A. I am very glad to find you here.
D. Are you going to see some one or do you mean to buy?
A. I will tell you, and we will talk as we go, and have a look at the village girls. Compadre, my wife has a very difficult temper, and now, God willing, I am thinking of selling her, and will give her for next to nothing.
D. Your wife is good enough, I don’t know what is the matter with, you, my friend.
A. If she had married you, you would complain just as I do now.
D. Well, as to mine, compadre, she is so slack and clumsy that she can never knead bread without knocking over the flour....
(Later enter Branca Annes, wife of A., and Marta Dias, wife of D.)
B.A. Since in so ill an hour I married, cousin, and such a husband, I will buy a tub here and keep him under it, and a great stone on top. For he goes to the fig-trees and eats ripe and unripe, and all my hung grapes he devours till he seems a very rubbish heap. He goes for the plums before they are ripe, he breaks down the cherry trees, and as to the grapes of the vines I don’t know what he does with them. He eats all day, sleeps all night, never does anything, and is always telling me that he is hungry.
M. To me he seems a good husband.[43]