But he wouldn’t have been able to explain to his wife that the antagonism he felt toward her family was due not to ideological but to esthetic differences, the same silent antagonism he felt toward the inexhaustible Spanish ugliness of so many commonplace things, a kind of national depravity that offended his sense of beauty more deeply than his convictions regarding justice: the stuffed heads of bulls over the bars in taverns; the paprika red and saffron-substitute yellow of bullfight posters; folding chairs and carved desks that imitated the Spanish Renaissance; dolls in flamenco dresses, a curl on their forehead, which closed their eyes when leaned back and opened them as if resuscitated when they were upright again; rings with cubic stones; gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children—he rose to heaven, he joined the angels—and their tragic white coffins; baroque moldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera; funeral announcements in the ABC or El Debate; photographs of King Alfonso XIII hunting, just a few days before he left the country, indifferent or blind to what was happening around him, leaning on his rifle beside the head of a dead deer, or erect and jovial next to a sacrifice of partridges or pheasants or hares, surrounded by gentlemen in hunting outfits and gaiters and servants in poor men’s berets and espadrilles and smiles diminished by toothless mouths. He sometimes thought his excessive anger had more to do with esthetics than ethics, with ugliness than injustice. In the rotunda of the Palace Hotel monarchist gentlemen raised their teacups and extended their little fingers adorned with a small ring and a very long polished nail. In the most successful movies characters profaned the marvelous technology of sound by breaking into folksongs, dressed in awful regional outfits, mounted on donkeys, leaning against window grilles hung with flowerpots, wearing broad-brimmed hats or berets or rustic bandannas. The
Heraldo reported with patriotic fervor that at the beginning of the great bullfight for the festival of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza the matador’s team had performed the promenade to the vibrant rhythms of the “Himno de Riego,” the national anthem. In the house of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo family, at the end of a gloomy hallway, tiny electric candles burned in the small lamps framing a full-color print of Jesus of Medinaceli that had an artistic roof of Mudéjar inspiration and a small railing simulating an Andalusian balcony. In the Renaissance armchair in the dining room filled with dark wood furniture that imitated a style between Gothic and Moorish and had inlaid medallions of the Catholic sovereigns, Don Francisco de Asís Ponce-Cañizares, retired member of the Honorable Provincial Delegation of Madrid, read aloud in a grave voice the lead articles and parliamentary accounts in the ABC, and Doña Cecilia listened to him, half bewildered and half impatient, and said “Good” or “Of course” or “How shameful” each time Don Francisco de Asís concluded a paragraph in the cavernous tone of a sacred orator and at the same time noted the pangs of emotion and those of stomach upset, about which he’d inform the family in detail. Don Francisco de Asís was intoxicated by the apocalyptic prose of Calvo Sotelo’s speeches in Parliament and of reporters who spoke of Asiatic hordes or mobs filled with Bolshevik resentment or the virile martial joy of German youth cheering the Führer, waving olive branches, raising their right arms in unison in the stadiums. He liked words like “horde,” “mob,” “vortex,” “collapse,” and “collusion,” and as he read and became more emotional, his voice deepened and he accompanied his reading with oratorical gestures, angry blows on the table, an accusatory index finger. He loved sonorous verbal turns and expressions in Latin: alea iacta est; sic semper tyrannis; he who laughs last laughs best; better to die with honor than to live in shame; better honor without ships than ships without honor; the clarions of destiny; the moment of truth; the straw that broke the camel’s back. The fervent articles by correspondents in Germany and Italy and the Falangist publications his son Víctor brought home provided him with a poetic prose somewhat less old-fashioned but just as intoxicating and allowed him the gratification of feeling in tune with the youthful dynamism of the new day. But it was true that toward Ignacio Abel he’d always demonstrated a resounding affection of bear hugs and kisses that included a curious mixture of admiration and indulgence: admiration of his son-in-law’s brilliance and the tenacity with which he overcame the difficulties of his origins and the early deaths of his parents; indulgence of his political convictions, which he attributed, if he thought about them at all, more to a sentimental loyalty to the memory of his Republican and Socialist father than to real personal radicalism. How could he be an extremist and still be so fond of well-cut suits and good manners? If Ignacio Abel was a Socialist, he had to be one in the civilized, semi-British mode of Don Julián Besteiro or Don Fernando de los Ríos. But according to the uncle who was a priest, he shouldn’t let himself be deceived, because those Socialists were the worst ones, the most insidious! Who but Fernando de los Ríos, with all his unctuous manners, had devised the blasphemous divorce law when he was minister of justice? Deep down, Don Francisco de Asís must have compared the perseverance and integrity of his son-in-law, who came from nothing and created himself, with the uselessness of his own son, who always had everything but couldn’t complete his law degree and spent years bouncing from one job to another, not understanding anything, his head filled with stupidities, becoming involved in futile projects and dubious business schemes, dazzled now by a Falangist enthusiasm that in Don Francisco de Asís’s heart provoked not sympathy but alarm and distrust. He was afraid something awful would happen to his son, that he’d take part in a conspiracy and be sent to prison, or that one day he’d end up dead in the street after one of those gunfights between Falangists and Communists, he was always so inept, as a boy so easily intimidated in spite of his bravado.