Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

This happy time was now nothing but a faded though pleasant recollection in the poor woman's memory.

Señor Juan became ill of consumption, and for two years his wife had to nurse him, working harder than ever at her various jobs to make up for the peseta that her husband formerly gave her. Finally he died in the hospital, resigned to his fate, having come to the conclusion that life was worth nothing without bulls and Manzanilla. His last looks of love and gratitude were for his wife, as though he were crying out with his eyes, "Olé! the best woman in the world!"...

When the Señora Angustias was left alone, her situation became no worse; on the contrary, she was much less hampered in her movements, freed from the man who in the last two years of his life had weighed more heavily on her than all the rest of the family. Being a woman of prompt and energetic action, she immediately struck out a line for her children. Encarnacion, who was now seventeen, went to the Tobacco factory, where her mother was able to introduce her, thanks to her relations with certain friends of her youth, who were now overseers. Juanillo, who from his babyhood had spent his days under the doorway in the suburb de la Feria, watching his father work, should become a shoemaker, by the will of Señora Angustias.

She took him away from school, where he had only learnt to read very badly, and at twelve years old he was apprenticed to one of the best shoemakers in Seville.

Now commenced the martyrdom of the poor woman. Ay! that urchin. The son of such honoured parents!... Almost every day instead of going to his master's shop, he would go to the slaughter-house with certain ragamuffins, who had their meeting place on a bench in the Alameda de Hercules, and for the amusement of shepherds and slaughtermen, would venture to throw a cloak before the oxen, frequently getting knocked over and trampled. The Señora Angustias, who watched many nights needle in hand, so that her son should go decently clad to the workshop in clean clothes, would find him at the house door, afraid to come in, but from the extremity of his hunger equally afraid to run away, with his trousers torn, his jacket filthy, and bruises and grazes on his face.

To the bruises of the treacherous oxen would be added his mother's blows and beatings with a broomstick: but the hero of the slaughter-house endured everything, as long as he could get his poor pittance, "Beat me, but give me something to eat," and with an appetite sharpened by the violent exercise, he would swallow the hard bread, the weevilled beans, the putrefied salt cod, all the damaged goods that the thrifty woman found in the shops, which enabled her to maintain the family on very little money.

Busy all day scrubbing the floors of other people's houses, it was only now and again in the evenings that she was able to look after her son, going to his master's shop to enquire about the apprentice's progress. When she returned from the shoemaker's she was usually panting with rage, promising herself to administer the most stupendous punishments in order to correct the rascal.

On most days he never went near the shop at all. He spent the mornings at the slaughter-house, and in the evenings formed one of a group of other vagabonds at the entrance of the Calle de las Sierpes, prowling round the groups of toreros without contracts, who assembled in La Campana, dressed in new clothes with spick and span hats, and scarcely a peseta between them in their pockets, each one boasting of his own imaginary exploits.

Juanillo viewed them as creatures of amazing superiority, he envied their fine carriage, and the coolness with which they ogled the women. The idea that each one of those men had in his house a set of silk clothes embroidered with gold, and being dressed in these would march past before the crowd to the sound of music, produced a shiver of respect.

The son of Señora Angustias was known to all his ragged companions as "Zapaterin,"[50] and he seemed delighted at having a nickname, like almost all the great men who appeared in the circus. Everything must have a beginning. Round his neck he wore a red handkerchief filched from his sister, and from beneath his cap the hair fell over his ears in long locks, which he smoothed with saliva. He wanted to have his drill blouses made short to the waist with many pleats, his trousers, old remains of his father's wardrobe, high in the waist, full in the legs, well fitting over the hips; and he wept with humiliation when his mother would not give in to these requirements.