They could not sleep; several times they had to get up and change their places, for the water leaked through the roof.
On the following morning, when they left their hole, it was no longer raining. The snow had been melted completely. The Cattle Market was transformed into a swamp; the pavement of the Ronda, into a sea of mud; the houses and the trees dripped water; everything was black, miry, abandoned; only a few wandering, famished, mud-stained dogs were sniffing about in the heaps of refuse.
Manuel pawned his cape and on the advice of Jesús protected his chest with several layers of newspaper. For his cape he was allowed ten reales at a pawnbroker’s, and the three went off to eat at the Shelter of the Montaña del Príncipe Pío.
Manuel and Jesús, accompanied by Don Alonso, went into two printing shops and inquired after work, but there was none. At night they went back to the shelter for supper. Don Alonso suggested that they go to the beggars’ Depósito. Thither the three wended their way; it was dusk; before the doors of the Depósito there was a long row of tattered ragamuffins, waiting for them to open; Jesús and Manuel were opposed to going in.
They walked through the little wood near the Montaña barracks; some soldiers and prostitutes were chatting and smoking in a group. They went along the Calle de Ferraz, then along Bailén; they crossed the Viaduct, and going through the Calle de Toledo, reached the Paseo de los Pontones.
The corner of the shed where they had spent the previous night was now occupied by a crew of young vagabonds.
They resumed their trudging through the mud; it began to rain anew. Manuel proposed that they go to La Blasa’s tavern, and by the staircase of the Paseo Imperial they descended to the quarters of Las Injurias. The tavern was closed. They walked down a lane. Their feet sank into mud and pools of water. They noticed a hovel with an open door; they went inside. The Snake-Man struck a match. The place had two rooms, each a couple of metres square. The walls of the dingy dens oozed dampness and slime; the floor, of tamped earth, was riddled with the constant dripping and covered with puddles. The kitchen was a cess-pool of pestilence; in the centre rose a mound of refuse and excrement; in the corners, dead, desiccated cockroaches.
The next morning they left the house. It was a damp, dreary day; afar, the fields lay wrapped in mist. Las Injurias district was depopulated; its denizens were on their way through the muddy lanes to Madrid, on the hunt. Some ascended to the Paseo Imperial, others trooped down though the Arroyo de Embajadores.
They were a repulsive rout; some, ragpickers; others, mendicants; still others, starvelings; almost all of them of nauseating mien. Worse in appearance than the men were the women,—filthy, dishevelled, tattered. This was human refuse, enfolded in rags, swollen with cold and dankness, vomited up by this pest-ridden quarter. Here was a medley of skin-diseases, marks left by all the ailments to which the flesh is heir, the jaundiced hue of tertian fever, the contracted eyelash,—all the various stigmata of illness and poverty.
“If the rich could only see this, eh?” asked Don Alonso.