CHAPTER VI
The Snow—More Tales From Don Alonso—Las Injurias—The Asilo del Sur
Manuel slept like a log the whole of the following morning. Indeed, when he got up it was past three in the afternoon.
He knocked at Jesús’s door. La Fea was at the machine and La Salvadora was sitting in a tiny chair ripping some skirts; the tot was playing on the floor.
“Where’s Jesús?” asked Manuel.
“I guess you know better than we do,” retorted La Salvadora, her voice quivering with anger.
“I ... left him ...; then I met a friend....” Manuel forced himself to invent a lie. “Perhaps he’s at the shop,” he added.
“No. He’s not at the printing shop,” replied La Salvadora.
“I’ll go look for him.”
Manuel left the hostelry of Santa Casilda in shame. He walked toward the heart of the city and asked for his friend at the tavern on the Calle de Tetuán.
“He was here,” answered the waiter, “until the place closed. Then he went off as drunk as a lord, I don’t know where.”
Manuel returned to the house, and went back to bed with the intention of going to the printing shop on the next day. But the following day he awoke late again. He was overcome by an inertia that seemed impossible to conquer.
He came upon La Salvadora in the corridor.
“Haven’t you gone to the shop today, either?” she asked.
“No.”
“Very well, then. Don’t trouble yourself ever to come back here again,” rasped the girl, furiously. “We don’t need any tramps. While we’re here slaving away, you fellows go out for a gay time. I’m telling you, now, don’t ever show up here again, and if you see Jesús, tell him the same for his sister and for me.”
Manuel shrugged his shoulders and left the house. It had been snowing all day. In the Puerta del Sol gangs of street-sweepers and hose men were clearing away the drifts; the filthy water ran along the gutters.
Several times Manuel stepped into the Café de Lisboa, hoping to come upon Vidal. Not finding him there he had a bite at a tavern, after which he went for a stroll through the streets. It got dark very early. Madrid, enveloped in snow, was deserted. The Plaza de Oriente looked unreal, somewhat like a scene set upon a stage. The monarchs of stone wore white cloaks. The statue in the centre of the square stood out nobly against the sky of grey. From the Viaduct there was a view of white expanses. Toward Madrid lay a heap of yellowish structures and black roofs, of towers jutting into the milky heavens, reddened by a luminous irradiation.
Manuel returned to the house in low spirits; he threw himself into bed.
“Tomorrow I’m going back to the shop,” he said to himself. But on the morrow he did not go back. He rose very early with that intention, and was actually about to enter the printery when the idea occurred to him that the boss might raise a rumpus, so he turned away. “If not here, then I’ll find work elsewhere,” he thought, and he turned his steps back in the direction of the Puerta del Sol, proceeding thence to the Plaza de Oriente, through the Calle de Bailén, and the Calle de Ferraz to the Paseo de Rosales. The avenue was silent and deserted.
From this point could be viewed the entire landscape white under the snow, the dark groves of the Casa de Campo, and the round hills bristling with black pine trees. The pallid sun hovered in a leaden sky. Near the horizon, in the direction of Villaverde, shone a strip of clear blue sky in a pink mist. Profound silence everywhere. Only the strident whistle of the locomotives and the hammering in the workshops of the Estación del Norte disturbed that calm. Not a footfall resounded on the pavement.
The houses along the avenue displayed snowy adornments upon balustrade and coping; the trees seemed to flatten under that white mantle.
That afternoon Manuel returned toward the printing-shop, ventured inside and asked the pressman for Jesús.
“He got a fierce call-down from the boss,” was the answer.
“Did he fire him?”
“Maybe not! Go up now and take your medicine.”
Manuel, about to go up, paused.
“Has Jesús gone already?”
“Yes. He must be in the corner tavern.”
And he really was. He sat before a table drinking a glass of whisky. There was a sad, doleful expression upon his face. He was a prey to his sombre thoughts.
“What are you doing?” asked Manuel.
“Oh, it’s you, is it?”
“Yes. Did the old cripple discharge you?”
“Yes.”
“Were you thinking of anything?”
“Pse!... There’s nothing doing, anyway. Come on, let’s have a glass or two.”
“No, not for me.”
“You’ll do as you’re told. I’ve got only forty céntimos, which is as good as nothing. Hey, waiter! A couple of glasses.”
They drank and then walked off in the direction of the Santa Casilda hostelry. It was still snowing. Jesús, his cheeks hectic, coughed desperately.
