Part 10 (1/2)
When Manuel reached the Aguila Street stairway it was getting dark. He sat down to rest a while in the Campillo de Gil Imon. 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 a.s.sumed 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 Salome 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 Corralon, 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 Corralon (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 facade 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 pa.s.sage paved with cobblestones; this, soon widening, formed a patio surrounded by high, gloomy walls.
From the sides of the narrow entrance pa.s.sage 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 ba.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 bal.u.s.trades, curtains made of mats, quilts mended with patches of ill-a.s.sorted 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Corralon 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 s.p.a.ces 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 superst.i.tious considerations none dared to throw her into the street.
On his very first night in La Corrala Manuel verified, not without a certain astonishment, the truth of what Vidal had told him. That youngster, and almost all the gamins of his age, had sweethearts among the little girls of the tenement, and it was not a rare occurrence, as he pa.s.sed by some nook, to come upon a couple that jumped up and ran away.