Mayflower, page 4
Then it was, some two years after Tonet had gone away, that the big surprise occurred. Dolores, gran diós! and the Rector, were getting married. The Cabañal sat up nights discussing the overwhelming piece of news. And she did the proposing, I'll have you know! And people added other spicy bits of information that kept the laughing going. Tona talked more picturesquely than she had ever talked before. So Her Royal Highness of the Horseshoe, that wench of a teamster's daughter, was getting into the family, as she had always meant to do! Well, that Queen Virtuous knew which side her bread was buttered on. Just what she needed—a husband with a thick skull and nothing inside it, who would be able to work like a cart-horse from morning till night. The pickpocket! Just like her to steal the only man in the family that could earn a cent!
But then suddenly Tona thought of something, and she broke off her tirade. Better let them get married! That simplified the situation and favored her own plans. Tonet would now take Rosario! Though it was hard to swallow it all, she consented even to attend the wedding and say filla mehua to that scheming hussy who changed her men as she changed her clothes!
But what would Tonet say, what would Tonet do, when he heard the glad tidings? That was something to worry about, because everybody remembered the kind of temper he had when he got angry. So another surprise was due when the boy wrote back that everything was all right and that he was glad of it. Been away so long, you see, new faces, new places! That, doubtless, was why he found it so natural that Dolores should take a husband, since she had no one else to fall back on. Besides,—and this is what Tonet himself said—it was better for her to marry his brother than run any risk on some one else; and the Rector was a good sort, too.
And the sailor showed himself just as reasonable when he turned up in the Cabañal one evening, with his discharge papers in his pocket and his bundle of clothes slung over his shoulder, surprising everybody with the fine appearance he made and with the reckless way he threw money around from the back pay he had just collected. Dolores he greeted affectionately as a sister he was fond of. Oh, that? What the devil! Don't even think of that! It was all right, all right! He had not been having a bad time himself on his trip around the world! And, in the midst of the popularity he was enjoying as a returned hero, Tonet seemed to forget all about Dolores and the Rector.
In front of the door of tio Paella's old place, now occupied by Pascualet, the villagers would sit in the open air all night sometimes, on low stools or on the ground, listening open-mouthed while the sailor told about the countries he had visited, embroidering his adventures with harmless embellishments to rouse greater thrills in his simple-minded audience. As compared with the uncouth fishermen they knew, dull and stupid from the routine of daily toil, or with the stevedores he used to work with in Valencia, Tonet looked like an aristocrat to the girls of the Cabañal, with his palish-dark face, his carefully curled mustache, his hands clean and well manicured, his hair sleek and neatly brushed with a parting in the middle and—pasted down on his forehead—two cowlicks just visible under a silk cap!
Siñá Tona, for her part, was quite satisfied with her boy. As much of a scamp as ever, but he had himself more in hand, and it was evident that the navy discipline had done him good. The same old Tonet, but he had been taught to dress better and cleaner, and he could drink without drinking too much. A dandy still, but not sure to be getting into jail every other minute, and less bent on venting the caprices of a law-breaking daredevil than on satisfying the selfish cravings of a rake!
Proof of such progress was that he now took kindly to his mother's suggestions. Marry Rosario? No objection! Good girl, and a penny or two, that would be just the thing for a man of ideas, and the brains to carry them out. Money, after all, was what he needed. You couldn't expect a fellow fresh from the Royal Navy to go back to lugging bags and boxes on a wharf! Anything but that! And to siñá Tona's unbounded delight, Tonet took Rosario to wife.
Everything went finely. That was a handsome pair now, wasn't it?—a tiny little thing, Rosario, timid, obedient, believing in her husband as she believed in God; and Tonet, proud of his good luck, carrying himself as stiffly as if, under his flannel shirt, he had a coat-of-mail, made of his wife's silver dollars, dispensing favors to right and left, living like a village squire, smoking his pipe all afternoon and evening in the tavern, and sporting long rubber boots on days when it rained!
