'A good foot and good ear
Signs of a good beast are.'
For talking, they make use of a kind of jargon that, in my opinion, they themselves don't understand. These parleys that I don't comprehend displease me, for I never know whether I am being bought or sold.
"There was one—the size of a tunny-fish—they called Don 'Turo.[166] He fell to me. To see him blowing and sweating over those sands made one pity him, for a league finishes them; the sun offends them; the heat makes them weak, and dissolves them entirely. That platter face would persist in doing everything contrariwise, as they do it in his country. Once he took it into his head to use my clasp-knife to eat with, and cut himself. With that he got out a medicine-chest as big as a surgeon's. 'Go along!' said I to myself, 'a spider bit me, and I bound the wound up in a sheet.' He was as hard-headed as a corner. Another time he made up his mind that he ought to shoot a partridge, and, though I told him it was against the law to shoot partridges at that season, he fired, and would have fired if his father had stood before the mouth of his gun. He fired and killed an urraca.[167] 'Sir,' said I, 'what has your honor done?' Says he to me, 'Killed the partridge.' 'Why, sir, it isn't a partridge, it's an urraca.' 'It's all right,' said the big bungler, quite composedly. 'But it is not right,' answered I; 'the killing of urracas is prohibited.' 'And who prohibits it?' he asked, putting on his face of a lion. 'I have my license, that cost me three thousand reals.' 'But, sir, that is for large game—you understand? The urracas mustn't be killed. You comprehend?' Says he to me, 'In this country of Santísima María'—for, as I have told you already, he said everything reversed, as they do in his—'in this country there's no end of privileges, and do the very urracas have them?'
"That question was so foolish, or else meant to be ironical, that I didn't care to set him right; so I told him, 'Yes, privileges that were granted to them in very ancient times, by Doña Urraca herself.' He took out a blank-book and wrote that down. 'Let the ball roll,' said I in my jacket, 'it isn't my business to stop it.'"
"But, Uncle Bartolo, why may they not kill urracas in the district?" asked a young man.
"Because they are the ones that planted the pine woods," answered Uncle Bartolo.
"Oh! none of that! you are not talking to platter-face," replied the youth.
"So I perceive, since his swallow for novelties was too big; and you—for a blockhead of those who believe only what they see—haven't any. Nevertheless, sir, that the urracas do plant the pines is a truth as evident as a house. They open the ripe cones, and pick out the seeds for food. Being very saving birds, they bury those that they can't eat; and, being very brainless ones, they forget all about it and never go back to look for them; and the seeds sprout. If it were not true, why would the dukes prohibit the killing of urracas, when they are thicker in the district than sparrows on a threshing-floor? Therefore, Alonso, no one may say, 'This camel can't enter the eye of my needle'; for, of two silly birds, the one that always keeps his bill shut is more silly than the one that has his always open. But you were a dunce from the beginning; and, as you grow older, you are gaining upon Blas, that ate horse-beans."
"And at night, uncle, what did those people do with themselves there in the province?" asked the listeners.
"The Englishmen ate and drank, for their honors are made hollow, in order that they may always be putting things into their mouths. That is the reason they are so fat and big. Platter-face told me one day—with an air as if God had just revealed it to him—that I was able to go so long without getting tired because I was lean; and that he would give a thousand dollars, or some such sum, to be as lean as I. I answered—shouting to make him understand better—'Your worship has only to eat gazpacho[168] to dry up your flesh, and raw onions and garlic to sharpen your senses."