The Santa Casilda Hostelry—Jacob’s History—La Fea and La Sinforosa—The Motherless Child—A not Very Merry Christmas By the time spring came around Manuel was setting type with ease. Somewhat later, the third compositor left, and Jesús advised the boss to let Manuel fill the vacancy.
“But he doesn’t know anything,” replied the owner.
“What need he know? Pay him by the line.”
“No. I’ll raise his daily wage.”
“How much are you going to give him?”
“Eight reales.”
“That’s too little. The other fellow got twelve.”
“Very well. I’ll give him nine. But let him not come here to sleep.”
Manuel’s new position freed him from the duty of sweeping the shop. He abandoned the sty in which he had been sleeping. Jesús took him to the Santa Casilda hostelry, where he himself stayed; it was a huge, one-story structure with three very large patios, situated on the Ronda de Toledo. Manuel would have preferred not to return to this section, which was linked in his memory to so many unpleasant recollections; but his friendship with Jesús[148] won him over. He got, at the hostelry, for a fortnightly rent of eight reales, a tiny room with a bed, a broken reed chair and a mat hanging from the ceiling and serving as the door. When the wind blew from the direction of the fields of San Isidro, the rooms and the corridors of the Santa Casilda hostelry were filled with smoke. The patios of the place were more or less like those at Uncle Rilo’s house, with identical galleries and numbered doors.
From the window of Manuel’s den could be seen three red, round-paunched tanks of the gashouse, with their lofty iron girders that ended in pulleys at the top; round about was the Rastro; to one side, dumping-places blackened with coal and slag; farther on stretched the arid landscape, the yellow slopes of which climbed into the horizon. Directly before him rose the Los ángeles hill with the hermitage on its crest.
In the very next room to that which Manuel occupied were a carpenter, his wife and a child. The couple would get drunk and beat the child unmercifully.
Many a time Manuel was on the point of bursting into the room, for it seemed to him that those beasts were torturing the little girl.
One morning, encountering the carpenter’s wife, he said to her:
“Why do you beat that poor little girl so?”
“Is it any of your business?”
“It certainly is.”
“Isn’t she my daughter? I can do what I please with her.”
[149]
“That’s what your mother should have done with you,” retorted Manuel. “Beat the life out of you for a witch.”
The woman grumbled something or other and Manuel went off to the printing-shop.
That night the carpenter stopped Manuel.
“What was it you said to my wife, eh?”
“I told her that she oughtn’t to beat her daughter.”
“And who told you to mix into this business?”
The carpenter was a ferocious-looking fellow with a wide, bulging space between his eyebrows, and a bull neck. His forehead was crossed by a swollen vein. Manuel made no reply.
Fortunately for him the carpenter and his wife soon moved from the place.
In the holes of the same corridor there lived also two aged gipsies together with their families, both exceedingly noisy and thievish; a blind maiden who sang gipsy songs in the streets, wiggling with epileptic convulsions, and who was accompanied by another lass with whom she was for ever fighting, and two very cheap, very slovenly sisters, with painted cheeks and loud voices,—a pair of lying, quarrelsome strumpets, but as happy as goats.
Jesús’s room was near Manuel’s, and this life in common both at the printing-shop and at the house tightened the bonds of their friendship.
Jesús was an excellent youth, but he got drunk with lamentable frequency. He had two maiden sisters, one a pretty chit with green cat’s eyes and an impudent face, called La Sinforosa, and the other a[150] sickly creature, all twisted and scrofulous, whom everybody heartlessly called La Fea, ugly.
After they had been living thus for two months or so at the hostelry, Jesús, in his peculiar, ironic tone, remarked one day to Manuel on the way to the shop:
“Did you hear? My sister is pregnant.”
“That so?”
“That’s what.”
“Which of the two?”
“La Fea. I wonder who the hero could have been. He deserves a cross of valour.”
The compositor continued to prattle about the misfortune, jesting upon it indifferently.
This did not appear very just to Manuel; after all, she was the man’s sister. But Jesús launched forth with his invectives against the family, declaring that a fellow need not concern himself about his brothers and sisters, his parents, or anybody.
“A fine theory for egotists,” answered Manuel.
“Why, the family is nothing but egotism that favours a few as against humanity,” agreed Jesús.
“Much you care about humanity. As little as for your family,” retorted Manuel.
This topic was the theme of a number of other discussions, in the heat of which they spoke some bitter, mortifying words to each other.
