← catalogue

The Quest

by Pío Baroja · English · Gutenberg #8496 · 398,044 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Quest
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Quest

Author: Pío Baroja

Translator: Isaac Goldberg


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8496]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8496

Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, Cam, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Cam, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team










THE QUEST

BY PÍO BAROJA

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH By ISAAC GOLDBERG




CONTENTS


PART ONE

I Preamble--Somewhat Immoral Notions of a Boarding-House Keeper--A
Balcony is Heard Closing--A Cricket Chirps

II Doña Casiana's House--A Morning Ceremony--Conspiracy--Wherein is
Discussed The Nutritive Value of Bones--Petra and Her Family--Manuel;
his Arrival in Madrid

III First Impressions of Madrid--The Boarders--Idyll--Sweet and
Delightful Lessons

IV Oh, Love, Love!--What's Don Telmo Doing?--Who is Don
Telmo?--Wherein the Student and Don Telmo Assume Certain Novelesque
Proportions


PART TWO

I "The Regeneration of Footgear" and "The Lion of the Bootmaker's
Art"--The First Sunday--An Escapade--_El Bizco_ and his Gang

II The "Big Yard" or Uncle Rilo's House--Local Enmities

III Roberto Hastings at the Shoemaker's--The Procession of
Beggars--Court of Miracles

IV Life in the Cobbler's Shop--Manuel's Friends

V La Blasa's Tavern

VI Roberto in Quest of a Woman--_El Tabuenca_ and his
Inventions--Don Alonso or the Snake-Man

VII The _Kermesse_ on Pasión Street--"The Dude"--A Café Chantant

VIII Leandro's Irresolution--In La Blasa's Tavern--The Man with the
Three Cards--The Duel with _Valencia_

IX An Unlikely Tale--Manuel's Sisters--Life's Baffling Problems


PART THREE

I Uncle Patas' Domestic Drama--The Bakery--Karl the Baker--The Society
of the Three

II One of the Many Disagreeable Ways of Dying in Madrid--The
Orphan--_El Cojo_ and his Cave--Night in the Observatory

III Meeting with Roberto--Roberto Narrates the Origin of a Fantastic
Fortune

IV Dolores the Scandalous--_Pastiri's_ Tricks--Tender Savagery--A
Modest Out-of-the-way Robbery

V Gutter Vestals--The Troglodites

VI Señor Custodio and his Establishment--The Free Life

VII Señor Custodio's Ideas--_La Justa, el Carnicerín_ and _El
Conejo_

VIII The Square--A Wedding in La Bombilla--The Asphalt Caldrons




PART ONE




CHAPTER I

  Preamble--Somewhat Immoral Notions of a Boarding-House Keeper--A
    Balcony Is Heard Closing--A Cricket Chirps.


The clock in the corridor had just struck twelve, in a leisurely,
rhythmic, decorous manner. It was the habit of that tall old
narrow-cased clock to accelerate or retard, after its own sweet taste
and whim, the uniform and monotonous series of hours that encircle our
life until it wraps it and leaves it, like an infant in its crib, in
the obscure bosom of time.

Soon after this friendly indication of the old clock, uttered in a
solemn, peaceful voice becoming an aged person, the hour of eleven
rang out in a shrill, grotesque fashion, with juvenile impertinence,
from a petulant little clock of the vicinity, and a few minutes later,
to add to the confusion and the chronometric disorder, the bell of a
neighbouring church gave a single long, sonorous stroke that quivered
for several seconds in the silent atmosphere.

Which of the three clocks was correct? Which of those three devices
for the mensuration of time was the most exact in its indications?

The author cannot say, and he regrets it. He, regrets it, because
Time, according to certain solemn philosophers, is the canvas
background against which we embroider the follies of our existence,
and truly it is little scientific not to be able to indicate at
precisely which moment the canvas of this book begins. But the author
does not know; all he can say is, that at that moment the steeds of
night had for an appreciable time been coursing across the heavens. It
was, then, the hour of mystery; the hour when wicked folk stalk
abroad; the hour in which the poet dreams of immortality, rhyming
_hijos_ with _prolijos_ and _amor_ with _dolor_; the hour in which the
night-walker slinks forth from her lair and the gambler enters his;
the hour of adventures that are sought and never found; the hour,
finally, of the chaste virgin's dreams and of the venerable old man's
rheumatism. And as this romantic hour glided on, the shouts and songs
and quarrels of the street subsided; the lights in the balconies were
extinguished; the shopkeepers and janitors drew in their chairs from
the gutter to surrender themselves to the arms of sleep.

In the chaste, pure dwelling of Doña Casiana the boarding-house
keeper, idyllic silence had reigned for some time. Only through the
balcony windows, which were wide open, came the distant rumbling of
carriages and the song of a neighbouring cricket who scratched with
disagreeable persistency upon the strident string of his instrument.

At the hour, whatever it was, that was marked by the twelve slow,
raucous snores of the corridor clock, there were in the house only an
old gentleman,--an impenitent early-riser; the proprietress, Doña
Casiana,--a landlady equally impenitent, to the misfortune of her
boarders, and the servant Petra.

At this moment the landlady was asleep, seated upon the rocking-chair
before the open balcony; Petra, in the kitchen, was likewise asleep,
with her head resting against the window-frame, while the old
early-rising gentleman amused himself by coughing in bed.

Petra had finished scouring and her drowsiness, the heat and fatigue
had doubtless overcome her. She could be made out dimly in the light
of the small lamp that hung by the hearth. She was a thin, scrawny
woman, flat-chested, with lean arms, big red hands and skin of greyish
hue. She slept seated upon a chair with her mouth open; her breathing
was short and laboured.

At the strokes of the corridor clock she suddenly awoke; she shut the
window, through which came a nauseating, stable-like odour from the
milk-dairy on the ground-floor; she folded the clothes and left with a
pile of dishes, depositing them upon the dining-room table; then she
laid away in a closet the table-ware, the tablecloth and the left-over
bread; she took down the lamp and entered the room in the balcony of
which the landlady sat sleeping.

"Señora, señora!" she called, several times.

"Eh? What is it?" murmured Doña Casiana drowsily.

"Perhaps you wish something?"

"No, nothing. Oh, yes! Tell the baker tomorrow that I'll pay him the
coming Monday."

"Very well. Good-night."

The servant was leaving the room, when the balconies of the house
across the way lighted up. They opened wide and soon there came the
strains of a tender prelude from a guitar.

"Petra! Petra!" cried Doña Casiana. "Come here. Eh? Over in that
Isabel's house ... You can tell they have visitors."

The domestic went to the balcony and gazed indifferently at the house
opposite.

"Now that's what pays," the landlady went on. "Not this nasty
boarding-house business."

At this juncture there appeared in one of the balconies of the other
house a woman wrapped in a flowing gown, with a red flower in her
hair. A young man in evening dress, with swallow-tail coat and white
vest, clasped her tightly about the waist.

"That's what pays," repeated the landlady several times.

This notion must have stirred her ill-humour, for she added in an
irritated voice:

"Tomorrow I'll have some plain words with that priest and those
gadabout daughters of Doña Violante, and all the rest who are behind
in their payments. To think a woman should have to deal with such a
tribe! No! They'll laugh no more at me! ..."

Petra, without offering a reply, said good-night again and left the
room. Doña Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund
person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment
of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment,
with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long
procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities,
mystic and mundane, in such numbers that she was compelled to install
a ticket-office at the entrance.

While the landlady lulled her fancy in this sweet vision of a brothel
_de luxe_, Petra entered a dingy little room that was cluttered
with old furniture. She set the light upon a chair, and placed a
greasy box of matches on the top of the container; she read for a
moment out of a filthy, begrimed devotionary printed in large type;
she repeated several prayers with her eyes raised to the ceiling, then
began to undress. The night was stifling; in that hole the heat was
horrible. Petra got into bed, crossed herself, put out the lamp, which
smoked for a long time, stretched herself out and laid her head upon
the pillow. A worm in one of the pieces of furniture made the wood
crack at regular intervals.

Petra slept soundly for a couple of hours, then awoke stifling from
the heat. Somebody had just opened the door and footsteps were heard
in the entry.

"That's Doña Violante and her daughters," mumbled Petra. "It must be
pretty late."

The three women were probably returning from los Jardines, after
having supped in search of the pesetas necessary to existence. Luck
must have withheld its favour, for they were in bad humour and the two
young women were quarrelling, each blaming the other for having wasted
the night.

There were a number of venomous, ironic phrases, then the dispute
ceased and silence was restored. Petra, thus kept awake, sank into her
own thoughts; again footfalls were heard in the corridor, this time
light and rapid. Then came the rasping of the shutter-bolt of a
balcony that was being opened cautiously.

"One of them has got up," thought Petra. "What can the fuss be now?"

In a few minutes the voice of the landlady was heard shouting
imperiously from her room:

"Irene! ... Irene!"

"Well?"

"Come in from the balcony."

"And why do I got to come in?" replied a harsh voice in rough,
ill-pronounced accents.

"Because you must ... That's why."

"Why, what am I doing in the balcony?"

"That's something you know better than I."

"Well, I don't know."

"Well, I do."

"I was taking the fresh air."

"I guess you're fresh enough."

"You mean you are, señora."

"Close the balcony. You imagine that this house is something else."

"I? What have I done?"

"I don't have to tell you. For that sort of thing there's the house
across the way, across the way."

"She means Isabel's," thought Petra.

The balcony was heard to shut suddenly; steps echoed in the entry,
followed by the slamming of a door. For a long time the landlady
continued her grumbling; soon came the murmuring of a conversation
carried on in low tones. Then nothing more was heard save the
persistent shrilling of the neighbouring cricket, who continued to
scrape away at his disagreeable instrument with the determination of a
beginner on the violin.




CHAPTER II

  Doña Casiana's House--A Morning Ceremony--Conspiracy--Wherein Is
    Discussed the Nutritive Value of Bones--Petra and her
    Family--Manuel; his arrival in Madrid.


... And the cricket, now like an obstinate virtuoso, persisted in his
musical exercises, which were truly somewhat monotonous, until the sky
was brightened by the placid smile of dawn. At the very first rays of
the sun the performer relented, doubtless content with the perfection
of his artistic efforts, and a quail took up his solo, giving the
three regulation strokes. The watchman knocked with his pike at the
stores, one or two bakers passed with their bread, a shop was opened,
then another, then a vestibule; a servant threw some refuse out on the
sidewalk, a newsboy's calling was heard.

The author would be too bold if he tried to demonstrate the
mathematical necessity imposed upon Doña Casiana's house of being
situated on Mesonero Romanos Street rather than upon Olivo, for,
undoubtedly, with the same reason it might have been placed upon
Desengaño, Tudescos or any other thoroughfare. But the duties of the
author, his obligation as an impartial and veracious chronicler compel
him to speak the truth, and the truth is that the house was on
Mesonero Romanos Street rather than on Olivo.

At this early hour not a sound could be heard inside; the janitor had
opened the vestibule-entrance and was regarding the street with a
certain melancholy.

The vestibule,--long, dingy, and ill-smelling,--was really a narrow
corridor, at one side of which was the janitor's lodge.

On passing this lodge, if you glanced inside, where it was encumbered
with furniture till no room was left, you could always make out a fat
woman, motionless, very swarthy, in whose arms reposed a pale weakling
of a child, long and thin, like a white earthworm. It seemed that
above the window, instead of "Janitor" the legend should have read:
"The Woman-Cannon and her Child," or some similar sign from the circus
tents.

If any question were addressed to this voluminous female she would
answer in a shrill voice accompanied by a rather disagreeable gesture
of disdain. Leaving the den of this woman-cannon to one side, you
would proceed; at the left of the entrance began the staircase, always
in darkness, with no air except what filtered in through a few high,
grated windows that opened upon a diminutive courtyard with filthy
walls punctured by round ventilators. For a broad, roomy nose endowed
with a keen pituitary membrane, it would have been a curious sport to
discover and investigate the provenience and the species of all the
vile odours comprising that fetid stench, which was an inalienable
characteristic of the establishment.

The author never succeeded in making the acquaintance of the persons
living upon the upper floors. He has a vague notion that there were
two or three landladies, a family who let out rooms to permanent
gentlemen boarders, but nothing else. Wherefore the author does not
climb those heights but pauses upon the first landing.

Here, at least by day, could be made out in the reigning darkness, a
tiny door; at night, on the other hand, by the light of a kerosene
lantern one could glimpse a tin door-plate painted red, upon which was
inscribed in black letters: "Casiana Fernández."

At one side of the door hung a length of blackish rusted chain that
could be reached only by standing on tiptoe and stretching out one's
arm; but as the door was always ajar, the lodgers could come and go
without the need of knocking.

This led to the house. By day, one was plunged into utter obscurity;
the sole thing that indicated a change of place was the smell, not so
much because it was more agreeable than that of the staircase, as
because it was distinct; on the contrary, at night, in the vague light
shed by a cork night-taper afloat in the water and oil of a bowl that
was attached to the wall by a brass ring, there could be seen through
a certain dim nebulosity, the furniture, the pictures and the other
paraphernalia that occupied the reception hall.

Facing the entrance stood a broad, solid table on which reposed an
old-fashioned music-box consisting of several cylinders that bristled
with pins; close beside it, a plaster statue: a begrimed figure
lacking a nose, and difficult to distinguish as some god, half-god or
mortal.

On the wall of the reception room and of the corridor hung some large,
indistinct oil paintings. A person of intelligence would perhaps have
considered them detestable, but the landlady, who imagined that a very
obscure painting must be very good, refreshed herself betimes with the
thought that mayhap these pictures, sold to an Englishman, would, one
day make her independent.

There were several canvases in which the artist had depicted
horrifying biblical scenes: massacres, devastation, revolting plagues;
but all this in such a manner, that, despite the painter's lavish
distribution of blood, wounds and severed heads, these canvases
instead of horrifying, produced an impression of merriment. One of
them represented the daughter of Herodias contemplating the head of
St. John the Baptist. Every figure expressed amiable joviality: the
monarch, with the indumentary of a card-pack king and in the posture
of a card-player, was smiling; his daughter, a florid-face dame, was
smiling; the familiars, encased in their huge helmets, were smiling,
and the very head of St. John the Baptist was smiling from its place
upon a repoussé platter. Doubtless the artist of these paintings, if
he lacked the gift of design and colour, was endowed with that of
joviality.

To the right and left of the house door ran the corridor, from whose
walls hung another exhibit of black canvases, most of them unframed,
in which could be made out absolutely nothing; only in one of them,
after very patient scrutiny, one might guess at a red cock pecking at
the leaves of a green cabbage.

Upon this corridor opened the bedrooms, in which, until very late in
the afternoon, dirty socks and torn slippers were usually seen strewn
upon the floor, while on the unmade beds lay collars and cuffs.

Almost all the boarders in that house got up late, except two
travelling salesmen, a bookkeeper and a priest, who arose early
through love of their occupations, and an old gentleman who did so
through habit or for reasons of hygiene.

The bookkeeper would be off, without breakfast, at eight in the
morning; the priest left _in albis_ to say mass; but the salesmen
had the audacious presumption to eat a bite in the house, and the
landlady resorted to a very simple procedure to send them off without
so much as a sip of water; these two agents began work between
half-past nine and ten; they retired very late, bidding their landlady
wake them at eight-thirty. She would see to it that they were not
aroused until ten. When they awoke and saw the time, they would jump
out of bed, hurriedly dress and dash off like a shot, cursing the
landlady. Then, when the feminine element of the house gave signs of
life, every nook would echo with cries, discordant voices,
conversations shouted from one bedchamber to another, and out of the
rooms, their hands armed with the night-service, would come the
landlady, one of Doña Violante's daughters, a tall, obese Biscayan
Lady, and another woman whom they called the Baroness.

The landlady invariably wore a corset-cover of yellow flannel, the
Baroness a wrapper mottled with stains from cosmetics and the Biscayan
lady a red waist through whose opening was regularly presented, for
the admiration of those who happened along the corridor, a huge white
udder streaked with coarse blue veins.

After this matutinal ceremony, and not infrequently during the same,
complaints, disputes, gossip and strife would arise, providing
tid-bits for the remaining hours.

On the day following the scrape between the landlady and Irene, when
the latter returned to her room after having fulfilled her mission, a
secret conclave was held by those who remained.

"Don't you know? Didn't you hear anything last night?" asked the
Biscayan.

"No," replied the landlady and the Baroness. "What happened?"

"Irene smuggled a man into the house last night."

"She did?"

"I heard her talking to him myself."

"And he must have opened the street door! The dog!" muttered the
landlady.

"No; the man came from this tenement."

"One of the students from upstairs," offered the Baroness.

"I'll tell a thing or two to the rascally fellow," replied Doña
Casiana.

"No. Take your time," answered the Biscayan. "We're going to give her
and her gallant a fright. If he comes tonight, while they're talking,
we'll tell the watchman to knock at the house door, and at the same
time we'll all come out of our rooms with lights, as if we were going
to the dining-room, and catch them."

While this plot was being hatched in the corridor, Petra was preparing
breakfast in the obscurity of the kitchen. There was very little to
prepare, for the meal invariably consisted of a fried egg, which never
by any accident was large, and a beefsteak, which, in memories
reverting to the remotest epoch, had not a single time by any
exception been soft.

At noon, the Biscayan, in tones of deep mystery, told Petra about the
conspiracy, but the maid-of-all-work was in no mood for jests that
day. She had just received a letter that filled her with worriment.
Her brother-in-law wrote her that Manuel, the eldest of Petra's
children, was being sent to Madrid. No lucid explanation of the reason
for this decision was given. The letter stated simply that back there
in the village the boy was only wasting his time, and that it would be
better for him to go to Madrid and learn a trade.

This letter had set Petra thinking. After wiping the dishes, she
washed herself in the kneeding-trough; she could not shake the fixed
idea that if her brother-in-law was sending Manuel to her it was
because the boy had been up to some mischief. She would soon find out,
for he was due to arrive that night.

Petra had four children, two boys and two girls; the girls were well
placed; the elder as a maid, with some very wealthy religious ladies,
the younger in a government official's home.

The boys gave her more bother; the younger not so much, since, as they
said, he continued to reveal a steady nature. The elder, however, was
rebellious and intractable.

"He doesn't take after me," thought Petra. "In fact, he's quite like
my husband."

And this disquieted her. Her husband, Manuel Alcázar, had been an
energetic, powerful man, and, towards his last days, harsh-tempered
and brutal.

He was a locomotive machinist and earned good pay. Petra and he could
not get along together and the couple were always at blows.

Folks and friends alike blamed Alcázar the machinist for everything,
as if the systematic contrariness of Petra, who seemed to enjoy
nagging the man, were not enough to exasperate any one. Petra had
always been that way,--wilful, behind the mask of humility, and as
obstinate as a mule. As long as she could do as she pleased the rest
mattered little.

While the machinist was alive, the family's economic situation had
been relatively comfortable. Alcázar and Petra paid sixteen duros per
month for their rooms on Relojo street, and took in boarders: a mail
clerk and other railroad employés.

Their domestic existence might have been peaceful and pleasureful were
it not for the daily altercations between husband and wife. They had
both come to feel such a need for quarrelling that the most
insignificant cause would lead to scandalous scenes. It was enough
that he said white for her to cry black; this opposition infuriated
the machinist, who would throw the dishes about, belabour his wife,
and smash all the household furniture. Then Petra, satisfied that she
had sufficient cause for affliction, shut herself in her room to weep
and pray.

What with his alcohol, his fits of temper, and his hard work, the
machinist went about half dazed; on one terribly hot day in August he
fell from the train on to the roadbed and was found dead without a
wound.

Petra, disregarding the advice of her boarders, insisted upon changing
residence, as she disliked that section of the city. This she did,
taking in new lodgers--unreliable, indigent folk who ran up large
bills or never paid at all--and in a short time she found herself
compelled to sell her furniture and abandon her new house.

Then she hired out her daughters as servants, sent her two boys off to
a little town in the province of Soria, where her brother-in-law was
the superintendent of a small railway station, and herself entered as
a domestic in Doña Casiana's lodging-house. Thus she descended from
mistress to servant, without complaint. It was enough that the idea
had occurred to her; therefore it was best.

She had been there for two years, saving her pay. Her ambition was to
have her sons study in a seminary and graduate as priests. And now
came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her plans. What
could have happened?

She made various conjectures. In the meantime with her deformed hands
she removed the lodgers' dirty laundry. In through the courtyard
window wafted a confusion of songs and disputing voices, alternating
with the screech of the clothes-line pulleys.

In the middle of the afternoon Petra began preparation for dinner. The
mistress ordered every morning a huge quantity of bones for the
sustenance of her boarders. It is very possible that there was, in all
that heap of bones, a Christian one from time to time; certainly,
whether they came from carnivorous animals or from ruminants, there
was rarely on those tibiae, humeri, and femora a tiny scrap of meat.
The ossuary boiled away in the huge pot with beans that had been
tempered with bicarbonate, and with the broth was made the soup,
which, thanks to its quantity of fat, seemed like some turbid
concoction for cleaning glassware or polishing gilt.

After inspecting the state of the ossuary in the stew-pot, Petra made
the soup, and then set about extracting all the scrap meat from the
bones and covering them hypocritically with a tomato sauce. This was
the _pièce de résistance_ in Doña Casiana's establishment.

Thanks to this hygienic regimen, none of the boarders fell ill with
obesity, gout or any of those other ailments due to excess of food and
so frequent in the rich.