Dolores showed no trace of emotion in the presence of her former sweetheart—only in her domineering eyes one might have seen an intenser sparkle, a glint of golden fire,—telltale evidence of yearnings unconfessed. And a happy year went rapidly by. But the money which penny by penny had been painfully assembled in the wretched store where Rosario had been born, streamed away between the fingers of the spendthrift husband; and the cow was running dry, as the mistress of the tavern-boat observed to her son one day, in a lecture on prodigality.
Along with poverty, discord, tears, and finally the flying fist entered Tenet's house. Rosario joined the neighbors on the beach and began to dirty her hands on the slimy fish baskets. Falling from her high estate as heiress and lady she became a fish-woman, one of the poorest and hardest-working followers of that soul-killing trade. She was up now every morning shortly after midnight, waiting on the shore with her feet in the puddles, drawing a frayed and threadbare shawl about her shivering body, when the storms blew. All the way to Valencia she would go on foot carrying that back-breaking load of fish, and it would be dark again by the time she got home, faint with hunger and fatigue, but happy withal because her lord and master could still live the life of a gentleman without any humiliations to translate into swear-words and beatings. That Tonet might pass his night in the café, swapping stories with engineers from the steamers or skippers from the fishing boats, she would, many a time in the Fishmarket in town, stifle the hunger that gripped her at sight of the cups of steaming chocolate and the breaded chops her companions were busy with at the tables in their stalls.
The important thing was to keep her idol appeased, an idol so quick to wrath, so prone to curse the rotten marriage he had made. He had to have his peseta for the night's session at coffee and dominoes. He had to have his square meal and his flashy flannel shirts. He had a reputation to keep up. And so long as he had what he wanted, the poor little wife, thinner and more peaked every day, found all her struggles well worth while, cost her what it might. She was an old woman before thirty, but she could boast of exclusive proprietorship of the handsomest buck in the Cabañal.
Privation brought them closer to the Rector's household, which, while they were going down and down, was going up and up, on the wings of prosperity. Brothers have to stand together in hard luck. Of course! And Rosario, though much against her inner preferences, went to see Dolores often, and accepted a renewal of intimate friendship between her husband and his sister-in-law. She was worried, but there must not be an open quarrel. The Rector would get mad; and he it was who kept them going on weeks when no fish came in, or when the village dandy found nothing to get a commission on as go-between in one of the little business deals that feature life in a seaport town. But the moment came when the two women, deadly enemies underneath, could pretend cordiality no longer. Four years after her marriage, Dolores was at last able to announce the coming of an heir to the Rector's fortune; and the Rector, with a silly smile on his moon-face, advertised the auspicious event on every hand—and all his acquaintances were delighted, though they smiled with a sly wink he did not notice. No one really knew, to be sure. But funny, wasn't it! That rather deliberate decision of Dolores corresponded strangely with the time Tonet had become a less frequent visitor to the café and had begun to spend more of his time in his brother's house.
The two women now spoke their minds with the savage frankness of their station. The breach between them became permanent. Tonet kept going to the Rector's place, but alone; and that made Rosario very angry, and the quarrels in her home now ended always in ferocious cudgelings. And the time came when Rosario began to say openly that the baby looked like Tonet. Her husband meanwhile stuck closer than ever to the Rector, who had revived his old fondness for his younger brother, letting himself be sponged on in spite of his tight-fistedness. The pretty daughter of tio Paella poked biting fun at that wreck she had for a sister-in-law, that old hen, quite passée, poor as a rat, a mere day laborer of the meanest kind, who couldn't hang on to the man she had married! Tonet, in fact, as in earlier days, was again following Dolores around like an obedient dog, sitting up when he was told to sit up, and charging when he was told to charge.
A withering blast of relentless hatred, of flaying jest and stinging insolence, swept from the old home of tio Paella, now repainted and with a new ell, toward the wretched tumble-down shack where Rosario had finally taken refuge in her penury. And well-meaning busybodies, with the holiest good-will toward both, kept telling what Rosario had said about Dolores and what Dolores had said about Rosario, taking care that every apostrophe should reach its destination and receive its fit reply.
