Marianela 6

Marianela 6

The family thus being disposed of, the parents sat up for a while in

the living-room, and while Centeno, seating himself with a stretch

close to the little table and taking up a newspaper, made a series of

grimaces to convey his bold intention of reading it, his wife took a

stocking full of money out of the family chest, and after counting it

and adding or taking out a few pieces, carefully restored it to its

place. Then she took out sundry paper packets containing gold pieces

and transferred some from one parcel to another. Meanwhile such remarks

as these were made. "Mariuca's petticoat cost thirty-two _reales_.

I gave Tanasio the six _reales_ he had to pay. We only want eleven

_duros_[2] to make up the five hundred."

 

Or, on the other hand:

 

"The deputies agreed."--"Yesterday a conference was held, etc...."

 

Señana's fingers did her sums, while her husband's forefinger passed

doubtfully and waveringly along the lines, to guide his eye and mind

through the labyrinth of letters. And these sentences gradually died

away into monosyllables; one yawned, then the other, and at last all

sunk into silence, after extinguishing the lamp by which the overseer

of the mules had been cultivating his mind.

 

One night, when all was quiet, a creaking of baskets became audible

in the kitchen. It was not perfectly dark there, for the shutters of

the little window were never shut, and Celipin Centeno, who was not

yet asleep, saw the topmost baskets, which were packed one inside the

other, rising slowly like a gaping oyster-shell, and out of the opening

peeped the nose and black eyes of Nela.

 

"Celipin," she said, "Celipinillo, are you asleep?" and she put a hand

out.

 

"No, I am awake; Nela, you look like a mussel in its shell. What do you

want?"

 

"Here, take this, it is a _peseta_[3] that a gentleman gave me this

evening--the brother of Don Cárlos. How much have you got now? This is

something like a present; now I have given you something better than

coppers!"

 

"Give it here and thank you very much, Nela," said the boy, sitting up

to reach the money. "You have given me nearly thirty-two _reales_ now,

a copper at a time.[4] I have it all safe here, inside my shirt, in the

little bag you gave me. You are a real good girl."

 

"I do not want money for anything; but take good care of it, for

if Señana were to find it, she would think you would get into some

mischief with it and thrash you with the big stick."

 

"No, no, it is not to get into mischief," said the boy vehemently, and

clenching the money to his breast with one hand, while he supported

himself on the other. "It is to make myself a rich man, Nela, a clever

man like some I know. On Sunday, if they will let me go to Villamojada,

I must buy a spelling-book to learn to read, although they will not

teach me here. Who cares! I will learn by myself. Do you know, Nela,

they say that Don Cárlos is the son of a man who swept the streets in

Madrid, and he, all by himself, learnt everything he knows."

 

"And so you think you can do the same, noodle."

 

"I believe you! If father will not take me away from these confounded

mines, I will find some other way; ah! you shall see what sort of a

man I am. I was never meant for that Nela. You just wait till I have

collected a good sum, and then you will see--you will see how I will

find a place in the town there, or take the train to Madrid, or a

steamboat to carry me over to the islands out there, or get a place as

a servant to some one who will let me study."

 

"Dear Mother of Heaven!" exclaimed Nela, opening her oyster-shell still

wider and putting out her whole head. "How quiet you have kept all

these sly plans."

 

"Do you take me for a fool? I tell you what Nela, I am in a mad rage.

I cannot live like this; I shall die in the mines. Drat it all! Why,

I spend my nights in crying, and my hands are all knocked to pieces

and--but do not be frightened, Nela, at what I am going to say, and do

not think me wicked--I would not say it to any other living soul...."

 

"Well?"

 

"I do not love father and mother--not as I ought."

 

"Oh! if you say such things I will never give you another _real_.

Celipin, for God's sake, think of what you are saying."

 

"I cannot help it. Why, just look how we go on here. We are not

human beings, we are brutes. Sometimes I almost think we are less

than the mules, and I ask myself if I am in any way better than a

donkey--fetching a basket of the ore and pitching it into a truck;

shoving the truck up to the furnaces; stirring the mineral with a stick

to wash it!--Oh dear, oh dear!" ... and the hapless boy began to sob

bitterly. "Drat--drat it all! but if you spend years upon years in work

like this, you are bound to go to the bad at last, your very brains

turn to iron-stone.--No, I was never meant for this. I tell my father

to let me go away and learn something, and he answers that we are poor,

and that I am too full of fancies.--We are nothing, nothing but brutes

grinding out a living day by day.--Why do you say nothing?"

 

But Nela did not answer--perhaps she was comparing the boy's hard lot

with her own, and finding her own much the worse of the two.