After preparing the meal and serving it, Petra postponed the
dish-washing, and left the house to meet her son.

Night had not yet fallen. The sky was vaguely red, the air stifling,
heavy with a dense mist of dust and steam. Petra went up Carretas
Street, continued through Atocha, entered the Estación del Mediodía
and sat down on a bench to wait for Manuel....

Meanwhile, the boy was approaching the city half asleep, half
asphyxiated, in a third-class compartment.

He had taken the train the night before at the railway station where
his uncle was superintendent. On reaching Almazán, he had to wait more
than an hour for a mixed train, so he sauntered through the deserted
streets to kill time.

To Manuel, Almazán seemed vast, infinitely sad; the town, glimpsed
through the gloom of a dimly starlit night, loomed like a great,
fanastic, dead city. The pale electric lights shone upon its narrow
streets and low houses; the spacious plaza with its arc lights was
deserted; the belfry of a church rose into the heavens.

Manuel strolled down towards the river. From the bridge the town
seemed more fantastic and mysterious than ever; upon a wall might be
made out the galleries of a palace, and several lofty, sombre towers
shot up from amidst the jumbled dwellings of the town; a strip of moon
gleamed close to the horizon, and the river, divided by a few islets
into arms, glittered as if it were mercury.

Manuel left Almazánhad to wait a few hours in Alcuneza for the next
train. He was weary, and as there were no benches in the station, he
stretched himself out upon the floor amidst bundles and skins of oil.

At dawn he boarded the other train, and despite the hardness of the
seat, managed to fall asleep.

Manuel had been two years with his relatives; he departed from their
home with more satisfaction than regret.

Life had held no pleasure for him during those two years.

The tiny station presided over by his uncle was near a poor hamlet
surrounded by arid, stony tracts upon which grew neither tree nor
bush. A Siberian temperature reigned in those parts, but the
inclemencies of Nature were nothing to bother a little boy, and gave
Manuel not the slightest concern.

The worst of it all was that neither his uncle nor his uncle's wife
showed any affection for him, rather indifference, and this
indifference prepared the boy to receive their few benefactions with
utter coldness.

It was different with Manuel's brother, to whom the couple gradually
took a liking.

The two youngsters displayed traits almost absolutely opposite; the
elder, Manuel, was of a frivolous, slothful, indolent disposition, and
would neither study nor go to school. He was fond of romping about the
fields and engaging in bold, dangerous escapades. The characteristic
trait of Juan, the younger brother, was a morbid sentimentalism that
would overflow in tears upon the slightest provocation.

Manuel recalled that the school master and town organist, an old
fellow who was half dominie and taught the two brothers Latin, had
always prophesied that Juan would make his mark; Manuel he considered
as an adventure-seeking rover who would come to a bad end.

As Manuel dozed in the third-class compartment, a thousand
recollections thronged his imagination: the events of the night before
at his uncle's mingled in his mind with fleeting impressions of Madrid
already half forgotten. One by one the sensations of distinct epochs
intertwined themselves in his memory, without rhyme or reason and
among them, in the phantasmagoria of near and distant images that
rolled past his inner vision, there stood out clearly those sombre
towers glimpsed by night in Almazán by the light of the moon....

When one of his travelling companions announced that they had already
reached Madrid, Manuel was filled with genuine anxiety. A red dusk
flushed the sky, which was streaked with blood like some monster's
eye; the train gradually slackened speed; it glided through squalid
suburbs and past wretched houses; by this time, the electric lights
were gleaming pallidly above the high signal lanterns....

The train rolled on between long lines of coaches, the round-tables
trembled with an iron rumble, and the Estación del Mediodía,
illuminated by arc lamps, came into view.

The travellers got out; Manuel descended with his little bundle of
clothes in his hand, looked in every direction for a glimpse of his
mother and could not make her out anywhere on the wide platform. For a
moment he was confused, then decided to follow the throng that was
hurrying with bundles and bird-cages toward a gate; he was asked for
his ticket, he stopped to go through his pockets, found it and issued
into the street between two rows of porters who were yelling the names
of hotels.

"Manuel! Where are you going?"

There was his mother. Petra had meant to be severe; but at the sight
of her son she forgot her severity and embraced him effusively.

"But--what happened?" Petra asked at once.

"Nothing."

"Then--why have you come?"

"They asked me whether I wanted to stay there or go to Madrid, and I
said I'd rather go to Madrid."

"Nothing more?"

"Nothing more," replied Manuel simply.

"And Juan? Was he studying?"

"Yes. Much more than I was. Is the house far off, Mother?"

"Yes, Why? Are you hungry?"

"I should say. I haven't had a bite all the way."

They left the Station at the Prado; then they walked up Alcalá street.
A dusty mist quivered in the air; the street-lamp shone opaquely in
the turbid atmosphere.... As soon as they reached the house Petra made
supper for Manuel and prepared a bed for him upon the floor, beside
her own. The youth lay down, but so violent was the contrast between
the hamlet's silence and the racket of footsteps, conversations and
cries that resounded through the house, that, despite his weariness,
Manuel could not sleep.

He heard every lodger come in; it was past midnight when the
disturbance quieted down; suddenly a squabble burst out followed by a
crash of laughter which ended in a triply blasphemous imprecation and
a slap that woke the echoes.

"What can that be, Mother?" asked Manuel from his bed.

"That's Doña Violante's daughter whom they've caught with her
sweetheart," Petra answered, half from her sleep. Then it occurred to
her that it was imprudent to tell this to her boy, and she added,
gruffly:

"Shut up and go to sleep."

The music-box in the reception-room, set going by the hand of one of
the boarders, commenced to tinkle that sentimental air from _La
Mascotte_,--the duet between Pippo and Bettina:

  _Will you forget me, gentle swain?_

Then all was silent.




CHAPTER III

  First Impressions of Madrid--The Boarders--Idyll--Sweet and
    Delightful Lessons.


Manuel's mother had a relation, her husband's cousin, who was a
cobbler. Petra had decided, some days previously, to give Manuel into
apprenticeship at the shoe-shop; but she still hoped the boy would be
convinced that it was better for him to study something than to learn
a trade, and this hope had deterred her from the resolution to send
the boy to her relative's house.

Persuading the landlady to permit Manuel to remain in the house cost
Petra no little labour, but at last she succeeded. It was agreed that
the boy would run errands and help to serve meals. Then when the
vacation season had passed, he would resume his studies.

On the day following his arrival the youngster assisted his mother at
the table.

All the borders, except the Baroness and her girl, were seated in the
dining-room, presided over by the landlady with her wrinkle-fretted,
parchment-hued face and its thirty-odd moles.

The dining-room, a long, narrow habitation with a window opening on
the courtyard, communicated with two narrow corridors that switched
off at right angles; facing the window stood a dark walnut sideboard
whose shelves were laden with porcelain, glassware and cups and
glasses in a row. The centre table was so large for such a small room
that when the boarders were seated it scarcely left space for passage
at the ends.

The yellow wall-paper, torn in many spots, displayed, at intervals,
grimy circles from the oil of the lodgers' hair; reclining in their
seats they would rest the back of the chairs and their heads against
the wall.

The furniture, the straw chairs, the paintings, the mat full of
holes,--everything in that room was filthy, as if the dust of many
years had settled upon the articles and clung to the sweat of several
generations of lodgers.

By day the dining-room was dark; by night it was lighted by a
flickering kerosene lamp that smudged the ceiling with smoke.

The first time that Manuel, following his mother's instructions,
served at table, the landlady, as usual, presided. At her right sat an
old gentleman of cadaverous aspect,--a very fastidious personage who
conscientiously wiped the glasses and plates with his napkin. By his
side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he
would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady
rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of bestial appearance, with a
huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat
as a toad, was Doña Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now
Doña Violent and now Doña Violated.

Near Doña Violante were grouped her daughters; then a priest who
prattled incessantly, a journalist whom they called the Superman,--a
very fair youth, exceedingly thin and exceedingly serious,--the
salesmen and the bookkeeper.

Manuel served the soup and all the boarders took it, sipping it with a
disagreeable inhalation. Then, according to his mother's orders, the
youngster remained standing there. Now followed the beans which, if
not for their size then for their hardness might have figured in an
artillery park, and one of the boarders permitted himself some
pleasantry about the edibleness of so petreous a vegetable; a
pleasantry that glided over the impassive countenance of Doña Casiana
without leaving the slightest trace.

Manuel sat about observing the boarders. It was the day after the
conspiracy; Doña Violante and her daughters were incommunicative and
in ugly humour. Doña Violante's inflated face at every moment creased
into a frown, and her restless, turbid eyes betrayed deep
preoccupation. Celia, the elder of the daughters, annoyed by the
priest's jests, began to answer violently, cursing everything human
and divine with a desperate, picturesque, raging hatred, which caused
loud, universal laughter. Irene, the culprit of the previous night's
scandal, a girl of some fifteen or sixteen years with a broad head,
large hands and feet, an as yet incompletely developed body and heavy,
ungainly movements, spoke scarcely a word and kept her gaze fixed upon
her plate.

The meal at an end, the lodgers went off to their various tasks. At
night Manuel served supper without dropping a thing or making a single
mistake, but in five or six days he was forever doing things wrong.

It is impossible to judge how much of an impression was made upon the
boy by the usage and customs of the boarding roost and the species of
birds that inhabited it; but they could not have impressed him much.
Manuel, while he served at table in the days that followed, had to put
up with and endless succession of remarks, jests and practical jokes.

A thousand incidents, comical enough to one who did not have to suffer
them, turned up at every step; now they would discover tobacco in the
soup, now coal, ashes, and shreds of coloured paper in the
water-bottle.

One of the salesmen, who was troubled with his stomach and spent his
days gazing at the reflection of his tongue in the mirror, would jump
up in fury when one of these jokes was perpetrated, and ask the
proprietress to discharge an incompetent booby who committed such
atrocities.

Manuel grew accustomed to these manifestations against his humble
person, and when they scolded him he retorted with the most bare-faced
impudence and indifference.

Soon he learned the life and miracles of every boarder and was ready
to talk back in outrageous fashion if they tried his patience.

Doña Violante and her daughters,--especially the old lady, showed a
great liking for the boy. The three women had now been living in the
house for several months; they paid little and when they couldn't pay
at all, they didn't. But they were easily satisfied. All three
occupied an inner room that opened onto the courtyard, whence came a
nauseating odour of fermented milk that escaped from the stable of the
ground floor.

The hole in which they lived was not large enough to move about in;
the room assigned to them by the landlady--in proportion to the size
of their rent and the insecurity of the payment--was a dark den
occupied by two narrow iron beds, between which, in the little space
left, was crammed a cot.

Here slept these gallant dames; by day they scoured all Madrid, and
spent their existence making arrangements with money-lenders, pawning
articles and taking them out of pawn.

The two young ladies, Celia and Irene, although they were mother and
daughter, passed for sisters. Doña Violante, in her better days, had
led the life of a petty courtesan and had succeeded in hoarding up a
tidy bit as provision against the winter of old age, when a former
patron convinced her that he had a remarkable combination for winning
a fortune at the Fronton. Doña Violante fell into the trap and her
patron left her without a céntimo. Then Doña Violante went back to the
old life, became half blind and reached that lamentable state at which
surely she would have arrived much sooner if, early in her career, she
had developed a talent for living respectably.

The old lady passed most of the day in the confinement of her dark
room, which reeked of stable odors, rice powder and cosmetics; at
night she had to accompany her daughter and her granddaughter on
walks, and to cafés and theatres, on the hunt and capture of the kid,
as it was put by the travelling salesman who suffered from his
stomach,--a fellow half humorist and half grouch. When they were in
the house Celia and Irene, the daughter and the granddaughter of Doña
Violante, kept bickering at all hours; perhaps this continuous state
of irritation derived from the close quarters in which they lived;
perhaps so much passing as sisters in the eyes of others had convinced
them that they really were, so that they quarrelled and insulted one
another as such.

The one point on which they agreed was that Doña Violante was in their
way; the burden of the blind woman frightened away every libidinous
old fellow that came within the range of Irene and Celia.

The landlady, Doña Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected
the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two maternally
to gird themselves with patience; Doña Violante, after all, was not,
like Calypso, immortal. But they replied that this toiling away at
full speed just to keep the old lady in medicine and syrups wasn't at
all to their taste.

Doña Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circumstances
enabled her to put herself in Doña Violante's place, and she argued
with this example, asking them to put themselves in the grandmother's
position; but neither was convinced.

Then the landlady advised them to peer into her mirror. She--as she
assured them--had descended from the heights of the Comandancia (her
husband had been a commander of the carbineers) to the wretchedness of
running a boarding-house, yet she was resigned, and her lips curled in
a stoic smile.

Doña Casiana knew the meaning of resignation and her only solace in
this life was a few volumes of novels in serial form, two or three
feuilletons, and a murky liquid mysteriously concocted by her own
hands out of sugared water and alcohol.

This beverage she poured into a square, wide-mouthed flask, into which
she placed a thick stem of anis. She kept it in the closet of her
bedroom.

Some one who discovered the flask with its black twig of anis compared
it to those bottles in which fetuses and similar nasty objects are
preserved, and since that time, whenever the landlady appeared with
rosy cheeks, a thousand comments--not at all favourable to the
madame's abstinence--ran from lodger to lodger.

"Doña Casiana's tipsy from her fetus-brandy."

"The good lady drinks too much of that fetus."

"The fetus has gone to her head...."

Manuel took a friendly part in this witty merriment of the boarders.
The boy's faculties of adaptation were indisputably enormous, for
after a week in the landlady's house it was as if he had always lived
there.

His skill at magic was sharpened: whenever he was needed he was not to
be seen and no sooner was anybody's back turned than he was in the
street playing with the boys of the neighbourhood.

As a result of his games and his scrapes he got his clothes so dirty
and torn that the landlady nicknamed him the page Don Rompe-Galas,
recalling a tattered character from a saínete that Doña Casiana,
according to her affirmations, had seen played in her halycon days.

Generally, those who most made use of Manuel's services were the
journalist whom they called the Superman--he sent the boy off with
copy to the printers--and Celia and Irene, who employed him for
bearing notes and requests for money to their friends. Doña Violante,
whenever she pilfered a few céntimos from her daughter would dispatch
Manuel to the store for a package of cigarettes, and give him a cigar
for the errand.

"Smoke it here," she would say. "Nobody'll see you."

Manuel would sit down upon a trunk and the old lady, a cigarette in
her mouth and blowing smoke through her nostrils, would recount
adventures from the days of her glory.

That room of Doña Violante and her daughters was a haunt of infection;
from the hooks nailed to the wall hung dirty rags, and between the
lack of air and the medley of odours a stench arose strong enough to
fell an ox.

Manuel listened to Doña Violante's stories with genuine delight. The
old lady was at her best in her commentaries.

"I tell you, my boy," she would say, "you can take my word for it. A
woman with a good pair of breasts and who happens to be a pretty warm
article"--and here the old lady pulled at her cigarette and with an
expressive gesture indicated what she meant by her no less expressive
word--"will always have a trail of men after her."

Doña Violante used to sing songs from Spanish _zarzuelas_ and
from French operettas, which produced in Manuel a terrible sadness. He
could not say why, but they gave him the impression of a world of
pleasures that was hopelessly beyond his reach. When he heard Doña
Violante sing the song from _El Juramento_

  _Disdain is a sword with a double edge,
  One slays with love, the other with forgetfulness...._

he had a vision of salons, ladies, amorous intrigues; but even more
than by this he was overwhelmed with sadness by the waltzes from _La
Dina_ and _La Grande Duchesse_.

Doña Violante's reflexions opened Manuel's eyes; the scenes that
occurred daily in the house, however, worked quite as much as these
toward such a result.

Another good instructor was found in the person of Doña Casiana's
niece, a trifle older than Manuel,--a thin, weakly chit of such a
malicious nature that she was always hatching plots against somebody.

If any one struck her she didn't shed a tear; she would go down to the
concierge's lodge when the concierge's little boy was left alone,
would grab him and pinch him and kick him, in this manner wreaking
vengeance for the blows she had received.

After eating, almost all of the boarders went off to their affairs;
Celia and Irene, together with the Biscayan, indulged in a grand
frolic by spying upon the women in Isabel's house, who would come out
on the balcony and chat, or signal to the neighbours. At times these
miserable brothel odalisques were not content with speaking; they
would dance and exhibit their calves.

Manuel's mother, as always, would be meditating upon heaven and hell,
giving little heed to the pettiness of this earth, and she could not
shield her son from such edifying spectacles. Petra's educational
system consisted only of giving Manuel an occasional blow and of
making him read prayer-books.

Petra imagined that she could see the traits of the machinist showing
up in the boy, and this troubled her. She wished Manuel to be like
her,--humble toward his superiors, respectful toward the priests...;
but a fine place this was for learning to respect anything!

One morning, after the solemn ceremony had been celebrated in which
all the women of the house issued into the corridor swinging their
night service, there burst from Doña Violante's room a clamour of
shouts, weeping, stamping and vociferation.

The landlady, the Biscayan and several of the boarders tiptoed into
the corridor to pry. Inside the quarrellers must have realized that
they were being spied upon, for they opened the door and the fray
continued in low tones.

Manuel and the landlady's niece remained in the entry. They could hear
Irene's sobbing and the scolding voices of Celia and Doña Violante.

At first they could not make out what was being said; but soon the
three women forgot their determination to speak low and their voices
rose in anger.

"Go! Go to the House of Mercy and have them rid you of that swelling!
Wretch!" cried Celia.

"Well, what of it?" retorted Irene. "I'm caught, am I? I know it. What
of it?"

Doña Violante opened the door to the entry furiously; Manuel and the
landlady's niece scampered off, and the old lady came out in a patched
flannel shift and a weed kerchief tied about her ears, and began to
pace to and fro, dragging her worn-out shoes from end to end of the
corridor.

"The sow! Worse than a sow!" she muttered. "Did any one ever see such
a filthy creature!"

Manuel went off to the parlour, where the landlady and the Biscayan
were chatting in low tones. The landlady's niece, dying with
curiosity, questioned the two women with growing irritation:

"But why are they scolding Irene?"

The landlady and the Biscayan exchanged amicable glances and burst
into laughter.

"Tell me," cried the child insistently, clutching at her aunt's
kerchief. "What of it if she has that bundle? Who gave her that
package?"

The landlady and the Biscayan could no longer restrain their guffaws,
while the little girl stared avidly up at them, trying to make out the
meaning of what she heard.

"Who gave her that package?" repeated the Biscayan between outbursts.
"My dear little girl, we really don't know who gave her that package."

All the boarders repeated the niece's question with enthusiastic
delight, and at every table discussion some wag would be sure to
interrupt suddenly with:

"Now I see that you know who gave her that package." The remark would
be greeted with uproarious merriment.

Then, after a few days had passed, there was rumour of a mysterious
consultation held by Doña Violante's daughters with the wife of a
barber on Jardines street,--a sort of provider of little angels for
limbo; it was said that Irene returned from the conference in a coach,
very pale, and that she had to be put at once to bed. Certainly the
girl did not leave her room for more than a week and, when she
appeared, she looked like a convalescent and the frowns had
disappeared completely from the face of her mother and her
grandmother.

"She looks like an infanticide," said the priest when he saw her
again, "but she's prettier than ever."

Whether any transgression had been committed, none could say with
surety; soon everything was forgotten; a patron appeared for the girl,
and he was, from all appearances, wealthy. In commemoration of so
happy an event the boarders participated in the treat. After the
supper they drank cognac and brandy, the priest played the guitar,
Irene danced _sevillanas_ with less grace than a bricklayer, as
the landlady said; the Superman sang some _fados_ that he had
learned in Portugal, and the Biscayan, not to be outdone, burst forth
into some _malagueñas_ that might just as well have been a
_cante flamenco_ or the Psalms of David.

Only the blond student with the eyes of steel abstained from the
celebration; he was absorbed in his thoughts.

"And you, Roberto," Celia said to him several times,--"don't you sing
or do anything?"

"Not I," he replied coldly.

"You haven't any blood in your veins."

The youth looked at her for a moment, shrugged his shoulders
indifferently and his pale lips traced a smile of disdainful mockery.

Then, as almost always happened in these boarding-house sprees, some
wag turned on the music-box in the corridor and the duet from _La
Mascotte_ together with the waltz from _La Diva_ rose in
confusion upon the air; the Superman and Celia danced a couple of
waltzes and the party wound up with everybody singing a
_habanera_, until they wearied and each owl flew off to his nest.




CHAPTER IV

  Oh, love, love!--What's Don Telmo Doing?--Who is Don
    Telmo?--Wherein the Student and Don Telmo Assume Certain
    Novelesque Proportions.


The Baroness was hardly ever seen in the house, except during the
early hours of the morning and the night. She dined and supped
outside. If the landlady was to be credited, she was an adventuress
whose position varied considerably, for one day she would be moving to
a costly apartment and sporting a carriage, while the next she would
disappear for several months in the germ-ridden hole of some cheap
boarding-house.

The Baroness's daughter, a child of some twelve or fourteen years,
never appeared in the dining-room or in the corridor; her mother
forbade all communication with the lodgers. Her name was Kate. She was
a fair girl, very light-complexioned and exceedingly winsome. Only the
student Roberto spoke to her now and then in English.

The youth was enthusiastic over her.

That summer the Baroness's streak of bad luck must have come to an
end, for she began to make herself some fine clothes and prepared to
move.

