Fanny, Roberto, Leandro and Manuel took seats to the right of the
door.
"What'll you have?" asked the woman at the counter.
"Four fifteen-centimo glasses of wine."
The woman brought the glasses in a filthy tray, and set them upon the
table. Leandro pulled out sixty centimos.
"They're ten apiece," corrected the woman in ill-humoured tones.
"How's that?"
"Because this is outside the limits."
"All right; take whatever it comes to."
The woman left twenty centimos on the table and returned to the
counter. She was broad, large-breasted, with a head that set deep in
between her shoulders and a neck composed of some five or six
layers of fat; from time to time she would serve a drink, always getting
the price in advance; she spoke very little, with evident displeasure
and with an invariable gesture of ill-humour.
This human hippopotamus had at her right a tin tank with a spigot, for
brandy, and at her left a flask of strong wine and a chipped jar
covered with a black funnel, into which she poured whatever was left
in the glasses by her customers.
Roberto's cousin fished out a phial of smelling salts, hid it in her
clamped hand and took a sniff from time to time.
Opposite the place where Roberto, Fanny, Leandro and Manuel were
seated, a crowd of some twenty men were packed around a table playing
cane.
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