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The Quest

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"I tell you," exclaimed El Pastiri, "he's a booby, and he's scared so
stiff he can't stand."

"Yes, but he answered every thrust, just the same," added the
lace-maker.

"Yah! Did you see him?"

"Certainly."

"Bah, you must be soused to the gills!"

"You only wish you were as sober as I. Bah!"

"What? You're so full you can't talk!"

"Go on; shut up. You're so drunk you can't stand; I tell you, if you
run afoul of this guy"--and Besuguito pointed to Leandro--"you're in
for a bad time."

"Hell, no!"

"That's my opinion, anyhow."

"You don't have any opinion here, or anything like it," exclaimed
Leandro. "You're going to clear out and shut up. Valencia's liver is
whiter than paper; it's as Pastiri says. Brave enough when it comes to
exploiting boobs like you and the other tramps and low lives,... but
when he bucks up against a chap that's all there, hey? Bah! He's a
white-livered wretch, that's what."

"True," assented all.

"And maybe we won't let him hear a few things," said the escaped
convict, "if he has the nerve to return here for his share of the
winnings."

"I should say!" exclaimed Pastiri.

"Very well, gentlemen, it's my treat now," said Leandro, "for I've got
the money and I happen to feel like it." He fished out a couple of
coins from his pocket and slapped them down on the table. "Lady, let's
have something to drink."

"Right away."

"Manuel! Manuel!" shouted Leandro several times. "Where in thunder has
that kid disappeared?"

Manuel, following the example of the bully, had made his escape by the
back door.




CHAPTER IX

An Unlikely Tale--Manuel's Sisters--Life's Baffling Problems.


It was already the beginning of autumn; Leandro, on the advice of
Señor Ignacio, was living with his aunt on Aguila street; Milagros
continued keeping company with Lechuguino. Manuel gave up going with
Vidal and Bizco on their skirmishes and joined the company of
Rebolledo and the two Aristas.

The elder, Aristón, entertained him and frightened him out of his wits
with lugubrious tales of cemeteries and ghosts; the little Aristas
continued his gymnastic exercises; he had constructed a springboard by
placing a plank upon a heap of sand and there he practised his
death-defying leaps.

One day Alonso, Tabuenca's aid, appeared in the Corralón accompanied
by a woman and a little girl.

The woman seemed old and weary; the tot was long and thin and pale.
Don Alonso found them a place in a dingy corner of the small patio.

They brought with them a small bundle of clothes, a dirty poodle with
a very intelligent look, and a monkey tied to a chain; in a short
while they had to sell the monkey to some gipsies that lived in the
Quinta de Goya.

Don Alonso called Manuel and said to him:

"Run off and hunt up Don Roberto, and tell him that there's a woman
here named Rosa, and that she is or has been a circus acrobat; she
must be the one he's looking for."

At once Manuel went off to the house; Roberto had left the place and
Manuel did not know his whereabouts.

Don Alonso carne frequently to the Corralón and conversed with the
mother and the girl. On the window-sill of their tiny home the mother
and the daughter had a little box with a sprig of mint planted in it;
although they watered it every morning, it scarcely grew, for there
was no sun. One day the woman and child disappeared together with
their pretty poodle; they left nothing in their quarters except a
worn-out, broken tambourine.

Don Alonso got into the habit of visiting the Corralón; he would
exchange a few words with Rebolledo, he of the modernist barber-shop
who chattered away, and would witness the gymnastic prowess of
Aristas. One afternoon the boy's mother asked the former Snake-Man
whether the child showed any real aptitude.

Don Alonso grew serious and subjected the boy's performance to a
searching examination, so that he could form an estimate of the
youngster's abilities and give him a little useful advice.

It was really curious to see the former circus-player give his orders;
he went through them with august seriousness.

"One, two, three.... Hop-la!... Once more, now. At position. The knees
near the head ... nails down ... One, two ... one, two.... Hop-la!"

Don Alonso was not at all displeased with little Aristas' showing, but
he emphasized the unavoidable necessity of continual hard practise.

"Whoever wants something has to pay the price, my little fellow," he
said. "And the profession of gymnast isn't within everybody's reach."

To the mother he confided that her son might some day be a fine circus
artist.

Then Don Alonso, finding himself before a numerous public, would begin
to talk volubly of the United States, of Mexico, and the South
American republics.

"Why don't you tell us stories of the countries you've been to?" asked
Perico Rebolledo.

"No, not now; I have to go out with the _Infiel_ Tower."

"Ah! Go on, tell us," they would all implore.