For several weeks a modiste and her assistant came daily, with gowns
and hats for the Baroness and Kate.

Manuel, one night, saw the modiste's assistant go by with a huge box
in her hand and was smitten.

He followed her at a distance in great fear lest she see him. As he
stole on behind, he wondered what he could say to such a maiden if he
were to accompany her. It must be something gallant, exquisite; he
even imagined that she was at his side and he racked his brain for
beautiful phrases and delicate compliments, yet nothing but
commonplaces rewarded his search. In the meantime the assistant and
her box were lost in the crowd and he could not catch sight of them
again.

The memory of that maiden was for Manuel as an enchanting music, a
fancy upon which were reared still wilder fancies. Often he made up
tales in which always he figured as the hero and the assistant as the
heroine. While Manuel bemoaned the harshness of fate, Roberto, the
blond student, gave himself up likewise to melancholy, brooding upon
the Baroness's daughter. The student was forced to endure jests
especially from Celia, who, according to certain evil tongues, was
trying to rouse him from his habitual frigidity. But Roberto gave her
no heed.

Some days later the house was agog with curiosity.

As the boarders came in from the street, they greeted each other
jokingly, repeating in the manner of a pass-word: "Who is Don Telmo?
What's Don Telmo doing?"

One day the district police-commissioner came and spoke to Don Telmo,
and some one heard or invented the report that the two men were
discussing the notorious crime on Malasana Street. Upon hearing this
news the expectant inquisitiveness of the boarders waxed great, and
all, half in jest and half in earnest, arranged to keep a watch upon
the mysterious gentleman.

Don Telmo was the name of the cadaverous old fellow who wiped his cups
and spoons with his napkin, and his reserved manner seemed to invite
observation. Taciturn, indifferent, never joining the conversation, a
man of few words who never made any complaints, he attracted attention
by the very fact that he seemed intent upon not attracting it.

His only visible occupation was to wind the seven or eight clocks of
the house and to regulate them when they got out of order,--an event
of common occurrence.

Don Telmo had the features of a very sad man,--one in profound sorrow.
His livid countenance betrayed fathomless dejection. He wore his white
beard and his hair short; his brows fell like brushes over his grey
eyes.

In the house he went around wrapped in a faded coat, with a Greek
bonnet and cloth slippers. When he went out he donned a long frock
coat and a very tall silk hat; only on certain summer days would he
wear a Havana hat of woven straw.

For more than a month Don Telmo was the topic of conversation in the
boarding-house.

In the famous trial of the Malasana Street crime a servant declared
that one afternoon she saw Doña Celsa's son in an aqueduct of the
Plaza de Oriente, talking with a lame old man. For the guests this man
could be none other than Don Telmo. With this suspicion they set about
spying upon the old man; he, however, had a sharp scent and sniffed
the state of affairs at once; the boarders, seeing how bootless their
attempts were proving, tried to ransack his room; they used a number
of keys until they got the door open and when they had forced an
entrance, discovered nothing more that a closet fastened by a
formidable safety-lock.

The Biscayan and Roberto, the blond student, opposed this campaign of
espionage. The Superman, the priest, the salesmen and the women of the
establishment made up that the Biscayan and the student were allies of
Don Telmo, and, in all probability, accomplices in the Malasana Street
crime.

"Without a doubt," averred the Superman, "Don Telmo killed Doña Celsa
Nebot; the Biscayan poured oil over the body and set it afire, and
Roberto hid the jewels in the house on Amaniel Street."

"That cold bird!" replied Celia. "What could he do?"

"Nothing, nothing. We must keep on their track," said the curate.

"And get some money out of that old Shylock," added the Superman.

This espionage, carried on half in joke and half in all seriousness,
wound up in debates and disputes, and as a result two groups were
formed in the house; that of the Sensible folk, comprised by the three
criminals and the landlady, and that of the Foolish, in which were
enrolled all the rest.

This limitation of sides forced Roberto and Don Telmo into intimacy,
so that the student changed his place at the table and sat next to the
old man.

One night, after eating, while Manuel was removing the service, the
plates and the cups, Don Telmo and Roberto were engaged in
conversation.

The student was a dogmatic reasoner, dry, rectilinear, never swerving
from his point of view; he spoke but little, but when he did speak, it
was in a sententious manner.

One day, discussing whether or not young men should be ambitious and
look to the future, Roberto asserted that the first was the proper
course.

"Well, that isn't what you're doing," commented the Superman.

"I am absolutely convinced," replied Roberto, "that some day I'm going
to be a millionaire. I am engaged in constructing the machinery that
will bring me a fortune."

The Superman posed as a man of the world who had seen many things;
upon hearing this he permitted himself a scoffing remark concerning
Roberto's ability, and the youth retorted in so violent and aggressive
a manner that the journalist lost his composure and blurted out a
string of apologies.

Afterwards, when Don Telmo and Roberto were left alone at the table,
they continued talking, and from the general theme as to whether young
folk should or should not be ambitious, they passed on to the
student's hopes of some day being a millionaire.

"I'm convinced that I shall be one," said the boy. "In my family there
have been a number of individuals with great luck."

"That's all very well, Roberto," muttered the old man. "But one must
know how to become wealthy."

"Don't imagine that my hope is illusory; I'm going to inherit, and not
a small amount, either; I'm heir to a vast sum ... millions.... The
foundations of my work and the framework are already completed; all I
need now is money."

Don Telmo's countenance was crossed by an expression of disagreeable
surprise.

"Don't worry," replied Roberto, "I'm not going to ask you for it."

"My dear boy, if I had it, I'd give it to you with pleasure, and free
of interest. They think I'm a millionaire."

"No. I tell you I'm not trying to get a céntimo from you. All I ask is
a bit of advice."

"Speak, then, speak. I'm all attention," answered the old man, resting
an elbow upon the table.

Manuel, who was taking off the tablecloth, cocked his ears.

At that juncture one of the salesmen entered the dining-room, and
Roberto, who was about to say something, grew silent and looked
impertinently at the intruder. The student was an aristocratic type
with blond hair, thick and combed back, and moustache of glittering
white, like silver; his skin was somewhat tanned by the sun.

"Won't you continue?" asked Don Telmo.

"No," answered the student, staring at the salesman. "For I don't want
anybody to hear what I have to say."

"Come to my room, then," replied Don Telmo. "There we can talk
undisturbed. We'll have coffee up in my room. Manuel!" he ordered.
"Bring us two coffees."

Manuel, who was deeply interested in discovering what the student had
to say, dashed out into the street on his errand. He was more than a
quarter of an hour in returning with the coffee, and supposed that
Roberto by this time had finished his story.

He knocked at Don Telmo's door and was resolved to linger there as
long as possible, that he might catch all he could of the
conversation. He began to dust Don Telmo's lamp-table with a cloth.

"And how did you ascertain that," Don Telmo was asking, "if your
family didn't know it?"

"Quite by accident," answered the student. "A couple of years ago,
about this time of the year, I wished to give a present to a sister,
who is a protegée of mine, and who is very fond of playing the piano.
It occurred to me, three days before her birthday, to purchase two
operas, have them bound and send them to her. I wanted to have the
book bound immediately, but at the shops they told me there was no
time; I was walking along with my operas under my arm in the vicinity
of the Plaza de las Descalzas when in the back wall of a convent I
caught sight of a tiny bookbinder's shop,--like a cave with steps
leading down. I asked the man,--a gnarled old fellow,--whether he
would bind the book for me in a couple of days, and he said 'Yes.'
'Very well,' I told him, 'then I'll call within two days.'--'I'll
send it to you; let me have your address.' I gave him my address and
he asked my name. 'Roberto Hasting y Núñez de Letona.'--'Are you a
Núñez de Latona?' he inquired, gazing at me curiously. 'Yes, sir.'--'Do
you come from la Rioja?'--'Yes, and suppose I do?' I retorted,
provoked by all this questioning. And the binder, whose mother was a
Núñez de Latona and came from la Rioja, told me the story I've just
told you. At first I took it all as a joke; then, after some time, I
wrote to my mother, and she wrote back that everything was quite so,
and that she recalled something of the whole matter."

Don Telmo's gaze strayed over toward Manuel.

"What are you doing here?" he snarled. "Get out; I don't want you
going around telling tales...."

"I'm no tattle-tale."

"Very well, then, get a move on."

Manuel went out, and Don Telmo and Roberto continued their
conversation. The boarders showered Manuel with questions, but he
refused to open his mouth. He had decided to join the group of the
Sensible ones.

This friendship between the old man and the student served as an
incitement for the continuation of the espionage. One of the salesmen
learned that Don Telmo drew up contracts of sales on reversion and
made a living by lending money on houses and furniture, and at other
such usurious business.

Some one saw him in the Rastro in an old clothes shop that probably
belonged to him, and invented the tale that he had gold coins
concealed in his room and that he played with them at night upon the
bed.

It was also discovered that Don Telmo frequently paid visits to a very
elegant, good looking young lady, who was, according to some, his
sweetheart, and to others, his niece.

On the following Sunday Manuel overheard a conversation between the
old man and the student. In a dark room there was a transom that
opened into Don Telmo's room, and from this position he played the
eavesdropper.

"So he refuses to furnish any more data?" Don Telmo was asking.

"Absolutely," said the student. "And he assures me that the reason for
the name of Fermín de Núñez de Latona not appearing in the parish
register was--forgery; that this was effected by a certain Shaphter,
one of Bandon's agents, and that afterwards the curates took advantage
of it to acquire possession of some chaplaincies. I am certain that
the town where Fermín Núñez was born was either Arnedo or Autol."

Don Telmo carefully inspected a large folio document: the genealogy of
Roberto's family.

"What course do you think I ought to pursue?" asked the student.

"You need money; but it's so hard to find that!" muttered the old man.
"Why don't you marry?"

"And what good would that do?"

"I mean some wealthy woman...."

Here Don Telmo lowered his voice to an inaudible pitch and after a few
words they separated.

The espionage of the boarders became so obstructive to the men spied
upon that the Biscayan and Don Telmo served notice on the landlady of
their removal. Doña Casiana's desolation, when she learned of their
decision, was exceedingly great; several times she had to resort to
the closet and surrender herself to the consolations of the beverage
of her own concoction.

The boarders were so disappointed at the flight of the Biscayan and of
Don Telmo that neither the altercations between Irene and Celia nor
the stories told by the priest Don Jacinto, who stressed the smutty
note, were potent enough to draw them from their silence.

The bookkeeper, a jaundiced fellow with an emaciated face and a beard
like that of a monumental Jew, exceedingly taciturn and timid, had
burst into speech in his excitement over the intrigues invented and
fancied in the life of Don Telmo; now he became from moment to moment
sallower than ever with his hypochondria.

Don Telmo's departure was paid for by the student and Don Manuel. As
far as the student was concerned they dared no more than twit him on
his complicity with the old man and the Biscayan; at Manuel, however,
they all kept screeching and scolding when they weren't kicking him.

One of the salesmen,--the fellow who was troubled with his stomach,
exasperated by the boredom, the heat and his uncertain digestion,
found no other distraction than insulting and berating Manuel while he
served at table, whether or not there were cause.

"Go on, you cheap fool!" he would say. "You're not worth the food you
eat! Clown!"

This refrain, added to others of the same tenor, began to weary
Manuel. One day the salesman heaped the insults and the vilification
upon him more plentifully than ever. They had sent the boy out for two
coffees, and he was slow in returning; on that particular day the
delay was not due to any fault of his, for he had been kept waiting a
long time.

"They ought to put a pack-saddle on you, you ass!" shouted the agent
as Manuel entered.

"You won't be the one to do it!" retorted the boy impudently, as he
placed the cups upon the table.

"I won't? Do you want to see me?"

"Yes, I do."

The salesman got up and kicked Manuel in the shins; the poor boy saw
stars. He gave a cry of pain and then, furious, seized a plate and
sent it flying at the agent's head; the latter ducked and the
projectile crossed the dining-room, crashed through a window pane and
fell into the courtyard, where it smashed with a racket. The salesman
grabbed one of the coffee-pots that was filled with coffee and milk
and hurled it at Manuel with such good aim that it struck the boy in
the face; the youth, blinded with rage and by the coffee and milk,
rushed upon his enemy, cornered him, and took revenge for the insults
and blows with an endless succession of kicks and punches.

"He's killing me! He's killing me!" shrieked the agent in feminine
wails.

"Thief! Clown!" shouted Manuel, employing the street's choicest
repertory of insults.

The Superman and the priest seized Manuel by the arms, leaving him at
the mercy of the salesman, who, beholding the boy thus corralled,
tried to wreak vengeance; but when he was ready to strike, Manuel gave
him such a forceful kick in the stomach that the fellow vomited up his
whole meal.

Everybody took sides against Manuel, except Roberto, who defended him.
The agent retired to his room, summoned the landlady, and told her
that he refused to remain another moment as long as Petra's son was in
the house.

The landlady, whose chief interest was to retain her boarder,
communicated her decision to her servant.

"Now see what you've done. You can't stay here any longer," said Petra
to her son.

"All right. That clown will pay for these," replied the boy, nursing
the welts on his forehead. "I tell you, if I ever meet him I'm going
to smash in his head."

"You take good care not to say a word to him."

At this moment the student happened to enter the dining-room.

"You did well, Manuel," he exclaimed, turning to Petra. "What right
had that blockhead to insult him? In this place every boss has a right
to attack his neighbour if he doesn't do as all the others wish. What
a cowardly gang!"

As he spoke, Roberto blanched with rage; then he grew calm and asked
Petra:

"Where are you going to take Manuel now?"

"To a cobbler's shop that belongs to a relative of mine on Aguila
street."

"Is it in the poorer quarters?"

"Yes."

"I'll come to see you some day."

Before Manuel had gone to bed, Roberto appeared again in the
dining-room.

"Listen," he said to Manuel. "If you know any strange place in the
slums where criminals get together, let me hear. I'll go with you."

"I'll let you know, never you mind."

"Fine. See you again. Good-bye!"

Roberto extended his hand to Manuel, who pressed it with deep
gratitude.




PART TWO




CHAPTER I

  The Regeneration of Footwear and The Lion of The Shoemaker's
    Art--The First Sunday--An Escapade--El Bizco and his Gang.


The inhabitant of Madrid who at times finds himself by accident in the
poor quarters near the Manzanares river, is surprised at the spectacle
of poverty and sordidness, of sadness and neglect presented by the
environs of Madrid with their wretched Rondas, laden with dust in the
summer and in winter wallowing in mire. The capital is a city of
contrasts; it presents brilliant light in close proximity to deep
gloom; refined life, almost European, in the centre; in the suburbs,
African existence, like that of an Arab village. Some years ago, not
many, in the vicinity of the Ronda de Sevilla and of el Campillo de
Gil Imón, there stood a house of suspicious aspect and of not very
favourable repute, to judge by popular rumour. The observer ...

In this and other paragraphs of the same style I had placed some hope,
for they imparted to my novel a certain phantasmagoric and mysterious
atmosphere; but my friends have convinced me I ought to suppress these
passages, arguing that they would be quite in place in a Parisian
novel, but not in one dealing with Madrid,--not at all. They add,
moreover, that here nobody goes astray, not even if one wishes to.
Neither are there here any observers, nor houses of suspicious aspect,
nor anything else. In resignation, then, I have excised these
paragraphs, through which I hoped some day to be elected to the
Spanish Academy; and so I continue my tale in more pedestrian
language.

It came about, then, that on the day following the row in the
dining-room of the lodging-house, Petra, very early in the morning,
woke Manuel and told him to dress.

The boy recalled the scene of the previous day; he verified it by
raising his hand to his forehead, for the bruises still pained him,
and from his mother's tone he understood that she persisted in her
resolve to take him to the cobbler's.

After Manuel had dressed, mother and son left the house and went into
the bun-shop for a cup of coffee and milk. Then they walked down to
Arenal Street, crossed the Plaza del Oriente, and the Viaduct, thence
through Rosario Street. Continuing along the walls of a barracks they
reached the heights at whose base runs the Ronda de Segovia. From this
eminence there was a view of the yellowish countryside that reached as
far as Jetafe and Villaverde, and the San Isidro cemeteries with their
grey mudwalls and their black cypresses.

From the Ronda de Segovia, which they covered in a short time, they
climbed up Aguila Street, and paused before a house at the corner of
the Campillo de Gil Imón.

There were two shoe shops opposite one another and both closed.
Manuel's mother, who could not recall which was her relative's place,
inquired at the tavern.

"Señor Ignacio's over at the big house," answered the tavern-keeper.
"I think the cobbler's come already, but he hasn't opened the shop
yet."

Mother and son had to wait until the shop was opened. The building was
not the tiny, evil-boding one, but it looked as if it had an atrocious
desire to cave in, for here and there it, too, showed cracks, holes
and all manner of disfigurements. It had a lower and upper floor,
large and wide balconies the balustrades of which were gnawed by rust
and the diminutive panes of glass held in place by leaden strips.

On the ground floor of the house, in the part that faced Aguila
Street, there was a livery-stable, a carpenter's shop, a tavern and
the cobbler's shop owned by Petra's relation. This establishment
displayed over the entrance a sign that read:

  _For The Regeneration of Footwear._

The historian of the future will surely find in this sign proof of
how widespread, during several epochs, was a certain notion of
national regeneration, and it will not surprise him that this idea,
which was launched in the aim to reform and regenerate the Constitution
and the Spanish people, came to an end upon the signboard of a shop on
a foresaken corner of the slums, where the only thing done was the
reformation and regeneration of footwear.

We will not deny the influence of this regenerating theory upon the
proprietor of the establishment _For The Regeneration of Footwear;_
but we must point out that this presumptuous legend was put up in token
of his defiance of the cobbler across the way, and we must register
likewise that it had been answered by another, and even more
presumptuous, one.

One fine morning the workmen in the establishment for _The
Regeneration of Footwear_ were dumfounded to find staring them in
the face the sign of the rival shop. It was a beautiful signboard about
two metres long, bearing this inscription:

  _The Lion of the Shoemaker's Art_

This in itself was quite tolerable; the terrible, annihilating thing
about it was the painting that sprawled over the middle of the board.
A handsome yellow lion with the face of a man and with wavy mane,
standing erect; in his front paws he held a boot, apparently of
patent-leather. Beneath this representation was printed the following:
_You may break, but never unstitch it._

This was a crushing motto: A lion (wild beast) trying to unseam the
boot made by the Lion (shoemaker), and powerless before the task! What
a humiliation for the lion! What a triumph for the shoemaker! The
lion, in this case, was _For The Regeneration of Footwear,_
which, as the saying goes, had been compelled to bite the dust.

In addition to Señor Ignacio's sign there was, in one of the balconies
of the large house, the bust of a woman, made probably of pasteboard,
with lettering beneath: _Perfecta Ruiz: Ladies' Hair Dressing;_
on the side walls of the main entrance there hung several
announcements unworthy of occupying the attention of the
aforementioned historian, in which were offered low-priced rooms with
or without bed, amanuenses and seamstresses. A single card, upon which
were pasted horizontally, vertically and obliquely a number of cut-out
figures, deserved to go down in history for its laconicism. It read:

  _Parisian Styles. Escorihuela, Tailor._

Manuel, who had not taken the trouble to read all these signs, went
into the building by a little door at the side of the livery-stable
entrance, and walked through the corridor to a very filthy courtyard.

When he returned to the street the cobbler's shop had already been
opened. Petra and her boy entered.

"Isn't Señor Ignacio in?" she asked.

"He'll be here in a second," answered a youngster who was piling up
old shoes in the middle of the shop.

"Tell him that his cousin is here,--Petra."

Señor Ignacio appeared. He was a man of between forty and fifty, thin
and wizened. Petra and he got into conversation, while the boy and a
little urchin continued to heap up the old shoes. Manuel was looking
on, when the boy said to him:

"Come on, you. Lend a hand!"

Manuel pitched in, and when the three had ended their labours, they
waited for Petra and Señor Ignacio to finish chatting. Petra was
recounting Manuel's latest exploits to her cousin and the cobbler
listened smilingly. The man bore no signs of gruffness; he was blond
and beardless; upon his upper lip sprouted a few saffron-hued hairs.
His complexion was leathery, wrinkled; the deep furrows of his face,
and his wearied mien, gave him the appearance of a weakling. He spoke
with a certain ironic vagueness.

"You're going to stay here," said Petra to Manuel.

"All right."

"He's an amiable rogue," exclaimed Señor Ignacio, laughing. "He agrees
right away."

"Yes; he takes everything calmly. But, look--" she added, turning to
her son, "if ever I find out that you carry on as you did yesterday,
you'll hear from me!"

Manuel said good-bye to his mother.

"Were you very long in that town of Soria with my cousin?" Señor
Ignacio asked.

"Two years."

"And did you work very hard there?"

"I didn't work at all."

"Well, sonny, you can't get out of it here. Come. Sit down and get
busy. These are your cousins," added Señor Ignacio, indicating the
youth and the little boy.

"They are a pair of warriors, too."

The youth's name was Leandro, and he was well-built; in no respect did
he resemble his father. He had thick lips and a thick nose, an
obstinate, manly expression; the other was a boy of about Manuel's
age, frail, thin, with a rascally look, and called Vidal.

