Folks and friends alike blamed Alcázar the machinist for everything, as if the systematic contrariness of Petra, who seemed to enjoy nagging the man, were not enough to exasperate any one. Petra had always been that way,—wilful, behind the mask of humility, and as obstinate as a mule. As long as she could do as she pleased the rest mattered little.
While the machinist was alive, the family's economic situation had been relatively comfortable. Alcázar and Petra paid sixteen duros per month for their rooms on Relojo street, and took in boarders: a mail clerk and other railroad employés.
Their domestic existence might have been peaceful and pleasureful were it not for the daily altercations between husband and wife. They had both come to feel such a need for quarrelling that the most insignificant cause would lead to scandalous scenes. It was enough that he said white for her to cry black; this opposition infuriated the machinist, who would throw the dishes about, belabour his wife, and smash all the household furniture. Then Petra, satisfied that she had sufficient cause for affliction, shut herself in her room to weep and pray.
What with his alcohol, his fits of temper, and his hard work, the machinist went about half dazed; on one terribly hot day in August he fell from the train on to the roadbed and was found dead without a wound.
Petra, disregarding the advice of her boarders, insisted upon changing residence, as she disliked that section of the city. This she did, taking in new lodgers—unreliable, indigent folk who ran up large bills or never paid at all—and in a short time she found herself compelled to sell her furniture and abandon her new house.
Then she hired out her daughters as servants, sent her two boys off to a little town in the province of Soria, where her brother-in-law was the superintendent of a small railway station, and herself entered as a domestic in Doña Casiana's lodging-house. Thus she descended from mistress to servant, without complaint. It was enough that the idea had occurred to her; therefore it was best.
She had been there for two years, saving her pay. Her ambition was to have her sons study in a seminary and graduate as priests. And now came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her plans. What could have happened?
She made various conjectures. In the meantime with her deformed hands she removed the lodgers' dirty laundry. In through the courtyard window wafted a confusion of songs and disputing voices, alternating with the screech of the clothes-line pulleys.
In the middle of the afternoon Petra began preparation for dinner. The mistress ordered every morning a huge quantity of bones for the sustenance of her boarders. It is very possible that there was, in all that heap of bones, a Christian one from time to time; certainly, whether they came from carnivorous animals or from ruminants, there was rarely on those tibiae, humeri, and femora a tiny scrap of meat. The ossuary boiled away in the huge pot with beans that had been tempered with bicarbonate, and with the broth was made the soup, which, thanks to its quantity of fat, seemed like some turbid concoction for cleaning glassware or polishing gilt.
After inspecting the state of the ossuary in the stew-pot, Petra made the soup, and then set about extracting all the scrap meat from the bones and covering them hypocritically with a tomato sauce. This was the pièce de résistance in Doña Casiana's establishment.