"You make me? … Why, you're nothing but a low-down lout, a thief—" and Manuel was advancing against El Carnicerín, when one of the fellow's friends gave him a punch in the head that stunned him. The boy made another attempt to rush upon the butcher's son; two or three guests pushed him out of the way and shoved him out on to the road at the door of the inn.
"Starveling! … Loafer!" shouted Manuel.
"You're one yourself," cried one of Justa's friends tauntingly after him. "Rabble! Guttersnipe!"
Manuel, filled with shame and thirsting for vengeance, still half dazed by the blow, thrust his cap down over his face and stamped along the road weeping with rage. Soon after he left he heard somebody running toward him from behind.
"Manuel, Manolillo," said Justa to him in an affectionate, jesting voice. "What's the matter?"
Manuel breathed heavily and a long sigh of grief escaped him.
"What's the matter? Come, let's return. We'll go together."
"No, no; go away from me."
He was at a loss; without another word he set off on a run toward
Madrid.
The wild flight dried his tears and rekindled his fury. He meant not to return to Señor Custodio's even if he died of hunger.
His rage rose in waves up his throat; he felt a blind madness, hazy notions of attacking, of destroying everything, of razing the world to the ground and disemboweling every living creature.
Mentally he promised El Carnicerín that if ever he met him alone, he would sink his claws into his neck and strangle him; he would split the fellow's head in two as they do to hogs, and would hang him up head downwards with a stick between his ribs and another in his intestines, and moreover, he'd place a tin box at his mouth into which his cursed pig's blood could drip.
Then he generalized his hatred and considered that society itself was against him, intent only upon plaguing him and denying him everything.
Very well, then; he would go against society, he would join El Bizco and assassinate right and left, and when, wearied of committing so many crimes, he would be led to the scaffold, he would look scornfully down from the platform upon the people below and die with a supreme gesture of hatred and disdain.
While all these thoughts of wholesale extermination thronged in his brain, night was falling. Manuel walked up to the Plaza de Oriente and followed thence along Arenal Street.
A strip of the Puerta del Sol was being asphalted; ten or twelve furnaces ranged in a row were belching thick acrid smoke through their chimneys. The white illumination of the arc-lights had not yet been turned on; the silhouettes of a number of men who were stirring with long shovels the mass of asphalt in the caldrons danced diabolically up and down before the flaming mouths of the furnaces.
Manuel approached one of the caldrons when suddenly he heard his name called. It was El Bizco; he was seated upon some paving blocks.
"What are you doing here?" Manuel asked him.
"We've been thrown out of the caves," answered El Bizco, "and it's cold. What about you? Have you left the house?"
"Yes."
"Have a seat."
Manuel sat down and rested his back against a keg of asphalt.
Lights began to sparkle in the balconies of the residences and in the shop windows; the street cars arrived gently, as if they were vessels floating in, with their yellow, green and red lanterns; their bells rang and they traced graceful circles around the Puerta del Sol. Carriages, horses, carts came rattling by; the itinerant hawkers cried their wares from their sidewalk stands; there was a deafening din…. At the end of one street, against the coppery splendour of the dusk stood out the tapering outlines of a belfry.
"And don't you ever see Vidal?" asked Manuel.
"No. See here, Have you got any money?" blurted El Bizco.
"Twenty or thirty céntimos at most."
"Fine."
Manuel bought a loaf of bread, which he gave to El Bizco, and the two drank a glass of brandy in a tavern. Then they went wandering about the streets and, at about eleven, returned to the Puerta del Sol.
Around the asphalt caldrons had gathered knots of men and tattered gamins; some were sleeping with their heads bent against the furnace as if they were about to attack it in bull fashion. The ragamuffins were talking and shouting, and they laughed at the passers-by who came over out of curiosity for a closer look.
"We sleep just as if we were in the open country," said one of the idlers.
"It wouldn't be at all bad," added another, "to take a walk now over to the Plaza Mayor and see whether they wouldn't give us a pound of ham."
"It has trichinae in it, anyway."
"Take care of that spring-matress," bellowed a flat-nosed gamin who was going about striking the sleepers with a stick in the shins. "Hey, there, you're rumpling the sheets!"
At Manuel's side, a rachetic urchin with thick lips and streaked eyes and one of his feet bandaged in dirty rags, was crying and groaning; Manuel, engrossed in his own thoughts, had not noticed him before.
"Some howling you're doing," came to the sufferer from a boy who was stretched out on the ground with his legs cramped close to his chest and his head pillowed against a rock.
"It hurts like anything."
"Then shut up, grin and bear it. Hang yourself."
Manuel thought that he heard El Carnicerín's voice and glanced toward the speaker. The fellow's hat was pulled down over his eyes and his face was not visible.
"Who's that?" asked Manuel of El Bizco.
"He's the captain of the cave gang: El Interprete."
"And what's he talking to the kid like that for?"
El Bizco shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of indifference.
"What's' the trouble?" Manuel inquired of the boy.
"I have a wound in my foot," replied the child, bursting again into tears.
"Shut up, I tell you," interrupted El Interprete, aiming a kick at the sufferer, who managed to escape the blow. "Go tell your troubles to your bitch of a mother…. Damn it all! It's impossible to sleep here."
"Then to hell with you!" shouted Manuel.