Don Alonso pretended to be importuned by the request; but when he got
going, he spun one yarn after the other in such numbers that they
almost had to beg him to stop.

"And didn't you ever see in those countries men who had been killed by
lions?" asked Aristón.

"No."

"Then there aren't any lions?"

"Lions in cages ... yes, a lot."

"But I mean at liberty, in the fields."

"In the fields? No."

Don Alonso seemed rather provoked to make these confessions.

"No other wild beasts, either?"

"There are no longer any wild beasts in the civilized countries," said
the barber.

"Why, see here, there certainly are wild beasts over there," and Don
Alonso, wrinkling his features into a jesting grimace, winked slily at
Rebolledo. "Once a terrible thing happened to me; we were sailing by
an island when we heard cannon shots. It was the garrison firing off a
salvo."

"But what are you laughing at?" asked Aristón.

"Nervousness.... Well, as I was saying, I went up to the captain of
the ship and asked his permission to let me land on the island. 'Very
well,' he said to me, 'take the Golondrina, if you wish,'--Golondrina
was the name of the canoe; 'but you must be back within a couple of
hours.'

"I set off in my boat and hala! hala! ... I reached the island, which
was thickly planted with plane-trees and cocoanut-trees, and I
disembarked on the beach into which the Golondrina had thrust its
prow."

Here Don Alonso's features were convulsed with the impossibility of
restraining his laughter; he shot a glance at the barber, accompanied
by a confidential wink.

"I land," he continued, "then I start running, and soon, paf! ... in
the face; a huge mosquito, and then, paf! ... another mosquito, until
I was surrounded by a swarm of the animals, each one as large as a
bat. With a scarred face I begin to run for the beach so as to escape
in my canoe, when I catch sight of a lobster right next to the
Golondrina; but what a lobster I He must have been as big as a bear;
he was black, and shiny, and went chug, chug, chug, like an
automobile. No sooner did the creature set eyes on me than he began to
rush upon me with loud outcries; I ran for a cocoanut tree, and one,
two, three, I shinnied right up the trunk to the top. The lobster
approaches the tree, stops meditatively, and decides to shinny up
after me,--which he did."

"An awful situation," commented the barber.

"Just imagine," replied Don Alonso, blinking. "I only had a little
stick in my hands, and I defended myself against the lobster by
hitting him in the knuckles; but he, roaring with rage, and eyes
shining, continued climbing. I couldn't get any farther, and I was
thinking of coming down; but as I made a movement, biff!... The son of
a sea-cook grabs me with one of his many legs by the coat and remains
there hanging from me. The cussed critter was as heavy as lead; he was
already reaching up after me with another claw when I remembered that
I had in my vest pocket a toothpick that I had bought in Chicago, and
that it had a knife attachment; I opened this, and in a moment slashed
off the tail of my coat, and cataplun! ... down from a height of at
least forty metres the lobster fell to the ground. I can't understand
how he wasn't killed. There he began to cry and howl, and go round and
round the cocoanut tree in which I was, glaring at me with his
terrible eyes. Whereupon I--for being a gymnast had to come in handy
to a fellow,--began to leap from one cocoanut tree to the next and
from one plane-tree to the other, while the lobster kept following me,
howling away with the tail of my coat in his teeth.

"Reaching near the beach I find that the tide has gone out and that
the Golondrina is more than fifty metres above the waves. 'I'll wait,'
I said to myself. But at this moment I see, thrusting its head out
from the tree-top that I was then on, a serpent; I seize a branch,
swing up and back for a while so that I can land as far as possible
from the lobster, when the damned branch breaks on me and I lose my
support."

"And what did you do then?" asked the barber.

"I took two somersaults in the air at a hazard."

"That was a useful precaution."

"Certainly I thought I was lost. On the contrary, I was saved."

"But how?" asked El Aristón.

"Very simple. For as I fell, with the branch in my hand, I landed
plump on the lobster, and as I came down with such a high velocity, I
pierced him right through with the branch and left him nailed to the
beach. The animal roared like a bull; I jumped into the Golondrina and
made my escape. But my vessel had sailed away. I began to row, but
there wasn't a sail in sight. 'I'm lost,' says I to myself. But thanks
to the lobster, I was rescued...."

"The lobster?" asked everybody in amazement.

"Yes sirree; a steamboat that was on its course many miles off, on
hearing the lobster's wails thought that this might be the signal of
some shipwrecked crew; it drew near the island, picked me up, and in a
few days I was back with my company."

