The "Big Yard," or Uncle Rilo's House—Local Enmities.
When Salomé finished her sewing and went off to Aguila Street to sleep, Manuel definitively settled in the home of Uncle Rilo, of Embajadores lane. Some called this La Corrala, others, El Corralón, still others, La Piltra, and it boasted so many other names that it seemed as if the neighbours spent hours and hours thinking up new designations for it.
The Corralón (Big yard)—this was the best known name of Uncle Rilo's lair,—fronted the Paseo de las Acacias, but it was not in the direct line of this thoroughfare, as it set somewhat back. The façade of this tenement, low, narrow, kalso-mined, indicated neither the depth nor the size of the building; the front revealed a few ill-shaped windows and holes unevenly arranged, while a doorless archway gave access to a narrow passage paved with cobblestones; this, soon widening, formed a patio surrounded by high, gloomy walls.
From the sides of the narrow entrance passage rose brick stairways leading to open galleries that ran along the three stories of the house and returned to the patio. At intervals, in the back of these galleries, opened rows of doors painted blue with a black number on the lintel of each.
Between the lime and the bricks of the walls stuck out, like exposed bones, jamb-posts and crossbeams, surrounded by lean bass ropes. The gallery columns, as well as the lintels and the beams that supported them, must formerly have been painted green, but as the result of the constant action of sun and rain only a stray patch of the original colour remained.
The courtyard was always filthy; in one corner lay a heap of useless scraps covered by a sheet of zinc; one could make out grimy cloths, decayed planks, debris, bricks, tiles, baskets: an infernal jumble. Every afternoon some of the women would do their washing in the patio, and when they finished their work they would empty their tubs on to the ground, and the big pools, on drying, would leave white stains and indigo rills of bluing. The neighbours also had the habit of throwing their rubbish anywhere at all, and when it rained—since the mouth of the drain would always become clogged—an unbearable, pestilential odour would rise from the black, stagnant stream that inundated the patio, and on its surface floated cabbage leaves and greasy papers.
Each neighbour could leave his tools and things in the section of the gallery that bounded his dwelling; from the looks of this area one might deduce the grade of poverty or relative comfort of each family,—its predilections and its tastes.
This space usually revealed an attempt at cleanliness and a curious aspect; here the wall was whitewashed, there hung a cage,—a few flowers in earthenware pots; elsewhere a certain utilitarian instinct found vent in the strings of garlic put out to dry or clusters of grape suspended; beyond, a carpenter's bench and a tool-chest gave evidence of the industrious fellow who worked during his free hours.
In general, however, one could see only dirty wash hung out on the balustrades, curtains made of mats, quilts mended with patches of ill-assorted colors, begrimed rags stretched over broomsticks or suspended from ropes tied from one post to the other, that they might get a trifle more light and air.
Every section of the gallery was a manifestation of a life apart within this communism of hunger; this edifice contained every grade and shade of poverty: from the heroic, garbed in clean, decent tatters, to the most nauseating and repulsive.