-Iii- · I

A dialogue serving as an exposition

“Wait, child, do not walk so fast,” said Golfín, stopping. “Let me light a cigar.”

The night was so calm that he had no need of the precautions smokers usually take against the wind. When the cigar was lit, he held the match close to Nela’s face, saying kindly:

“Let me see your face.”

The girl gazed at him in astonishment, and her small black eyes flashed with a reddish spark during the brief instant that the matchlight lasted. She looked like a child, for her stature was among the smallest, matching her extremely slender waist and poorly developed frame. Yet she looked like a maiden too, for her eyes lacked the innocent gaze of childhood, and her face revealed the maturity of an organism into which judgment had entered, or ought to have entered. Despite this disproportion, she was admirably formed, and her small head sat with a certain grace upon her frail body. Some said she was a grown woman viewed through a diminishing glass; others, that she was a child with the eyes and expression of an adolescent. To a stranger, it was doubtful whether she represented an astonishing precocity or a deplorable backwardness.

“How old are you?” asked Golfín, shaking his fingers to toss away the match, which was beginning to burn him.

“They say I am sixteen,” replied Nela, examining the doctor in her turn.

“Sixteen! You are backward, child. Your body is that of a twelve-year-old at most.”

“Mother of God! They say I am a sort of monster,” she remarked in a tone of self-pity.

“A monster!” repeated Golfín, resting his hand upon the girl’s hair. “That may be. Come, lead on.”

Nela began to walk resolutely forward without hurrying ahead, taking care rather to stay beside the traveler, as though she valued to the full the honor of such noble company. She went barefoot; her small, nimble feet showed customary familiarity with the rough ground, the stones, the puddles, and the briars. She wore a simple skirt, none too long, showing in her rudimentary attire, as well as in the freedom of her loose, short hair, curled with native grace, a certain independence more proper to a savage than to a beggar. Her words, on the contrary, surprised Golfín by their modesty and humility, giving token of a serious and thoughtful nature. Her voice had an agreeable ring of courtesy that could never have come from schooling, and her glances were fleeting and momentary, except when directed toward the ground or the sky.

“Tell me,” Golfín asked her, “do you live at the mines? Are you the daughter of someone employed here?”

“They say I have neither father nor mother.”

“Poor child! You work in the mines, then?...”

“No, sir. I am good for nothing,” she replied without raising her eyes from the ground.

“Well, you do not lack modesty, upon my word.”

Teodoro bent down to look at her face. It was thin, heavily freckled, sprinkled all over with tiny brownish specks. Her forehead was small, her nose sharp and not without grace, her eyes black and lively, though commonly shadowed by a sorrowful light. Her dark-golden hair had lost its natural beauty through neglect and constant exposure to wind, sun, and dust. Her lips could scarcely be seen, so small were they, and were constantly parted in a smile; yet that smile resembled the imperceptible expression of some who have died thinking of heaven. Nela’s mouth, aesthetically speaking, was plain and unattractive; yet it might well have deserved praise in the words of Polo de Medina: “so sweet her mouth, it never begs.” Indeed, neither in speech, nor in glance, nor in smile did the wretched creature reveal the degrading habit of street beggary.

Golfín stroked her face with his hand, taking her chin and almost enclosing it within his broad fingers.

“Poor little one!” he exclaimed. “God has not been lavish with you. With whom do you live?”

“With Señor Centeno, the cattle overseer at the mines.”

“I imagine you were not born to luxury. Whose child are you?”

“They say my mother sold peppers in the market at Villamojada. She was unmarried. She bore me on All Souls’ Day, and afterwards went to Madrid to work as a wet nurse.”

“A fine sort of mother!” muttered Teodoro ironically. “Perhaps nobody knows who your father was.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Nela with a touch of pride. “My father was the first man to light the lamps in Villamojada.”

“Bless my soul!”

“I mean that when the town council first put lanterns in the streets,” said the girl, giving her account the solemnity of history, “my father was appointed to light and trim them. I was already being raised by my mother’s sister, who was unmarried too, so they say. My father had quarreled with her.... They say they lived together... they all lived together... and when he went round lamp-lighting he carried me in his basket along with the glass chimneys, the wicks, and the oil can.... One day, they say, he climbed up to clean the lantern on the bridge; he set the basket on the parapet, I tumbled out and fell into the river.”

“And were you drowned?”

“No, sir, for I fell upon the stones. Holy Mother of God! They say that before that I was very pretty.”

“Yes, no doubt you were very pretty,” affirmed the stranger, his heart brimming with kindness. “And you are pretty still.... But tell me something else. Have you lived long at the mines?”

