came to me in the twilight of a winter's day, when the three Ave Marias had been repeated to the sound of the church-bells, and said solemnly, "You need not go to bed with the chickens to-night, Pedro; you are a big boy now, and you ought to have supper with your parents and your older brothers. This is Christmas Eve."

I shall never forget the delight with which I heard these words. I was not going to bed until late! I cast a glance of commiseration and contempt upon my younger brothers, and instantly fell to composing a description, to be delivered at school on my return after Twelfth Night, of this my first adventure, my first lark, the first dissipation of my life.

II.

It was already las Ánimas,[1] as they say in our village.

Our village! Ninety leagues from Madrid, a thousand leagues from the world, nestling in a fold of the Sierra Nevada! I can almost fancy I see you, brothers, father, and mother!

A huge oak log whistled and crackled in the fireplace. We all sat together under the vault of the chimney. My two grandmothers, who spent that night with us, presiding over the household ceremonies, occupied the corner seats; my father and mother sat next to them, the rest of the place being occupied by the children and servants; for on such an occasion we all represented the home, and it seemed fitting that one fire should warm us all. I remember, however, that our men remained standing, and that our maids squatted or knelt. Their respectful humility forbade their occupying a chair. The cats slept in the centre of the circle, their tails turned to the fire. An occasional snowflake came fluttering down the chimney,—that elfin road,—and the wind moaned in the distance and spoke to us of the absent, the poor, the wayfarers. My father and my eldest sister played on the harp, and I accompanied them, to their distress, on a drum which I had contrived that very evening out of a broken water-jug.

Do you know the song of the Aguinaldos, which is sung in the villages that lie east of the Mulhacem? Well, that was the music that constituted the concert. The maid-servants took it upon themselves to render the vocal parts, and they sang couplets to this effect:—

And all was happiness and merry-making. Rusks, butter-cakes, pastes of nuts and honey, sweetmeats made by the nuns, rosoli, and cherry brandy were freely passed around. There was much talk of going to midnight Mass, to the Nativity play at dawn, to see the Bethlehem manger which we boys had constructed in the tower, and also of making sherbet out of the snow that carpeted the court.

Suddenly in the midst of all this merriment I was struck by the deep meaning of these words, sung by my paternal grandmother:—

In spite of my tender age this couplet chilled my heart. All the melancholy horizons of life seemed to have been unfolded before me in a flash. It was a burst of intuition, unnatural at my age; it was a miraculous prescience, the herald of the ineffable tedium of poetry; it was my first inspiration. I saw and understood at a glance, with marvellous lucidity, the inevitable fate of the three generations present. It occurred to me that my grandparents, my parents, and my brothers were like a marching army whose vanguard was stepping into the grave, while the rearguard had not yet left the cradle; and these three generations represented a century; and all past centuries had been alike, and ours would disappear as they had done, and so would the centuries unborn.

Such is the implacable monotony of time, the pendulum oscillating in space, the indifferent repetition of events, in contrast with the brevity of our pilgrimage in this world.

Horrible thought! Cruel sentence, the definite meaning of which was like a summons to me,—death beckoning me from the shadows of the future. Before my imagination a thousand Christmas Eves filed by, a thousand hearths were extinguished, a thousand families that had supped together ceased to exist,—other children, other joys, other songs, lost forever; the loves of my grandparents, their antiquated mode of dress, their remote youth, the memories thereof that crowded upon them; my parents' childhood, the first Christmas celebration in our home, all the happiness that had preceded me! Then I could imagine, I could foresee, a thousand more Christmas Eves recurring periodically and robbing us of our life and hope,—future joys in which we should not all take part together, my brothers scattered over the earth, my parents naturally dying before us, the twentieth century following upon the nineteenth! The live coals turned to ashes,—my vanished youth, my old age, my grave, my posthumous memory, then the complete oblivion of me, the indifference, the ingratitude of my grandchildren, living of my blood, and who would laugh and enjoy while the worms profaned the skull in which these very thoughts were now conceived.

The tears gushed from my eyes. I was asked why I was crying, and as I did not know or at least could not have defined the reason even to myself, my father concluded that I was sleepy, and I was accordingly sent to bed. Here was another motive for weeping, and so it happened that my first philosophical tears and my last childish ones were mingled. That night of insomnia which I spent listening to the joyous sounds of a celebration from which I had been excluded for being too much of a child, as my parents believed then,—or too much of a man, as I realize now,—was perhaps the bitterest of my life.

I must have fallen asleep at last, however, for I cannot remember whether the projects of going to midnight Mass, the Nativity play, and making sherbet out of the snow in the court fell through or not.

III.

Where is my childhood?

I feel as though I had just been relating a dream.

