“But he doesn’t know anything,” replied the owner.
“What need he know? Pay him by the line.”
“No. I’ll raise his daily wage.”
“How much are you going to give him?”
“Eight reales.”
“That’s too little. The other fellow got twelve.”
“Very well. I’ll give him nine. But let him not come here to sleep.”
Manuel’s new position freed him from the duty of sweeping the shop. He abandoned the sty in which he had been sleeping. Jesús took him to the Santa Casilda hostelry, where he himself stayed; it was a huge, one-story structure with three very large patios, situated on the Ronda de Toledo. Manuel would have preferred not to return to this section, which was linked in his memory to so many unpleasant recollections; but his friendship with Jesús won him over. He got, at the hostelry, for a fortnightly rent of eight reales, a tiny room with a bed, a broken reed chair and a mat hanging from the ceiling and serving as the door. When the wind blew from the direction of the fields of San Isidro, the rooms and the corridors of the Santa Casilda hostelry were filled with smoke. The patios of the place were more or less like those at Uncle Rilo’s house, with identical galleries and numbered doors.
From the window of Manuel’s den could be seen three red, round-paunched tanks of the gashouse, with their lofty iron girders that ended in pulleys at the top; round about was the Rastro; to one side, dumping-places blackened with coal and slag; farther on stretched the arid landscape, the yellow slopes of which climbed into the horizon. Directly before him rose the Los Ángeles hill with the hermitage on its crest.
In the very next room to that which Manuel occupied were a carpenter, his wife and a child. The couple would get drunk and beat the child unmercifully.