“They say three years. They say my mother took me back after the fall. My father fell ill, and as my mother would not nurse him, because he was wicked, he went to the hospital, where they say he died. Then my mother came to work at the mines. They say that one day the foreman discharged her because she had drunk too much spirits....”

“And your mother went away.... Come, this lady interests me. She went away....”

“She went to a huge hole up yonder,” said Nela, stopping before the doctor and speaking in the most pathetic tone, “and threw herself inside.”

“Good heavens! What a dreadful end! I suppose she never came out again.”

“No, sir,” replied Nela simply. “She is down there still.”

“After such a catastrophe, poor creature,” said Golfín tenderly, “you were left to work here. Mining is very hard labor. You are stained with the color of the ore; you look stunted and ill-nourished. Such a life ruins the strongest constitutions.”

“No, sir, I do not work. They say I am good for nothing and never shall be.”

“Nonsense, silly child, you are a treasure.”

“No, sir,” insisted Nela with great firmness. “I cannot work. As soon as I lift any light weight, I fall to the ground. If I try to do anything hard, I faint at once.”

“God’s will be done.... Well, if you fell into the hands of people who knew how to manage you, you would work well enough.”

“No, sir,” repeated Nela with as much emphasis as if she were praising herself; “I am of no use except as a nuisance.”

“So then you are a vagabond?”

“No, sir, because I keep company with Pablo.”

“And who is Pablo?”

“That blind young gentleman whom you met in La Terrible. I have been his guide for a year and a half. I take him everywhere; we go walking all over the countryside.”

“He seems a good lad, that Pablo.”

Nela halted once more, looking up at the doctor. With her face radiant with enthusiasm, she cried:

“Mother of God! He is the best creature in all the world. My poor dear young master! Without sight, he has more sense than all those who can see.”

“I like your young master. Is he of this neighborhood?”

“Yes, sir; he is the only son of Don Francisco Penáguilas, a very good and wealthy gentleman who lives in the houses of Aldeacorba.”

“Tell me, why do they call you Nela? What does that mean?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. After a pause, she replied:

“My mother was called Señá María Canela; but they called her Nela. They say that is a dog’s name. My name is María.”

“Mariquita.”

“They call me María Nela, and also Canela’s Daughter. Some call me Marianela, and others just Nela.”

“And your master, is he very fond of you?”

“Yes, sir, he is very good. He says he sees through my eyes, because as I take him everywhere and tell him what everything is like....”

“All the things he cannot see.”

The stranger seemed to take great delight in this dialogue.

“Yes, sir; I tell him everything. He asks me what a star is like, and I describe it to him so well that it is just the same to him as if he saw it. I explain everything to him—what the grass is like, the clouds, the sky, the water, the lightning, the weather vanes, the butterflies, the smoke, the snails, and the bodies and faces of people and animals. I tell him what is ugly and what is beautiful, and so he comes to understand everything.”

“I see that yours is no light task. The ugly and the beautiful! That is no small matter.... You busy yourself with that?... Tell me, do you know how to read?”

“No, sir. As I told you, I am good for nothing.”

She said this in the most convincing tone, and the gesture that accompanied her firm protest seemed to add: “You are a simpleton to suppose that I am good for anything.”

“Would you not rejoice if God were to grant your young master the gift of sight?”

The girl made no reply. After a pause, she murmured:

“Holy God! That is impossible.”

“Not impossible, though difficult.”

“The head engineer of the mines has given my master’s father hope.”

“Don Carlos Golfín?”

“Yes, sir. Don Carlos has a brother who is an eye doctor, and they say he gives sight to the blind, cures the one-eyed, and straightens the eyes of the cross-eyed.”

“What a clever fellow!”

“Yes, sir; and now that the doctor wrote to his brother saying he was coming, his brother wrote back telling him to bring his instruments to see if he could give Pablo his sight.”

“And has that worthy gentleman arrived yet?”

“No, sir; as he is always traveling about the Americas and England, it seems he will be late in coming. But Pablo laughs at it all, and says that man cannot give him what the Holy Virgin denied him from his birth.”

“Perhaps he is right.... But tell me, are we nearly there?... For I see chimneys vomiting smoke blacker than the pit of hell, and I see a glow that looks like a blacksmith’s forge.”

“Yes, sir, we are arriving now. Those are the calcining furnaces, which burn day and night. Opposite are the washing machines, which work only by day; on the right is the repair shop, and down yonder, at the very end, are the offices.”

