In the meantime the girls would be playing in a ring, the women would shout from gallery to gallery and the men would chat in their shirtsleeves; some fellow, squatting on the floor, would scrape away monotonously at the strings of a guitar.
La Muerte, the old beggar, would also cheer the evening gatherings with her long discourse.
La Corrala was a seething, feverish world in little, as busy as an anthill. There people toiled, idled, guzzled, ate and died of hunger; there furniture was made, antiques were counterfeited, old embroideries were fashioned, buns cooked, broken porcelain mended, robberies planned and women's favours traded.
La Corrala was a microcosm; it was said that if all the denizens were placed in line they would reach from Embajadores lane to the Plaza del Progreso; it harboured men who were everything and yet nothing: half scholars, half smiths, half carpenters, half masons, half business men, half thieves.
In general, everybody who lived here was disoriented, dwelling in that unending abjection produced by everlasting, irremediable poverty; many sloughed their occupations as a reptile its skin; others had none; some carpenters' or masons' helpers, because of their lack of initiative, understanding and skill, could never graduate from their apprenticeship. There were also gypsies, mule and dog clippers, nor was there a dearth of porters, itinerant barbers and mountebanks. Almost all of them, if opportunity offered, stole what they could; they all presented the same pauperized, emaciated look. And all harboured a constant rage that vented itself in furious imprecations and blasphemies.
They lived as if sunk in the shades of a deep slumber, unable to form any clear notion of their lives, without aspirations, aims, projects or anything.
There were some whom a couple of glasses of wine made drunk for half a week; others seemed already besotted, without having had a sip, and their countenances constantly mirrored the most absolute debasement, whence they escaped only in a fleeting moment of anger or indignation.
Money was to them, more often than not, a misfortune. Possessing an instinctive understanding of their weakness and their frail wills, they would resort to the tavern in quest of courage; there they would cast off all restraint, shout, argue, forget the sorrows of the moment, feel generous, and when, after having bragged to the top of their bent they believed themselves ready for anything, they discovered that they hadn't a céntimo and that the illusory strength imbibed with the alcohol was evaporating.
The women of the house, as a rule, worked harder than the men, and were almost always disputing. For thirty years past they had all shared the same character and represented almost the same type: foul, unkempt, termagacious, they—shrieked and grew desperate upon the slightest provocation.
From time to time, like a gentle sunbeam amidst the gloom, the souls of these stultified, bestial men,—of these women embittered by harsh lives that held neither solace nor illusion,—would be penetrated by a romantic, disinterested feeling of tenderness that made them live like human beings for a while; but when the gust of sentimentalism had blown over, they would return to their moral inertia, as resigned and passive as ever. The permanent neighbours of La Corrala were situated in the floors surrounding the large courtyard. In the other courtyard the majority were transients, and spent, at most, a couple of weeks in the house. Then, as the saying was among them, they spread wing.