After Amadeo came to Ecks, Rafaela went no longer to the river. The
former engineer was unwilling that his wife should toil. They had enough
for all to live on for a while, with what he had made in prison. They
spoke not of the past. You might almost have thought they had forgotten
it. Why remember? Zureda had forgiven everything. Rafaela, moreover, was
no longer the same. The gay happiness of her eyes had gone dead; the
waving blackness of her hair and the girlish quickness of her body had
vanished. There was a melancholy abandonment, heavy with remorse, in her
sad and flabby face, in the humility of her look, in the slow, round
fatness of her whole body.
The ex-convict followed the advice of Don Adolfo and gave up all idea of
devoting himself to farming. In the best street of the village, near the
church, he set up a general repair-shop where he took in both wood and
iron work. There he shod a mule, mended a cart or put a new coulter to a
plow, with equal facility.
He had not been established long when his modest little business began
to pick up and be a real money-maker. Very soon his customers increased.
The disquieting story of his imprisonment seemed forgotten. Everybody
liked him, for he was good, affable and pleasant, in a melancholy way.
He paid his little debts promptly, and worked hard.
Zureda felt life once more grow calm. Slowly his future, which till then
had looked stormy, commenced to appear a land of hospitality,
comfortable and good. The threat of to-morrow, which makes so many men
uneasy, had ceased to be a problem for him. His future was already
founded, laid out, foreseen. The fifteen or twenty years that still
might remain to him, he hoped to pass in the loving accumulation of a
little fortune to leave his Rafaela.
He got up with the sun and worked industriously all day, driven by this
ambition. In the evening he took a dog that Don Adolfo had given him,
and went wandering in the outskirts of the village. One of his favorite
walks was out to the cemetery. He often pushed open the old gate, which
never was quite closed, and in the burial-ground sat himself down upon a
broken mill-stone which happened to be there. Seated thus, he liked to
smoke a cigarette.
Many crosses were blackening with age, in the tall grass that covered
the earth. The old man often called up memories of the time when he had
been an engineer. He remembered the prison, too, and his tired will
seemed to tremble. Peacefully he looked about him. Here, sometime, would
be his bed. What rest, what silence! And he breathed deep, enthralled by
the rare and calming joy of willingness to die. Here inside the old wall
of mud bricks, reddened by the setting sun--here in this garden of
forgetfulness--how well one ought to sleep!
Only one trouble disturbed and embittered the peaceful decline of Amadeo
Zureda. This trouble was his son, Manolo. Through an excess of fatherly
love, doubtless mistaken, he had the year before got Manolo exempted
from military service. The boy's wild, vicious character was fanatically
rebellious against all discipline. In vain Zureda sought to teach him a
trade. Threats and entreaties, as well as all kinds of wise advice, were
shattered against the invincibly gypsy-like will of the young fellow.
"If you don't want to support me," Manolo often used to say, "let me go.
Kick me out. I'll get by, on my own hook."
Often and often Manolo vanished from the little town. He stayed away for
days at a time, engaged in mysterious adventures. People coming in from
neighboring villages reported him as given over to gaming. One night he
showed up with a serious wound in the groin, a deep knife-stab.
"Who did that to you?" demanded Zureda.
The youth answered:
"Nobody's business. _I_ know who it is. Sometime or other he'll get his,
all right!"
To save himself from police investigation, Zureda said nothing about it.
For some weeks, Manolo kept quiet. But early one morning a couple of
rural guards found the body of a man on the river-bank. His body was
covered with stabs. All investigations to find the murderer were
fruitless. The crime remained unavenged. Only Amadeo--who just a bit
after the discovery of the body had discovered Manolo washing a
blood-stained handkerchief in a water-jar--was certain that his son had
done this murder.
Once more the sinister words of Don Adolfo recurred to his mind,
bruising him, maddening him, seeming to bore into his very brain:
"He does not seem to be your son, at all!"
Amadeo pondered this, and decided it was true. The boy did not seem his.
Manolo's outlaw way of living did not stop here. Taking advantage of his
mother's love and of the quiet disposition of Amadeo, almost every day
he showed the very greatest need of money.
"I've got to have a hundred pesetas," he would say. "I've just _got_ to
have them! If you people don't come across, well, all right! I'll get
them, some way. But perhaps you'll be sorry then, you didn't give them
to me!"
He was mad for enjoyment. When his mother tried to warn and advise him,
saying: "Why don't you work, you young wretch? Don't you see how your
father does?"--he would retort:
"I don't call _that_ living, to work! I'd rather go hang myself, than
live the way the old man lives!"
You would have thought Rafaela was his slave, by the lack of decency and
respect he showed her. When he called her, he would hardly condescend to
look at her at all. He spoke little to his father, and what he said was
rough and harsh. The worst boy in the world could not have acted with
more insolence. His wild spirit, lusting pleasure, seemed to burn with
an instinctive flame of hate.
