Don Telmo carefully inspected a large folio document: the genealogy of
Roberto's family.
"What course do you think I ought to pursue?" asked the student.
"You need money; but it's so hard to find that!" muttered the old man.
"Why don't you marry?"
"And what good would that do?"
"I mean some wealthy woman…."
Here Don Telmo lowered his voice to an inaudible pitch and after a few words they separated.
The espionage of the boarders became so obstructive to the men spied upon that the Biscayan and Don Telmo served notice on the landlady of their removal. Doña Casiana's desolation, when she learned of their decision, was exceedingly great; several times she had to resort to the closet and surrender herself to the consolations of the beverage of her own concoction.
The boarders were so disappointed at the flight of the Biscayan and of Don Telmo that neither the altercations between Irene and Celia nor the stories told by the priest Don Jacinto, who stressed the smutty note, were potent enough to draw them from their silence.
The bookkeeper, a jaundiced fellow with an emaciated face and a beard like that of a monumental Jew, exceedingly taciturn and timid, had burst into speech in his excitement over the intrigues invented and fancied in the life of Don Telmo; now he became from moment to moment sallower than ever with his hypochondria.
Don Telmo's departure was paid for by the student and Don Manuel. As far as the student was concerned they dared no more than twit him on his complicity with the old man and the Biscayan; at Manuel, however, they all kept screeching and scolding when they weren't kicking him.
One of the salesmen,—the fellow who was troubled with his stomach, exasperated by the boredom, the heat and his uncertain digestion, found no other distraction than insulting and berating Manuel while he served at table, whether or not there were cause.
"Go on, you cheap fool!" he would say. "You're not worth the food you eat! Clown!"
This refrain, added to others of the same tenor, began to weary Manuel. One day the salesman heaped the insults and the vilification upon him more plentifully than ever. They had sent the boy out for two coffees, and he was slow in returning; on that particular day the delay was not due to any fault of his, for he had been kept waiting a long time.
"They ought to put a pack-saddle on you, you ass!" shouted the agent as Manuel entered.
"You won't be the one to do it!" retorted the boy impudently, as he placed the cups upon the table.
"I won't? Do you want to see me?"
"Yes, I do."
The salesman got up and kicked Manuel in the shins; the poor boy saw stars. He gave a cry of pain and then, furious, seized a plate and sent it flying at the agent's head; the latter ducked and the projectile crossed the dining-room, crashed through a window pane and fell into the courtyard, where it smashed with a racket. The salesman grabbed one of the coffee-pots that was filled with coffee and milk and hurled it at Manuel with such good aim that it struck the boy in the face; the youth, blinded with rage and by the coffee and milk, rushed upon his enemy, cornered him, and took revenge for the insults and blows with an endless succession of kicks and punches.
"He's killing me! He's killing me!" shrieked the agent in feminine wails.
"Thief! Clown!" shouted Manuel, employing the street's choicest repertory of insults.
The Superman and the priest seized Manuel by the arms, leaving him at the mercy of the salesman, who, beholding the boy thus corralled, tried to wreak vengeance; but when he was ready to strike, Manuel gave him such a forceful kick in the stomach that the fellow vomited up his whole meal.
Everybody took sides against Manuel, except Roberto, who defended him. The agent retired to his room, summoned the landlady, and told her that he refused to remain another moment as long as Petra's son was in the house.
The landlady, whose chief interest was to retain her boarder, communicated her decision to her servant.
"Now see what you've done. You can't stay here any longer," said Petra to her son.
"All right. That clown will pay for these," replied the boy, nursing the welts on his forehead. "I tell you, if I ever meet him I'm going to smash in his head."
"You take good care not to say a word to him."
At this moment the student happened to enter the dining-room.
"You did well, Manuel," he exclaimed, turning to Petra. "What right had that blockhead to insult him? In this place every boss has a right to attack his neighbour if he doesn't do as all the others wish. What a cowardly gang!"
As he spoke, Roberto blanched with rage; then he grew calm and asked
Petra:
"Where are you going to take Manuel now?"
"To a cobbler's shop that belongs to a relative of mine on Aguila street."
"Is it in the poorer quarters?"
"Yes."
"I'll come to see you some day."
Before Manuel had gone to bed, Roberto appeared again in the dining-room.
"Listen," he said to Manuel. "If you know any strange place in the slums where criminals get together, let me hear. I'll go with you."
"I'll let you know, never you mind."
"Fine. See you again. Good-bye!"
Roberto extended his hand to Manuel, who pressed it with deep gratitude.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
The Regeneration of Footwear and The Lion of The Shoemaker's
Art—The First Sunday—An Escapade—El Bizco and his Gang.
The inhabitant of Madrid who at times finds himself by accident in the poor quarters near the Manzanares river, is surprised at the spectacle of poverty and sordidness, of sadness and neglect presented by the environs of Madrid with their wretched Rondas, laden with dust in the summer and in winter wallowing in mire. The capital is a city of contrasts; it presents brilliant light in close proximity to deep gloom; refined life, almost European, in the centre; in the suburbs, African existence, like that of an Arab village. Some years ago, not many, in the vicinity of the Ronda de Sevilla and of el Campillo de Gil Imón, there stood a house of suspicious aspect and of not very favourable repute, to judge by popular rumour. The observer …
In this and other paragraphs of the same style I had placed some hope, for they imparted to my novel a certain phantasmagoric and mysterious atmosphere; but my friends have convinced me I ought to suppress these passages, arguing that they would be quite in place in a Parisian novel, but not in one dealing with Madrid,—not at all. They add, moreover, that here nobody goes astray, not even if one wishes to. Neither are there here any observers, nor houses of suspicious aspect, nor anything else. In resignation, then, I have excised these paragraphs, through which I hoped some day to be elected to the Spanish Academy; and so I continue my tale in more pedestrian language.
It came about, then, that on the day following the row in the dining-room of the lodging-house, Petra, very early in the morning, woke Manuel and told him to dress.
The boy recalled the scene of the previous day; he verified it by raising his hand to his forehead, for the bruises still pained him, and from his mother's tone he understood that she persisted in her resolve to take him to the cobbler's.
After Manuel had dressed, mother and son left the house and went into the bun-shop for a cup of coffee and milk. Then they walked down to Arenal Street, crossed the Plaza del Oriente, and the Viaduct, thence through Rosario Street. Continuing along the walls of a barracks they reached the heights at whose base runs the Ronda de Segovia. From this eminence there was a view of the yellowish countryside that reached as far as Jetafe and Villaverde, and the San Isidro cemeteries with their grey mudwalls and their black cypresses.
