SeÑor Custodio and His Establishment—The Free Life.

… And he was in the midst of the most ravishing dreams when a harsh voice recalled him to the bitter, impure realities of existence.

"What are you doing there, loafer?" some one was asking him.

"I!" mumbled Manuel, opening his eyes and staring at his questioner.
"I'm not doing anything."

"Yes, I can see that. I can see that."

Manuel got up; before him he beheld an old man with greyish hair and gloomy mien, with a sack across his shoulder and a hook in his hand. The fellow wore a fur cap, a sort of yellowish overcoat and a reddish muffler rolled around his neck.

"Have you a home?" asked the man.

"No, sir."

"And you sleep in the open?"

"Well, as I haven't any home…."

The ragpicker began to rake over the ground, fished up some objects and various papers, shoved them into the sack and turning his gaze again upon Manuel, added:

"You'd be better off if you went to work."

"If I had work, I'd work; but I haven't, so …"—and Manuel, wearied of these useless words, huddled into his corner to continue his slumbers.

"See here," said the ragdealer, "you come along with me. I need a boy
… I'll feed you."

Manuel looked at the man without replying.

"Well, do you want to or not? Hurry up and decide."

Manuel lazily arose. The rag man, sack slung across his shoulder, climbed the slope of the embankment until he reached Rosales Street, where he had a cart drawn by two donkeys. The man told them to move on and they ambled down toward the Paseo de la Florida, thence through Virgen del Puerto Avenue to the Ronda de Segovia. The cart, with its license plate and number, was a tumbledown affair, held together by strips of brass, and was laden with two or three sacks, buckets and baskets.

The ragman, SeÑor Custodio,—that was what he gave as his name,—looked like a good-natured soul.

From time to time he would bend over, pick up something from the street and throw it into the cart.

Underneath the cart, attached to it by a chain, jogged along in leisurely fashion a dog with yellowish locks, long and lustrous,—an amiable creature who appeared to Manuel as good a canine as his master was a human being.

* * * * *

Between the Segovia and Toledo bridges, not far from the head of Imperial Avenue, there opens a dark depression with a cluster of two or three squalid, wretched huts. It is a quadrangular ditch, blackened by smoke and coal dust, hemmed in by crumbling walls and heaps of rubbish.

As he reached the edge of this depression, the rag-dealer stopped and pointed out to Manuel a hovel standing next to a broken-down merry-go-round and some swings, saying:

"That's my house; take the cart down there and unload it. Can you do that?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Are you hungry?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. Then tell my wife to give you a bite."

Manuel accompanied the cart into the hollow over an embankment of rubbish. The ragdealer's house was the largest in the vicinity and had a yard as well as an adjoining shed.

Manuel stopped before the door of the hut; an old woman came out to meet him.

"What do you want, kid?" she asked. "Who sent you here?"

"SeÑor Custodio. He told me to ask you where to put the stuff that's in the cart."

The woman pointed out the shed.

"He told me also," added the boy, "to say that you should give me something to eat."

"I know you, you foxy creature," mumbled the old woman. And after grumbling for a long time and waiting for Manuel to dump out the contents of the cart, she gave him a slice of bread and a piece of cheese.

The woman unharnessed the two mules and released the dog, who began to bark and play with contentment; he snapped playfully at the mules, one black and the other a silvery grey, who turned their eyes upon him and showed their teeth; desperately he gave chase to a white cat with a tail that bristled like a feather-duster, then approached Manuel, who, seated in the sun, was nibbling at his bit of cheese and his slice of bread, waiting for something. They both had lunch.

Manuel walked around the dwelling and looked it over. One of its narrow sides was composed of two bathing-houses.

These two bathing-houses were not joined, but left between them a space filled in by a rusty iron door such as is used to fasten shops.

The two longer walls of the ragdealer's hovel were formed of stakes paid with pitch, and the wall opposite to that built of the bathing-houses was constructed of thick, irregular rocks and curved outward with a swelling like that of a church presbytery. Within, this curve corresponded to a hollow in the manner of a wide vaulted niche occupied by the hearth.

The house, despite its tiny size, had no uniform system of roofing; in some spots tiles were substituted by strips of tin with heavy rocks holding them in place and the interstices chinked with straw; in others, the slate was mortared together with mud; in still others, sheets of zinc provided protection.

The construction of the house betrayed each phase of its growth. As the shell of the tortoise augments with the development of the reptile, so did the rag-dealer's hovel little by little increase. At first it must have been a place for only one person, something like a shepherd's hut; then it widened, grew longer, divided into rooms, afterwards adding its annexes, its shed and its yard.

