Chapter 6

Historical bazaars _à la_ Cesare Cantù may be put on one side, as belonging to an inferior genre. They remind me of those great nineteenth century world's fairs, vast, miscellaneous and exhausting.

As for the German historians, they are not translated, so I do not know them. I have read only a few essays of Simmel, which I think extremely keen, and Stewart Chamberlain's book upon the foundations of the nineteenth century, which, if the word France were to be substituted for the word Germany, might easily have been the production of an advanced nationalist of the _Action Française_.

VII

MY FAMILY

FAMILY MYTHOLOGY

The celebrated Vicomte de Chateaubriand, after flaunting an ancestry of princes and kings in his _Memoires d'outre-tombe_, then turns about and tells us that he attaches no importance to such matters.

I shall do the same. I intend to furbish up our family history and mythology, and then I shall assert that I attach no importance to them. And, what is more, I shall be telling the truth.

My researches into the life of Aviraneta [Footnote: A kinsman of Baroja and protagonist of his series of historical novels under the general title of _Memoirs of a Man of Action_.] have drawn me of late to the genealogical field, and I have looked into my family, which is equivalent to compounding with tradition and even with reaction.

I have unearthed three family myths: the Goñi myth, the Zornoza myth, and the Alzate myth.

The Goñi myth, vouched for by an aunt of mine who died in San Sebastian at an age of ninety or more, established, according to her, that she was a descendant of Don Teodosio de Goñi, a Navarrese _caballero_ who lived in the time of Witiza, and who, after killing his father and mother at the instigation of the devil, betook himself to Mount Aralar wearing an iron ring about his neck, and dragging a chain behind him, thus pilloried to do penance. One day, a terrible dragon appeared before him during a storm.

Don Teodosio lifted up his soul unto God, and thereupon the Archangel Saint Michael revealed himself to him, in his dire extremity, and broke his chains, in commemoration of which event Don Teodosio caused to be erected the chapel of San Miguel in Excelsis on Mount Aralar.

There were those who endeavoured to convince my aunt that in the time of this supposititious Don Teodosio, which was the early part of the eighth century, surnames had not come into use in the Basque country, and even, indeed, that there were at that time no Christians there--in short they maintained that Don Teodosio was a solar myth; but they were not able to convince my aunt. She had seen the chapel of San Miguel on Aralar, and the cave in which the dragon lived, and a document wherein Charles V. granted to Juan de Goñi the privilege of renaming his house the Palace of San Miguel, as well as of adding a dragon to his coat of arms, besides a cross in a red field, and a _broken_ chain.

The Zornoza myth was handed down through my paternal grandmother of that name.

I remember having heard this lady say when I was a child, that her family might be traced in a direct line to the chancellor Pero López de Ayala, and, I know not through what lateral branches, also to St. Francis Xavier.

My grandmother vouched for the fact that her father had sold the documents and parchments in which these details were set forth, to a titled personage from Madrid.

The Zornozas boast an escutcheon which is embellished with a band, a number of wolves, and a legend whose import I do not recall.

Indeed, wolves occur in all the escutcheons of the Baroja, Alzate and Zornoza families, in so far as I have been able to discover, and I take them to be more or less authentic. We have wolves passant, wolves rampant, and wolves mordant. The Goñi escutcheon also displays hearts. If I become rich, which I do not anticipate, I shall have wolves and hearts blazoned on the doors of my dazzling automobile, which will not prevent me from enjoying myself hugely inside of it.

Turning to the Alzate myth, it too runs back to antiquity and the primitive struggles of rival families of Navarre and Labourt. The Alzates have been lords of Vera ever since the fourteenth century.

The legend of the Alzates of Vera de Navarra relates that one Don Rodrigo, master of the village in the fifteenth century, fell in love with a daughter of the house of Urtubi, in France, near Urruña, and married her. Don Rodrigo went to live in Urtubi and became so thoroughly gallicized that he never cared to return to Spain, so the people of Vera banded together, dispossessed him of his honours and dignity, and sequestrated his lands.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, my great-grandfather, Sebastián Ignacio de Alzate, was among those who assembled at Zubieta in 1813 to take part in the rebuilding of San Sebastian, and this great-grandfather was uncle to Don Eugenio de Aviraneta, a good relative of mine, protagonist of my latest books.

