Mare Nostrum | Page 5

in various local societies, was continually filling up his house with mementoes of the past picked up in the villages, or that his clients freely gave him. He was not able to find wall space enough for the pictures, nor room in his salons for the furniture. Therefore, the latest acquisitions were provisionally taking their way to the p��rche to await definite installation. Years afterward, when he should retire from his profession, he might be able to construct a medieval castle--the most medieval possible on the coasts of the Marina; near to the village where he had been born, he would put each object in a place appropriate to its importance.
Whatever the notary deposited in the rooms of the first floor would soon make its appearance in the garret as mysteriously as though it had acquired feet; for Do?a Cristina and her servants, obliged to live in a continual struggle with the dust and cobwebs of an edifice that was slowly dropping to pieces, were beginning to feel a ferocious hatred of everything old.
Up here on the top floor, discords and battles because of lack of things to dress up in, were not possible among the boys. They had only to sink their hands into any one of the great old chests, pulsing with the dull gnawing of the wood-borers, whose iron fretwork, pierced like lace, was dropping away from its supports. Some of the youngsters, brandishing short, small swords with hilts of mother-of-pearl, or long blades such as the Cid carried, would then wrap themselves in mantles of crimson silk darkened by ages. Others would throw over their shoulders damask counterpanes of priceless old brocade, peasant skirts with great flowers of gold, farthingales of richly woven texture that crackled like paper.
When they grew tired of imitating comedians with noisy clashing of spades and death-blows, Ulysses and the other active lads would propose the game of "Bandits and Bailiffs." But thieves could not go clad in such rich cloths; their attire ought to be inconspicuous. And so they overturned some mountains of dull-colored stuffs that appeared like mere sacking in whose dull woven designs could be dimly discerned legs, arms, heads, and branching sprays of metallic green.
Don Esteban had found these fragments already torn by the farmers into covers for their large earthen jars of oil or into blankets for the work-mules. They were bits of tapestry copied from cartoons of Titian and Rubens which the notary was keeping only out of historic respect. Tapestry then, like all things that are plentiful, had no special merit. The old-clothes dealers of Valencia had in their storehouses dozens of the same kind of remnants and when the festival of Corpus Christi approached they used them to cover the natural barricades formed by the ground, instead of building new ones in the street followed by the processions.
At other times, Ulysses repeated the same game under the name of "Indians and Conquerors." He had found in the mountains of books stored away by his father, a volume that related in double columns, with abundant wood cuts, the navigations of Columbus, the wars of Hernando Cortez, and the exploits of Pizarro.
This book cast a glamor over the rest of his existence. Many times afterwards, when a man, he found this image latent in the background of his likes and desires. He really had read few of its paragraphs, but what interested him most were the engravings--in his estimation more worthy of admiration than all the pictures in the garret.
With the point of his long sword he would trace on the ground, just as Pizarro had done before his discouraged companions, ready on the Island of Gallo to desist from the conquest: "Let every good Castilian pass this line...." And the good Castilians--a dozen little scamps with long capes and ancient swords whose hilts reached up to their mouths--would hasten to group themselves around their chief, who was imitating the heroic gestures of the conqueror. Then was heard the war-cry: "At them! Down with the Indians!"
It was agreed that the Indians should flee and on that account they were modestly clad in scraps of tapestry and cock feathers on their head. But they fled treacherously, and upon finding themselves upon vargue?os, tables and pyramids of chairs, they began to shy books at their persecutors. Venerable leather volumes decorated with dull gold, and folios of white parchment fell face downward on the floor, their fastenings breaking apart and spreading abroad a rain of printed or manuscript pages and yellowing engravings--as though tired of living, they were letting their life-blood flow from their bodies.
The uproar of these wars of conquest brought Do?a Cristina to the rescue. She no longer cared to harbor little imps who preferred the adventurous whoops of the garret to the mystic delights of the