On the first Sunday that Manuel spent there, Senor 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.
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