He was almost running as he entered a dirty street in one of the most miserable sections of the village, lines of dwarf olives on either hand, the sidewalks filthy with trodden dirt, and lined with two rows of shacks, the front yards fenced in with old boards. The door of Rosario's cottage was closed. He ran into it with a violence that almost snapped the latch, and as it swung open, it banged violently against the wall behind. In the murky light of a single candle, Rosario was sitting on a stool, her head between her hands. Her demeanor of sorrow and despair was quite in harmony with the desolate, ill-furnished interior of that hovel—a table, a couple of chairs, two chromos on the wall for decoration, an old mandolin, and some abandoned fish-nets. The place, as the women of the neighborhood said, had the smell of hunger and wife-beating.
Rosario looked up as the door slammed open, and the Rector's massive figure towered over the threshold, completely filling the door-way. "Oh, it's you!" she said with a bitter smile. She had been waiting for him. She knew he would come. Wouldn't he have a chair? He had been rough with her down on the beach, but she didn't mind. "We all feel that way at first! I couldn't believe it when they first told me about Tonet. I slapped the face of the woman who came to me. And then, an hour later, I went and asked her for God's sake to tell the truth. Well, you were going to kill me a little while ago. And here you are! When people are really in love ... they get mad at first. But then they want to know the truth, even if it pulls the heart out of them! We are both fools, Pascualo!"
The Rector had closed the door behind him, and was standing now in front of his sister-in-law, his arms folded, looking at her with a scowl of angry hostility, the instinctive hatred a man feels toward the one who wrecks his dream.
"The truth, now! The truth! Speak out! All you've got to say!" Pascualo hissed the threatening words, to put a stop to that everlasting moralizing of an idiot! Would she never get to the point? Yet, in all his menacing, raging impatience, there was terror in his soul, the wish that minutes might turn, almost, to centuries, to postpone the cruel revelation.
Well, yes, she would tell him everything! But how would he take it? What she had to say would hurt him terribly, and he must not hate her so for it. She had had her time of it too. She had suffered now till she could stand it no longer. She hated Tonet, and she hated that infamous Dolores! For her Pascualo was simply a comrade in misfortune. Dolores had been deceiving him. "Oh, it's not a matter of yesterday or day before. They've been carrying on for years—almost from the time Tonet and I were married. Tonet was a good boy. But when that thing saw some one else have him for a husband, she set her eyes on him, and she was the one who first led him astray."
"Bosh!" roared the Rector, blind with fury and anguish. "I want proofs! I'm tired of your talk. Proofs! Proofs, Rosario! And be quick about it."
Rosario smiled pityingly at sight of such a fool! "Proofs! Proofs! Why don't you ask the whole village for proofs, proofs! They've been laughing at you for a year or more. It has been the talk of the town. You won't get angry at me? You want the whole truth? Well, even the 'cats' and the sailors on the beach, when they want to say that a man's wife is deceiving him, call him a worse lanudo than the Rector."
"Damn your soul!" Pascualo roared, clenching his fist and shaking it in Rosario's face. "Rosario ... Look, Rosario, be careful what you say. Because ... if you don't make good on every blessed word of it ... I'll wring your neck the way I would a chicken's."
"I wish you would! I'm tired of living. What have I to live for? No children! Not a friend in the world! Work like a dog from morning till night, to give him the money I earn so as to escape a beating. And he beats me just the same! Wring my neck! That doesn't scare me! Look, Pascualo, look!"
Rosario rolled up her sleeve, and showed on the sallow skin that covered the bones and tendons of her fore-arm, the black-and-blue marks where a heavy hand had squeezed it as in a vise. "And that's only one. I can show you others almost anywhere on my body! And they come from having complained about his bad behavior with Dolores! This one here I got this morning, when I said he ought not go to the beach with her and help her sell the fish as though he was her husband. And I said it wasn't fair to make a fool of the Rector in public like that! But you want proofs, proofs! Well, why didn't Tonet go out with you on the first trip two days ago? He hurt his hand, didn't he? Yes, but his hand got well the moment the Mayflower was beyond the Breakwater. And the next morning there wasn't a bandage to be seen. And everybody noticed it. And you went to sea, to stay up all night, in the cold and wet, to keep your home going for your wife, your dear Dolores! And Tonet stayed all warm and cosy at home with her, the pair of them laughing to see what a stupid, self-satisfied idiot you were! Tonet didn't sleep in this house after you sailed. And he's not here even to-night. He ran in a few moments ago, got his things and was off, saying he wouldn't be back again. And where is he, Pascualo? Over at your house of course! They are sure the Mayflower will keep you down on the shore all night. And Tonet is preparing to make himself at home in your place!"