“What has he done?” replied one of them. “Nothing at all, only it’s come out that he’s been living with La Sinfo, who’s the blackest of black sheep. Jesús and she had taken to drink and that big fox of a Sinfo has been taking La Fea’s pay from her.”
“That can’t be true,” said Manuel.
“Is that so? Well, Jesús himself was the one to tell it.”
“H’m. The other one isn’t any too decent herself when it comes to that,” interpolated one of the women.
“She’s as decent as the best of them,” retorted the spokeswoman. “She told everything to the doctor from the Emergency Hospital. One night when she hadn’t had a bite in her mouth, because Jesús and La Sinfo had taken every céntimo from her, La Fea went and drank a drop of brandy to quiet her hunger; then she had another; she was so weak that she got drunk right away. In came La Sinfo and Jesús, both stewed to the gills, and the shameless fox, seeing La Fea in bed, said to her, she says: ‘Out with you. We need the bed ourselves for ...’ and here she made an indecent gesture. You know what I mean. And she goes and shows her sister the door. La Fea, who was too tipsy to know what was going on, went into the street, and an officer, seeing how drunk she was, took her to the station and shoved her into a dark cell, where some tramp....”
“Who must have been drunk himself,” interjected a mason, who had paused to hear the story.
“So there you are ...” concluded the gossip.
“I’ll bet that if there had been light in the cell nothing would have happened, for the moment the guy caught sight of that face he would have turned sober with fright,” added the mason, continuing on his way.
Manuel left the gabbling women and stopped in the doorway of Jesús’s room. It was a desolating spectacle. The typesetter’s sister, pale, with closed eyes, thrown across the floor on a few mats and covered with burlap, looked like a corpse. The doctor was bandaging her at that moment. Señora Salomona was dressing the newborn. A pool of blood stained the stone flooring.