Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

And a real calling it was that the boy felt for the sea. The boat of tio Borrasca was more to his taste than the grounded hulk on shore there with its grunting hogs and cackling hens. He worked hard; and to supplement his wages he got a few kicks from the old skipper, who could be gentle enough on land, but once with a deck under him would have made Saint Anthony himself toe the mark. He could run up the mast to set the lantern or clear a line as spryly as a cat. When the time came to chorrar, to haul the nets, he would take his hand at the ropes. He scrubbed the decks, stowed the baskets of fish in the hold, and kept the fires going in the galley, so that the men of the crew never had a chance to complain. And what luxuries in reward for all that enthusiasm! When the captain and the men were through eating, the leavings were for Pascualet and the other "cat," who had been standing by motionless and respectful during the meal. The two boys would sit down on the bow with black pots between their legs and loaves of bread under their arms. They would eat almost everything with their spoons, but when scooping became too slow, they would begin to mop the bottoms of the pots with crusts of bread till the metal was polished and shining. Then they would carefully collect the few drops of wine that the men had left in their tin cups. Finally, if there was no work to do, the "cats" would lie down like princes in the forecastle, their shirt-tails hanging out, their bellies toward the stars, their faces pleasantly tickled by the breeze, till they were rocked to sleep by the swaying of the vessel. There was tobacco a-plenty. Tio Borrasca was always raising a rumpus because he couldn't understand how his pockets ran empty so soon, now of the alguilla of Algiers, now of the Havana fine cut – according to the stock of the latest smuggler to make the Cabañal.

That was real life in Pascualet's eyes. Every time he came in, his mother could see that he had grown, was stronger, tanned a darker brown, but as good-natured as ever in spite of his fights with other "cats," husky little hectors who would stop at nothing, and who always puffed smoke in your face, when you talked to them, from pipes as big as they were.

These rapid visits home were all there was to remind siñá Tona that she had an elder son at all. The mistress of the tavern had something else on her mind. She was now spending entire days alone in her hulk there. "The Rector" was offshore, earning his share of cabets, returning only Sundays to hand over, with a show of pride, the three or four pesetas that represented his week's wage. The other boy, that lost soul Tonet, had turned out a regular waster – that was the very word for him. And he never came home unless he was hungry. He had joined the ragamuffins along shore, a swarm of wharf rats that knew no more about their fathers than the homeless dogs who went with them on their raids. He could swim like a fish, and all through the summer days he loafed around the liners in the harbor, without a stitch on his lean sunburned body, diving for the silver coins the passengers threw overboard. At night he would come home, his trousers in rags, his face scratched and bleeding. His mother had caught him several times fondly caressing the brandy keg; and one evening she had had to put on her shawl and go to harbor-police headquarters, where her tears and lamentations finally got him loose on the promise that she would cure him of his ugly weakness for scraping the bottoms of the sugar boxes stored on the piers.

That Tonet was a limb of the Devil! And, diós mio, where did he get it, where did he get it! How could two decent honest parents, such as she and Pascualo had been, ever get to have a boy like that? With a perfectly good dinner waiting for him at home, why did he insist on sneaking around the steamers from Scotland, waiting for the watchman to turn his back so as to be off with a dried codfish under his arm? No, that boy was to be the death of her! Twelve years old, no inclination to work, and not the slightest fear or respect for her, in spite of all the broomsticks she had broken over his back.

Siñá Tona usually confided her troubles to a certain Martinez, a young policeman who patrolled that part of the shore, spending the noon hours under the café shelter, his rifle across his knees, his eyes vaguely fixed on the horizon of the sea, and his ears filled with the running plaint of the tavernkeeper. A handsome chap Martinez was, an Andalusian from Huelva, slender and trim of person, natty as could be in the old service uniform which he sported with a truly martial swagger, twirling the corner of his blond mustache with an air that people called "distinguished." Siñá Tona admired the man. After all, breeding will come out! You can tell it a mile away. How Martinez talked, for instance! You could see from his choice of words that he was a man of schooling. For that matter he had studied years and years in the Seminary up his way; and if now he was only a patrolman, it was because he hadn't wanted to be a priest – he had quarreled with his family on the subject – preferring to see a bit of the world by enlisting in the army. The mistress of the tavern listened open-mouthed to the tales he told about himself in a heavy Andalusian dialect where every "s" was like "th" in "thing." In deference to his learning, she answered in kind, floundering about in an absurd and unintelligible Castillian which made people in the village laugh.