“I warn you: Salvadora, that little kid, will raise holy hell,” said Manuel. “Such a temper she has!”
“Well, what do they want? To have us saving up money all our lives? I’m glad that the kid is in the house, for she can take care of La Fea, who is the unhappier of the two.... And you,—how much have you got left from your pay?” asked the compositor of Manuel.
“Me? Not even a button.”
At this reply Jesús was so deeply moved that he seized his companion by the arm and assured him in the most ardent outbursts that he esteemed him and loved him as a brother.
“And may I be damned!” he concluded, “if I’m not willing to do anything under the sun for you. For this telling me that you haven’t even a button is worth more to me than all the deeds of the hero of Cascorro.”[4]
Manuel, affected by these words, asseverated in a husky voice that though he was a vagabond and a good-for-nothing, he was ready to perform any sacrifice for so staunch a friend.
In order to celebrate such tender protestations of amity, they both lurched into a tavern on the Calle de Barrionuevo and gulped down a few more glasses of whisky.
They reached the Santa Casilda hostelry dead drunk. The house janitor came out to meet them, demanding of each the rent for his room. Jesús answered jestingly that they gave him no money because they had none to give. He rejoined that either they paid or they could take to the street, whereupon the compositor dared him to throw them out.
The man’s wife, who might have been a soldier, took them both by the shoulder and shoved them into the street.
“Lord, oh Lord! The weaker sex!” mumbled Jesús. “That’s what they call the weaker sex!... And they can throw a fellow out of the house.... And where’s a guy going to get two duros?... Well, what do you say to that, Manuel? Hey? The weaker sex.... How do you like such a figurative manner of speech?... It’s we who are the weaker, and they simply abuse their strength.”
They began to stagger along the street; neither felt the cold.
From time to time Jesús would pause and deliver a diatribe; a man would laugh as they passed by, or a youngster, from some doorway, would call after them and send a snowball in their direction.
“I wonder whom they’re laughing at?” thought Manuel.
The Ronda was silent, white, cut by a dark stream of water left by the carts. The large flakes came falling down, interweaving in their descent; they danced in the gusts of wind like white butterflies. During the intervals of calm they would glide slowly, softly through the greyish atmosphere, like the gentle down from the neck of a swan.
Afar, in the mist, lay the white landscape of the suburbs, the gently curving slopes, the houses and the cemeteries of the Campo de San Isidro. Against this background everything stood out more distinct than ordinarily: the roofs, the mudwalls, the trees, the lanterns thickly hooded in snow.
In this whitish ambient the black smoke belched forth by the chimneys spread through the air like a threat.
“The weaker sex. Hey, Manuel?” continued Jesús, harping upon his fixed idea. “And yet they can show a fellow to the door.... It’s as if they said the weak snow.... Because you tread upon it.... Isn’t that so?... But the snow makes you cold.... And then who’s the weaker, you or the snow?... You, because you catch cold. That’s all a fellow does in this world,—catch cold.... Everything is cold, understand?... Everything.... Like the snow.... Do you see how white it is, eh? It looks so good, so affectionate ... the weaker sex.... Well, touch it, and you freeze.”
They squandered their last céntimos on another glass of whisky, and from that moment they were no longer conscious of their doings.
The following morning they awoke frozen through and through, in a shed of the Cattle Market situated near the Paseo de los Pontones.
Jesús was coughing horribly.
“You stay here,” said Manuel to him. “I’m going to see whether I can pick up something to eat.”
He went out to the Ronda. The snow had ceased. Several gamins were amusing themselves by throwing snowballs at one another. He went up the Calle del Águila; the cobbler’s was closed. It then occurred to Manuel to hunt out Jacob; he turned toward the Viaduct and was walking along absent-mindedly when he felt some one grab him by the shoulders and cry:
“Stay thy hand, Abraham. Where are you bound?”
It was the Snake-Man, the illustrious Don Alonso.
Manuel told him what straits he and Jesús were in.
“Don’t give up; better times are coming,” mumbled the Snake-Man. “Have you any place to go to?”
“A shed.”
“Good. Let’s go there. I’ve got a peseta. That’s enough to get the three of us a bite.”
They went into a chop house on the Calle del Águila where, for two reales, they received a pot of stew; they bought bread and then the pair made quickly for the shed. They ate, laid aside something for the night, and after their meal Don Alonso tore loose several pickets from a fence and succeeded in starting a fire inside the shed.
That afternoon it began to rain in torrents; the Snake-Man considered it his duty to enliven the company, so he told one tale after the other, always commencing with his eternal refrain of “Once in America....”
