LITMIR.BIZ

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She here! A daughter of such honourable parents! God! What shame!

      The prostitute, through professional habit, tried to receive those exclamations of the scandalized farmer's wife with a cynical smile and the sceptical expression of one who has been initiated into the secret of life, and who believes in nothing; but Pepeta's clear eyes seemed to shame the girl, and she dropped her head as though she were about to weep.

      No: she was not bad. She had worked in the factories, she had been a servant, but finally, her sisters, tired of suffering hunger, had given her the example. So here she was, sometimes receiving caresses, and sometimes receiving blows, and here she would stay till she ceased to live forever. It was natural: any family may end thus where there is no mother nor father left. The cause of it all was the master of the land; he was to blame for everything, that Don Salvador, who assuredly must be burning in hell! Ah, thief! How he had ruined the entire family!

      Pepeta forgot her frigid attitude and cold reserve in order to join in the girl's indignation. It was the truth, the whole truth! That avaricious old miser was to blame. The entire huerta knew it! Heaven save us! How easily a family may be ruined! And poor old Barret had been so good! If he could only raise his head and see his daughters!... It was well-known yonder that the poor father had died in Ceuta two years before; and as for the mother, the poor widow had ended her suffering on a hospital-bed.

      What changes take place in the world in ten years! Who would have said to her, and her sisters, who were reigning like queens in their homes at the time, that they would come to such an end? Oh Lord! Lord! Deliver us from evil!

      Rosario became animated during this conversation; she seemed rejuvenated by this friend of her childhood. Her eyes, previously dead, sparkled as she recalled the past.

      And the barraca? And the land? They were still deserted. Truly? That pleased her;—let them go to smash,—let them go to rack and ruin,—those sons of the rascally don Salvador.

      That alone seemed to console her: she was very grateful to Pimentó and to all the others, because they had prevented those people yonder from coming to work the land which rightfully belonged to the family. And if any one wished to take possession of it, he knew only too well the remedy.... Bang! A report from a gun which would blow his head off!

      The girl grew bolder; her eyes gleamed fiercely; within the passive breast of the prostitute, accustomed to blows, there came to life the daughter of the huerta, who, from very birth, has seen the musket hung behind the door, and breathed in the smell of gunpowder on feast-days with delight.

      After speaking of the sad past Rosario, whose curiosity was awakened, went on inquiring about all the folks at home, and ended by noticing how badly Pepeta looked. Poor thing! It was perfectly apparent that she was not happy. Although still young, her eyes, clear, guileless, and timid as a virgin's, alone revealed her real age. Her body was a mere skeleton, and her reddish hair, the colour of a tender ear of corn, was streaked with grey though as yet she had not reached her thirtieth year.

      What kind of a life was Pimentó giving her? Always drunk and averse to work? She had brought it upon herself, marrying him contrary to every one's advice. He was a strapping fellow, that was true; every one feared him in the tavern of Copa on Sunday evenings, when he played cards with the worst bullies of the huerta; but in the house, he was bound to prove an insufferable husband. Still, after all, men are all alike! Perhaps she didn't know it! Dogs, all of them, not worth the trouble of being looked after! Great Heavens! how ill poor Pepeta was looking!

      The loud, deep voice of a virago resounded like a clap of thunder down the narrow stairway.

      "Elisa! Bring up the milk at once! The gentleman is waiting!"

      Rosario began to laugh as though mad. "I am called Elisa now! You didn't know that!"

      It was a requirement of her business to change her name, as well as to speak with an Andalusian accent. And she began to imitate the voice of the virago upstairs with a species of rough humour.

      But in spite of her mirth, she was in a hurry to get away. She was afraid of those upstairs. The owner of the rough voice or the gentleman who wanted the milk might give her some memento of the delay. So she hurried up after urging Pepeta to stop again some other time to tell her the news of the huerta.

      The monotonous tinkling of the bell of La Rocha continued for more than an hour through the streets of Valencia; the wilted udders yielded up their last drop of insipid milk, produced by a miserable diet of cabbage-leaves and garbage, and Pepeta finally was ready to start back toward the barraca.

      The poor labouring-woman walked along sadly deep in thought. The encounter had impressed her; she remembered, as though it had just happened the day before, the terrible tragedy which had swallowed up old Barret and his entire family.

      Since then, the fields, which his ancestors had tilled for more than a hundred years, had lain abandoned at the edge of the high road.

      The uninhabited barraca was slowly crumbling to pieces without any merciful hand to mend the roof or to cast a handful of clay upon the chinks in the wall.

      Ten years of passing and re-passing had accustomed people to the sight of this ruin, so they paid no further attention to it. It had been some time since even Pepeta had looked at it. It now interested only the boys who, inheriting the hatred of their fathers, trampled down the nettles of the abandoned fields in order to riddle the deserted house with rocks, which split great gaps in the closed door, or to fill up the well under the ancient grape-arbour with earth and stones.

      But this morning Pepeta, under the spell of the recent meeting, not only looked at the ruin, but stopped at the edge of the highway to see it the better.

      The fields of old Barret, or rather, of the Jew, Don Salvador, and his excommunicated heirs, were an oasis of misery and abandonment in the midst of the huerta, so fertile, well-tilled, and smiling.

      Ten years of desolation had hardened the soil, causing all the parasitic plants, all the nettles which the Lord has created to chasten the farmer, to spring up out of its sterile depths. A dwarfish forest, tangled and deformed, spread itself out over those fields in waving ranks of strange green tones, varied here and there by flowers, mysterious and rare, of the sort which thrive only amid cemeteries and ruins.

      Here, in the rank maze of this thicket, fostered by the security of their retreat, there bred and multiplied all species of loathsome vermin, which spread out into the neighbouring fields; green lizards with corrugated loins, enormous beetles with shells of metallic reflection, spiders with short and hairy legs, and even snakes, which slid off to the adjoining canals. Here they thrived in the midst of the beautiful and cultivated plain, forming a separate estate, and devouring one another. Though they caused some damage to the farmers, the latter respected them even with a certain veneration, for the seven plagues of Egypt would have seemed but a trifle to the dwellers of the huerta had they descended upon those accursed fields.

      The lands of old Barret never had been destined for man, so let the most loathsome pests nest among them, and the more, the better.

      In the midst of these fields of desolation, which stood out in the beautiful plain like a soiled patch on a royal robe of green velvet, the barraca rose up, or one should rather say fell away, its straw roof bursting open, showing through the gaps, which the rain and wind had pierced, the worm-eaten framework of wood within.

      The walls, rotted away by the rains, laid bare the clay-adobe. Only some very light stains revealed the former whitewash; the door was ragged along the lower edge which rats had gnawed, with wide cracks that ran, full length, from end to end. The two or three little windows, gaping wide, hung loosely on one hinge exposed to the mercy of the south-west winds, ready to fall as soon as the first gust should shake them.

      This ruin hurt the spirit and weighed upon the heart. It seemed as though phantoms might sally forth from the wretched and abandoned hut as soon as darkness closed in; that from the interior might come the cries of the assassinated, rending the night; that all this waste of weeds might be a shroud to conceal hundreds of tragic corpses from sight.

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