The Quest by Pio Baroja

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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 Estacion del Mediodia
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 Almazan, he had to wait more
than an hour for a mixed train, so he sauntered through the deserted
streets to kill time.

To Manuel, Almazan 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 Almazanhad 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 youngsters displayed traits almost absolutely opposite; the
elder, Manuel, was of a frivolous, slothful, indolent disposition, and
would neither study nor go to school. He was fond of romping about the
fields and engaging in bold, dangerous escapades. The characteristic
trait of Juan, the younger brother, was a morbid sentimentalism that
would overflow in tears upon the slightest provocation.

Manuel recalled that the school master and town organist, an old
fellow who was half dominie and taught the two brothers Latin, had
always prophesied that Juan would make his mark; Manuel he considered
as an adventure-seeking rover who would come to a bad end.

As Manuel dozed in the third-class compartment, a thousand
recollections thronged his imagination: the events of the night before
at his uncle's mingled in his mind with fleeting impressions of Madrid
already half forgotten. One by one the sensations of distinct epochs
intertwined themselves in his memory, without rhyme or reason and
among them, in the phantasmagoria of near and distant images that
rolled past his inner vision, there stood out clearly those sombre
towers glimpsed by night in Almazan by the light of the moon....

When one of his travelling companions announced that they had already
reached Madrid, Manuel was filled with genuine anxiety. A red dusk
flushed the sky, which was streaked with blood like some monster's
eye; the train gradually slackened speed; it glided through squalid
suburbs and past wretched houses; by this time, the electric lights
were gleaming pallidly above the high signal lanterns....

The train rolled on between long lines of coaches, the round-tables
trembled with an iron rumble, and the Estacion del Mediodia,
illuminated by arc lamps, came into view.

The travellers got out; Manuel descended with his little bundle of
clothes in his hand, looked in every direction for a glimpse of his
mother and could not make her out anywhere on the wide platform. For a
moment he was confused, then decided to follow the throng that was
hurrying with bundles and bird-cages toward a gate; he was asked for
his ticket, he stopped to go through his pockets, found it and issued
into the street between two rows of porters who were yelling the names
of hotels.

"Manuel! Where are you going?"

There was his mother. Petra had meant to be severe; but at the sight
of her son she forgot her severity and embraced him effusively.

"But--what happened?" Petra asked at once.

"Nothing."

"Then--why have you come?"

"They asked me whether I wanted to stay there or go to Madrid, and I
said I'd rather go to Madrid."

"Nothing more?"

"Nothing more," replied Manuel simply.

"And Juan? Was he studying?"

"Yes. Much more than I was. Is the house far off, Mother?"

"Yes, Why? Are you hungry?"

"I should say. I haven't had a bite all the way."

They left the Station at the Prado; then they walked up Alcala street.
A dusty mist quivered in the air; the street-lamp shone opaquely in
the turbid atmosphere.... As soon as they reached the house Petra made
supper for Manuel and prepared a bed for him upon the floor, beside
her own. The youth lay down, but so violent was the contrast between
the hamlet's silence and the racket of footsteps, conversations and
cries that resounded through the house, that, despite his weariness,
Manuel could not sleep.

He heard every lodger come in; it was past midnight when the
disturbance quieted down; suddenly a squabble burst out followed by a
crash of laughter which ended in a triply blasphemous imprecation and
a slap that woke the echoes.

"What can that be, Mother?" asked Manuel from his bed.

"That's Dona Violante's daughter whom they've caught with her
sweetheart," Petra answered, half from her sleep. Then it occurred to
her that it was imprudent to tell this to her boy, and she added,
gruffly:

"Shut up and go to sleep."

The music-box in the reception-room, set going by the hand of one of
the boarders, commenced to tinkle that sentimental air from _La
Mascotte_,--the duet between Pippo and Bettina:

_Will you forget me, gentle swain?_

Then all was silent.

CHAPTER III

First Impressions of Madrid--The Boarders--Idyll--Sweet and
Delightful Lessons.

Manuel's mother had a relation, her husband's cousin, who was a
cobbler. Petra had decided, some days previously, to give Manuel into
apprenticeship at the shoe-shop; but she still hoped the boy would be
convinced that it was better for him to study something than to learn
a trade, and this hope had deterred her from the resolution to send
the boy to her relative's house.

Persuading the landlady to permit Manuel to remain in the house cost
Petra no little labour, but at last she succeeded. It was agreed that
the boy would run errands and help to serve meals. Then when the
vacation season had passed, he would resume his studies.

On the day following his arrival the youngster assisted his mother at
the table.

All the borders, except the Baroness and her girl, were seated in the
dining-room, presided over by the landlady with her wrinkle-fretted,
parchment-hued face and its thirty-odd moles.

The dining-room, a long, narrow habitation with a window opening on
the courtyard, communicated with two narrow corridors that switched
off at right angles; facing the window stood a dark walnut sideboard
whose shelves were laden with porcelain, glassware and cups and
glasses in a row. The centre table was so large for such a small room
that when the boarders were seated it scarcely left space for passage
at the ends.