“Once in America”—(and this is the least unlikely tale of all he told)—“we were sailing down the Mississippi on a steamer. And let me tell you, those steamboats rock so little that you can play billiards on them. Well, we were sailing along and we reach a certain town. The boat stops and we see a mob of people on the wharf of that village. We draw nearer and we behold that they’re all Indians, with the exception of a few guards and Yankee soldiers.
“I” (and Don Alonso added this information proudly) “who was the director, said to my musicians, ‘We must start a lively tune,’ and right away, Boom! Boom! Tra, la, la!... You can’t imagine the shouts and the shrieks and the croaking of that crowd.
“When the band had stopped playing, a big fat Indian squaw with her head full of cock feathers steps up to me and begins to make ceremonial greetings. I asked one of the Yankees, ‘Who is this lady?’ ‘She’s the queen,’ he said, ‘and she wants a little more music.’ I saluted the queen. Most excellent lady! (And I made an elegant series of Versaillesque bows, setting one foot back.) I said to the members of the band, ‘Boys, a little more music for her Majesty.’ They started up again, and the queen, highly pleased, saluted me with her hand on her heart. I did the same. Most excellent lady!
“We put up our portable circus in a few hours and I withdrew to ponder over the programme. I was the director. ‘We’ll have to give The Mounted Indian,’ I said to myself. Even though it’s a discredited number in the cities, they can’t know it here. Then I’ll exhibit my ecuyères, acrobats, equilibrists, pantomimists and, as a finale, the clowns, who will be the climax of the show. The fellow who was to play The Mounted Indian I tipped off and said, ‘See here, make yourself up to look as much like our audience as possible.’ ‘Don’t worry about that, director,’ he answered. Boys! It was a sensational success. When the ‘Indian’ appeared, what a racket of applause!”
Don Alonso mimed the number; he crouched, imitating the movements of one about to mount a horse; he sank his head in his chest, staring at a fixed point and imitated the whirling of a lasso above his head.
“The Mounted Indian,” continued Don Alonso, “won the applause of the other Indians. I’m positive that not one of them knew how to ride a horse. Then there was an acrobatic number, followed by a variety of others, until the time for the clowns came around. ‘Here’s where there’s pandemonium,’ I thought to myself. And surely enough, all they had to do was appear when a wild tumult broke loose. ‘They’re having a wonderful time,’ I said to myself, when in comes a boy. ‘Director, Señor Director!’ ‘What’s the trouble?’ ‘The whole audience is leaving.’ ‘Leaving?’ And indeed, they were. The Indians had become scared at sight of the clowns, and imagined that they were evil spirits come there to spoil the performance for them. I jump into the ring, and send the clowns stumbling off. Then, to efface the bad impression, I performed several sleight-of-hand tricks. When I began to belch ribbons of flame from my mouth, Lord, what a triumph! The whole house was astounded. But when I palmed a couple of rings and then drew out of my coat pocket a fish-bowl filled with live fishes, I received the greatest ovation of my career.”
Don Alonso was silent. Jesús and Manuel prepared to go to sleep, stretched out on the ground, huddled into a corner. The rain came down in bucketfuls; the water drummed loudly upon the roof of the shed; the wind whistled and moaned from afar.
It began to thunder, and it was for all the world as if some train were crashing headlong down a metal slope, so continuous, so violent was the thundering.
“A fine tempest!” grunted Jesús.
“Bah! Tempests on land!” sniffed Don Alonso. “Cheap stuff! Tempests on land are mere imitations. At sea,—that’s where you want to witness a tempest, at sea! when the waves come sweeping over the masts.... Even on the lakes. On Lake Erie and Lake Michigan I’ve been through tremendous storms, with waves as high as houses. But I must admit that the wind goes down almost at once and in a little while the water is as smooth as the pond of the Retiro. Why, once yonder in America....”
But Manuel and Jesús, weary of American tales, pretended to be fast asleep and the former Snake-Man sank into disconsolate silence, thinking of the days when he palmed the Indians’ rings and drew forth fish-bowls.
They could not sleep; several times they had to get up and change their places, for the water leaked through the roof.
On the following morning, when they left their hole, it was no longer raining. The snow had been melted completely. The Cattle Market was transformed into a swamp; the pavement of the Ronda, into a sea of mud; the houses and the trees dripped water; everything was black, miry, abandoned; only a few wandering, famished, mud-stained dogs were sniffing about in the heaps of refuse.
