Roberto Hastings at the Shoemaker's--Procession of Beggars--Court
of Miracles.
One morning toward the end of September Roberto appeared in the
doorway of _The Regeneration of Footwear_, and thrusting his head
into the shop exclaimed:
"Hello, Manuel!"
"Hello, Don Roberto!"
"Working, eh?"
Manuel shrugged his shoulders, indicating that the job was not exactly
to his taste.
Roberto hesitated for a moment, but at last made up his mind and
entered the shop.
"Have a seat," invited Señor Ignacio, offering him a chair.
"Are you Manuel's uncle?"
"At your service."
Roberto sat down, offered a cigar to Señor Ignacio and another to
Leandro, and the three began to smoke.
"I know your nephew," said Roberto to the proprietor, "for I live in
the house where Petra works."
"You do?"
"And I wish you'd let him off today for a couple of hours."
"All right, señor. All afternoon, if you wish."
"Fine. Then I'll call for him after lunch."
"Very well."
Roberto watched them work for a while, then suddenly jumped up and
left.
Manuel could not understand what Roberto wanted, and in the afternoon
waited for him with genuine impatience. Roberto carne, and the pair
turned out of Aguila Street down toward the Ronda de Segovia.
"Do you know where La Doctrina is?" Roberto asked Manuel.
"What Doctrina?"
"A place where herds of beggars meet every Friday."
"I don't know."
"Do you know where the San Isidro highway is?"
"Yes."
"Good. For that's where we're going. That's where La Doctrina is."
Manuel and Roberto walked down the Paseo de los Pontones and continued
in the direction of Toledo Bridge. The student was silent and Manuel
did not care to ask any questions.
It was a dry, dusty day. The stifling south wind whirled puffs of heat
and sand; a stray bolt of lightning illuminated the clouds; from the
distance came the rumble of thunder; the landscape lay yellow under a
blanket of dust.
Over the Toledo Bridge trudged a procession of beggars, both men and
women, each dirtier and more tattered than the next. Out of las
Cambroneras and las Injurias streamed recruits for this ragged army;
they came, too, from the Paseo Imperial and from Ocho Hilos, and by
this time forming solid ranks, they trooped on to the Toledo Bridge
and tramped up the San Isidro highway until they reached a red
edifice, before which they came to a halt.
"This must be La Doctrina," said Roberto to Manuel, pointing to a
building that had a patio with a statue of Christ in the centre.
The two friends drew near to the gate. This was a beggars' conclave, a
Court of Miracles assembly. The women took up almost the entire
courtyard; at one end, near a chapel, the men were huddled together;
one could see nothing but swollen, stupid faces, inflamed nostrils,
and twisted mouths; old women as fat and clumsy as melancholy whales;
little wizened, cadaverous hags with sunken mouths and noses like the
beak of a bird of prey; shamefaced female mendicants, their wrinkled
chins bristling with hair, their gaze half ironical and half shy;
young women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young
and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended,
patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that
had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab
city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of the
countrywomen.
Roberto sauntered about, peering eagerly info the courtyard. Manuel
trailed after him indifferently.
A large number of the beggars was blind; there were cripples, minus
hand or foot, some hieratic, taciturn, solemn, others restless. Brown
long-sleeved loose coats mingled with frayed sack-coats and begrimed
smocks. Some of the men in tatters carried, slung over their
shoulders, black sacks and game-bags; others huge cudgels in their
hands; one burly negro, his face tattooed with deep
stripes,--doubtless a slave in former days,--leaned against the wall in
dignified indifference, clothed in rags; barefoot urchins and mangy
dogs scampered about amongst the men and women; the swarming,
agitated, palpitating throng of beggars seethed like an anthill.
"Let's go," said Roberto. "Neither of the women I'm looking for is
here.... Did you notice," he added, "how few human faces there are
among men! All you can read in the features of these wretches is
mistrust, abjection, malice, just as among the rich you find only
solemnity, gravity, pedantry. It's curious, isn't it? All cats have
the face of cats; all oxen look like oxen; while the majority of human
beings haven't a human semblance."
Roberto and Manuel left the patio. They sat down opposite La Doctrina,
on the other side of the road, amid some sandy clearings.
"These doings of mine," began Roberto, "may strike you as queer. But
they won't seem so strange when I tell you that I'm looking for two
women here; one of them a poor beggar who can make me rich; the other,
a rich lady, who perhaps would make me poor."
Manuel stared at Roberto in amazement. He had always harboured a
certain suspicion that there was something wrong with the student's
head.
"No. Don't imagine this is silly talk. I'm on the trail of a
fortune,--a huge fortune. If you help me, I'll remember you."
"Sure. What do you want me to do?"
"I'll tell you when the right moment comes."
Manuel could not conceal an ironic smile.
"You don't believe it," muttered Roberto.
"That doesn't matter. When you'll see, you'll believe."
"Naturally."
"If I should happen to need you, promise you'll help me."
"I'll help you as far as I am able," replied Manuel, with feigned
earnestness.
Several ragamuffins sprawled themselves out on the clearing near
Manuel and Roberto, and the student did not care to go on with his
tale.
"They've already begun to split up into divisions," said one of the
loafers who wore a coachman's hat, pointing with a stick to the women
inside the courtyard of La Doctrina.
And so it was; groups were clustering about the trees of the patio, on
each of which was hung a poster with a picture and a number in the
middle.
"There go the marchionesses," added he of the coachman's hat,
indicating several women garbed in black who had just appeared in the
courtyard.
The white faces stood out amidst the mourning clothes.
"They're all marchionesses," said one.
"Well, they're not all beauties," retorted Manuel, joining the
conversation. "What have they come here for?"
