The Quest Part 37

Between the acts the members of the claque would adjourn to a tavern on Barquillo Street, varying this occasionally with a visit to another place on the Plaza, del Rey. This latter resort was the rendezvous of the claquers that worked in Price's Circus.

Almost all the legion of applauders were youngsters; a few of them worked in shops here and there; for the most part they were loafers and organgrinders who wound up by becoming supernumeraries, chorus men or ticket-speculators.

There were among them effeminate, clean-shaven types with a woman's face and a shrill voice.

At the entrance to the theatre Vidal and Manuel made the acquaintance of a group of girls, from thirteen to eighteen years of age, who wandered about Alcala Street approaching well-to-do pillars of the middle cla.s.s; they pretended to be news-vendors and always had a copy of the _Heraldo_ with them.

Vidal cultivated the intimacy of the girls; they were almost all homely, but this did not interfere with his plans, which consisted of extending the radius of his activities and his knowledge.

"We must leave the suburbs and work our way toward the centre," said Vidal.

Vidal wished Manuel to help him, but Manuel had no gift for it. Vidal came to be the cadet for four girls who lived together in Cuatro Caminos and were named, respectively, La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia; they had come to form, together with Vidal, El Bizco and Manuel another Society, though this one was anonymous.

The poor girls needed protection; they were pursued more than the other loose women by the police because they paid no graft to the inspectors. They would be forever fleeing from the guards and agents, who, whenever there was a round-up, would take them to the station and thence to the Convento de las Trinitarias.

The thought of being immured in the convent struck genuine terror into their hearts.

"To think of never seeing the street," they moaned, as if this were a most horrible punishment.

And the abandonment at night in the unprotected thoroughfares, which inspired horror in others; the cold, the rain, the snow,--were to them liberty and life.

They all spoke in a rough manner; their grammar and word-forms were incorrect; language in them leaped backwards into a curious atavic regression.

They spiced their talk with a long string of theatrical lines and "gags."

The four led a terrible life; they spent the morning and the afternoon in bed sleeping and didn't go to sleep again till dawn.

"We're like cats," La Mella would say. "We hunt at night and sleep by day."

La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia would go at night to the centre of Madrid, accompanied by a white-bearded beggar with a smiling face and a striped cap.

The old man came to beg alms; he was a neighbour of the girls and they called him Uncle Tarrillo, bantering him upon his frequent sprees. He was utterly daft and loved to talk upon the corruption of popular manners.

La Mella said that Uncle Tarrillo had tried, one night after they had returned alone from the Jardinillos del Deposito de Agua, to violate her and that he had made her laugh so much that it was impossible.

The mendicant would wax indignant at the tale and would pursue the indiscreet maid with all the ardour of an old faun.

Of the four girls the ugliest was La Mella; with her big, deformed head, her black eyes, her wide mouth and broken teeth, her dumpy figure, she looked like the lady-jester of some ancient princess. She had been on the point of becoming a chorus-girl; she was balked, however, for despite her good voice and excellent ear for music, she could not p.r.o.nounce the words clearly because of her missing teeth.

La Mella was always in high spirits, singing and laughing at all hours of the day and night. She carried in her ap.r.o.n-pocket a tiny powder-puff with a mirror on the inside of the cover; she would stop at every other step to gaze at herself by the light of a street-lantern and powder her face.

She was affectionate and kind-hearted. Her excessive ugliness made Manuel gag. The la.s.s was eager to win him but Vidal advised his cousin not to take up with her; La Goya suited him better, for she made more money.

La Mella was not at all to Manuel's taste, despite her affectionate caresses; but La Goya was compromised with El Soldadito, a man with a position, as she said, for when he went to work he turned the crank of an handorgan.

This organ-grinder took all the receipts of La Goya, who, as the prettiest of the quartet, enjoyed the most numerous patronage; El Soldadito watched her and when she went off with anybody, followed, waiting for her to come out of the house of a.s.signation so that he could collect her earnings.

