CHAPTER VIII
The Municipal Dungeons—The Returned Soldier—The Convent Soup
Several times Manuel, Jesús and Don Alonso slept in churches. One night, after the trio had retired in a chapel of San Sebastian, crowded with benches, the sexton threw them out and handed them over to a couple of officers. Don Alonso tried to show the guards that he was not only a respectable person, but an important one as well. While he was thus engaged in argument, Jesús escaped by the Plaza de Santa Ana.
“You can tell all that to the court,” answered the guard to the Snake-Man’s protestations.
They made their way through a nearby street and entered by a gate before which burned a red lamp. They climbed a narrow stairway into a room where two clerks sat scribbling. The clerks ordered Don Alonso and Manuel to be seated upon a bench, which both made haste to do most humbly.
“You, the older, what’s your name?” asked one of the clerks.
“I?” said the Snake-Man.
“Yes, you. Are you deaf, or an idiot?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Well, you look it. What’s your name?”
“Alonso de Guzmán Calderón y Téllez.”
“Age?”
“Fifty-six.”
“Married or single?”
“Bachelor.”
“Profession?”
“Circus artist.”
“Where do you live?”
“Up to a few days ago....”
“Where do you live now, I’m asking you, you imbecile.”
“Why, at present....”
“Write ‘without fixed residence,’” suggested the other clerk.
They then registered Manuel, whereupon he and the older man returned to their benches without a word, deeply speculative upon the fate that awaited them.
Officials of the department strolled around the room, chatting; now and then would be heard the tinkling of a bell.
Soon the door opened and a young woman came in with a mantilla over her shoulders. Her eyes were filled with great agitation.
She went over to the two clerks.
“Can you send somebody over ... to my house.... A physician ...? My mother just fell and broke her head.”
The clerk blew out a puff from his cigar and made no reply. Then, turning about so as to face the woman, and staring at her from crown to toe, he answered with an epical coarseness and bestiality:
“That belongs to the Emergency Hospital. We’ve got nothing to do with such cases.” He turned away and continued to smoke. The woman’s eyes roved in fright through the room; she finally decided to leave, mumbled good night in a breathless voice to which nobody replied, and disappeared.
“The ink-spilling pettifoggers! The beasts!” muttered Don Alonso in a low voice. “How much would it have cost them to send some guard to accompany that woman to the Emergency Hospital!”
Manuel and the Snake-Man spent more than two hours on the bench. At the end of this time the guards escorted them to another room in which was a tall man with a black beard combed in chulo fashion; he looked like a gambler or a croupier.
“Who are these persons?” asked the man, in an Andalusian accent.... As he twirled his moustaches, a diamond ring on his finger shot dazzling gleams.
“They’re the fellows who’ve been sleeping in the San Sebastian church,” said the guard. “They haven’t any home.”
“Begging your pardon,” interrupted Don Alonso. “By sheer accident....”
“Well, we’ll give them a home for a fortnight,” said the tall man.
Before Don Alonso could utter a word one of the guards shoved him rudely out of the room. Manuel followed him.
The two guards made them descend the stairways and put them into a dark room where, after some groping, they located a bench.
“Well, better times are coming,” said Don Alonso, sitting down and heaving a deep sigh.
Manuel, despite the fact that the situation was by no means a comical one, was seized with such an impulse to laugh that he could not contain it.
“What are you laughing at, sonny?” asked Don Alonso.
Manuel could not explain the reason for his laughter; but after a long siege of this hilarity he was left in a funereal mood.
“What would Jesús say if he were here!” muttered Manuel. “In the house of God, where all are equal, it is a crime to enter and rest. The sexton hands a fellow over to the guards; the guards thrust a fellow into a dark cell. And who’s to know what they’re going to do to us! I’m afraid they’ll take us off to prison, if, for that matter, they don’t hang us altogether.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. If they’d only give us a bite to eat!” moaned Don Alonso.
“They must be considering that.”
It must have been about one or two in the morning when the door to this pig-pen was opened. The Snake-Man and Manuel were led by two guards into the street.
“Say, where are you taking us?” inquired Don Alonso, a little scared.
“Keep on moving ahead,” replied the guard.
“This is an outrage,” muttered Don Alonso.