The world is wide, after all! My paternal grandmother, the one who sang the couplet, died a long time ago. On the other hand, my brothers have married and have children. My father's harp, unstrung and broken, has been thrown among the cast-off furniture. It has been many a Christmas Eve since I had supper at home. My village has disappeared from the ocean of my life like the islet which the mariner leaves behind him.

I am no longer the same Pedro, the child, that focus of ignorance, curiosity, and anguish trembling on the threshold of life. I am nothing short of a man, an inhabitant of Madrid, comfortably settled in life, proud of my independence as a bachelor, a novelist, and a volunteer in the great orphanage of the capital, with whiskers, debts, and loves.

When I compare myself now, my perfect freedom, my broad life, the immense scene of my operations, my early experience, standing as I do revealed, tuned like a grand piano on the night of a concert; when I compare myself with all my boldness, my ambitions, my contempts, with the little chap that played the drum fifteen years ago on Christmas Eve in a remote corner of Andalusia,—I smile, I even laugh aloud, with the feeling that it befits me, while my lonely heart sheds pure tears of infinite melancholy, which it carefully hides from view. Holy tears! May Providence frank you to the home where my father is growing old!

IV.

Well, what shall it be?—for, as the boys sing in the streets,—

Where shall I spend the evening? Fortunately I can choose; let me see.

This is the 24th of December, 1855. We are in Madrid. We know the waiters of all the cafÉs by name. We are hand in glove with the most applauded poets of the day, the demi-gods of provincial amateurs. We frequent theatres and see plays from the inside, as it were. The great actors and singers shake our hand behind the scenes. We penetrate into the editor's rooms and are initiated in the alchemy which produces newspapers. We have seen the type-setter's fingers stained with the lead of words, and the fingers of the author stained with the ink of thoughts. We have free access to one of the tribunes of Congress, credit at the hotels; there are social gatherings that appreciate us, and tailors that endure us.

We are happy! Our youthful ambition is satisfied. We can enjoy this night. We have conquered the world. Madrid is ours. Madrid is our home. A cheer for Madrid! And you, provincial youths, who at nightfall on an autumn day, sad and lonely, unearth and air your impotent longing for the capital,—you who feel yourselves to be poets, musicians, painters, orators, who despise your village, who will not speak to your parents, who weep with ambition and dream of suicide,—burst with envy, all of you, as we are now bursting with pleasure.

V.

Two hours have passed. It is nine o'clock. I have money; where shall I take supper? My friends, more fortunate than I, will smother their loneliness in the clamor of an orgy. "Night is of wine," they said to me only a few moments ago; but I would not be of them. It has been some time now since I crossed this red sea of youth dry-footed.

"Night is of tears," I said to them.

Those who compose our social gatherings are at the theatre. The people of Madrid celebrate the Nativity of our Lord by listening to the ranting of actors.

A few homes in which I am almost a stranger have offered me alms out of their domestic warmth in the form of an invitation to dinner,—for the old-fashioned supper has gone out of style. But I would not accept. That is not what I want. What I long for is the Paschal feast, the Christmas Eve supper, my home, my relatives, my traditions, my memories, the former joys of my soul, the religion that was taught me when I was a child.

VI.

Ah, Madrid is an inn. On a night like this we come to know what Madrid is. Our capital is a floating population, heterogeneous, exotic, which can only be compared to the population of a free port, of a jail, of an insane asylum. Travellers journeying toward a future, to the fantastic kingdom of ambition, halt here as well as those who are journeying back from misery, from crime.

Beauty comes here to marry, or to sell herself, the landed proprietor to squander his wealth, the literati for glory, the deputy to become a minister, the worthless man for a government office. The savant, the inventor, the comedian, the giant, the dwarf, the man with an anomaly in his soul or in his body, the monster with seven arms and three noses as well as the philosopher with double sight, the charlatan, the reformer, the man who creates melodies, and the man who counterfeits bank-notes,—all spend some period of their life in the great inn. Those who attain notoriety, those who find a purchaser, those who have grown rich at the expense of themselves, become in time the innkeepers, the landlords, the masters of Madrid, and forget the land of their birth. But we, the wayfarers, the lodgers,—we realize to-night that Madrid means exile, that Madrid is a bivouac, a prison, a purgatory. For the first time in the year we feel that neither the cafÉ, the theatre, the casino, nor the hotel is our house. More than that, we realize that our house is not our home.

VII.