Señor Ignacio and the three boys sat down around a wooden block formed
of a tree-trunk with a deep groove running through it. The labour
consisted in undoing and taking apart old boots and shoes, which
arrived at the shop from every direction in huge, badly tied bales and
in sacks with paper designations sewed to the burlap. The boot
destined to be drawn and quartered was laid upon the block; there it
received a stroke or more from a knife until the heel was severed;
then, with the nippers the various layers of sole were ripped off;
with the scissors they cut off buttons and laces, and everything was
sorted into its corresponding basket: in one, the heels; in others,
the rubbers, the latchets, the buckles.

So low had _The Regeneration of Footwear_ descended: it justified
its title in a manner quite distinct from that intended by the one who
had bestowed it.

Señor Ignacio, a master workman, had been compelled through lack of
business to abandon the awl and the shoemaker's stirrup for the
nippers and the knife; creating for destroying; the fashioning of new
boots for the disembowelling of old. The contrast was bitter; but
Señor Ignacio could find consolation in looking across at his
neighbour, he of the _Lion of The Shoemaker's Art_, who only at
rare intervals would receive an order for some cheap pair of boots.

The first morning of work was infinitely boresome to Manuel; this
protracted inactivity became unbearable. At noon a bulky old woman
entered the shop with their lunch in a basket. This was Señor
Ignacio's mother.

"And my wife?" the cobbler asked her.

"She's gone washing."

"And Salomé Isn't she coming?"

"No. She got some work in a house for the whole week."

The old lady extracted from the basket a pot, dishes, napkins,
cutlery, and a huge loaf of bread; she laid a cloth upon the floor and
everybody squatted down around it. She poured the soup from the pot
into the plates, into which each one crumbled a bit of bread, and they
began to eat. Then the old woman doled out to each his portion of
boiled meat and vegetables, and, as they ate, the cobbler discoursed
briefly upon the future of Spain and the reasons for national
backwardness,--a topic that appeals to most Spaniards, who consider
themselves regenerators.

Señor Ignacio was a mild liberal, a man who swelled with enthusiasm
over these words about the national sovereignty, and who spoke openly
of the Glorious Revolution. In matters of religion he advocated
freedom of worship; his ideal would be for Spain to have an equal
number of priests of the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and every other
denomination, for thus, he asserted, each would choose the dogma that
seemed to him best. But one thing he'd certainly do if he had a say in
the government. He would expel all the monks and nuns, for they're
like the mange: the weaker the sufferer, the more it thrives. To this
argument Leandro, the elder son, added that as far as the monks, nuns
and other small fry were concerned, the best course with them was to
lop off their heads like hogs, and with regard to the priests, whether
Catholic, Protestant or Chinese, nothing would be lost if there were
nary a one.

The old lady, too, joined the conversation, and since to her, as a
huckstress of vegetables, politics was chiefly a question between
marketwomen and the municipal guards, she spoke of a row in which the
amiable ladies of the Cebada market had discharged their garden
produce at the heads of several redcoats who were defending a
trouble-maker of the market. The huckstresses wanted to organize a
union, and then lay down the law and fix prices. Now this didn't at
all appeal to her.

"What the deuce!" she exclaimed. "What right have they to take away a
person's stock if he wants to sell it cheaper? Suppose I take it into
my head to give it all away free."

"Why no, señora," differed Leandro. "That's not right."

"And why not?"

"Because it isn't. Because tradesfolk ought to help one another, and
if you, let's suppose, do as you say, you prevent somebody else from
selling, and that's why Socialism was invented,--to favour man's
industry."

"All right, then. Let them give two duros to man's industry and kill
it."

The woman spoke very phlegmatically and sententiously. Her calm manner
harmonized perfectly with her huge person, which was as thick and
rigid as a tree-trunk; her face was fleshy and of stolid features, her
wrinkles deep; pouches of loose flesh sagged beneath her eyes; on her
head she wore a black kerchief, tightly knotted around her temples.

Señora Jacoba--that was her name--was a woman who probably felt
neither heat nor cold; summer and winter she spent the dead hours
seated by her vegetable stand at the Puerta de Moros; if she sold a
head of lettuce between sunrise and sunset, it was a great deal.

After eating, some of the shoemaker's family went off to the courtyard
for their siesta, while others remained in the shop.

Vidal, the man's younger son, sprawled out in the patio beside Manuel,
and having inquired into the cause of the bumps that stood out on his
cousin's forehead, asked:

"Have you ever been on this street before?"

"I? No."

"We have great times around here."

"You do, eh?"

"I should say so. Haven't you a girl?"

"I? No."

"Well, there are lots of girls 'round here that would like to have a
fellow."

"Really?"

"Yes, sir! Over where we live there's a very pretty little thing, a
friend of my girl. You can hitch up with her."

"But don't you live in this house?"

"No. We live in Embajadores lane. It's my aunt Salomé and my
grandmother who live here. Over where we are--oh, boy!--the times I've
had!"

"In the town where I come from," said Manuel, not to be dwarfed by his
cousin, "there were mountains higher than twenty of your houses here."

"In Madrid we've got the Monte de Príncipe Pio."

"But it can't be as high as the one in that town."

"It can't? Why, in Madrid everything's the best."

Manuel was not a little put out by the superiority which his cousin
tried to assume by speaking to him about women in the tone of an
experienced man about town who knew them through and through. After
the noonday nap and a game of mus, over which the shoemaker and a few
neighbours managed to get into a wrangle, Señor Ignacio and his
children went off to their house. Manuel supped at Señora Jacoba's,
the vegetable huckstress's, and slept in a beautiful bed that looked
to him far better than the one at the boarding-house.

Once in, he weighed the pros and contras of his new social position,
and in the midst of his calculations as to whether the needle of the
balance inclined to this side or that, he fell asleep.

At first, the monotony of the labour and the steady application
bothered Manuel; but soon he grew accustomed to one thing and another,
so that the days seemed shorter and the work less irksome.

The first Sunday Manuel was fast asleep in Señora Jacoba's house when
Vidal came in and waked him. It was after eleven; the marketwoman, as
usual, had departed at dawn for her stall, leaving the boy alone.

"What are you doing there?" asked Vidal. "Why don't you get up?"

"Why? What time is it?"

"Awful late."

Manuel dressed hurriedly and they both left the house. Nearby,
opposite Aguila street, on a little square, they joined a group of
boys who were playing _chito_, and they followed the fortunes of
the game with deep interest.

At noon Vidal said to his cousin:

"Today we're going to eat yonder."

"At your house?"

"Yes. Come on."

Vidal, whose specialty was finding things, discovered close by the
fountain of the Ronda, which is near Aguila Street, an old,
wide-brimmed high hat; the poor thing was hidden in a corner, perhaps
through modesty. He began to kick it along and send it flying through
the air and Manuel joined in the enterprise, so that between the two
they transported the relic, venerable with antiquity, from the Ronda
de Segovia to that of Toledo, thence to the Ronda de Embajadores,
until they abandoned it in the middle of the street, minus top and
brim. Having committed this perversity, Manuel and Vidal debouched
into the Paseo da las Acacias and went into a house whose entrance
consisted of a doorless archway.

The two boys walked through a narrow passage paved with cobblestones
until they reached a courtyard, and then, by one of the numerous
staircases they climbed to the balcony of the first floor, on which
opened a row of doors and windows all painted blue.

"Here's where we live," said Vidal, pointing to one of the doors.

They entered. Señor Ignacio's home was small; it comprised two
bedrooms, a parlour, the kitchen and a dark room. The first habitation
was the parlour, furnished with a pine bureau, a sofa, several straw
chairs and a green mirror stuck with chromos and photographs and
covered with red netting. The cobbler's family used the parlour as the
dining-room on Sundays, because it was the lightest and the most
spacious of their rooms.

When Manuel and Vidal arrived the family had been waiting for them a
long time. They all sat down to table, and Salomé, the cobbler's
sister-in-law, took charge of serving the meal. She resembled very
closely her sister, the mother of Vidal. Both, of medium height, had
short, saucy noses and black, pretty eyes; despite this physical
similarity, however, their appearance differentiated them sharply.
Vidal's mother,--called Leandra,--untidy, unkempt, loathsome, and
betraying traces of ill humour, seemed much older than Salomé,
although but three or four years separated them. Salomé had a merry,
resolute air.

Yet, consider the irony of fate! Leandra, despite her slovenly ways,
her sour disposition and her addiction to drink, was married to a good
hardworking man, while Salomé, endowed with excellent gifts of
industriousness and sweet temper, had wound up by going to live with
an outcast who made his way by swindling, pilfering and browbeating
and who had given her two children. Her humble or servile spirit,
confronted with this wild, independent nature, made Salomé adore her
man, and she deceived herself into considering him a tremendous,
energetic fellow, though he was in all truth a coward and a tramp. The
bully had seen just how matters stood, and whenever it pleased him he
would stamp into the house and demand the pay that Salomé earned by
sewing at the machine, at five céntimos per two yards. Unresistingly
she handed him the product of her sweating toil, and many a time the
ruffian, not content with depriving her of the money, gave her a
beating into the bargain.

Salomé's two children were not today in Señor Ignacio's home; on
Sundays, after dressing them very neatly, their mother would send them
to a relative of hers,--the proprietress of a workshop,--where they
spent the afternoon.

At the meal Manuel listened to the conversation without taking part.
They were discussing one of the girls of the neighbourhood who had run
off with a wealthy horse-dealer, a married man with a family.

"She did wisely," declared Leandra, draining a glass of wine.

"If she didn't know he was married...."

"What's the difference?" retorted Leandra with an air of unconcern.

"Plenty. How would you like a woman to carry off your husband?" Salomé
asked her sister.

"Psch!"

"Yes, nowadays, we know," interrupted Señor Ignacio's mother. "Of two
women there isn't one that's respectable."

"A great ways any one'll go by being respectable," snarled Leandra.
"Poverty and hunger.... If a woman weren't to get married, then she
might make a change and even acquire money."

"I don't see how," asserted Salomé.

"How? Even if she had to go into the business."

Señor Ignacio, disgusted, turned his head away from his wife, and his
elder son, Leandro, eyed his mother grimly, severely.

"Bah, that's all talk," argued Salomé, who wished to thresh the matter
out impersonally. "You'd hardly like it just the same if folks were to
insult you wherever you went."

"Me? Much I care what folks say to me!" replied the cobbler's wife.
"Stuff and nonsense! If they call me a loose woman, and if I'm not,
why, you see: a floral wreath. And if I am,--it's all the same in the
end."

Señor Ignacio, offended, shifted the conversation to the crime on
Pañuelas Street; a jealous organ-grinder had slain his sweetheart for
a harsh word and the hearers were excited over the case, each offering
his opinion. The meal over, Señor Ignacio, Leandro, Vidal and Manuel
went out to the gallery to have a nap while the women remained inside
gossiping.

All the neighbours had brought their sleeping-mats out, and in their
undershirts, half naked, some seated, others stretched out, they were
dozing on the galleries.

"Hey, you," said Vidal to Manuel. "Let's be off."

"Where?"

"To the Pirates. We meet today. They must be waiting for us already."

"What do you mean,--pirates?"

"Bizco and the others."

"And why do they call 'em that?"

"Because they're like the old time pirates."

Manuel and Vidal stepped into the patio and leaving the house, walked
off down Embajadores lane.

"They call us the Pirates," explained Vidal, "from a certain battle of
stones we had. Some of the kids from the Paseo de las Acacias had got
some sticks and formed a company with a Spanish flag at the head; then
I, Bizco, and three or four others, began to throw stones at them and
made them retreat. The Corretor, a fellow who lives in our house, and
who saw us chasing after them, said to us: 'Say, are you pirates or
what? For, if you're pirates you ought to fly the black flag. Well,
next day I swiped a dark apron from my father and I tied it to a stick
and we got after the kids with the Spanish flag and came near making
them surrender it. That's why they call us the Pirates."

The two cousins came to a tiny, squalid district.

"This is the Casa del Cabrero," said Vidal. "And here are our chums."

So it proved; the entire pirate gang was here encamped. Manuel now
made the acquaintance of El Bizco, a cross-eyed species of chimpanzee,
square-shaped, husky, long-armed, with misshapen legs and huge red
hands.

"This is my cousin," added Vidal, introducing Manuel to the gang; and
then, to make him seem interesting, he told how Manuel had come to the
house with two immense lumps that he had received in a Homeric
struggle with a man.

Bizco stared closely at Manuel, and seeing that Manuel, on his side,
was observing him calmly, averted his gaze. Bizco's face possessed the
interest of a queer animal or of a pathological specimen. His narrow
forehead, his flat nose, his thick lips, his freckled skin and his
red, wiry hair lent him the appearance of a huge, red baboon.

As soon as Vidal had arrived, the gang mobilized and all the
ragamuffins went foraging through la Casa del Cabrero.

This was the name given to a group of low tenement hovels that bounded
a long, narrow patio. At this hot hour the men and women, stretched
out half naked on the ground, were sleeping in the shade as in a
trance. Some women, in shifts, huddled into a circle of four or five,
were smoking the same cigar, each taking a puff and passing it along
from hand to hand.

A swarm of naked brats infested the place; they were the colour of the
soil, most of them black, some fair, with blue eyes. As if already
they felt the degradation of their poverty, these urchins neither
shouted nor frolicked about the yard.

A few lasses of ten to fourteen were chatting in a group. Bizco, Vidal
and the rest of the gang gave chase to them around the patio. The
girls, half naked, dashed off, shrieking and shouting insults.

Bizco boasted that he had violated some of the girls.

"They're all _puchereras_ like the ones on Ceres Street," said
one of the Pirates.

"So they make pots, do they?" inquired Manuel.

"Yes. Fine pots, all right!"

"Then why do you call them _puchereras_?"

"Becau--" added the urchin, and he made a coarse gesture.

"Because they're a sly bunch," stammered Bizco. "You're awful simple."

Manuel contemplated Bizco scornfully, and asked his cousin:

"Do you mean to say that those little girls...?"

"They and their mothers," answered Vidal philosophically. "Almost all
of 'em that live here."

The Pirates left the Casa del Cabrero, descended an embarkment after
passing a high, black fence, and at the middle of Casa Blanca turned
into the Paseo de Yeserías.

They approached the morgue, a white structure near the river, situated
at the foot of the Dehesa del Canal. They circled around it, trying to
catch a glimpse of some corpse, but the windows were closed.

They continued along the banks of the Manzanares, amidst the twisted
pines of la Dehesa. The river ran very thin, consisting of a few
threads of murky water and pools above the mud.

At the end of the Dehesa de la Arganzuela, opposite a large, spacious
lot surrounded by a fence made of flattened oil cans nailed to posts,
the gang paused to inspect the place, whose wide area was taken up
with watering-carts, mechanical sweepers, ditch pumps, heaps of brooms
and other tools and appurtenances of municipal cleanliness.

In one corner of the lot arose a white edifice that, judging from its
two towers and the vacant belfries, had formerly been a church or a
convent.

The gang went nosing about the place and passed under an arch bearing
the inscription: "Stallion Stables." Behind the structure that looked
like a convent they came upon some shanties furnished with filthy,
grimy mats: African huts built upon a framework of rough sticks and
cane.

Bizco went into one of these hovels and returned with a piece of cod
in his hand.

Manuel was overcome by a horrible fear.

"I'm going," he said to Vidal.

"What do you mean!..." exclaimed one of the gang ironically. "Much
nerve you've got!"

All at once another of the urchins cried:

"Skip. Somebody's coming!"

The pirates started on a run down the Paseo del Canal.

Madrid, with its yellowish dwellings veiled in a cloud of dust, came
into view. The high window-panes were aglow with the reflection of the
setting sun. From the Paseo del Canal, crossing a stubble patch, they
reached the Plaza de las Peñuelas, then, after going up another street
they climbed the Paseo de las Acacias.

They entered the Corralón. Manuel and Vidal, after having arranged to
meet the gang on the following Sunday, climbed the stairway to Señor
Ignacio's house and as they drew near to the cobbler's door they heard
cries.

"Father's giving the old lady a beating," murmured Vidal. "There
won't be much to eat today. I'm going off to sleep."

"And how do I get to the other house?" asked Manuel.

"All you have to do is walk along the Ronda until you reach the Aguila
street stairway. You can't miss it."

Manuel followed the directions. It was fearfully hot; the air was
thick with dust. A few men were playing cards in tavern doorways, and
in others they were dancing in embrace to the strains of a
barrel-organ.

When Manuel reached the Aguila Street stairway it was getting dark. He
sat down to rest a while in the Campillo de Gil Imón. From this
elevated point could be seen the yellowish country, growing darker and
darker with approaching night, and the chimneys and housetops sharply
outlined against the horizon. The sky, blue and green above, was
flushed with red nearer the earth; it darkened and assumed sinister
hues,--coppery reds, purplish reds.

Above the mudwalls jutted the turrets and the cypresses of San Isidro
cemetery; a round cupola stood out clearly in the atmosphere; at its
top rose an angel with wings outspread, as if about to take flight
against the flaming, blood-red background of evening.

Above the embanked clouds of the twilight shone a pale star in a green
border, and on the horizon, animated by the last breath of day, could
be discerned the hazy silhouettes of distant mountains.




CHAPTER II

  The "Big Yard," or Uncle Rilo's House--Local Enmities.


When Salomé finished her sewing and went off to Aguila Street to
sleep, Manuel definitively settled in the home of Uncle Rilo, of
Embajadores lane. Some called this La Corrala, others, El Corralón,
still others, La Piltra, and it boasted so many other names that it
seemed as if the neighbours spent hours and hours thinking up new
designations for it.

The Corralón (Big yard)--this was the best known name of Uncle Rilo's
lair,--fronted the Paseo de las Acacias, but it was not in the direct
line of this thoroughfare, as it set somewhat back. The façade of this
tenement, low, narrow, kalso-mined, indicated neither the depth nor
the size of the building; the front revealed a few ill-shaped windows
and holes unevenly arranged, while a doorless archway gave access to a
narrow passage paved with cobblestones; this, soon widening, formed a
patio surrounded by high, gloomy walls.

From the sides of the narrow entrance passage rose brick stairways
leading to open galleries that ran along the three stories of the
house and returned to the patio. At intervals, in the back of these
galleries, opened rows of doors painted blue with a black number on
the lintel of each.

Between the lime and the bricks of the walls stuck out, like exposed
bones, jamb-posts and crossbeams, surrounded by lean bass ropes. The
gallery columns, as well as the lintels and the beams that supported
them, must formerly have been painted green, but as the result of the
constant action of sun and rain only a stray patch of the original
colour remained.

The courtyard was always filthy; in one corner lay a heap of useless
scraps covered by a sheet of zinc; one could make out grimy cloths,
decayed planks, debris, bricks, tiles, baskets: an infernal jumble.
Every afternoon some of the women would do their washing in the patio,
and when they finished their work they would empty their tubs on to
the ground, and the big pools, on drying, would leave white stains and
indigo rills of bluing. The neighbours also had the habit of throwing
their rubbish anywhere at all, and when it rained--since the mouth of
the drain would always become clogged--an unbearable, pestilential
odour would rise from the black, stagnant stream that inundated the
patio, and on its surface floated cabbage leaves and greasy papers.

Each neighbour could leave his tools and things in the section of the
gallery that bounded his dwelling; from the looks of this area one
might deduce the grade of poverty or relative comfort of each
family,--its predilections and its tastes.

This space usually revealed an attempt at cleanliness and a curious
aspect; here the wall was whitewashed, there hung a cage,--a few
flowers in earthenware pots; elsewhere a certain utilitarian instinct
found vent in the strings of garlic put out to dry or clusters of
grape suspended; beyond, a carpenter's bench and a tool-chest gave
evidence of the industrious fellow who worked during his free hours.

In general, however, one could see only dirty wash hung out on the
balustrades, curtains made of mats, quilts mended with patches of
ill-assorted colors, begrimed rags stretched over broomsticks or
suspended from ropes tied from one post to the other, that they might
get a trifle more light and air.

Every section of the gallery was a manifestation of a life apart
within this communism of hunger; this edifice contained every grade
and shade of poverty: from the heroic, garbed in clean, decent
tatters, to the most nauseating and repulsive.

In the majority of the rooms and holes of La Corrala one was struck
immediately by the resigned, indolent indigence combined with organic
and moral impoverishment.

In the space belonging to the cobbler's family, at the tip of a very
long pole attached to one of the pillars, waved a pair of
patch-covered trousers comically balancing itself.

Off from the large courtyard of El Corralón branched a causeway heaped
with ordure, leading to a smaller courtyard that in winter was
converted into a fetid swamp.

A lantern, surrounded with a wire netting to prevent the children from
breaking it with stones, hung from one of the black walls.

In the inner courtyard the rooms were much cheaper than those of the
large patio; most of them brought twenty-three reales, but there were
some for two or three pesetas per month: dismal dens with no
ventilation at all, built in the spaces under stairways and under the
roof.

In some moister climate La Corrala would have been a nest of
contagion: the wind and sun of Madrid, however,--that sun which brings
blisters to the skin,--saw to the disinfection of that pesthole.

As if to make sure that terror and tragedy should haunt the edifice,
one saw, on entering,--either at the main door or in the corridor,--a
drunken, delirious hag who begged alms and spat insults at everybody.
They called her Death. She must have been very old, or at least
appeared so. Her gaze was wandering, her look diffident, her face
purulent with scabs; one of her lower eyelids, drawn in as the result
of some ailment, exposed the bloody, turbid inside of her eyeball.
Death would stalk about in her tatters, in house slippers, with a
tin-box and an old basket into which she gathered her findings.
Through certain superstitious considerations none dared to throw her
into the street.

