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 Guipuzcoa. But I myself prefer it. I
have no city, and I hold myself to be strictly extra-urban.
MY PARENTS
My father, Serafin 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 Goni. 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.
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