Manuel was not much concerned about the theoretical problem. What did fill him with indignation, however, was to see that Jesús and La Sinforosa took no pity upon their sister, sending her on errands and making her sweep the place when the[151] poor rachitic creature couldn’t stir because of her huge abdomen, which threatened to become monstrous. As a result of these altercations there were days on which Manuel exchanged scarcely two words with Jesús, preferring to chat with Jacob and ask him questions about his native land.
Jacob, despite the fact that he was always lamenting the evil days he had suffered in his country, was fond of speaking about it.
He came from Fez and was wildly enthusiastic over that city.
He depicted it as a paradise flourishing with gardens, palm-trees, lemon and orange trees, and beribboned with crystalline streamlets. In Fez, in the Jewish quarter Jacob had passed his childhood, until he entered the service of a wealthy merchant who did business in Rabat, Mogador and Saffi.
With his lively imagination and his exaggerated speech, which was so picturesque and thronged with imagery, Jacob communicated an impression of reality whenever he spoke of his country.
He pictured the procession of the caravans composed of camels, asses and dromedaries. These last he described with their long necks and their small heads, swaying like those of serpents, with their dull eyes directed toward the sky. As one listened to him at the height of his evocations one imagined that one was crossing those white sands in the blinding sun. He described, too, the markets that were set up at the intersection of several roads and characterized the folk who came to them: the Moors of the nearby Kabyles, with their guns; the serpent[152] charmers; the sorcerers; the tellers of tales from the Thousand And One Nights, the medicine men who draw worms from human ears.
And as the caravans departed, each proceeding on its different way, the men mounted on their horses and mules, Jacob would imitate the cawing of the crows that swooped down in flocks upon the market place and covered it with a black cloak.
He pictured the effect of beholding thirty or forty Berbers on horseback, with their flowing locks, armed with long muskets. As they passed a Jew they would spit upon the ground. He told of the uncertain life there; on the roads, earless, armless folk, victims of justice, begging alms in the name of Muley Edris; during the winter, the dangerous crossing of the rivers, the nights at the gates of the villages, while the cus-cus was being prepared, playing the guembrí and singing sad, drowsy airs.
One Sabbath Jacob invited Manuel to eat with him at his house.
The Jew lived in the Pozas section, in a ramshackle house on a lane near the Paseo de Areneros.
The tiny structure looked strange, somewhat Oriental. One or two low pine tables; small mats instead of chairs, and, hanging from the walls, coloured cloths and two small three-stringed guitars.
Manuel was introduced to Jacob’s father, a long-haired old fellow who walked about the house in a dark tunic and a cap, to his wife, Mesoda, and to a black-eyed child called Aisa.
They all sat down to table; the old man solemnly pronounced a number of words in an involved language,[153] which Manuel took for some Hebrew prayer, and then they began to eat.
The meal had a taste of strong aromatic herbs and to Manuel it seemed that he was chewing flowers.
At table the old man, employing that extravagant Castilian in which the entire family spoke, recounted to Manuel the events of the African war. In his version Prim, or, as he referred to him, Se?or Juan Prim, assumed epic proportions. Jacob must have respected the old man very deeply, for he allowed him to speak on and on about Prim and about the Almighty. Mesoda, who was very timid, only smiled, and blushed upon the slightest provocation.
After the meal Jacob took down from the wall one of the small three-stringed guitars and sang several Arabian songs, accompanying himself on the primitive instrument.
Manuel bid adieu to Jacob’s family and promised to visit them from time to time.
One autumn night, as Manuel was returning from work after a day during which Jesús had not put in an appearance at the shop, he entered the hostelry to find in the corridor leading to his room a knot of women gossiping about Jesús and his sisters.
La Fea had given birth; the doctor from the Emergency Hospital was in her room together with Se?ora Salomona, a kindly woman who made her living as a nurse.
“But what has Jesús done?” asked Manuel, hearing[154] the insults heaped upon the typesetter by the angry women.
“What has he done?” replied one of them. “Nothing at all, only it’s come out that he’s been living with La Sinfo, who’s the blackest of black sheep. Jesús and she had taken to drink and that big fox of a Sinfo has been taking La Fea’s pay from her.”
“That can’t be true,” said Manuel.
“Is that so? Well, Jesús himself was the one to tell it.”
“H’m. The other one isn’t any too decent herself when it comes to that,” interpolated one of the women.
“She’s as decent as the best of them,” retorted the spokeswoman. “She told everything to the doctor from the Emergency Hospital. One night when she hadn’t had a bite in her mouth, because Jesús and La Sinfo had taken every céntimo from her, La Fea went and drank a drop of brandy to quiet her hunger; then she had another; she was so weak that she got drunk right away. In came La Sinfo and Jesús, both stewed to the gills, and the shameless fo............