St. Francis Xavier, Don Teodosio de Goñi, Pero López de Ayala, Aviraneta--a saint, a revered worthy, an historian, a conspirator--these are our family gods.

Now let me take my stand with Chateaubriand as attaching no importance to such things.

OUR HISTORY

Baroja is a hamlet in the province of Alava in the district of Peñacerrada. According to Fernández Guerra, it is an Iberian name derived from Asiatic Iberia. I believe that I have read in Campión that the word Baroja is compounded from the Celtic _bar_, meaning mountain, and the Basque _otza, ocha_ meaning cold. In short, a cold mountain.

The district of Peñacerrada, which includes Baroja, is an austere land, covered with intricate mountain ranges which are clad with trees and scrub live oaks.

Hawks abound. In his treatise on falconry, Zúñiga mentions the Bahari falcon, propagated principally among the mountains of Peñacerrada.

My ancestors originally called themselves Martínez de Baroja. One Martín had a son who was known as Martínez. This Martínez (son of Martín) doubtless left the village, and as there were others of the name Martínez (sons of Martín), they dubbed him the Martínez of Baroja, or Martínez de Baroja.

The Martínez de Barojas lived in that country for many years; they were hidalgos, Christians of old stock. And there is still a family of the name in Peñacerrada.

One Martínez de Baroja, by name Juan, who lived in the village of Samiano, upon becoming outraged because of an attempt to force him to pay tribute to the Count of Salinas--in those days a very natural source of offence--took an appeal in the year 1616 from a ruling of the Prosecuting Attorney of His Majesty and the Alcaldes and Regidors of the Earldom of Treviño, and he was sustained by the Chamber of Hidalgos at Valladolid, which decided in his favour in a decree dated the eighth day of the month of August, 1619.

This same hidalgo, Juan Martínez de Baroja, moved the enforcement of this decree, as is affirmed by a writ of execution which is inscribed on forty-five leaves of parchment, to which is attached a leaden seal pendant from a cord of silk, at the end of which may be found the stipulations of the judgment entered against the Municipality and Corporation of the Town and Earldom of Treviño and the Village of Samiano.

The Martínez de Barojas, despite the fact that they sprang from the land of the falcon and the hawk, in temper must have been dark, heavy, rough. They were members of the Brotherhood of San Martín de Peñacerrada, which apparently was of great account in those regions, besides being regidors and alcaldes of the Santa Hermandad, a rural police and judicial organization which extended throughout the country.

In the eighteenth century, one of the family, my great-grandfather Rafael, doubtless possessing more initiative, or having more of the hawk in him than the others, grew tired of ploughing up the earth, and left the village, turning pharmacist, setting up in 1803 at Oyarzun, in Guipúzcoa. This Rafael shortened his name and signed himself Rafael de Baroja.

Don Rafael must have been a man of modern sympathies, for he bought a printing press and began to issue pamphlets and even occasional books.

Evidently Don Rafael was also a man of radical ideas. He published a newspaper at San Sebastian in 1822 and 1823, which he called _El Liberal Guipúzcoano_. I have seen only one copy of this, and that was in the National Library.

That this newspaper was extremely liberal, may be judged by the articles that were reprinted from it in _El Espectador_, the Masonic journal published at Madrid during the period. Don Rafael had connections both with constitutionalists and members of the Gallic party. There must have been antecedents of a liberal character in our family, as Don Rafael's uncle, Don Juan José de Baroja, at first a priest at Pipaon and later at Vitoria, had been enrolled in the Basque _Sociedad Económica_.

Don Rafael had two sons, Ignacio Ramón and Pío. They settled in San Sebastian as printers. Pío was my grandfather.

My second family name, Nessi, as I have said before, comes out of Lombardy and the city of Como.

