“Then I’ll go this very moment.”
Without bidding good-bye to Alex, Manuel left the garret and went off to the Calle de Luchana in search of Bernardo Santín. The apartment was nominally on the third floor, but counting the mezzanine and the ground floor, it was really on the fifth. In response to Manuel’s knocking an aged man with reddish eyes opened the door; it was Bernardo’s father. Manuel explained the purpose of his coming, and the old man shrugged his shoulders, and returned to the kitchen, where he was cooking. Manuel waited for Bernardo to arrive. The house was still without any furniture; there was only a table and a few pots and pans in the kitchen, and two beds in a large room. Bernardo arrived, and the three had lunch and Santín decided that Manuel should ask the janitor for a step-ladder and get busy arranging and inserting the panes of glass in the gallery.
After having given these orders he said that he must be off at once to an appointment, and left.
Manuel spent the first day at the top of a ladder, putting the panes into place with bands of lead and gluing the broken ones together with strips of paper.
Arranging the panes was a matter of much time; then Manuel put up the curtains and papered the gallery with rolls of blue printing paper.
Within a week or thereabouts Roberto appeared with the catalogues. He marked with a pencil the things that they would have to order, and instructed Bernardo in the arrangement of the dark room; he indicated a spot best adapted to the installment of a transom, where the plates would be exposed to the sun and the positives made, and informed him upon a number of other details. Bernardo paid close attention to all Roberto said and then handed over all the duties to Manuel. Bernardo, besides possessing little intelligence, was an inveterate idler. He did absolutely nothing. Only when his sweetheart came to see how matters were progressing would he pretend to be very busy.
His sweetheart was a very winsome creature; she seemed to Manuel even pretty, despite her red hair and her lashes and eyebrows of the same colour. She had a pale little face, somewhat freckled, a pinkish, turned-up nose, clear eyes and lips so red and alluring that they roused a desire to kiss them. She was of diminutive build, but very well formed. She did not trill her r’s, gliding over them, and pronounced her c’s before e and i as s instead of th.
She seemed to be genuinely in love with Bernardo, and this shocked Manuel.
“She can’t really know him,” he thought.