CHAPTER I

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.