"Who are you talking to?" demanded El Interprete, shoving his cap back on his head and revealing a brutish face with a flat nose and high cheekbones.
"To you, you thief, you coward!"
El Interprete sprang to his feet and strode over to Manuel, who, in an excess of fury seized him with both hands by the neck, kicked him in the leg with his right heel, made him lose his balance and threw him to the ground. There he thumped him violently. El Interprete, more muscular than Manuel, was able to get to his feet again; but he had lost his nerve and Manuel, gathering strength from his anger, threw him down a second time and was about to crash a rock into his face when a pair of municipal guards happened along and kicked them apart. El Interprete went off disgraced.
The members of the crowd calmed down and went off, one after the other, to resume their positions around the caldron.
Manuel sat down upon some paving blocks; the struggle had wiped out the memory of the blow he had received that afternoon; he felt brave and in a jesting mood, so, facing the curiosity-hunters that were watching the group, some laughing and others eyeing the urchins with pity, he addressed them.
"The session is about to close," he said. "Now we shall begin the community singing lessons. We're about to commence snoring, ladies and gentlemen. Let the public have no fear. We'll take good care of the bedsheets. Tomorrow we'll send them to the river to be washed. Now is the time. Whoever so desires," and he pointed to a rock, "may take advantage of these pillows. They're excellent pillows, such as are used by the Marquises of Archipipi. Whoever doesn't wish to sleep on them, let him be gone and not bother us. Ea! Gentlemen! If you don't pay I'll summon the servant and tell her to close…."
"It's the same with all of them," said one of the ragamuffins. "They talk nonsense when they get sleepy. They all look as if they were starved."
Manuel felt as garrulous as a mountebank. When he had wearied, he leaned against a heap of stones and with arms crossed prepared to sleep.
Shortly after this the group of curiosity-hunters had dispersed; only a guard and an old gentleman were left, and they discussed the ragamuffins in tones of pity.
The gentleman deplored the way these children were abandoned and said that in other countries they built schools and asylums and a thousand other things. The guard shook his head dubiously. At last he summed up the conversation, saying in the tranquil manner of a Galician:
"Take my word for it: there's no good left in any of them."
Manuel, hearing this, began to tremble; he arose from his place on the ground, left the Puerta del Sol and began to wander aimlessly about.
"There's no good left in any of them!" The remark had made a deep impression upon him. Why wasn't he good? Why? He examined his life. He wasn't bad, he had harmed nobody. He hated El Carnicerín because that fellow had robbed him of happiness, had made it impossible for him to go on living in the one corner where he had found some affection and shelter. Then contradicting himself, he imagined that perhaps he was bad after all, and in this case the most he could do was to reform and become better.
Absorbed in these reflections, he was passing along Alcalá Street when he heard his name called several times. It was La Mellá and La Rabanitos, skulking in a doorway.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"Nothing, man. Just a word with you. Have you come into your money yet?"
"No. What are you doing?"
"Hiding here," answered La Mellá.
"Why, what's the trouble?"
"There's a round-up, and that skunk of an inspector wants to take us to the station, even if we do pay him. Keep us company!"
Manuel accompanied them for a while; but they both picked up a couple of men on the way and he was left alone. He returned to the Puerta del Sol.
The night seemed to him endless; he walked around and walked yet again; the electric lights were extinguished, the street-cars stopped running, the square was left in darkness.
Between Montera and Alcalá Streets there was a café before whose illuminated windows women passed up and down dressed in bright clothes and wearing crape kerchiefs, singing, accosting benighted passers-by; several loafers, lurking behind the lanterns, watched them and chatted with them, giving them orders….
Then came a procession of street-women, touts and procurers. All of parasitical, indolent, gay Madrid issued forth at these hours from the taverns, the dens, the gambling-houses, the dives and vice resorts, and amidst the poverty and misery that throbbed in the thoroughfares these night-owls strutted by with their lighted cigars, conversing, laughing, joking with the prostitutes, indifferent to the agony of all these ragged, hungry, shelterless wretches who, shivering with the cold, sought refuge in the doorways.
A few old strumpets remained at the street-corners, wrapped in their cloaks, smoking….
It was long before the heavens grew bright; it was still night when the coffee stands were opened, and the coachmen and ragamuffins went up for their cup or glass. The gas lamps were extinguished.
The light from the watchmen's lanterns danced across the grey pavement, which already was dimly lighted by the pale glow of dawn, and the black silhouettes of the ragdealers stood out against the heaps of ordure as they bent over to take the rubbish. Now and then some pale benighted fellow with his coat collar raised, would glide by as sinister as an owl before the growing light and soon some workmen passed…. Industrious, honest; Madrid was preparing for its hard daily task.
This transition from the feverish turmoil of night to the calm, serene activity of morning plunged Manuel into profound thought.
He understood that the existence of the night-owls and that of the working folk were parallel lives that never for an instant met. For the ones, pleasure, vice, the night; for the others, labour, fatigue, the sun. And it seemed to him, too, that he should belong to the second class, to the folk who toil in the sun, not to those who dally in the shadows.
END OF "TO BUSCA,"
(THE QUEST)
The second volume of the trilogy is called "Mala Hierba" (Weeds); the third, "Aurora Roja" (Red Dawn).