As he finished his tale Don Alonso made a most expressive grimace, and
left with his _Infiel_ Tower for the street. Aristas, Rebolledo
and Manuel applauded the old circus man's stories, and the apprentice
gymnast felt more determined than ever to continue practicing upon the
trapeze and the springboard, so that some day he might behold those
distant lands of which Don Alonso spoke.

A few weeks later there occurred one of the events that left upon
Manuel the deepest impression of his entire career. It was Sunday; the
boy went to his mother's place, and helped her, as usual, to wash the
dishes. Then came Petra's daughters, and they spent the whole
afternoon quarrelling over a skirt or a petticoat that the younger had
bought with the elder sister's money.

Manuel, bored by the chatter, invented some excuse and left the house.

The rain was coming down in bucketfuls; Manuel reached the Puerta del
Sol, entered the café de Levante and sat down near the window. The
people outside, dressed in their Sunday clothes, scampered by to
places of refuge in the wide doorways of the big square; the coaches
rumbled hurriedly on amidst the downpour; umbrellas came and went and
their black tops, glistening with rain, collided and intertwined like
a shoal of tortoises. Presently it cleared up and Manuel left the
café; it was still too early to return to the house; he crossed the
Plaza de Oriente and stopped on the Viaduct, watching from that point
the people strolling along Segovia street.

In the sky, which was becoming serene, floated a few dark clouds with
silver linings, resembling mountains capped with snow; blown by the
wind, they scurried along with outspread wings; the bright sun
illumined the fields with its golden rays; resplendent in the clouds,
it reddened them like live coals; a few cloudlets scudded through
space, white flakes of foam. The hillocks and dales of the Madrilenian
suburbs were not yet mottled with green grass; the trees of the Campo
del Moro stood out reddish, skeleton-like, amidst the foliage of the
evergreens; dark rolls of vapour rose along the ground, soon to be
swept away by the wind. As the clouds passed by overhead, the plain
changed hue; successively it graded from purple into leaden-grey,
yellow, copper; the Extremadura cart-road, with the rows of grey,
dirty houses on each side, traced a broken line. This severe,
melancholy landscape of the Madrilenian suburbs, with their bleak,
cold gloominess, penetrated into Manuel's soul.

He left the Viaduct balcony, sauntered through several narrow lanes,
until he reached Toledo Street, walked down the Ronda and turned in
toward his house. He was getting near the Paseo de las Acacias when he
overheard two old women talking about a crime that had just been
committed at the corner of Amparo Street.

"And just as they were about to catch him, he killed himself," one of
them was saying.

Out of curiosity Manuel hastened his step, and approached a group that
was discussing the event at the entrance to the Corralón.

"Where did this fellow come from that killed himself?" asked Manuel of
Aristas.

"Why! It was Leandro!"

"Leandro!"

"Yes, Leandro, who killed Milagros and then killed himself."

"But ... is this really so?"

"Yes, man. Just a moment ago,"

"Here? In the house?"

"On this very spot."

Manuel, quaking with fear, ran up the stairs to the gallery. The floor
was still stained with the pool of blood. Señor Zurro, the only
witness to the drama, was telling the story to a group of neighbours.

"I was here, reading the paper," said the old-clothes man, "and
Milagros and her mother were talking to Lechuguino. The engaged couple
were enjoying themselves, when up comes Leandro to the gallery; he was
about to open the door to his rooms when, before he went in, he
suddenly turned to Milagros. 'Is that your sweetheart?' he said to
her. It seemed to me that he was as pale as a corpse. 'Yes,' she
answered. 'All right. Then I've come here to end things once and for
all,' he shouted. 'Which of the two do you prefer, him or me?' 'Him,'
shrieks Milagros. 'Then it's all up,' cried Leandro in a hoarse voice.
'I'm going to kill you.' After that I can't recall anything clearly;
it was all as swift as a thunderbolt; when I ran over to them, the
girl was gushing blood from her mouth; the proof-reader's wife was
screaming and Leandro was chasing Lechuguino with his knife opened."

"I saw him leave the house," added an old woman. "He was waving his
blood-stained knife in the air; my husband tried to stop him; but he
backed like a bull, lunged for him and came near killing him."

"And where are my uncle and aunt?" asked Manuel.

"Over at the Emergency Hospital. They followed the stretcher."

Manuel went down into the patio.

"Where are you going?" asked Aristón.

"To the Emergency Hospital."

"I'll go along with you."

The two boys were joined by a machine shop apprentice who lived in the
Corrala.