The Nessis of Como fled from Austrian rule, and came to Spain, probably peddling mousetraps and _santi boniti barati_.

One of the Nessis, who survived until a short time ago, always said that the family had been very comfortably off in Lombardy, where one of his relatives, Guiseppe Nessi, a doctor, had been professor in the University of Pavia during the eighteenth century, besides being major in the Austrian Army.

As mementos of the Italian branch of the family, I still preserve a few views of Lake Como in my house, a crude image of the Christ of the Annunziatta, stamped on cloth, and a volume of a treatise on surgery by Nessi, which bears the _imprimatur_ of the Inquisition at Venice.

VIII

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

SAN SEBASTIAN

I was born in San Sebastian on the 28th of December, 1872. So I am not only a Guipúzcoan but a native of San Sebastian. The former I regard as an honour, but the latter means very little to me.

I should prefer to have been born in a mountain hamlet or in a small coast town, rather than in a city of summer visitors and hotel keepers.

Garat, who was a most conventional person who lived in Bayonne, always used to maintain that he came from Ustariz. I might say that I am from Vera del Bidasoa, but I should not deceive myself.

There are several reasons why I dislike San Sebastian:

In the first place, the city is not beautiful, when it might well be so. It is made up of straight streets which are all alike, together with two or three monuments that are horrible. The general construction is miserable and shoddy. Although excellent stone abounds in the neighbourhood, no one has had the sense to erect anything either noble or dignified. Cheap houses confront the eye on all sides, whether simple or pretentious. Whenever the citizens of San Sebastian raise their hands--and in this they are abetted by the _Madrileños_--they do something ugly. They have defaced Monte Igueldo already, and now they are defacing the Castillo. Tomorrow, they will manage somehow to spoil the sea, the sky, and the air.

As for the spirit of the city, it is lamentable. There is no interest in science, art, literature, history, politics, or anything else. All that the inhabitants think about are the King, the Queen Regent, yachts, bull fights, and the latest fashions in trousers.

San Sebastian is a conglomeration of parvenus and upstarts from Pamplona, Saragossa, Valladolid, Chile and Chuquisaca, who are anxious to show themselves off. Some do this by walking alongside of the King, or by taking coffee with a famous bull-fighter, or by bowing to some aristocrat. The young men of San Sebastian are among the most worthless in Spain. I have always looked upon them as _infra_ human.

As for the ladies, many of them might be taken for princesses in summer, but their winter tertulias are on a level with a porter's lodge where they play _julepe_. It is a card game, but the word means dose, and Madame Recamier would have fainted at the mention of it.

When I observe these parvenus' attempts to shine, I think to myself: "The ostentation of the freshman year at college. How unfortunate that some of us have moved on to the doctorate!"

No one reads in San Sebastian. They run over the society news, and then drop the paper for fear their brains will begin to smoke.

This city, imagining itself to be so cultivated, although it really is a new town, is under the domination of a few Jesuit fathers, who, like most of the present days sons of Loyola, are coarse, heavy and wholly lacking in real ability.

The Jesuit manages the women, which is not a very difficult thing to do, as he holds the leading strings of the sexual life in his hands. In addition he influences the men.

He assists the young who are of good social standing, who belong to distinguished families, and brings about desirable matches. The poor can do anything they like. They are at liberty to eat, to get drunk, to do whatever they will except to read. These unhappy, timid, torpid clerks and hangers-on imagine they are free men whenever they get drunk. They do not see that they are like the Redskins, whom the Yankees poisoned with alcohol so as to hold them in check.

I inspected a club installed in a house in the older part of the city some years ago.

A sign on one door read "Library." When it was opened, I was shown, laughing, a room filled with bottles.

"If a Jesuit could see this, he would be in ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes, replacing books with wines and liquors! What a business for the sons of Saint Ignatius!"

In spite of all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than from the capital of Guipúzcoa. But I myself prefer it. I have no city, and I hold myself to be strictly extra-urban.

MY PARENTS

My father, Serafín Baroja y Zornoza, was a mining engineer, who wrote books both in Castilian and Basque, and he, too, came from San Sebastian. My mother's name is Carmen Nessi y Goñi. She was born in Madrid.

