Part 3 (2/2)
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.
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