On his very first night in La Corrala Manuel verified, not without a
certain astonishment, the truth of what Vidal had told him. That
youngster, and almost all the gamins of his age, had sweethearts among
the little girls of the tenement, and it was not a rare occurrence, as
he passed by some nook, to come upon a couple that jumped up and ran
away.

The little children amused themselves playing bull-fight, and among
the most-applauded feats was that of Don Tancredo. One tot would get
down on all fours, and another, not very heavy, would mount him and
fold his arms, thrust back his chest and place a three-cornered hat of
paper upon his erect, haughty head.

He who was playing the bull would approach, roar loudly, sniff Don
Tancredo and pass by without throwing him over; a couple of times he
would repeat this, and then dash off. Whereupon Don Tancredo would
dismount from his living pedestal to receive the plaudits of the
public. There were wily, waggish bulls who took it into their heads to
pull both statue and pedestal to the ground, and this would be
received amidst shouts and huzzahs of the spectators.

In the meantime the girls would be playing in a ring, the women would
shout from gallery to gallery and the men would chat in their
shirtsleeves; some fellow, squatting on the floor, would scrape away
monotonously at the strings of a guitar.

La Muerte, the old beggar, would also cheer the evening gatherings
with her long discourse.

La Corrala was a seething, feverish world in little, as busy as an
anthill. There people toiled, idled, guzzled, ate and died of hunger;
there furniture was made, antiques were counterfeited, old
embroideries were fashioned, buns cooked, broken porcelain mended,
robberies planned and women's favours traded.

La Corrala was a microcosm; it was said that if all the denizens were
placed in line they would reach from Embajadores lane to the Plaza del
Progreso; it harboured men who were everything and yet nothing: half
scholars, half smiths, half carpenters, half masons, half business
men, half thieves.

In general, everybody who lived here was disoriented, dwelling in that
unending abjection produced by everlasting, irremediable poverty; many
sloughed their occupations as a reptile its skin; others had none;
some carpenters' or masons' helpers, because of their lack of
initiative, understanding and skill, could never graduate from their
apprenticeship. There were also gypsies, mule and dog clippers, nor
was there a dearth of porters, itinerant barbers and mountebanks.
Almost all of them, if opportunity offered, stole what they could;
they all presented the same pauperized, emaciated look. And all
harboured a constant rage that vented itself in furious imprecations
and blasphemies.

They lived as if sunk in the shades of a deep slumber, unable to form
any clear notion of their lives, without aspirations, aims, projects
or anything.

There were some whom a couple of glasses of wine made drunk for half a
week; others seemed already besotted, without having had a sip, and
their countenances constantly mirrored the most absolute debasement,
whence they escaped only in a fleeting moment of anger or indignation.

Money was to them, more often than not, a misfortune. Possessing an
instinctive understanding of their weakness and their frail wills,
they would resort to the tavern in quest of courage; there they would
cast off all restraint, shout, argue, forget the sorrows of the
moment, feel generous, and when, after having bragged to the top of
their bent they believed themselves ready for anything, they
discovered that they hadn't a céntimo and that the illusory strength
imbibed with the alcohol was evaporating.

The women of the house, as a rule, worked harder than the men, and
were almost always disputing. For thirty years past they had all
shared the same character and represented almost the same type: foul,
unkempt, termagacious, they--shrieked and grew desperate upon the
slightest provocation.

From time to time, like a gentle sunbeam amidst the gloom, the souls
of these stultified, bestial men,--of these women embittered by harsh
lives that held neither solace nor illusion,--would be penetrated by a
romantic, disinterested feeling of tenderness that made them live like
human beings for a while; but when the gust of sentimentalism had
blown over, they would return to their moral inertia, as resigned and
passive as ever. The permanent neighbours of La Corrala were situated
in the floors surrounding the large courtyard. In the other courtyard
the majority were transients, and spent, at most, a couple of weeks in
the house. Then, as the saying was among them, they spread wing.

One day a mender would appear with his huge bag, his brace and his
pliers, shouting through the streets in a husky voice: "Jars and tubs
to mend ... pans, dishes and plates!" After a short stay he would be
off; the following week arrived a dealer in cloth bargains, crying at
the top of his lungs his silk handkerchiefs at ten and fifteen
céntimos; another day came an itinerant hawker, his cases laden with
pins, combs and brooches, or some purchaser of gold and silver braid.
Certain seasons of the year brought a contingent of special types;
spring announced itself through the appearance of mule dealers,
tinkers, gypsies and bohemians; in autumn swarmed bands of rustics
with cheese from La Mancha and pots of honey, while winter brought the
walnut and chestnut vendors.

Of the permanent tenants in the first courtyard, those who were
intimate with Señor Ignacio included: a proof-corrector, nick-named El
Corretor; a certain Rebolledo, both barber and inventor, and four
blind men, who were known by the sobriquets El Calabazas, El Sapistas,
El Erigido and El Cuco and dwelt in harmony with their respective
wives playing the latest tangos, _tientos_ and _zarzuela_
ditties on the streets.

The proof-reader had a numerous family: his wife, his mother-in-law, a
daughter of twenty and a litter of tots; the pay he earned correcting
proof at a newspaper office was not enough for his needs and he used
to suffer dire straits. He was in the habit of wearing a threadbare
macfarland,--frayed at the edges,--a large, dirty handkerchief tied
around his throat, and a soft, yellow, grimy slouch hat.

His daughter, Milagros by name, a slender lass as sleek as a bird, had
relations with Leandro, Manual's cousin.

The sweethearts had plenty of love quarrels, now because of her
flirtations, now because of the evil life he led.

They could not get along, for Milagros was a bit haughty and a
climber, considering herself a social superior fallen upon evil days,
while Leandro, on the other hand, was abrupt and irascible.

The cobbler's other neighbour, Señor Zurro, a quaint, picturesque
type, had nothing to do with Señor Ignacio and felt for the
proof-reader a most cordial hatred. El Zurro went about forever
concealed behind a pair of blue spectacles, wearing a fur cap and
ample cassock.

"His name is Zurro (fox)," the proof-reader would say, "but he's a fox
in his actions as well; one of those country foxes that are masters of
malice and trickery."

According to popular rumour, El Zurro knew what he was about; he had a
place at the lower end of the Rastro, a dark, pestilent hovel
cluttered with odds and ends, second-hand coats, remnants of old
cloth, tapestries, parts of chasubles, and in addition, empty bottles,
flasks full of brandy and cognac, seltzer water siphons, shattered
clocks, rusty muskets, keys, pistols, buttons, medals and other
frippery.

Despite the fact that surely no more than a couple of persons entered
Señor Zurro's shop throughout the livelong day and spent no more than
a couple of reales, the second-hand dealer thrived.

He lived with his daughter Encarna, a coarse specimen of some
twenty-five years, exceedingly vulgar and the personification of
insolence, who went walking with her father on Sundays, bedecked with
jewelry. Encarna's bosom was consumed with the fires of passion for
Leandro; but that ingrate, enamoured of Milagros, was unscathed by the
soul-flames of the second-hand dealer's daughter.

Wherefore Encarna mortally hated Milagros and the members of her
family; every hour of the day she branded them as vulgarians,
starvelings, and insulted them with such scoffing sobriquets as
Mendrugo, "Beggar's Crumb," which was applied by her to the
proof-reader, and "The Madwoman of the Vatican," which meant his
daughter.

It was not at all rare for such hatreds, between persons forced almost
into living in common, to grow to violent rancour and malevolence;
thus, the members of one and the other family never looked at each
other without exchanging curses and wishes for the most disastrous
misfortunes.




CHAPTER III

  Roberto Hastings at the Shoemaker's--Procession of Beggars--Court
    of Miracles.


One morning toward the end of September Roberto appeared in the
doorway of _The Regeneration of Footwear_, and thrusting his head
into the shop exclaimed:

"Hello, Manuel!"

"Hello, Don Roberto!"

"Working, eh?"

Manuel shrugged his shoulders, indicating that the job was not exactly
to his taste.

Roberto hesitated for a moment, but at last made up his mind and
entered the shop.

"Have a seat," invited Señor Ignacio, offering him a chair.

"Are you Manuel's uncle?"

"At your service."

Roberto sat down, offered a cigar to Señor Ignacio and another to
Leandro, and the three began to smoke.

"I know your nephew," said Roberto to the proprietor, "for I live in
the house where Petra works."

"You do?"

"And I wish you'd let him off today for a couple of hours."

"All right, señor. All afternoon, if you wish."

"Fine. Then I'll call for him after lunch."

"Very well."

Roberto watched them work for a while, then suddenly jumped up and
left.

Manuel could not understand what Roberto wanted, and in the afternoon
waited for him with genuine impatience. Roberto carne, and the pair
turned out of Aguila Street down toward the Ronda de Segovia.

"Do you know where La Doctrina is?" Roberto asked Manuel.

"What Doctrina?"

"A place where herds of beggars meet every Friday."

"I don't know."

"Do you know where the San Isidro highway is?"

"Yes."

"Good. For that's where we're going. That's where La Doctrina is."

Manuel and Roberto walked down the Paseo de los Pontones and continued
in the direction of Toledo Bridge. The student was silent and Manuel
did not care to ask any questions.

It was a dry, dusty day. The stifling south wind whirled puffs of heat
and sand; a stray bolt of lightning illuminated the clouds; from the
distance came the rumble of thunder; the landscape lay yellow under a
blanket of dust.

Over the Toledo Bridge trudged a procession of beggars, both men and
women, each dirtier and more tattered than the next. Out of las
Cambroneras and las Injurias streamed recruits for this ragged army;
they came, too, from the Paseo Imperial and from Ocho Hilos, and by
this time forming solid ranks, they trooped on to the Toledo Bridge
and tramped up the San Isidro highway until they reached a red
edifice, before which they came to a halt.

"This must be La Doctrina," said Roberto to Manuel, pointing to a
building that had a patio with a statue of Christ in the centre.

The two friends drew near to the gate. This was a beggars' conclave, a
Court of Miracles assembly. The women took up almost the entire
courtyard; at one end, near a chapel, the men were huddled together;
one could see nothing but swollen, stupid faces, inflamed nostrils,
and twisted mouths; old women as fat and clumsy as melancholy whales;
little wizened, cadaverous hags with sunken mouths and noses like the
beak of a bird of prey; shamefaced female mendicants, their wrinkled
chins bristling with hair, their gaze half ironical and half shy;
young women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young
and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended,
patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that
had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab
city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of the
countrywomen.

Roberto sauntered about, peering eagerly info the courtyard. Manuel
trailed after him indifferently.

A large number of the beggars was blind; there were cripples, minus
hand or foot, some hieratic, taciturn, solemn, others restless. Brown
long-sleeved loose coats mingled with frayed sack-coats and begrimed
smocks. Some of the men in tatters carried, slung over their
shoulders, black sacks and game-bags; others huge cudgels in their
hands; one burly negro, his face tattooed with deep
stripes,--doubtless a slave in former days,--leaned against the wall in
dignified indifference, clothed in rags; barefoot urchins and mangy
dogs scampered about amongst the men and women; the swarming,
agitated, palpitating throng of beggars seethed like an anthill.

"Let's go," said Roberto. "Neither of the women I'm looking for is
here.... Did you notice," he added, "how few human faces there are
among men! All you can read in the features of these wretches is
mistrust, abjection, malice, just as among the rich you find only
solemnity, gravity, pedantry. It's curious, isn't it? All cats have
the face of cats; all oxen look like oxen; while the majority of human
beings haven't a human semblance."

Roberto and Manuel left the patio. They sat down opposite La Doctrina,
on the other side of the road, amid some sandy clearings.

"These doings of mine," began Roberto, "may strike you as queer. But
they won't seem so strange when I tell you that I'm looking for two
women here; one of them a poor beggar who can make me rich; the other,
a rich lady, who perhaps would make me poor."

Manuel stared at Roberto in amazement. He had always harboured a
certain suspicion that there was something wrong with the student's
head.

"No. Don't imagine this is silly talk. I'm on the trail of a
fortune,--a huge fortune. If you help me, I'll remember you."

"Sure. What do you want me to do?"

"I'll tell you when the right moment comes."

Manuel could not conceal an ironic smile.

"You don't believe it," muttered Roberto.

"That doesn't matter. When you'll see, you'll believe."


"Naturally."

"If I should happen to need you, promise you'll help me."

"I'll help you as far as I am able," replied Manuel, with feigned
earnestness.

Several ragamuffins sprawled themselves out on the clearing near
Manuel and Roberto, and the student did not care to go on with his
tale.

"They've already begun to split up into divisions," said one of the
loafers who wore a coachman's hat, pointing with a stick to the women
inside the courtyard of La Doctrina.

And so it was; groups were clustering about the trees of the patio, on
each of which was hung a poster with a picture and a number in the
middle.

"There go the marchionesses," added he of the coachman's hat,
indicating several women garbed in black who had just appeared in the
courtyard.

The white faces stood out amidst the mourning clothes.

"They're all marchionesses," said one.

"Well, they're not all beauties," retorted Manuel, joining the
conversation. "What have they come here for?"

"They're the ones who teach religion," answered the fellow with the
hat. "From time to time they hand out sheets and underwear to the
women and the men. Now they're going to call the roll."

A bell began to clang; the gate closed; groups were formed, and a lady
entered the midst of each.

"Do you see that one there?" asked Roberto. "She's Don Telmo's niece."

"That blonde?"

"Yes. Wait for me here."

Roberto walked down the road toward the gate.

The reading of the religious lesson began; from the patio came the
slow, monotonous drone of prayer.

Manuel lay back on the ground. Yonder, flat beneath the grey horizon,
loomed Madrid out of the mist of the dust-laden atmosphere. The wide
bed of the Manzanares river, ochre-hued, seemed furrowed here and
there by a thread of dark water. The ridges of the Guadarrama range
rose hazily into the murky air.

Roberto passed by the patio. The humming of the praying mendicants
continued. An old lady, her head swathed in a red kerchief and her
shoulders covered with a black cloak that was fading to green, sat
down in the clearing.

"What's the matter, old lady? Wouldn't they open the gate for you?"
shouted the fellow with the coachman's hat.

"No.... The foul old witches!"

"Don't you care. They're not giving away anything today. The
distribution takes place this coming Friday. They'll give you at least
a sheet," added he of the hat mischievously.

"If they don't give me anything more than a sheet," shrilled the hag,
twisting her blobber-lip, "I'll tell them to keep it for themselves.
The foxy creatures! ..."

"Oh, they've found you out, granny!" exclaimed one of the loafers
lying on the ground. "You're a greedy one, you are."

The bystanders applauded these words, which came from a
_zarzuela_, and the chap in the coachman's hat continued
explaining to Manuel the workings of La Doctrina.

"There are some men and women who enrol in two and even three
divisions so as to get all the charity they can," he went on. "Why,
we--my father and I--once enrolled in four divisions under four
different names.... And what a rumpus was raised! What a row we had
with the marchionesses!"

"And what did you want with all those sheets," Manuel asked him.

"Why! Sell 'em, of course. They re sold here at the very gate at two
_chulés_ apiece."

"I'm going to buy one," said a coachman from a nearby hackstand,
approaching the group. "I'll give it a coating of linseed oil, then
varnish it and make me a cowled waterproof."

"But the marchionesses,--don't they see that these people sell their
gifts right away?"

"Much they see!"

To these idlers the whole business was nothing more than a pious
recreation of the religious ladies, of whom they spoke with
patronizing irony.

The reading of the religious lesson did not last quite an hour.

A bell rang; the gate was swung open; the various groups dissolved and
merged; everybody arose and the women began to walk off, balancing
their chairs upon their heads, shouting, shoving one another
violently; two or three huckstresses peddled their wares as the
tattered crowd issued through the gate in a jam, shrieking as if in
escape from some imminent danger. A few old women ran clumsily down
the road; others huddled into a corner to urinate, and all of them
were howling at the top of their lungs, overcome by the necessity of
insulting the women of La Doctrina, as if instinctively they divined
the uselessness of a sham charity that remedied nothing. One heard
only protests and manifestation of scorn.

"Damn it all! These women of God...."

"And they want a body to have faith in 'em."

"The old drunkards."

"Let them have faith, and the mother that bore 'em."

"Let 'em give blood-pudding to everybody."

After the women came the men,--blind, maimed, crippled,--in leisurely
fashion, and conversing solemnly.

"Huh! They don't want me to marry!" grumbled a blind fellow,
sarcastically, turning to a cripple.

"And what do you say," asked the latter.

"I? What the deuce! Let them get married if they have any one to marry
'em. They came here and bore us stiff with their prayers and sermons.
What we need isn't sermons, but hard cash and plenty of it."

"That's what, man ... the dough,--that's what we want."

"And all the rest is nothing but ... chatter and chin music....
Anybody can give advice. When it comes to bread, though, not a sign of
it."

"So say I!"

The ladies came out, prayer-books in hand; the old beggar-women set
off in pursuit and harassed them with entreaties.

Manuel looked everywhere for the student; at last he caught sight of
him with Don Telmo's niece. The blonde turned around to look at him,
and then stepped into a coach. Roberto saluted her and the coach
rolled off.

Manuel and Roberto returned by the San Isidro highway.

The sky was still overcast; the air dry; the procession of beggars was
advancing in the direction of Madrid. Before they reached the Toledo
Bridge, at the intersection of the San Isidro highway and the
Extremadura cartroad, Roberto and Manuel entered a very large tavern.
Roberto ordered a bottle of beer.

"Do you live in the same house where the shoe shop is?" asked Roberto.

"No. I live over in the Paseo de las Acacias, in a house called El
Corralón."

"Good. I'll come to visit you there, and you already understand that
whenever you happen to go to any place where poor folk or criminals
gather, you're to let me know."

"I'll let you know. I was watching that blonde eye you. She's pretty."

"Yes."

"And she has a swell coach."

"I should say so."

"Well? Are you going to marry her?"

"What do I know? We'll see. Come, we can't stay here," said Roberto,
stepping up to the counter to pay.

In the tavern a large number of beggars, seated at the tables, were
gulping down slices of cod and scraps of meat; a piquant odour of
fried bird-tripe and oil came from the kitchen.

They left. The wind still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray
bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near
the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with
tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through
an atmosphere murky with dust.

Suddenly Roberto halted, and placing his hand upon Manuel's shoulder
said:

"Listen to what I say, for it is the truth. If you ever want to
accomplish anything in life, place no belief in the word 'impossible.'
There's nothing impossible to an energetic will. If you try to shoot
an arrow, aim very high,--as high as you can; the higher you aim, the
farther you'll go."

Manuel stared at Roberto with a puzzled look, and shrugged his
shoulders.




CHAPTER IV

  Life In the Cobbler's Shop--Manuel's Friends.


The months of September and October were very hot; it was impossible
to breathe in the shoe shop.

Every morning Manuel and Vidal, on their way to the shoemaker's, would
talk of a thousand different things and exchange impressions; money,
women, plans for the future formed everlasting themes of their chats.
To both it seemed a great sacrifice, something in the nature of a
crowning misfortune in their bad luck, to have to spend day after day
cooped up in a corner ripping off outworn soles.

The languorous afternoons invited to slumber. After lunch especially,
Manuel would be overcome by stupor and deep depression. Through the
doorway of the shop could be seen the fields of San Isidro bathed in
light; in the Campillo de Gil Imón the wash hung out to dry gleamed in
the sun.

There came a medley of crowing cocks, far-off shouts of vendors, the
shrieking of locomotive whistles muffled by the distance. The dry,
burning, atmosphere vibrated. A few women of the neighbourhood came
out to comb their hair in the open, and the mattress-makers beat their
wool in the shade of the Campillo, while the hens scampered about and
scratched the soil.

Later, as evening fell, the air and the earth changed to a dusty grey.
In the distance, cutting the horizon, waved the outline of the arid
field,--a simple line, formed by the gentle undulation of the
hillocks,--a line like that of the landscapes drawn by children, with
isolated houses and smoking chimneys. Here and there a lone patch of
green grove splotched against the yellow field, which lay parched by
the sun beneath a pallid sky, whitish and murky in the hot vapours
rising from the earth. Not a cry, not the slightest sound rent the
air.

At dusk the mist grew transparent and the horizon receded until, far
in the distance, loomed the vague silhouettes of mountains not to be
glimpsed by day, against the red background of the twilight.

When they left off working in the shop it was usually night. Señor
Ignacio, Leandro, Manuel and Vidal would turn down the road toward
home.

The gas lights shone at intervals in the dusty air; lines of carts
rumbled slowly by, and across the road, in little groups, tramped the
workmen from the neighbouring factories.

And always, coming and going, the conversation between Manuel and
Vidal would turn upon the same topics: women and money.

Neither had a romantic notion, or anything like it, of women. To
Manuel, a woman was a magnificent animal with firm flesh and swelling
breast.

Vidal did not share this sexual enthusiasm; he experienced, with all
women, a confused feeling of scorn, curiosity and preoccupation.

As far as concerned money, they were both agreed that it was the
choicest, most admirable of all things; they spoke of money--especially
Vidal--with a fierce enthusiasm. To him, the thought that
there might be anything--good or evil--that could not be obtained with
hard cash, was the climax of absurdity. Manuel would like to have
money to travel all over the world and see cities and more cities and
sail in vessels. Vidal's dream was to live a life of ease in Madrid.

