"What function?"
"In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor." He got to his feet and tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him.
They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd. He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too artistic for these pigs of provincials.
"Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally.
"How ruined?" asked Telemachus.
"The Zarzuela is dead. The days of the great writers of zarzuela have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of the zarzuelas of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a great singer of zarzuela.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now look at me!"
Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anæmic wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark, strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace of red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic. The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke and generations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over the fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where the soup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on the fire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangled with stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure of the padrón, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watching the coffee-pot.
"It was an elegant life, full of voyages," went on the actor. "South America, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners, receptions, ceremonial dress.... Ladies of high society came to congratulate us.... I played all the child rôles.... When I was fourteen a duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged, dying of hunger—not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of a village. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want is foreign importations, Viennese musical comedies, smutty farces from Paris...."
"With cognac or rum?" the padrón roared out suddenly in his deep voice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire.
"Cognac," said the actor. "What rotten coffee!" He gave little petulant sniffs as he poured sugar into his glass.