Life In the Cobbler's Shop--Manuel's Friends.
The months of September and October were very hot; it was impossible
to breathe in the shoe shop.
Every morning Manuel and Vidal, on their way to the shoemaker's, would
talk of a thousand different things and exchange impressions; money,
women, plans for the future formed everlasting themes of their chats.
To both it seemed a great sacrifice, something in the nature of a
crowning misfortune in their bad luck, to have to spend day after day
cooped up in a corner ripping off outworn soles.
The languorous afternoons invited to slumber. After lunch especially,
Manuel would be overcome by stupor and deep depression. Through the
doorway of the shop could be seen the fields of San Isidro bathed in
light; in the Campillo de Gil Imón the wash hung out to dry gleamed in
the sun.
There came a medley of crowing cocks, far-off shouts of vendors, the
shrieking of locomotive whistles muffled by the distance. The dry,
burning, atmosphere vibrated. A few women of the neighbourhood came
out to comb their hair in the open, and the mattress-makers beat their
wool in the shade of the Campillo, while the hens scampered about and
scratched the soil.
Later, as evening fell, the air and the earth changed to a dusty grey.
In the distance, cutting the horizon, waved the outline of the arid
field,--a simple line, formed by the gentle undulation of the
hillocks,--a line like that of the landscapes drawn by children, with
isolated houses and smoking chimneys. Here and there a lone patch of
green grove splotched against the yellow field, which lay parched by
the sun beneath a pallid sky, whitish and murky in the hot vapours
rising from the earth. Not a cry, not the slightest sound rent the
air.
At dusk the mist grew transparent and the horizon receded until, far
in the distance, loomed the vague silhouettes of mountains not to be
glimpsed by day, against the red background of the twilight.
When they left off working in the shop it was usually night. Señor
Ignacio, Leandro, Manuel and Vidal would turn down the road toward
home.
The gas lights shone at intervals in the dusty air; lines of carts
rumbled slowly by, and across the road, in little groups, tramped the
workmen from the neighbouring factories.
And always, coming and going, the conversation between Manuel and
Vidal would turn upon the same topics: women and money.
Neither had a romantic notion, or anything like it, of women. To
Manuel, a woman was a magnificent animal with firm flesh and swelling
breast.
Vidal did not share this sexual enthusiasm; he experienced, with all
women, a confused feeling of scorn, curiosity and preoccupation.
As far as concerned money, they were both agreed that it was the
choicest, most admirable of all things; they spoke of money--especially
Vidal--with a fierce enthusiasm. To him, the thought that
there might be anything--good or evil--that could not be obtained with
hard cash, was the climax of absurdity. Manuel would like to have
money to travel all over the world and see cities and more cities and
sail in vessels. Vidal's dream was to live a life of ease in Madrid.
After two or three months in the Corralón, Manuel had become so
accustomed to the work and the life there that he wondered how he
could do anything else. Those wretched quarters no longer produced
upon him the impression of dark, sinister sadness that they cause in
one unaccustomed to live in them; on the contrary, they seemed to him
filled with attractions. He knew almost everybody in the district.
Vidal and he would escape from the house on any pretext at all, and on
Sundays they would meet Bizco at the Casa del Cabrero and go off into
the environs: to Las Injurias, Las Cambroneras, the restaurants of
Alarcón, the Campamento, and the inns on the Andalucía road, where
they would consort with thieves and rogues and play with them at
_cané_ and _rayuela_.
Manuel did not care for Bizco's company; Bizco sought only to hobnob
with thieves. He was forever taking Manuel and Vidal to haunts
frequented by bandits and low types, but since Vidal seemed to think
it all right, Manuel never objected.
Vidal was the link between Manuel and Bizco, Bizco hated Manuel, who
in turn, not only felt enmity and repugnance for Bizco, but showed
this repulsion plainly. Bizco was a brute,--an animal deserving of
extermination. As lascivious as a monkey, he had violated several of
the little girls of the Casa del Cabrero, beating them into
submission; he used to rob his father, a poverty-stricken cane-weaver,
so that he might have money enough to visit some low brothel of Las
Penuelas or on Chopa Street, where he found rouged dowagers with
cigarette-stubs in their lips, who looked like princesses to him. His
narrow skull, his powerful jaw, his blubber-lip, his stupid glance,
lent him a look of repellant brutality and animality.
A primitive man, he kept his dagger--bought in El Rastro--sharp,
guarding it as a sacred object. If he ever happened across a cat or
dog, he would enjoy torturing it to death with oft-repeated stabs. His
speech was obscene, abounding in barbarities and blasphemies.
Whether anybody induced Bizco to tattoo his arms, or the idea was
original with him, cannot be said; probably the tattooing he had seen
on one of the bandits that he ran after had suggested a similar
adornment for himself. Vidal imitated him, and for a time the pair
gave themselves up enthusiastically to self-tattooing. They pricked
their skins with a pin until a little blood came, then moistened the
wounds with ink.
Bizco painted crosses, stars and names upon his chest; Vidal, who
didn't like to prick himself, stippled his own name on one arm and his
sweetheart's on the other; Manuel didn't care to inscribe anything
upon his person, first because he was afraid of blood, and then
because the idea had been Bizco's.
Each harboured a mute hostility against the other.
Manuel, always with a chip on his shoulder, was disposed to show his
enemy challenge; Bizco, doubtless, noticed this scornful hatred in
Manuel's eyes, and this confused him.
To Manuel, a man's superiority consisted in his talent, and, above
all, in his cunning; to Bizco, courage and strength constituted the
sole enviable qualities; the greatest merit of all was to be a real
brute, as he would declare with enthusiasm.