Before the door to the dwelling, on a flat stretch of tamped earth, stood a carrousel surrounded by a low, octagonal impalement; the stakes, decayed by the action of moisture and heat, still showed a vestige of their original blue paint.

Those poor merry-go-round steeds, painted red, offered to the gaze of the indifferent spectator the most comical, and at the same time the most pathetic sight. One of the coursers was of indeterminate hue; the other must have forgotten his paws in his mad race; one of them, in a most elegantly uncomfortable pose, symbolized humble sadness and honest, refined modesty.

At the side of the merry-go-round rose a frame formed of two tripods upon which rested a beam, whose hooks served as the support of swings.

The black ditch harboured three other hovels, all three constructed of tins, rubbish, planks, ruins and other similar building materials. One of the shacks, owing either to old age or deficient architecture, threatened to collapse, and the owner, no doubt, had sought to prevent its fall by sinking a row of stakes along one of the walls, against which it leaned like a lame man upon his crutch; another house flaunted like a flagstaff a long stick on its roof with a pot stuck on the top….

After eating Manuel informed the old woman that SeÑor Custodio had told him he might remain there.

"Tell me whether there's anything else for me to do," he concluded.

"All right. Stay here. Take care of the fire. If the pot boils, let it; if it doesn't, throw a bit of coal into the flames. Reverte! Reverte!" shouted the woman to the dog. "Let him remain here."

She went off and Manuel was left alone with the dog. The stew boiled merrily. Manuel, followed by Reverte, made an inspection tour of the house. It was divided into three compartments: a tiny kitchen and a large room into which the light entered through two high, small windows.

In this room or store-room, on all sides, from the walls and from the ceiling, hung old wares of various hue, white clothes, red boinas and Catalonian caps, strips of crape cloaks. On the shelves and on the floor, separated according to class and size, were flasks, bottles, jars, canisters, a veritable army of glass and porcelain pots; the ranks were broken by those huge, green, dropsical pharmacy bottles, and several heavy-paunched demi-johns; then came half-gallon bottles, tall and dark; straw-covered vases; this was followed by the section devoted to medicinal waters, the most varied and numerous of all, for it included Seltzer-water siphons, oxygenized-water siphons, bottles of gaseous water, Vichy, Mondariz, Carabana; after this came the small fry, the perfume phials, the pots, the cold-cream jars, the cosmetic receptacles.

In addition to this department of bottles there were others: canned-goods tins and pans ranged on shelves; buttons and keys kept in chests; remnants, ribbons and laces rolled around spools or cardboard.

All this struck Manuel as quite pleasant. Everything was in its proper place, relatively spick and span; the hand of a methodical, neat person was in evidence.

In the kitchen, which was kalsomined, shone the few scullery utensils. On the hearth, above the white ashes, an earthenware stew-pot was boiling away with a gentle purring.

From outside there scarcely came the distant noises of the city, which filtered in like a pale sound; it was as quiet as in a remote hamlet; now and then a dog would bark, some cart would creak as it bumped along the road, then silence would be restored and in the kitchen nothing would be heard save the glu glu of the pot, like a soft, confidential murmur….

Manuel cast a look of satisfaction through the chink of the door to the dark ditch outside. In the corral the hens were scratching the earth; a hog was rooting about, running in fright from one side to the other, grunting and quivering with nervous tremours; Reverte was yawning, blinking gravely, and one of the donkeys was wallowing delightedly amidst broken pots, decayed baskets and heaps of refuse, while the other, as if scandalized by such unrefined comportment, contemplated him with the utmost surprise.

All this black earth filled Manuel with an impression of ugliness, yet at the same time with a sense of tranquillity and shelter; it seemed a proper setting for him. This soil formed the daily deposits of the dumping-place; this earth, whose sole products were old sardine-cans, oyster shells, broken combs and shattered pots; this earth, black and barren, composed of the detritus of civilization, of bits of lime and mortar and factory refuse, of all that the city had cast off as useless, seemed to Manuel a place made especially for him, for he himself was a bit of the flotsam and jetsam likewise cast adrift by the life of the city.

Manuel had seen no other fields than the sad, rocky meadows of Soria and the still sadder ones of the Madrilenian suburbs. He did not suspect that in spots uncultivated by man there were green meadows, leafy woods, beds of flowers; he thought that trees and flowers were born only in the gardens of the rich….

Manuel's first days in SeÑor Custodio's house seemed too burdened; but as there is plenty of free roaming in the ragdealer's life, he soon grew accustomed to it.

SeÑor Custodio arose when it was still night, woke Manuel, and they
both harnessed the two donkeys to the cart and took the direction to
Madrid, on their daily hunt for the old boot and the discarded tatter.
Sometimes they went by way of MelancÓlicos Avenue; others, by the
Rondas or through Segovia Street.

