“Oh, tha all right; I’ll lend you a loose jacket; sorry I have one for everybody.”
“I’d sooner not, thank you.”
“Nonsense! My jacket! Here it is; it will be a little large for you!”
“But, Braulio....”
“You must have it—bother etiquette!” and he thereupon pulled off my coat himself, velis nolis, and buried me in a great striped jacket, through which only my feet and head protruded, and the sleeves of which would probably not permit me to eat. I thanked him; he thought he was doing me a favour.
The days upon which my friend has no visitors he contents himself with a low table, little more than a cobble bench, because he and his wife, as he says, what should they want more? From this little table he carries his food, like water drawn up a well, to his mouth, where it arrives dripping after its long journey; for to imagine that these people keep a proper table and eat comfortably every day in the year is to expect too much. It is easy, therefore, to conceive that the installations of a large table for a dinner-party was an event in that house, so much so that a table at which scarcely eight people could have eaten comfortably had been considered capable of sitting the whole fourteen of us. We had to sit sideways with one shoulder towards the dinner, and the elbows of the guests entered on intimate relationship with each other in the most confiding fashion possible. They put me as in a place of honour between a child five years old, raised on some cushions, which I had to arrange every minute, as the natural restlessness of my youthful neighbour caused them to slip, and one of those men that occupy in this world the room of three, whose corpulency rose from the basis of the armchair (the only one) in which he was sitting as from the point of a needle. The table-napkins which we silently unfolded were new, for they were just as little commodities of daily use, and were pulled by these good gentlemen through a button-hole of their frock-coats to serve as intermediary bodies between the sauces and their broadcloth.
“You will have to do penance, gentlemen,” exclaimed our amphitryon as soon as he had sat down.
“What ridiculous affectation if untrue,” said I to myself; “and if it is true, what folly to invite on friends to do penance.” Unfortunately it was not long before I knew that there was in that expression more truth than my good Braulio imagined. Interminable and of poor taste were the compliments with which, upon passing and receiving each dish, we wearied one another. “Pray help yourself.” “Do me the favour.” “I could think of it.” “Pass it on to the lady.” “Ah, tha right.” “Pardon me.” “Thank you.”
“No ceremony, gentlemen,” exclaimed Braulio, and was the first to dip his spoon into his plate.
The soup was followed by an olla, an assortment of the most savoury impertinences of that most annoying but excellent dish; here was some meat, there some green stuff; here the dried beans,[13] there the ham; the chicken to the right, the bacon in the middle, and the Estremaduran sausage to the left. Then came some larded veal, upon which may the curse of Heaven alight, and after this another dish, and another and another and another, half of which were brought over from an hotel, which will suffice to excuse our praising them, the other half made at home by their own maid and a Biscayan wench, a help hired for this festivity, and the mistress of the house, who on such occasions is supposed to have a hand in everything, and can consequently superintend nothing properly.