With the break of day the bells awoke in the church towers throughout the old city, and began to peal forth their noisy reminder of the virility of the Holy Catholic faith. Then the man raised his head, seemingly startled into awareness of his material environment. For a few moments he listened confusedly to the insistent clatter––but he made no sign of the cross, nor did his head bend with the weight of a hollow Ave on his bloodless lips while the clamoring muezzins filled the warm, tropical air with their jangling appeal. Rising with an air of weary indifference, he slowly crossed the room and threw wide the shutters of the solitary window, admitting a torrent of sunlight. As he did this, the door of the cell softly opened, and a young novitiate entered.
“With your permission, Padre,” said the boy, bowing low. “His Grace summons you to the Cathedral.”
The man made a languid gesture of dismissal, and turned from the lad to the rare view which greeted him through the open window. The dusty road below was beginning to manifest the city’s awakening. Barefooted, brown-skinned women, scantily clad in cheap calico gowns, were swinging along with shallow baskets under their arms to the plaza for the day’s marketing. Some carried naked babes astride their hips; some smoked long, slender cigars of their own rolling. Half-clad children of all ages, mixtures of mestizo, Spaniard, and Jamaican negro, trotted along beside them; and at intervals a blustering cochero rattled around the corner in a rickety, obsolete type of trap behind a brace of emaciated horses.
The lively gossip of the passing groups preluded the noisy chaffering to follow their arrival at the market place.
“Caramba, little pig!” shrilled a buxom matron, snatching her naked offspring away from a passing vehicle. “Think you I have money to waste on Masses for your naughty soul?”
“Na, señora,” bantered another, “it will cost less now than later to get him out of purgatory.”
“But, comadre, do you stop at the Cathedral to say a Pater-noster?”
“To be sure, amiga, and an Ave, too. And let us return by way of the Hotel España, for, quien sabe? we may catch a glimpse of the famous matador.”
“Señor Varilla?”