The Spaniard ended his story on such a casual note that for the first moment I hardly took it in. But when I did I was profoundly shocked.
‘Barbarous,’ I said. ‘It was just cold-blooded murder.’
My host got up.
‘You’re talking nonsense, my young friend. Don Pedro did the only thing he could do in the circumstances.’
I left Seville next day, and from then till now have never been able to discover the name of the man who told me this strange story. I have often wondered whether the lady I saw, the lady with the pale face and the lock of white hair, was the unhappy Soledad.
The poet
I AM NOT much interested in the celebrated and I have never had patience with the passion that afflicts so many to shake hands with the great ones of the earth. When it is proposed to me to meet some person distinguished above his fellows by his rank or his attainments, I seek for a civil excuse that may enable me to avoid the honour; and when my friend Diego Torre suggested giving me an introduction to Santa Aña I declined. But for once the excuse I made was sincere; Santa Aña was not only a great poet but also a romantic figure and it would have amused me to see in his decrepitude a man whose adventures (in Spain at least) were legendary; but I knew that he was old and ill and I could not believe that it would be anything but a nuisance to him to meet a stranger and a foreigner. Calisto de Santa Aña was the last descendant of the Grand School; in a world unsympathetic to Byronism he had led a Byronic existence and he had narrated his hazardous life in a series of poems that had brought him a fame unknown to his contemporaries. I am no judge of their value, for I read them first when I was three-and-twenty and then was enraptured by them; they had a passion, a heroic arrogance and a multi-coloured vitality that swept me off my feet, and to this day, so intermingled are those ringing lines and haunting cadences with the charming memories of my youth, I cannot read them without a beating heart. I am inclined to think that Calisto de Santa Aña deserves the reputation he enjoys among the Spanish-speaking peoples. In those days his verses were on the lips of all young men and my friends would talk to me endlessly of his wild ways, his vehement speeches (for he was a politician as well as a poet), his incisive wit, and his amours. He was a rebel and sometimes an outlaw, daring and adventurous; but above all he was a lover. We knew all about his passion for this great actress or that divine singer – had we not read till we knew them by heart the burning sonnets in which he described his love, his anguish, and his wrath? – and we were aware that an infanta of Spain, the proudest descendant of the Bourbons, having yielded to his entreaties, had taken the veil when he ceased to love her. When the Philips, her royal ancestors, tired of a mistress she entered a convent, for it was unfitting that one whom the King had loved should be loved by another, and was not Calisto de Santa Aña greater than any earthly king? We applauded the lady’s romantic gesture; it was creditable to her and flattering to our poet.
But all this took place many years ago and for a quarter of a century Don Calisto, disdainfully withdrawing from a world that had nothing more to offer, had lived in seclusion in his native town of Ecija. It was when I announced my intention of going there (I had been spending a week or two in Seville) not because of him, but because it is a charming little Andalusian town with associations that endear it to me, that Diego Torre offered me this introduction. It appeared that Don Calisto allowed the younger men of letters occasionally to visit him and now and then would talk to them with the fire that had electrified his hearers in the great days of his prime.
‘What does he look like now?’ I asked.
‘Magnificent.’
‘Have you a photograph of him?’
‘I wish I had. He has refused to face the camera since he was thirty-five. He says he does not wish posterity to know him other than young.’
I confess that I found this suggestion of vanity not a little touching. I knew that in early manhood he was of extraordinary beauty, and that moving sonnet of his written when he grew conscious that youth had for ever left him shows with what a bitter and sardonic pang he must have watched the passing of those looks that had been so fantastically admired.
But I refused my friend’s offer; I was quite satisfied to read once more the poems I had known so well and for the rest I preferred to wander about the silent and sunswept streets of Ecija in freedom. It was with some consternation therefore that on the evening of my arrival I received a note from the great man himself. Diego Torre had written to him of my visit, he said, and it would give him great pleasure if I would call on him at eleven next morning. In the circumstances there was nothing for me to do but to present myself at his house at the appointed hour.