"See, siñor Martines, that jacknape of mine is driving me mad with all his carrying on. I say to him, I say: 'Anything wrong in this house, jail-bird? Well, then, why go tearing around with that gang of good-for-nothings, who will die at the end of a rope, every one of them!' now osté siñor Martines, you know how to talk in good grammar. You just tell him what is what. You tell him they'll put him in the lock-up at Valencia if he isn't a good boy."

And siñor Martines promised to take the little rogue in hand, and he did, in fact, give him a lecture, which reduced Tonet, for a moment at least, to cowering in terror in the presence of that uniform and that heavy gun, which the soldier would never let go of for an instant. These slight favors gradually brought Martinez into the family, making his relations with siñá Tona more and more intimate. He got his meals now at the tavern, and spent most of his time there; and the mistress finally had the pleasure of darning his stockings and sewing the buttons on his underwear. Poor siñor Martines! What would happen to a fine young man like him without a woman around? He would get to be as shabby and disreputable as a stray cat. And, frankly, no decent lady could allow that to happen!

Summer afternoons when the sun was beating full upon the deserted beach, turning the baked sand into a fiery furnace, one scene would always be enacted in the shade of the thatched roof of the tavern shelter. Martinez would be seated on a reed stool with one elbow on the counter, reading Perez Escrich, his favorite author, in bulging grimy volumes with the corners worn down from having passed from patrol to patrol along the coast. Siñá Tona was convinced at last. That was where he got all those big words and that moral philosophy which stirred the bottom of her soul; and she looked at the books with the superstitious awe of an illiterate. Across the counter, mechanically sewing, without thinking of what she was doing, she would sit looking at Martinez fixedly, studying his thin blond mustache for half an hour at a time, then the elegant lines of his nose for just as long, and finally the exquisite skill with which he parted his hair, making two absolutely even plasters of golden locks on either side.

Sometimes, on looking up at the bottom of a page, Martinez would find the two black eyes of siñá Tona nailed upon him; and he would blush and go on reading. Then afterwards the tavern keeper would be ashamed of herself. The idea! When Pascualo was alive, she had looked at the fellow casually once or twice, because she thought his face was interesting. But now she sat there looking and looking and looking, like a fool! What would people say if they ever caught her at it! Of course! She liked him! And why not? So handsome, and such fine manners! And how well he could talk! But after all, that was absurd. She was well on toward forty, thirty-six or so, she couldn't just remember. And he, well, twenty-four at the outside! But then again, and then again! What difference did a few years make? She was not so bad looking. She carried her age well. To settle that question, just listen to the men off the boats who were always pestering her! And if it was all so absurd, why were people gossiping about it? The other patrolmen, friends of Martinez, and the fish-women on the beach, were always teasing them with indirect allusions which, if anything, were too direct.

And the expected happened. To silence her own misgivings, siñá Tona argued that her boys needed a father, and Martinez was just the man. The courageous Amazon, who would cudgel the roughest sailor at the slightest flippancy, herself took the initiative, overcoming the bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an automaton.

The matter did not remain long secret; nor was Tona displeased at the talk. She wanted it known that the tavern had a man in charge. When she had something to attend to in the Cabañal, she left the shop in care of Martinez, who sat, as he had always sat, under the shelter, looking out to sea with the rifle across his knees. Even the two boys understood that something was going on. "The Rector," on his turns ashore, would look at his mother with a perplexed expression on his face, and he was timid and ashamed in the presence of that big yellow-headed youth in uniform whom he always found about the tavern. Not so Tonet. That rascal smiled broadly all the time, reflecting the gibes and sarcasms he had picked up along shore. And he ceased to be at all impressed at the sermons of the patrolman, which he now rebutted by thumbing his nose and going off down the beach cavorting and turning handsprings.