Manuel pawned his cape and on the advice of Jesús protected his chest with several layers of newspaper. For his cape he was allowed ten reales at a pawnbroker’s, and the three went off to eat at the Shelter of the Montaña del Príncipe Pío.
Manuel and Jesús, accompanied by Don Alonso, went into two printing shops and inquired after work, but there was none. At night they went back to the shelter for supper. Don Alonso suggested that they go to the beggars’ Depósito. Thither the three wended their way; it was dusk; before the doors of the Depósito there was a long row of tattered ragamuffins, waiting for them to open; Jesús and Manuel were opposed to going in.
They walked through the little wood near the Montaña barracks; some soldiers and prostitutes were chatting and smoking in a group. They went along the Calle de Ferraz, then along Bailén; they crossed the Viaduct, and going through the Calle de Toledo, reached the Paseo de los Pontones.
The corner of the shed where they had spent the previous night was now occupied by a crew of young vagabonds.
They resumed their trudging through the mud; it began to rain anew. Manuel proposed that they go to La Blasa’s tavern, and by the staircase of the Paseo Imperial they descended to the quarters of Las Injurias. The tavern was closed. They walked down a lane. Their feet sank into mud and pools of water. They noticed a hovel with an open door; they went inside. The Snake-Man struck a match. The place had two rooms, each a couple of metres square. The walls of the dingy dens oozed dampness and slime; the floor, of tamped earth, was riddled with the constant dripping and covered with puddles. The kitchen was a cess-pool of pestilence; in the centre rose a mound of refuse and excrement; in the corners, dead, desiccated cockroaches.
The next morning they left the house. It was a damp, dreary day; afar, the fields lay wrapped in mist. Las Injurias district was depopulated; its denizens were on their way through the muddy lanes to Madrid, on the hunt. Some ascended to the Paseo Imperial, others trooped down though the Arroyo de Embajadores.
They were a repulsive rout; some, ragpickers; others, mendicants; still others, starvelings; almost all of them of nauseating mien. Worse in appearance than the men were the women,—filthy, dishevelled, tattered. This was human refuse, enfolded in rags, swollen with cold and dankness, vomited up by this pest-ridden quarter. Here was a medley of skin-diseases, marks left by all the ailments to which the flesh is heir, the jaundiced hue of tertian fever, the contracted eyelash,—all the various stigmata of illness and poverty.
“If the rich could only see this, eh?” asked Don Alonso.
“Bah! They’d do nothing,” muttered Jesús.
“Why not?”
“Because they wouldn’t. If you were to deprive the rich man of the satisfaction of knowing that while he sleeps another is freezing, and that while he eats another is dying of hunger, you would deprive him of half his pleasure and good fortune.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked Don Alonso, staring in astonishment at Jesús.
“I certainly do. What’s more,—why should we bother with what they may think? They don’t give themselves any concern over us. At this hour they must be sleeping in their clean, soft beds, so peacefully, while we....”
The Snake-Man made a gesture of displeasure; he was vexed that any one should speak ill of the rich.
The sun came out: a disk of red over the black earth. Then carts began to arrive at the Gas Work’s dumping grounds and to dump rubbish and refuse. Here and there in the doorways of the hovels that filled the hollow appeared a woman with a cigar in her mouth.
One night the watchman of Las Injurias discovered the three men in the abandoned shanty and ejected them.
The following days, Manuel and Jesús—the showman had disappeared—decided to go to the Asilo de las Delicias for the night. Neither was at all bent upon finding work. It was already almost a month since they had taken to this tramp’s existence, and between one day at a barracks and the next in a monastery or a shelter, they managed to keep going.
The first time that Jesús and Manuel slept in the Asilo de las Delicias was a March day.
When they reached the Asilo it had not yet opened. They passed their wait strolling along the old Yeseros road. They wandered into the fields nearby, where they saw wretched shacks in the doorways of which some men were playing at chito or tejo, while bands of ragged children swarmed about.
These by-roads were gloomy, bleak, desolate spots,—the abode of ruins, as if a city had been reared there and been annihilated by a cataclysm. On all sides were heaps of refuse and débris, gullies filled with rubbish; here and there a broken stone chimney, a shattered lime-kiln. Only at rare intervals might one catch a glimpse of a garden with its draw-well; in the distance, on the hills that bounded the horizon, rose the dim suburbs and scattered houses. It was a disquieting vicinity; behind the hillock one came suddenly upon evil-looking vagabonds in groups of three or four.
