And now
came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her plans. What
could have happened?
She made various conjectures. In the meantime with her deformed hands
she removed the lodgers' dirty laundry. In through the courtyard
window wafted a confusion of songs and disputing voices, alternating
with the screech of the clothes-line pulleys.
In the middle of the afternoon Petra began preparation for dinner. The
mistress ordered every morning a huge quantity of bones for the
sustenance of her boarders. It is very possible that there was, in all
that heap of bones, a Christian one from time to time; certainly,
whether they came from carnivorous animals or from ruminants, there
was rarely on those tibiae, humeri, and femora a tiny scrap of meat.
The ossuary boiled away in the huge pot with beans that had been
tempered with bicarbonate, and with the broth was made the soup,
which, thanks to its quantity of fat, seemed like some turbid
concoction for cleaning glassware or polishing gilt.
After inspecting the state of the ossuary in the stew-pot, Petra made
the soup, and then set about extracting all the scrap meat from the
bones and covering them hypocritically with a tomato sauce. This was
the _piece de resistance_ in Dona Casiana's establishment.
Thanks to this hygienic regimen, none of the boarders fell ill with
obesity, gout or any of those other ailments due to excess of food and
so frequent in the rich.
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