Because of the great esteem in which he held craft and cunning, Manuel
felt deep admiration for the Rebolledos, father and son, who also
lived in the Corralón. The father, a dwarfed hunchback, a barber by
trade, used to shave his customers in the sunlight of the open, near
the Rastro. This dwarf had a very intelligent face, with deep eyes; he
wore moustache and side-whiskers, and long, bluish, unwashed hair. He
dressed always in mourning; in winter and summer alike he went around
in an overcoat, and, by some unsolved mystery of chemistry his
overcoat kept turning green while his trousers, which were also black,
kept quite as plainly turning red.
Every morning Rebolledo would leave the Corralón carrying a little
bench and a wooden wall-bracket, from which hung a brass basin and a
poster. Reaching a certain spot along the Americas fence he would
attach the bracket and put up, beside it, a humorous sign the point of
which, probably, he was the only one to see. It ran thus:
MODERNIST TONSORIAL PARLOUR
Antiseptic Barber
Walk in Gents. Shaving by Rebolledo.
Money Lent
The Rebolledos were very skilful; they made toys of wire and of
pasteboard, which they afterward sold to the street-vendors; their
home, a dingy little room of the front patio, had been converted into
a workshop, and they had there a vise, a carpenter's bench and an
array of broken gew-gaws that were apparently of no further use.
The neighbours of the Corralón had a saying that indicated their
conception of Rebolledo's acute genius.
"That dwarf," they said, "has a regular Noah's ark in his head."
The father had made for his own use a set of false teeth. He had taken
a bone napkin-ring, cut it into two unequal parts, and, by filing it
on either side, had fitted the larger to his mouth. Then with a tiny
saw he made the teeth, and to simulate the gums he covered a part of
the former napkin-ring with sealing-wax. Rebolledo could remove and
insert the false set with remarkable ease, and he could eat with them
perfectly, provided, as he said, there was anything to eat.
Perico, the son of the dwarf, promised even to outstrip his father in
cleverness. Between the hunger that he often suffered, and the
persistent tertian fevers, he was very thin and his complexion was
citreous. He was not, like his father, deformed, but slender,
delicate, with sparkling eyes and rapid, jerky motions. He looked, as
the saying is, like a rat under a bowl.
One of the proofs of his inventive genius was a mechanical snuffler
that he had made of a shoe-polish tin.
Perico cherished a particular enthusiasm for white walls, and wherever
he discovered one he would sketch, with a piece of coal, processions
of men, women and horses, houses puffing smoke, soldiers, vessels at
sea, weaklings engaging in struggle with burly giants, and other
equally diverting scenes.
Perico's masterpiece was the Don Tancredo triptych, done in coal on
the walls of the narrow entrance lane to La Corrala. This work
overwhelmed the neighbours with admiration and astonishment.
The first part of the triptych showed the valiant hypnotizer of bulls
on his way to the bull-ring, in the midst of a great troop of
horsemen; the legend read: "Don Tancredo on his _weigh_ to the
bulls." The second part represented the "king of bravery" in his
three-cornered hat, with his arms folded defiantly before the wild
beast; underneath, the rubric "Don Tancredo upon his pedestal." Under
the third part one read: "The bull takes to flight." The depiction of
this final scene was noteworthy; the bull was seen fleeing as one
possessed of the devil amidst the toreros, whose noses were visible in
profile while their mouths and both eyes were drawn in front view.
Despite his triumphs, Perico Rebolledo did not grow vain, nor did he
consider himself superior to the men of his generation; his greatest
pleasure was to sit down at his father's side in the patio of La
Corrala, amidst the works of old clocks, bunches of keys and other
grimy, damaged articles, and ponder over the possible utilization of
an eye-glass crystal, for example, or a truss, or the rubber bulb of a
syringe, or some similar broken, out-of-order contrivance.
Father and son spent their lives dreaming of mechanical contraptions;
they considered nothing useless; the key that could open no door, the
old-style coffee-pot, as queer as some laboratory instrument, the oil
lamp with machine attachment,--all these articles were treasured up,
taken apart and put to some use. Rebolledo, father and son, wasted
more ingenuity in living wretchedly than is employed by a couple of
dozen comic authors, journalists and state ministers dwelling in
luxury.
Among the friends of Perico Rebolledo were the Aristas, who became
intimate with Manuel.
The Aristas, two brothers, sons of an ironing-woman, were apprentices
in a foundry of the near-by Ronda. The younger passed his days in a
continuous capering, indulging in death-defying leaps, climbing trees,
walking on his hands and performing acrobatic stunts from all the door
transoms.
The elder brother, a long-legged stutterer whom they called Aristón in
jest, was the most funereal fellow on the planet; he suffered from
acute necromania; anything connected with coffins, corpses, wakes and
candles roused his enthusiasm. He would like to have been a
gravedigger, the priest of a religious confraternity, a cemetery
warden; but his great dream,--what most enchanted him,--was a funeral;
he would imagine, as a wonderful ideal, the conversations that the
proprietor of a funeral establishment must have with the father or the
inconsolable widow as he offered wreaths of immortelles, or as he went
to take the measure of a corpse or strolled amidst the coffins. What a
splendid existence, this manufacturing of last resting-places for men,
women and children, and afterward accompanying them to the
burial-ground. For Aristón, details relating to death were the most
important matter in life.
Through that irony of fate which almost always exchanges the proper
labels of things and persons, Aristón was a supernumerary in one of
the vaudeville theatres, through the influence of his father, who was
a scene-shifter, and the job disgusted him, for in such a playhouse
nobody ever died upon the stage, nobody ever came out in mourning and
there was no weeping. And while Aristón kept thinking of nothing but
funereal scenes, his brother dreamed of circuses, trapezes and
acrobats, hoping that some day fate would send him the means to
cultivate his gymnastic talents.