The Quest | Page 9

tried his patience.
Doña Violante and her daughters,--especially the old lady, showed a
great liking for the boy. The three women had now been living in the
house for several months; they paid little and when they couldn't pay at
all, they didn't. But they were easily satisfied. All three occupied an
inner room that opened onto the courtyard, whence came a nauseating
odour of fermented milk that escaped from the stable of the ground
floor.

The hole in which they lived was not large enough to move about in;
the room assigned to them by the landlady--in proportion to the size of
their rent and the insecurity of the payment--was a dark den occupied
by two narrow iron beds, between which, in the little space left, was
crammed a cot.
Here slept these gallant dames; by day they scoured all Madrid, and
spent their existence making arrangements with money-lenders,
pawning articles and taking them out of pawn.
The two young ladies, Celia and Irene, although they were mother and
daughter, passed for sisters. Doña Violante, in her better days, had led
the life of a petty courtesan and had succeeded in 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. Doña Violante fell into the trap and her patron
left her without a céntimo. Then Doña 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 Doña 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 Doña 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, Doña Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected

the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two
maternally to gird themselves with patience; Doña 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.
Doña Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circumstances
enabled her to put herself in Doña 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.
Doña 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.
"Doña 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