 

"What do you want me to say?" she replied at last. "I can never be any

good to any one--I am nobody. I can say nothing to you.... But do not

think such wicked things--about your father I mean."

 

"You only say so to comfort me; but you know quite well it is true, and

I do believe you are crying."

 

"I ... no."

 

"Yes, you are, I am sure."

 

"Every one has something to cry for," said María in a broken voice.

"But it is very late, Celipin; we must go to sleep."

 

"No indeed, not if I know it!"

 

"Yes, child; go to sleep and do not think of such miserable things.

Good-night."

 

The shell closed and all was silent.

 

We hear a great deal said about the hard and narrow materialism of

cities, a dry rot which, amid all the splendor and pleasures of

civilization, eats into the moral cohesion of society; but there is

a worse and deeper disease; the parochial materialism of country

villages--which ossifies millions of living beings, crushes every

noble ambition in their souls and shuts them into the petty round of a

mechanical existence, reducing them to the meanest animal instincts.

There are many more blatant evils in the social order as, for instance,

speculation, usury, the worship of mammon among men of high culture;

but above all these, broods a monster which secretly and silently

ruins more than all else, and that is the greed of the peasant. The

covetous peasant acknowledges no moral law, has no religion, no clear

notions of right and wrong; they are all inextricably mixed up in his

mind with a strange compound of superstition and calculating avarice.

Behind an air of hypocritical simplicity, there lies a sinister

arithmetic which, for keenness and intelligibility, far transcends the

methods of the best mathematicians. A peasant who has taken a fancy to

hoard copper coin, and dreams of changing it presently into silver and

then the silver into gold, is the most ignoble creature in creation; he

is capable of every form and device of malice known to man, combined

with an absence of feeling that is appalling. His soul shrinks and

shrivels till it is nothing more than a minim measure. Ignorance,

coarseness, and squalor complete the abominable compound and deprive it

of all the means of veiling the desolation within. He can only count on

his fingers, but he is capable of reducing to figures all moral sense,

conscience and the soul itself.

 

Señana and Centeno, who, after many struggles, had contrived to earn

their "morsel of bread" in the mines of Socartes, were able to make,

with the added toil of their four children, a daily wage which they

would have regarded as a princely fortune in the days when they

wandered from fair to fair selling pots and pipkins. It should be

mentioned with regard to the intellectual powers of Centeno, that

his head, in the opinion of many persons, rivalled the steam-hammer

in the workshops for sheer hardness; with no disparagement to that

of dame Ana, his wife, who seemed to be a woman of much prudence and

discrimination, and who governed her household as carefully as the

wisest prince could govern his dominions. She bagged the wages, earned

by her husband and children, with the best grace in the world, and they

amounted to a neat little sum; and each time the money was brought

home, she felt as if the very sacrament itself were being carried in,

so intense was her delight at the mere sight of coin.

 

Señana afforded her children very little comfort in return for the

fortune she was accumulating by the labor of their hands; however, as

they never complained of the utter and debasing misery in which they

lived, as they betrayed no wish for emancipation, nor for a breath of

any nobler life worthier of intelligent beings, Señana let the days

slip on. Many indeed had slipped away before her children slept in

beds, and many, many more before their brawny limbs were covered with

decent garments. She gave them regular and wholesome meals, following

in this respect the rules most in vogue; but eating in her house was a

melancholy ceremony nevertheless, a mere doling out of fodder, as it

were, to human animals.

 

So far as mental nourishment was concerned, Señana firmly believed

that her husband's erudition, acquired by much miscellaneous reading,

was amply sufficient to credit the whole family with learning, and for

that reason she forbore to cram the minds of her progeny even with the

amount of instruction which is given in schools. The elder ones helped

her, and the youngest lived free of pedagogues, buried alive for twelve

hours out of every twenty-four in brutalizing toil in the mines, so

that the whole family swam at large and at leisure in the vast and

stagnant ocean of dulness.

 

The two girls, Mariuca and Pepina, were not destitute of charms, though

youth and robust growth were the chief. One of them read fluently, but

not the other, and, so far as knowledge of the world was concerned, it

is easy to suppose that some rudimentary information, at least, was

not lacking to girls who lived with a perfect chorus of nymphs of all

ages and every grade of respectability--or the contrary--perpetually

employed in mechanical work which left their tongues free to wag.

Mariuca and Pepina were buxom and well grown, and as erect and strong

as Amazons. They wore short petticoats, displaying half the calf of the

leg which, as well as their broad feet, was bare, and their rough heads

might have supported an architrave as stoutly as those of Caryatides.

The russet dust of the iron ore which colored them from head to foot,

like all in the mines, gave them the appearance of massive figures in terra-cotta.