After two or three months in the Corralón, Manuel had become so
accustomed to the work and the life there that he wondered how he
could do anything else. Those wretched quarters no longer produced
upon him the impression of dark, sinister sadness that they cause in
one unaccustomed to live in them; on the contrary, they seemed to him
filled with attractions. He knew almost everybody in the district.
Vidal and he would escape from the house on any pretext at all, and on
Sundays they would meet Bizco at the Casa del Cabrero and go off into
the environs: to Las Injurias, Las Cambroneras, the restaurants of
Alarcón, the Campamento, and the inns on the Andalucía road, where
they would consort with thieves and rogues and play with them at
_cané_ and _rayuela_.

Manuel did not care for Bizco's company; Bizco sought only to hobnob
with thieves. He was forever taking Manuel and Vidal to haunts
frequented by bandits and low types, but since Vidal seemed to think
it all right, Manuel never objected.

Vidal was the link between Manuel and Bizco, Bizco hated Manuel, who
in turn, not only felt enmity and repugnance for Bizco, but showed
this repulsion plainly. Bizco was a brute,--an animal deserving of
extermination. As lascivious as a monkey, he had violated several of
the little girls of the Casa del Cabrero, beating them into
submission; he used to rob his father, a poverty-stricken cane-weaver,
so that he might have money enough to visit some low brothel of Las
Penuelas or on Chopa Street, where he found rouged dowagers with
cigarette-stubs in their lips, who looked like princesses to him. His
narrow skull, his powerful jaw, his blubber-lip, his stupid glance,
lent him a look of repellant brutality and animality.

A primitive man, he kept his dagger--bought in El Rastro--sharp,
guarding it as a sacred object. If he ever happened across a cat or
dog, he would enjoy torturing it to death with oft-repeated stabs. His
speech was obscene, abounding in barbarities and blasphemies.

Whether anybody induced Bizco to tattoo his arms, or the idea was
original with him, cannot be said; probably the tattooing he had seen
on one of the bandits that he ran after had suggested a similar
adornment for himself. Vidal imitated him, and for a time the pair
gave themselves up enthusiastically to self-tattooing. They pricked
their skins with a pin until a little blood came, then moistened the
wounds with ink.

Bizco painted crosses, stars and names upon his chest; Vidal, who
didn't like to prick himself, stippled his own name on one arm and his
sweetheart's on the other; Manuel didn't care to inscribe anything
upon his person, first because he was afraid of blood, and then
because the idea had been Bizco's.

Each harboured a mute hostility against the other.

Manuel, always with a chip on his shoulder, was disposed to show his
enemy challenge; Bizco, doubtless, noticed this scornful hatred in
Manuel's eyes, and this confused him.

To Manuel, a man's superiority consisted in his talent, and, above
all, in his cunning; to Bizco, courage and strength constituted the
sole enviable qualities; the greatest merit of all was to be a real
brute, as he would declare with enthusiasm.

Because of the great esteem in which he held craft and cunning, Manuel
felt deep admiration for the Rebolledos, father and son, who also
lived in the Corralón. The father, a dwarfed hunchback, a barber by
trade, used to shave his customers in the sunlight of the open, near
the Rastro. This dwarf had a very intelligent face, with deep eyes; he
wore moustache and side-whiskers, and long, bluish, unwashed hair. He
dressed always in mourning; in winter and summer alike he went around
in an overcoat, and, by some unsolved mystery of chemistry his
overcoat kept turning green while his trousers, which were also black,
kept quite as plainly turning red.

Every morning Rebolledo would leave the Corralón carrying a little
bench and a wooden wall-bracket, from which hung a brass basin and a
poster. Reaching a certain spot along the Americas fence he would
attach the bracket and put up, beside it, a humorous sign the point of
which, probably, he was the only one to see. It ran thus:

      MODERNIST TONSORIAL PARLOUR
           Antiseptic Barber
  Walk in Gents. Shaving by Rebolledo.
              Money Lent

The Rebolledos were very skilful; they made toys of wire and of
pasteboard, which they afterward sold to the street-vendors; their
home, a dingy little room of the front patio, had been converted into
a workshop, and they had there a vise, a carpenter's bench and an
array of broken gew-gaws that were apparently of no further use.

The neighbours of the Corralón had a saying that indicated their
conception of Rebolledo's acute genius.

"That dwarf," they said, "has a regular Noah's ark in his head."

The father had made for his own use a set of false teeth. He had taken
a bone napkin-ring, cut it into two unequal parts, and, by filing it
on either side, had fitted the larger to his mouth. Then with a tiny
saw he made the teeth, and to simulate the gums he covered a part of
the former napkin-ring with sealing-wax. Rebolledo could remove and
insert the false set with remarkable ease, and he could eat with them
perfectly, provided, as he said, there was anything to eat.

Perico, the son of the dwarf, promised even to outstrip his father in
cleverness. Between the hunger that he often suffered, and the
persistent tertian fevers, he was very thin and his complexion was
citreous. He was not, like his father, deformed, but slender,
delicate, with sparkling eyes and rapid, jerky motions. He looked, as
the saying is, like a rat under a bowl.

One of the proofs of his inventive genius was a mechanical snuffler
that he had made of a shoe-polish tin.

Perico cherished a particular enthusiasm for white walls, and wherever
he discovered one he would sketch, with a piece of coal, processions
of men, women and horses, houses puffing smoke, soldiers, vessels at
sea, weaklings engaging in struggle with burly giants, and other
equally diverting scenes.

Perico's masterpiece was the Don Tancredo triptych, done in coal on
the walls of the narrow entrance lane to La Corrala. This work
overwhelmed the neighbours with admiration and astonishment.

The first part of the triptych showed the valiant hypnotizer of bulls
on his way to the bull-ring, in the midst of a great troop of
horsemen; the legend read: "Don Tancredo on his _weigh_ to the
bulls." The second part represented the "king of bravery" in his
three-cornered hat, with his arms folded defiantly before the wild
beast; underneath, the rubric "Don Tancredo upon his pedestal." Under
the third part one read: "The bull takes to flight." The depiction of
this final scene was noteworthy; the bull was seen fleeing as one
possessed of the devil amidst the toreros, whose noses were visible in
profile while their mouths and both eyes were drawn in front view.

Despite his triumphs, Perico Rebolledo did not grow vain, nor did he
consider himself superior to the men of his generation; his greatest
pleasure was to sit down at his father's side in the patio of La
Corrala, amidst the works of old clocks, bunches of keys and other
grimy, damaged articles, and ponder over the possible utilization of
an eye-glass crystal, for example, or a truss, or the rubber bulb of a
syringe, or some similar broken, out-of-order contrivance.

Father and son spent their lives dreaming of mechanical contraptions;
they considered nothing useless; the key that could open no door, the
old-style coffee-pot, as queer as some laboratory instrument, the oil
lamp with machine attachment,--all these articles were treasured up,
taken apart and put to some use. Rebolledo, father and son, wasted
more ingenuity in living wretchedly than is employed by a couple of
dozen comic authors, journalists and state ministers dwelling in
luxury.

Among the friends of Perico Rebolledo were the Aristas, who became
intimate with Manuel.

The Aristas, two brothers, sons of an ironing-woman, were apprentices
in a foundry of the near-by Ronda. The younger passed his days in a
continuous capering, indulging in death-defying leaps, climbing trees,
walking on his hands and performing acrobatic stunts from all the door
transoms.

The elder brother, a long-legged stutterer whom they called Aristón in
jest, was the most funereal fellow on the planet; he suffered from
acute necromania; anything connected with coffins, corpses, wakes and
candles roused his enthusiasm. He would like to have been a
gravedigger, the priest of a religious confraternity, a cemetery
warden; but his great dream,--what most enchanted him,--was a funeral;
he would imagine, as a wonderful ideal, the conversations that the
proprietor of a funeral establishment must have with the father or the
inconsolable widow as he offered wreaths of immortelles, or as he went
to take the measure of a corpse or strolled amidst the coffins. What a
splendid existence, this manufacturing of last resting-places for men,
women and children, and afterward accompanying them to the
burial-ground. For Aristón, details relating to death were the most
important matter in life.

Through that irony of fate which almost always exchanges the proper
labels of things and persons, Aristón was a supernumerary in one of
the vaudeville theatres, through the influence of his father, who was
a scene-shifter, and the job disgusted him, for in such a playhouse
nobody ever died upon the stage, nobody ever came out in mourning and
there was no weeping. And while Aristón kept thinking of nothing but
funereal scenes, his brother dreamed of circuses, trapezes and
acrobats, hoping that some day fate would send him the means to
cultivate his gymnastic talents.




CHAPTER V

  La Blasa's Tavern.


The frequent quarrels between Leandro and his sweetheart, the
Corrector's daughter, very often gave the neighbours of the Corrala
food for gossip. Leandro was an ill-tempered, quarrelsome sort; his
brutal instincts were quickly awakened; despite his habit of going
every Saturday night to the taverns and restaurants, ready for a
rumpus with the bullies and the ruffians, he had thus far managed to
steer clear of any disagreeable accident. His sweetheart was somewhat
pleased with this display of valour; her mother, however, regarded it
with genuine indignation, and was forever advising her daughter to
dismiss her Leandro for good.

The girl would dismiss her lover; but afterwards, when he returned in
humility, ready to accede to any conditions, she relented.

This confidence in her power turned the girl despotic, whimsical,
voluble; she would amuse herself by rousing Leandro's jealousy; she
had arrived at a particular state, a blend of affection and hatred, in
which the affection remained within and the hatred outside, revealing
itself in a ferocious cruelty, in the satisfaction of mortifying her
lover constantly.

"What you ought to do some fine day," Señor Ignacio would say to
Leandro, incensed by the cruel coquetry of the maiden, "is to get her
into a corner and take all you want.... And then give her a beating
and leave her soft as mush. The next day she'd be following you around
like a dog."

Leandro, as brave as any bully, was as meek as a charity-pupil in the
presence of his sweetheart. At times he recalled his father's counsel,
but he would never have summoned the courage to carry it through.

One Saturday afternoon, after a bitter dispute with Milagros, Leandro
invited Manuel to make the rounds that night together with him.

"Where'll we go?" asked Manuel.

"To the Naranjeros café, or to the Engrima restaurant."

"Wherever you please."

"We'll make the rounds of those dives and then we'll wind up at La
Blasa's tavern."

"Do the hard guys go there?"

"I should say. As tough as you make 'em."

"Then I'll let Roberto know,--that fellow who came for me to take him
to la Doctrina."

"All right."

After work Manuel went off to the boardingrhouse and took counsel with
Roberto.

"Be at the San Millán café about nine in the evening," said Roberto,
"I'll be there with a cousin of mine."

"Are you going to take her there?" Manuel asked in astonishment.

"Yes. She's a queer one, a painter."

"And is this painter good-looking?" asked Leandro.

"I can't say. I don't know her."

"Damn my sweet---- ... ! I'd give anything to have this woman come
along, man."

"Me, too."

They both went to the San Millán café, sat down and waited
impatiently. At the hour indicated Roberto appeared in company of his
cousin whom he called Fanny. She was a woman between thirty and forty,
very slender, with a sallow complexion,--a distinguished, masculine
type; there was about her something of the graceless beauty of a
racehorse; her nose was curved, her jaw big, her cheeks sunken and her
eyes grey and cold. She wore a jacket of dark green taffeta, a black
skirt and a small hat.

Leandro and Manuel greeted her with exceeding timidity and
awkwardness; they shook hands with Roberto and conversed.

"My cousin," said Roberto, "would like to see something of slum life
hereabouts."

"Whenever you wish," answered Leandro. "But I warn you beforehand that
there are some pretty tough specimens in this vicinity."

"Oh, I'm prepared," said the lady, with a slight foreign accent,
showing a revolver of small calibre.

Roberto paid, despite Leandro's protests, and they left the café.
Coming out on the Plaza del Rastro, they walked down the Ribera de
Curtidores as far as the Ronda de Toledo.

"If the lady wishes to see the house we live in, this is the one,"
said Leandro.

They went into the Corralón; a crowd of gamins and old women, amazed
to see such a strange woman there at such an hour, surrounded them,
showering Manuel and Leandro with questions. Leandro was eager for
Milagros to learn that he had been there with a woman, so he
accompanied Fanny through the place, pointing out all the holes of the
wretched dwelling.

"Poverty's the only thing you can see here," said Leandro.

"Yes, yes indeed," answered the woman.

"Now if you wish, we'll go to La Blasa's tavern."

They left the Corralón for Embajadores lane and walked along the black
fence of a laundry. It was a dark night and a drizzle had begun to
fall. They stumbled along the surrounding path.

"Look-out," said Leandro. "There's a wire here."

He stepped upon the wire to hold it down. They all crossed the path
and passed a group of white houses, coming to Las Injurias.

They approached a low cottage with a dark socle; a door with clouded
broken panes stuffed with bundles of paper, through which shone a
pallid light, gave entrance to the dwelling. In the opaque
transparency of the glass appeared from time to time the shadow of a
person.

Leandro opened the door and they all went in. A stuffy, smoky wave of
atmosphere struck them in the face. A kerosene lamp, hanging from the
ceiling and covered with a white shade, provided light for the tiny,
low-roofed tavern.

As the four entered, the customers greeted them with an expression of
stupefaction; for a while the habituées whispered among themselves,
then some, resumed their playing as others looked on.

Fanny, Roberto, Leandro and Manuel took seats to the right of the
door.

"What'll you have?" asked the woman at the counter.

"Four fifteen-céntimo glasses of wine."

The woman brought the glasses in a filthy tray, and set them upon the
table. Leandro pulled out sixty céntimos.

"They're ten apiece," corrected the woman in ill-humoured tones.

"How's that?"

"Because this is outside the limits."

"All right; take whatever it comes to."

The woman left twenty céntimos on the table and returned to the
counter. She was broad, large-breasted, with a head that set deep in
between her shoulders and a neck composed of some five or six
layers of fat; from time to time she would serve a drink, always getting
the price in advance; she spoke very little, with evident displeasure
and with an invariable gesture of ill-humour.

This human hippopotamus had at her right a tin tank with a spigot, for
brandy, and at her left a flask of strong wine and a chipped jar
covered with a black funnel, into which she poured whatever was left
in the glasses by her customers.

Roberto's cousin fished out a phial of smelling salts, hid it in her
clamped hand and took a sniff from time to time.

Opposite the place where Roberto, Fanny, Leandro and Manuel were
seated, a crowd of some twenty men were packed around a table playing
cane.

Near them, huddled on the floor next the stove, reclining against the
wall, could be seen a number of ugly, scraggly-haired hags, dressed in
corsages and ragged skirts that were tied around their waists by
ropes.

"Who are those women?" asked the painter.

"They're old tramps," explained Leandro. "The kind that go to the
Botanical Garden and the clearings outside the city."

Two or three of the unfortunates held in their arms children belonging
to other women who had come there to spend the night; some were dozing
with their cigarettes sticking from the corner of their mouths. Amid
the old women were a few little girls of thirteen or fourteen,
monstrously deformed, with bleary eyes; one of them had her nose
completely eaten away, with nothing but a hole like a wound left in
its place; another was hydro-cephalous, with so thin a neck that it
seemed the slightest movement would snap it and send her head rolling
from her shoulders.

"Have you seen the large jars they have here?" Leandro asked Manuel.
"Come on and take a look."

The two rose and approached the group of gamblers. One of these
interrupted his game.

"Please make way?" Leandro said to him, with marked impertinence.

The man drew in his chair sourly. There was nothing remarkable about
the jars; they were large, embedded in the wall, painted with
red-lead; each of them bore a sign denoting the class of wine inside,
and had a spigot.

"What's so wonderful about this, I'd like to know?" asked Manuel.

Leandro smiled; they returned as they had come, disturbing the player
once more and resuming their seats at the table.

Roberto and Fanny conversed in English.

"That fellow we made get up," said Leandro, "is the bully of this
place."

"What's his name?" asked Fanny.

"El Valencia."

The man they were speaking about, hearing his sobriquet mentioned,
turned around and eyed Leandro; for a moment their glances crossed
defiantly; Valencia turned his eyes away and continued playing. He was
a strong man, about forty, with high cheek bones, reddish skin and a
disagreeably sarcastic expression. Every once in a while he would cast
a severe look at the group formed by Fanny, Roberto and the other two.

"And that Valencia,--who is he?" asked the lady in a low voice.

"He's a mat maker by trade," answered Leandro, raising his voice. "A
tramp that wheedles money out of low-lives; before he used to belong
to the _pote_,--the kind that visit houses on Sundays, knock, and
when they see nobody's home, stick their jimmy into the lock and
zip!... But he hasn't the courage even for this, 'cause his liver is
whiter than paper."

"It would be curious to investigate," said Roberto, "just how far
poverty has served as centre of gravity for the degradation of these
men."

"And how about that white-bearded old fellow at his side?" asked
Fanny.

"He's one of those apostles that cure with water. They say he's a wise
old fellow.... He has a cross on his tongue. But I believe he painted
it there himself."

"And that other woman there?"

"That's La Paloma, Valencia's mistress."

"Prostitute?" asked the lady.

"For at least forty years," answered Leandro with a laugh.

They all looked closely at Paloma; she had a huge, soft face, with
pouches of violet skin, and a timid look as of a humble beast; she
represented at least forty years of prostitution and all its
concomitant ills; forty years of nights spent in the open, lurking
about barracks, sleeping in suburban shanties and the most repulsive
lodgings.

Among the women there was also a gypsy who, from time to time, would
get up and walk across the tavern with a saucy strut.

Leandro ordered some glasses of whiskey; but it was so bad that nobody
could drink it.

"Hey, you," called Leandro to the gipsy, offering her the glass. "Want
a drink?"

"No."

The gypsy placed her hands upon the table,--a pair of stubby, wrinkled
hands incrusted with dirt.

"Who are these gumps?" she asked Leandro.

"Friends of mine. Will you drink or not?" and he offered her the glass
again.

"No."

Then in a shrill voice, he shouted:

"Apostle, will you have a drink?"

The Apostle rose from his place amongst the gamblers. He was dead
drunk and could hardly move; his eyes were viscous, like those of an
angered animal; he staggered over to Leandro and took the glass, which
trembled in his grasp; he brought it to his lips and gulped it down.

"Want more?" asked the gypsy.

"Sure, sure," he drooled.

Then he began to babble, showing the stumps of his yellow teeth, but
nobody could understand a word; he drained the other glasses, rested
his forehead against his hand and slowly made his way to a corner,
into which he squatted, and then stretched himself out on the floor.

"Do you want me to tell your fortune, princess?" asked the gipsy of
Fanny, seizing her hand.

"No," replied the lady drily.

"Won't you give me a few coins for the _churumbeles_?"

"No."

"Wicked woman! Why won't you give me a few coins for the
_churumbeles_?"

"What does _churumbeles_ mean?" asked the lady.

"Her children," answered Leandro, laughing.

"Have you children?" Fanny asked the gipsy.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Two. Here they are."

And the gipsy fetched a blond little fellow and a girl of about five
or six.

The lady petted the little boy; then she took a duro from her purse
and gave it to the gipsy.

The gipsy, parting her lips in amazement and bursting forth into
profuse flattery, exhibited the duro to everybody in the place.

"We'd better be going," advised Leandro. "To pull one of those big
coins out in a dive like this is dangerous."

The four left the tavern.

"Would you like to make the rounds of this quarter?" asked Leandro.

"Yes. Let's," said the lady.

Together they wound in and out of the narrow lanes of Las Injurias.

"Watch out, the drain runs in the middle of the street," cautioned
Manuel.

The rain kept falling; the quartet of slummers entered narrow patios
where their feet sank into the pestiferous slime. Along the entire
extension of the ravine black with mud, shone but a single oil lamp,
attached to the side of some half crumbled wall.

"Shall we go back?" asked Roberto.

"Yes," answered the lady.

They set out for Embajadores lane and walked up the Paseo de las
Acacias. The rain came down harder; here and there a faint light shone
in the distance; against the intense darkness of the sky loomed the
vague silhouette of a high chimney....

Leandro and Manuel accompanied Fanny and Roberto as far as the Plaza
del Rastro, and there they parted, exchanging handshakes.

"What a woman!" exclaimed Leandro.

"Nice, eh?" asked Manuel.

"You bet. I'd give anything to have a try at her."




CHAPTER VI

  Roberto In Quest of a Woman--El Tabuenca and his Inventions--Don
    Alonso or the Snake-Man.


A few months later Roberto appeared in the Corrala at the hour when
Manuel and the shoe-shop employés were returning from their day's
work.

"Do you know Señor Zurro?" Roberto asked Manuel.

"Yes. He lives here on this side."

"I know that. I'd like to have a talk with him.

"Then knock at his door. He must be in."

"Come along with me."

Manuel knocked and Encarna opened; they went inside. Señor Zurro was
in his room, reading a newspaper by the light of a large candle; the
place was a regular storehouse, cluttered with old secretaries,
dilapidated chests, mantlepieces, clocks and sundry other items. It
was close enough to stifle a person; it was impossible to breathe or
to take a step without stumbling against something.

"Are you Señor Zurro?" asked Roberto.

"Yes."

"I have come at the suggestion of Don Telmo."

"Don Telmo!" repeated the old man, rising and offering the student a
chair. "Have a seat. How is the good gentleman?"

"Very well."

"He's an excellent friend of mine," continued Zurro. "I should say so.
Well, young man, let me know what you wish. It's enough for me that
you come from Don Telmo; that assures you my best services."

"I should like to learn the whereabouts of a certain girl acrobat who
lived about five or six years ago in a lodging-house of this vicinity,
or in Cuco's hostelry."

