Viva Maria!
Viva Maria!
A beggar unexpectedly appeared, as if he had sprung from below ground; and he stretched out his hand.
"Charity, for the love of the Madonna!"
It was a young man, with his head bound in a red handkerchief, one corner of which covered his eye. He raised this corner and showed an enormous eye, swollen like a pocket, purulent, on which the winking of the upper eyelids forced a shudder horrible to see.
"Charity, for the love of the Madonna!"
George gave him money; and the beggar again hid his deformity. But, a little farther on, a man of gigantic stature, with an empty sleeve, half-raised his shirt in order to show the red and furrowed cicatrice of the amputation.
"A bite—a horse's bite! Look!"
And he threw himself on the ground, thus uncovered, and he kissed the ground several times, crying each time, in a harsh voice:
"For pity's sake!"
Under a tree was another beggar, a bandy-legged fellow, on a kind of seat composed of a pack-saddle, a goat-skin, an empty petroleum can and large stones. Wrapped in a sordid covering from which protruded two hairy legs, soiled with dry mud, he wildly shook his hand, twisted like a root, to chase away the flies that assailed him in clouds.