Arturo Barea: Grandmother's Lesson

Arturo Barea

Grandmother’s Lesson

Translator (Ilse Pollak / Ilsa Barea)

If a man uncorks a bottle of vintage sherry and pours it down his gullet faster than the two o’clock Mass is read by a priest who has not yet broken his fast, he will get drunk like a pig and deserves to be put on water for the rest of his life. Yet this is just what I did once, and I would do it again in the circumstances, although I couldn’t guarantee the same result. The years have left their traces.

It was all the fault of my grandmother, my father’s mother whom we used to call Big Granny, and the story has to be told as a lesson that should be taken to heart.

Big Granny was a country woman with a massive personality in every sense of the word. She was well over six foot, and proportionally big all round. I couldn’t tell how much she weighed, but I can remember what happened when she insisted that a chemist should weigh her. She was always worried about my thinness, and each time she came to Madrid she would drag me willy-nilly to the pharmacy of an old suitor of hers, so that he could weigh me on his scales. One day she wanted to know her own weight, but the poor little man began to stutter in a flurry of apprehension:

“Inés . . . these instruments are so delicate . . . I wouldn’t dare to...”

And though she ranted at him for a quarter of an hour he stuck to his guns, shaking his head like a marionette. At last we left the shop, the door slammed shut behind us, and we were no wiser than before. Grandmother dragged me along, pushing and elbowing her way through the dense crowd in the market place. The people she jostled let their words of angry protest die on their lips when they found themselves confronted with her bulk.

Suddenly she swivelled round, causing a new eddy among the shopping housewives, and stared at me accusingly:

“And that skinned tomcat wanted to become your grandfather! Only think of it. Lucky for you I turned him down, if he’d married me, you'd never been born.”

Big Granny loved to boast of my grandfather’s vigor which had given her twenty-five children and, so she maintained, would have given her more if he hadn’t died too soon. By the time of my story, however, most of the twenty-five were dead, and the rest lost in the wide world. My mother, the widow of her youngest son, and we four grandchildren, were her only close kin within reach. Big Granny wanted to stay with us and help us along—at least, this is what she said; but my mother had other ideas, and our grandmother retired to her native village of Navalcarnero. There she amused herself with taking over the household of a winegrower with four ungovernable children—a devil’s brood!—and a wife in the churchyard.

Navalcarnero is not far from Madrid, and Big Granny came to see us once every two or three weeks, to our great delight, since she always arrived laden with gifts. They were rural gifts changing with the seasons: around September, a jug of sweet wine or grape juice syrup; at slaughter time, sausages and black pudding, or a flitch of smoke-cured bacon; at Christmas, the traditional sweets; all through the summer, fruit; and the whole year round the marvellous doughnuts she would make herself. No wonder her grandchildren went to the railway station to meet her every time she announced her coming.

One day my sister and I went alone, because our two brothers were working. My sister Concha had her stiff little plaits tied with red ribbons, and I wore my sailor’s blouse. Normally, Concha jeered at this rig and dirtied the white collar with whatever she found handy, while I would take revenge by pulling off her beloved ribbons and throwing them into a puddle. On that spring morning, however, we made a truce and walked quietly down to the station; we wanted our grandmother to see us looking clean and trim, for she had written that she ‘would bring each of us a dozen of the moulded cottage cheeses, called quesillos.

Concha started to lecture me:

“You know, those cheese moulds are little baskets made of rushes: the girls in the village weave them so tightly that only the whey runs out and the curds stay inside—and when they don’t drip anymore it’s done.”

I knew as well as she did how cottage cheeses were made, and saw through her design. “All you're after,” I said, “is my moulds, but you won't get them.” For the rest of our walk we did not speak a word.

The Central Station of the Line Madrid-Almorax-Villadelprado, togive it its full title, was tiny, quite in keeping with a railway the trains, asof which looked like toys and took at least seven hours for a run about sixteen miles. Although later on the Company went per it had originally been a good idea to build a line by which the villages could send their wine, vegetables, grain, flour and sheep directly to Madrid. The trouble was that at first the villagers still had their carts and muleteers, so they were unwilling to spend money on rail transport; and by the time the line began to show profit, buses and lorries offered cheaper and faster services. Anyway, when I was a small boy, the miniature terminus was new, clean, and bright with fresh paint. The rails shone like silver. The glossy red coaches and green engines, glittering with burnished brass, were a joy to old and young. When the one and only passenger train of the day was signalled, the policemen on duty put on their green gloves and straightened their sir shakos; the food-tax collectors, the Consumeros, as we called them, took up their posts on both sides of the exit; the porters and railway guards donned their braided caps and fanned out along the platform. —We loathed the Consumeros. In those years, there was a money duty on all eatables brought into Madrid, and on every road, at every terminus, there was an office where the taxgatherers lay in wait. They were armed with spikes like huge larding pins, which they used to prod bundles and haversacks so that nobody should smuggle in taxable goods.