"And do you know this girl's name?"

"Yes."

"And you say that she used to live in Cuco's hostelry?"

"Yes, sir."

"I know somebody who lives there," murmured the second-hand dealer.

"Yes, that's so," said Encarna.

"That man with the monkeys. Didn't he live there?" asked Señor Zurro.

"No; he lived in la Quinta de Goya," answered his daughter.

"Well, then.... Just wait a moment, young man. Wait a moment."

"Isn't it Tabuenca that lives there, father?" interrupted Encarna.

"That's the fellow. That's it. El Tabuenca. You go and see him. And
tell him," added Señor Zurro, turning to Roberto, "that I sent you.
He's a grouchy old fellow, as testy as they make 'em."

Roberto took leave of the second-hand man and his daughter, and in
company of Manuel walked out to the gallery of the house.

"And where's this Cuco's hostelry?" he asked.

"Over there near Las Yeserías," answered Manuel.

"Come along with me, then; we'll have supper together," suggested
Roberto.

"All right."

They both went on to the hostelry, which was situated upon a
thoroughfare that was deserted at this hour. It was a large building,
with an entrance-vestibule in country style and a patio crowded with
carts. They questioned a boy. El Tabuenca had just come, he told them.
They walked into the vestibule, which was illuminated by a lantern.
There was a man inside.

"Does anybody live here by the name of Tabuenca?" asked Roberto.

"Yes. What is it?" asked the man.

"I'd like to have a talk with him."

"Well, talk away, then, for I'm Tabuenca."

As the speaker turned, the light of the oil lantern hanging upon the
wall struck him full in the face; Roberto and Manuel stared at him in
amazement. He was a yellow, shrivelled specimen; he had an absurd
nose, as if it had been wrenched from its roots and replaced by a
round little ball of meat. It seemed that he looked at the same time
with his eyes and with the two little nasal orifices. He was
clean-shaven, dressed pretty decently, and wore a round woollen cap
with a green visor.

He listened grumpily to what Roberto had to say; then he lighted a
cigar and flung the match far away. Doubtless because of the exiguity
of his organ, he found it necessary to stop the windows of his nose
with his fingers in order to smoke.

Roberto thought at first that the man had not understood his question,
and he repeated it twice. Tabuenca gave no heed; but all at once,
seized with the utmost indignation, he snatched the cigar furiously
from his mouth and began to blaspheme in a whining, gull-like voice,
shrieking that he couldn't make out why folks pestered him with
matters that didn't concern him a particle.

"Don't shout so," said Roberto, provoked by this rumpus. "They'll
imagine that we've come here to assassinate you, at the very least."

"I shout because I please to."

"All right, man; shout away to your heart's content."

"Don't you talk to me like that or I'll push in your face," yelled
Tabuenca.

"_You'll_ push in _my_ face?" retorted Roberto, laughing;
then, turning to Manuel, he added, "These noseless fellows get on my
nerves and I'm going to let this flat-nose have it."

Tabuenca, his mind made up, withdrew and returned in a short while
with a rapier-cane, which he unsheathed; Roberto looked in every
direction for something with which he might defend himself, and found
a carter's stick; Tabuenca aimed a thrust at Roberto, who parried it
with the stick; then another thrust, and Roberto, as again he parried
it, smashed the lantern at the entrance, leaving the scene in
darkness. Roberto began to strike out right and left and he must have
landed once upon some delicate part of Tabuenca's anatomy, for the man
began to shout in horrible tones:

"Assassins! Murder!"

At this, several persons came running into the zaguán, among them a
stout mule-driver with an oil-lamp in his hand.

"What's the trouble?" he asked.

"These murderers are after my life," bellowed Tabuenca.

"Not a bit of it," replied Roberto in a calm voice. "The fact is, we
came here to ask this fellow a civil question, and without any reason
at all he began to yell and insult me."

"I'll smash your face for you!" interjected Tabuenca.

"Well suppose you try it, and don't stand there talking all day about
it!" Roberto taunted,

"Rascal! Coward!"

"It's you who are the coward. You've got as little guts as you have
nose."

Tabuenca spat out a series of insults and blasphemies, and turning
around, left the place.

"And who's going to pay me for this broken lantern?" asked the
mule-driver.

"How much is it worth?" asked Roberto.

"Three pesetas."

"Here they are."

"That Tabuenca is a loud-mouthed imbecile," said the mule-driver as he
took the money. "And what was it you gentlemen wished?"

"I wanted to ask about a woman that lived here some years ago; she was
an acrobat."

"Perhaps Don Alonso, Titiri, would know. If you'll be so kind, tell me
where you're going, and I'll have Titiri look you up."

"All right. You tell him that we'll be waiting for him at the San
Millán café at nine o'clock," said Roberto.

"And how are we going to recognize this fellow?" asked Manuel.

"That's so," said Roberto. "How are we going to know him?"

"Easy. He goes around nights through the cafés with one of those
apparatuses that sings songs."

"You mean a phonograph?"

"That's it."

At this juncture an old woman appeared in the entrance, shouting:

"Who was the dirty son of a bitch that broke the lantern?"

"Shut up, shut up," answered the mule-driver. "It's all paid for."

"Come along!" said Manuel to Roberto.

They left the inn and strode off at a fast clip. They entered the San
Millán café. Roberto ordered supper. Manuel knew Tabuenca from having
seen him in the street, and as they ate he explained to Roberto just
what sort of fellow he was.

Tabuenca made his living through a number of inventions that he
himself constructed. When he saw that the public was tiring of one
thing, he would put another on the market, and so he managed to get
along. One of these contraptions was a wafer-mold wheel that revolved
around a circle of nails among which numbers were inscribed and
colours painted. This wheel the owner carried about in a pasteboard
box with two covers, which were divided into tiny squares with numbers
and colours corresponding to those placed around the nails, and here
the bets were laid. Tabuenca would carry the closed box in one hand
and a field table in the other. He would set up his outfit at some
street corner, give the wheel a turn and begin to mutter in his
whining voice;

"'Round goes the wheel. Place your bets, gentlemen.... Place your
bets. Number or colour ... number or colour.... Place your bets."

When enough bets were placed,--and this happened fairly
often,--Tabuenca would set the wheel spinning, at the same time
repeating his slogan: "'Round goes the wheel!" The marble would bounce
amidst the nails and even before it came to a stop the operator knew
the winning number and colour, crying: "Red seven...." or "the blue
five," and always he guessed right.

As Manuel spoke on, Roberto became pensive.

"Do you see?" he said, all at once, "these delays are what provoke a
fellow. You have a capital of will in bank-notes, gold-pieces, in
large denominations, and you need energy in céntimos, in small change.
It's the same with the intelligence; that's why so many intelligent
and energetic men of ambition do not succeed. They lack fractions, and
in general they also lack the talent to conceal their efforts. To be
able to be stupid on some occasions would probably be more useful than
the ability to be discreet on just as many other occasions."

Manuel, who did not understand the reason for this shower of words,
stared open-mouthed at Roberto, who sank again into his meditations.

For a long time both remained silent, when there came into the café a
tall, thin man with greyish hair and grey moustache.

"Can that be Titiri, Don Alonso?" asked Roberto.

"Maybe."

The gaunt fellow went from table to table, exhibiting a box and
announcing: "Here's a novelty. Here's somethin' new."

He was about to leave when Roberto called him.

"Do you live at Cuco's hostelry?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Are you Don Alonso?"

"At your service."

"Well, we've been waiting for you. Take a seat; you'll have coffee
with us."

The man took a seat. His appearance was decidedly comical,--a blend of
humility, bragodoccio and sad arrogance. He gazed at the place that
Roberto had just abandoned, in which remained a scrap of roast meat.

"Pardon me," he said to Roberto. "You're not intending to finish that
scrap? No? Then.... with your permission--" and he took the plate, the
knife and the fork.

"I'll order another beefsteak for you," said Roberto.

"No, no. It's one of my whims. I imagine that this meat must be good.
Would you kindly let me have a slice of bread?" he added, turning to
Manuel. "Thanks, young man. Many thanks."

The man bolted the meat and bread in a trice.

"What? Is there a little wine left?" he asked, smiling.

"Yes," replied Manuel, emptying the bottle into the man's glass.

"All right," answered the man in ill-pronounced English as he gulped
it down. "Gentlemen! At your service. I believe you wished to ask me
something."

"Yes."

"At your service, then. My name is Alonso de Guzmán Calderón y Téllez.
This same fellow that's talking to you now has been director of a
circus in America; I've travelled through all the countries and sailed
over every sea in the world; at present I'm adrift in a violent
tempest; at night I go from café to café with this phonograph, and the
next morning I carry around one of these betting apparatuses that
consists of an _Infiel_[1] Tower with a spiral. Underneath the
tower there's a space with a spring that shoots a little bone ball up
the spiral, and then the bone falls upon a board perforated with holes
and painted in different colours. That is my livelihood. I! Director
of an equestrian circus! This is what I've descended to; an assistant
to Tabuenca. What things come to pass in this world!"

[Footnote 1: i.e. Faithless. A pun on Eiffel.]

"I should like to ask you," interrupted Roberto, "if during your
residence in Cuco's hostelry you ever made the acquaintance of a
certain Rosita Buenavida, a circus acrobat."

"Rosita Buenavida! You say that her name was Rosita Buenavida?... No,
I don't recall.... I did have a Rosita in my company; but her name
wasn't Buenavida (i. e., Goodlife); she'd have been better named
Evil-life and evil habits, too."

"Perhaps she changed her name," said Roberto impatiently. "What age
was the Rosita that you knew?"

"Well, I'll tell you; I was in Paris in '68; had a contract with the
Empress Circus. At that time I was a contortionist and they called me
the Snake-Man; then I became an equilibrist and adopted the name of
Don Alonso. Alonso is my name. After four months of that Pérez and
I--Pérez was the greatest gymnast in the world--went to America, and
two or three years later we met Rosita, who must have been about
twenty-five or thirty at that time."

"So that the Rosita you're talking about should be sixty-odd years old
today," computed Roberto. "The one I'm looking for can't be more than
thirty at most."

"Then she's not the one. Caramba, how sorry I am!" murmured Don
Alonso, seizing the glass of coffee and milk and raising it to his
lips as if he feared it were going to be wrested from him. "And what a
sweet little girl she was! She had eyes as green as a cat's. Oh, she
was a pretty chit, a peach."

Roberto had sunk into meditation; Don Alonso continued his chatter,
turning to Manuel:

"There's no life like a circus artist's," he exclaimed. "I don't know
what your profession is, and I don't want to disparage it; but if
you're looking for art.... Ah, Paris, the Empress Circus,--I'll never
forget them! Of course, Pérez and I had luck; we created a furore
there, and I needn't mention what that means. Oh, that was the
life.... Nights, after our performance, we'd get a note: 'Will be
waiting for you at such and such a café.' We'd go there and find one
of your high-life women, a whimsical creature who'd invite a fellow to
supper... and to all the rest. But other gymnasts came to the Empress
Circus; the novelty of our act wore off, and the impresario, a Yankee
who owned several companies, asked Pérez and me if we wanted to go to
Cuba. 'Right ahead,' said I. 'All right.'"

"Have you been in Cuba?" asked Roberto, roused from his abstraction.

"I've been in so many places!" replied the Snake-Man. "We embarked at
Havre," continued Don Alonso, "on a vessel called the Navarre, and we
were in Havana for about eight months; while we were performing there
we struck it big, Pérez and I, and won twenty thousand gold pesos in
the lottery."

"Twenty thousand duros!" exclaimed Manuel.

"Right-o! The next week we had lost it all, and Pérez and I were left
without a centavo. A few days we lived on guava-fruit and yam, until
we fell in with some gymnasts on the Havana wharf who were down on
their uppers. We joined them. They weren't at all bad performers;
among them were acrobats, clowns, pantominists, bar artists, and a
French ecuyére; we formed a company and made a tour through the island
towns; and some magnificent tour that was. How they did welcome us and
treat us in that country! 'Come right in, friend, and have a glass.'
'Many thanks.' 'The gentleman mustn't displease me; let's have a drink
in that cantine, eh? ...' And the drink flowed to your heart's
content. As I was the only one in the troupe that knew how to
figure--for I've had an education," interposed Don Alonso, "and my
father was a soldier--they named me director. In one of the towns I
reinforced the company with a ballerina and a strong man. The dancer's
name was Rosita Montañés; she's the one I thought of when you
mentioned the Rosita you were looking for. This Montañés was Spanish
and had married the strong man, an Italian whose real name was
Napoleon Pitti. The couple had with them as secretary a
Galician,--very intelligent chap, but as an artist, detestable. And
between Rosita and him they deceived Hercules. This wasn't very hard,
for Napoleon was one of the ugliest men I've ever laid eyes on. As for
strength, there was never his match; he had a back as solid as a front
wall; his ears were flattened from blows got in prize-fighting; he was
a barbarian for fair, and you know what they say: 'Tell a man by his
talk and a bullock by his horn.' And believe me, this little Galician
chap led Hercules by the horn, all right. The cursed smarty fooled me,
too, though not as he did Hercules, for I've always been a bachelor,
thank the Lord, partly through fear and partly through design. Nor
have I ever lacked women," added Don Alonso, boastfully.

"What was I saying, now? Oh, yes. I didn't know any English; the
damned lingo isn't very hard, but I simply couldn't get it into my
head. So I needed an interpreter, and I appointed the Galician as
secretary of the company and ticket-seller. We had been together for
almost a year when we reached an English island near Jamaica. The
governor of the island, the queerest Englishman there ever was, with a
pair of side-whiskers that looked like flames leaping from his cheeks,
summoned me as soon as we landed. As there was no site for our
performances, he made alterations in the municipal school, which was a
regular palace; he ordered all the partitions removed and the ring and
tiers of seats installed. Only the negroes of the town went to that
school, and what need had those creatures of learning to read and
write?

"We stayed there a month, and despite the fact that we had rent free
and that we played to full houses every afternoon, and that we had
practically no expenses, we didn't make any profit. 'How can it be?' I
kept asking myself.--A mystery."

"And what was the reason?" asked Manuel.

"I'm coming to that. First I must explain that the governor with the
flaming side-whiskers had fallen in love with Rosita, and without
beating around the bush he had taken her off to his palace. Poor
Hercules roared and crushed the dishes with his fingers, drowning his
grief and his rage by committing all sorts of barbarities.

"The governor, a generous sort, invited the Galician and me to his
residence, and there, in a garden of cedars and palms, we would draw
up the program of the performances, and amuse ourselves at
target-practice while we smoked the finest tobacco and drank glass after
glass of rum. We paid court to Rosita and she'd laugh like a madwoman,
and dance the tango, the _cachucha_ and the _vito_, and she'd fail the
Englishman an awful number of times. One day the governor, who treated
me as a friend, said to me: 'That secretary of yours is robbing you.'
'I think he is,' I answered. 'Tonight you'll have the proof.'

"We finished the performance; I went off home, had supper and was
about to go to bed when a little negro servant comes in and tells me
to follow him; all right; I follow; we both leave; we draw near the
circus house, and in a nearby saloon I see the governor and the town
chief of police. It was a very beautiful moonlit night, and there was
no light in the saloon; we wait and wait, and soon a figure appears,
and steals in through a window of the schoolhouse. '_Forwer_'
whispered the governor. That means Forward," interpreted Don Alonso.

"The three of us followed and entered noiselessly through the same
window; on tiptoe we reached the entrance to the former school, which
served as the circus vestibule and contained the ticket-office. We see
the secretary with a lantern in his hand going through the money-box.
'Surrender in the name of the authorities!' shouted the governor, and
with the revolver that he held in his hand he fired a shot into the
air. The secretary was paralyzed at the sight of us; then the governor
aimed the gun at the fellow's chest and fired again point blank; and
the man wavered, turned convulsively in the air and fell dead.

"The governor was jealous and the truth is that Rosita was in love
with the secretary. I never in my life saw grief as great as that
woman's when she found her lover dead. She wept and dragged along
after him, uttering wails that simply tore your soul in two. Napoleon,
too, wept.

"We buried the secretary and four or five days later the chief of
police of the island informed us that the school could no longer serve
as a circus and that we'd have to clear out. We obeyed the order, for
there was no way out of it, and for another couple of years we
wandered from town to town through Central America, Yucatan, Mexico,
until we struck Tampico, where the company disbanded. As there was no
outlook for us there, Pérez and I took a vessel for New Orleans."

"Beautiful town, eh?" said Roberto.

"Beautiful. Have you been there?"

"Yes."

"Man, how happy I am to hear it!"

"What a river, eh?"

"An ocean! Well, to continue my story. The first time we performed in
that city, gentlemen, what a success! The circus was higher than a
church; I said to the carpenter; 'Place our trapeze as high as
possible,' and after giving him these orders I went off for a bite.

"During our absence the impresario happened along and asked: 'Are
those Spanish gymnasts going to perform at such a height?' 'That's
what they said,' answered the carpenter. 'Let them know, then, that I
don't want to be responsible for such barbarity.'

"Pérez and I were in the hotel, when we received a message calling us
to the circus at once."

"'What can it be?' my companion asked me. 'You'll see,' I told him.
'They're going to demand that we lower the trapeze.'

"And so it was. Pérez and I go to the circus and we see the
impresario. That was what he requested.

"'Nothing doing,' I told him. 'Not even if the President of the
Republic of the United States himself comes here, together with his
esteemed mother. I won't lower the trapeze an inch.' 'Then you'll be
compelled to.' 'We'll see.' The impresario summoned a policeman; I
showed the fellow my contract, and he sided with me; he told me that
my companion and I had a perfect right to break our necks...."

"What a country!" murmured Roberto, ironically.

"You're right," agreed Don Alonso in all seriousness. "What a country.
That's what you call progress!

"That night, in the circus, before we went on, Pérez and I listened to
the comments of the public. 'What? Are these Spaniards going to
perform at such an altitude?' the people were asking each other.
'They'll kill themselves.' And we listened calmly, all the time
smiling.

"We were about to enter the ring, when along comes a fellow with
sailor's chinwhiskers wearing a flat-brimmed high hat and a carrick,
and in a twanging voice he tells us that we're in danger of having a
terrible accident performing 'way up there, and that, if we wish, we
can take out life insurance. All we'd have to do is to sign a few
papers that he had in his hand. Lord! I nearly died. I felt like
choking the fellow.

"Trembling and screwing up our courage, Pérez and I entered the ring.
We had to put on a little rouge. We wore a blue costume decorated with
silver stars,--a reference to the United States flag; we saluted and
then, up the rope.

"At first I thought that I was going to slip; my head was going
'round, my ears were humming; but with the first applause I forgot
everything, and Pérez and I performed the most difficult feats with
most admirable precision. The public applauded wildly. What days those
were!"

And the old gymnast smiled; then he made a bitter grimace; his eyes
grew moist; he blinked so as to dry a tear that at last escaped and
coursed down his earth-coloured cheek.

"I'm an old fool; but I can't help it," Don Alonso murmured in
explanation of his weakness.

"And did you stay in New Orleans?" asked Roberto.

"Pérez and I signed a contract there," replied Don Alonso, "with a big
circus syndicate of New York that had about twenty or thirty companies
touring all America. All of us gymnasts, ballet-dancers, ecuyéres,
acrobats, pantominists, clowns, contortionists, and strong men
travelled in a special train.... The majority were Italians and
Frenchmen."

"Were there good-looking women, eh?" asked Manuel.

"Uf! ... Like this ..." replied Don Alonso, bringing his fingers all
together. "Women with such muscles! ... There was no other life
anything like it," he added, reverting to his melancholy theme. "You
had all the money and women and clothes you wanted.... And above all,
glory, applause...."

And the gymnast went into a trance of enthusiasm, staring rigidly at a
fixed point.

Roberto and Manuel gazed at him in curiosity.

"And Rosita,--didn't you ever see her again?" asked Roberto.

"No. They told me that she had got a divorce from Napoleon so that she
could marry again, in Boston, some millionaire from the West. Ah,
women.... Who can trust them? ... But gentlemen, it's already eleven.
Pardon me; I'll have to be going. Thanks ever so much!" murmured Don
Alonso, seizing Roberto and Manuel by the hands and pressing them
effusively. "We'll meet again, won't we?"

"Oh, yes, we'll see each other," replied Roberto.

Don Alonso picked up his phonograph and wound in and out among the
tables, repeating his phrase: "Novelty! Something new!" Then, after
having saluted Roberto and Manuel once more, he disappeared.

"Nothing. I can't discover a thing," grumbled Roberto. "Good-bye. See
you again."

Manuel was left alone, and musing upon Don Alonso's tales and upon the
mystery surrounding Roberto, he returned to the Corralón and went to
bed.




CHAPTER VII

  The Kermesse on Pasión Street--"The Dude"--A Café Chantant.


Leandro eagerly awaited the kermesse that was to take place on Pasión
street. In former years he had accompanied Milagros to the nocturnal
fair of San Antonio and to those of the Prado; he had danced with her,
treated her to buns, presented her with a pot of sweet basil; but this
summer the proof-reader's family seemed very much determined upon
keeping Milagros away from Leandro. He had learned that his sweetheart
and her mother were thinking of going to the kermesse, so he procured
a pair of tickets and told Manuel that they two would attend.

So it happened. They went, on a terribly hot August night; a dense,
turbid vapour filled all the streets in the vicinity of the Rastro,
which were decorated and illuminated with Venetian lanterns.

