United States or Micronesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When he was drunk he would tell everything to the last detail; and little Dolores, crouching at a safe distance from her father's boots, would listen to the whole story with her eyes wide open in amazement and, written on her face, an eager unhealthy curiosity in all the filthy things tio Paella would be talking about in his brutal soliloquy, gloating over the infamous revelries he had been witnessing.
She was running true to form a real daughter of tio Paella, drunkard that he had been, patron and agent of the girls in the Fishmarket section, talking around his house as though Dolores were some member of his "flock"! What could she ever have learned from a man like that! To be a bad girl, that's all, and no decency whatever. And that was how, just how, she had turned out!
For mere looks, Rosario could not, of course, compare with the daughter of tio Paella; but her goodness the strong point of insignificant human beings was something Tona could not praise highly enough, though she never mentioned the most important thing of all, that Rosario was an orphan. Her parents had kept a store in the Cabañal, and from them Tona had bought her stock.
Some one might carry the joke too far! But Dolores showed herself a true daughter of tio Paella! She laughed and laughed, as though the best compliments of the sailing had been for her. And the Rector was delighted. He had always thought himself the most popular man in town!
Dolores was now attending to him as she had to Tonet. She kept his clothes mended, and, something she had never been troubled with in the case of that roistering loafer she also was taking care of his savings. One day tio Paella was brought home dead. He had got drunk and fallen from the seat of his cart, both wheels passing over him.
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.
On Sundays and the fiestas of the Valencian saints who for Uncle Caragol were the first in heaven, San Vicente Mártir, San Vicente Ferrer, La Virgin de los Desamparados and the Cristo del Grao would appear the smoking paella, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls.
She did not insist on a princess for her Tonet, but how could any one think he would ever marry that girl of tio Paella the truckman! Dolores, shameless hussy, was pretty enough, to be sure, but bound to make the woman who got her for a daughter-in-law lead a song and a dance!
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.
And he would go on the trip, to suffer the torment of an interminable rally, a paella, during which his fellow partisans would bore him with their uncouth merriment and ill-mannered flattery. "You really ought to give your horse a couple of days' rest. Instead of going out for a ride, spend your afternoon at the Club! Our fellows are complaining they never get a sight of you."
Word Of The Day