The Cabin [La barraca]

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Pimentó was magnificent. He suffered great pain, and went about supported by his friends with his head bandaged, transformed into an eccehomo, as the indignant gossips declared; but he made an effort to smile, and answered every incitement to revenge with an arrogant gesture, declaring that he took the castigation of the enemy upon himself.

Batiste did not doubt that these people would seek vengeance. He was familiar with the usual methods of the huerta. The courts of the city were not made for this land; prison was a small matter when a question of satisfying a grudge was concerned. Why should a man make use of a judge or a civil guard, if he had a good eye and a shotgun in his house? The affairs of men should be settled by the men themselves.

And as all the huerta thought thus, vainly on the day following the quarrel did two guards with enamelled tricorns pass and repass over the paths leading from Copa's tavern to the farm-house of Pimentó, making sly inquiries of the people who were in the fields. No one had seen anybody; no one knew anything. Pimentó related with brutal bursts of laughter how he had broken his own head coming home from the tavern, declaring it to be the consequence of his bet; the brandy had made him stagger, and strike his head against the trees on the road. So the rural police had to turn back to their little barracks at Alboraya without any clear information concerning the vague rumours of quarrel and bloodshed which had reached them.

This magnanimity of the victim and his friends alarmed Batiste, who made up his mind to live perpetually on the defensive.

The family, shrinking from contact with the huerta, withdrew within the house as a timid snail withdraws within its shell.

The little ones did not even go to school. Roseta stopped going to the factory, and Batistet did not go a pace away from the fields. Only the father went out, showing himself as calm and confident about his security as he was careful and prudent for the others.

But he made no trips to the city without carrying the shotgun with him, which he left with a friend in the suburbs. He literally lived with his weapon. The most modern thing in his house, it was always clean, shining and cared for with that affection which the Valencian farmer, like the Barbary tribesman, bestows upon his gun.

Teresa was as sad as she had been upon the death of the little one. Every time that she saw her husband cleaning the double-barrelled shotgun, changing the cartridges, or making the trigger play up and down to be sure it would work smoothly, there arose in her mind the image of the prison, the terrible tale of old Barret; she saw blood and cursed the hour in which they had thought of settling upon these accursed lands. And then came the hours of fear on account of the absence of her husband, those long afternoons spent awaiting the man who did not return, going out to the door of the farm-house to explore the road, trembling each time that there sounded from the distance some report from the hunters of sparrows, fearing that it was the beginning of a tragedy, the shot which shattered the head of the father of the family or which would take him to prison. And when Batiste finally appeared, the little ones would shout with joy, Teresa would smile, wiping her eyes, the daughter would run out to embrace her father, and even the dog leaped close to him, sniffing restlessly, as though he scented about his person the danger which he had just encountered.

And Batiste, serene and firm, but without arrogance, laughed at his family's anxiety, and became bolder and bolder as the famous quarrel receded into the past.

He considered himself secure. As long as he carried "the bird with the two voices," as he called his shotgun, he could calmly walk throughout all the huerta. When he went out in such good company, his enemies pretended not to know him. At times he had even seen Pimentó from a distance, walking through the huerta, exhibiting like a flag of vengeance his bandaged head, but the bully, in spite of his recovery from the blow had fled, fearing the encounter perhaps even more than Batiste.