The festival was celebrated upon a large vacant lot on Pasión street.
Leandro and Manuel entered as the band from the Orphan Asylum was
playing a _habanera_. The lot, aglare with arc-lights, was
bedecked with ribbons, gauze and artificial flowers that radiated from
a pole in the centre to the boundaries of the enclosure. Before the
entrance door there was a tiny wooden booth adorned with red and
yellow percale and a number of Spanish flags; this was the raffle
stand.

Leandro and Manuel took a seat in a corner and waited. The
proof-reader and his family did not arrive until after ten; Milagros
looked very pretty that night; she had on a light costume with blue
figuring, a kerchief of black crape and white slippers. She wore her
gown somewhat decolleté, as far as the smooth, round beginnings of her
throat.

At this moment the band from the Orphan Asylum blared forth the
schottisch called _Los Cocineros_ (The Cooks). Leandro, stirred
by the strains, invited Milagros out for a dance, but the maiden made
a slight gesture of annoyance.

"You might soil my new costume," she murmured, and put her kerchief
around her waist.

"If you dance with another fellow he'll soil it, too," replied Leandro
in all humility.

Milagros did not heed his words; she danced with her skirt gathered in
one hand, answering him in peevish monosyllables.

The schottisch over, Leandro invited the family to refreshments. To
the right of the entrance there were two decorated staircases, which
led to another lot about six or seven metres above the grounds where
the dance was being held. On one of the stairways, which were both
aglow with Spanish flags, was a signpost reading "Refreshments:
Entrance" upon the other, "Refreshments: Exit."

They all went upstairs. The refreshment-parlour was a spacious place,
with trees and illumination of electric globes that hung from thick
cables. Seated at the tables was a motley crowd, speaking at the top
of their voices, clapping their hands and laughing.

They had to wait a long while before a waiter brought them their beer;
Milagros ordered an ice, and as there were none, she would have
nothing.

She sat there thus, without opening her mouth, considering herself
grievously offended, until she met two girls from her shop and joined
them, whereupon her displeasure vanished in a trice. Leandro, at the
first opportunity, left the proof-reader and, rejoining Manuel, set
off in quest of his sweetheart. In the lot next to the entrance, where
the dancing was going on, couples resting between numbers strolled
around in leisurely fashion. Milagros and her two friends, arms
linked, came by in jovial mood, followed closely by three men. One of
them was a rough-looking youth, tall, with fair moustache; the other a
stupid fellow, of ordinary appearance, with dyed moustache,
shirt-front and fingers sparkling with diamonds; the third was a knave
with, cheek-whiskers, half gipsy and half cattle-dealer, with every
ear mark of the most dangerous mountebank.

Leandro, noticing the manoeuvres of the masculine trio, thrust himself
in between the maidens and their gallants, and turning to the men
impertinently asked:

"What's up?"

The trio pretended not to understand and lagged behind.

"Who are they?" asked Manuel.

"One of them's Lechuguino (the dude)," answered Leandro in a loud
voice, so that his sweetheart should hear. "He's at least fifty, and
he comes around here trying to play the dashing young blade; that runt
with the dyed moustache is Pepe el Federal (the Federalist), and the
other is Eusebio el Carnicero (the Butcher), a fellow who owns quite a
number of questionable horses."

Leandro's blustering outburst appealed to one of the maidens, who
turned to look at the youth and smiled at him; but Milagros was not in
the least affected, and looking back, she repeatedly sought the group
of three men with her glance.

At this juncture there appeared the fellow whom Leandro had designated
with the sobriquet of Lechuguino, in company of the proof-reader and
his wife. The three girls approached them, and Lechuguino invited
Milagros to dance. Leandro glanced in anguish at his sweetheart; she,
however, whirled off heedlessly. The band was playing the _pas
double _from the _Drummer of the Grenadiers_. Lechuguino was
an expert dancer; he swept his partner along as if she were a feather
and as he spoke, brought his lips so close to hers that it seemed as
if he were kissing her.

Leandro was at an utter loss and suffered agonies; he could not make
up his mind to leave. The dance came to an end and Lechuguino
accompanied Milagros to the place where her mother was sitting.


"Come. Let's be going!" said Leandro to Manuel. "If we don't, I'm sure
to do something rash."

They escaped from the fair and entered a café chantant on Encomienda
Street. It was deserted. Two girls were dancing on a platform; one
dressed like a _maja_, the other, like a _manólo_.

Leandro, absorbed in his thoughts, said nothing; Manuel was very
sleepy.

"Let's get out of here," muttered Leandro after a short while. "This
is too gloomy."

They walked to the Plaza del Progreso, Leandro with head bowed, as
pensive as ever, and Manuel so sleepy that he could hardly stand.

"Over at the Marina café," suggested Leandro, "there must be a high
old time."

"It would be better to go home," answered Manuel.

Leandro, without listening to his companion, walked to the Puerta del
Sol, and the two very silently turned into Montera Street and around
the corner of Jardines. It was past one. As the pair walked on,
prostitutes in their gay attire accosted them from the doorways in
which they lurked, but looking into Leandro's grim countenance and
Manuel's poverty-stricken features the girls let them walk on,
following them with a gibe at their seriousness.

Midway up the narrow, gloomy street shone a red lamp, which
illuminated the squalid front of the Marina café.

Leandro shoved the door open and they went inside. At one end the
platform, with four or five mirrors, glittered dazzlingly; the floor
was so tightly jammed with rows of tables thrust against either wall
that only a narrow passage was left in the middle.

Leandro and Manuel found a seat. Manuel rested his forehead against
his palm and was soon asleep; Leandro beckoned to one of the two
singers, who were gaily dressed and were conversing with some fat
women, and the two singers sat down at his table.

"What'll you have?" asked Leandro.

"Canary-seed for me," answered one of them,--a slender, nervous type
with small eyes that were ringed with cosmetics.

"And what's your name?"

"Mine? María la Chivato,"

"And that girl's?"

"La Tarugo."

Tarugo, who was a buxom, gipsy-like Malagueña, sat down beside
Leandro, and they started a conversation in hushed tones.

The waiter approached.

"Let's have four whiskies," ordered Chivato. "For this chap is going
to drink, too," she added, turning to Manuel and seizing his arm.
"Hey, you there, lad!"

"Eh!" exclaimed the boy, waking up without a notion of his
whereabouts. "What do you want?"

Chivato burst into laughter.

"Wake up, man, you'll lose your express! Did you come in this
afternoon on the mixed train?"

"I came on the ..." and Manuel let loose a stream of obscenity.

Then, in very ugly humour, he began to stare in every direction,
making all manner of efforts not to fall asleep.

At a table set aside a man who looked like a horse-dealer was
discussing the _flamenco_ song and dance with a cross-eyed fellow
bearing every appearance of an assassin.

"There's no more artists," the horse-dealer was saying. "Once upon a
time folks came here to see Pinto, Canito, the Feos, the
Macarronas.... Now what? Now, nothing. Pullets in vinegar."

"That's what," agreed the cross-eyed assassin, very seriously.

"That's the musician," said Chivato, pointing to the latter.

The two singers did not remain very long at the table with Leandro and
Manuel. The cross-eyed fellow was already on the platform; he began to
tune the guitar, and six women sat down around him in a row, beginning
to clap hands in time to the music; Tarugo rose from her seat and
started a side dance, and was soon wiggling her hips convulsively; the
singer commenced to gargarize softly; at intervals he would be silent
and then nothing would be heard save the snapping of Tarugo's fingers
and the clatter of her heels, which played the counterpoint.

After the Malaga singer had finished, a gipsy youth with a chocolate
complexion got up and executed a tango and a negro dance; he twisted
himself in and out, thrust his abdomen forward and his arms back. He
wound up with effeminate undulations of his hips and a most
complicated intertwining of arms and legs.

"That's what you call art!" commended! the horse-dealer.

"See here, I'm going," grumbled Manuel.

"Wait a minute; we'll have another drink."

"No. I'm going."

"All right; let's come. Too bad!"

At that moment a corpulent singer with a powerful neck, and the
cross-eyed guitarist with the assassin's face, came forward to the
public, and while the one strummed the guitar, suddenly muting the
strings by placing his hands over them, the other, his face flushed,
the veins of his neck standing out tensely, and his eyes bulging from
their sockets, poured forth a guttural wail that was doubtless of most
difficult execution, for it reddened him to the very forehead.




CHAPTER VIII

  Leandro's Irresolution--In Blasa's Tavern--The Man With The Three
    Cards--The Duel With Valencia.


Some nights Manuel would hear Leandro tossing about in his bed and
heaving sighs as deep as a bull's roar.

"Things are going rotten with him," thought Manuel.

The break between Milagros and Leandro was definitive. Lechuguino, on
the other hand, was gaining ground: he had won over the girl's mother,
would treat the proof-reader and wait for Milagros where she worked,
accompanying her home.

One day, toward dusk, Manuel saw the pair near the foot of Embajadores
Street; Lechuguino minced along with his cloak thrown back across his
shoulder; she was huddled in her mantle; he was talking to her and she
was laughing.

"What's Leandro going to do when he finds out?" Manuel asked himself.
"No, I'm not going to tell him. Some witch of the neighbourhood will
see to it that he learns soon enough."

And thus it came about; before a month had passed, everybody in the
house knew that Milagros and Lechuguino were keeping company, that he
had given up the gay life in the dives of the city and was considering
the continuation of his father's business,--the sale of construction
material; he was going to settle down and lead the life of a
respectable member of the community.

While Leandro would be away working in the shoeshop, Lechuguino would
visit the proof-reader's family; he now saw Milagros with the full
consent of her parents.

Leandro was, or pretended to be, the only person unaware of Milagros'
new beau. Some mornings as the boy passed Señor Zurro's apartment on
the way down to the patio, he would encounter Encarna, who, catching
sight of him, would ask maliciously after Milagros, or else sing him a
tango which began:

  _Of all the crazy deeds a man commits in his life,
     The craziest is taking to himself a wife.
       (De las grandes locuras que el hombre hace,
        No comete ninguna como casarse.)_

Whereupon she would specify the madness and entering into details,
would add at the top of her voice:

  _He's off to his office bright and early,
     While some neighbourhood swell stays at home with his girlie.
       (Y por la mañana el va a la oficina,
        y ella queda en casa con algun vecino que es persona
                fina.)_

Leandro's bitterness corroded the very depths of his soul, and however
much he tried to dominate his instincts, he could not succeed in
calming himself. One Saturday night, as they were walking homewards
along the Ronda, Leandro drew near to Manuel.

"Do you know whether Milagros talks to Lechuguino?"

"I?"

"Haven't you heard that they were going to get married?"

"Yes; so folks say."

"What would you do in my case?"

"I ... I'd find out."

"And suppose it proved to be true?"

Manuel was silent. They walked along without a word. Soon Leandro
carne to an abrupt stop and placed his hand upon Manuel's shoulder.

"Do you believe," he asked, "that if a woman deceives a man, he has
the right to kill her?"

"I don't believe he has," answered Manuel, staring into Leandro's
eyes.

"Well, if a man has the guts he does it whether he has a right to or
not.

"But, the deuce! Has Milagros deceived you? Were you married to her?
You've had a quarrel; that's all."

"I'll wind up by doing something desperate. Take my word for it,"
muttered Leandro.

Neither spoke. They entered La Corrala, climbed up the stairways and
walked into Leandro's house. They brought out supper, but Leandro
didn't eat; he drank three glasses of water in succession and went out
to the gallery.

Manuel was about to leave after supper, when he heard Leandro call him
several times.

"What do you want?"

"Come on, let's be going."

Manuel ran out to the balcony; Milagros and her mother, from their
door, were heaping insults upon Leandro.

"Outcast! Blackguard!" the proof-reader's wife was shouting. "If her
father were here you wouldn't talk like that."

"I would, too, even if her grandfather were here," exclaimed Leandro,
with a savage laugh. "Come on, let's be off," he added, turning to
Manuel. "I'm sick and tired of these whores."

They left the gallery and were soon out of El Corralón.

"What was the matter?'" asked Manuel.

"Nothing. It's all over now," answered Leandro. "I went in and said to
her, nice enough, 'Listen Milagros, is it true that you're going to
marry Lechuguino?' 'Yes, it is true. Is it any business of yours?' she
says. 'Yes, it is,' I said to her. 'You know that I like you. Is it
because he's richer than me?' 'Even if he were poorer than a
church-mouse I'd marry him.' 'Bah!' 'You don't believe me?' 'All
right.' Finally I got sore and I told her for all I cared she might
marry a dog, and that she was a cheap street-walker.... It's all over
now. Well, so much the better. Now we know just where we stand. Where
shall we go? To Las Injurias again?"

"What for?"

"To see if that Valencia continues to put on airs when I'm around."

They crossed the wired-off surrounding path. Leandro, taking long
strides, was very soon in Las Injurias. Manuel could hardly keep up
with him.

They entered Blasa's tavern; the same men as on the previous night
were playing cané near the stove. Of the women, only La Paloma and La
Muerte were in. The latter, dead drunk, was asleep on the table. The
light fell full upon her face which was swollen with erisypelas and
covered with scabs; saliva drooled through the thick lips of her
half-opened mouth; her tow-like hair,--grey, filthy, matted,--stuck
out in tufts beneath the faded, greenish kerchief that was soiled with
scurf; despite the shouts and the disputes of the gamblers she did not
so much as blink; only from time to time she would give a prolonged
snore, which, at the start was sibilant, but ended in a rasping snort.
At her side Paloma, huddled on the floor near Valencia, held a tot of
three or four in her arms,--a pale, delicate creature who blinked
incessantly,--to whom she was giving whisky from a glass.

A gaunt, weak fellow wearing a small cap with a gilded number and a
blue smock, passed moodily up and down before the counter; his arms
hung beside his body as if they did not belong to him, and his legs
were bent. Whenever it occurred to him, he took a sip from his glass;
he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and would resume his
languid pacing to and fro. He was the brother of the woman who owned
the tavern.

Leandro and Manuel took a seat at the same table where the gamblers
were playing. Leandro ordered wine, emptied a deep glass at a single
gulp and heaved a few sighs.

"Christ!" muttered Leandro half under his breath. "Never let yourself
go wild over a woman. The best of them is as poisonous as a toad."

Then he seemed to calm down. He gazed at the drawings scratched on the
top of the table: there were hearts pierced by arrows, the names of
women; he drew a knife from his pocket and began to cut letters into
the wood.

When he wearied of this he invited one of the gamblers to drink with
him.

"Thanks, friend," replied the gambler. "I'm playing."

"All right, leave the game. If you don't want to, nobody'll force you.
Doesn't anybody want to drink with me? My treat."

"I'll have one," said a tall, bent fellow with a sickly air, who was
called El Pastiri. He arose and came over to Leandro.

Leandro ordered more wine and amused himself by laughing loudly when
any one lost and in betting against Valencia.

Pastiri took advantage of the opportunity to empty one glass after the
other. He was a sot, a croney of Tabuenca's and likewise dedicated
himself to the deception of the unwary with ball-and-number tricks.
Manuel knew him from having seen him often on la Ribera de Curtidores.
He used to ply his trade in the suburbs, playing at three cards. He
would place three cards upon a little table; one of these he would
show, then slowly he would change the position of the other two,
without touching the card he had shown; he would then place a little
stick across the three cards and wager that nobody could pick out the
one he had let them see. And so well was the game prepared that the
card was never picked.

Pastiri had another trick on the same order, worked with three men
from a game of checkers; underneath one of the men he would place a
tiny ball of paper or a crumb of bread and then bet that nobody could
tell under which of the three ball or crumb was to be found. If, by
accident, any one chanced upon the right man, Pastiri would conceal
the crumb in his finger-nail as he turned the man up.

That night Pastiri was saturated with alcohol and had lost all power
of speech.

Manuel, who had drunk a little too much, was beginning to feel sick
and considered how he might manage to make his escape; but by the time
he had made up his mind the tavern-keeper's brother was already
locking the door.

Before he had quite done so there came in, through the space that was
still left open, an under-grown fellow, shaved, dressed in black, with
a visored woollen cap, curly hair and the repellant appearance of a
hermaphrodite. He greeted Leandro affectionately. He was a lacemaker
from Uncle Rilo's house, of dubious repute and called Besugito
(sea-bream) because his face suggested a fish; by way of more cruel
sobriquet they had christened him the "Barrack hack."

The lacemaker took a sip from a glass, standing, and began to talk in
a thick voice; yet it was a feminine voice, unctuous, disagreeable,
and he emphasized his words with mimicked wonder, fright, and other
mannerisms.

Nobody was bothered by his loquacity. Some fine day when they least
expected, he informed them, the entire district of Las Injurias was
going to be buried beneath the ruins of the Gas House.

"As far as I'm concerned," he went on, "this entire hollow ought to be
filled in with earth. Of course, I'd feel sorry, for I have some good
friends in this section."

"Ay! Pass!" said one of the gamblers.

"Yes, I'd be sorry," continued Besuguito, heedless of the
interruption. "But the truth is that it would be a small loss, for, as
Angelillo, the district watchman says, nobody lives here except
outcasts, pickpockets and prostitutes."

"Shut up, you 'fairy!' You barrack hack!" shouted the proprietress.
"This district is as good as yours."

"You're right, there," replied Besuguito, "for you ought to see the
Portillo de Embajadores and las Peñuelas. I tell you. Why, the
watchman can't get them to shut their doors at night. He closes them
and the neighbours open them again. Because they're almost all
denizens of the underworld. And they do give me such frights...."

An uproar greeted the frights of Besuguito, who continued unabashed
his meaningless, repetitious chatter, which was adorned with all
manner of notions and involutions. Manuel rested an arm upon the
table, and with his cheek upon it, he fell asleep.

"Hey you! Why aren't you drinking, Pastiri?" asked Leandro. "Do you
mean to offend me? Me?"

"No, friend, I simply can't get any more down," answered the
card-sharper in his insolent voice, raising his open hand to his
throat. Then, in a voice that seemed to come from a broken organ, he
shouted:

"Paloma!"

"Who's calling that woman?" demanded Valencia immediately, glaring at
the group of gamblers.

"I," answered El Pastiri. "I want Paloma over here."

"Ah!... You? Well, there's nothing doing," declared Valencia.

"I said I want Paloma over here," repeated Pastiri, without looking at
the bully.

The latter pretended not to have heard. The card-sharper, provoked by
this discourtesy, got up and, slapping Valencia's sleeve with the back
of his hand, he repeated his words, dwelling upon every syllable:

"I said that I wanted Paloma, and that these friends of mine want to
talk with the lady."

"And I tell you that there's nothing doing," answered the other.

"Those gentlemen want to talk with her."

"All right.... Then let them ask my permission."

Pastiri thrust his face into the bully's, and looking him straight in
the eye, croaked:

"Do you realize, Valencia, that you're getting altogether too damned
high and mighty?"

"You don't say!" sneered Valencia, calmly continuing his game.

"Do you know that I'm going to let you have a couple with my fist?"

"You don't say!"

Pastiri drew back with drunken awkwardness and began to hunt in the
inside pocket of his coat for his knife, amidst the derisive laughter
of the bystanders. Then all at once, with a sudden resolve, Leandro
jumped to his feet, his face as red as flame; he seized Valencia by
the lapel of his coat, gave him a rude tug and sent him smashing
against the wall.

The gamblers rushed into the fray; the table was overturned and there
was a pandemonium of cries and curses. Manuel awoke with a frightened
start. He found himself in the midst of an awful row; most of the
gamblers, with the tavern-owner's brother at their head, wanted to
throw Leandro out, but the raging youth, backed against the counter,
was kicking off anybody that approached him.

"Leave us alone!" shouted Valencia, his lips slavering as he tried to
work himself free of the men who were holding him.

"Yes, leave them alone," said one of the gamblers.

"I'll kill the first guy that touches me," warned El Valencia,
displaying a long knife with black blades.

"That's the stuff," commented Leandro mockingly. "Let's see who are
the red-blooded men."

"Olé!" shouted Pastiri enthusiastically, in his husky voice.

Leandro drew from the inside pocket of his sack-coat a long, narrow
knife; the onlookers retreated to the walls so as to leave plenty of
room for the duellists. Paloma began to bawl:

"You'll get killed! You'll get killed, I'm telling you!"

"Take that woman away," yelled Valencia in a tragic voice: "Ea!" he
added, cleaving the air with his knife. "Now let's see who are the men
with guts!"

The two rivals advanced to the centre of the tavern, glaring furiously
at each other. The spectators were enthralled by mingled interest and
horror.

Valencia was the first to attack; he bent forward as if to seek out
where to strike his opponent; he crouched, aimed at the groin and
lunged forward upon Leandro; but seeing that Leandro awaited him
calmly without retreating, he rapidly recoiled. Then he resumed his
false attacks, trying to surprise his adversary with these feints,
threatening his stomach yet all the while aiming to stab him in the
face; but before the rigid arm of Leandro, who seemed to be sparing
every motion until he should strike a sure blow, the bully grew
disconcerted and once again drew back. Then Leandro advanced. The
youth came on with such sangfroid that he struck terror into his
opponent's heart; his face bespoke his determination to transfix
Valencia. An oppressive silence weighed upon the tavern; only the
sounds of Paloma's convulsive sobs were heard from the adjoining room.

Valencia, divining Leandro's resolve, grew so pale that his face
turned a sickly blue, his eyes distended and his teeth began to
chatter. At Leandro's first lunge he retreated, but remained on guard;
then his fea

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/8496