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Updated: May 23, 2025
For nine years, winter and summer, storm and shine, he got his mails through, backwards and forwards, sleeping one night at San Celoni, the next at Puente de Rey. Such was Juan Quereno, "a stupid enough fellow," the democratic schoolmaster of San Celoni said, with a shrug of his shoulders and a wave of the cigarette which he always carried half-smoked and unlighted in his fingers.
Then at length he turned homewards, towards San Celoni, with hanging ears and a loose tail. He probably suspected that the Mule had long stood between him and starvation that none other would take his place or remember to feed a dog of so unattractive an appearance and no pedigree whatever.
He thought that he was an orator, and that gift, which is called by those who do not possess it the gift of the gab, is the most dangerous that a man can have. There was no one in San Celoni to listen to him. And if Caterina were married and he were a free man, he could give up the school and go to Malaga, where assuredly he could make a name.
"It is a slow business," said the schoolmaster to Sergeant Nolveda, of the Guardia Civil, who lived in San Celoni and trained one young recruit after another according to the regulations of this admirable corps. For one never meets a Guardia Civil alone, but always in company an old head and a pair of young legs. "A slow business.
But when he returned on the second evening, he made it evident that he had been thinking of Caterina in his absence, for he gave her, half shyly and very awkwardly, some presents that he had brought from a larger village than San Celoni, which he had passed on his way.
So, one morning before departing on his daily journey, the Mule was unobtrusively married to Caterina in the little pink stucco chapel that broods over the village of San Celoni like a hen over her chickens. And Cristofero Colon and the dog waited outside. It was a commonplace ceremony, and at its conclusion the bridegroom trudged off up the village street behind his mail-bags.
She stood before him in a girlish attitude, folding the kerchief across her hand, and holding it so that the light of their new lamp fell upon it. "It is very pretty." The Mule had washed his face and hands at the fountain, as he came into San Celoni, remembering that he was a bridegroom.
There was no match so good in all the valley, and certainly none to compare with this dull swain in the accursed village of San Celoni. The schoolmaster never spoke of the village without a malediction. He had been planted there in his youth with a promise of promotion, and promotion had never come. For a man of education it was exile no newspapers, no passing travellers at the Cafe.
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