Manuel was glad to be left by himself with Reverte,
contemplating the house, the yard, the ditch; he turned
the carrousel round and it creaked ill-humouredly;
he climbed up the swing frame, looked down at the
hens, teased the pig a little and then ran up and down
with the dog chasing after him barking merrily in
feigned fury.
This dark depression attracted Manuel somehow or other,
with its rubbish heaps, its gloomy hovels, its comical,
dismantled merry-go-round, its swings, and its ground
that held so many surprises, for a rough, ordinary
pot burgeoned from its depths as easily as a lady’s
elegant perfume phial; the rubber bulb of a prosaic
syringe grew side by side with the satin, scented sheet
of a love letter.
This rough, humble life, sustained by the detritus
of a refined, vicious existence; this almost savage
career in the suburbs of a metropolis, filled Manuel
with enthusiasm. It seemed to him that all the
stuff cast aside in scorn by the capital,—the
ordure and broken tubs, the old flower-pots and toothless
combs, buttons and sardine tins,—all the
rubbish thrown aside and spurned by the city, was
dignified and purified by contact with the soil.
Manuel thought that if in time he should become the
owner of a little house like Senor Custodio’s,
and of a cart and donkeys, and hens and a dog, and
find in addition a woman to love him, he would be one
of the almost happy men in this world.
Senor Custodio’s Ideas—La
Justa, El Carnicerin, and El Conejo.
Senor Custodio was an intelligent fellow of natural
gifts, very observant and quick to take advantage
of a situation. He could neither read nor write,
yet made notes and kept accounts; with crosses and
scratches of his own invention he devised a substitute
for writing, at least for the purposes of his own business.
Senor Custodio was exceedingly eager for knowledge,
and if it weren’t that the notion struck him
as ridiculous, he would have set about learning how
to read and write. In the afternoon, work done,
he would ask Manuel to read the newspapers and the
illustrated reviews that he picked up on the streets,
and the ragdealer and his wife listened with the utmost
attention.
Senor Custodio had, too, several volumes of novels
in serial form that had been left behind by his daughter,
and Manuel began to read them aloud.
The comment of the ragdealer, who took this fiction
for historic truth, was always perspicacious and just,
revelatory of an instinct for reasoning and common
sense. The man’s realistic criticism was
not always to Manuel’s taste, and at times the
boy would make bold to defend a romantic, immoral
thesis. Senor Custodio, however, would at once
cut him short, refusing to let him continue.
For professional reasons the ragdealer was much preoccupied
with thought of the manure that went to waste in Madrid.
He would say to Manuel:
