Part 43 (2/2)

”What's the matter? Come, let's return. We'll go together.”

”No, no; go away from me.”

He was at a loss; without another word he set off on a run toward Madrid.

The wild flight dried his tears and rekindled his fury. He meant not to return to Senor Custodio's even if he died of hunger.

His rage rose in waves up his throat; he felt a blind madness, hazy notions of attacking, of destroying everything, of razing the world to the ground and disemboweling every living creature.

Mentally he promised El Carnicerin that if ever he met him alone, he would sink his claws into his neck and strangle him; he would split the fellow's head in two as they do to hogs, and would hang him up head downwards with a stick between his ribs and another in his intestines, and moreover, he'd place a tin box at his mouth into which his cursed pig's blood could drip.

Then he generalized his hatred and considered that society itself was against him, intent only upon plaguing him and denying him everything.

Very well, then; he would go against society, he would join El Bizco and a.s.sa.s.sinate right and left, and when, wearied of committing so many crimes, he would be led to the scaffold, he would look scornfully down from the platform upon the people below and die with a supreme gesture of hatred and disdain.

While all these thoughts of wholesale extermination thronged in his brain, night was falling. Manuel walked up to the Plaza de Oriente and followed thence along Arenal Street.

A strip of the Puerta del Sol was being asphalted; ten or twelve furnaces ranged in a row were belching thick acrid smoke through their chimneys. The white illumination of the arc-lights had not yet been turned on; the silhouettes of a number of men who were stirring with long shovels the ma.s.s of asphalt in the caldrons danced diabolically up and down before the flaming mouths of the furnaces.

Manuel approached one of the caldrons when suddenly he heard his name called. It was El Bizco; he was seated upon some paving blocks.

”What are you doing here?” Manuel asked him.

”We've been thrown out of the caves,” answered El Bizco, ”and it's cold. What about you? Have you left the house?”

”Yes.”

”Have a seat.”

Manuel sat down and rested his back against a keg of asphalt.

Lights began to sparkle in the balconies of the residences and in the shop windows; the street cars arrived gently, as if they were vessels floating in, with their yellow, green and red lanterns; their bells rang and they traced graceful circles around the Puerta del Sol.

Carriages, horses, carts came rattling by; the itinerant hawkers cried their wares from their sidewalk stands; there was a deafening din....

At the end of one street, against the coppery splendour of the dusk stood out the tapering outlines of a belfry.

”And don't you ever see Vidal?” asked Manuel.

”No. See here, Have you got any money?” blurted El Bizco.

”Twenty or thirty centimos at most.”

”Fine.”

Manuel bought a loaf of bread, which he gave to El Bizco, and the two drank a gla.s.s of brandy in a tavern. Then they went wandering about the streets and, at about eleven, returned to the Puerta del Sol.

Around the asphalt caldrons had gathered knots of men and tattered gamins; some were sleeping with their heads bent against the furnace as if they were about to attack it in bull fas.h.i.+on. The ragam.u.f.fins were talking and shouting, and they laughed at the pa.s.sers-by who came over out of curiosity for a closer look.

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