nce at
Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental
wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of
racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too
timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything
else to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up
medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In
_Juventud-Egolatria_ ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfully
shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years
before starting to write. And he still runs a bakery.

You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from the
great focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing
window. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages and
white sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's "Graces,"
others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle are
oblong plates with pates and sliced bologna and things in jelly; then
come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscene
jam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door you
see a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful of
brown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread
and pastry swirls about the sidewalk.

So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own field, he has freed himself
from any compromise with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet, his
novels may be as bitter as he likes.

II

The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue sky where a few stars
glisten faint as mica. Shadow fills half the street, etching a
silhouette of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the cobblestones,
leaving the rest very white with moonlight. The facades of the houses,
with their blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In the dark of a
doorway a woman sits hunched under a brown shawl. Her head nods, but
still she jerks a tune that sways and dances through the silent street
out of the accordion on her lap. A little saucer for pennies is on the
step beside her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are huddled
together asleep. The moonlight points out with mocking interest their
skinny dirt-crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy pavement,
and the filthy rags that barely cover their bodies. Two men stumble out
of a wineshop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who walk along
unsteadily in their worn canvas shoes,