United States or Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Tio Borrasca was always raising a rumpus because he couldn't understand how his pockets ran empty so soon, now of the alguilla of Algiers, now of the Havana fine cut according to the stock of the latest smuggler to make the Cabañal. That was real life in Pascualet's eyes.
In the excitement of the first moments little notice was taken of the devoted bailer, who ardently regarded Chonita. Don Juan de la Borrasca was flouting his sixties, fighting for his youth as a parent fights for its young.
Beyond that, and closing the horizon shoreward, was the saw-toothed Cordillera, with ripples of red granite, its unmoving crests reaching up to lap the sky like tongues. Yes, the good weather had come early that year! You could take it from the Rector! Everybody from the Cabañal knew that, in such matters, he had inherited from his master, tio Borrasca, an instinct that never failed.
Her supple elastic figure and healthy whiteness of skin betokened endurance and vitality, and he looked at her with pleasure. "Yes, you are strong," he said. "You look as if you would last, as if you never would grow brown nor stout." "What difference, if the next generation be beautiful?" she said, lightly. "Look at Don Juan de la Borrasca. See him gaze upon Panchita Lopez, who is just sixteen.
And since he felt a hankering for it, the profession of his father and his grandfather was good enough for him; and tio Borrasca, an old skipper who had been a great friend of tio Pascualo, thought so too.
The boat of tio Borrasca was more to his taste than the grounded hulk on shore there with its grunting hogs and cackling hens. He worked hard; and to supplement his wages he got a few kicks from the old skipper, who could be gentle enough on land, but once with a deck under him would have made Saint Anthony himself toe the mark.
It seemed to me the simplest climax for the unfolding drama, although I should have been sorry for Diego. It was Reinaldo's turn to look black, but he devoted himself ostentatiously to Prudencia, who beamed like a child with a stick of candy. Chonita rode between Don Juan de la Borrasca and Adan.
And the Rector talked on, expounding the sailor's philosophy of life he had learned offshore under tio Borrasca. But no one listened, except the "cat," who was on his first voyage, and stood clinging, palish-green with fright, to the mast, but with eyes and ears, nevertheless, for everything. Night fell.
One year when the drag-net season came around, the pesca del bòu, as the Valencians say, where two boats worked in team, Pascualet shipped with tio Borrasca as "cat," gato de barca, for his keep, and all he might make, in addition, from the cabets, the small fry, shrimp, sea-horses and so on, that came up in the nets from the bottom along with the big fish.
The Rector had grown up to be a lusty sailor, stingy of words, fearless in danger. From gato de barca he had graduated to the rank of able-bodied seaman and was the man of the crew on whom tio Borrasca most relied. Every month Pascualet handed four or five duros over to his mother to keep for him. Tonet was not settling down to any trade. A stubborn fight was going on between him and his mother.
Word Of The Day