From the Ronda de Segovia, which they covered in a short time, they climbed up Aguila Street, and paused before a house at the corner of the Campillo de Gil Imón.
There were two shoe shops opposite one another and both closed. Manuel's mother, who could not recall which was her relative's place, inquired at the tavern.
"Señor Ignacio's over at the big house," answered the tavern-keeper. "I think the cobbler's come already, but he hasn't opened the shop yet."
Mother and son had to wait until the shop was opened. The building was not the tiny, evil-boding one, but it looked as if it had an atrocious desire to cave in, for here and there it, too, showed cracks, holes and all manner of disfigurements. It had a lower and upper floor, large and wide balconies the balustrades of which were gnawed by rust and the diminutive panes of glass held in place by leaden strips.
On the ground floor of the house, in the part that faced Aguila Street, there was a livery-stable, a carpenter's shop, a tavern and the cobbler's shop owned by Petra's relation. This establishment displayed over the entrance a sign that read:
For The Regeneration of Footwear.
The historian of the future will surely find in this sign proof of how widespread, during several epochs, was a certain notion of national regeneration, and it will not surprise him that this idea, which was launched in the aim to reform and regenerate the Constitution and the Spanish people, came to an end upon the signboard of a shop on a foresaken corner of the slums, where the only thing done was the reformation and regeneration of footwear.
We will not deny the influence of this regenerating theory upon the proprietor of the establishment For The Regeneration of Footwear; but we must point out that this presumptuous legend was put up in token of his defiance of the cobbler across the way, and we must register likewise that it had been answered by another, and even more presumptuous, one.
One fine morning the workmen in the establishment for The Regeneration of Footwear were dumfounded to find staring them in the face the sign of the rival shop. It was a beautiful signboard about two metres long, bearing this inscription:
The Lion of the Shoemaker's Art
This in itself was quite tolerable; the terrible, annihilating thing about it was the painting that sprawled over the middle of the board. A handsome yellow lion with the face of a man and with wavy mane, standing erect; in his front paws he held a boot, apparently of patent-leather. Beneath this representation was printed the following: You may break, but never unstitch it.
This was a crushing motto: A lion (wild beast) trying to unseam the boot made by the Lion (shoemaker), and powerless before the task! What a humiliation for the lion! What a triumph for the shoemaker! The lion, in this case, was For The Regeneration of Footwear, which, as the saying goes, had been compelled to bite the dust.
In addition to Señor Ignacio's sign there was, in one of the balconies of the large house, the bust of a woman, made probably of pasteboard, with lettering beneath: Perfecta Ruiz: Ladies' Hair Dressing; on the side walls of the main entrance there hung several announcements unworthy of occupying the attention of the aforementioned historian, in which were offered low-priced rooms with or without bed, amanuenses and seamstresses. A single card, upon which were pasted horizontally, vertically and obliquely a number of cut-out figures, deserved to go down in history for its laconicism. It read:
Parisian Styles. Escorihuela, Tailor.
Manuel, who had not taken the trouble to read all these signs, went into the building by a little door at the side of the livery-stable entrance, and walked through the corridor to a very filthy courtyard.
When he returned to the street the cobbler's shop had already been opened. Petra and her boy entered.
"Isn't Señor Ignacio in?" she asked.
"He'll be here in a second," answered a youngster who was piling up old shoes in the middle of the shop.
"Tell him that his cousin is here,—Petra."
Señor Ignacio appeared. He was a man of between forty and fifty, thin and wizened. Petra and he got into conversation, while the boy and a little urchin continued to heap up the old shoes. Manuel was looking on, when the boy said to him:
"Come on, you. Lend a hand!"
Manuel pitched in, and when the three had ended their labours, they waited for Petra and Señor Ignacio to finish chatting. Petra was recounting Manuel's latest exploits to her cousin and the cobbler listened smilingly. The man bore no signs of gruffness; he was blond and beardless; upon his upper lip sprouted a few saffron-hued hairs. His complexion was leathery, wrinkled; the deep furrows of his face, and his wearied mien, gave him the appearance of a weakling. He spoke with a certain ironic vagueness.
"You're going to stay here," said Petra to Manuel.
"All right."
"He's an amiable rogue," exclaimed Señor Ignacio, laughing. "He agrees right away."
"Yes; he takes everything calmly. But, look—" she added, turning to her son, "if ever I find out that you carry on as you did yesterday, you'll hear from me!"
Manuel said good-bye to his mother.
"Were you very long in that town of Soria with my cousin?" Señor
Ignacio asked.
"Two years."
"And did you work very hard there?"
"I didn't work at all."
"Well, sonny, you can't get out of it here. Come. Sit down and get busy. These are your cousins," added Señor Ignacio, indicating the youth and the little boy.
"They are a pair of warriors, too."
The youth's name was Leandro, and he was well-built; in no respect did he resemble his father. He had thick lips and a thick nose, an obstinate, manly expression; the other was a boy of about Manuel's age, frail, thin, with a rascally look, and called Vidal.
Señor Ignacio and the three boys sat down around a wooden block formed of a tree-trunk with a deep groove running through it. The labour consisted in undoing and taking apart old boots and shoes, which arrived at the shop from every direction in huge, badly tied bales and in sacks with paper designations sewed to the burlap. The boot destined to be drawn and quartered was laid upon the block; there it received a stroke or more from a knife until the heel was severed; then, with the nippers the various layers of sole were ripped off; with the scissors they cut off buttons and laces, and everything was sorted into its corresponding basket: in one, the heels; in others, the rubbers, the latchets, the buckles.
So low had The Regeneration of Footwear descended: it justified its title in a manner quite distinct from that intended by the one who had bestowed it.
Señor Ignacio, a master workman, had been compelled through lack of business to abandon the awl and the shoemaker's stirrup for the nippers and the knife; creating for destroying; the fashioning of new boots for the disembowelling of old. The contrast was bitter; but Señor Ignacio could find consolation in looking across at his neighbour, he of the Lion of The Shoemaker's Art, who only at rare intervals would receive an order for some cheap pair of boots.
The first morning of work was infinitely boresome to Manuel; this protracted inactivity became unbearable. At noon a bulky old woman entered the shop with their lunch in a basket. This was Señor Ignacio's mother.