One night when Amadeo came home from the Casino where he and Don Adolfo,
with the druggist and a few other such-like worthies, were wont to meet
every Saturday, he found the door of his shop ajar. This astonished him.
He raised his voice and began to call:
"Manolo! You, Manolo!"
Rafaela answered him, from the back room of the house:
"He's not here."
"Do you know whether he's going to come back soon? I want to know,
before locking up."
A short silence followed. After a bit, Rafaela answered:
"You'd better lock up, anyhow."
There seemed to be something like a sob of grief in the voice of the
poor woman. The old engineer, alarmed by a presentiment of something
terrible, strode through the shop and went on into the house. Rafaela
was sitting in front of the stove, in the kitchen, her hands humbly
crossed on her lap, her eyes full of tears, her white hair rumpled up,
as if some parricide hand had furiously seized her head. Zureda took
hold of his wife by the shoulders and forced her to get up.
"What--what's happened?" he stammered.
Rafaela's nose was all bloody, her forehead was bruised and her hands
bore lacerations.
"What's the matter with you?" repeated the engineer.
Old and dull as were his eyes, now they blazed up again with that red
lightning of death which, twenty years before, had sent him to prison.
Rafaela was terrified, and tried to lie out of it.
"It's nothing, Amadeo," she stammered. "Nothing, I tell you. Let me tell
you! I--I fell--that's the living truth!"
But Zureda shook the truth out of her with threats, almost with
violence.
"Manolo's been beating you, eh? He has, hasn't he?"
She began to sob, still trying to deny it, not wanting to accuse her
heart's darling. The old engineer repeated, trembling with rage:
"He beat you, eh? What?"
Rafaela took a long time to answer. She was afraid to speak, but finally
she confessed everything.
"Yes, yes, he did. Oh--it's terrible!"
"What did he beat you for?"
"Because he wanted money."
"God! The swine!"
The rage and pain of the old convict burst out in a leonine roar, that
filled the kitchen.
"He told you that?" demanded Amadeo. "Said he wanted money?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Twenty-five pesetas. I refused as long as I could. But what could I do?
Oh, if you'd seen him then, you wouldn't have known him. I was awfully
scared--thought he was going to kill me----"
As she said this, she covered her eyes with her hands. She seemed to be
shutting out from them, together with the ugly vision of what had just
happened, some other sight--the sight of something horrible, something
long-past, something quite the same.
Zureda, afraid of showing the tumultuous rage in his heart, said nothing
more. The most ominous memories crowded his mind. A long, long time ago,
before he had gone to jail, Don Tomás in the course of an unforgettable
conversation had told him that Manolo Berlanga maltreated Rafaela. And
all these years afterward, when he was once more a free man, Don Adolfo
had said the same thing about young Manolo. Remembering this strange
agreement of opinions, Amadeo Zureda felt a bitter and inextinguishable
hate against the whole race of the silversmith--a race accursed, it
seemed, which had come into the world only to hurt and wound him in his
dearest affections.
Next morning the old man, who had hardly slept more than an hour or two,
woke early.
"What time is it?" asked he.
Rafaela had already risen. She answered:
"Almost six."
"Has Manolo come back?"
"Not yet."
The old engineer got out of bed, dressed as usual and went down to his
shop. Rafaela kept watch on him. The apparent calm of the old man looked
suspicious. Noon came, and Manolo did not return for dinner. Night drew
on, nor did he come back to sleep. Zureda and his wife went to bed
early. A few days drifted along.
Sunday morning, Zureda was sitting at the door of his shop. It was just
eleven. Women, some with mantillas, others with but a simple kerchief
knotted about their heads, were going to mass. High up in the Gothic
steeple, the bells were swinging, gay and clangorous. A neighbor,
passing, said to the old engineer:
"Well, Manolo's showed up."
"When?" asked Zureda, phlegmatically.
"Last night."
"Where did you see him?"
"At Honorio's inn."
"A great one, that boy is! He's certainly some fine lad! Never came near
_me_!"
The day drew on, without anything happening. Cautiously the engineer
guarded against telling Rafaela that their son had returned. A little
while before supper, giving her the excuse that Don Adolfo was waiting
for him at the Casino, Zureda left the house and made his way to the inn
where Manolo was wont to meet his rough friends. There he found him,
indeed, gaming with cards.
"I've got something to say to you," said he.
The young man threw his cards on the table and got up. He was tall, slim
and good-looking; and in the thin line of his lips and the penetrant
gaze of his greenish eyes lay something bold, defiant.
The two men went out into the street, and, saying no word, walked to the
outskirts of the town. When Amadeo thought they had come to a good
place, he stopped and looked his son fair in the face.
"I've brought you out here," said he, "to tell you you're never coming
back to my house. Understand me?"