Of all people, Ignacio Alzugaray was the most incredulous in regard to his friend; his mother and his sister believed in Cæsar as in an oracle. Cæsar often thought that he ought to fall definitely in love with Ignacio’s sister and marry her; but neither he nor she seemed to have set upon passing the limits of a cordial friendship.
Cæsar told the Alzugaray family how he lived and caused them to laugh and wonder.
He had rented a fairly large upper story in a street in Valle Hermoso, for five dollars. The days he had nothing to do he went there. He put on an old, worn-out fur coat, which was still a protection, a soft hat, took a stick, and went walking in the environs.
His favourite walk was the neighbourhood of the Canalillo and of the Dehesa de Amaniel.
Generally he went out of his house on the side opposite the Model Prison, then he walked toward Moncloa, and taking the right, passed near the Rubio Institute, and entered the Cerro del Pimiento by an open lot which he got into through a broken wall.
From there one could see, far away, the Guadarrama range, like a curtain of blue mountains and snowy crests; on clear days, the Escorial; Aravaca, the Casa de Campo, and the Sierra de Gredos, which ran out on the left hand like a promontory. Nearby one saw a pine grove, close to the Rubio Institute, and a valley containing market-gardens, and the ranges of the Moncloa shooting school.
Cæsar would walk on by the winding road, and stop to look at the Cemetery of San Martín on the right, with its black cypresses and its yellowish walls.
Then he would follow the twists of the Canalillo, and pass in front of the third Reservoir, to the Amaniel road.
That was where Cæsar would have built himself a house, had he had the idea of living retired.
The dry, hard landscape was the kind he liked. The mornings were wonderful, the blue sky radiant, the air limpid and thin.