There were
always some ten or twelve men in shirt-sleeves, brandishing their arms
desperately over the troughs, and in the back of the room a she-mule
slowly turned the kneading machine.
Life in the bakery was disagreeable and hard; the work was enervating
and the pay small: seven reales per day. Manuel, unaccustomed to the
heat of the furnace, turned dizzy; besides, when he moistened the
loaves fresh from the oven he would burn his fingers and it disgusted
him to see his hands begrimed with grease and soot.
He was also unlucky enough to have his bed placed in the kneaders'
room, beside that of an old workman of the shop who suffered from
chronic catarrh, as a result of having breathed so much flour into his
lungs; this fellow kept hawking away at all hours.
From sheer disgust Manuel found it impossible to sleep here, so he
went to the furnace kitchen and threw himself down upon the floor. He
was forever weary; but despite this, he worked automatically.
Then nobody paid any attention to him; the other bakers, a gang of
pretty rough Galicians, treated him as if he were a mule; none of them
even took the trouble to learn his name, and some addressed him, "Hey,
you, Choto!" while others cried "Hello, Barriga!" When they spoke of
him they referred to him as "the ragamuffin from Madrid" or simply,
"ragamuffin.
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