Meanwhile Tona was passing through a new honeymoon in the full maturity of life. In comparison, her marriage with Pascualo seemed like monotony itself. Into her passion for the soldier she put all the vehemence of a woman whose youth is sloping toward sunset, and she paraded her joy in bold indifference to what people were saying. Let them talk! Let them talk till their tongues wore out! Many women were worse than she was. Of course the girls were sore at her carrying off a good-looking fellow right under their noses!

Martinez, for his part, with the usual dreamy expression on his face, let himself be kissed and pampered as though he deserved every bit of it; besides his prestige had gone up not only in his squad but with his superiors. Why not, with a boat full of the real stuff, not to mention that stocking crammed with silver duros that sometimes stuck into his ribs as he lay down on the bed in the stateroom! To make sleeping more comfortable he removed that annoying obstruction, and siñá Tona said not a word. Was he not to be her husband? The money was all hers, and so long as the tavern paid as well as it was paying, there was no need to worry.

In four or five months, however, Tona began to go around with a long face. See here, Martinez, siñor Martines, just come down out of the clouds and listen to Tona for a moment. Tona is saying something to you. She is saying that something must be done, in the circumstances. The present situation cannot last. A satisfactory explanation must be ready for what is bound to occur. A respectable mother of two children cannot be the respectable mother of three children, without a man there to step forward and say: "This is mine!"

And Martinez said: "Bueno!", but there was a sign of annoyed surprise in the way he said it, as though he had suddenly bumped against some hard reality in his plunge from the ideal heights where he always dwelt as a man unappreciated by the world, and where he could dream at leisure of becoming a general, a Dictator, and all the other things the heroes of Perez Escrich become, in that imaginative writer's novels!

Yes, he would send for the certificates necessary for the marriage license. But it would take time of course, because Huelva was a long way off. Tona waited, with her thoughts on Huelva, a city hazy in the distance, which she figured must be off around Cuba, or the Philippines, perhaps. And time went by, while the situation grew more and more alarming.

Martinez, siñor Martines, in two months … Tona cannot pretend any longer! People are noticing. What will the boys say when they find that they have a young brother? But Martinez got cross. It wasn't his fault, if the documents didn't come. She could see how many letters he kept writing.

Finally the patrolman announced one morning that there was no other way out of it. He would have to go and get those cursed papers himself, and he had secured leave of absence from his captain. Fine! Siñá Tona thought that was a good idea. She gave him all the money she had, sleeked his hair one last time, wept a little, and … "Good-by! And don't be long!"

A patrolman going by one day was kind enough to tell her the real truth. All that talk about going to Huelva was a lie. Martinez had been writing for papers all right, but to Madrid, asking to be transferred to another district at the opposite end of Spain, since the climate at Valencia was not good for him. And he had won his point. He had been assigned to the department of La Coruña.

That was a bad moment for siñá Tona. The thief! The bandit! You just trust these smooth talkers! So that was to be her pay for giving him her last cent – and combing his hair, the towhead, out there under the shed in the afternoon, as kind and soft-like as a mother.

But for all of Tona's desperation, in a few weeks she was handing out drinks across the counter while she nursed a white sickly girl baby, a tiny little thing with blue eyes and an over-sized yellow head that looked like a ball of gold.

CHAPTER II

SIÑÁ TONA'S FAMILY

And the years rolled on with nothing further to disturb the monotonous course of life for the family sheltered in the tavern-boat. The Rector had grown up to be a lusty sailor, stingy of words, fearless in danger. From gato de barca he had graduated to the rank of able-bodied seaman and was the man of the crew on whom tio Borrasca most relied. Every month Pascualet handed four or five duros over to his mother to keep for him.