"And my wife?" the cobbler asked her.
"She's gone washing."
"And Salomé Isn't she coming?"
"No. She got some work in a house for the whole week."
The old lady extracted from the basket a pot, dishes, napkins, cutlery, and a huge loaf of bread; she laid a cloth upon the floor and everybody squatted down around it. She poured the soup from the pot into the plates, into which each one crumbled a bit of bread, and they began to eat. Then the old woman doled out to each his portion of boiled meat and vegetables, and, as they ate, the cobbler discoursed briefly upon the future of Spain and the reasons for national backwardness,—a topic that appeals to most Spaniards, who consider themselves regenerators.
Señor Ignacio was a mild liberal, a man who swelled with enthusiasm over these words about the national sovereignty, and who spoke openly of the Glorious Revolution. In matters of religion he advocated freedom of worship; his ideal would be for Spain to have an equal number of priests of the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and every other denomination, for thus, he asserted, each would choose the dogma that seemed to him best. But one thing he'd certainly do if he had a say in the government. He would expel all the monks and nuns, for they're like the mange: the weaker the sufferer, the more it thrives. To this argument Leandro, the elder son, added that as far as the monks, nuns and other small fry were concerned, the best course with them was to lop off their heads like hogs, and with regard to the priests, whether Catholic, Protestant or Chinese, nothing would be lost if there were nary a one.
The old lady, too, joined the conversation, and since to her, as a huckstress of vegetables, politics was chiefly a question between marketwomen and the municipal guards, she spoke of a row in which the amiable ladies of the Cebada market had discharged their garden produce at the heads of several redcoats who were defending a trouble-maker of the market. The huckstresses wanted to organize a union, and then lay down the law and fix prices. Now this didn't at all appeal to her.
"What the deuce!" she exclaimed. "What right have they to take away a person's stock if he wants to sell it cheaper? Suppose I take it into my head to give it all away free."
"Why no, señora," differed Leandro. "That's not right."
"And why not?"
"Because it isn't. Because tradesfolk ought to help one another, and if you, let's suppose, do as you say, you prevent somebody else from selling, and that's why Socialism was invented,—to favour man's industry."
"All right, then. Let them give two duros to man's industry and kill it."
The woman spoke very phlegmatically and sententiously. Her calm manner harmonized perfectly with her huge person, which was as thick and rigid as a tree-trunk; her face was fleshy and of stolid features, her wrinkles deep; pouches of loose flesh sagged beneath her eyes; on her head she wore a black kerchief, tightly knotted around her temples.
Señora Jacoba—that was her name—was a woman who probably felt neither heat nor cold; summer and winter she spent the dead hours seated by her vegetable stand at the Puerta de Moros; if she sold a head of lettuce between sunrise and sunset, it was a great deal.
After eating, some of the shoemaker's family went off to the courtyard for their siesta, while others remained in the shop.
Vidal, the man's younger son, sprawled out in the patio beside Manuel, and having inquired into the cause of the bumps that stood out on his cousin's forehead, asked:
"Have you ever been on this street before?"
"I? No."
"We have great times around here."
"You do, eh?"
"I should say so. Haven't you a girl?"
"I? No."
"Well, there are lots of girls 'round here that would like to have a fellow."
"Really?"
"Yes, sir! Over where we live there's a very pretty little thing, a friend of my girl. You can hitch up with her."
"But don't you live in this house?"
"No. We live in Embajadores lane. It's my aunt Salomé and my grandmother who live here. Over where we are—oh, boy!—the times I've had!"
"In the town where I come from," said Manuel, not to be dwarfed by his cousin, "there were mountains higher than twenty of your houses here."
"In Madrid we've got the Monte de Príncipe Pio."
"But it can't be as high as the one in that town."
"It can't? Why, in Madrid everything's the best."
Manuel was not a little put out by the superiority which his cousin tried to assume by speaking to him about women in the tone of an experienced man about town who knew them through and through. After the noonday nap and a game of mus, over which the shoemaker and a few neighbours managed to get into a wrangle, Señor Ignacio and his children went off to their house. Manuel supped at Señora Jacoba's, the vegetable huckstress's, and slept in a beautiful bed that looked to him far better than the one at the boarding-house.
Once in, he weighed the pros and contras of his new social position, and in the midst of his calculations as to whether the needle of the balance inclined to this side or that, he fell asleep.
At first, the monotony of the labour and the steady application bothered Manuel; but soon he grew accustomed to one thing and another, so that the days seemed shorter and the work less irksome.
The first Sunday Manuel was fast asleep in Señora Jacoba's house when Vidal came in and waked him. It was after eleven; the marketwoman, as usual, had departed at dawn for her stall, leaving the boy alone.
"What are you doing there?" asked Vidal. "Why don't you get up?"
"Why? What time is it?"
"Awful late."
Manuel dressed hurriedly and they both left the house. Nearby, opposite Aguila street, on a little square, they joined a group of boys who were playing chito, and they followed the fortunes of the game with deep interest.
At noon Vidal said to his cousin:
"Today we're going to eat yonder."
"At your house?"
"Yes. Come on."
Vidal, whose specialty was finding things, discovered close by the fountain of the Ronda, which is near Aguila Street, an old, wide-brimmed high hat; the poor thing was hidden in a corner, perhaps through modesty. He began to kick it along and send it flying through the air and Manuel joined in the enterprise, so that between the two they transported the relic, venerable with antiquity, from the Ronda de Segovia to that of Toledo, thence to the Ronda de Embajadores, until they abandoned it in the middle of the street, minus top and brim. Having committed this perversity, Manuel and Vidal debouched into the Paseo da las Acacias and went into a house whose entrance consisted of a doorless archway.
The two boys walked through a narrow passage paved with cobblestones until they reached a courtyard, and then, by one of the numerous staircases they climbed to the balcony of the first floor, on which opened a row of doors and windows all painted blue.
"Here's where we live," said Vidal, pointing to one of the doors.
They entered. Señor Ignacio's home was small; it comprised two bedrooms, a parlour, the kitchen and a dark room. The first habitation was the parlour, furnished with a pine bureau, a sofa, several straw chairs and a green mirror stuck with chromos and photographs and covered with red netting. The cobbler's family used the parlour as the dining-room on Sundays, because it was the lightest and the most spacious of their rooms.
