It was a beautiful May afternoon; the sun shone strong and steady. The returned soldier recounted some anecdotes of the campaign in Cuba. He spoke in a violent fashion, and when anger or indignation mastered him, he grew terribly pale.
He talked of life on that island,—a horrible life; forever marching and marching, barefoot, legs sunk into swampy soil and the air clouded with mosquitos whose bites left welts on your skin. He recalled a dingy little village theatre that had been converted into a hospital, its stage cluttered with sick and wounded. The army officers, even before the fantastic battles—for the Cubans always ran off like hares—would dispute the distribution of crosses, and the soldiers would make fun of the battles and the crosses and the bravery of their leaders. Then the war of extermination decreed by Weyler, the burning mills, the green slopes that in a moment were left without a bush, the exploding cane, and, in the towns, the famished populace, the women and children crying: “Don Lieutenant, Don Sergeant, we’re hungry!” Besides this, the executions, the cold slaughter of one by the other with the machetes. Between generals and lower officers, hatred and rivalry; and in the meantime the soldiers, indifferent to it all, hardly replying to the sharpshooting of the enemy, with the same affection for life that one can feel for a discarded sandal. There were some who said: “Captain, I’ll remain here.” Whereupon their guns were taken from them and the others proceeded. And after all this, their return to Spain, almost sadder than the life in Cuba; the whole ship loaded with men dressed in striped cotton duck; a ship laden with skeletons, and every day five, six or seven who died and were cast into the waves.
“And the arrival at Barcelona! Hell! What a disillusion!” he concluded. “A fellow would be waiting for some sort of reward for having served his country,—hoping for a little affection. Eh? Not a thing. Lord! Everybody looked at you as you went by without paying the slightest attention. We disembark in port as if we’re so many bales of cotton. On the ship we had said to ourselves, ‘We’ll be swamped with questions when we get back to Spain.’ Nothing like it. Nobody was in the least interested in what I had gone through in the Cuban thickets.... Go and defend your country, ha? Let the papal Nuncio go and defend it! So that he can afterward die of hunger and cold, and have somebody say to him: ‘If you had any guts, the island wouldn’t have been lost.’ It’s too damned much, I say! Too much!...”
The sun was already sinking in the west when the soldier and Manuel got up and went off toward Madrid.
CHAPTER IX
Night in the Paseo de la Virgen del Puerto—A Shot Rings Out—Calatrava and Vidal—A Tango by La Bella Pérez
“On nights when it isn’t very cold,” said the soldier, “I sleep in that grove near the Virgen del Puerto. Would you want to go there today?” he added.
“Sure. Come on.”