Tonet was not settling down to any trade. A stubborn fight was going on between him and his mother. Tona would run her legs off finding him jobs which he would proceed to lose. For about a week he was apprentice to a cobbler. Then he went for a couple of months as "cat" on tio Borrasca's boat; and not even that stern disciplinarian was able to kick any obedience into him. Then he tried his hand at coopering, the steadiest of all trades; but his boss bounced him to the sidewalk in a very few days. Then he joined a stevedore's colla in town; but he never worked unloading the steamers more than two days a week, and that much quite against his will.

But his many shortcomings as vagrant and rowdy found easy excuse in siñá Tona's eyes, when she would see him of a holiday – and what days were not holidays for that rascal? – with that fluffy flat silk cap of his topping off a brown face with just the suggestion of a mustache showing, a blue denim coat fitting close to his figure, and a black silk sash wound around his waist over a flannel shirt with black and green checks. Any woman would be proud to own a boy like that! He was going to be another terror on the lines of that Martinez – curse the wretch – but with more "seasoning," more get-up-and-go, to him. To be sure of that, it was enough to watch the girls in the Cabañal when he was around. They would be willing to scratch each other's eyes out to get him for a lover! Tona was kept posted on all his adventures, and was immensely flattered at the boy's popularity and "social position." A bit too fond of brandy, yes – and what a pity! – but a regular fellow, quite different from that big good-natured booby of a Pascualet, who wouldn't say a word if a cart ran over him.

One Sunday evening in a tavern appositely labeled the "Inn of Good Morals," he began to throw bottles at some stevedores who had accepted a cut in wages; and when the police came in to restore order, they caught him, red-handed, chasing his enemies over the tops of the tables with his knife drawn. More than one week-end he spent in the jail at headquarters whence his mother's tears and the "pull" tio Mariano had as a politician and distributor of election money, would finally extricate him. And arrest proved so salutary to him that on the very night of one of his discharges he was taken again for drawing a knife on two English sailors, who, after a number of treats, tried to explain some of the details of the Marquis of Queensbury rules to him. Not much good at drudgery, but able to drink anybody under the table, and do it night after night, passing from dive to dive, and not showing his face at home for weeks at a time!

Tonet had an intimate way of conducting his more serious love-affairs that made many people suspect him of anticipating legal ceremonies. But his mother took no stock in such reports. She did not insist on a princess for her Tonet, but how could any one think he would ever marry that girl of tio Paella the truckman! Dolores, shameless hussy, was pretty enough, to be sure, but bound to make the woman who got her for a daughter-in-law lead a song – and a dance! What could you expect of a girl brought up without a mother by that tio Paella, a tippler who could never walk straight as he went out to hitch up at daylight, and who was getting thinner and thinner from alcohol, except for his nose that was growing so big it almost covered his puffy cheeks.

A tough customer was tio Paella, and no one said a good word for him. His trade was all in town, in the Fishmarket section of Valencia. When an English boat came in, he openly offered his services to take sailors to places only he knew about; and on summer nights he would load his wagon up with girls in white wrappers, with painted cheeks and flowers in their hair, and drive parties of men off with them to various resorts along the shore, where they would have one grand carousal till sunrise, while he sat off in a corner, his whip in one hand and a wine mug in the other, paternally chaperoning what, sacrilegiously, he called his "flock."

And he talked right out regardless of his girl's presence. The language he used to her was the language he used to the women he knew in town. When he was drunk he would tell everything to the last detail; and little Dolores, crouching at a safe distance from her father's boots, would listen to the whole story with her eyes wide open in amazement and, written on her face, an eager unhealthy curiosity in all the filthy things tio Paella would be talking about in his brutal soliloquy, gloating over the infamous revelries he had been witnessing.

That was good training for a girl, wasn't it! What she didn't know was probably not worth knowing. And Tona was to be mother-in-law of a piece like that! Pretty as she was, all that had kept her off the streets so far was the good advice some of the women of the neighborhood gave her.