I should be a very good man. My father was a good man, although he was capricious and arbitrary, and my mother is a good woman, firmer and more positive in her manifestations of virtue. Yet, I am not without reputation for ferocity, which, perhaps, is deserved.

I do not know why I believed for a long while that I had been born in the Calle del Puyuelo in San Sebastian, where we once lived. The street is well within the old town, and truly ugly and forlorn. The mere idea of it was and is distasteful to me.

When I complained to my mother about my birthplace and its want of attractiveness, she replied that I was born in a beautiful house near the esplanade of La Zurriola, fronting on the Calle de Oquendo, which belonged to my grandmother and looked out upon the sea, although the house does so no longer, as a theatre has been erected directly in front. I am glad that I was born near the sea, because it suggests freedom and change.

My paternal grandmother, Doña Concepción Zornoza, was a woman of positive ideas and somewhat eccentric. She was already old when I knew her. She had mortgaged several houses which she owned in the city in order to build the house which was occupied by us in La Zurriola.

Her plan was to furnish it and rent it to King Amadeo. Before Amadeo arrived at San Sebastian, however, the Carlist war broke out, and the monarch of the house of Savoy was compelled to abdicate, and my grandmother to abandon her plans.

My earliest recollection is the Carlist attempt to bombard San Sebastian. It is a memory which has now grown very dim, and what I saw has been confused with what I have heard. I have a confused recollection of the bringing in of soldiers on stretchers, and of having peeped over the wall of a little cemetery near the city, in which corpses were laid out, still unburied.

As I have said, my father was a mining engineer, but during the war he was engaged in teaching natural history at the Institute. I have no idea how this came about. He was also one of the Liberal volunteers.

I have a vague idea that one night I was taken from my bed, wrapped up in a mantle, and carried to a chalet on the Concha, belonging to one Errazu, who was a relative of my mother's. We lived there for a time in the cellar of the chalet.

Three shells, which were known in those days as cucumbers, dropped on the house, and wrecked the roof, making a great hole in the wall which separated our garden from the next.

MONSIGNOR, THE CAT

Monsignor was a handsome yellow cat belonging to us while we were living in the cellar of Señor Errazu's chalet.

From what I have since learned, his name was a tribute to the extraordinary reputation enjoyed at that period by Monsignor Simeoni.

Monsignor--I am referring to the yellow cat--was intelligent. A bell surmounted the Castillo de la Mota at San Sebastian, by whose side was stationed a look-out. When the look-out spied the flash of Carlist guns, he rang the bell, and then the townspeople retired into the doorways and cellars.

Monsignor was aware of the relation of the bell to the cannonading, so when the bell rang, he promptly withdrew into the house, even going so far sometimes as to creep under the beds.

My father had friends who were not above going down into our cellar on such occasions so as better to observe the manoeuvres of the cat.

TWO LUNATICS

After the war, I used to stroll as a boy with my mother and brothers to the Castillo de la Mota on Sundays. It was truly a beautiful walk, which will soon be ruined utterly by the citizens of San Sebastian. We looked out to sea from the Castillo and then we talked with the guard. We often met a lunatic there, who was in the care of a servant. As soon as he caught sight of us children, the lunatic was happy at once, but if a woman came near him, he ran away and flattened himself against the walls, kicking and crying out: "Blind dog! Blind dog!"

I remember also having seen a young woman, who was insane, in a great house which we used to visit in those days at Loyola. She gesticulated and gazed continually into a deep well, where a half moon of black water was visible far below. These lunatics, one at the Castillo and the other in that great house, haunted my imagination as a child.

THE HAWK

My latest recollection of San Sebastian is of a hawk, which we brought home to our house from the Castillo.

Some soldiers gave us the hawk when it was still very young, and it grew up and became accustomed to living indoors. We fed it snails, which it gulped down as if they were bonbons.

When it was full-grown, it escaped to the courtyard and attacked our chickens, to say nothing of all the cats of the neighbourhood. It hid under the beds during thundershowers.