When Manuel and Vidal arrived the family had been waiting for them a long time. They all sat down to table, and Salomé, the cobbler's sister-in-law, took charge of serving the meal. She resembled very closely her sister, the mother of Vidal. Both, of medium height, had short, saucy noses and black, pretty eyes; despite this physical similarity, however, their appearance differentiated them sharply. Vidal's mother,—called Leandra,—untidy, unkempt, loathsome, and betraying traces of ill humour, seemed much older than Salomé, although but three or four years separated them. Salomé had a merry, resolute air.
Yet, consider the irony of fate! Leandra, despite her slovenly ways, her sour disposition and her addiction to drink, was married to a good hardworking man, while Salomé, endowed with excellent gifts of industriousness and sweet temper, had wound up by going to live with an outcast who made his way by swindling, pilfering and browbeating and who had given her two children. Her humble or servile spirit, confronted with this wild, independent nature, made Salomé adore her man, and she deceived herself into considering him a tremendous, energetic fellow, though he was in all truth a coward and a tramp. The bully had seen just how matters stood, and whenever it pleased him he would stamp into the house and demand the pay that Salomé earned by sewing at the machine, at five céntimos per two yards. Unresistingly she handed him the product of her sweating toil, and many a time the ruffian, not content with depriving her of the money, gave her a beating into the bargain.
Salomé's two children were not today in Señor Ignacio's home; on Sundays, after dressing them very neatly, their mother would send them to a relative of hers,—the proprietress of a workshop,—where they spent the afternoon.
At the meal Manuel listened to the conversation without taking part. They were discussing one of the girls of the neighbourhood who had run off with a wealthy horse-dealer, a married man with a family.
"She did wisely," declared Leandra, draining a glass of wine.
"If she didn't know he was married…."
"What's the difference?" retorted Leandra with an air of unconcern.
"Plenty. How would you like a woman to carry off your husband?" Salomé asked her sister.
"Psch!"
"Yes, nowadays, we know," interrupted Señor Ignacio's mother. "Of two women there isn't one that's respectable."
"A great ways any one'll go by being respectable," snarled Leandra. "Poverty and hunger…. If a woman weren't to get married, then she might make a change and even acquire money."
"I don't see how," asserted Salomé.
"How? Even if she had to go into the business."
Señor Ignacio, disgusted, turned his head away from his wife, and his elder son, Leandro, eyed his mother grimly, severely.
"Bah, that's all talk," argued Salomé, who wished to thresh the matter out impersonally. "You'd hardly like it just the same if folks were to insult you wherever you went."
"Me? Much I care what folks say to me!" replied the cobbler's wife. "Stuff and nonsense! If they call me a loose woman, and if I'm not, why, you see: a floral wreath. And if I am,—it's all the same in the end."
Señor Ignacio, offended, shifted the conversation to the crime on Pañuelas Street; a jealous organ-grinder had slain his sweetheart for a harsh word and the hearers were excited over the case, each offering his opinion. The meal over, Señor Ignacio, Leandro, Vidal and Manuel went out to the gallery to have a nap while the women remained inside gossiping.
All the neighbours had brought their sleeping-mats out, and in their undershirts, half naked, some seated, others stretched out, they were dozing on the galleries.
"Hey, you," said Vidal to Manuel. "Let's be off."
"Where?"
"To the Pirates. We meet today. They must be waiting for us already."
"What do you mean,—pirates?"
"Bizco and the others."
"And why do they call 'em that?"
"Because they're like the old time pirates."
Manuel and Vidal stepped into the patio and leaving the house, walked off down Embajadores lane.
"They call us the Pirates," explained Vidal, "from a certain battle of stones we had. Some of the kids from the Paseo de las Acacias had got some sticks and formed a company with a Spanish flag at the head; then I, Bizco, and three or four others, began to throw stones at them and made them retreat. The Corretor, a fellow who lives in our house, and who saw us chasing after them, said to us: 'Say, are you pirates or what? For, if you're pirates you ought to fly the black flag. Well, next day I swiped a dark apron from my father and I tied it to a stick and we got after the kids with the Spanish flag and came near making them surrender it. That's why they call us the Pirates."
The two cousins came to a tiny, squalid district.
"This is the Casa del Cabrero," said Vidal. "And here are our chums."
So it proved; the entire pirate gang was here encamped. Manuel now made the acquaintance of El Bizco, a cross-eyed species of chimpanzee, square-shaped, husky, long-armed, with misshapen legs and huge red hands.
"This is my cousin," added Vidal, introducing Manuel to the gang; and then, to make him seem interesting, he told how Manuel had come to the house with two immense lumps that he had received in a Homeric struggle with a man.
Bizco stared closely at Manuel, and seeing that Manuel, on his side, was observing him calmly, averted his gaze. Bizco's face possessed the interest of a queer animal or of a pathological specimen. His narrow forehead, his flat nose, his thick lips, his freckled skin and his red, wiry hair lent him the appearance of a huge, red baboon.
As soon as Vidal had arrived, the gang mobilized and all the ragamuffins went foraging through la Casa del Cabrero.
This was the name given to a group of low tenement hovels that bounded a long, narrow patio. At this hot hour the men and women, stretched out half naked on the ground, were sleeping in the shade as in a trance. Some women, in shifts, huddled into a circle of four or five, were smoking the same cigar, each taking a puff and passing it along from hand to hand.
A swarm of naked brats infested the place; they were the colour of the soil, most of them black, some fair, with blue eyes. As if already they felt the degradation of their poverty, these urchins neither shouted nor frolicked about the yard.
A few lasses of ten to fourteen were chatting in a group. Bizco, Vidal and the rest of the gang gave chase to them around the patio. The girls, half naked, dashed off, shrieking and shouting insults.
Bizco boasted that he had violated some of the girls.
"They're all puchereras like the ones on Ceres Street," said one of the Pirates.
"So they make pots, do they?" inquired Manuel.
"Yes. Fine pots, all right!"
"Then why do you call them puchereras?"
"Becau—" added the urchin, and he made a coarse gesture.
"Because they're a sly bunch," stammered Bizco. "You're awful simple."
Manuel contemplated Bizco scornfully, and asked his cousin:
"Do you mean to say that those little girls…?"
"They and their mothers," answered Vidal philosophically. "Almost all of 'em that live here."
The Pirates left the Casa del Cabrero, descended an embarkment after passing a high, black fence, and at the middle of Casa Blanca turned into the Paseo de Yeserías.
They approached the morgue, a white structure near the river, situated at the foot of the Dehesa del Canal. They circled around it, trying to catch a glimpse of some corpse, but the windows were closed.
