The air grew diaphanous, acquired more transparency; the horizon more depth; and the sides of the white walls of garrets and corners, as they reflected the scarlet or rosy sky, resembled blocks of snow animated by the pale rays of a boreal sun....
Presently the lamps were lighted; their little red flames flickering in the shadows; and squares of lighted windows punctured the façades of the houses.
At this hour on work days, women visited the stores; wealthy families returned in their coaches from their orchards; youths rode back and forth on horseback; and the nocturnal life of Cordova poured through the central streets, which were lighted by street lamps and shop windows.
Quentin wandered from place to place, ruminating on his sadness; walked indifferently along streets and plazas; watched the young ladies coming and going with their mammas, and followed by their beaux. When his irritation disappeared, he felt discouraged. The melancholy calmness of the city, the dreamy atmosphere, produced within him a feeling of great lassitude and laziness.
At times he firmly believed that Rafaela would trouble him no more; that his feeling of love had been a superficial fantasy.
In the morning Quentin often went to the Patio de los Naranjos where El Pende’s father used to spend his time with a coterie of old men, beggars, and tramps, which all Cordova ironically called La Potrá, or the herd of young mares.
El Pende senior, or Matapalos, passed his time there chatting with his friends. He was an original and knowing fellow who spoke in apothegms and maxims. He dominated the meetings as few others could. No one could, like him, so slyly introduce a number of subjects in a conversational hiatus, or in the act of rolling a cigarette. Of course, for him, this last was by no means a simple affair; but rather an operation that demanded time and science. First, Matapalos took out a little knife and began to scrape a plug of tobacco; after the scraping came the rubbing of it between his hands; then he tore a leaf of cigarette paper from its little book, held it for a moment sticking to his under lip, and then began to roll the cigarette first on one end, and then on the other, until the manœuvre was happily consummated. This operation over, Matapalos removed his calañés, placed it between his legs, and from somewhere within the hat drew forth a little leather purse, from which he extracted flint and steel and tinder.
After this, he slowly covered himself and from time to time, in the midst of the conversation, struck the steel with the flint until he happened to light the tinder, and with the tinder, his cigarette.
The old man lived in a hut in the Matadero district; he knew everything that had occurred in Cordova for many years, and boasted of it. For Matapalos, there were no toreadors like those of his own time.
“I’m not taking any merit away from Lagartijo or Manuel Fuentes,” he said, “but you don’t see any more toreadors like El Panchón, or Rafael Bejarano, or Pepete, or El Camará. You ought to have seen Bejarano! He was such a great rival of no less a person than Costillares, that in my time they used to sing: