The Quest | Page 4

were two
or three landladies, a family who let out rooms to permanent gentlemen
boarders, but nothing else. Wherefore the author does not climb those
heights but pauses upon the first landing.
Here, at least by day, could be made out in the reigning darkness, a tiny
door; at night, on the other hand, by the light of a kerosene lantern one
could glimpse a tin door-plate painted red, upon which was inscribed in
black letters: "Casiana Fernández."
At one side of the door hung a length of blackish rusted chain that
could be reached only by standing on tiptoe and stretching out one's
arm; but as the door was always ajar, the lodgers could come and go
without the need of knocking.
This led to the house. By day, one was plunged into utter obscurity; the
sole thing that indicated a change of place was the smell, not so much
because it was more agreeable than that of the staircase, as because it
was distinct; on the contrary, at night, in the vague light shed by a cork
night-taper afloat in the water and oil of a bowl that was attached to the
wall by a brass ring, there could be seen through a certain dim
nebulosity, the furniture, the pictures and the other paraphernalia that
occupied the reception hall.
Facing the entrance stood a broad, solid table on which reposed an
old-fashioned music-box consisting of several cylinders that bristled
with pins; close beside it, a plaster statue: a begrimed figure lacking a
nose, and difficult to distinguish as some god, half-god or mortal.
On the wall of the reception room and of the corridor hung some large,
indistinct oil paintings. A person of intelligence would perhaps have
considered them detestable, but the landlady, who imagined that a very
obscure painting must be very good, refreshed herself betimes with the
thought that mayhap these pictures, sold to an Englishman, would, one
day make her independent.
There were several canvases in which the artist had depicted horrifying

biblical scenes: massacres, devastation, revolting plagues; but all this in
such a manner, that, despite the painter's lavish distribution of blood,
wounds and severed heads, these canvases instead of horrifying,
produced an impression of merriment. One of them represented the
daughter of Herodias contemplating the head of St. John the Baptist.
Every figure expressed amiable joviality: the monarch, with the
indumentary of a card-pack king and in the posture of a card-player,
was smiling; his daughter, a florid-face dame, was smiling; the
familiars, encased in their huge helmets, were smiling, and the very
head of St. John the Baptist was smiling from its place upon a repoussé
platter. Doubtless the artist of these paintings, if he lacked the gift of
design and colour, was endowed with that of joviality.
To the right and left of the house door ran the corridor, from whose
walls hung another exhibit of black canvases, most of them unframed,
in which could be made out absolutely nothing; only in one of them,
after very patient scrutiny, one might guess at a red cock pecking at the
leaves of a green cabbage.
Upon this corridor opened the bedrooms, in which, until very late in the
afternoon, dirty socks and torn slippers were usually seen strewn upon
the floor, while on the unmade beds lay collars and cuffs.
Almost all the boarders in that house got up late, except two travelling
salesmen, a bookkeeper and a priest, who arose early through love of
their occupations, and an old gentleman who did so through habit or for
reasons of hygiene.
The bookkeeper would be off, without breakfast, at eight in the
morning; the priest left in albis to say mass; but the salesmen had the
audacious presumption to eat a bite in the house, and the landlady
resorted to a very simple procedure to send them off without so much
as a sip of water; these two agents began work between half-past nine
and ten; they retired very late, bidding their landlady wake them at
eight-thirty. She would see to it that they were not aroused until ten.
When they awoke and saw the time, they would jump out of bed,
hurriedly dress and dash off like a shot, cursing the landlady. Then,
when the feminine element of the house gave signs of life, every nook

would echo with cries, discordant voices, conversations shouted from
one bedchamber to another, and out of the rooms, their hands armed
with the night-service, would come the landlady, one of Doña
Violante's daughters, a tall, obese Biscayan Lady, and another woman
whom they called the Baroness.
The landlady invariably wore a corset-cover of yellow flannel, the
Baroness a wrapper mottled with stains from cosmetics and the
Biscayan lady a red waist through whose opening was regularly
presented,