They continued along the banks of the Manzanares, amidst the twisted pines of la Dehesa. The river ran very thin, consisting of a few threads of murky water and pools above the mud.
At the end of the Dehesa de la Arganzuela, opposite a large, spacious lot surrounded by a fence made of flattened oil cans nailed to posts, the gang paused to inspect the place, whose wide area was taken up with watering-carts, mechanical sweepers, ditch pumps, heaps of brooms and other tools and appurtenances of municipal cleanliness.
In one corner of the lot arose a white edifice that, judging from its two towers and the vacant belfries, had formerly been a church or a convent.
The gang went nosing about the place and passed under an arch bearing the inscription: "Stallion Stables." Behind the structure that looked like a convent they came upon some shanties furnished with filthy, grimy mats: African huts built upon a framework of rough sticks and cane.
Bizco went into one of these hovels and returned with a piece of cod in his hand.
Manuel was overcome by a horrible fear.
"I'm going," he said to Vidal.
"What do you mean!…" exclaimed one of the gang ironically. "Much nerve you've got!"
All at once another of the urchins cried:
"Skip. Somebody's coming!"
The pirates started on a run down the Paseo del Canal.
Madrid, with its yellowish dwellings veiled in a cloud of dust, came into view. The high window-panes were aglow with the reflection of the setting sun. From the Paseo del Canal, crossing a stubble patch, they reached the Plaza de las Peñuelas, then, after going up another street they climbed the Paseo de las Acacias.
They entered the Corralón. Manuel and Vidal, after having arranged to meet the gang on the following Sunday, climbed the stairway to Señor Ignacio's house and as they drew near to the cobbler's door they heard cries.
"Father's giving the old lady a beating," murmured Vidal. "There won't be much to eat today. I'm going off to sleep."
"And how do I get to the other house?" asked Manuel.
"All you have to do is walk along the Ronda until you reach the Aguila street stairway. You can't miss it."
Manuel followed the directions. It was fearfully hot; the air was thick with dust. A few men were playing cards in tavern doorways, and in others they were dancing in embrace to the strains of a barrel-organ.
When Manuel reached the Aguila Street stairway it was getting dark. He sat down to rest a while in the Campillo de Gil Imón. From this elevated point could be seen the yellowish country, growing darker and darker with approaching night, and the chimneys and housetops sharply outlined against the horizon. The sky, blue and green above, was flushed with red nearer the earth; it darkened and assumed sinister hues,—coppery reds, purplish reds.
Above the mudwalls jutted the turrets and the cypresses of San Isidro cemetery; a round cupola stood out clearly in the atmosphere; at its top rose an angel with wings outspread, as if about to take flight against the flaming, blood-red background of evening.
Above the embanked clouds of the twilight shone a pale star in a green border, and on the horizon, animated by the last breath of day, could be discerned the hazy silhouettes of distant mountains.
CHAPTER II
The "Big Yard," or Uncle Rilo's House—Local Enmities.
When Salomé finished her sewing and went off to Aguila Street to sleep, Manuel definitively settled in the home of Uncle Rilo, of Embajadores lane. Some called this La Corrala, others, El Corralón, still others, La Piltra, and it boasted so many other names that it seemed as if the neighbours spent hours and hours thinking up new designations for it.
The Corralón (Big yard)—this was the best known name of Uncle Rilo's lair,—fronted the Paseo de las Acacias, but it was not in the direct line of this thoroughfare, as it set somewhat back. The façade of this tenement, low, narrow, kalso-mined, indicated neither the depth nor the size of the building; the front revealed a few ill-shaped windows and holes unevenly arranged, while a doorless archway gave access to a narrow passage paved with cobblestones; this, soon widening, formed a patio surrounded by high, gloomy walls.
From the sides of the narrow entrance passage rose brick stairways leading to open galleries that ran along the three stories of the house and returned to the patio. At intervals, in the back of these galleries, opened rows of doors painted blue with a black number on the lintel of each.
Between the lime and the bricks of the walls stuck out, like exposed bones, jamb-posts and crossbeams, surrounded by lean bass ropes. The gallery columns, as well as the lintels and the beams that supported them, must formerly have been painted green, but as the result of the constant action of sun and rain only a stray patch of the original colour remained.
The courtyard was always filthy; in one corner lay a heap of useless scraps covered by a sheet of zinc; one could make out grimy cloths, decayed planks, debris, bricks, tiles, baskets: an infernal jumble. Every afternoon some of the women would do their washing in the patio, and when they finished their work they would empty their tubs on to the ground, and the big pools, on drying, would leave white stains and indigo rills of bluing. The neighbours also had the habit of throwing their rubbish anywhere at all, and when it rained—since the mouth of the drain would always become clogged—an unbearable, pestilential odour would rise from the black, stagnant stream that inundated the patio, and on its surface floated cabbage leaves and greasy papers.
Each neighbour could leave his tools and things in the section of the gallery that bounded his dwelling; from the looks of this area one might deduce the grade of poverty or relative comfort of each family,—its predilections and its tastes.
This space usually revealed an attempt at cleanliness and a curious aspect; here the wall was whitewashed, there hung a cage,—a few flowers in earthenware pots; elsewhere a certain utilitarian instinct found vent in the strings of garlic put out to dry or clusters of grape suspended; beyond, a carpenter's bench and a tool-chest gave evidence of the industrious fellow who worked during his free hours.
In general, however, one could see only dirty wash hung out on the balustrades, curtains made of mats, quilts mended with patches of ill-assorted colors, begrimed rags stretched over broomsticks or suspended from ropes tied from one post to the other, that they might get a trifle more light and air.
Every section of the gallery was a manifestation of a life apart within this communism of hunger; this edifice contained every grade and shade of poverty: from the heroic, garbed in clean, decent tatters, to the most nauseating and repulsive.
In the majority of the rooms and holes of La Corrala one was struck immediately by the resigned, indolent indigence combined with organic and moral impoverishment.
In the space belonging to the cobbler's family, at the tip of a very long pole attached to one of the pillars, waved a pair of patch-covered trousers comically balancing itself.
Off from the large courtyard of El Corralón branched a causeway heaped with ordure, leading to a smaller courtyard that in winter was converted into a fetid swamp.
A lantern, surrounded with a wire netting to prevent the children from breaking it with stones, hung from one of the black walls.
