The Cabin [La barraca]

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

She recalled with growing fear certain stories of the huerta that she had heard in the factory; the fear that the little girls had of Pimentó, and other bullies who congregated in the tavern of Copa: heartless fellows who pinched the girls wherever they could, and pushed them into the canals, or made them fall behind the haylofts. And Roseta, who was no longer innocent after entering the factory, gave free rein to her imagination, till it reached the utmost limits of the horrible; and she saw herself assassinated by some one of these monsters, her stomach ripped up and soaked in blood, like those children of the legends of the huerta whose fat sinister and mysterious murderers extracted and used in making wonderful salves and potions for the rich.

In the twilight of winter, dark and oftentimes rainy, Roseta passed over more than half of the road all a tremble. But the most cruel crisis, the most terrible obstacle was almost at the end, and close to the farm—the famous tavern of Copa.

Here was the den of the wild beast. This was the most frequented and the brightest bit of road. The sound of voices, the outbursts of laughter, the thrumming of a guitar, and couplets of songs with loud shouting came forth from the door which, like the mouth of a furnace, cast forth a square of reddish light over the black road, in which grotesque shadows moved about. And nevertheless, the poor mill girl, on arriving near this place, stopped undecided, trembling like the heroines of the fairy-tales before the den of the ogre, ready to set out through the fields in order to make a détour around the rear of the building, to sink into the canal which bordered the road, and to slip away hidden behind the sloping banks; anything rather than to pass in front of this red gullet which gave forth the din of drunkenness and brutality.

Finally she decided; made an effort of will like one who is going to throw himself over a high cliff, and passed swiftly before the tavern, along the edge of the canal, with a very light step, and the marvellous poise which fear lends.

She was a breath, a white shadow which did not give the turbid eyes of the customers of Copa time to fix themselves upon it.

And the tavern passed, the child ran and ran, believing that some one was just behind her, expecting to feel the tug of his powerful paw at her skirt.

She was not calm until she heard the barking of the dog at the farm-house, that ugly animal, who by way of antithesis no doubt, was called The Morning Star, and who came bounding up to her in the middle of the road with bounds and licked her hands.

Roseta never told those at home of the terrors encountered on the road. The poor child composed herself on entering the house, and answered the questions of her anxious mother quietly, meeting the situation valorously by stating that she had come home with some companions.

The spinning-mill girl did not want her father to come out nights to accompany her on the road. She knew the hatred of the neighbourhood: the tavern of Copa with its quarrelsome people inspired her with fear.

And on the following day she returned to the factory to suffer the same fears upon returning, enlivened only by the hope that the spring would soon come with its longer days and its luminous twilights, which would permit her to return to the house before it grew dark.