Jaime Rodriguez (with weary resignation): Aye.
Trotaconventos: And did you ever hear that she sold her daughter to a Jew, and that daughter a nun?
Jaime Rodriguez (in horror): Never!
Trotaconventos: But if she had, would her tears of penitence have washed it out?
Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, if she had confessed it and done penance.
Trotaconventos: And what is more, become herself a scourge of sinners and saved the souls of two innocent babes for the Church?
Jaime Rodriguez: Yes, thus would she have acquired merit.
Trotaconventos: Well, I have brought as many maids to bed that multiplied by ten you will have baptised and buried when you are three score years and ten.... Why! it is no more to me than it was to my old father, who owned some land Carmona way, to take a heifer to bull. In truth, if Don Love still reigned in heaven and had not fallen with Satan into hell, your children’s children would be praying to Saint Trotaconventos that she would send them kisses and ribbons and moonless nights; my bones would be lying under the altar of some parish church, and two of my teeth in a fine golden reliquary would cure maids of pimples, lads of warts. All that lies very lightly on my soul ... but there are other things ... and ... (looking round furtively) these nights I’ve sometimes wished for a dog that I might hear his snore.... What if before she died Trotaconventos should be re-christened Convent-Scourge? I have learned ... oh, one of my trade needs must have as many eyes as the cow-herd of the Roman dame, I forget what the trovares call her, and as many ears as eyes ... that a certain nun of this convent ... you grow restive? Why, then, once more I must whisper the magic name and root you to the ground. Sister Pilar is deep in an amour with a knight of the Court ... an overbearing, vain, foolish man against whom I bear a grudge. And Trotaconventos means, before she dies, on one nun at least in place of opening, to shut the convent gate; nay, to bring her to her knees and penitence. Well, what think you?
Jaime Rodriguez: There is some dark thought brooding in your heart, and, unlike the crow, I deem it will hatch out acts black as itself,[4] but the whiteness of her virtue will not be soiled.
Trotaconventos: And is Sister Pilar too firmly settled in her niche to topple down? Yet how she laughs at you! Why, I have heard her say that you are neither man nor priest, but just a bundle of hay dressed up in a soutane, whose head is a hollow pumpkin holding a burning candle, to frighten boors and children with death and judgment on the eve of All Souls.