I am not one of those Galicians who feel homesickness very intensely, but, nevertheless, the first group of chestnuts which I recognized in the distance, appeared to me like a friend bidding me welcome home.
My mother was at Ullosa, so I went there at once, partly by stage and partly on foot, for one has to make use of all sorts of locomotion to get there. I arrived at sunset, and my mother came out into the road to meet me. With joined hands, and arm in arm, we walked over the space which separates Ullosa from the highway.
After she had wiped away the tears which invariably gather in a mother’s eyes when she sees her son after a long absence, her first volley of questions was as follows: “So your uncle has hired a house, eh? Is it true that he has furnished it very handsomely? That’s what a man does if he has money. They say that the bridal-bed is sumptuous. What rent does he pay? Something frightful, I presume, because everything is up to the sky in Madrid. And do you know whether he has yet secured a servant? It will be a wonder if he does not hire some horrid jade. That’s the way the city council’s funds fly off. That’s why they do such mean things. Don’t say that they don’t, or you’ll drive me wild, Salustio.”
“But, my dear mother, what difference does it make to us?” I exclaimed, when I could get in a word edgewise. “How am I to blame because my uncle gets married?”
“Because you said it was all right,” she replied, stopping to take breath, while her lips quivered like children’s when their little troubles come upon them.
“You seem to think my uncle would be guided by what I say. You must make the best of it, dear mother, and try to bear patiently what you can’t help. I am sure that is the best way to act, on all accounts, even for our own advantage.”
My mother fixed her eyes on me. She was two years older than Uncle Felipe, and had kept her good looks remarkably, thanks to her robust health, to the simple and healthful life she led, and perhaps also to her lack of serious thought and resulting intellectual weariness. She was as brisk as a bird, and her excitable and changeable disposition kept her from getting bilious, and whipped her blood into a more rapid circulation. Her moral fickleness, her inability to rise to the region of general and abstract ideas, allowed my mother to keep all her energy and ability for action. It was her strong will which guided her thoughts; and the predominance of the emotive and practical elements was revealed in her smooth, narrow brow, in the capricious play of her lips, and in the questioning, restless gaze of her ever-watchful eyes.
My mother never went to Pontevedra except in cold weather, or in Holy Week, or at Easter to take communion. The Ullosa place was kept up the year round. With all her reviling of the Cardoso stock, my mother had much of the acquisitiveness, the sordid economy, and the mercantile spirit which characterize the Hebrew race. How much affection can do, and how it tangles up logic! Those traits which disgusted me in my uncle appeared like virtues in my mother, and really were so, if it is a virtue to make the best of circumstances. With a miserable four or five hundred, which was the most that could be got out of our property with the utmost squeezing, it was little short of a miracle to be able to live as she did with comparative comfort, pay no small part of the expenses of my education, and even hide away inside of a mattress five or six onzas for a rainy day. She who could succeed in doing this, was not an ordinary woman.
My mother always wore the Carmelite habit, to save expense for dresses, of course. She had linen woven from the flax raised on her land,—that strong, coarse, brown, Galician linen, which never wears out,—and made shirts and sheets out of that. Out of a vineyard of sour grapes she made a little claret with which she would regale me during my vacations; from the rye raised in her fields, she made the bread she ate; a couple of pigs, fattened at home, kept her pot full all the year round; she raised chickens, to furnish her with eggs; she got her wood from a bit of a grove; she kept a cow, and sold it at the fair at a good profit when it no longer gave milk; other cattle she used to have in partnership with her tenants, making some small gains in that way; she distilled brandy from the grape-skins, and preserved plums in it,—in fact, she did everything possible to get the juice out of her money and her property, thus accomplishing those prodigies of good management and frugality, which a woman is only able to perform when she lives alone. Forced by her sex to confine her business undertakings within narrow limits, she made up for it by looking carefully after the smallest details, and not wasting the value of a pin. Healthy, high-spirited, indefatigable, she passed every moment of the day in some useful occupation; and I even suspect that she sometimes did sewing or embroidery, in a secret way, for other people.
“I shall be as proud as a queen the day you finish learning your profession, and begin to earn money,” she would say, when I used to express my amazement at seeing her so eager and so busy.