My hotel was in the Plaza and on that spring morning it was animated, but as soon as I left it I might have walked in a deserted city. The streets, the tortuous white streets, were empty but for a woman in black now and then who returned with measured steps from her devotions. Ecija is a town of churches and you can seldom go far without seeing a crumbling façade or a tower in which storks have built their nests. Once I paused to watch a string of little donkeys pass by. Their red caparisons were faded and they carried I know not what in their panniers. But Ecija has been a place of consequence in its day and many of these white houses have gateways of stone surmounted by imposing coats of arms, for to this remote spot flowed the riches of the New World and adventurers who had gathered wealth in the Americas spent here their declining years. It was in one of these houses that Don Calisto lived and as I stood at the reja after pulling the bell, I was pleased to think that he lived in such a fitting style. There was a dilapidated grandeur about the massive gateway that suited my impression of the flamboyant poet. Though I heard the bell peal through the house no one answered it and I rang a second and then a third time: at last an old woman with a heavy moustache came to the gate.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
She had fine black eyes, but a sullen look, and I supposed that it was she who took care of the old man. I gave her my card.
‘I have an appointment with your master.’
She opened the iron gateway and bade me enter. Asking me to wait she left me and went upstairs. The patio was pleasantly cool after the street. Its proportions were noble and you surmised that it had been built by some follower of the conquistadores; but the paint was tarnished, the tiles on the floor broken, and here and there great flakes of plaster had fallen away. There was about everything an air of poverty but not of squalor. I knew that Don Calisto was poor. Money had come to him easily at times but he had never attached any importance to it and had spent it profusely. It was plain that he lived now in a penury that he disdained to notice. In the middle of the patio was a table with a rocking-chair on each side of it, and on the table newspapers a fortnight old. I wondered what dreams occupied his fancy as he sat there on the warm summer nights, smoking cigarettes. On the walls under the colonnade were Spanish pictures, dark and bad, and here and there stood an ancient dusty bargueno and on it a mended lustre plate. By the side of a door hung a pair of old pistols, and I had a pleasant fancy that they were the weapons he had used when in the most celebrated of his many duels, for the sake of Pepa Montañez the dancer (now, I suppose, a toothless and raddled hag), he had killed the Duke of Dos Hermanos.
The scene, with its associations which I vaguely divined, so aptly fitted the romantic poet that I was overcome by the spirit of the place. Its noble indigence surrounded him with a glory as great as the magnificence of his youth; in him too there was the spirit of the old conquistadores, and it was becoming that he should finish his famous life in that ruined and magnificent house. Thus surely should a poet live and die. I had arrived cool enough and even somewhat bored at the prospect of my meeting, but now I began to grow a trifle nervous. I lit a cigarette. I had come at the time appointed and wondered what detained the old man. The silence was strangely disturbing. Ghosts of the past thronged the silent patio and an age dead and gone gained a sort of shadowy life for me. Th
e men of that day had a passion and a wildness of spirit that are gone out of the world for ever. We are no longer capable of their reckless deeds or their theatrical heroics.
I heard a sound and my heart beat quickly. I was excited now and when at last I saw him coming slowly down the stairs I caught my breath. He held my card in his hand. He was a tall old man and exceedingly thin, with a skin the colour of old ivory; his hair was abundant and white, but his bushy eyebrows were dark still; they made his great eyes flash with a more sombre fire. It was wonderful that at his age those black eyes should still preserve their brilliance. His nose was aquiline, his mouth close-set. His unsmiling eyes rested on me as he approached and there was in them a look of cool appraisal. He was dressed in black and in one hand held a broad-brimmed hat. There was in his bearing assurance and dignity. He was as I should have wished him to be and as I watched him I understood how he had swayed men’s minds and touched their hearts. He was every inch a poet.
