The Regeneration of Footwear and The Lion of The Shoemaker's
Art—The First Sunday—An Escapade—El Bizco and his Gang.

The inhabitant of Madrid who at times finds himself by accident in the poor quarters near the Manzanares river, is surprised at the spectacle of poverty and sordidness, of sadness and neglect presented by the environs of Madrid with their wretched Rondas, laden with dust in the summer and in winter wallowing in mire. The capital is a city of contrasts; it presents brilliant light in close proximity to deep gloom; refined life, almost European, in the centre; in the suburbs, African existence, like that of an Arab village. Some years ago, not many, in the vicinity of the Ronda de Sevilla and of el Campillo de Gil ImÓn, there stood a house of suspicious aspect and of not very favourable repute, to judge by popular rumour. The observer …

In this and other paragraphs of the same style I had placed some hope, for they imparted to my novel a certain phantasmagoric and mysterious atmosphere; but my friends have convinced me I ought to suppress these passages, arguing that they would be quite in place in a Parisian novel, but not in one dealing with Madrid,—not at all. They add, moreover, that here nobody goes astray, not even if one wishes to. Neither are there here any observers, nor houses of suspicious aspect, nor anything else. In resignation, then, I have excised these paragraphs, through which I hoped some day to be elected to the Spanish Academy; and so I continue my tale in more pedestrian language.

It came about, then, that on the day following the row in the dining-room of the lodging-house, Petra, very early in the morning, woke Manuel and told him to dress.

The boy recalled the scene of the previous day; he verified it by raising his hand to his forehead, for the bruises still pained him, and from his mother's tone he understood that she persisted in her resolve to take him to the cobbler's.

After Manuel had dressed, mother and son left the house and went into the bun-shop for a cup of coffee and milk. Then they walked down to Arenal Street, crossed the Plaza del Oriente, and the Viaduct, thence through Rosario Street. Continuing along the walls of a barracks they reached the heights at whose base runs the Ronda de Segovia. From this eminence there was a view of the yellowish countryside that reached as far as Jetafe and Villaverde, and the San Isidro cemeteries with their grey mudwalls and their black cypresses.

From the Ronda de Segovia, which they covered in a short time, they climbed up Aguila Street, and paused before a house at the corner of the Campillo de Gil ImÓn.

There were two shoe shops opposite one another and both closed. Manuel's mother, who could not recall which was her relative's place, inquired at the tavern.

"SeÑor Ignacio's over at the big house," answered the tavern-keeper. "I think the cobbler's come already, but he hasn't opened the shop yet."

Mother and son had to wait until the shop was opened. The building was not the tiny, evil-boding one, but it looked as if it had an atrocious desire to cave in, for here and there it, too, showed cracks, holes and all manner of disfigurements. It had a lower and upper floor, large and wide balconies the balustrades of which were gnawed by rust and the diminutive panes of glass held in place by leaden strips.

On the ground floor of the house, in the part that faced Aguila Street, there was a livery-stable, a carpenter's shop, a tavern and the cobbler's shop owned by Petra's relation. This establishment displayed over the entrance a sign that read:

For The Regeneration of Footwear.

The historian of the future will surely find in this sign proof of how widespread, during several epochs, was a certain notion of national regeneration, and it will not surprise him that this idea, which was launched in the aim to reform and regenerate the Constitution and the Spanish people, came to an end upon the signboard of a shop on a foresaken corner of the slums, where the only thing done was the reformation and regeneration of footwear.

We will not deny the influence of this regenerating theory upon the proprietor of the establishment For The Regeneration of Footwear; but we must point out that this presumptuous legend was put up in token of his defiance of the cobbler across the way, and we must register likewise that it had been answered by another, and even more presumptuous, one.

One fine morning the workmen in the establishment for The Regeneration of Footwear were dumfounded to find staring them in the face the sign of the rival shop. It was a beautiful signboard about two metres long, bearing this inscription:

The Lion of the Shoemaker's Art

This in itself was quite tolerable; the terrible, annihilating thing about it was the painting that sprawled over the middle of the board. A handsome yellow lion with the face of a man and with wavy mane, standing erect; in his front paws he held a boot, apparently of patent-leather. Beneath this representation was printed the following: You may break, but never unstitch it.

This was a crushing motto: A lion (wild beast) trying to unseam the boot made by the Lion (shoemaker), and powerless before the task! What a humiliation for the lion! What a triumph for the shoemaker! The lion, in this case, was For The Regeneration of Footwear, which, as the saying goes, had been compelled to bite the dust.

In addition to SeÑor Ignacio's sign there was, in one of the balconies of the large house, the bust of a woman, made probably of pasteboard, with lettering beneath: Perfecta Ruiz: Ladies' Hair Dressing; on the side walls of the main entrance there hung several announcements unworthy of occupying the attention of the aforementioned historian, in which were offered low-priced rooms with or without bed, amanuenses and seamstresses. A single card, upon which were pasted horizontally, vertically and obliquely a number of cut-out figures, deserved to go down in history for its laconicism. It read:

Parisian Styles. Escorihuela, Tailor.

Manuel, who had not taken the trouble to read all these signs, went into the building by a little door at the side of the livery-stable entrance, and walked through the corridor to a very filthy courtyard.

When he returned to the street the cobbler's shop had already been opened. Petra and her boy entered.

"Isn't SeÑor Ignacio in?" she asked.

"He'll be here in a second," answered a youngster who was piling up old shoes in the middle of the shop.

"Tell him that his cousin is here,—Petra."

SeÑor Ignacio appeared. He was a man of between forty and fifty, thin and wizened. Petra and he got into conversation, while the boy and a little urchin continued to heap up the old shoes. Manuel was looking on, when the boy said to him:

"Come on, you. Lend a hand!"

Manuel pitched in, and when the three had ended their labours, they waited for Petra and SeÑor Ignacio to finish chatting. Petra was recounting Manuel's latest exploits to her cousin and the cobbler listened smilingly. The man bore no signs of gruffness; he was blond and beardless; upon his upper lip sprouted a few saffron-hued hairs. His complexion was leathery, wrinkled; the deep furrows of his face, and his wearied mien, gave him the appearance of a weakling. He spoke with a certain ironic vagueness.

"You're going to stay here," said Petra to Manuel.

"All right."

"He's an amiable rogue," exclaimed SeÑor Ignacio, laughing. "He agrees right away."

"Yes; he takes everything calmly. But, look—" she added, turning to her son, "if ever I find out that you carry on as you did yesterday, you'll hear from me!"

Manuel said good-bye to his mother.

"Were you very long in that town of Soria with my cousin?" SeÑor
Ignacio asked.

"Two years."

"And did you work very hard there?"

"I didn't work at all."

"Well, sonny, you can't get out of it here. Come. Sit down and get busy. These are your cousins," added SeÑor Ignacio, indicating the youth and the little boy.

"They are a pair of warriors, too."

The youth's name was Leandro, and he was well-built; in no respect did he resemble his father. He had thick lips and a thick nose, an obstinate, manly expression; the other was a boy of about Manuel's age, frail, thin, with a rascally look, and called Vidal.

SeÑor Ignacio and the three boys sat down around a wooden block formed of a tree-trunk with a deep groove running through it. The labour consisted in undoing and taking apart old boots and shoes, which arrived at the shop from every direction in huge, badly tied bales and in sacks with paper designations sewed to the burlap. The boot destined to be drawn and quartered was laid upon the block; there it received a stroke or more from a knife until the heel was severed; then, with the nippers the various layers of sole were ripped off; with the scissors they cut off buttons and laces, and everything was sorted into its corresponding basket: in one, the heels; in others, the rubbers, the latchets, the buckles.

So low had The Regeneration of Footwear descended: it justified its title in a manner quite distinct from that intended by the one who had bestowed it.

SeÑor Ignacio, a master workman, had been compelled through lack of business to abandon the awl and the shoemaker's stirrup for the nippers and the knife; creating for destroying; the fashioning of new boots for the disembowelling of old. The contrast was bitter; but SeÑor Ignacio could find consolation in looking across at his neighbour, he of the Lion of The Shoemaker's Art, who only at rare intervals would receive an order for some cheap pair of boots.

