The Quest | Page 6

did, taking in
new lodgers--unreliable, indigent folk who ran up large bills or never
paid at all--and in a short time she found herself compelled to sell her
furniture and abandon her new house.

Then she hired out her daughters as servants, sent her two boys off to a
little town in the province of Soria, where her brother-in-law was the
superintendent of a small railway station, and herself entered as a
domestic in Doña Casiana's lodging-house. Thus she descended from
mistress to servant, without complaint. It was enough that the idea had
occurred to her; therefore it was best.
She had been there for two years, saving her pay. Her ambition was to
have her sons study in a seminary and graduate as priests. And now
came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her plans. What
could have happened?
She made various conjectures. In the meantime with her deformed
hands she removed the lodgers' dirty laundry. In through the courtyard
window wafted a confusion of songs and disputing voices, alternating
with the screech of the clothes-line pulleys.
In the middle of the afternoon Petra began preparation for dinner. The
mistress ordered every morning a huge quantity of bones for the
sustenance of her boarders. It is very possible that there was, in all that
heap of bones, a Christian one from time to time; certainly, whether
they came from carnivorous animals or from ruminants, there was
rarely on those tibiae, humeri, and femora a tiny scrap of meat. The
ossuary boiled away in the huge pot with beans that had been tempered
with bicarbonate, and with the broth was made the soup, which, thanks
to its quantity of fat, seemed like some turbid concoction for cleaning
glassware or polishing gilt.
After inspecting the state of the ossuary in the stew-pot, Petra made the
soup, and then set about extracting all the scrap meat from the bones
and covering them hypocritically with a tomato sauce. This was the
_pièce de résistance_ in Doña Casiana's establishment.
Thanks to this hygienic regimen, none of the boarders fell ill with
obesity, gout or any of those other ailments due to excess of food and
so frequent in the rich.
After preparing the meal and serving it, Petra postponed the

dish-washing, and left the house to meet her son.
Night had not yet fallen. The sky was vaguely red, the air stifling,
heavy with a dense mist of dust and steam. Petra went up Carretas
Street, continued through Atocha, entered the Estación del Mediodía
and sat down on a bench to wait for Manuel....
Meanwhile, the boy was approaching the city half asleep, half
asphyxiated, in a third-class compartment.
He had taken the train the night before at the railway station where his
uncle was superintendent. On reaching Almazán, he had to wait more
than an hour for a mixed train, so he sauntered through the deserted
streets to kill time.
To Manuel, Almazán seemed vast, infinitely sad; the town, glimpsed
through the gloom of a dimly starlit night, loomed like a great, fanastic,
dead city. The pale electric lights shone upon its narrow streets and low
houses; the spacious plaza with its arc lights was deserted; the belfry of
a church rose into the heavens.
Manuel strolled down towards the river. From the bridge the town
seemed more fantastic and mysterious than ever; upon a wall might be
made out the galleries of a palace, and several lofty, sombre towers
shot up from amidst the jumbled dwellings of the town; a strip of moon
gleamed close to the horizon, and the river, divided by a few islets into
arms, glittered as if it were mercury.
Manuel left Almazánhad to wait a few hours in Alcuneza for the next
train. He was weary, and as there were no benches in the station, he
stretched himself out upon the floor amidst bundles and skins of oil.
At dawn he boarded the other train, and despite the hardness of the seat,
managed to fall asleep.
Manuel had been two years with his relatives; he departed from their
home with more satisfaction than regret.

Life had held no pleasure for him during those two years.
The tiny station presided over by his uncle was near a poor hamlet
surrounded by arid, stony tracts upon which grew neither tree nor bush.
A Siberian temperature reigned in those parts, but the inclemencies of
Nature were nothing to bother a little boy, and gave Manuel not the
slightest concern.
The worst of it all was that neither his uncle nor his uncle's wife
showed any affection for him, rather indifference, and this indifference
prepared the boy to receive their few benefactions with utter coldness.
It was different with Manuel's brother, to whom the couple gradually
took a liking.
The two