Doña Violante and her daughters,—especially the old lady, showed a great liking for the boy. The three women had now been living in the house for several months; they paid little and when they couldn't pay at all, they didn't. But they were easily satisfied. All three occupied an inner room that opened onto the courtyard, whence came a nauseating odour of fermented milk that escaped from the stable of the ground floor.
The hole in which they lived was not large enough to move about in; the room assigned to them by the landlady—in proportion to the size of their rent and the insecurity of the payment—was a dark den occupied by two narrow iron beds, between which, in the little space left, was crammed a cot.
Here slept these gallant dames; by day they scoured all Madrid, and spent their existence making arrangements with money-lenders, pawning articles and taking them out of pawn.
The two young ladies, Celia and Irene, although they were mother and daughter, passed for sisters. Doña Violante, in her better days, had led the life of a petty courtesan and had succeeded in hoarding up a tidy bit as provision against the winter of old age, when a former patron convinced her that he had a remarkable combination for winning a fortune at the Fronton. Doña Violante fell into the trap and her patron left her without a céntimo. Then Doña Violante went back to the old life, became half blind and reached that lamentable state at which surely she would have arrived much sooner if, early in her career, she had developed a talent for living respectably.
The old lady passed most of the day in the confinement of her dark room, which reeked of stable odors, rice powder and cosmetics; at night she had to accompany her daughter and her granddaughter on walks, and to cafés and theatres, on the hunt and capture of the kid, as it was put by the travelling salesman who suffered from his stomach,—a fellow half humorist and half grouch. When they were in the house Celia and Irene, the daughter and the granddaughter of Doña Violante, kept bickering at all hours; perhaps this continuous state of irritation derived from the close quarters in which they lived; perhaps so much passing as sisters in the eyes of others had convinced them that they really were, so that they quarrelled and insulted one another as such.
The one point on which they agreed was that Doña Violante was in their way; the burden of the blind woman frightened away every libidinous old fellow that came within the range of Irene and Celia.
The landlady, Doña Casiana, who at the slightest occasion suspected the abandonment of the blind old woman, admonished the two maternally to gird themselves with patience; Doña Violante, after all, was not, like Calypso, immortal. But they replied that this toiling away at full speed just to keep the old lady in medicine and syrups wasn't at all to their taste.
Doña Casiana shook her head sadly, for her age and circumstances enabled her to put herself in Doña Violante's place, and she argued with this example, asking them to put themselves in the grandmother's position; but neither was convinced.
Then the landlady advised them to peer into her mirror. She—as she assured them—had descended from the heights of the Comandancia (her husband had been a commander of the carbineers) to the wretchedness of running a boarding-house, yet she was resigned, and her lips curled in a stoic smile.
Doña Casiana knew the meaning of resignation and her only solace in this life was a few volumes of novels in serial form, two or three feuilletons, and a murky liquid mysteriously concocted by her own hands out of sugared water and alcohol.