The first morning of work was infinitely boresome to Manuel; this protracted inactivity became unbearable. At noon a bulky old woman entered the shop with their lunch in a basket. This was SeÑor Ignacio's mother.

"And my wife?" the cobbler asked her.

"She's gone washing."

"And SalomÉ Isn't she coming?"

"No. She got some work in a house for the whole week."

The old lady extracted from the basket a pot, dishes, napkins, cutlery, and a huge loaf of bread; she laid a cloth upon the floor and everybody squatted down around it. She poured the soup from the pot into the plates, into which each one crumbled a bit of bread, and they began to eat. Then the old woman doled out to each his portion of boiled meat and vegetables, and, as they ate, the cobbler discoursed briefly upon the future of Spain and the reasons for national backwardness,—a topic that appeals to most Spaniards, who consider themselves regenerators.

SeÑor Ignacio was a mild liberal, a man who swelled with enthusiasm over these words about the national sovereignty, and who spoke openly of the Glorious Revolution. In matters of religion he advocated freedom of worship; his ideal would be for Spain to have an equal number of priests of the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and every other denomination, for thus, he asserted, each would choose the dogma that seemed to him best. But one thing he'd certainly do if he had a say in the government. He would expel all the monks and nuns, for they're like the mange: the weaker the sufferer, the more it thrives. To this argument Leandro, the elder son, added that as far as the monks, nuns and other small fry were concerned, the best course with them was to lop off their heads like hogs, and with regard to the priests, whether Catholic, Protestant or Chinese, nothing would be lost if there were nary a one.

The old lady, too, joined the conversation, and since to her, as a huckstress of vegetables, politics was chiefly a question between marketwomen and the municipal guards, she spoke of a row in which the amiable ladies of the Cebada market had discharged their garden produce at the heads of several redcoats who were defending a trouble-maker of the market. The huckstresses wanted to organize a union, and then lay down the law and fix prices. Now this didn't at all appeal to her.

"What the deuce!" she exclaimed. "What right have they to take away a person's stock if he wants to sell it cheaper? Suppose I take it into my head to give it all away free."

"Why no, seÑora," differed Leandro. "That's not right."

"And why not?"

"Because it isn't. Because tradesfolk ought to help one another, and if you, let's suppose, do as you say, you prevent somebody else from selling, and that's why Socialism was invented,—to favour man's industry."

"All right, then. Let them give two duros to man's industry and kill it."

The woman spoke very phlegmatically and sententiously. Her calm manner harmonized perfectly with her huge person, which was as thick and rigid as a tree-trunk; her face was fleshy and of stolid features, her wrinkles deep; pouches of loose flesh sagged beneath her eyes; on her head she wore a black kerchief, tightly knotted around her temples.

SeÑora Jacoba—that was her name—was a woman who probably felt neither heat nor cold; summer and winter she spent the dead hours seated by her vegetable stand at the Puerta de Moros; if she sold a head of lettuce between sunrise and sunset, it was a great deal.

After eating, some of the shoemaker's family went off to the courtyard for their siesta, while others remained in the shop.

Vidal, the man's younger son, sprawled out in the patio beside Manuel, and having inquired into the cause of the bumps that stood out on his cousin's forehead, asked:

"Have you ever been on this street before?"

"I? No."

"We have great times around here."

"You do, eh?"

"I should say so. Haven't you a girl?"

"I? No."

"Well, there are lots of girls 'round here that would like to have a fellow."

"Really?"

"Yes, sir! Over where we live there's a very pretty little thing, a friend of my girl. You can hitch up with her."

"But don't you live in this house?"

"No. We live in Embajadores lane. It's my aunt SalomÉ and my grandmother who live here. Over where we are—oh, boy!—the times I've had!"

"In the town where I come from," said Manuel, not to be dwarfed by his cousin, "there were mountains higher than twenty of your houses here."

"In Madrid we've got the Monte de PrÍncipe Pio."

"But it can't be as high as the one in that town."

"It can't? Why, in Madrid everything's the best."

Manuel was not a little put out by the superiority which his cousin tried to assume by speaking to him about women in the tone of an experienced man about town who knew them through and through. After the noonday nap and a game of mus, over which the shoemaker and a few neighbours managed to get into a wrangle, SeÑor Ignacio and his children went off to their house. Manuel supped at SeÑora Jacoba's, the vegetable huckstress's, and slept in a beautiful bed that looked to him far better than the one at the boarding-house.

Once in, he weighed the pros and contras of his new social position, and in the midst of his calculations as to whether the needle of the balance inclined to this side or that, he fell asleep.

At first, the monotony of the labour and the steady application bothered Manuel; but soon he grew accustomed to one thing and another, so that the days seemed shorter and the work less irksome.

The first Sunday Manuel was fast asleep in SeÑora Jacoba's house when Vidal came in and waked him. It was after eleven; the marketwoman, as usual, had departed at dawn for her stall, leaving the boy alone.

"What are you doing there?" asked Vidal. "Why don't you get up?"

"Why? What time is it?"

"Awful late."

Manuel dressed hurriedly and they both left the house. Nearby, opposite Aguila street, on a little square, they joined a group of boys who were playing chito, and they followed the fortunes of the game with deep interest.

At noon Vidal said to his cousin:

"Today we're going to eat yonder."

"At your house?"

"Yes. Come on."

Vidal, whose specialty was finding things, discovered close by the fountain of the Ronda, which is near Aguila Street, an old, wide-brimmed high hat; the poor thing was hidden in a corner, perhaps through modesty. He began to kick it along and send it flying through the air and Manuel joined in the enterprise, so that between the two they transported the relic, venerable with antiquity, from the Ronda de Segovia to that of Toledo, thence to the Ronda de Embajadores, until they abandoned it in the middle of the street, minus top and brim. Having committed this perversity, Manuel and Vidal debouched into the Paseo da las Acacias and went into a house whose entrance consisted of a doorless archway.

The two boys walked through a narrow passage paved with cobblestones until they reached a courtyard, and then, by one of the numerous staircases they climbed to the balcony of the first floor, on which opened a row of doors and windows all painted blue.

"Here's where we live," said Vidal, pointing to one of the doors.

They entered. SeÑor Ignacio's home was small; it comprised two bedrooms, a parlour, the kitchen and a dark room. The first habitation was the parlour, furnished with a pine bureau, a sofa, several straw chairs and a green mirror stuck with chromos and photographs and covered with red netting. The cobbler's family used the parlour as the dining-room on Sundays, because it was the lightest and the most spacious of their rooms.

When Manuel and Vidal arrived the family had been waiting for them a long time. They all sat down to table, and SalomÉ, the cobbler's sister-in-law, took charge of serving the meal. She resembled very closely her sister, the mother of Vidal. Both, of medium height, had short, saucy noses and black, pretty eyes; despite this physical similarity, however, their appearance differentiated them sharply. Vidal's mother,—called Leandra,—untidy, unkempt, loathsome, and betraying traces of ill humour, seemed much older than SalomÉ, although but three or four years separated them. SalomÉ had a merry, resolute air.

Yet, consider the irony of fate! Leandra, despite her slovenly ways, her sour disposition and her addiction to drink, was married to a good hardworking man, while SalomÉ, endowed with excellent gifts of industriousness and sweet temper, had wound up by going to live with an outcast who made his way by swindling, pilfering and browbeating and who had given her two children. Her humble or servile spirit, confronted with this wild, independent nature, made SalomÉ adore her man, and she deceived herself into considering him a tremendous, energetic fellow, though he was in all truth a coward and a tramp. The bully had seen just how matters stood, and whenever it pleased him he would stamp into the house and demand the pay that SalomÉ earned by sewing at the machine, at five cÉntimos per two yards. Unresistingly she handed him the product of her sweating toil, and many a time the ruffian, not content with depriving her of the money, gave her a beating into the bargain.

SalomÉ's two children were not today in SeÑor Ignacio's home; on Sundays, after dressing them very neatly, their mother would send them to a relative of hers,—the proprietress of a workshop,—where they spent the afternoon.