“You walk ahead, unless you want to march tied elbow to elbow,” snarled the guard.
They crossed the Puerta del Sol, continued through the Calle Mayor and stopped before the Municipal Police Headquarters. To the left of the causeway, by a narrow stairway, they had to descend to a room with a low ceiling which was lighted by an oil lamp. There were a number of high cots where ten or a dozen guards were asleep in a row, with their clothes and shoes on.
From this room they descended another tiny stairway to a very narrow corridor, one of the sides of which was divided into two cages with huge gratings. Into one of these they thrust Don Alonso and Manuel, locking the gate after them.
A man and a knot of gamins surrounded them curiously.
“This is an outrage,” shouted Don Alonso. “We’ve done nothing that gives them a right to imprison us.”
“Neither did I,” grumbled a young beggar who, according to report, had been caught asking an alms. “Besides, it’s impossible to stay here.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Manuel.
“One of these fellows has made a mess. He’s sick and naked. They ought to take him to the hospital. He says they’ve robbed him of his clothes. The kids, though, say he gambled them away in the cell.”
“And so he did,” declared one of the ragamuffins. “We were sent up for two weeks. When we left prison, just as we had reached the gate, they grabbed us all again and brought us here.”
By the light from the corridor could be made out, in the rear of that cage, several men on the floor.
Thrown upon a bench near the wall, naked, his legs curled up to his belly, the sick man was huddled into a threadbare cape; every move of his laid bare some part of his person.
“Water!” he begged, in a thin voice.
“We’ve already asked the sergeant for some,” said the beggar. “But he doesn’t bring it.”
“This is savagery!” roared the Snake-Man. “This is barbaric.”
As no one paid any attention to Don Alonso, he decided to subside into silence.
“That guy over there,” added the ragamuffin with a laugh, “has syphilis and the mange.”
Don Alonso sank deeper than ever into his melancholy and uttered not a word.
“And what are they going to do with us?” asked Manuel.
“They’ll shoot us off to prison for a couple of weeks,” answered the beggar.
“Do they eat there?” asked the Snake-Man, rising from the depths of his self-absorption.
“Not always.”
There was a general silence. All at once there was a hubbub of voices in the passageway; soon it became a pandemonium of women’s shrieks, curses and weeping.
“Hey, there, quit your shoving!”
“Damn the cuss!”
“Get along with you, now. Get along,” ordered a man’s voice.
This was a rout of some thirty women who had been arrested on the streets. They were all locked up in the cage next to the men. Some were shouting, others were groaning, and still others brought forth their choicest repertory of abuse, which they hurled at the heads of the Police Captain and the Chief of the Board of Health.
“There isn’t a sound one among them,” observed Don Alonso.
It seemed to Manuel that he made out the voices of La Chata and La Rabanitos. After locking up the women a sergeant came over to the men’s cage.
“Señor Sergeant,” spoke up Don Alonso. “There’s a fellow here who’s sick.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Señor Sergeant, perhaps you could do me a favour ...” added Manuel.
“What?”
“If there’s any reporter around for police news, just tell him that I’m a compositor on El Mundo and that I’ve been arrested.”
“Very well. I’ll do so.”
Before a half hour had gone by the sergeant returned. He opened the gate and turned toward Manuel.
“Hey, you. Compositor. Out with you.”
Manuel stepped out, passed by the cage that held the women, saw La Chata and La Rabanitos in a knot of old prostitutes which contained a negress (all of them horrible), and hurriedly climbed the stairway to the room in which the reserve guards were sleeping. The sergeant opened the door, seized Manuel by the arm, gave him a kick with all his might and pushed him into the street.
The City Hall clock was at three; it was drizzling; Manuel went off by the Calle de Ciudad Rodrigo to take shelter in the arches of the Plaza Mayor, and as he was weary, he sat down upon a door step. He was about to doze off when a man who looked like a professional beggar took a seat beside him. The fellow said he was a soldier back from Cuba,—that he could find no employment and, as far as that was concerned, was no good for work any more, as he had got used to living in constant flight.
“After all,” continued the returned soldier, “I’ve got my luck with me. If I haven’t died this winter, I’ll never die.”