"I saw him kill himself," said the apprentice. "We were all running
after him, hollering, 'Catch him! Stop him!' when two guards appeared
on Amparo Street, drew their swords and blocked his way. Then Leandro
bounded back, made his way through the people and landed here again;
he was going to escape through the Paseo de las Acacias when he
stumbled against La Muerte, who began to call him names. Leandro
stopped, looked in every direction; nobody dared to get near him; his
eyes were blazing. Suddenly he jabbed the knife into his left side I
don't know how many times. When one of the guards seized him by the
arm he collapsed like an empty sack."

The commentary of Aristón and the apprentice proved endless; the boys
arrived at the Emergency Hospital and were told that the corpses,
those of Milagros and Leandro, had been taken to the Morgue. The three
gamins walked down to the Canal, to the little house near the river's
edge, which Manuel and the urchins of his gang had so often visited,
trying to peep into the windows. A knot of people had gathered about
the door.

"Let's have a look," said Aristón.

There was a window, wide open, and they peered in. Stretched upon a
marble slab lay Leandro; his face was the color of wax, and his
features bore an expression of proud defiance. At his side Señora
Leandro stood wailing and vociferating; Señor Ignacio, with his son's
hand clasped in his own, was weeping silently. At another table a
group surrounded Milagros' corpse. The man in charge of the morgue
ordered them all out. As the proofreader and Señor Ignacio met at the
entrance they exchanged looks and then averted their glance; the two
mothers, on the other hand, glared at each other in terrible hatred.

Señor Ignacio arranged that they should not sleep at the Corralón but
in Aguila Street. In that place, at the home of Señora Jacoba, there
was a horrible confusion of weeping and cursing. The three women
blamed Milagros for everything; she was a common strumpet, an evil
woman, a selfish, wretched ingrate.

One of the neighbours of the Corrala indicated a strange detail: when
the public doctor came to examine Milagros and remove her corset so
that he might determine the wound, he found a tiny medallion
containing a portrait of Leandro.

"Whose picture is this?" he is reported to have asked.

"The fellow who killed her," they answered. This was exceedingly
strange, and it fascinated Manuel; many a time he had thought that
Milagros really loved Leandro; this fairly confirmed his conjectures.

During all that night Señor Ignacio, seated on a chair, wept without
cease; Vidal was scared through and through, as was Manuel. The
presence of death, seen so near, had terrorized the two boys.

And while inside the house everybody was crying, in the streets the
little girls were dancing around in a ring. And this contrast of
anguish and serenity, of grief and calm, imparted to Manuel a confused
sense of life. It must, he thought, be something exceedingly sad, and
something weirdly inscrutable.




PART THREE




CHAPTER I

Uncle Patas' Domestic Drama--The Bakery--Karl the Baker--The
Society of the Three.


The death of his son made such a deep impression upon Señor Ignacio
that he fell ill. He gave up working in the shop and as he showed no
improvement after two or three weeks, Leandra said to Manuel:

"See here: better be off to your mother's place, for I can't keep you
here."

Manuel returned to the lodging-house and Petra, through the
intercession of the landlady, procured her son a job as errand-boy at
a bread and vegetable stand situated upon the Plaza del Carmen.

Manuel was here more oppressed than at Señor Ignacio's. Uncle Patas,
the proprietor, a heavy, burly Galician, instructed the youth in his
duties.

He was to get up at daybreak, open the store, untie the bundles of
greens that were brought by a boy from the Plaza de la Cebada and
receive the bread that was left by the delivery-men. Then he was to
sweep the place and wait for Uncle Patas, his wife or sister-in-law to
awake. As soon as one of these came in Manuel would leave his place
behind the counter and, balancing a little basket upon his head, would
start off on his route delivering bread to the customers of the
vicinity. This going and returning would take all the morning. In the
afternoon the work was harder: Manuel would have to stand quietly
behind the counter in utter boredom, under the surveillance of the
proprietor's wife and his sister-in-law.

Accustomed to his daily strolls through the Rondas, Manuel was
rendered desperate by this immobility.

Uncle Patas' store, a tiny, ill-smelling hole, was papered in yellow
with green borders; the paper was coming off from sheer old age. A
wooden counter, a few dirty shelves, an oil lamp hanging from the
ceiling and two benches comprised the fixtures.

The back room, which was reached by a door at the rear, was a
compartment with no more light than could filter in through a transom
that opened upon the vestibule. This was the dining-room and led to
the kitchen, which in turn gave access to a narrow, very filthy patio
with a fountain. At the other side of the patio were the bedrooms of
Uncle Patas, his wife and his sister-in-law.