Even so, her conduct with Tonet was getting to be the talk of the village. The boy went in and out in her house as though he were quite at home; and he took his meals there, knowing very well that the truckman would not be back till late at night. Dolores did his washing and even rifled tio Paella's pockets to get money for her lover; and that made the teamster vomit mouthfuls of vile oaths on the subject of false friendship, because he thought his tavern companions had robbed him while he was drunk. One thing at a time, Tonet was moving all his belongings from the tavern-boat to the truckman's cabin, as though the girl were foreclosing on his property.

And siñá Tona was living more and more by herself. The Rector was always off peseta-hunting, as he said, either fishing, or sometimes shipping on one of the laúds that ran to Torrevieja for salt. Tonet was hanging around the liquor places or staying up at tio Paella's. Poor Tona was growing old behind the counter of her little shop, carrying the yellow-headed baby around, loving her with a strange vehemence at times, and then again hating her at the thought of that thief of a Martinez – whom the Devil take in due time!

So it was only off and on that God looked after decent people! Things were not going so well as they used to go, in the early days of Tona's widowhood. Other old hulks had been turned by copy-cats into taverns along the beach; and the fishermen could choose where they would go. She, besides, was not so pretty as she had been once; and the younger fellows were not so eager to buy drinks of her on the chance of getting something more. The tavern was living on its old habitués, and bringing in just enough to keep the wolf from the door. More than once Tona would walk down to the water as she used to and sadly look back at the two stoves now cold, the fences now rickety and tumbling down, the pig-pen where a lean hog scarcely ever grunted at all, and the half dozen hens hungrily pecking about the sands. How time dragged for her in that stultifying life of solitude, which was enlivened only when Tonet got into trouble or when Tona's eyes would fall on a picture of siñor Martines in uniform, which she had hung up in the stateroom as a constant and refinedly cruel reminder of her one mistake.

Little Roseta, a favor left behind in the tavern-boat by the considerate patrolman, gave her mother hardly a moment's peace. She was growing up like an untameable wildcat. Every evening Tona had to go and hunt for her before she could shut her up in the boat after a hard spanking; and from morning till night she would never be seen unless she happened to be hungry. Thy will be done! One more cross for poor Tona to drag through this vale of tears! Taciturn and fond of her own company, Roseta would lie out full length on the wet sand, playing with shells or making piles of seaweed. She would sit for hours with her blue eyes staring into space with fixed hypnotic vacancy, the breeze twirling her yellow locks, as twisted and withy as so many snakes, or blowing up the faded old frock that reached the knees of two slim legs, shiny white, which had known no stockings other than the coat of brown the sun burned over their extremities in summer. Or for hours also she would lie face downward on the sand, which would take on the imprint of her body under her, bathing her face in the thin ripple of water that the surf threw up and sucked back again over the shining beach spangled with all the capricious tracings of moiré.

She was an incorrigible truant, a chip of the old block, as Tona put it, thinking of that loafer who had been responsible for her, and who also sat staring day in day out at the horizon like a good-for-nothing idiot, half awake. If Tona had had to depend on that girl for a living, a fine mess she would have been in! Lazy, irresponsible, was no name for it! Couldn't wipe a plate or wash a glass in the café without breaking up housekeeping! Put a herring on to fry when she was tending the fire and she'd burn it black! Much better to let her run the beach or go to the dressmaker's shop in the Cabañal.

At times the child showed a mad eagerness to study, and at the risk of a whipping, would run away from home and go to the village school. But when Tona found this out and was inclined to encourage her, she would play truant all the time. It was only in summer that she was of any use at all. Then a fondness for money could be reconciled with her passion for roving aimlessly here and there; so during the bathing season, she would take a jar almost as big as herself, fill it with water from the fònt de Gas, and go glass in hand among the bathers, or even among the carriages driving on the pier, shaking her tangled yellow head of hair and crying in rather a faint voice: Al ua fresqueta! Other times it would be a basket, instead, filled with cakes, seasoned some with salt and some with sugar, which she hawked plaintively about: Salaes y dolses! In this way Roseta would bring as many as two reals to her mother in the evening, and Tona's face would brighten up, for with business going as it was, she was getting selfish.