Teatro Eslava is the Madrid theater where a boy’s first sustained encounter with revue performers reshapes his understanding of sexuality and of his grandfather, Don Guillermo Medina. The artists’ entrance opens onto a world of backstage intimacy, practical errands, teasing, and performance: for the boy, the theater becomes at once a place of awakening and a setting in which the exemplary public figure he has known proves more complicated than his reputation suggests.

Setting and first visit

Don Guillermo brings his grandson to Teatro Eslava by taxi, warning him that nobody there knows him and that he must not say his grandfather’s name. The warning gives the visit an air of secrecy before the pair even enters. Rather than use the main door, they go in through the artists’ entrance, and instead of watching from the stalls they see the rehearsal from the side of the stage. These altered routes place the boy inside the theater’s working world, not among its ordinary audience.

The rehearsal is a full-dress run of the revue Orgía en Constantinopla. Backstage, a young performer welcomes Don Guillermo wearing a tiny gold-sequined brief and a peacock-feather train, her upper body bare. The boy has never seen a woman like her. His first response is astonishment; then an unfamiliar, intimate embarrassment flushes his face. He experiences the feeling as both pleasant and unpleasant, and as something at once personal and strangely detached from him. The scene makes the theater a threshold: what he had known through pictures in the schoolyard is suddenly embodied before him, while his own physical response remains new enough to seem doubtful.

Backstage as a place of discovery

The encounter extends beyond the first performer. The women treat the boy as if he were invisible while greeting the revue’s author, and the ease of their behavior unsettles his assumptions about nudity and decorum. In a single afternoon, he learns that the women in the pictures are real, that performers can behave as naturally undressed as dressed, and that an erection can hurt without quite being pain. Teatro Eslava’s backstage is thus not simply a spectacle viewed from afar; it is where bodily discovery, social ease, and the boy’s embarrassment meet at close range.

The older narrator presents these lessons as arriving together, but distinguishes one as the most important: life is both simpler and more complicated than he had thought. The theater supplies concrete experiences; his grandfather supplies the interpretive shock. The boy had understood Don Guillermo as a devoted father, incorruptible official, affectionate husband, exemplary republican, and patriotic playwright. At Teatro Eslava he sees him respond to the performers’ bodies with an enthusiasm as unguarded as a child’s. The contrast does not cancel the public virtues the boy associates with him, but it breaks their appearance of seamlessness.

Don Guillermo’s public and private selves

The theater brings into focus a contradiction that the boy cannot immediately resolve. Don Guillermo is remembered as a man whose only homeland was humanity, yet the narrator concludes that he had been unfaithful to his wife with half the chorus girls in the city. His appetite does not make him more or less progressive, the narrator reflects; instead, it opens a consoling fissure in an otherwise monolithic image of integrity. It also connects him, in this private conduct, to the neighbors of Hermosilla 49 whom he most despises. The old man, however, appears to live harmoniously with the contradiction.

A feather-covered stage prop makes the discrepancy almost comic: when Susi lifts what looks like a hollow bra designed to display rather than cover the breasts, Don Guillermo watches with an appetite the narrator likens to a cat’s. The scene’s humor is also a form of revelation. The revered grandfather is neither exposed as simply false nor left untouched by the discovery; the boy has to accommodate the same person’s humane public commitments and his conspicuous sexual weakness.

The theater’s mascot

After the first visit, the boy asks whether he can return the next day. Don Guillermo refuses, telling him to study if he wants to attend university in September, but offers him two tickets to the opening so he can invite Miguel. The consolation does not satisfy him. The next afternoon, he tells his grandmother he is going to study at the library and instead returns to Teatro Eslava through the artists’ entrance. His return changes the theater from a single startling encounter into a recurring part of his life.

During the run of Orgía en Constantinopla, the performers give him the nickname Meri, short for meritorio, meaning an aspiring junior or errand boy. Maruja, the company’s star performer, coins the name; soon even the stagehands use it. The name fits the tasks he willingly takes on: fastening bras, tightening corsets, and going out for cigarettes, coffee, or sandwiches. The company jokes about the reward his diligence might earn him, but the narrator says he never took their suggestive promises seriously. He describes himself as something like a mascot: less than a little brother, more than an admirer, and trusted enough to enter dressing rooms where the performers move about half-dressed.

A new education and its limits

The backstage familiarity is affectionate and teasing, but the performers’ knowledge of their own interests is not mistaken for an invitation. The narrator calls them clever, resourceful, funny, and fully capable of defending themselves; for that reason, he says, he never developed illusions. He can sit on their knees and help fasten a garter without confusing the intimacy of the routine with a promise. When Candi later takes his arm at the company’s final performance and tells him that perseverance is the key to success, he nevertheless feels his legs tremble: the joke lands on a boy whose desire has been awakened, even as his account insists on the boundary between fantasy and what the women actually offer.

This period at Teatro Eslava exists alongside, rather than replacing, the rest of his education. He is a student at the Institución, spends weekends on exhausting hikes in the Guadarrama mountains, and applies himself deliberately to his studies on weekday afternoons. The fatigue of the hikes is enough to leave him worn out before his nighttime visits to the theater. He also recalls masturbating frequently during those months, but says that the prospect of religious schooling would have made the experience a source of nightmares and an unpredictable crisis of conscience. The theater’s lessons therefore extend beyond the performers themselves: they help him encounter desire without the same framework of religious guilt he imagines he might otherwise have faced.

Teatro Eslava remains significant as the place where these strands converge: the artists’ entrance and the dressing rooms make private proximity possible; the boy’s errands give that proximity a practical form; the performers’ teasing makes its limits legible; and Don Guillermo’s behavior complicates the moral image the boy has inherited. The theater does not resolve those contradictions. It gives the boy a first, vivid education in living with them.