The two spent the night huddled close to one another, and the next morning went to the Plaza de la Cebada on a foraging expedition. The soldier pilfered some nuts from a pile, and this constituted the breakfast of the two comrades.
Later they went down by the Toledo bridge.
“Where are we going?” asked Manuel.
“Here, to a Trappist monastery near Getafe. They’ll give us a feed,” said the soldier.
Manuel quickened his pace.
“Let’s hurry.”
“There’s no need. They bring out the food after they themselves have eaten. So that even if you run, you don’t gain anything by it. We must take our time.”
Manuel moderated his gait. The soldier was a common sort; his nose was thick, his face wide, his moustaches blond. He wore a pointed hat, clothes covered with patches, an old muffler rolled around his throat, and in his hand, a stick.
They reached the monastery, walked into the porter’s lodge and sat down before a table where six or seven men were already waiting.
“Can you write verses?” asked the soldier of Manuel.
“I? No. Why?”
“Because a few days ago I came here with a gentleman who was really as dead hungry as ourselves. While we were waiting for the meal he asked the name of the rector and wrote some verses to him that were as pretty as you’d wish. Then the rector sent for him and gave him plenty to eat and drink.”
“It’s a shame that we can’t write a rhyme. What’s the rector’s name?”
“Domingo.”
Manuel tried hard to find a word ending in ingo, but could not. And when the lay brother entered with a large pot that he deposited upon the table, Manuel forgot his task completely.
The brother then brought wooden spoons and distributed them among the beggars. Of these, all but one brought forth large cups; the solitary exception was a repulsive type with a swollen lower lip that protruded and was covered with ulcers.
“Wait a second, brother,” said the soldier, before the other fellow could thrust his spoon into the pot. “We’re going to put the food into the cover of the pot and we’ll eat from there.”
“I don’t know what you’ve got against me!” mumbled the beggar.
“You? You’ve got a lip that looks like a beefsteak.”
Manuel and the soldier then ate and after thanking the lay brother they left the monastery and stretched themselves out on the field in the sun.
It was a beautiful May afternoon; the sun shone strong and steady. The returned soldier recounted some anecdotes of the campaign in Cuba. He spoke in a violent fashion, and when anger or indignation mastered him, he grew terribly pale.
He talked of life on that island,—a horrible life; forever marching and marching, barefoot, legs sunk into swampy soil and the air clouded with mosquitos whose bites left welts on your skin. He recalled a dingy little village theatre that had been converted into a hospital, its stage cluttered with sick and wounded. The army officers, even before the fantastic battles—for the Cubans always ran off like hares—would dispute the distribution of crosses, and the soldiers would make fun of the battles and the crosses and the bravery of their leaders. Then the war of extermination decreed by Weyler, the burning mills, the green slopes that in a moment were left without a bush, the exploding cane, and, in the towns, the famished populace, the women and children crying: “Don Lieutenant, Don Sergeant, we’re hungry!” Besides this, the executions, the cold slaughter of one by the other with the machetes. Between generals and lower officers, hatred and rivalry; and in the meantime the soldiers, indifferent to it all, hardly replying to the sharpshooting of the enemy, with the same affection for life that one can feel for a discarded sandal. There were some who said: “Captain, I’ll remain here.” Whereupon their guns were taken from them and the others proceeded. And after all this, their return to Spain, almost sadder than the life in Cuba; the whole ship loaded with men dressed in striped cotton duck; a ship laden with skeletons, and every day five, six or seven who died and were cast into the waves.
“And the arrival at Barcelona! Hell! What a disillusion!” he concluded. “A fellow would be waiting for some sort of reward for having served his country,—hoping for a little affection. Eh? Not a thing. Lord! Everybody looked at you as you went by without paying the slightest attention. We disembark in port as if we’re so many bales of cotton. On the ship we had said to ourselves, ‘We’ll be swamped with questions when we get back to Spain.’ Nothing like it. Nobody was in the least interested in what I had gone through in the Cuban thickets.... Go and defend your country, ha? Let the papal Nuncio go and defend it! So that he can afterward die of hunger and cold, and have somebody say to him: ‘If you had any guts, the island wouldn’t have been lost.’ It’s too damned much, I say! Too much!...”
The sun was already sinking in the west when the soldier and Manuel got up and went off toward Madrid.