"They're the ones who teach religion," answered the fellow with the
hat. "From time to time they hand out sheets and underwear to the
women and the men. Now they're going to call the roll."
A bell began to clang; the gate closed; groups were formed, and a lady
entered the midst of each.
"Do you see that one there?" asked Roberto. "She's Don Telmo's niece."
"That blonde?"
"Yes. Wait for me here."
Roberto walked down the road toward the gate.
The reading of the religious lesson began; from the patio came the
slow, monotonous drone of prayer.
Manuel lay back on the ground. Yonder, flat beneath the grey horizon,
loomed Madrid out of the mist of the dust-laden atmosphere. The wide
bed of the Manzanares river, ochre-hued, seemed furrowed here and
there by a thread of dark water. The ridges of the Guadarrama range
rose hazily into the murky air.
Roberto passed by the patio. The humming of the praying mendicants
continued. An old lady, her head swathed in a red kerchief and her
shoulders covered with a black cloak that was fading to green, sat
down in the clearing.
"What's the matter, old lady? Wouldn't they open the gate for you?"
shouted the fellow with the coachman's hat.
"No.... The foul old witches!"
"Don't you care. They're not giving away anything today. The
distribution takes place this coming Friday. They'll give you at least
a sheet," added he of the hat mischievously.
"If they don't give me anything more than a sheet," shrilled the hag,
twisting her blobber-lip, "I'll tell them to keep it for themselves.
The foxy creatures! ..."
"Oh, they've found you out, granny!" exclaimed one of the loafers
lying on the ground. "You're a greedy one, you are."
The bystanders applauded these words, which came from a
_zarzuela_, and the chap in the coachman's hat continued
explaining to Manuel the workings of La Doctrina.
"There are some men and women who enrol in two and even three
divisions so as to get all the charity they can," he went on. "Why,
we--my father and I--once enrolled in four divisions under four
different names.... And what a rumpus was raised! What a row we had
with the marchionesses!"
"And what did you want with all those sheets," Manuel asked him.
"Why! Sell 'em, of course. They re sold here at the very gate at two
_chulés_ apiece."
"I'm going to buy one," said a coachman from a nearby hackstand,
approaching the group. "I'll give it a coating of linseed oil, then
varnish it and make me a cowled waterproof."
"But the marchionesses,--don't they see that these people sell their
gifts right away?"
"Much they see!"
To these idlers the whole business was nothing more than a pious
recreation of the religious ladies, of whom they spoke with
patronizing irony.
The reading of the religious lesson did not last quite an hour.
A bell rang; the gate was swung open; the various groups dissolved and
merged; everybody arose and the women began to walk off, balancing
their chairs upon their heads, shouting, shoving one another
violently; two or three huckstresses peddled their wares as the
tattered crowd issued through the gate in a jam, shrieking as if in
escape from some imminent danger. A few old women ran clumsily down
the road; others huddled into a corner to urinate, and all of them
were howling at the top of their lungs, overcome by the necessity of
insulting the women of La Doctrina, as if instinctively they divined
the uselessness of a sham charity that remedied nothing. One heard
only protests and manifestation of scorn.
"Damn it all! These women of God...."
"And they want a body to have faith in 'em."
"The old drunkards."
"Let them have faith, and the mother that bore 'em."
"Let 'em give blood-pudding to everybody."
After the women came the men,--blind, maimed, crippled,--in leisurely
fashion, and conversing solemnly.
"Huh! They don't want me to marry!" grumbled a blind fellow,
sarcastically, turning to a cripple.
"And what do you say," asked the latter.
"I? What the deuce! Let them get married if they have any one to marry
'em. They came here and bore us stiff with their prayers and sermons.
What we need isn't sermons, but hard cash and plenty of it."
"That's what, man ... the dough,--that's what we want."
"And all the rest is nothing but ... chatter and chin music....
Anybody can give advice. When it comes to bread, though, not a sign of
it."
"So say I!"
The ladies came out, prayer-books in hand; the old beggar-women set
off in pursuit and harassed them with entreaties.
Manuel looked everywhere for the student; at last he caught sight of
him with Don Telmo's niece. The blonde turned around to look at him,
and then stepped into a coach. Roberto saluted her and the coach
rolled off.
Manuel and Roberto returned by the San Isidro highway.
The sky was still overcast; the air dry; the procession of beggars was
advancing in the direction of Madrid. Before they reached the Toledo
Bridge, at the intersection of the San Isidro highway and the
Extremadura cartroad, Roberto and Manuel entered a very large tavern.
Roberto ordered a bottle of beer.
"Do you live in the same house where the shoe shop is?" asked Roberto.
"No. I live over in the Paseo de las Acacias, in a house called El
Corralón."
"Good. I'll come to visit you there, and you already understand that
whenever you happen to go to any place where poor folk or criminals
gather, you're to let me know."
"I'll let you know. I was watching that blonde eye you. She's pretty."
"Yes."
"And she has a swell coach."
"I should say so."
"Well? Are you going to marry her?"
"What do I know? We'll see. Come, we can't stay here," said Roberto,
stepping up to the counter to pay.
In the tavern a large number of beggars, seated at the tables, were
gulping down slices of cod and scraps of meat; a piquant odour of
fried bird-tripe and oil came from the kitchen.
They left. The wind still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray
bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near
the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with
tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through
an atmosphere murky with dust.
Suddenly Roberto halted, and placing his hand upon Manuel's shoulder
said:
"Listen to what I say, for it is the truth. If you ever want to
accomplish anything in life, place no belief in the word 'impossible.'
There's nothing impossible to an energetic will. If you try to shoot
an arrow, aim very high,--as high as you can; the higher you aim, the
farther you'll go."
Manuel stared at Roberto with a puzzled look, and shrugged his
shoulders.