The Quest Part 3

Manuel's mother had a relation, her husband's cousin, who was a cobbler. Petra had decided, some days previously, to give Manuel into apprenticeship at the shoe-shop; but she still hoped the boy would be convinced that it was better for him to study something than to learn a trade, and this hope had deterred her from the resolution to send the boy to her relative's house.

Persuading the landlady to permit Manuel to remain in the house cost Petra no little labour, but at last she succeeded. It was agreed that the boy would run errands and help to serve meals. Then when the vacation season had pa.s.sed, he would resume his studies.

On the day following his arrival the youngster a.s.sisted his mother at the table.

All the borders, except the Baroness and her girl, were seated in the dining-room, presided over by the landlady with her wrinkle-fretted, parchment-hued face and its thirty-odd moles.

The dining-room, a long, narrow habitation with a window opening on the courtyard, communicated with two narrow corridors that switched off at right angles; facing the window stood a dark walnut sideboard whose shelves were laden with porcelain, gla.s.sware and cups and gla.s.ses in a row. The centre table was so large for such a small room that when the boarders were seated it scarcely left s.p.a.ce for pa.s.sage at the ends.

The yellow wall-paper, torn in many spots, displayed, at intervals, grimy circles from the oil of the lodgers' hair; reclining in their seats they would rest the back of the chairs and their heads against the wall.

The furniture, the straw chairs, the paintings, the mat full of holes,--everything in that room was filthy, as if the dust of many years had settled upon the articles and clung to the sweat of several generations of lodgers.

By day the dining-room was dark; by night it was lighted by a flickering kerosene lamp that smudged the ceiling with smoke.

The first time that Manuel, following his mother's instructions, served at table, the landlady, as usual, presided. At her right sat an old gentleman of cadaverous aspect,--a very fastidious personage who conscientiously wiped the gla.s.ses and plates with his napkin. By his side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of b.e.s.t.i.a.l appearance, with a huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat as a toad, was Dona Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now Dona Violent and now Dona Violated.

Near Dona Violante were grouped her daughters; then a priest who prattled incessantly, a journalist whom they called the Superman,--a very fair youth, exceedingly thin and exceedingly serious,--the salesmen and the bookkeeper.

Manuel served the soup and all the boarders took it, sipping it with a disagreeable inhalation. Then, according to his mother's orders, the youngster remained standing there. Now followed the beans which, if not for their size then for their hardness might have figured in an artillery park, and one of the boarders permitted himself some pleasantry about the edibleness of so petreous a vegetable; a pleasantry that glided over the impa.s.sive countenance of Dona Casiana without leaving the slightest trace.

Manuel sat about observing the boarders. It was the day after the conspiracy; Dona Violante and her daughters were incommunicative and in ugly humour. Dona Violante's inflated face at every moment creased into a frown, and her restless, turbid eyes betrayed deep preoccupation. Celia, the elder of the daughters, annoyed by the priest's jests, began to answer violently, cursing everything human and divine with a desperate, picturesque, raging hatred, which caused loud, universal laughter. Irene, the culprit of the previous night's scandal, a girl of some fifteen or sixteen years with a broad head, large hands and feet, an as yet incompletely developed body and heavy, ungainly movements, spoke scarcely a word and kept her gaze fixed upon her plate.

The meal at an end, the lodgers went off to their various tasks. At night Manuel served supper without dropping a thing or making a single mistake, but in five or six days he was forever doing things wrong.

It is impossible to judge how much of an impression was made upon the boy by the usage and customs of the boarding roost and the species of birds that inhabited it; but they could not have impressed him much.

Manuel, while he served at table in the days that followed, had to put up with and endless succession of remarks, jests and practical jokes.

A thousand incidents, comical enough to one who did not have to suffer them, turned up at every step; now they would discover tobacco in the soup, now coal, ashes, and shreds of coloured paper in the water-bottle.

One of the salesmen, who was troubled with his stomach and spent his days gazing at the reflection of his tongue in the mirror, would jump up in fury when one of these jokes was perpetrated, and ask the proprietress to discharge an incompetent b.o.o.by who committed such atrocities.

Manuel grew accustomed to these manifestations against his humble person, and when they scolded him he retorted with the most bare-faced impudence and indifference.

Soon he learned the life and miracles of every boarder and was ready to talk back in outrageous fashion if they tried his patience.

Dona Violante and her daughters,--especially the old lady, showed a great liking for the boy. The three women had now been living in the house for several months; they paid little and when they couldn't pay at all, they didn't. But they were easily satisfied. All three occupied an inner room that opened onto the courtyard, whence came a nauseating odour of fermented milk that escaped from the stable of the ground floor.

The hole in which they lived was not large enough to move about in; the room a.s.signed to them by the landlady--in proportion to the size of their rent and the insecurity of the payment--was a dark den occupied by two narrow iron beds, between which, in the little s.p.a.ce left, was crammed a cot.

Here slept these gallant dames; by day they scoured all Madrid, and spent their existence making arrangements with money-lenders, p.a.w.ning articles and taking them out of p.a.w.n.

The two young ladies, Celia and Irene, although they were mother and daughter, pa.s.sed for sisters. Dona Violante, in her better days, had led the life of a petty courtesan and had succeeded in h.o.a.rding up a tidy bit as provision against the winter of old age, when a former patron convinced her that he had a remarkable combination for winning a fortune at the Fronton. Dona Violante fell into the trap and her patron left her without a centimo. Then Dona Violante went back to the old life, became half blind and reached that lamentable state at which surely she would have arrived much sooner if, early in her career, she had developed a talent for living respectably.