Through a little gorge nearby flowed the Abroñigal, a rivulet; Manuel and Jesús followed it until they reached a stone bridge called Tres Ojos.
They returned at night. The shelter was already open. It was on the right hand side of the Yeseros road, in the vicinity of a number of abandoned cemeteries. Its pointed roof, its galleries and wooden staircases, lent it the appearance of a Swiss châlet. On the balcony was a signboard attached to the balustrade, reading: “Asilo Municipal del Sur.” A lantern with a red glass shed its gory light upon the deserted fields.
Manuel and Jesús went down several steps; at a counter a clerk who was scribbling away in a big book asked them their names; they replied and then entered the institution. The section for men consisted of two large rooms lit by gas-burners, separated by a partition wall; each had wooden pillars and high, tiny windows. Jesús and Manuel crossed the first room and went into the second, where there were several men stretched out here and there upon the beds. They, too, lay down and chatted for a while....
As they spoke, a number of beggars kept coming in, taking possession of the beds that were placed in the middle of the room and near the pillars. These new arrivals dropped on to the floor their coats, their patched capes, their filthy undershirts,—a heap of tatters,—at the same time depositing tin cans filled with cigarette ends, pots and baskets.
Almost all the patrons of the place went into the second room.
“There isn’t such a draught in this room,” said an old beggar who was preparing to lie down near Manuel.
Several ragamuffins between fifteen and twenty years of age burst into the place, took possession of a corner and settled down to a game of cané.
“You bunch of rascals!” cried the old beggar near Manuel. “You had to choose this place to come and gamble in. Damn it!”
“Wow! Listen to what old Wrinkle-face is bawling about now!” retorted one of the gamins.
“Shut your mouth, Old Bore! You’re as bad as Don Nicanor pounding his drum,” jeered another.
“Tramps! Vagabonds!” growled the old fellow angrily.
Manuel turned toward the fuming old man. He was a diminutive creature, with a sparse, greyish beard; he had a pair of eyes that looked like scars and black spectacles that reached to the middle of his forehead. He wore a patched, grimy coat; a flat, woolen cap, on top of which sat a derby with a greasy brim. As he had entered, he had disburdened himself of a canvas bag which he dropped to the floor.
“It’s these whippersnappers that get us in wrong,” explained the old man. “Last year they robbed the shelter telephone and stole a piece of lead from a water-pipe.”
Manuel swept the room with his glance. Near him, a tall old fellow with a white beard and the features of an apostle, leaned his shoulder against one of the pillars, immersed in his thoughts; he wore a smock, a muffler and a cap. In the corner occupied by the impudent, blustering ragamuffins rose the silhouette of a man garbed in black,—the type of a retired official. On his knees reposed the head of a slumbering boy of five or six.
All the rest were of bestial appearance; beggars that looked like highwaymen; maimed and crippled who roamed the streets exhibiting their deformities; unemployed labourers, now inured to idleness, amongst whom was an occasional specimen of a ruined gentleman, with straggling beard and greasy locks, whose bearing and apparel,—collar, cravat and cuffs, filthy as they might be,—still recalled a certain distinction,—a pallid reflection of the splendour that once had been.
The air in the room very soon grew hot, and the atmosphere, saturated with the odour of tobacco and poverty, became nauseating.
Manuel lay back in his cot and listened to the conversation that had sprung up between Jesús and the old man with the black spectacles. The fellow was an inveterate beggar, a connoisseur in all the arts of exploiting official charity.
Despite his continuous wanderings hither and thither, he had never been more than five or six leagues away from Madrid.
“Once upon a time this shelter was a good place,” he explained to Jesús. “There was a stove; each cot had its woollen blanket, and in the morning everybody got a good plate of soup.”
“Yes, water soup,” sneered another beggar, a young, thin, long-haired lad whose cheeks were browned by the sun.
“Even so. It warmed a fellow’s innards.”
The man of refinement, doubtless disgusted to find himself amid this rout of ragamuffins, took the sleeping child in his arms and drew near to the place occupied by Manuel and Jesús. He joined the conversation and began to relate his tribulations. Sad as his story was, there was yet something comical about it.
He came from a provincial capital, having left a modest position and believed in the words of the district deputy, who promised him a situation in the offices of the Ministry. For two months he tagged at the heels of the deputy; at the end of this time he found himself face to face with the direst poverty, absolutely without influence or recourse. In the meantime he was writing to his wife, inspiring her with hope.
