style="font-size:15px;"> Along with poverty, discord, tears, and finally the flying fist entered Tenet's house. Rosario joined the neighbors on the beach and began to dirty her hands on the slimy fish baskets. Falling from her high estate as heiress and lady she became a fish-woman, one of the poorest and hardest-working followers of that soul-killing trade. She was up now every morning shortly after midnight, waiting on the shore with her feet in the puddles, drawing a frayed and threadbare shawl about her shivering body, when the storms blew. All the way to Valencia she would go on foot carrying that back-breaking load of fish, and it would be dark again by the time she got home, faint with hunger and fatigue, but happy withal because her lord and master could still live the life of a gentleman without any humiliations to translate into swear-words and beatings. That Tonet might pass his night in the café, swapping stories with engineers from the steamers or skippers from the fishing boats, she would, many a time in the Fishmarket in town, stifle the hunger that gripped her at sight of the cups of steaming chocolate and the breaded chops her companions were busy with at the tables in their stalls.
The important thing was to keep her idol appeased, an idol so quick to wrath, so prone to curse the rotten marriage he had made. He had to have his peseta for the night's session at coffee and dominoes. He had to have his square meal and his flashy flannel shirts. He had a reputation to keep up. And so long as he had what he wanted, the poor little wife, thinner and more peaked every day, found all her struggles well worth while, cost her what it might. She was an old woman before thirty, but she could boast of exclusive proprietorship of the handsomest buck in the Cabañal.
Privation brought them closer to the Rector's household, which, while they were going down and down, was going up and up, on the wings of prosperity. Brothers have to stand together in hard luck. Of course! And Rosario, though much against her inner preferences, went to see Dolores often, and accepted a renewal of intimate friendship between her husband and his sister-in-law. She was worried, but there must not be an open quarrel. The Rector would get mad; and he it was who kept them going on weeks when no fish came in, or when the village dandy found nothing to get a commission on as go-between in one of the little business deals that feature life in a seaport town. But the moment came when the two women, deadly enemies underneath, could pretend cordiality no longer. Four years after her marriage, Dolores was at last able to announce the coming of an heir to the Rector's fortune; and the Rector, with a silly smile on his moon-face, advertised the auspicious event on every hand – and all his acquaintances were delighted, though they smiled with a sly wink he did not notice. No one really knew, to be sure. But funny, wasn't it! That rather deliberate decision of Dolores corresponded strangely with the time Tonet had become a less frequent visitor to the café and had begun to spend more of his time in his brother's house.
The two women now spoke their minds with the savage frankness of their station. The breach between them became permanent. Tonet kept going to the Rector's place, but alone; and that made Rosario very angry, and the quarrels in her home now ended always in ferocious cudgelings. And the time came when Rosario began to say openly that the baby looked like Tonet. Her husband meanwhile stuck closer than ever to the Rector, who had revived his old fondness for his younger brother, letting himself be sponged on in spite of his tight-fistedness. The pretty daughter of tio Paella poked biting fun at that wreck she had for a sister-in-law, that old hen, quite passée, poor as a rat, a mere day laborer of the meanest kind, who couldn't hang on to the man she had married! Tonet, in fact, as in earlier days, was again following Dolores around like an obedient dog, sitting up when he was told to sit up, and charging when he was told to charge.
A withering blast of relentless hatred, of flaying jest and stinging insolence, swept from the old home of tio Paella, now repainted and with a new ell, toward the wretched tumble-down shack where Rosario had finally taken refuge in her penury. And well-meaning busybodies, with the holiest good-will toward both, kept telling what Rosario had said about Dolores and what Dolores had said about Rosario, taking care that every apostrophe should reach its destination and receive its fit reply.
When Rosario, flaming with anger and weeping from sheer despair, would simply have to tell some one of her troubles, she would go off to the tavern-boat, which, like its mistress, was also aging rapidly with the years. There she would be listened to in silence, with an expression of sorrow, or a shake of the head from siñá Tona and Roseta, who were living on in sullen antipathy toward one another in spite of their relationship, agreeing only on one thing, that men were beneath contempt. The old hulk, that served them as lair, was a sort of vantage point from which they were able to follow the war between the two families.
"Men! Men! What fleas!" siñá Tona would say, with a glance at the picture of the patrolman, who seemed to be the presiding genius of the place. "Men! Crooks every one of them, not worth the rope to hang them with!" And Roseta, with her big bright sea-green eyes – the eyes of a virgin who knows all about the world and is quite sure of herself – would murmur for once approvingly: "And those who are not scamps like Tonet are like the Rector – puddingheads!"
CHAPTER III
A FAMILY ENTERPRISE
Though spring had not yet come, the sun was so hot, that day, that the Rector and Tonet, to talk things over down on the beach, had sought out the shade of an old boat drawn up high and dry on the sand. There would be plenty of time to get their tan on when they got out to sea. The two men talked slowly and sleepily as if the glare and the heat along shore had gone to their heads. A real day, come now! Who would have thought Easter was still a week away, when, usually, there were squalls all the time and sudden tempests.
The sky, overflowing with sunlight, had a whitish sheen. A few silver clouds were lazily drifting along like handfulls of foam scattered hap-hazard over the expanse of heaven; and from the heated sands a damp radiation was shimmering, giving tremulous, hazy outlines to objects in the distance. Nothing was going on along the beach itself. The casa del bòus, where the launching oxen were idly chewing their cud, rose with its red roof and its blue trimmings, over long lines of boats drawn up on shore to make a sort of nomad city with streets and cross roads, much like a Greek encampment of the Heroic Age, when the triremes were used for entrenchments. The lateen masts, gracefully tilted forward, with their points blunt and fat, looked like a forest of headless lances. The tarred ropes twined and intertwined like lichens and vines. Under the big sails, which had been lowered to the decks, a whole people of amphibians was swarming, – red legs bare and caps pulled down over ears – repairing nets or tending galley fires where fish were frying with appetizing fragrance. The hulls, of wide bilge, painted white or blue, stretched away along the glaring shore, like big-bellied sailors lying on their backs and taking the sun.
In this improvised city, which might, before the night was over, be broken up and scattered to the four winds beyond the girdling horizon, the order and symmetry of a modern town laid out by a surveyor could have been discerned. In the front line, nearest the waves which rippled in like thin blades of crystal over the spangled sand, were the little boats, the trollers, al volantí, tiny spry craft that looked like chicks of the heavy boats lying, in the row behind, in pairs of the same size and color —barcas del bòu. In the third file, the retired veterans of the shore, old hulks, their sides wide open, their worm-eaten ribs showing through the black gaps, reminded one of the decrepit nags used in the bull ring, and lay meditating, it seemed, on the ingratitude of men who do so little for deserving old age.
Rust-colored nets, with flannel shirts and trousers of yellow baize, were strung along most of the masts; and above this array of color, some gulls, apparently drunk with sunshine, were leisurely planing in wide circles, occasionally dropping for a moment into the sea, where the water was shivering and seething in blebs of light under the high noon.
The Rector was talking about the weather, letting his yellowish eyes wander sleepily and placidly over the sea and down the coast. Along the green horizon line some pointed sails dotted the sky like wings of doves that might have been drinking off there. The shore at this point receded, forming a bight in the land,