The home—that sacred abode of the patriarch, of the Roman citizen, of the feudal lord, of the very Arab; the holy arch of the Penates, temple of hospitality, and altar of the family—has completely disappeared in our great modern centres. The home survives in the provinces alone. There our house is our own. In Madrid it is generally the landlord's. In the provinces our house shelters us for twenty, thirty, forty years at least. In Madrid one moves every month, or at least every year. Our home has a physiognomy of its own, which never varies, ever kindly and sympathetic. It grows old with us; it bears the impress of our lives; it preserves our footprints. In Madrid the exterior changes every leap year; the apartments are arrayed in new garments; that furniture is sold which our contact had consecrated. At home the whole edifice is ours: the grassy court, the poultry-yard filled with chickens, the high, cheery terraces, the deep well,—the children's terror,—the monumental tower, the broad cool, vine-covered summer-house. Here we occupy a half-flat, paper-lined, and divided into mean apartments, with no view of the sky, no sun, no air. There we have that neighborly affection, something between friendship and relationship, which binds together all the families of one street. Here the man who moves about noisily above our heads is unknown to us, neither do we know the man who dies beyond the partition of our alcove, and whose death-rattle disturbs our sleep. Our provincial home is a cluster of memories, of local attachments: here the room in which we were born, there the room where our brother died; here the empty hall in which we played as children, there the study in which we wrote our first verses. On the chapter of a column, in the trough of an old ceiling, swallows have built their nests, and every year the faithful couple fly over from Africa to hatch a new brood. In Madrid all this is unknown. And the hearth, that consecrated stone, cold in summer, cold in our absence, but warm and friendly during the happy winter evenings when all the children are brought together and grouped about the old people,—for the colleges have their vacations, the married daughters bring their little ones home on a visit, and the absent ones, the prodigal sons, come back to the heart of the family,—where, tell me, where is this hearth in the houses of the capital? Can we call a French mantel-piece, made of marble, bronze, and iron, a hearth, that which one can buy at a store, at wholesale or retail, and can even hire, if need be? The French mantel-piece is the symbol of home in a great city. People of Madrid, that is your hearth,—a hearth subject to the changes of fashion, a hearth which is sold when it is old, which can be moved from room to room, from street to street, and which can even be pawned in an emergency.

VIII.

I wandered through a street. Far above my head, from a high story, my grandmother's prophetic couplet floated down to me amid the shock of glasses, the rattle of dishes, and the merry laughter of girls.

"Here," thought I, "is a home, a hearth, with almond soup and a gilt-head, which I could buy for four dollars!" Just then a woman came up to me, begging. She had two children, one in her arms wrapped in her ravelled shawl, the other clinging to her hand. Both were crying; I thought the mother was crying too.

IX.

I do not know how I happen to be in this cafÉ. The clock strikes midnight, the hour when the Christ was born. I am here, alone, in a boisterous crowd. I have fallen to analyzing my life since I left my father's roof, and for the first time I am horror-stricken at the painful struggle of the poet in Madrid,—a struggle in which so much affection, so much peace, is sacrificed to a vain ambition.

I have watched the bards of the nineteenth century writing the local; I have watched the Muse, scissors in hand, making clippings; I have seen men who in other ages would have written a national epic busily patching up editorials to rehabilitate a party and earn fifty dollars a month.

Poor children of God! Poor poets! Antonio Trueba, to whom I dedicate this article, says,—

"I have found so many thorns on my journey that my heart aches, my soul aches!"

And so much for my present Christmas Eve!

Then I travel back, in thought, through the bygone years. I am surely missed at home to-night; and my mother shivers when the wind moans in the chimney, as though those moans were my dying sighs. And she says to the neighbors, "In such a year, when he was with us," or, "I wonder where he is now!"

Ah, I cannot bear this! I wave you a farewell from my soul, dear ones! I am ambitious; I am an ingrate, a bad brother, a bad son! How can I explain it? A supernatural force leads me on, whispering, "Thou shalt be!" The voice of damnation that spoke to me in my very cradle. And what, pray, am I to be, poor wretch that I am?

Ah, I do not want to go! I shall not go! I have struggled too hard to fail. I shall return. I will triumph in life and in death. Is there to be no compensation for the infinite anguish of my soul?

X.

It is very late, and that couplet of the dead still rings in my brain,—

"Yes, yes; other Christmas Eves will come," thought I, as a child; and I dreamed of the future and built castles in the air. I saw myself the centre of a family, as yet unborn, in the second twilight of life when the flowers of love come to fruit. That storm of love and tears which wrecks me now was passed; my head was at rest in the lap of patience, crowned with the melancholy flowers of the last, true affections. I was a husband, a father, the support of a home, of a family.

The flame of an unknown hearth sparkled in the distance, and in its vacillating light I saw strange beings that made me throb with pride; they were my sons. Then I wept, and I closed my eyes to prolong the vision of that reddish light and the prophetic apparition of the unborn. The grave was near; my locks were gray. But what of that? Would not half of my life remain in these children of love? Would not half of my soul remain with their mother? In vain did I try to recognize this wife, who was to share the twilight of my life. This future companion whom God holds for me sat with her back to me. I could not see her face. I looked for the reflection of her features in the faces of my sons, but the light from the hearth began to fail.

When it was out I still saw her, because I felt the warmth of her in my soul. I murmured:

And I was asleep, perhaps dead.