Vidal, of the four, condescended to choose La Rabanitos and Engracia as the objects of his protection; the two girls were forever disputing over him. La Rabanitos looked like a pocket-edition of a woman; a white little face with blue streaks about her nose and her mouth; a rachetic, wizened body; thin lips and large eyes of schlerotic blue; she dressed like an old woman, with her sombre little cloak and her black dress; such was La Rabanitos. She was bothered with frequent hemorrhages; she spoke with all the mannerisms of a granny, making queer twists and turns, and she spent all her spare change on dry salt tunny fish, caramels and other dainties.

Engracia, Vidal's other favourite, was the typical brothel inmate: her face was white with rice powder; her dark, flashing eyes had an expression of purely animal melancholy; as she spoke she showed her blue teeth, which contrasted with the whiteness of her powdered countenance. She leaped from joy to dejection without transition. She could not smile. Her face was as soon darkened by stupidity as it was illuminated by a ribald merriment, insulting and cynical.

Engracia had little to say and when she spoke it was to utter something particularly b.e.s.t.i.a.l and filthy, of involved cynicism and p.o.r.nography. Her imagination was of monstrous fertility.

A macabrous sculptor might have hit upon a work of genius by cutting the thoughts of this girl into the stone representing some infernal Dance of Death.

Engracia could not read. She wore loud waists, blue and pink; a white kerchief on her head and a coloured ap.r.o.n; she trotted along with a swaying movement, so that the coins in her purse kept jingling. She had been eight years in this brothel life, and was only sixteen in all. She was sorry to have grown up, for she said that she had earned far more as a little girl.

The friendship of Manuel and Vidal with these girls lasted a couple of months; Manuel could not make up his mind to take up with La Mella; she was too repulsive; Vidal widened the horizons of his activity, tippled with a gang of _chulos_ and devoted himself to the conquest of a flower-girl who sold carnations.

Engracia and La Rabanitos conceived a violent hatred for the la.s.s.

"That strumpet?" La Rabanitos would say. "Why, she's already as disreputable as us...."

One night Vidal did not put in his usual appearance at Casa Blanca, and two or three days later he showed up at the Puerta del Sol with a tall, buxom woman garbed in grey.

"Who's that?" asked Manuel of his cousin.

"Her name's Violeta; I've taken up with her."

"And the other one, at Casa Blanca?"

Vidal shrugged his shoulders.

"You can have her if you wish," he said.

Vidal's former sweetheart likewise disappeared from Casa Blanca and, after he had been unable to collect the two weeks' rent, the administrator put Manuel out into the street and sold the furnishings: a few empty bottles, a stew-pot and a bed.

For several days Manuel slept upon the benches of the Plaza de Oriente and on the chairs of La Castellana and Recoletos. It was getting toward the end of summer and he could still sleep in the open. A few centimos that he earned by carrying valises from the stations helped him to exist, though badly, until October.

There were days when the only thing he ate was the cabbage stalks that he picked up in the marketplaces; other days, on the contrary, he treated himself to seventy-eight centimo banquets in the chop-houses.

October came around and Manuel began to feel cold at night; his eldest sister gave him a frayed overcoat and a m.u.f.fler; but despite these, whenever he could find no roof to shelter him he almost froze to death in the street.

One night in the early part of November Manuel stumbled against El Bizco at the entrance to a cafe on La Cabecera del Rastro; the cross-eyed ragam.u.f.fin was bent over, almost naked, his arms crossed against his chest, barefoot; he presented a painful picture of poverty and cold.

Dolores La Escandalosa had left him for another.

"Where can we go to sleep?" Manuel asked him.

"Let's try the caves of La Montana," answered El Bizco.

"But can we get in there?"

"Yes, if there aren't too many."

"Come on, then."

The two crossed through the Puerta de Moros and Mancebos Street to the Viaduct; they traversed the Plaza de Oriente, following along Bailen and Ferraz Streets, and, as they reached the Montana del Principe Pio, ascended a narrow path bordered by recently planted pines.