“What was it you said to my wife, eh?”
“I told her that she oughtn’t to beat her daughter.”
“And who told you to mix into this business?”
The carpenter was a ferocious-looking fellow with a wide, bulging space between his eyebrows, and a bull neck. His forehead was crossed by a swollen vein. Manuel made no reply.
Fortunately for him the carpenter and his wife soon moved from the place.
In the holes of the same corridor there lived also two aged gipsies together with their families, both exceedingly noisy and thievish; a blind maiden who sang gipsy songs in the streets, wiggling with epileptic convulsions, and who was accompanied by another lass with whom she was for ever fighting, and two very cheap, very slovenly sisters, with painted cheeks and loud voices,—a pair of lying, quarrelsome strumpets, but as happy as goats.
Jesús’s room was near Manuel’s, and this life in common both at the printing-shop and at the house tightened the bonds of their friendship.
Jesús was an excellent youth, but he got drunk with lamentable frequency. He had two maiden sisters, one a pretty chit with green cat’s eyes and an impudent face, called La Sinforosa, and the other a sickly creature, all twisted and scrofulous, whom everybody heartlessly called La Fea, ugly.
After they had been living thus for two months or so at the hostelry, Jesús, in his peculiar, ironic tone, remarked one day to Manuel on the way to the shop:
“Did you hear? My sister is pregnant.”