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The Quest

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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.

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