Winter was coming on; at the hour when they sallied forth Madrid was in complete darkness. The ragdealer had his fixed itinerary and his schedule of call stations. When he went by way of the Rondas and drove up Toledo Street, which was his most frequent route, he would halt at the Plaza de la Cebada and the Puerta de Moros, fill his hamper with vegetables and continue toward the heart of the city.

On other days he travelled through MelancÓlicos Avenue to the Virgen del Puerto, from here to La Florida, then to Rosales Street, where he rummaged in the rubbish deposited by the tip-carts, continuing to the Plaza de San Marcial and arriving at the Plaza de los Mostenses.

On the way SeÑor Custodio let nothing escape his eye; he would examine it and keep it if it were worth the trouble. The leaves of vegetables went into the hampers; rags, paper and bones went into the sacks; the half-burned coke and coal found a place in a bucket and dung was thrown into the back of the cart.

Manuel and the ragdealer returned early in the morning; they unloaded the cart on the flat earth before the door, and husband, wife and the boy would separate and classify the day's collection. The rag-dealer and his wife were amazingly skilful and quick at this work.

On rainy days the assorting was done in the shed. During such weather the depression became a dismal, repellant swamp, and in order to cross it one had to sink into the mud, in places half way up to the knee. Everything would drip water; the hog in the yard would wallow in mire; the hens would appear with their wings all black and the dog scampered about coated with mud to the ears.

After the sorting of the collection, SeÑor Custodio and Manuel, each with a basket, would wait for the dump-carts to arrive, and as the refuse was tipped out, they would set about sorting it on the very dumping-grounds: pasteboard, rags, glass and bones.

In the afternoon SeÑor Custodio would go to certain stables in the ArgÜelles district to clean out the manure and take it to the orchards on the Manzanares.

Between one thing and another SeÑor Custodio made enough to live in a certain comfort; he had a firm grasp upon his business and as he was under no compulsion to sell his wares promptly, he would wait for the most opportune occasion so that he could sell with advantage.

The paper that he thus stored up was purchased by the pasteboard factories; they gave him from thirty or forty cÉntimos per arroba. The manufacturers required the paper to be perfectly dry, and SeÑor Custodio dried it in the sun. As they tried at times to get the best of him in weight, he used to place in each sack two or three full arrobas, weighed with a steelyard; on the cloth of the sack he would inscribe a number in ink, indicating the amount of arrobas it contained, and these sacks he held in a sort of cellar or ship's hold that he had dug into the ground of the shed.

When there was a great quantity of paper he sold it to a pasteboard factory on Acacias Avenue. SeÑor Custodio's journey was not in vain, for in addition to selling the goods at a fancy price, he would, on the way back, drive his cart in the direction of a pitch factory of the vicinity, and there he picked up from the ground a very fine coal that burned excellently and gave as much heat as slag.

He sold the bottles to wine houses, to liquor and beer distilleries; the medicine flasks he disposed of to pharmacists; the bones went to the refineries and the rags to the paper factories.

The bread leavings, vegetable leaves and fruit cores were reserved for the feed of the pigs and hens, and what was of no use at all was cast into the rotting-place, converted into manure and sold to the orchards near the river.

On the first Sunday that Manuel spent there, SeÑor Custodio and his wife took the afternoon off. For many a day they had never gone out together because they were afraid to leave the house alone; this day they dressed up in their best and went on a visit to their daughter, who worked as a modiste in a relative's shop.

Manuel was glad to be left by himself with Reverte, contemplating the house, the yard, the ditch; he turned the carrousel round and it creaked ill-humouredly; he climbed up the swing frame, looked down at the hens, teased the pig a little and then ran up and down with the dog chasing after him barking merrily in feigned fury.

This dark depression attracted Manuel somehow or other, with its rubbish heaps, its gloomy hovels, its comical, dismantled merry-go-round, its swings, and its ground that held so many surprises, for a rough, ordinary pot burgeoned from its depths as easily as a lady's elegant perfume phial; the rubber bulb of a prosaic syringe grew side by side with the satin, scented sheet of a love letter.

This rough, humble life, sustained by the detritus of a refined, vicious existence; this almost savage career in the suburbs of a metropolis, filled Manuel with enthusiasm. It seemed to him that all the stuff cast aside in scorn by the capital,—the ordure and broken tubs, the old flower-pots and toothless combs, buttons and sardine tins,—all the rubbish thrown aside and spurned by the city, was dignified and purified by contact with the soil.

Manuel thought that if in time he should become the owner of a little house like SeÑor Custodio's, and of a cart and donkeys, and hens and a dog, and find in addition a woman to love him, he would be one of the almost happy men in this world.