Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper - Francisco de Quevedo (good summer reads .TXT) 📗

to table sanctified. Some said, “These are certainly black Ethiopian peas”; others cried they were in mourning, and wondered what relation of theirs was dead. Our master happened to bite one of them, and it pleased God that he broke his teeth.

On Fridays the old woman would dress us some eggs, but so full of her reverend grey hairs, that they appeared no less aged then herself. It was a common practice with her to dip the fire-shovel into the pot instead of the ladle, and to serve up porrengers of broth stuffed with coals, vermin, chips, and knots of flax she used to spin, all which she threw in to fill up and cram the guts. In this misery we continued till the next Lent, at the beginning of which one of our companions fell sick. Cabra, to save charges, delayed sending for a physician, till the patient was just giving up the ghost and desired to prepare for another world; then he called a young quack, who felt his pulse, and said, “Hunger had been beforehand with him, and prevented his killing that man.” These were his last words; the poor lad died, and was buried meanly because he was a stranger. This struck a terror into all that lived in the house; the dismal story flew all about the town, and came at last to Don Alonso Coronel’s ears, who having no other son, began to be convinced of Cabra’s inhumanity, and to give more credit to the words of two mere shadows, for we were no better at that time. He came to take us from the boarding school, and asked for us, though we stood before him; so that finding us in such a deplorable condition, he gave our pinch-gut master some hard words. We were carried away in two chairs, taking leave of our famished companions, who followed us, as far as they could, with their eyes and wishes, lamenting and bewailing, as those do who remain slaves at Algiers when their other associates are ransomed.

IV

Of my convalescence, and departure for the University of Alcalá de Henares.

When we came to Don Alonso’s house, they laid us very gently on to two beds, for fear of rattling our bones, they were so bare with starving; then with magnifying glasses they began to search all about our faces for our eyes, and were a long time before they could find out mine, because I had suffered most, being treated like a servant, and consequently mine was a royal hunger. Physicians were called, who ordered the dust should be wiped off our mouths with foxtails, as if we had been paintings; and indeed we looked like the picture of death; and that we should be nourished with good broths and light meats, for fear of overloading our weak stomachs. Who can be able to express the rejoicing there was in our guts, the first good soup that we tasted, and afterwards when we came to eat some fowl? All these things to them were unknown novelties. The doctors gave order that for nine days nobody should talk in our chamber, because our stomachs were so empty that the least word returned an echo in them. These and suchlike precautions used caused our spirits to return to us in some measure; but our jaws were so tanned and shrivelled up that there was no stretching of them, and therefore care was taken that they should be every day gently forced out, and, as it were, set upon the last with the bottom of a pestle. In a few days we got up to try our limbs, but still we looked like the shadows of other men, and so lean and pale as if we were lineally descended from the fathers in the desert. We spent the whole day in praising God for having delivered us out of the clutches of the most inhuman Cabra, and offered up our earnest prayers, that no Christian might ever fall into that miserable thraldom. If ever, when we were eating, we happened to think of the miserable boarding school table, it made us so hungry that we devoured twice as much as at any other time. We used to tell Don Alonso, how, when Cabra sat down to table, he would inveigh against gluttony though he never knew anything of it in his life; and he laughed heartily when we informed him that, in speaking of the commandment “Thou shall not kill,” he made it extend to partridges and capons, and such other dainties as never came within his doors, and even to killing of hunger, which he certainly counted a heinous sin, and therefore had an aversion to all eating. We were three whole months upon our recovery, and at the end thereof Don Alonso began to think of sending his son to Alcalá, to finish his Humanity. He asked me whether I would go, and I thinking I could never be far enough from that inhuman monster of misery and famine, offered to serve his son faithfully, as experience should show. He provided him another servant, in the nature of steward, to look after him, and give an account of the money he sent for his expenses, by bill upon one Julian Merluza. We put all our equipage into a cart belonging to one Diego Monge; it consisted of a small bed for our master, and a truckle bed to run under it, for me and the steward whose name was Aranda, five quilts, four pair of sheets, eight pillows, four hangings, a trunk of linen, and other furniture for a house. We went ourselves into a coach in the evening, a little before nightfall, and about midnight came to the ever accursed lone inn of Viveros. The innkeeper was a Morisco, and a downright thief; and all my life I never saw cat and dog so united in peace as that day.