“I heard the old one,” she said, evidently meaning Señorita Elvira. “Do you like music? Then you won’t mind the radio. Will you be here long? Did you bring many bags? Do you like children? Do children where you come from cry at night?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not after a certain age.” It seemed to me a strange sort of introductory conversation. The courtyard, formed by adjoining apartment blocks, was so narrow that women on balconies across the way could hear, and were listening with interest.
“Some babies are forced not to cry,” said Señora Pinedo. “Many are drugged, to make them sleep. Qué horror!”
An assenting murmur went around the court. Suddenly maternal, Señora Pinedo went indoors and fetched José María. For the next few minutes — until it bored her — she entertained him by shaking a ring of bells in his face, so that he shrieked with annoyance.
The courtyard, crisscrossed with lines of washing that dripped onto the cobbles below, seemed to be where the most active life of the apartment houses took place. Children played under the constant rain from the laundry, and the balconies were crowded with women sewing, preparing vegetables, and even cooking on portable charcoal stoves. The air was cloudy with frying olive oil. In spite of the sun, everyone, and particularly the children, seemed to me inordinately pale — perhaps because they had not yet shaken off the effects of the tiring Castilian winter. Against a wall that made a right angle with ours hung a huge iron block attached to a cable. At irregular intervals it rose and descended, narrowly scraping between the balconies. I asked Señora Pinedo about it finally, and she explained that it was the weight that counterbalanced the elevator in the building around the corner. Sometimes the little boys playing in the courtyard would sit on the block, holding on to the cable from which it was suspended, and ride up as far as the second-floor balconies, where they would scramble off; frequently the elevator would stall before they had traveled any distance. From our third-floor balcony, the children below looked frail and small. I asked Señora Pinedo if the block wasn’t dangerous.
“It is, without doubt,” she said, but with a great dark-rimmed glance of astonishment; it was clear that this thought had never before entered her head. “But then,” she added, as if primly repeating a lesson, “in Spain we do things our own way.”
Only after meeting Señor Pinedo could I imagine where she had picked up this petulant and, in that context, meaningless phrase. He arrived at two o’clock for his long lunch-and-siesta break. Señora Pinedo and I were still on the balcony, and José Maria had, miraculously, fallen asleep on his mother’s lap. Señor Pinedo carried out one of Señorita Elvira’s billowing chairs and sat down, looking stiff and formal. He wore a sober, badly cut suit and a large, cheap signet ring, on which was emblazoned the crossed arrows of the Falange. He told me, as if it were important this be made very clear, that he and his wife were living in such crowded quarters only temporarily. They were used to much finer things. I had the impression that they were between apartments.
“Yes, we’ve been here four and a half years,” said Señora Pinedo, cheerfully destroying the impression. “We were married and came right here. My trousseau linen is in a big box under the bed.”
“But you are not to suppose from this that there is a housing problem in Spain,” said Señor Pinedo. “On the contrary, our urban building program is one of the most advanced in Europe. We are ahead of England. We are ahead of France.”
“Then why don’t we have a nice little house?” his wife interrupted dreamily. “Or an apartment? I would like a salon, a dining room, three bedrooms, a balcony for flowers, and a terrace for the laundry. In my uncle’s house, in San Sebastián, the maids have their own bathroom.”
“If you are interested,” said Señor Pinedo to me, “I could bring you some interesting figures from the Ministry of Housing.”
“The maids have their own bathtub,” said Señora Pinedo, bouncing José Maria. “How many people in Madrid can say the same? Twice every month, they have their own hot water.”
“I will bring you the housing figures this evening,” Señor Pinedo promised. He rose, hurried his wife indoors before she could tell me anything more about the maids in San Sebastián, and bowed in the most ceremonious manner, as if we would not be meeting a few moments later in the dining room.
That evening, he did indeed bring home from his office a thick booklet that bore the imprint of the Ministry of Housing. It contained pictures of a workers’ housing project in Seville, and showed smiling factory hands moving into their new quarters. The next day, there was something else — a chart illustrating the drop in infant mortality. And after that came a steady flow of pamphlets and graphs, covering milk production, the exporting of olive oil, the number of miles of railroad track constructed per year, the improved lot of agricultural workers. With a triumphant smile, as if to say, “Aha! Here’s something you didn’t know!” Señor Pinedo would present me with some new document, open it, and show me photographs of a soup kitchen for nursing mothers or of tubercular children at a summer camp.
The Pinedos and I were not, of course, the only tenants of Señorita Elvira’s flat. Apart from the tourists, the honeymooning couples from the province, and the commercial travelers, there was a permanent core of lodgers, some of whom, although young, appeared to have lived there for years. These included a bank clerk, a student from Zaragoza, a civil engineer, a bullfighters’ impresario, and a former university instructor of Spanish literature, who, having taken quite the wrong stand during the Civil War — he had been neutral — now dispensed hand lotion and aspirin in a drugstore on the Calle del Carmen. There was also the inevitable Englishwoman, one of the queer Mad Megs who seem to have been born and bred for pension life. This one, on hearing me speak English in the dining room, looked at me with undisguised loathing, picked up knife, fork, plate, and wineglass, and removed herself to the far corner of the room; the maid followed with the Englishwoman’s own private assortment of mineral water, digestive pills, Keen’s mustard, and English chop sauce.
All these people, with the exception of the Englishwoman, seemed to need as much instruction as I did in the good works performed by the state. Every new bulletin published by the Ministry of Propaganda was fetched home by Señor Pinedo and circulated through the dining room, passing from hand to hand. All conversation would stop, and Señor Pinedo would eagerly search the readers’ faces, waiting for someone to exclaim over, say, the splendid tidings that a new luxury train had been put into operation between Madrid and the south. Usually, however, the only remark would come from the impresario, a fat, noisy man who smoked cigars and wandered about the halls in his underwear. Sometimes he entertained one of his simpleminded clients in our dining room; on these occasions, Señorita Elvira, clinging gamely to her boast that everyone was muy, muy distinguished, kept the conversation at her table at a rattling pitch in order to drown out the noise matador and impresario managed to make with their food and wine.
“How much did this thing cost?” the impresario would ask rudely, holding Señor Pinedo’s pamphlet at arm’s length and squinting at it. “Who made the money on it? What’s it good for?”
“Money?” Señor Pinedo would cry, seriously upset. “Good for?” Often, after such an exchange, he was unable to get on with his meal, and sat hurt and perplexed, staring at his plate in a rising clatter of dishes and talk.