Indeed, the place presented itself to Golfín’s eyes just as Marianela had described it. The smoke, spreading for lack of wind, wrapped all the buildings in a sort of dark, foul veil, whose black masses stood out in dim and fantastic shapes against the moonlit sky.

“This place is better to look at once than to live in,” remarked Golfín, quickening his pace. “The cloud of smoke covers everything, and the lights form a blurry disc, like the moon on a muggy night. Where are the offices?”

“Yonder; we shall be there directly.”

After passing in front of the furnaces, whose heat made him hasten his steps, the doctor saw a building as black and smoke-begrimed as the rest. No sooner had he caught sight of it than he heard the pleasant notes of a piano played with genuine musical frenzy.

“We have music here. I recognize my sister-in-law’s touch.”

“It is Señorita Sofía playing,” affirmed María.

The light of cheerful rooms shone from the windows, and the main balcony was open. A small glowing ember could be seen upon it: the tip of a cigar. Before the doctor reached the house, that ember fell, tracing a vertical line and breaking into tiny skipping sparks; the smoker had tossed away his butt.

“There is the everlasting smoker!” cried the doctor with the warmest affection. “Carlos! Carlos!”

“Teodoro!” replied a voice from the balcony.

The piano fell silent, like a singing bird startled by a noise. Footsteps sounded in the house. The doctor gave a silver coin to his guide and hastened toward the door.

-IV-

The Stone Family

Quickening her step and skipping over the obstacles in her path, Nela made her way toward the house behind the engine sheds, beside the stables where the sixty mules belonging to the works were chewing their cud slowly and solemnly. The dwelling of Señor Centeno was of modern construction, though neither elegant nor even comfortable. Low-ceilinged and small for housing in its three rooms Señor and Señora Centeno, their four children, the Centenos’ cat, and, to crown all, Nela, the house nevertheless figured upon the vellum plans of the great establishment proudly displaying, like many others, the label: Overseers’ Quarters.

Internally, the dwelling served to prove practically an aphorism with which we are already familiar, having heard it stated by Marianela herself: namely, that she, Marianela, served only as an encumbrance. Indeed, there was room for everything: for Señor and Señora Centeno, for their sons’ tools, for a thousand oddments of doubtful utility, for the cat, for the saucer from which the cat ate, for Tanasio’s guitar, for the materials he used in weaving garrotes (baskets), for half a dozen old mule collars, for the blackbird’s cage, for two useless iron pots, for an altar upon which Señora Centeno offered to the Deity rag flowers and century-old candles colonized by flies; for everything, in short, except the Daughter of Canela. One frequently heard:

“Can I not take a step without stumbling over this confounded Nela!...”

One heard also:

“Be off to your corner.... What a creature! She neither does anything nor lets anyone else do.”

The house consisted of three rooms and a garret. The first was, besides dining room and parlor, the bedroom of the elder Centenos. In the second slept the two young women, who were now grown up, and were called Mariuca and Pepina. Tanasio, the eldest son, made himself comfortable in the garret, and Celipín, the youngest of the family, bordering on twelve years old, had his sleeping quarters in the kitchen, the innermost, remotest, gloomiest, smokiest, and most uninhabitable room of the three that formed the Centeno abode.

Nela, during the long years of her residence there, had occupied various corners, shifting from one to another as required by the placement of a thousand objects that served only to rob living beings of their last scrap of habitable floor. On one occasion (the exact date is not known), Tanasio, who was as crippled in legs as in wit and had taken up the weaving of hazel baskets, piled up in the kitchen as many as half a dozen of those belly-shaped specimens of his craftsmanship. Then Canela’s daughter looked sorrowfully around without finding a place to rest; but that very predicament suggested a sudden and happy idea, which she immediately put into practice. She crept snugly into one of the baskets, and thus spent the night in easy and peaceful slumber. Undeniably it was snug and comfortable: when cold, she covered herself with another basket. Thenceforth, whenever large garrotes were on hand, she did not lack a case in which to shut herself up. Wherefore they said in the house: “She sleeps like a jewel in a casket.”

During meals, amid the noisy chatter of animated conversation about the morning’s work, a voice would abruptly call out: “Here.” Nela would take a bowl from the hands of any Centeno, great or small, and sit down against the chest to eat in peace. At the end of the meal, too, Señor Centeno’s harsh, guttural voice might be heard saying to his wife by way of reproach: “Wife, you have given nothing to poor Nela.” At times Señana (a name formed from Señora Ana) would toss her head to search with her eyes among the bodies of her children for some small, distant object, and would say at the same time: “Why, was she there? I thought she had stayed behind at Aldeacorba today too.”