When we moved away from San Sebastian, we were obliged to leave the hawk behind. We carried him up to the Castillo one day, turned him loose, and off he flew.

IN MADRID

We moved from San Sebastian to Madrid. My father had received an appointment to the Geographic and Political Institute. We lived on the Calle Real, just beyond the Glorieta de Bilbao, in a street which is now a prolongation of the Calle de Fuencarral.

Opposite our house, there was a piece of high ground, which has not yet been removed, which went by the name of "_La Era del Mico_," or "The Monkey Field." Swings and merry-go-rounds were scattered all over it, so that the diversions of "_La Era del Mico_," together with the two-wheeled calashes and chaises which were still in use in those days, and the funerals passing continually through the street, were the amusements which were provided ready-made for us, as we looked down from our balcony.

Two sensational executions took place while we lived here--those of the regicide Otero and of Oliva--one following closely on the heels of the other. We heard the _Salve_, or prayer, which is sung by the prisoners for the criminal awaiting death, hawked about us then on the streets.

IN PAMPLONA

From Madrid we went to Pamplona. Pamplona was still a curious city maintaining customs which would have been appropriate to a state of war. The draw-bridges were raised at night, only one, or perhaps two, gates being left open, I am not certain which.

Pamplona proved an amusing place for a small boy. There were the walls with their glacis, their sentry boxes, their cannon; there were the gates, the river, the cathedral and the surrounding quarters--all of them very attractive to us.

We studied at the Institute and committed all sorts of pranks like the other students. We played practical jokes in the houses of the canons, and threw stones at the bishop's palace, many of the windows of which were already paneless and forlorn.

We also made wild excursions to the roof of our house and to those of other houses in the neighbourhood, prying about the garrets and peering down over the cornices into the courtyards.

Once we seized a stuffed eagle, cherished by a neighbour, hauled it to the attic, pulled it through the skylight to the roof, and flung it down into the street, creating a genuine panic among the innocent passers-by, when they saw the huge bird drop at their feet.

One of my most vivid memories of Pamplona is seeing a criminal on his way to execution passing our house, attired in a round cap and yellow robe.

It was one of the sights which has impressed me most. Later in the afternoon, driven by curiosity, knowing that the man who had been garroted must be still on the scaffold, I ventured alone to see him, and remained there examining him closely for a long time. When I returned home that night, I was unable to sleep because of the impression he had made.

DON TIRSO LAREQUI

Many other vivid memories of Pamplona remain with me, never to be forgotten. I remember a lad of our own age who died, leaping from the wall, and then there were our adventures along the river.

Another terrible memory was associated with the cathedral. I had begun my first year of Latin, and was exactly nine at the time.

We had come out of the Institute, and were watching a funeral. Afterwards, three or four of the boys, among whom were my brother Ricardo and myself, entered the cathedral. The echo of the responses was ringing in my ears and I hummed them, as I wandered about the aisles.

Suddenly, a black shadow shot from behind one of the confessionals, pounced upon me and seized me around the neck with both hands, almost choking me. I was paralyzed with fear. It proved to be a fat, greasy canon, by name Don Tirso Larequi.

"What is your name?" he shouted, shaking me vigorously.

I could not answer because of my fright.

"What is his name?" the priest demanded of the other boys.

"His name is Antonio García," replied my brother Ricardo, coolly.

"Where does he live?"

"In the Calle de Curia, Number 14."

There was no such place, of course.

"I shall see your father at once," shouted the priest, and he rushed out of the cathedral like a bull.

My brother and I then made our escape through the cloister.

This red-faced priest, fat and ferocious, rushing out of the dark to choke a nine-year-old boy, has always been to me a symbol of the Catholic religion.

This experience of my boyhood partly explains my anti-clericalism. I recall Don Tirso with an undying hate, and were he still alive--I have no idea whether he is or not--I should not hesitate to climb up to the roof of his house some dark night, and shout down his chimney in a cavernous voice: "Don Tirso! You are a damned villain!"

A VISIONARY ROWDY