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Updated: June 28, 2025
With all the economy of a city built on an island, Alcira rears its edifices higher and higher as its population grows, leaving just enough space free for the bare needs of traffic. The streets were deserted. The noisy, orchard workers who had welcomed Rafael had gone back to the fields again.
These triumphs were announced by telegraph in the Party papers, which, to garnish the chief's glory and avoid suspicion of "inspiration," always began the article with: "According to a despatch printed in the Metropolitan press ..." "What a boy!" the priests of Alcira would say to doña Bernarda. "What a silver tongue! You'll see; he'll be a second Manterola!"
This haughty potentate, offended in his magnificence to see members of his family traveling over the roads dressed like vagabonds and preaching a religion of beggars, called a troop of horse and set out in pursuit of his brother and sisters. He came upon them near Alcira, hiding on the riverbank.
The Cortes were about to adjourn, so, in obedience to repeated urging from his fellow-partisans, and from doña Bernarda, to do something anything at all to show interest in the home town he took the floor one afternoon at the opening of the session, when only the president, the sergeant-at-arms, and a few reporters asleep in the press-gallery, were present, and, with his lunch rising in his throat from emotion, asked the Minister of Internal Affairs to show a little more despatch in the matter of flood protection at Alcira a bill still in its in-fancy, though it had been pending some seventy years.
He owned warehouses as large as churches in the vicinity of Alcira, employing armies of girls to wrap the oranges and regiments of carpenters to make the crates. He would buy the crop of an entire orchard at a single glance and never be more than a few pounds off. As for the pay he gave, the city was proud of its millionaire.
But since there was no stopping now, he ventured a second question: "And are you thinking of remaining in Alcira very long?..." Rafael thought the ground was giving way beneath his feet. Another glance from those green eyes! But, alas, this time it was cold and menacing, a livid flash of lightning refracted from a mirror of ice.
And Leonora, with the great swarming cities far from her mind, was really impressed at the numbers of bustling people crowding the little square, called del Prado, where every Wednesday the "grand market" of the Alcira region was held. Their sashes bulging with money bags, peasants were coming into town to buy supplies for the whole week out in the orange country.
How vividly Leonora remembered those days of poverty and dreams!... Little by little the modest capital the Doctor owned in Alcira vanished, what with living expenses and music lessons.
Old Brull, who through niggardliness and prudence had placed his son on "half rations," as he put it, sent the boy just money enough to keep him going; but dupe, in turn, of the wiles he had formerly practiced on the rustics of Alcira, he was compelled to make frequent trips to Valencia, to come to some understanding with money lenders there, who had advanced loans to his son on such terms that insolvency might lead Ramón to a prison cell.
He was, for instance, the one person in Alcira who scoffed at the tyranny of the Brulls without thereby losing entrance to the Party Club, where the young men admired his wit and his eccentric way of dressing. Rafael was still fond of Cupido, though not very intimate with him. In all the sedate, conservative world around him, the barber seemed the only person really worth while talking with.
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