The Quest | Page 9

hoarding up a tidy bit as provision against the winter of old age, when a former patron convinced her that he had a remarkable combination for winning a fortune at the Fronton. Do?a Violante fell into the trap and her patron left her without a céntimo. Then Do?a Violante went back to the old life, became half blind and reached that lamentable state at which surely she would have arrived much sooner if, early in her career, she had developed a talent for living respectably.
The old lady passed most of the day in the confinement of her dark room, which reeked of stable odors, rice powder and cosmetics; at night she had to accompany her daughter and her granddaughter on walks, and to cafés and theatres, on the hunt and capture of the kid, as it was put by the travelling salesman who suffered from his stomach,--a fellow half humorist and half grouch. When they were in the house Celia and Irene, the daughter and the granddaughter of Do?a Violante, kept bickering at all hours; perhaps this continuous state of irritation derived from the close quarters in which they lived; perhaps so much passing as sisters in the eyes of others had convinced them that they really were, so that they quarrelled and insulted one another as such.
The one point on which they agreed was that Do?a Violante was in their way; the burden of the blind woman frightened away every libidinous old fellow that came within the range of Irene and Celia.
The landlady, Do?a Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two maternally to gird themselves with patience; Do?a Violante, after all, was not, like Calypso, immortal. But they replied that this toiling away at full speed just to keep the old lady in medicine and syrups wasn't at all to their taste.
Do?a Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circumstances enabled her to put herself in Do?a 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 assured 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.
Do?a 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.
"Do?a 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 scrapes he got his clothes so dirty and torn that the landlady nicknamed him the page Don Rompe-Galas, recalling a tattered character from a saínete that Do?a 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. Do?a Violante, whenever she pilfered a few céntimos 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. "Nobody'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 Do?a 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