He had reached the patio and came slowly towards me. He had really the eyes of an eagle. It seemed to me a tremendous moment, for there he stood, the heir of the great old Spanish poets, the magnificent Herrera, the nostalgic and moving Fray Luis, Juan de la Cruz, the mystic, and the crabbed and obscure Góngora. He was the last of that long line and he trod in their steps not unworthily. Strangely in my heart sang the lovely and tender song which is the most famous of Don Calisto’s lyrics.
I was abashed. It was fortunate for me that I had prepared beforehand the phrase with which I meant to greet him.
‘It is a wonderful honour, Maestro, for a foreigner such as I to make the acquaintance of so great a poet.’
A flicker of amusement passed through those piercing eyes and a smile for an instant curved the lines of that stern mouth.
‘I am not a poet, Señor, but a bristle merchant. You have made a mistake, Don Calisto lives next door.’
I had come to the wrong house.
The mother
TWO OR THREE people, hearing sounds of a quarrel in the patio, came out of their rooms and listened.
‘It’s the new lodger,’ said a woman. ‘She’s having a row with the porter who brought her things.’
It was a tenement house of two storeys, built round a patio, in a back street of La Macarena, which is the roughest quarter in Seville. The rooms were let to working men and the small functionaries with whom Spain is overrun, postmen, policemen, or tram-conductors, and the place swarmed with children. There were twenty families there. They squabbled and made it up; they chattered their heads off; they helped one another when help was needed; for the Andalusians are good-natured people, and on the whole they got on well enough together. One room had been for some time unlet. A woman had taken it that morning, and an hour later had brought her bits and pieces, carrying as much as she could herself, a gallego – the Galicians are the general porters of Spain – laden with the rest.
But the quarrel was growing more violent, and the two women above, on the first floor, anxious not to miss a word, leant over the balcony.
They heard the newcomer’s shrill voice raised in a torrent of abuse and the man’s sullen interjections. The two women nudged one another.
‘I shan’t go till you pay me,’ he kept on saying.
‘But I’ve paid you already. You said you’d do it for three reales.’
‘Never! You promised me four.’
They were haggling over rather less than twopence halfpenny.
‘Four reales for moving those few things? You’re crazy.’
She tried to push him away.
‘I shan’t go till you pay me,’ he repeated.
‘I’ll give you a penny more.’
‘I won’t take it.’
The dispute grew more and more noisy. The woman screamed at the porter and cursed him. She shook her fist in his face. At last he lost patience.
‘Oh, all right, give me the penny and I’ll go. I’m not going to waste time on a slut like you.’
She paid him, and the man, throwing down her mattress, left her. She flung a filthy word at him as he went. She came out of the room to drag the things in, and the two women in the balcony saw her face.
‘Carai, what an evil face! She looks like a murderess.’
A girl came up the stairs at that moment, and her mother called out: ‘Did you see her, Rosalia?’
‘I asked the gallego where she came from, he says he brought the things from Triana. She promised him four reales and then wouldn’t pay.’
‘Did he tell you her name?’
‘He didn’t know. But in Triana they called her La Cachirra.’
The vixen appeared again to fetch a bundle she had forgotten.
She glanced at the women in the balcony watching her unconcernedly, but said nothing. Rosalia shuddered.
‘She frightens me.’
La Cachirra was forty, haggard and very thin, with bony hands and fingers like a vulture’s claws. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin wrinkled and yellow. When she opened her mouth, with its pale, heavy lips, she showed teeth that were pointed like those of a beast of prey. Her hair was black and coarse; she wore it in a clumsy knot, which seemed on the point of falling over her shoulders, and in front of each ear fell a straight wisp. Her eyes, deep-set in their sockets, large and black, shone fiercely. Her face bore an expression of such ferocity that no one dared come near to speak with her. She kept entirely to herself. The curiosity of the neighbours was aroused. They knew she was very poor, for her clothes were wretched. She went out every morning at six and did not return till night; but they could not even find out how she earned her living. They urged a policeman who lived in the house to make inquiries.