When Rosario, flaming with anger and weeping from sheer despair, would simply have to tell some one of her troubles, she would go off to the tavern-boat, which, like its mistress, was also aging rapidly with the years. There she would be listened to in silence, with an expression of sorrow, or a shake of the head from siñá Tona and Roseta, who were living on in sullen antipathy toward one another in spite of their relationship, agreeing only on one thing, that men were beneath contempt. The old hulk, that served them as lair, was a sort of vantage point from which they were able to follow the war between the two families.
"Men! Men! What fleas!" siñá Tona would say, with a glance at the picture of the patrolman, who seemed to be the presiding genius of the place. "Men! Crooks every one of them, not worth the rope to hang them with!" And Roseta, with her big bright sea-green eyes—the eyes of a virgin who knows all about the world and is quite sure of herself—would murmur for once approvingly: "And those who are not scamps like Tonet are like the Rector—puddingheads!"
Chapter III
A Family enterprise
Though spring had not yet come, the sun was so hot, that day, that the Rector and Tonet, to talk things over down on the beach, had sought out the shade of an old boat drawn up high and dry on the sand. There would be plenty of time to get their tan on when they got out to sea. The two men talked slowly and sleepily as if the glare and the heat along shore had gone to their heads. A real day, come now! Who would have thought Easter was still a week away, when, usually, there were squalls all the time and sudden tempests.
The sky, overflowing with sunlight, had a whitish sheen. A few silver clouds were lazily drifting along like handfulls of foam scattered hap-hazard over the expanse of heaven; and from the heated sands a damp radiation was shimmering, giving tremulous, hazy outlines to objects in the distance. Nothing was going on along the beach itself. The casa del bòus, where the launching oxen were idly chewing their cud, rose with its red roof and its blue trimmings, over long lines of boats drawn up on shore to make a sort of nomad city with streets and cross roads, much like a Greek encampment of the Heroic Age, when the triremes were used for entrenchments. The lateen masts, gracefully tilted forward, with their points blunt and fat, looked like a forest of headless lances. The tarred ropes twined and intertwined like lichens and vines. Under the big sails, which had been lowered to the decks, a whole people of amphibians was swarming,—red legs bare and caps pulled down over ears—repairing nets or tending galley fires where fish were frying with appetizing fragrance. The hulls, of wide bilge, painted white or blue, stretched away along the glaring shore, like big-bellied sailors lying on their backs and taking the sun.
In this improvised city, which might, before the night was over, be broken up and scattered to the four winds beyond the girdling horizon, the order and symmetry of a modern town laid out by a surveyor could have been discerned. In the front line, nearest the waves which rippled in like thin blades of crystal over the spangled sand, were the little boats, the trollers, al volantí, tiny spry craft that looked like chicks of the heavy boats lying, in the row behind, in pairs of the same size and color—barcas del bòu. In the third file, the retired veterans of the shore, old hulks, their sides wide open, their worm-eaten ribs showing through the black gaps, reminded one of the decrepit nags used in the bull ring, and lay meditating, it seemed, on the ingratitude of men who do so little for deserving old age.
Rust-colored nets, with flannel shirts and trousers of yellow baize, were strung along most of the masts; and above this array of color, some gulls, apparently drunk with sunshine, were leisurely planing in wide circles, occasionally dropping for a moment into the sea, where the water was shivering and seething in blebs of light under the high noon.
The Rector was talking about the weather, letting his yellowish eyes wander sleepily and placidly over the sea and down the coast. Along the green horizon line some pointed sails dotted the sky like wings of doves that might have been drinking off there. The shore at this point receded, forming a bight in the land, with masses of green and clusters of white cottages alternating along the coast. Here were the hills of the Puig, big swellings in the low-lying strand, which the sea sometimes swept over in its angry moods. And there was the castle of Sagunto, its wavy ramparts curling up and down along the summit of the ridge of caramel brown. Beyond that, and closing the horizon shoreward, was the saw-toothed Cordillera, with ripples of red granite, its unmoving crests reaching up to lap the sky like tongues.
Yes, the good weather had come early that year! You could take it from the Rector! Everybody from the Cabañal knew that, in such matters, he had inherited from his master, tio Borrasca, an instinct that never failed. A puff or two next week, a bit of chop, but nothing much! The stormy season was over ahead of time, thank heaven, and a fellow could earn an honest day's pay without fear of putting to sea.