The previous day he had been thrown out of his boarding-house and after having tramped over half of Madrid without finding a way to earn a peseta, had gone to the authorities and asked for an officer to conduct him and his child to some shelter. “I take only beggars to the shelter,” was the guard’s reply. “I’m going out begging,” answered the man humbly, “so you can take me.” “No,” was the officer’s answer. “First you must actually beg, then I’ll arrest you.”
The officer was intractable. At this moment a man happened to be going by. The father approached him with his child, brought his hand to his hat, but the request could not issue from his lips. It was then that the guard advised him to go to the Asilo de las Delicias.
“If they’d arrested you, you’d have gained nothing by it,” said the fellow with the black spectacles. “They’d have taken you off to the Cerro del Pimiento, and you’d have spent the livelong day there without so much as a crumb.”
“And then what would they have done with me?” asked the gentleman of refinement.
“Expel you from Madrid.”
“But aren’t there places here where a person can spend the night?” asked Jesús.
“A raft of them,” replied the old man. “Everywhere you go. Especially now, when it’s so cold in the winter.”
“I’ve lived,” chimed in the young beggar, “for more than half a year in Vaciamadrid,—an almost depopulated town. A comrade of mine and myself found a house that was closed, and we installed ourselves in it. For a few weeks we lived swimmingly. At night we’d go to the Arganda station; we’d bore a hole with an auger in a cask of wine, fill up our wine-bag and then stuff the hole with pitch.”
“And why did you leave the place?” queried Manuel.
“The civil guard laid siege to us and we were forced to escape through the windows. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t already tired of the joint. I like to roam along the road, one day here, another there. That’s the way a fellow meets people who know a thing or two, and picks up an education....”
“Have you done much tramping hereabouts?”
“All my life. I can’t use up more than one pair of sandals per town. If I stay very long in the same place I grow so uneasy that I just have to get a move on. Ah! The country! There’s nothing like it. You eat where you can. In winter it’s tough. But summer time! You make your thyme bed underneath a tree and have a magnificent sleep, better than the king himself. When the cold comes around, then, like the swallows, off you fly to wherever it’s nice and warm.”
The old man with the black spectacles, scornful of what the young vagabond had said, informed Jesús as to the nooks to be found in the outlying districts.
“Now let me tell you where I go when it’s fine weather. There’s a cemetery near the third Depósito. There are some houses there that we’ll go to this spring.”
The conclusion of the conversation reached Manuel in but a confused form, as he had fallen asleep. At midnight he was awakened by some voices. In the corner to which the ragamuffins had repaired two boys were rolling over the floor in a hand to hand struggle.
“I’ll pay you,” muttered one between his teeth.
“Let go. You’re choking me.”
The old mendicant, who had been awakened, got up in a fury and, seizing his stick, let it fall hard upon the shoulder of one of the boys. The youth who was struck down rose up, roaring with anger.
“Come on, now, you pig! You son of a dirty bitch!” he shrieked.
They rushed for each other, exchanged several blows and then both fell headlong to the floor.
“These young tramps are getting us in wrong,” exclaimed the old man.
A guard re-established order and expelled the trouble-makers. The denizens of the shelter were again calm and nothing more was heard save the muffled or sibilant snoring of the sleepers....
The next morning, even before daybreak, when the doors of the Asilo were opened, every one who had spent the night there left the place and had in a moment disappeared into the outskirts.
Manuel and Jesús chose the Calle de Mendez Alvaro. On the platforms of the Estación del Mediodía the electric arcs shone like globes of light in the gloomy atmosphere of the night.
From the chimneys of the roundhouse rose dense pillars of white smoke; the red and green pupils of the signal lamps winked confidentially from their lofty poles; the straining boilers of the locomotives sent forth most horrible roars.
On both sides along the perspective of the thoroughfare quivered the pale lights of the distant street lamps. Yonder in the country, through the air that was as murky and yellowish as ground glass, could be made out upon the colourless fields, low cottages, black picket fences, high gnarled telegraph poles, distant, obscure embankments that formed the railroad bed. A few ramshackle taverns, lighted by a languidly burning oil lamp, were open.... With the opaque glow of dawn appeared, to the right, the wide, leaden roof of the Estación del Mediodía, glistening with dew; opposite, the pile of the General Hospital, jaundice-hued; to the left, the barren fields, the indistinct brown vegetable patches that rose until they blended, with the undulating hills of the horizon under the grey, humid sky, into the vast desolation of the Madrilenian suburbs....