‘As long as she doesn’t break the peace, I have nothing to do with her,’ said he.
But in Seville scandal travels quickly and in a few days a mason who lived in an upper room brought the news that a friend in Triana knew her story. La Cachirra had only come out of prison one month before, and she had spent seven years there – for murder. She had lodged in a house in Triana, but the children, finding out what had happened, threw stones at her and called her names; and she, turning upon them with foul words and with blows, had filled the whole place with such tumult that the landlord gave her notice. Cursing him and all who had turned her out, La Cachirra one morning suddenly disappeared.
‘And whom did she murder?’ asked Rosalia.
‘They say it was her lover,’ replied the mason.
‘She can never have had one,’ said Rosalia, with a laugh of scorn.
‘Santa Maria!’ cried Pilar, her mother, ‘I hope she won’t kill any of us. I said she looked like a murderess!’
Rosalia, shivering, crossed herself. At that moment La Cachirra came in from her day’s work and a sudden oppression fell upon the talkers. They made a movement as if to huddle together and looked nervously at the wild-eyed woman. She seemed to see something ominous in their silence and gave them a rapid, suspicious glance. The policeman, to make conversation, bade her good evening.
‘Buena sera,’ she replied, with a scowl, and, passing quickly into her room, slammed the door.
They heard her lock it. The evil, sullen eyes had cast a gloom over them and they talked in whispers as if under a mischievous spell.
‘She has the devil in her,’ said Rosalia.
‘I’m glad you’re here to protect us, Manuel,’ added her mother to the policeman.
But La Cachirra seemed indisposed to give trouble. She went her way, unbending, never addressing so much as a word to anyone, and brusquely cut short every attempt at friendliness. She felt that the neighbours had discovered her secret, the homicide and the long years of imprisonment; and the lines in her face grew sterner, the expression of her deep-set eyes more inhuman. But gradually the anxiety she had caused was dispelled. Even the garrulous Pilar ceased to pay attention to the silent gaunt figure who occasionally passed through the group sitting in the patio.
‘I dare say the prison has sent her mad,
they say it often does.’
But one day an event occurred to revive the gossip. A youth came to the reja – the wrought-iron gate that serves as front door to the Sevillan house – and asked for Antonia Sanchez. Pilar, who was mending a skirt in the patio, looked up at her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.
‘No one of that name lives here,’ she said.
‘Yes, she does,’ the young man answered; then, after a pause: ‘They call her La Cachirra.’
‘An!’ Rosalia opened the gate and pointed to the door. ‘She’s in there.’
‘Thank you.’
The youth gave her a smile. She was a pretty girl, with a high colour and fine bold eyes. A red carnation threw up the glossy blackness of her hair. Her breasts were full and the nipples were prominent under her blouse.
‘Blessed be the mother that bore you,’ he said, using a hackneyed phrase.
‘Vaya Usted con Dios, go you with God,’ answered Pilar.
He passed on and knocked at the door. The two women looked after him curiously.
‘Who can he be?’ asked Pilar. ‘La Cachirra’s never had a visitor before.’
There was no reply to his knocking, and he knocked again. They heard La Cachirra’s rasping voice ask who was there.
‘Madre!’ he cried. ‘Mother.’
There was a shriek. The door was burst open.
‘Currito!’
The woman threw her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately. She fondled him and with a loving gesture stroked his face with both her hands. The girl and her mother who watched would never have thought her capable of such tenderness. At last, with little sobs of joy, she dragged him into her room.
‘He’s her son,’ said Rosalia, with surprise. ‘Who’d have thought it! And a fine fellow like that.’
Currito had a lean face and white, even teeth; his hair was cut very close, shaved on the temples, and set on the scalp with a truly Andalusian perfection. The shadow of his precocious beard showed blue beneath his brown skin. And of course he was a dandy. He had the national love of fine clothes, and his trousers were skin-tight; his short jacket and his frilled shirt were as new as new could be. He wore a broad-brimmed hat.