That morning, goodness knows why, they tried to chase my sister and me out of the station when we refused to show them our platform tickets—which they had no right to check anyway. The porters, called in by the two Consumeros, had no right to see our tickets either, so we didn’t show them. Only when a policeman came did we produce the tickets. But not quietly. We told him what we thought of the men with the spikes who had threatened to beat us. Who did they think we were? Little tramps? By the time the arrival of the train was signalled we had staged the most beautiful brawl. First the policeman had told the Consumeros to leave us in peace, as we had the right to be on the platform. The Consumeros had protested; why hadn’t we shown them our tickets? Then Concha, my sister, informed them that she hadn’t wanted to. The Consumero called her snotty, she called him a bully; and she kicked him on the shin, something she loved to do.

Then the row started in earnest. The Consumero tried to hit her, the policeman stopped him, and God only knows how it would have gone if the train hadn’t whistled just then, and the station master with his bebraided cap hadn’t appeared. With the greatest seriousness he shouted:

“Hey, every one to his post, you slow-coaches!”

At last our grandmother turned up, carrying two huge baskets, and we hurled ourselves at her: “Have you brought our cheeses?”

She dropped her burden to the ground and kissed us all over our faces, then she bent down, lifted the corner of a white cloth, and let us see the twenty-four rush moulds, small, round, oozing the white cottage cheese.

“A promise is a debt, children!”

“Give me one—give me onel”

“No, my dears. You'll eat them at home. Now let’s see if we get hold of a cab. My legs are a bit heavy nowadays.”

When we came to the gate, the nearest Consumero snatched at the corner of one her baskets. Big Granny did no more than waggle her hips, but it nearly knocked the man over, and she raised her mighty voice:

“Hooves off, eh? ... All right, all right, I don’t feel like a row this time. In here’s half a lamb and six pounds of salt pork. Oh yes, and some cottage cheeses, but there’s no duty on them. They’re for the kids here.”

Concha and me had giggled at the sight of the Comsumero pressed under Grandma’s weight, and he had given us a murderous look. Another Comsumero, possibly the senior there, he now heard her speak of “the kids here,” he said sharply:

 “What’s that—no duty on the cheeses? Aren't they eatables? Fifty centimos duty a dozen. Otherwise they won’t get into Madrid. For the kids or for the Holy Father, it makes no difference.”

Big Granny turned purple in the face, mostly because the man had pushed her away from the gate and forced her to stay on the platform. But she still tried to keep calm:

“There’s no duty on milk, and these quesillos are only milk, so they don’t pay duty either.”

“Never mind, they can’t pass. This milk here,” I have never forgotten the term he then pronounced with the utmost solemnity, “is a manufacture.”

Big Granny roared: “And I’m going to manufacture your nose! Milk it is, I’ve said, and it is milk. And the cheeses pay no duty because I won’t let myself be robbed by a gang of rascals who're here only for a plundering the poor. Do you think you can stuff yourself with them. The cheeses are for these kids here, for my grandchildren, and not for you!”

“They don’t pass all the same. You’d better pay, lady—or whatever devil you are—if not, the goods will be confiscated.”

“So that you can eat them, pretty boy? No, you’d get indigestion. a And as to that ‘lady or whatever,’ you must have been thinking of your mother, you babe-in-arms.”

Meanwhile she had left her baskets on the ground. The Consumer had  opened his mouth for a retort, then he shrugged, and leaned over to seize one of them. At this Big Granny dealt him a blow between his shoulderblades so that he sat down abruptly.

“I’ve told you before—hooves off! And don’t try my patience, you son of a devil!”

The man rose, cursing and swearing, and lifted his spike: “If you weren’t a woman...”

“If I weren’t a woman, you'd have started running half an hour ago. But there’s still time for it. And that’s all.”

Once more she picked up her two baskets and walked to the gate. The crowd let her through, and she said: “Now, children, go in front of me, and we shall see what these music-hall heroes are going to do.”

Then everything seemed to happen at once: the second Consumero blocked the gate with his big body and shouted for the two policemen. who had been stolidly looking on. The first Consumero clutched at Big Granny’s arm. One policeman pushed his way through a cluster of people and stopped straight in front of her, the other was hanging on to the belligerent Consumero who had been thrown back into the crowd by a violent shove of grandmother’s basket, and who now tried to assault his ‘enemy.’ The Consumero at the gate, seeing the tussle, ran up to help either his mate or the policeman. Big Granny dropped her baskets once again and began to swing her enormous arms like a propeller until she was surrounded by empty space. My sister and I jumped up and down. She kicked all the shins within her reach; I trod on every foot within my reach. I was small and slight, but my boots were hobnailed—and I trod hard.