Manuel's sleeping quarters were a straw-bed and a couple of old cloaks
behind the counter. Here, especially at night, it reeked of rotten
cabbage: but what bothered Manuel even more was the getting up at
dawn, when the watchman struck two or three blows with his pike upon
the door of the store.

They sold something in the shop,--enough to live on and no more. In
this hovel Uncle Patas had saved up a fortune céntimo by céntimo.

Uncle Patas' history was really interesting. Manuel had learned it
from the gossip of the men who delivered the bread and from the boys
in the other stores.

Uncle Patas had come to Madrid from a hamlet of Lugo, at the age of
fifteen, in search of a living. Within twenty years, by dint of
unbelievable economies, he had hoarded up from his wages in a bakery
some three or four thousand pesetas, and with this capital he
established a little grocery. His wife stood behind the counter while
he continued to work in the bakery and hoard his earnings. When his
son grew up he assigned to the boy the running of a tavern and then of
a pawnbroker-shop. It was during this prosperous epoch that Uncle
Patas' wife died, and the man, now a widower, wishing to taste the
sweets of life, which had thus far proved so fruitless, married again
despite his fifty-odd years; the bride, a lass that came from his own
province, was only twenty and her sole object in marrying was to
change from servant to mistress. All of Uncle Patas' friends tried to
convince him that it was a monstrosity for a man of his years to wed,
and such a young girl at that; but he persisted in his notions and
married.

Within two months after the marriage the son had come to an
understanding with his step-mother, and shortly after this the elderly
husband made the discovery. One day he played the spy and saw his son
and his wife leave an assignation house in Santa Margarita Street.
Perhaps the man intended to take harsh steps, to speak a few
unvarnished words to the couple; but as he was soft and peaceful by
nature, and did not wish to disturb his business, he let the time go
by and grew little by little accustomed to his position. Somewhat
later, Uncle Patas' wife brought from her town a sister of hers, and
when she arrived, between the wife and the son she was forced upon the
old man, who concluded by taking up with his sister-in-law. Since that
time the four had lived in unbroken harmony. They understood one
another most admirably.

Manuel was not in the least astonished by this state of affairs; he
was cured of fear, for at La Corrala there was more than one
matrimonial combination of the sort. What did make him indignant was
the stinginess of Uncle Patas and his people.

All the scrupulousness which Uncle Patas' wife did not feel in other
matters she reserved, no doubt, for the accounts. Herself accustomed
to pilfer, she knew to the least detail every trick of the servants,
and not a céntimo escaped her; she always thought she was being
robbed. Such was her spirit of economy that at home they ate stale
bread, thus confirming the popular saying, "in the house of the smith,
a wooden knife."

The sister-in-law, an uncouth peasant with a stubby nose, carroty
cheeks, abundant breasts and hips, could give lessons in avarice to
her sister, while in the matter of immodesty and undignified
comportment she outdistanced her. She would go about the store with
her bosom exposed and there wasn't a delivery-man who missed a chance
to pinch her.

"What a fatty you are! Oh!" they would all exclaim.

And it was as if all this frequently fingered fat didn't belong to
her, for she raised no protest. Should any one, however, try to get
the best of her on the price of a roll, she would turn into a wild
beast.

On Sunday afternoons Uncle Patas, his wife and his sister-in-law were
in the habit of playing _mus_ on a little table in the middle of
the road; they never dared to leave the store alone.

After Manuel had been here for three months, Petra carne to see Uncle
Patas and asked him to give her boy a regular wage. Uncle Patas burst
into laughter; the request struck him as the very height of absurdity
and he answered No, that it was impossible, that the boy didn't even
earn the bread he ate.

Then Petra sought out another place for Manuel and brought him to a
bakery on Horno de la Mata Street where he was to learn the trade.

As the beginning of his apprenticeship he was assigned to the furnace
as assistant to the man who removed the loaves from the oven. The work
was beyond his strength. He had to get up at eleven in the night and
commence by scraping the iron pans in which the smaller loaves were
baked; after they were cleaned he would go over them with a brush
dipped in melted butter; this accomplished he would help his superior
remove the live coals from the oven with an iron instrument; then,
while the baker baked the bread he would lift very heavy boards laden
with rolls and carry them to the kneading-trough at the mouth of the
furnace; when the baker placed the rolls inside Manuel would take the
board back to the kneading-trough. As the bread came out of the oven
he would moisten it with a brush dipped in water so as to make the
crust shiny. At eleven in the morning the work was over, and during
the intervals of idleness Manuel and the workmen would sleep.

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