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The lass was eager to win him but Vidal advised his cousin not to take up with her; La Goya suited him better, for she made more money. La Mella was not at all to Manuel's taste, despite her affectionate caresses; but La Goya was compromised with El Soldadito, a man with a position, as she said, for when he went to work he turned the crank of an handorgan.
Vidal came to be the cadet for four girls who lived together in Cuatro Caminos and were named, respectively, La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia; they had come to form, together with Vidal, El Bizco and Manuel another Society, though this one was anonymous.
"We hunt at night and sleep by day." La Mella, La Goya, La Rabanitos and Engracia would go at night to the centre of Madrid, accompanied by a white-bearded beggar with a smiling face and a striped cap. The old man came to beg alms; he was a neighbour of the girls and they called him Uncle Tarrillo, bantering him upon his frequent sprees.
The mendicant would wax indignant at the tale and would pursue the indiscreet maid with all the ardour of an old faun. Of the four girls the ugliest was La Mella; with her big, deformed head, her black eyes, her wide mouth and broken teeth, her dumpy figure, she looked like the lady-jester of some ancient princess.
Absorbed in these reflections, he was passing along Alcala Street when he heard his name called several times. It was La Mella and La Rabanitos, skulking in a doorway. "What do you want?" he asked. "Nothing, man. Just a word with you. Have you come into your money yet?" "No. What are you doing?" "Hiding here," answered La Mella. "Why, what's the trouble?"
Other villages of the province are: San Lorenzo de los Minas, 3 miles northeast of Santo Domingo, first settled in 1719 by negroes of the Minas tribe, refugees from French Santo Domingo; San Antonio de Guerra, situated in the plains 19 miles northeast of the capital; Boya, 32 miles northeast of the capital, founded in 1533 by Enriquillo, the last Indian chief and by the last survivors of the Indians of the island: it contains an old church of composite aboriginal Gothic architecture, in which the remains of Enriquillo and of his wife Dona Mencia are believed to rest; Mella, 7 miles, and La Victoria, 12 miles north of the capital; Yamasa, 30 miles northwest of Santo Domingo; and Sabana Grande, or Palenque, 22 miles west of the city.
He was utterly daft and loved to talk upon the corruption of popular manners. La Mella said that Uncle Tarrillo had tried, one night after they had returned alone from the Jardinillos del Deposito de Agua, to violate her and that he had made her laugh so much that it was impossible.
This is also an ancient trail which formerly passed through the town of Yamasa, but was diverted to shorten the distance to the Cibao. Leaving Santo Domingo the same route is followed as in going to the Widow's Pass, as far as Mella, where the road branches off to the left. Small grassy plains and rolling wooded lands are traversed, as is also the wide prairie known as the Maricao savanna.
They all spoke in a rough manner; their grammar and word-forms were incorrect; language in them leaped backwards into a curious atavic regression. They spiced their talk with a long string of theatrical lines and "gags." The four led a terrible life; they spent the morning and the afternoon in bed sleeping and didn't go to sleep again till dawn. "We're like cats," La Mella would say.
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