🦋 Juanito's parents: exposition
As I started reading the second section of Fortunata and Jacinta, "Santa Cruz and Arnáiz: A Historical View of Madrid's Business World," I got kind of spaced out -- this is looking like a long bit of dry exposition that would give me a flavor of the novel's setting maybe, but without contributing much to my understanding of the characters -- this is what I said to myself and I started reading from a distance, not engaging myself in the text. (It did not help that there's been a long break since I read the first section, so I had to be skipping back to remind myself of characters' names.) The text is certainly very dense, and requires a good bit of effort to maintain engagement with. But a few pages in, something just clicked when I realized Barbarita was going to grow up to be Juanito's mother. (Again, I would have known this right off if I'd been paying better attention.) Suddenly all the relationships start making sense, and I'm looking at the characters as individuals rather than as representatives of families. I want to quote a long piece from Chapter 2 of this section, but will put that below the fold. The description of the (newly bourgeois) families' economic lives is holding my attention a lot better now; I'm anxious to find out why Don Baldomero will bequeath his business to his two nephews rather than to his son. Also very nice: Galdós' digression lamenting the disappearance of bright primary colors from Spanish fashion as the Spanish economy comes under the sway of the northern model -- "We're under the influence of northern Europe, and the blasted North imposes on us the grays that it gets from its smoky gray sky." Read on for a picture of Barbarita's childhood.
 Barbarita and her older brother Gumersindo were Don Bonifacio Arnáiz's and Doña Asunción Trujillo's only children. When she was old enough, she went to Doña Calixta's school, located on Imperial Street, where the Fiel Contraste was. The two little girls who became her best friends were her age, and both came from the same neighborhood; one was from the Moreno family (who owned the pharmacy on Carretas Street) and the other was a daughter of Muñoz, the hardware merchant on Tintoreros Street. Eulalia Muñoz was very vain, and used to say that there was no store like theirs and that it was wonderful to see it, all full of iron things that were so big, "as big as Doña Calixta's cane," and so, so heavy that not even five hunddred men could pick them up. Then there were thousands of hammers, hooks, kettles, "so, so big... bigger than this room." And as for the packets of nails -- what could be nicer?...Her pockets were always stuffed with gadgets that she used to show off to dazzle her friends. She hasd gold-headed tacks, hook-and-eye snaps, gun-metal rings, buckles, scraps of sandpaper, leftover samples, and other broken or damaged items. But what she treasured most, and for this reason didn't take it out except on certain days, was her collection of labels, small pieces of green paper removed from useless packages that bore England's famous coat of arms -- the garter, the lion, and the unicorn. On all of them was written "Birmingham." "See? This Mr. Birmingán is the one who writes to my father every day, in English. And they're such good friends that he's always telling him to come see him, and just a little while ago he sent my father a smoked ham that smelled sort of burned, right with the nails, and also a huge meat pie as big as this, look, as big as Doña Calixta's brazier, and it had lots of teeny raisins in it, and it was hot as a Guinea pepper but it was so good, m-mm." The Moreno girl staked her vanity on scraps of paper with little figures and colored letters that told about pills and varnishes or ingredients for air dyes. She would show these one by one, but save her best item for last. Suddenly pulling out a handkerchief and thursting it at the nostrils of her friends, she would say, "Smell it." And indeed, they almost passed out from the strong smell of cologne. Their admiration momentarily silenced them, but gradually they recovered, and Eulalia, whose pride rarely admitted defeat, would produce a headless gold screw or a piece of foil with which she was planning to make a mirror. It was hard to erase the pleasant sensation and success of the perfume. The little ironmonger, somewhat abashed, had to put away her junk after hearing remarks that were really unfair. The girl from the pharmacy would turn up her nose, saying, "Ugh, what a stink, Eulalia. Put those awful things away!" The next day, Barbarita (who didn't want to be outdone by her friends) brought some very strange pieces of cardboard-backed paper all written over with Chinese-like scrawls. After making a big to do, pretending that she was going to show what she had and then hiding it again -- all of which increased the others' curiosity to the point of nervous irritation -- she suddenly thrust the paper at her friends' noses, exclaiming triumphantly, "And how about this?" Castita and Eulalia were overwhelmed by the Asiatic fragrance, wavering between admiration and envy. But finally they had no other choice; they had to swallow their pride when Arnáiz's little girl produced that faint scent, and they begged her for another whiff. Barbarita didn't like to squander her treasure, so when she had scarcely put the paper under their snubbed noses, she withdrew it with a cautious and greedy movement, fearful that the fragrance would disappear into her friends' respiratory organs like smoke up a chimney flue. ...Eventually, her two little friends, along with others who had approached them out of curiosity, and even Doña Calixta herself, who deigned to be friendly with her richer pupils, admitted, above all feelings of envy, that no one had nicer things than the girl from the Phillipines shop.
posted afternoon of Sunday, November 9th, 2008
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