They entered. Señor Ignacio's home was small; it comprised two bedrooms, a parlour, the kitchen and a dark room. The first habitation was the parlour, furnished with a pine bureau, a sofa, several straw chairs and a green mirror stuck with chromos and photographs and covered with red netting. The cobbler's family used the parlour as the dining-room on Sundays, because it was the lightest and the most spacious of their rooms.
When Manuel and Vidal arrived the family had been waiting for them a long time. They all sat down to table, and Salomé, the cobbler's sister-in-law, took charge of serving the meal. She resembled very closely her sister, the mother of Vidal. Both, of medium height, had short, saucy noses and black, pretty eyes; despite this physical similarity, however, their appearance differentiated them sharply. Vidal's mother,—called Leandra,—untidy, unkempt, loathsome, and betraying traces of ill humour, seemed much older than Salomé, although but three or four years separated them. Salomé had a merry, resolute air.
Yet, consider the irony of fate! Leandra, despite her slovenly ways, her sour disposition and her addiction to drink, was married to a good hardworking man, while Salomé, endowed with excellent gifts of industriousness and sweet temper, had wound up by going to live with an outcast who made his way by swindling, pilfering and browbeating and who had given her two children. Her humble or servile spirit, confronted with this wild, independent nature, made Salomé adore her man, and she deceived herself into considering him a tremendous, energetic fellow, though he was in all truth a coward and a tramp. The bully had seen just how matters stood, and whenever it pleased him he would stamp into the house and demand the pay that Salomé earned by sewing at the machine, at five céntimos per two yards. Unresistingly she handed him the product of her sweating toil, and many a time the ruffian, not content with depriving her of the money, gave her a beating into the bargain.
Salomé's two children were not today in Señor Ignacio's home; on Sundays, after dressing them very neatly, their mother would send them to a relative of hers,—the proprietress of a workshop,—where they spent the afternoon.
At the meal Manuel listened to the conversation without taking part. They were discussing one of the girls of the neighbourhood who had run off with a wealthy horse-dealer, a married man with a family.
"She did wisely," declared Leandra, draining a glass of wine.
"If she didn't know he was married…."
"What's the difference?" retorted Leandra with an air of unconcern.
"Plenty. How would you like a woman to carry off your husband?" Salomé asked her sister.
"Psch!"