"After dinner," cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. "We haven't eaten for a year and a half!"
The padrón, a red thick-necked individual with a week's white bristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams.
"You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are, travelling all over the world." He turned to the company with a gesture; "I was like that when I was young."
They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves on either side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all too small. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who was tending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth, noticing that they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackled and burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang.
"To-morrow's Carnival," she said. "We mustn't stint ourselves." Then she handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poached eggs floated, and the padrón drew the table near the fire and sat down opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while they ate.
After a while he began talking. From outside the hand-clapping and the sound of castanettes continued interrupted by intervals of shouting and laughter and an occasional snatch from the song that ended every verse with "y mañana Carnaval."
"I travelled when I was your age," he said. "I have been to America ... Nueva York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco.... Selling those little nuts.... Yes, peanuts. What a country! How many laws there are there, how many policemen. When I was young I did not like it, but now that I am old and own an inn and daughters and all that, vamos, I understand. You see in Spain we all do just as we like; then, if we are the sort that goes to church we repent afterwards and fix it up with God. In European, civilized, modern countries everybody learns what he's got to do and what he must not do.... That's why they have so many laws.... Here the police are just to help the government plunder and steal all it wants.... But that's not so in America...."
"The difference is," broke in Telemachus, "as Butler put it, between living under the law and living under grace. I should rather live under gra...." But he thought of the maxims of Penelope and was silent.
"But after all we know how to sing," said the Padrón. "Will you have coffee with cognac?... And poets, man alive, what poets!"
The padrón stuck out his chest, put one hand in the black sash that held up his trousers and recited, emphasizing the rhythm with the cognac bottle: