Youth and Egolatry Part 15

My paternal grandmother, Dona Concepcion Zornoza, was a woman of positive ideas and somewhat eccentric. She was already old when I knew her. She had mortgaged several houses which she owned in the city in order to build the house which was occupied by us in La Zurriola.

Her plan was to furnish it and rent it to King Amadeo. Before Amadeo arrived at San Sebastian, however, the Carlist war broke out, and the monarch of the house of Savoy was compelled to abdicate, and my grandmother to abandon her plans.

My earliest recollection is the Carlist attempt to bombard San Sebastian. It is a memory which has now grown very dim, and what I saw has been confused with what I have heard. I have a confused recollection of the bringing in of soldiers on stretchers, and of having peeped over the wall of a little cemetery near the city, in which corpses were laid out, still unburied.

As I have said, my father was a mining engineer, but during the war he was engaged in teaching natural history at the Inst.i.tute. I have no idea how this came about. He was also one of the Liberal volunteers.

I have a vague idea that one night I was taken from my bed, wrapped up in a mantle, and carried to a chalet on the Concha, belonging to one Errazu, who was a relative of my mother's. We lived there for a time in the cellar of the chalet.

Three sh.e.l.ls, which were known in those days as cuc.u.mbers, dropped on the house, and wrecked the roof, making a great hole in the wall which separated our garden from the next.

MONSIGNOR, THE CAT

Monsignor was a handsome yellow cat belonging to us while we were living in the cellar of Senor Errazu's chalet.

From what I have since learned, his name was a tribute to the extraordinary reputation enjoyed at that period by Monsignor Simeoni.

Monsignor--I am referring to the yellow cat--was intelligent. A bell surmounted the Castillo de la Mota at San Sebastian, by whose side was stationed a look-out. When the look-out spied the flash of Carlist guns, he rang the bell, and then the townspeople retired into the doorways and cellars.

Monsignor was aware of the relation of the bell to the cannonading, so when the bell rang, he promptly withdrew into the house, even going so far sometimes as to creep under the beds.

My father had friends who were not above going down into our cellar on such occasions so as better to observe the manoeuvres of the cat.

TWO LUNATICS

After the war, I used to stroll as a boy with my mother and brothers to the Castillo de la Mota on Sundays. It was truly a beautiful walk, which will soon be ruined utterly by the citizens of San Sebastian. We looked out to sea from the Castillo and then we talked with the guard. We often met a lunatic there, who was in the care of a servant. As soon as he caught sight of us children, the lunatic was happy at once, but if a woman came near him, he ran away and flattened himself against the walls, kicking and crying out: "Blind dog! Blind dog!"

I remember also having seen a young woman, who was insane, in a great house which we used to visit in those days at Loyola. She gesticulated and gazed continually into a deep well, where a half moon of black water was visible far below. These lunatics, one at the Castillo and the other in that great house, haunted my imagination as a child.

THE HAWK

My latest recollection of San Sebastian is of a hawk, which we brought home to our house from the Castillo.

Some soldiers gave us the hawk when it was still very young, and it grew up and became accustomed to living indoors. We fed it snails, which it gulped down as if they were bonbons.

When it was full-grown, it escaped to the courtyard and attacked our chickens, to say nothing of all the cats of the neighbourhood. It hid under the beds during thundershowers.

When we moved away from San Sebastian, we were obliged to leave the hawk behind. We carried him up to the Castillo one day, turned him loose, and off he flew.

IN MADRID

We moved from San Sebastian to Madrid. My father had received an appointment to the Geographic and Political Inst.i.tute. We lived on the Calle Real, just beyond the Glorieta de Bilbao, in a street which is now a prolongation of the Calle de Fuencarral.

Opposite our house, there was a piece of high ground, which has not yet been removed, which went by the name of "_La Era del Mico_," or "The Monkey Field." Swings and merry-go-rounds were scattered all over it, so that the diversions of "_La Era del Mico_," together with the two-wheeled calashes and chaises which were still in use in those days, and the funerals pa.s.sing continually through the street, were the amus.e.m.e.nts which were provided ready-made for us, as we looked down from our balcony.

Two sensational executions took place while we lived here--those of the regicide Otero and of Oliva--one following closely on the heels of the other. We heard the _Salve_, or prayer, which is sung by the prisoners for the criminal awaiting death, hawked about us then on the streets.

IN PAMPLONA

From Madrid we went to Pamplona. Pamplona was still a curious city maintaining customs which would have been appropriate to a state of war.

The draw-bridges were raised at night, only one, or perhaps two, gates being left open, I am not certain which.

Pamplona proved an amusing place for a small boy. There were the walls with their glacis, their sentry boxes, their cannon; there were the gates, the river, the cathedral and the surrounding quarters--all of them very attractive to us.

We studied at the Inst.i.tute and committed all sorts of pranks like the other students. We played practical jokes in the houses of the canons, and threw stones at the bishop's palace, many of the windows of which were already paneless and forlorn.

We also made wild excursions to the roof of our house and to those of other houses in the neighbourhood, prying about the garrets and peering down over the cornices into the courtyards.

Once we seized a stuffed eagle, cherished by a neighbour, hauled it to the attic, pulled it through the skylight to the roof, and flung it down into the street, creating a genuine panic among the innocent pa.s.sers-by, when they saw the huge bird drop at their feet.

One of my most vivid memories of Pamplona is seeing a criminal on his way to execution pa.s.sing our house, attired in a round cap and yellow robe.

It was one of the sights which has impressed me most. Later in the afternoon, driven by curiosity, knowing that the man who had been garroted must be still on the scaffold, I ventured alone to see him, and remained there examining him closely for a long time. When I returned home that night, I was unable to sleep because of the impression he had made.

DON TIRSO LAREQUI

Many other vivid memories of Pamplona remain with me, never to be forgotten. I remember a lad of our own age who died, leaping from the wall, and then there were our adventures along the river.

Another terrible memory was a.s.sociated with the cathedral. I had begun my first year of Latin, and was exactly nine at the time.

We had come out of the Inst.i.tute, and were watching a funeral.

Afterwards, three or four of the boys, among whom were my brother Ricardo and myself, entered the cathedral. The echo of the responses was ringing in my ears and I hummed them, as I wandered about the aisles.

Suddenly, a black shadow shot from behind one of the confessionals, pounced upon me and seized me around the neck with both hands, almost choking me. I was paralyzed with fear. It proved to be a fat, greasy canon, by name Don Tirso Larequi.