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Amadeo Zureda first grew pale and then red. Yes, he knew something was up. The old man had called him to tell him some terrible mystery. He felt that the strange feeling of vacancy all about him, which he had been sensing for some time, was at last going to be explained. He trembled.
Noon came, and Manolo did not return for dinner. Night drew on, nor did he come back to sleep. Zureda and his wife went to bed early. A few days drifted along. Sunday morning, Zureda was sitting at the door of his shop. It was just eleven. Women, some with mantillas, others with but a simple kerchief knotted about their heads, were going to mass.
The rattling uproar of the train and the swift succession of panoramas now unrolling before his eyes recalled to the memory of Zureda the joys of those other and better times when he had been an engineer joys now largely blotted out by the distance of long-gone years. He remembered Pedro, the Andalusian fireman, and those two engines, "Sweetie" and "Nigger," on which he had worked so long.
At the end of it all, the silversmith fully understood his own intentions, which caused him both joy and fear. "She's got me going," he thought. "She's certainly got me going! Say, I'm crazy about that woman!" At last, one evening, the ill-restrained passion of the man burst into an overwhelming torrent. On that very night, Zureda was going to come home.
When he came home at night from work, Rafaela ran to meet him with noisy jubilation and then cuddled herself caressingly on his knees, after he had sat down. All this filled Zureda with ineffable joy, so that he became quite speechless, in ecstasy. At such times even the thoughtful scar of the wrinkle between his brows grew less severe, in the calm gravity of his dark forehead.
Zureda recoiled a few steps and unsheathed his knife. The silversmith snicked open a big pocket blade. They fell violently on each other. It was a prehistoric battle, body to body, savage, silent. Manolo was killed. He fell on his back, his face white, his mouth twisted in an unforgettable grimace of pain and hate.
"Yes, and if he didn't," put in Berlanga, offering Zureda a glass of wine, "there'd be plenty more who would. How about that, Amadeo?" Zureda remained impassive. He gulped the wine at one swallow. Then he ordered a bottle for all hands. "Come on, now, I'll go you a game of mus," he challenged Berlanga. "Antolín, here, will be my partner." The silversmith accepted. "Go to it!" said he.
And always after that, when he saw her pass along, he would heave a sigh in an absurd, romantic manner. On the first of every month, Rafaela always wrote a four-page letter to Zureda, containing all the petty details of her quiet, humdrum life. It was by means of these letters, written on commercial cap, that the prisoner learned the rapid physical growth of little Manolo.
The wife's black eyes filled with tears as she told him to keep himself well bundled up and to think often of her. Tears quite blinded her. "What a good lass she is!" murmured Zureda. And as he recalled the poisonous doubt of a moment before, the man's ingenuous nobility felt shame. The life of Manolo Berlanga turned out to be pretty disreputable.
They had enough for all to live on for a while, with what he had made in prison. They spoke not of the past. You might almost have thought they had forgotten it. Why remember? Zureda had forgiven everything. Rafaela, moreover, was no longer the same. The gay happiness of her eyes had gone dead; the waving blackness of her hair and the girlish quickness of her body had vanished.
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