The yellow wall-paper, torn in many spots, displayed, at intervals,
grimy circles from the oil of the lodgers' hair; reclining in their
seats they would rest the back of the chairs and their heads against
the wall.

The furniture, the straw chairs, the paintings, the mat full of
holes,--everything in that room was filthy, as if the dust of many
years had settled upon the articles and clung to the sweat of several
generations of lodgers.

By day the dining-room was dark; by night it was lighted by a
flickering kerosene lamp that smudged the ceiling with smoke.

The first time that Manuel, following his mother's instructions,
served at table, the landlady, as usual, presided. At her right sat an
old gentleman of cadaverous aspect,--a very fastidious personage who
conscientiously wiped the glasses and plates with his napkin. By his
side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he
would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady
rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of bestial appearance, with a
huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat
as a toad, was Dona Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now
Dona Violent and now Dona Violated.

Near Dona Violante were grouped her daughters; then a priest who
prattled incessantly, a journalist whom they called the Superman,--a
very fair youth, exceedingly thin and exceedingly serious,--the
salesmen and the bookkeeper.

Manuel served the soup and all the boarders took it, sipping it with a
disagreeable inhalation. Then, according to his mother's orders, the
youngster remained standing there. Now followed the beans which, if
not for their size then for their hardness might have figured in an
artillery park, and one of the boarders permitted himself some
pleasantry about the edibleness of so petreous a vegetable; a
pleasantry that glided over the impassive countenance of Dona Casiana
without leaving the slightest trace.

Manuel sat about observing the boarders. It was the day after the
conspiracy; Dona Violante and her daughters were incommunicative and
in ugly humour. Dona Violante's inflated face at every moment creased
into a frown, and her restless, turbid eyes betrayed deep
preoccupation. Celia, the elder of the daughters, annoyed by the
priest's jests, began to answer violently, cursing everything human
and divine with a desperate, picturesque, raging hatred, which caused
loud, universal laughter. Irene, the culprit of the previous night's
scandal, a girl of some fifteen or sixteen years with a broad head,
large hands and feet, an as yet incompletely developed body and heavy,
ungainly movements, spoke scarcely a word and kept her gaze fixed upon
her plate.

The meal at an end, the lodgers went off to their various tasks. At
night Manuel served supper without dropping a thing or making a single
mistake, but in five or six days he was forever doing things wrong.

It is impossible to judge how much of an impression was made upon the
boy by the usage and customs of the boarding roost and the species of
birds that inhabited it; but they could not have impressed him much.
Manuel, while he served at table in the days that followed, had to put
up with and endless succession of remarks, jests and practical jokes.

A thousand incidents, comical enough to one who did not have to suffer
them, turned up at every step; now they would discover tobacco in the
soup, now coal, ashes, and shreds of coloured paper in the
water-bottle.

One of the salesmen, who was troubled with his stomach and spent his
days gazing at the reflection of his tongue in the mirror, would jump
up in fury when one of these jokes was perpetrated, and ask the
proprietress to discharge an incompetent booby who committed such
atrocities.

Manuel grew accustomed to these manifestations against his humble
person, and when they scolded him he retorted with the most bare-faced
impudence and indifference.

Soon he learned the life and miracles of every boarder and was ready
to talk back in outrageous fashion if they tried his patience.

Dona 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. Dona 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. Dona Violante fell into the trap and her
patron left her without a centimo. Then Dona 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 cafes 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 Dona
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 Dona 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, Dona Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected
the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two maternally
to gird themselves with patience; Dona 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.

Dona Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circumstances
enabled her to put herself in Dona 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.

Dona 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.

"Dona 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 sainete that Dona 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. Dona Violante,
whenever she pilfered a few centimos 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 Dona 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 to
fell an ox.

Manuel listened to Dona Violante's stories with genuine delight. The
old lady was at her best in her commentaries.

"I tell you, my boy," she would say, "you can take my word for it. A
woman with a good pair of breasts and who happens to be a pretty warm
article"--and here the old lady pulled at her cigarette and with an
expressive gesture indicated what she meant by her no less expressive
word--"will always have a trail of men after her."

Dona Violante used to sing songs from Spanish _zarzuelas_ and
from French operettas, which produced in Manuel a terrible sadness. He
could not say why, but they gave him the impression of a world of
pleasures that was hopelessly beyond his reach. When he heard Dona
Violante sing the song from _El Juramento_

_Disdain is a sword with a double edge,
One slays with love, the other with forgetfulness...._

he had a vision of salons, ladies, amorous intrigues; but even more
than by this he was overwhelmed with sadness by the waltzes from _La
Dina_ and _La Grande Duchesse_.

Dona Violante's reflexions opened Manuel's eyes; the scenes that
occurred daily in the house, however, worked quite as much as these
toward such a result.

Another good instructor was found in the person of Dona Casiana's
niece, a trifle older than Manuel,--a thin, weakly chit of such a
malicious nature that she was always hatching plots against somebody.

If any one struck her she didn't shed a tear; she would go down to the
concierge's lodge when the concierge's little boy was left alone,
would grab him and pinch him and kick him, in this manner wreaking
vengeance for the blows she had received.

