Because there was nothing to separate our rooms but the thinnest of plaster partitions, it sometimes seemed as if the Pinedos — Señor, Señora, and baby José María — and I were really living together. Every morning, we four were roused by the same alarm clock. At night, we all went to bed to the sound of Señora Pinedo’s prayers. She prayed in a bored, sleepy voice, invoking a great many saints of the Spanish calendar, while her husband, a fussy Madrid civil servant, followed along with the responses.
“San Juan de la Cruz …,” Señora Pinedo would say, between yawns. “San Agustín de Cantórbery … Santa Anatolia …”
“Pray for us!” her husband would command after every name.
After the prayers, I would hear them winding the clock and muffling door and window against harmful, wayward drafts of the night air. Then, long after all the lights in the pension we lived in had been put out, and against a background of the restless, endless racket of the Madrid night, their voices would sound almost against my ear as they talked about money.
“I have only one dress for the summer, and it’s too tight,” the Señora would say, into the dark. “José Maria’s doctor came right to the house today. I pretended I was out. ‘I know she never goes out,’ he said. By Monday, we have to pay the interest on the silver crucifix at the Monte de Piedad, or we lose it.” The Monte de Piedad was the municipal pawnshop, a brisk, banklike place into which occasionally vanished not only the crucifix but also José Maria’s silver christening cup and Señora Pinedo’s small radio.
“I know,” Señor Pinedo would reply, with somewhat less authority than he used in his prayers. Or, “It can’t be helped.”
Sometimes the baby cried, interrupting the sad little catalogue of complaints. He would cry again in the morning, jolted by the alarm, and I would hear Señor Pinedo swearing to himself as he stumbled about the room getting dressed and preparing José María’s early-morning biberón of dark wheat flour and milk. Señora Pinedo never rose until much later; it was understood that, having given birth to José María a few months before, she had done nearly as much as could be expected of her. Hours after her husband had gone off to his ministry desk and his filing trays, she would inch her way out of bed, groaning a little, and, after examining her face for signs of age (she was twenty-three), complete her toilette by drawing on a flowered cotton wrapper that at night hung on a gilded wall candle bracket, long fallen away from its original use.
“Is it a nice day?” she would call, knocking on the wall. Our windows faced the same direction, but she liked to be reassured. “Shall I go out? What would you do in my place?” It took several minutes of talking back and forth before the problem could be settled. If the day seemed to lack promise, she turned on the radio and went back to bed. Otherwise, she dragged a chair out to the courtyard balcony that belonged to both our rooms and sat in the sun, plucking her eyebrows and screaming companionably at the neighbors. Since it was well known that crying developed the lungs, José María was usually left indoors, where he howled and whimpered in a crib trimmed with shabby ribbons. His cries, the sound of the radio, and Señor Pinedo’s remarks all came through the wall as if it had been a sieve.
The Pinedos and I did, in a sense, share a room, for the partition divided what had once been the drawing room of a stately third-floor flat. The wall was designed with scrupulous fairness; I had more space and an extra window, while the Pinedos had the pink marble fireplace, the candle brackets, and some odd lengths of green velvet drapery gone limp with age. Each side had a door leading out to the balcony, and one semicircle of plaster roses on the ceiling, marking the place where a chandelier had hung.
Like many pensions in Madrid, the flat had once housed a rich middle-class family. The remnants of the family, Señorita Elvira Gómez and her brother, lived in two cramped rooms off the entrance hall. The rest of the house was stuffed with their possessions — cases of tropical birds, fat brocaded footstools, wardrobes with jutting, treacherous feet. Draperies and muslin blinds maintained the regulation pension twilight. In the Pinedos’ room, the atmosphere was particularly dense, for to the mountain of furnishings provided for their comfort they had added all the odds and ends of a larger household. Chairs, tables, and chimneypiece were piled with plates and glasses that were never used, with trinkets and paperweights shaped like charging bulls or Walt Disney gnomes. In one corner stood a rusty camping stove, a relic of Señora Pinedo’s hearty, marching youth. The stove was now used for heating José María’s bottles.
Added to this visual confusion was the noise. The baby wept tirelessly, but most of the heavy sounds came from the radio, which emitted an unbroken stream of jazz, flamenco, roaring fútbol games, the national anthem, Spanish operetta with odd, muddled overtones of Viennese, and, repeatedly, a singing commercial for headache tablets. The commercial was a particular favorite with Señora Pinedo. “Okal!” she would sing whenever it came on the air. “Okal! Okal es un producto superior!” There were three verses and three choruses, and she sang them all the way through. Sometimes it was too much for Señor Pinedo, and I would hear him pitting his voice against the uproar of his room in a despairing quaver of “Silencio!” He was a thin, worried-looking man, who bore an almost comic resemblance to Salvador Dali. Nevertheless, he was a Spanish husband and father, and his word, by tradition, was law. “Silencio!” he commanded.
“Viva a tableta Okal!” sang his wife.
I had arrived at the pension on a spring morning, for a few weeks’ stay. Señorita Elvira warned me about the noise next door, without for a moment proposing that anything might be done about it. Like so many of the people I was to encounter in Madrid, she lived with, and cherished, a galaxy of problems that seemed to trail about her person. The Pinedo radio was one. Another stemmed from the fact that she didn’t report her lodgers to the police and pay the tax required for running a pension. No government inspector ever visited the house, nor, I discovered from the porter downstairs, had anyone so much as asked why so many people came and went from our floor. Still Señorita Elvira lived in a frenzy of nervous apprehension, shared, out of sympathy, by her tenants.
On my first day, she ushered me in with a rapid succession of warnings, as dolorous and pessimistic as the little booklets of possible mishaps that accompany the sale of English cars. First, if a government inspector asked me questions, I was to say nothing, nothing at all. Then (frantically adjusting her helmet of tortoiseshell hairpins), I was not to use the electric fan in the room, because of the shaky nature of the fuses; I was to sign a little book whenever I made a telephone call; I was not to hang clothes on the balcony railing, because of some incoherent reason that had to do with the neighbors; and, finally, I was not to overtip the maid, who, although she earned the sturdy sum of two hundred pesetas — or five dollars — a month, became so giddy at the sight of money there was no keeping her in the kitchen. All her tenants were distinguished, Señorita Elvira said—muy, muy distinguished — and the most distinguished of all was my neighbor, Señor Pinedo. No matter how noisy I might find my accommodations, I was to remember how distinguished he was, and be consoled.
Later in the morning, I met my distinguished neighbor’s wife. She was sunning herself on the balcony in nightgown and wrapper, her bare feet propped flat against the warm railing. Her hair was tied back with a grubby ribbon, and on the upper and lower lids of her eyes, which were lovely, she had carefully applied makeup, in the Arab manner.