At the meal Manuel listened to the conversation without taking part. They were discussing one of the girls of the neighbourhood who had run off with a wealthy horse-dealer, a married man with a family.

"She did wisely," declared Leandra, draining a glass of wine.

"If she didn't know he was married…."

"What's the difference?" retorted Leandra with an air of unconcern.

"Plenty. How would you like a woman to carry off your husband?" SalomÉ asked her sister.

"Psch!"

"Yes, nowadays, we know," interrupted SeÑor Ignacio's mother. "Of two women there isn't one that's respectable."

"A great ways any one'll go by being respectable," snarled Leandra. "Poverty and hunger…. If a woman weren't to get married, then she might make a change and even acquire money."

"I don't see how," asserted SalomÉ.

"How? Even if she had to go into the business."

SeÑor Ignacio, disgusted, turned his head away from his wife, and his elder son, Leandro, eyed his mother grimly, severely.

"Bah, that's all talk," argued SalomÉ, who wished to thresh the matter out impersonally. "You'd hardly like it just the same if folks were to insult you wherever you went."

"Me? Much I care what folks say to me!" replied the cobbler's wife. "Stuff and nonsense! If they call me a loose woman, and if I'm not, why, you see: a floral wreath. And if I am,—it's all the same in the end."

SeÑor Ignacio, offended, shifted the conversation to the crime on PaÑuelas Street; a jealous organ-grinder had slain his sweetheart for a harsh word and the hearers were excited over the case, each offering his opinion. The meal over, SeÑor Ignacio, Leandro, Vidal and Manuel went out to the gallery to have a nap while the women remained inside gossiping.

All the neighbours had brought their sleeping-mats out, and in their undershirts, half naked, some seated, others stretched out, they were dozing on the galleries.

"Hey, you," said Vidal to Manuel. "Let's be off."

"Where?"

"To the Pirates. We meet today. They must be waiting for us already."

"What do you mean,—pirates?"

"Bizco and the others."

"And why do they call 'em that?"

"Because they're like the old time pirates."

Manuel and Vidal stepped into the patio and leaving the house, walked off down Embajadores lane.

"They call us the Pirates," explained Vidal, "from a certain battle of stones we had. Some of the kids from the Paseo de las Acacias had got some sticks and formed a company with a Spanish flag at the head; then I, Bizco, and three or four others, began to throw stones at them and made them retreat. The Corretor, a fellow who lives in our house, and who saw us chasing after them, said to us: 'Say, are you pirates or what? For, if you're pirates you ought to fly the black flag. Well, next day I swiped a dark apron from my father and I tied it to a stick and we got after the kids with the Spanish flag and came near making them surrender it. That's why they call us the Pirates."

The two cousins came to a tiny, squalid district.

"This is the Casa del Cabrero," said Vidal. "And here are our chums."

So it proved; the entire pirate gang was here encamped. Manuel now made the acquaintance of El Bizco, a cross-eyed species of chimpanzee, square-shaped, husky, long-armed, with misshapen legs and huge red hands.

"This is my cousin," added Vidal, introducing Manuel to the gang; and then, to make him seem interesting, he told how Manuel had come to the house with two immense lumps that he had received in a Homeric struggle with a man.

Bizco stared closely at Manuel, and seeing that Manuel, on his side, was observing him calmly, averted his gaze. Bizco's face possessed the interest of a queer animal or of a pathological specimen. His narrow forehead, his flat nose, his thick lips, his freckled skin and his red, wiry hair lent him the appearance of a huge, red baboon.

As soon as Vidal had arrived, the gang mobilized and all the ragamuffins went foraging through la Casa del Cabrero.

This was the name given to a group of low tenement hovels that bounded a long, narrow patio. At this hot hour the men and women, stretched out half naked on the ground, were sleeping in the shade as in a trance. Some women, in shifts, huddled into a circle of four or five, were smoking the same cigar, each taking a puff and passing it along from hand to hand.