The old lady pa.s.sed most of the day in the confinement of her dark room, which reeked of stable odors, rice powder and cosmetics; at night she had to accompany her daughter and her granddaughter on walks, and to cafes and theatres, on the hunt and capture of the kid, as it was put by the travelling salesman who suffered from his stomach,--a fellow half humorist and half grouch. When they were in the house Celia and Irene, the daughter and the granddaughter of Dona Violante, kept bickering at all hours; perhaps this continuous state of irritation derived from the close quarters in which they lived; perhaps so much pa.s.sing as sisters in the eyes of others had convinced them that they really were, so that they quarrelled and insulted one another as such.

The one point on which they agreed was that Dona Violante was in their way; the burden of the blind woman frightened away every libidinous old fellow that came within the range of Irene and Celia.

The landlady, Dona Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two maternally to gird themselves with patience; Dona Violante, after all, was not, like Calypso, immortal. But they replied that this toiling away at full speed just to keep the old lady in medicine and syrups wasn't at all to their taste.

Dona Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circ.u.mstances enabled her to put herself in Dona Violante's place, and she argued with this example, asking them to put themselves in the grandmother's position; but neither was convinced.

Then the landlady advised them to peer into her mirror. She--as she a.s.sured them--had descended from the heights of the Comandancia (her husband had been a commander of the carbineers) to the wretchedness of running a boarding-house, yet she was resigned, and her lips curled in a stoic smile.

Dona Casiana knew the meaning of resignation and her only solace in this life was a few volumes of novels in serial form, two or three feuilletons, and a murky liquid mysteriously concocted by her own hands out of sugared water and alcohol.

This beverage she poured into a square, wide-mouthed flask, into which she placed a thick stem of anis. She kept it in the closet of her bedroom.

Some one who discovered the flask with its black twig of anis compared it to those bottles in which fetuses and similar nasty objects are preserved, and since that time, whenever the landlady appeared with rosy cheeks, a thousand comments--not at all favourable to the madame's abstinence--ran from lodger to lodger.

"Dona Casiana's tipsy from her fetus-brandy."

"The good lady drinks too much of that fetus."

"The fetus has gone to her head...."

Manuel took a friendly part in this witty merriment of the boarders.

The boy's faculties of adaptation were indisputably enormous, for after a week in the landlady's house it was as if he had always lived there.

His skill at magic was sharpened: whenever he was needed he was not to be seen and no sooner was anybody's back turned than he was in the street playing with the boys of the neighbourhood.

As a result of his games and his sc.r.a.pes he got his clothes so dirty and torn that the landlady nicknamed him the page Don Rompe-Galas, recalling a tattered character from a sainete that Dona Casiana, according to her affirmations, had seen played in her halycon days.

Generally, those who most made use of Manuel's services were the journalist whom they called the Superman--he sent the boy off with copy to the printers--and Celia and Irene, who employed him for bearing notes and requests for money to their friends. Dona Violante, whenever she pilfered a few centimos from her daughter would dispatch Manuel to the store for a package of cigarettes, and give him a cigar for the errand.

"Smoke it here," she would say. "n.o.body'll see you."

Manuel would sit down upon a trunk and the old lady, a cigarette in her mouth and blowing smoke through her nostrils, would recount adventures from the days of her glory.

That room of Dona Violante and her daughters was a haunt of infection; from the hooks nailed to the wall hung dirty rags, and between the lack of air and the medley of odours a stench arose strong enough to fell an ox.

Manuel listened to Dona Violante's stories with genuine delight. The old lady was at her best in her commentaries.

"I tell you, my boy," she would say, "you can take my word for it. A woman with a good pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s and who happens to be a pretty warm article"--and here the old lady pulled at her cigarette and with an expressive gesture indicated what she meant by her no less expressive word--"will always have a trail of men after her."

Dona Violante used to sing songs from Spanish _zarzuelas_ and from French operettas, which produced in Manuel a terrible sadness. He could not say why, but they gave him the impression of a world of pleasures that was hopelessly beyond his reach. When he heard Dona Violante sing the song from _El Juramento_

_Disdain is a sword with a double edge, One slays with love, the other with forgetfulness...._

he had a vision of salons, ladies, amorous intrigues; but even more than by this he was overwhelmed with sadness by the waltzes from _La Dina_ and _La Grande d.u.c.h.esse_.

Dona Violante's reflexions opened Manuel's eyes; the scenes that occurred daily in the house, however, worked quite as much as these toward such a result.

Another good instructor was found in the person of Dona Casiana's niece, a trifle older than Manuel,--a thin, weakly chit of such a malicious nature that she was always hatching plots against somebody.

If any one struck her she didn't shed a tear; she would go down to the concierge's lodge when the concierge's little boy was left alone, would grab him and pinch him and kick him, in this manner wreaking vengeance for the blows she had received.

After eating, almost all of the boarders went off to their affairs; Celia and Irene, together with the Biscayan, indulged in a grand frolic by spying upon the women in Isabel's house, who would come out on the balcony and chat, or signal to the neighbours. At times these miserable brothel odalisques were not content with speaking; they would dance and exhibit their calves.