This beverage she poured into a square, wide-mouthed flask, into which she placed a thick stem of anis. She kept it in the closet of her bedroom.
Some one who discovered the flask with its black twig of anis compared it to those bottles in which fetuses and similar nasty objects are preserved, and since that time, whenever the landlady appeared with rosy cheeks, a thousand comments—not at all favourable to the madame's abstinence—ran from lodger to lodger.
"Doña Casiana's tipsy from her fetus-brandy."
"The good lady drinks too much of that fetus."
"The fetus has gone to her head…."
Manuel took a friendly part in this witty merriment of the boarders. The boy's faculties of adaptation were indisputably enormous, for after a week in the landlady's house it was as if he had always lived there.
His skill at magic was sharpened: whenever he was needed he was not to be seen and no sooner was anybody's back turned than he was in the street playing with the boys of the neighbourhood.
As a result of his games and his scrapes he got his clothes so dirty and torn that the landlady nicknamed him the page Don Rompe-Galas, recalling a tattered character from a saínete that Doña Casiana, according to her affirmations, had seen played in her halycon days.
Generally, those who most made use of Manuel's services were the journalist whom they called the Superman—he sent the boy off with copy to the printers—and Celia and Irene, who employed him for bearing notes and requests for money to their friends. Doña Violante, whenever she pilfered a few céntimos from her daughter would dispatch Manuel to the store for a package of cigarettes, and give him a cigar for the errand.
"Smoke it here," she would say. "Nobody'll see you."