A swarm of naked brats infested the place; they were the colour of the soil, most of them black, some fair, with blue eyes. As if already they felt the degradation of their poverty, these urchins neither shouted nor frolicked about the yard.

A few lasses of ten to fourteen were chatting in a group. Bizco, Vidal and the rest of the gang gave chase to them around the patio. The girls, half naked, dashed off, shrieking and shouting insults.

Bizco boasted that he had violated some of the girls.

"They're all puchereras like the ones on Ceres Street," said one of the Pirates.

"So they make pots, do they?" inquired Manuel.

"Yes. Fine pots, all right!"

"Then why do you call them puchereras?"

"Becau—" added the urchin, and he made a coarse gesture.

"Because they're a sly bunch," stammered Bizco. "You're awful simple."

Manuel contemplated Bizco scornfully, and asked his cousin:

"Do you mean to say that those little girls…?"

"They and their mothers," answered Vidal philosophically. "Almost all of 'em that live here."

The Pirates left the Casa del Cabrero, descended an embarkment after passing a high, black fence, and at the middle of Casa Blanca turned into the Paseo de YeserÍas.

They approached the morgue, a white structure near the river, situated at the foot of the Dehesa del Canal. They circled around it, trying to catch a glimpse of some corpse, but the windows were closed.

They continued along the banks of the Manzanares, amidst the twisted pines of la Dehesa. The river ran very thin, consisting of a few threads of murky water and pools above the mud.

At the end of the Dehesa de la Arganzuela, opposite a large, spacious lot surrounded by a fence made of flattened oil cans nailed to posts, the gang paused to inspect the place, whose wide area was taken up with watering-carts, mechanical sweepers, ditch pumps, heaps of brooms and other tools and appurtenances of municipal cleanliness.

In one corner of the lot arose a white edifice that, judging from its two towers and the vacant belfries, had formerly been a church or a convent.

The gang went nosing about the place and passed under an arch bearing the inscription: "Stallion Stables." Behind the structure that looked like a convent they came upon some shanties furnished with filthy, grimy mats: African huts built upon a framework of rough sticks and cane.

Bizco went into one of these hovels and returned with a piece of cod in his hand.

Manuel was overcome by a horrible fear.

"I'm going," he said to Vidal.

"What do you mean!…" exclaimed one of the gang ironically. "Much nerve you've got!"

All at once another of the urchins cried:

"Skip. Somebody's coming!"

The pirates started on a run down the Paseo del Canal.

Madrid, with its yellowish dwellings veiled in a cloud of dust, came into view. The high window-panes were aglow with the reflection of the setting sun. From the Paseo del Canal, crossing a stubble patch, they reached the Plaza de las PeÑuelas, then, after going up another street they climbed the Paseo de las Acacias.

They entered the CorralÓn. Manuel and Vidal, after having arranged to meet the gang on the following Sunday, climbed the stairway to SeÑor Ignacio's house and as they drew near to the cobbler's door they heard cries.

"Father's giving the old lady a beating," murmured Vidal. "There won't be much to eat today. I'm going off to sleep."

"And how do I get to the other house?" asked Manuel.

"All you have to do is walk along the Ronda until you reach the Aguila street stairway. You can't miss it."

Manuel followed the directions. It was fearfully hot; the air was thick with dust. A few men were playing cards in tavern doorways, and in others they were dancing in embrace to the strains of a barrel-organ.

When Manuel reached the Aguila Street stairway it was getting dark. He sat down to rest a while in the Campillo de Gil ImÓn. From this elevated point could be seen the yellowish country, growing darker and darker with approaching night, and the chimneys and housetops sharply outlined against the horizon. The sky, blue and green above, was flushed with red nearer the earth; it darkened and assumed sinister hues,—coppery reds, purplish reds.

Above the mudwalls jutted the turrets and the cypresses of San Isidro cemetery; a round cupola stood out clearly in the atmosphere; at its top rose an angel with wings outspread, as if about to take flight against the flaming, blood-red background of evening.

Above the embanked clouds of the twilight shone a pale star in a green border, and on the horizon, animated by the last breath of day, could be discerned the hazy silhouettes of distant mountains.