The Fourth Estate, vol. 1

by Armando Palacio Valdés

And rushing to each other, they shook hands with effusion.

"What a fate would have been yours had I not recognized you, Don Feliciano!" exclaimed Señor Miranda, showing his broad iron sword with its bone handle.

"And yours would not have been agreeable, Don Pedro!" returned the merchant, as he made passes in the air with his finely polished Toledo blade.

One had to go down two steps to enter Morana's shop. The shop was a confectioner's, although it did not look like it; it was the only confectioner's in Sarrio. Nowadays there are three, if I am not mistaken. I say, it did not look like a confectioner's, because church tapers, wax hands and feet and bodies for votive offerings were sold there and had gradually become the chief stock in trade instead of a mere supplementary one; and this was due to the lack of greediness in the town, which speaks very well for it. It is usual in Spain for the folk of little villages and towns to be passionately fond of sweets, for want of the pleasures peculiar to great towns, for, say what one may, the pleasures of the table even are not equal in small towns to those of large ones. In the first place, clever cooks are not forthcoming, the food has not the variety induced by the laws of biology, and the palate has not risen to the state of culture from a right and just estimate of the culinary science.

Perhaps it will be remarked: "But the nuns of St. Augustine used to make sweets." Yes, but we must remember that this manufacture was limited exclusively to preserves of cherry, quince, pear, and apricot, almond tart and burrage tart, and a particular sweetmeat shaped like fishes' fins, called orange flower.

I can only repeat the fact that there are few high livers in Sarrio. After all, rare as this abstemiousness may be in towns in the interior, it is common in maritime places, which are known to be less under ecclesiastical sway. For observation teaches the visitor of the towns that more sweets are consumed where church services and religious rites absorb the greater part of life, and where enthusiasm for the religious sentiment is evinced in nones, masses, confraternities, and canonries, which shows that there must be some mysterious affinity between mysticism and sweetmeats.

This branch of Morana's business was exhibited in the shop by two pine wood cupboards, painted blue, with glass doors at each end of the counter. In these cupboards there was a fair show of caramels, spiral cakes, sugar cakes, almond cakes, madeleines, and above all the celebrated tablets, the renown of which must certainly have reached the ears of our readers, as it dates from remotest time. The secret of the magic composition of these tablets we have never been able to discover, but their fascination was irresistible, and, strange to say, it was based upon their extraordinary hardness. At the age when Morana's tablets are eaten, the chief thing is not that the sweets should be delicate, savory, and exquisite, but that they should last a long time. It was not easy to get the teeth into them at all, but once in this stick-jaw paste, the extrication from it presented a really difficult problem.

Allow me to offer a delicate tribute of affection and gratitude to these tablets which, from four to eight years of age, constituted the greatest joy of my existence.

It is perhaps to their sweet influence that the author of this book owes the optimistic spirit which, according to the critics, shines in his works.

Morana, daughter and successor of another Morana, who was dead, was a woman of forty years of age, of a pallid complexion, with gutta-percha plaisters on her temples for the severe pains in her head.