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At nine Camaroncocido saw him again, in the neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who seemed to be a student, pay the latter's admission to the show, and again disappear among the shadows of the trees. "What is it to me?" again muttered Camaroncocido. "What do I get out of watching over the populace?" Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show.
"The Frenchman has paid me well," he said smiling and showing his picturesque gums, which looked like a street after a conflagration. "I did a good job in posting the bills." Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. "Quico," he rejoined in a cavernous voice, "if they've given you six pesos for your work, how much will they give the friars?"
But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent expression, something like mirthful pity being reflected in his looks. A funny little man accosted him merrily. "Friend!" exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a frog's, while he displayed several Mexican pesos, which Camaroncocido merely glanced at and then shrugged his shoulders. What did they matter to him?
Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. "To the friars?" "Because you surely know," continued Camaroncocido, "that all this crowd was secured for them by the conventos." The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay brethren captained by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows.
After bidding his friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins. With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about here and there with his crippled leg and sleepy looks. The arrival of unfamiliar faces caught his attention, coming as they did from different parts and signaling to one another with a wink or a cough.
Soon, however, he noticed that the officer, after speaking to two or three more groups, approached a carriage and seemed to be talking vigorously with some person inside. Camaroncocido took a few steps forward and without surprise thought that he recognized the jeweler Simoun, while his sharp ears caught this short dialogue. "The signal will be a gunshot!" "Yes, sir."
"Detectives or thieves?" Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately shrugged his shoulders. "But what is it to me?" The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of four or five of these individuals talking with a man who appeared to be an army officer. "Detectives! It must be a new corps," he muttered with his shrug of indifference.
The signal is a gunshot." "Hold hard, hold hard," murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his fingers. "On that side the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor country! But what is it to me?" Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time, two actions that with him were indications of supreme indifference, he continued his observations.
If Camaroncocido was red, he was brown; while the former, although of Spanish extraction, had not a single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and mustache, both long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively.
He had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen dictionaries, so with these salutary recollections, the wretched Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet, for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had once intimated that the journalist wrote with them. "You see, Quico?" said Camaroncocido.
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