In the inner courtyard the rooms were much cheaper than those of the large patio; most of them brought twenty-three reales, but there were some for two or three pesetas per month: dismal dens with no ventilation at all, built in the spaces under stairways and under the roof.
In some moister climate La Corrala would have been a nest of contagion: the wind and sun of Madrid, however,—that sun which brings blisters to the skin,—saw to the disinfection of that pesthole.
As if to make sure that terror and tragedy should haunt the edifice, one saw, on entering,—either at the main door or in the corridor,—a drunken, delirious hag who begged alms and spat insults at everybody. They called her Death. She must have been very old, or at least appeared so. Her gaze was wandering, her look diffident, her face purulent with scabs; one of her lower eyelids, drawn in as the result of some ailment, exposed the bloody, turbid inside of her eyeball. Death would stalk about in her tatters, in house slippers, with a tin-box and an old basket into which she gathered her findings. Through certain superstitious considerations none dared to throw her into the street.
On his very first night in La Corrala Manuel verified, not without a certain astonishment, the truth of what Vidal had told him. That youngster, and almost all the gamins of his age, had sweethearts among the little girls of the tenement, and it was not a rare occurrence, as he passed by some nook, to come upon a couple that jumped up and ran away.
The little children amused themselves playing bull-fight, and among the most-applauded feats was that of Don Tancredo. One tot would get down on all fours, and another, not very heavy, would mount him and fold his arms, thrust back his chest and place a three-cornered hat of paper upon his erect, haughty head.
He who was playing the bull would approach, roar loudly, sniff Don Tancredo and pass by without throwing him over; a couple of times he would repeat this, and then dash off. Whereupon Don Tancredo would dismount from his living pedestal to receive the plaudits of the public. There were wily, waggish bulls who took it into their heads to pull both statue and pedestal to the ground, and this would be received amidst shouts and huzzahs of the spectators.
In the meantime the girls would be playing in a ring, the women would shout from gallery to gallery and the men would chat in their shirtsleeves; some fellow, squatting on the floor, would scrape away monotonously at the strings of a guitar.
La Muerte, the old beggar, would also cheer the evening gatherings with her long discourse.
La Corrala was a seething, feverish world in little, as busy as an anthill. There people toiled, idled, guzzled, ate and died of hunger; there furniture was made, antiques were counterfeited, old embroideries were fashioned, buns cooked, broken porcelain mended, robberies planned and women's favours traded.
La Corrala was a microcosm; it was said that if all the denizens were placed in line they would reach from Embajadores lane to the Plaza del Progreso; it harboured men who were everything and yet nothing: half scholars, half smiths, half carpenters, half masons, half business men, half thieves.
In general, everybody who lived here was disoriented, dwelling in that unending abjection produced by everlasting, irremediable poverty; many sloughed their occupations as a reptile its skin; others had none; some carpenters' or masons' helpers, because of their lack of initiative, understanding and skill, could never graduate from their apprenticeship. There were also gypsies, mule and dog clippers, nor was there a dearth of porters, itinerant barbers and mountebanks. Almost all of them, if opportunity offered, stole what they could; they all presented the same pauperized, emaciated look. And all harboured a constant rage that vented itself in furious imprecations and blasphemies.
They lived as if sunk in the shades of a deep slumber, unable to form any clear notion of their lives, without aspirations, aims, projects or anything.
There were some whom a couple of glasses of wine made drunk for half a week; others seemed already besotted, without having had a sip, and their countenances constantly mirrored the most absolute debasement, whence they escaped only in a fleeting moment of anger or indignation.
Money was to them, more often than not, a misfortune. Possessing an instinctive understanding of their weakness and their frail wills, they would resort to the tavern in quest of courage; there they would cast off all restraint, shout, argue, forget the sorrows of the moment, feel generous, and when, after having bragged to the top of their bent they believed themselves ready for anything, they discovered that they hadn't a céntimo and that the illusory strength imbibed with the alcohol was evaporating.
The women of the house, as a rule, worked harder than the men, and were almost always disputing. For thirty years past they had all shared the same character and represented almost the same type: foul, unkempt, termagacious, they—shrieked and grew desperate upon the slightest provocation.
From time to time, like a gentle sunbeam amidst the gloom, the souls of these stultified, bestial men,—of these women embittered by harsh lives that held neither solace nor illusion,—would be penetrated by a romantic, disinterested feeling of tenderness that made them live like human beings for a while; but when the gust of sentimentalism had blown over, they would return to their moral inertia, as resigned and passive as ever. The permanent neighbours of La Corrala were situated in the floors surrounding the large courtyard. In the other courtyard the majority were transients, and spent, at most, a couple of weeks in the house. Then, as the saying was among them, they spread wing.
One day a mender would appear with his huge bag, his brace and his pliers, shouting through the streets in a husky voice: "Jars and tubs to mend … pans, dishes and plates!" After a short stay he would be off; the following week arrived a dealer in cloth bargains, crying at the top of his lungs his silk handkerchiefs at ten and fifteen céntimos; another day came an itinerant hawker, his cases laden with pins, combs and brooches, or some purchaser of gold and silver braid. Certain seasons of the year brought a contingent of special types; spring announced itself through the appearance of mule dealers, tinkers, gypsies and bohemians; in autumn swarmed bands of rustics with cheese from La Mancha and pots of honey, while winter brought the walnut and chestnut vendors.
Of the permanent tenants in the first courtyard, those who were intimate with Señor Ignacio included: a proof-corrector, nick-named El Corretor; a certain Rebolledo, both barber and inventor, and four blind men, who were known by the sobriquets El Calabazas, El Sapistas, El Erigido and El Cuco and dwelt in harmony with their respective wives playing the latest tangos, tientos and zarzuela ditties on the streets.
The proof-reader had a numerous family: his wife, his mother-in-law, a daughter of twenty and a litter of tots; the pay he earned correcting proof at a newspaper office was not enough for his needs and he used to suffer dire straits. He was in the habit of wearing a threadbare macfarland,—frayed at the edges,—a large, dirty handkerchief tied around his throat, and a soft, yellow, grimy slouch hat.
His daughter, Milagros by name, a slender lass as sleek as a bird, had relations with Leandro, Manual's cousin.
The sweethearts had plenty of love quarrels, now because of her flirtations, now because of the evil life he led.
They could not get along, for Milagros was a bit haughty and a climber, considering herself a social superior fallen upon evil days, while Leandro, on the other hand, was abrupt and irascible.