The Rector talked drawlingly, biting at a black "cardoon" from a smuggler's stock, his whole being swallowed up in the majestic slumber of the shore. Above the peaceful lulling whispers of the sea, the voice of a girl came from far away, up from under the ground, it seemed, chanting the monotonous cadence of a hoisting song: Oh … oh … isa! and a number of boys would tug at the mast they were stepping, pulling all together at the proper beat in the sleepy rhythm. It was dinner time; and tangle-haired women kept calling in shrill notes from the galley doors; for the "cats" were off gadding in the barn, looking at the oxen. In every direction the heavy mallets of calkers could be heard hammering away in deadening regularity. And all these noises evaporated, as it were, into the vast, light-filled calm, where sounds and things took on outlines of fantastic indistinctness.
Tonet studied his brother's face expectantly, waiting for that phlegmatic fellow, to whom words came so hard, to finish formulating his proposal.
At last the Rector came to the point. In two words, he was tired of making money penny by penny and day by day. He wanted to make a killing as so many others had done. There was a living in the sea for any man. Some people ate bread black, after sweating for it; others took it white and without the crust, for a moment's work—but risking something! You get the idea, eh, Tonet!
But the Rector did not wait for Tenet's reply. He got up and walked to the bow of the old boat, to see if any one were eavesdropping on the other side.
Not a soul! The beach was deserted as far as the eye could see, away along to the bath-houses at the resort, where the Valencians came to play in summer. Beyond lay the harbor, prickly with masts from the shipping, and flags everywhere, a maze of cross-trees and yards, red and black smokestacks and cranes that looked like gibbets. Seaward stretched the Breakwater, a cyclopean wall of red bowlders heaped up in confusion to make a lee on that storm-swept shore. As background to the whole scene, the tall buildings of the Grao, warehouses, office buildings,—the aristocracy and money of the port; and then a long straight line of roofs, the Cabañal, the Cañamelar, the Cap de Fransa, a rambling agglomeration of many colored houses, less close together as they left the water, summer places in front with many stories and slender cupolas, white cabins behind, where the farm land began, the thatched coverings of the huts rumpled by the strong sea winds.
There were no spies around. The Rector sat down again at his brother's side.
His wife had put the idea into his head. He had thought it over carefully, and come to the conclusion it was a good one. A trip "across the way," as people remembered his father used to say, over to the costa d'afora, to Algiers! No fishing, you understand. Fish aren't always around when you need them most. No, not that! But a cargo of contraband, the boat crammed to the decks with alguilla and flor de mayo, God of Gods! There, rediel, was business for you! And that was what the old man had done a thousand times. Well, what did Tonet say?
The honest Rector, who would never have dreamed of breaking a town ordinance or a harbor rule, laughed like a saint in heaven at the thought of that haul of tobacco which for days and days had been dancing before his eyes, till now he could actually see the fragrant bundles standing there wrapped in burlap on the sand. He was a son of the Spanish coast, proud of the deeds of his ancestors. In his eyes smuggling was the one thing a self-respecting sailor could take up when he got tired of fishing.
Tonet thought it was a bright idea. He had made two trips like that, though as ordinary seaman. Now that business was dull on the wharves, and tio Mariano hadn't gotten him that job in the coast and harbor survey he had wanted so, there was no reason why he shouldn't go along with his brother.
The Rector rounded out the plan. The most important thing he had already—his own boat, la Garbosa. Tonet gasped with surprise, so the Rector enlarged further on that detail. Of course he realized the tub was broken amidships, the ribs strained, the deck warped and sagging in the middle—squeaking like an old guitar every time a sea went under her, ready for breaking up, about. But they hadn't fooled him, they hadn't fooled him! Thirty duros, he had paid, not a cent more. And the firewood in her was worth that much. But she would keep afloat under men who knew the taste of salt water. For his part, he could negotiate that pond in a shoe with the tap gone! Besides, you see,—and he gave a knowing wink—if the revenue people caught them and confiscated the boat—well, thirty duros! And that clinched the argument for the wily Rector. Not a thought of the chance he was taking with his life in such a sieve!
