In the afternoon Señor Custodio would go to certain stables in the Argüelles district to clean out the manure and take it to the orchards on the Manzanares.
Between one thing and another Señor Custodio made enough to live in a certain comfort; he had a firm grasp upon his business and as he was under no compulsion to sell his wares promptly, he would wait for the most opportune occasion so that he could sell with advantage.
The paper that he thus stored up was purchased by the pasteboard factories; they gave him from thirty or forty céntimos per arroba. The manufacturers required the paper to be perfectly dry, and Señor Custodio dried it in the sun. As they tried at times to get the best of him in weight, he used to place in each sack two or three full arrobas, weighed with a steelyard; on the cloth of the sack he would inscribe a number in ink, indicating the amount of arrobas it contained, and these sacks he held in a sort of cellar or ship's hold that he had dug into the ground of the shed.
When there was a great quantity of paper he sold it to a pasteboard factory on Acacias Avenue. Señor Custodio's journey was not in vain, for in addition to selling the goods at a fancy price, he would, on the way back, drive his cart in the direction of a pitch factory of the vicinity, and there he picked up from the ground a very fine coal that burned excellently and gave as much heat as slag.
He sold the bottles to wine houses, to liquor and beer distilleries; the medicine flasks he disposed of to pharmacists; the bones went to the refineries and the rags to the paper factories.
The bread leavings, vegetable leaves and fruit cores were reserved for the feed of the pigs and hens, and what was of no use at all was cast into the rotting-place, converted into manure and sold to the orchards near the river.
On the first Sunday that Manuel spent there, Señor Custodio and his wife took the afternoon off. For many a day they had never gone out together because they were afraid to leave the house alone; this day they dressed up in their best and went on a visit to their daughter, who worked as a modiste in a relative's shop.
Manuel was glad to be left by himself with Reverte, contemplating the house, the yard, the ditch; he turned the carrousel round and it creaked ill-humouredly; he climbed up the swing frame, looked down at the hens, teased the pig a little and then ran up and down with the dog chasing after him barking merrily in feigned fury.
This dark depression attracted Manuel somehow or other, with its rubbish heaps, its gloomy hovels, its comical, dismantled merry-go-round, its swings, and its ground that held so many surprises, for a rough, ordinary pot burgeoned from its depths as easily as a lady's elegant perfume phial; the rubber bulb of a prosaic syringe grew side by side with the satin, scented sheet of a love letter.
This rough, humble life, sustained by the detritus of a refined, vicious existence; this almost savage career in the suburbs of a metropolis, filled Manuel with enthusiasm. It seemed to him that all the stuff cast aside in scorn by the capital,—the ordure and broken tubs, the old flower-pots and toothless combs, buttons and sardine tins,—all the rubbish thrown aside and spurned by the city, was dignified and purified by contact with the soil.