The cobbler's other neighbour, Señor Zurro, a quaint, picturesque type, had nothing to do with Señor Ignacio and felt for the proof-reader a most cordial hatred. El Zurro went about forever concealed behind a pair of blue spectacles, wearing a fur cap and ample cassock.
"His name is Zurro (fox)," the proof-reader would say, "but he's a fox in his actions as well; one of those country foxes that are masters of malice and trickery."
According to popular rumour, El Zurro knew what he was about; he had a place at the lower end of the Rastro, a dark, pestilent hovel cluttered with odds and ends, second-hand coats, remnants of old cloth, tapestries, parts of chasubles, and in addition, empty bottles, flasks full of brandy and cognac, seltzer water siphons, shattered clocks, rusty muskets, keys, pistols, buttons, medals and other frippery.
Despite the fact that surely no more than a couple of persons entered Señor Zurro's shop throughout the livelong day and spent no more than a couple of reales, the second-hand dealer thrived.
He lived with his daughter Encarna, a coarse specimen of some twenty-five years, exceedingly vulgar and the personification of insolence, who went walking with her father on Sundays, bedecked with jewelry. Encarna's bosom was consumed with the fires of passion for Leandro; but that ingrate, enamoured of Milagros, was unscathed by the soul-flames of the second-hand dealer's daughter.
Wherefore Encarna mortally hated Milagros and the members of her family; every hour of the day she branded them as vulgarians, starvelings, and insulted them with such scoffing sobriquets as Mendrugo, "Beggar's Crumb," which was applied by her to the proof-reader, and "The Madwoman of the Vatican," which meant his daughter.
It was not at all rare for such hatreds, between persons forced almost into living in common, to grow to violent rancour and malevolence; thus, the members of one and the other family never looked at each other without exchanging curses and wishes for the most disastrous misfortunes.
CHAPTER III
Roberto Hastings at the Shoemaker's—Procession of Beggars—Court of Miracles.
One morning toward the end of September Roberto appeared in the doorway of The Regeneration of Footwear, and thrusting his head into the shop exclaimed:
"Hello, Manuel!"
"Hello, Don Roberto!"
"Working, eh?"
Manuel shrugged his shoulders, indicating that the job was not exactly to his taste.
Roberto hesitated for a moment, but at last made up his mind and entered the shop.
"Have a seat," invited Señor Ignacio, offering him a chair.
"Are you Manuel's uncle?"
"At your service."
Roberto sat down, offered a cigar to Señor Ignacio and another to
Leandro, and the three began to smoke.
"I know your nephew," said Roberto to the proprietor, "for I live in the house where Petra works."
"You do?"
"And I wish you'd let him off today for a couple of hours."
"All right, señor. All afternoon, if you wish."
"Fine. Then I'll call for him after lunch."
"Very well."
Roberto watched them work for a while, then suddenly jumped up and left.
Manuel could not understand what Roberto wanted, and in the afternoon waited for him with genuine impatience. Roberto carne, and the pair turned out of Aguila Street down toward the Ronda de Segovia.
"Do you know where La Doctrina is?" Roberto asked Manuel.
"What Doctrina?"
"A place where herds of beggars meet every Friday."
"I don't know."
"Do you know where the San Isidro highway is?"
"Yes."
"Good. For that's where we're going. That's where La Doctrina is."
Manuel and Roberto walked down the Paseo de los Pontones and continued in the direction of Toledo Bridge. The student was silent and Manuel did not care to ask any questions.
It was a dry, dusty day. The stifling south wind whirled puffs of heat and sand; a stray bolt of lightning illuminated the clouds; from the distance came the rumble of thunder; the landscape lay yellow under a blanket of dust.
Over the Toledo Bridge trudged a procession of beggars, both men and women, each dirtier and more tattered than the next. Out of las Cambroneras and las Injurias streamed recruits for this ragged army; they came, too, from the Paseo Imperial and from Ocho Hilos, and by this time forming solid ranks, they trooped on to the Toledo Bridge and tramped up the San Isidro highway until they reached a red edifice, before which they came to a halt.
"This must be La Doctrina," said Roberto to Manuel, pointing to a building that had a patio with a statue of Christ in the centre.
The two friends drew near to the gate. This was a beggars' conclave, a Court of Miracles assembly. The women took up almost the entire courtyard; at one end, near a chapel, the men were huddled together; one could see nothing but swollen, stupid faces, inflamed nostrils, and twisted mouths; old women as fat and clumsy as melancholy whales; little wizened, cadaverous hags with sunken mouths and noses like the beak of a bird of prey; shamefaced female mendicants, their wrinkled chins bristling with hair, their gaze half ironical and half shy; young women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of the countrywomen.
Roberto sauntered about, peering eagerly info the courtyard. Manuel trailed after him indifferently.
A large number of the beggars was blind; there were cripples, minus hand or foot, some hieratic, taciturn, solemn, others restless. Brown long-sleeved loose coats mingled with frayed sack-coats and begrimed smocks. Some of the men in tatters carried, slung over their shoulders, black sacks and game-bags; others huge cudgels in their hands; one burly negro, his face tattooed with deep stripes,—doubtless a slave in former days,—leaned against the wall in dignified indifference, clothed in rags; barefoot urchins and mangy dogs scampered about amongst the men and women; the swarming, agitated, palpitating throng of beggars seethed like an anthill.
"Let's go," said Roberto. "Neither of the women I'm looking for is here…. Did you notice," he added, "how few human faces there are among men! All you can read in the features of these wretches is mistrust, abjection, malice, just as among the rich you find only solemnity, gravity, pedantry. It's curious, isn't it? All cats have the face of cats; all oxen look like oxen; while the majority of human beings haven't a human semblance."
Roberto and Manuel left the patio. They sat down opposite La Doctrina, on the other side of the road, amid some sandy clearings.
"These doings of mine," began Roberto, "may strike you as queer. But they won't seem so strange when I tell you that I'm looking for two women here; one of them a poor beggar who can make me rich; the other, a rich lady, who perhaps would make me poor."
Manuel stared at Roberto in amazement. He had always harboured a certain suspicion that there was something wrong with the student's head.
"No. Don't imagine this is silly talk. I'm on the trail of a fortune,—a huge fortune. If you help me, I'll remember you."
"Sure. What do you want me to do?"
"I'll tell you when the right moment comes."
Manuel could not conceal an ironic smile.
"You don't believe it," muttered Roberto.
"That doesn't matter. When you'll see, you'll believe."
"Naturally."
"If I should happen to need you, promise you'll help me."
"I'll help you as far as I am able," replied Manuel, with feigned earnestness.
Several ragamuffins sprawled themselves out on the clearing near Manuel and Roberto, and the student did not care to go on with his tale.
"They've already begun to split up into divisions," said one of the loafers who wore a coachman's hat, pointing with a stick to the women inside the courtyard of La Doctrina.
And so it was; groups were clustering about the trees of the patio, on each of which was hung a poster with a picture and a number in the middle.
"There go the marchionesses," added he of the coachman's hat, indicating several women garbed in black who had just appeared in the courtyard.
The white faces stood out amidst the mourning clothes.
"They're all marchionesses," said one.
"Well, they're not all beauties," retorted Manuel, joining the conversation. "What have they come here for?"
"They're the ones who teach religion," answered the fellow with the hat. "From time to time they hand out sheets and underwear to the women and the men. Now they're going to call the roll."
A bell began to clang; the gate closed; groups were formed, and a lady entered the midst of each.
"Do you see that one there?" asked Roberto. "She's Don Telmo's niece."
"That blonde?"
"Yes. Wait for me here."
Roberto walked down the road toward the gate.
The reading of the religious lesson began; from the patio came the slow, monotonous drone of prayer.
Manuel lay back on the ground. Yonder, flat beneath the grey horizon, loomed Madrid out of the mist of the dust-laden atmosphere. The wide bed of the Manzanares river, ochre-hued, seemed furrowed here and there by a thread of dark water. The ridges of the Guadarrama range rose hazily into the murky air.
Roberto passed by the patio. The humming of the praying mendicants continued. An old lady, her head swathed in a red kerchief and her shoulders covered with a black cloak that was fading to green, sat down in the clearing.
"What's the matter, old lady? Wouldn't they open the gate for you?" shouted the fellow with the coachman's hat.
"No…. The foul old witches!"
"Don't you care. They're not giving away anything today. The distribution takes place this coming Friday. They'll give you at least a sheet," added he of the hat mischievously.
"If they don't give me anything more than a sheet," shrilled the hag, twisting her blobber-lip, "I'll tell them to keep it for themselves. The foxy creatures! …"
"Oh, they've found you out, granny!" exclaimed one of the loafers lying on the ground. "You're a greedy one, you are."
The bystanders applauded these words, which came from a zarzuela, and the chap in the coachman's hat continued explaining to Manuel the workings of La Doctrina.
"There are some men and women who enrol in two and even three divisions so as to get all the charity they can," he went on. "Why, we—my father and I—once enrolled in four divisions under four different names…. And what a rumpus was raised! What a row we had with the marchionesses!"
"And what did you want with all those sheets," Manuel asked him.
"Why! Sell 'em, of course. They re sold here at the very gate at two chulés apiece."
"I'm going to buy one," said a coachman from a nearby hackstand, approaching the group. "I'll give it a coating of linseed oil, then varnish it and make me a cowled waterproof."
"But the marchionesses,—don't they see that these people sell their gifts right away?"
"Much they see!"
To these idlers the whole business was nothing more than a pious recreation of the religious ladies, of whom they spoke with patronizing irony.
The reading of the religious lesson did not last quite an hour.
A bell rang; the gate was swung open; the various groups dissolved and merged; everybody arose and the women began to walk off, balancing their chairs upon their heads, shouting, shoving one another violently; two or three huckstresses peddled their wares as the tattered crowd issued through the gate in a jam, shrieking as if in escape from some imminent danger. A few old women ran clumsily down the road; others huddled into a corner to urinate, and all of them were howling at the top of their lungs, overcome by the necessity of insulting the women of La Doctrina, as if instinctively they divined the uselessness of a sham charity that remedied nothing. One heard only protests and manifestation of scorn.
"Damn it all! These women of God…."
"And they want a body to have faith in 'em."
"The old drunkards."
"Let them have faith, and the mother that bore 'em."
"Let 'em give blood-pudding to everybody."
After the women came the men,—blind, maimed, crippled,—in leisurely fashion, and conversing solemnly.
"Huh! They don't want me to marry!" grumbled a blind fellow, sarcastically, turning to a cripple.
"And what do you say," asked the latter.
"I? What the deuce! Let them get married if they have any one to marry 'em. They came here and bore us stiff with their prayers and sermons. What we need isn't sermons, but hard cash and plenty of it."
"That's what, man … the dough,—that's what we want."
"And all the rest is nothing but … chatter and chin music…. Anybody can give advice. When it comes to bread, though, not a sign of it."
"So say I!"
The ladies came out, prayer-books in hand; the old beggar-women set off in pursuit and harassed them with entreaties.
Manuel looked everywhere for the student; at last he caught sight of him with Don Telmo's niece. The blonde turned around to look at him, and then stepped into a coach. Roberto saluted her and the coach rolled off.
Manuel and Roberto returned by the San Isidro highway.
The sky was still overcast; the air dry; the procession of beggars was
advancing in the direction of Madrid. Before they reached the Toledo
Bridge, at the intersection of the San Isidro highway and the
Extremadura cartroad, Roberto and Manuel entered a very large tavern.
Roberto ordered a bottle of beer.
"Do you live in the same house where the shoe shop is?" asked Roberto.
"No. I live over in the Paseo de las Acacias, in a house called El
Corralón."
"Good. I'll come to visit you there, and you already understand that whenever you happen to go to any place where poor folk or criminals gather, you're to let me know."
"I'll let you know. I was watching that blonde eye you. She's pretty."
"Yes."
"And she has a swell coach."
"I should say so."
"Well? Are you going to marry her?"
"What do I know? We'll see. Come, we can't stay here," said Roberto, stepping up to the counter to pay.
In the tavern a large number of beggars, seated at the tables, were gulping down slices of cod and scraps of meat; a piquant odour of fried bird-tripe and oil came from the kitchen.
They left. The wind still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through an atmosphere murky with dust.
Suddenly Roberto halted, and placing his hand upon Manuel's shoulder said:
"Listen to what I say, for it is the truth. If you ever want to accomplish anything in life, place no belief in the word 'impossible.' There's nothing impossible to an energetic will. If you try to shoot an arrow, aim very high,—as high as you can; the higher you aim, the farther you'll go."
Manuel stared at Roberto with a puzzled look, and shrugged his shoulders.