"All right; take whatever it comes to."
The woman left twenty céntimos on the table and returned to the counter. She was broad, large-breasted, with a head that set deep in between her shoulders and a neck composed of some five or six layers of fat; from time to time she would serve a drink, always getting the price in advance; she spoke very little, with evident displeasure and with an invariable gesture of ill-humour.
This human hippopotamus had at her right a tin tank with a spigot, for brandy, and at her left a flask of strong wine and a chipped jar covered with a black funnel, into which she poured whatever was left in the glasses by her customers.
Roberto's cousin fished out a phial of smelling salts, hid it in her clamped hand and took a sniff from time to time.
Opposite the place where Roberto, Fanny, Leandro and Manuel were seated, a crowd of some twenty men were packed around a table playing cane.
Near them, huddled on the floor next the stove, reclining against the wall, could be seen a number of ugly, scraggly-haired hags, dressed in corsages and ragged skirts that were tied around their waists by ropes.
"Who are those women?" asked the painter.
"They're old tramps," explained Leandro. "The kind that go to the
Botanical Garden and the clearings outside the city."
Two or three of the unfortunates held in their arms children belonging to other women who had come there to spend the night; some were dozing with their cigarettes sticking from the corner of their mouths. Amid the old women were a few little girls of thirteen or fourteen, monstrously deformed, with bleary eyes; one of them had her nose completely eaten away, with nothing but a hole like a wound left in its place; another was hydro-cephalous, with so thin a neck that it seemed the slightest movement would snap it and send her head rolling from her shoulders.
"Have you seen the large jars they have here?" Leandro asked Manuel.
"Come on and take a look."