After eating, almost all of the boarders went off to their affairs;
Celia and Irene, together with the Biscayan, indulged in a grand
frolic by spying upon the women in Isabel's house, who would come out
on the balcony and chat, or signal to the neighbours. At times these
miserable brothel odalisques were not content with speaking; they
would dance and exhibit their calves.

Manuel's mother, as always, would be meditating upon heaven and hell,
giving little heed to the pettiness of this earth, and she could not
shield her son from such edifying spectacles. Petra's educational
system consisted only of giving Manuel an occasional blow and of
making him read prayer-books.

Petra imagined that she could see the traits of the machinist showing
up in the boy, and this troubled her. She wished Manuel to be like
her,--humble toward his superiors, respectful toward the priests...;
but a fine place this was for learning to respect anything!

One morning, after the solemn ceremony had been celebrated in which
all the women of the house issued into the corridor swinging their
night service, there burst from Dona Violante's room a clamour of
shouts, weeping, stamping and vociferation.

The landlady, the Biscayan and several of the boarders tiptoed into
the corridor to pry. Inside the quarrellers must have realized that
they were being spied upon, for they opened the door and the fray
continued in low tones.

Manuel and the landlady's niece remained in the entry. They could hear
Irene's sobbing and the scolding voices of Celia and Dona Violante.

At first they could not make out what was being said; but soon the
three women forgot their determination to speak low and their voices
rose in anger.

"Go! Go to the House of Mercy and have them rid you of that swelling!
Wretch!" cried Celia.

"Well, what of it?" retorted Irene. "I'm caught, am I? I know it. What
of it?"

Dona Violante opened the door to the entry furiously; Manuel and the
landlady's niece scampered off, and the old lady came out in a patched
flannel shift and a weed kerchief tied about her ears, and began to
pace to and fro, dragging her worn-out shoes from end to end of the
corridor.

"The sow! Worse than a sow!" she muttered. "Did any one ever see such
a filthy creature!"

Manuel went off to the parlour, where the landlady and the Biscayan
were chatting in low tones. The landlady's niece, dying with
curiosity, questioned the two women with growing irritation:

"But why are they scolding Irene?"

The landlady and the Biscayan exchanged amicable glances and burst
into laughter.

"Tell me," cried the child insistently, clutching at her aunt's
kerchief. "What of it if she has that bundle? Who gave her that
package?"

The landlady and the Biscayan could no longer restrain their guffaws,
while the little girl stared avidly up at them, trying to make out the
meaning of what she heard.

"Who gave her that package?" repeated the Biscayan between outbursts.
"My dear little girl, we really don't know who gave her that package."

All the boarders repeated the niece's question with enthusiastic
delight, and at every table discussion some wag would be sure to
interrupt suddenly with:

"Now I see that you know who gave her that package." The remark would
be greeted with uproarious merriment.

Then, after a few days had passed, there was rumour of a mysterious
consultation held by Dona Violante's daughters with the wife of a
barber on Jardines street,--a sort of provider of little angels for
limbo; it was said that Irene returned from the conference in a coach,
very pale, and that she had to be put at once to bed. Certainly the
girl did not leave her room for more than a week and, when she
appeared, she looked like a convalescent and the frowns had
disappeared completely from the face of her mother and her
grandmother.

"She looks like an infanticide," said the priest when he saw her
again, "but she's prettier than ever."

Whether any transgression had been committed, none could say with
surety; soon everything was forgotten; a patron appeared for the girl,
and he was, from all appearances, wealthy. In commemoration of so
happy an event the boarders participated in the treat. After the
supper they drank cognac and brandy, the priest played the guitar,
Irene danced _sevillanas_ with less grace than a bricklayer, as
the landlady said; the Superman sang some _fados_ that he had
learned in Portugal, and the Biscayan, not to be outdone, burst forth
into some _malaguenas_ that might just as well have been a
_cante flamenco_ or the Psalms of David.

Only the blond student with the eyes of steel abstained from the
celebration; he was absorbed in his thoughts.

"And you, Roberto," Celia said to him several times,--"don't you sing
or do anything?"

"Not I," he replied coldly.

"You haven't any blood in your veins."

The youth looked at her for a moment, shrugged his shoulders
indifferently and his pale lips traced a smile of disdainful mockery.

Then, as almost always happened in these boarding-house sprees, some
wag turned on the music-box in the corridor and the duet from _La
Mascotte_ together with the waltz from _La Diva_ rose in
confusion upon the air; the Superman and Celia danced a couple of
waltzes and the party wound up with everybody singing a
_habanera_, until they wearied and each owl flew off to his nest.

CHAPTER IV

Oh, love, love!--What's Don Telmo Doing?--Who is Don
Telmo?--Wherein the Student and Don Telmo Assume Certain
Novelesque Proportions.

The Baroness was hardly ever seen in the house, except during the
early hours of the morning and the night. She dined and supped
outside. If the landlady was to be credited, she was an adventuress
whose position varied considerably, for one day she would be moving to
a costly apartment and sporting a carriage, while the next she would
disappear for several months in the germ-ridden hole of some cheap
boarding-house.

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