Youth and Egolatry Part 14

OUR HISTORY

Baroja is a hamlet in the province of Alava in the district of Penacerrada. According to Fernandez Guerra, it is an Iberian name derived from Asiatic Iberia. I believe that I have read in Campion that the word Baroja is compounded from the Celtic _bar_, meaning mountain, and the Basque _otza, ocha_ meaning cold. In short, a cold mountain.

The district of Penacerrada, which includes Baroja, is an austere land, covered with intricate mountain ranges which are clad with trees and scrub live oaks.

Hawks abound. In his treatise on falconry, Zuniga mentions the Bahari falcon, propagated princ.i.p.ally among the mountains of Penacerrada.

My ancestors originally called themselves Martinez de Baroja. One Martin had a son who was known as Martinez. This Martinez (son of Martin) doubtless left the village, and as there were others of the name Martinez (sons of Martin), they dubbed him the Martinez of Baroja, or Martinez de Baroja.

The Martinez de Barojas lived in that country for many years; they were hidalgos, Christians of old stock. And there is still a family of the name in Penacerrada.

One Martinez de Baroja, by name Juan, who lived in the village of Samiano, upon becoming outraged because of an attempt to force him to pay tribute to the Count of Salinas--in those days a very natural source of offence--took an appeal in the year 1616 from a ruling of the Prosecuting Attorney of His Majesty and the Alcaldes and Regidors of the Earldom of Trevino, and he was sustained by the Chamber of Hidalgos at Valladolid, which decided in his favour in a decree dated the eighth day of the month of August, 1619.

This same hidalgo, Juan Martinez de Baroja, moved the enforcement of this decree, as is affirmed by a writ of execution which is inscribed on forty-five leaves of parchment, to which is attached a leaden seal pendant from a cord of silk, at the end of which may be found the stipulations of the judgment entered against the Munic.i.p.ality and Corporation of the Town and Earldom of Trevino and the Village of Samiano.

The Martinez de Barojas, despite the fact that they sprang from the land of the falcon and the hawk, in temper must have been dark, heavy, rough.

They were members of the Brotherhood of San Martin de Penacerrada, which apparently was of great account in those regions, besides being regidors and alcaldes of the Santa Hermandad, a rural police and judicial organization which extended throughout the country.

In the eighteenth century, one of the family, my great-grandfather Rafael, doubtless possessing more initiative, or having more of the hawk in him than the others, grew tired of ploughing up the earth, and left the village, turning pharmacist, setting up in 1803 at Oyarzun, in Guipuzcoa. This Rafael shortened his name and signed himself Rafael de Baroja.

Don Rafael must have been a man of modern sympathies, for he bought a printing press and began to issue pamphlets and even occasional books.

Evidently Don Rafael was also a man of radical ideas. He published a newspaper at San Sebastian in 1822 and 1823, which he called _El Liberal Guipuzcoano_. I have seen only one copy of this, and that was in the National Library.

That this newspaper was extremely liberal, may be judged by the articles that were reprinted from it in _El Espectador_, the Masonic journal published at Madrid during the period. Don Rafael had connections both with const.i.tutionalists and members of the Gallic party. There must have been antecedents of a liberal character in our family, as Don Rafael's uncle, Don Juan Jose de Baroja, at first a priest at Pipaon and later at Vitoria, had been enrolled in the Basque _Sociedad Economica_.

Don Rafael had two sons, Ignacio Ramon and Pio. They settled in San Sebastian as printers. Pio was my grandfather.

My second family name, Nessi, as I have said before, comes out of Lombardy and the city of Como.

The Nessis of Como fled from Austrian rule, and came to Spain, probably peddling mousetraps and _santi boniti barati_.

One of the Nessis, who survived until a short time ago, always said that the family had been very comfortably off in Lombardy, where one of his relatives, Guiseppe Nessi, a doctor, had been professor in the University of Pavia during the eighteenth century, besides being major in the Austrian Army.

As mementos of the Italian branch of the family, I still preserve a few views of Lake Como in my house, a crude image of the Christ of the Annunziatta, stamped on cloth, and a volume of a treatise on surgery by Nessi, which bears the _imprimatur_ of the Inquisition at Venice.

VIII

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

SAN SEBASTIAN

I was born in San Sebastian on the 28th of December, 1872. So I am not only a Guipuzcoan but a native of San Sebastian. The former I regard as an honour, but the latter means very little to me.

I should prefer to have been born in a mountain hamlet or in a small coast town, rather than in a city of summer visitors and hotel keepers.

Garat, who was a most conventional person who lived in Bayonne, always used to maintain that he came from Ustariz. I might say that I am from Vera del Bidasoa, but I should not deceive myself.

There are several reasons why I dislike San Sebastian:

In the first place, the city is not beautiful, when it might well be so.

It is made up of straight streets which are all alike, together with two or three monuments that are horrible. The general construction is miserable and shoddy. Although excellent stone abounds in the neighbourhood, no one has had the sense to erect anything either n.o.ble or dignified. Cheap houses confront the eye on all sides, whether simple or pretentious. Whenever the citizens of San Sebastian raise their hands--and in this they are abetted by the _Madrilenos_--they do something ugly. They have defaced Monte Igueldo already, and now they are defacing the Castillo. Tomorrow, they will manage somehow to spoil the sea, the sky, and the air.

As for the spirit of the city, it is lamentable. There is no interest in science, art, literature, history, politics, or anything else. All that the inhabitants think about are the King, the Queen Regent, yachts, bull fights, and the latest fas.h.i.+ons in trousers.

San Sebastian is a conglomeration of parvenus and upstarts from Pamplona, Saragossa, Valladolid, Chile and Chuquisaca, who are anxious to show themselves off. Some do this by walking alongside of the King, or by taking coffee with a famous bull-fighter, or by bowing to some aristocrat. The young men of San Sebastian are among the most worthless in Spain. I have always looked upon them as _infra_ human.

As for the ladies, many of them might be taken for princesses in summer, but their winter tertulias are on a level with a porter's lodge where they play _julepe_. It is a card game, but the word means dose, and Madame Recamier would have fainted at the mention of it.

When I observe these parvenus' attempts to s.h.i.+ne, I think to myself: "The ostentation of the freshman year at college. How unfortunate that some of us have moved on to the doctorate!"

No one reads in San Sebastian. They run over the society news, and then drop the paper for fear their brains will begin to smoke.

This city, imagining itself to be so cultivated, although it really is a new town, is under the domination of a few Jesuit fathers, who, like most of the present days sons of Loyola, are coa.r.s.e, heavy and wholly lacking in real ability.

The Jesuit manages the women, which is not a very difficult thing to do, as he holds the leading strings of the s.e.xual life in his hands. In addition he influences the men.

He a.s.sists the young who are of good social standing, who belong to distinguished families, and brings about desirable matches. The poor can do anything they like. They are at liberty to eat, to get drunk, to do whatever they will except to read. These unhappy, timid, torpid clerks and hangers-on imagine they are free men whenever they get drunk. They do not see that they are like the Redskins, whom the Yankees poisoned with alcohol so as to hold them in check.

I inspected a club installed in a house in the older part of the city some years ago.

A sign on one door read "Library." When it was opened, I was shown, laughing, a room filled with bottles.

"If a Jesuit could see this, he would be in ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes, replacing books with wines and liquors! What a business for the sons of Saint Ignatius!"

In spite of all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than from the capital of Guipuzcoa. But I myself prefer it. I have no city, and I hold myself to be strictly extra-urban.

MY PARENTS

My father, Serafin Baroja y Zornoza, was a mining engineer, who wrote books both in Castilian and Basque, and he, too, came from San Sebastian. My mother's name is Carmen Nessi y Goni. She was born in Madrid.

I should be a very good man. My father was a good man, although he was capricious and arbitrary, and my mother is a good woman, firmer and more positive in her manifestations of virtue. Yet, I am not without reputation for ferocity, which, perhaps, is deserved.

I do not know why I believed for a long while that I had been born in the Calle del Puyuelo in San Sebastian, where we once lived. The street is well within the old town, and truly ugly and forlorn. The mere idea of it was and is distasteful to me.

When I complained to my mother about my birthplace and its want of attractiveness, she replied that I was born in a beautiful house near the esplanade of La Zurriola, fronting on the Calle de Oquendo, which belonged to my grandmother and looked out upon the sea, although the house does so no longer, as a theatre has been erected directly in front. I am glad that I was born near the sea, because it suggests freedom and change.