After a few seconds the place was a general battlefield. Most of the passengers who had come with the train were country people like our grandmother and came to her assistance. The tramps hanging around the station, and the neighbors from the nearest houses who had come to see the train arrive, all hated official authority and in particular the Consumeros. Grandmother had risen to the dignity of a heroine in their eyes. Meanwhile the street-arabs explored baskets and knapsacks behind the backs of their owners, whose attention was engaged elsewhere.

Suddenly the station master strode up, behind him all the railway guards and porters he had been able to muster. He had the inspiration to chuck a fistful of detonators, the kind used as fog signals, on to the railway track, and the chain of crackling reports paralyzed the people embroiled in the row. Most of them took to their heels. Then the railwaymen made a cordon around us. The station master addressed the policeman in his deep, powerful voice, an unlikely voice to come out of his sparse body:

“What is all this noise?” With perfect poise he addressed Big Granny, “And you, madam, what is the matter? ... Quiet over there! This lady is a passenger of our Line, she is within the precincts of the Company, and therefore under its protection.”

He struck them dumb. They gaped at him. Even Big Granny sounded subdued when she told her story, although her calm could not deceive Concha and me. When she finished, the station master turned to the two Consumeros and then eyed directly the senior one: “It is a shame to interfere with a helpless woman, and you should be ashamed of yourselves!”

The Consumeros looked more flabbergasted than ashamed of anything.

After all that had gone before, and in plain view of my grandmother, whose head loomed high above the station master’s braided cap, his turn of phrase provoked an outburst of guffaws. But the man turned back to her, unperturbed: “They demand fifty centimos a dozen from you, isn’t it so? Don’ t you worry, madam. The Company will pay this peseta for you.” And he put his hand in his pocket. .

Big Granny stopped him. “Very kind of you, but don’t bother. It isn a question of money, it’s a question of one’s rights. The cheeses are going to Madrid without paying duty, and they'll get there with me. Those rascals need a lesson. Ill take the cheeses in, all by myself and under their noses.”

“They won’t ...” began the more aggressive of the two Consumeros.

Quietly, serenely, our grandmother took her two baskets which had miraculously escaped unscathed, and went to a seat on the platform, followed by a crowd that had formed anew. She sat down, lifted the white cloth from the rows of cheese, grasped one of the small rush baskets in her right hand, and shook its contents on to her left. She started eating.

Thus she emptied one mould after the other, eating without pause and without haste, while we were staring at her spellbound. My sister was the first to gather her wits. She whispered into my ear: “She is going to eat the lot,” and said aloud to Big Granny, “Give me one, please, granny.” .

“No, dear. If anyone’s to get a stomach ache, it’s me.” .

A chorus of children which had gathered around us as spectators to stare at our unintended show cried shrilly: “One for me... don’t eat them all yourself, old meanie ... ,” while a second one of women’s voices intoned, subdivided into two groups: “That woman is completely able of eating them all, and not one for the poor kids!” And: “She’s right,it’s her due—you either do a thing well, or you don’t do it.” But Concha and I had our eyes full of water.—We loved quesillos, they were our favourite dessert to eat out!

When the last of the twenty-four cottage cheeses had disappeared in her mouth, Big Granny rose and shook crumbs and rush moulds from her skirt. Facing the speechless Consumeros, she patted her just expanded, bulkier stomach: “Well, pretty boys, do they pass or don’t they?”

No one said a word or raised a finger. She walked to the gate, with is in her wake. Outside we found a cab. In a weary trot the horse took us away from the station. Concha and I were red-eyed and furious; frorn time to time, when she thought of her lost baskets, Concha hiccoughed. Big Granny sat opposite us, very straight and rigid, but. with a faraway look in her eyes. Suddenly her face changed, and she burst into gusty laughter, so loud that the cabby turned his head.

“And because of that joke they forgot to make me pay duty on all the other stuff, and I forgot to pay it!” She opened a basket, gave each of us a luscious doughnut, and exhibited the many excellent things: she had brought. While we were giggling as if we had never shed a tear, she told us in her gruffest voice: |

“Let it be a lesson to you, you snivellers. If you behave as if you were all sugar and honey, the flies will eat you. And if you want to get on in life, don’t let anyone tread on your corns. It’s the only way to make ’em respect you, and then they may even let you get away without having paid up.” Her great laugh shook the whole cab.

This is the reason why, some twelve years later, I poured a whole bottle of vintage sherry down my throat, under the noses of several angry but powerless French customs officials, and why—already on the outskirts of Paris—I woke from drunken sleep to look contentedly at the signs they had chalked up on my suitcases at the Spanish frontier, without even opening them. My fellow travelers made astonished faces; they had heard me snore for hours, motionless in my seat, and now failed to understand my sudden burst of laughter. But why should I have told them the story of my Big Grandmother, who had been for many years at rest underground?