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They went into the Corralon; a crowd of gamins and old women, amazed to see such a strange woman there at such an hour, surrounded them, showering Manuel and Leandro with questions. Leandro was eager for Milagros to learn that he had been there with a woman, so he accompanied Fanny through the place, pointing out all the holes of the wretched dwelling.
The neighbours of the Corralon had a saying that indicated their conception of Rebolledo's acute genius. "That dwarf," they said, "has a regular Noah's ark in his head." The father had made for his own use a set of false teeth. He had taken a bone napkin-ring, cut it into two unequal parts, and, by filing it on either side, had fitted the larger to his mouth.
Don Alonso carne frequently to the Corralon and conversed with the mother and the girl. On the window-sill of their tiny home the mother and the daughter had a little box with a sprig of mint planted in it; although they watered it every morning, it scarcely grew, for there was no sun.
The elder, Ariston, entertained him and frightened him out of his wits with lugubrious tales of cemeteries and ghosts; the little Aristas continued his gymnastic exercises; he had constructed a springboard by placing a plank upon a heap of sand and there he practised his death-defying leaps. One day Alonso, Tabuenca's aid, appeared in the Corralon accompanied by a woman and a little girl.
As the proofreader and Senor Ignacio met at the entrance they exchanged looks and then averted their glance; the two mothers, on the other hand, glared at each other in terrible hatred. Senor Ignacio arranged that they should not sleep at the Corralon but in Aguila Street. In that place, at the home of Senora Jacoba, there was a horrible confusion of weeping and cursing.
After two or three months in the Corralon, Manuel had become so accustomed to the work and the life there that he wondered how he could do anything else. Those wretched quarters no longer produced upon him the impression of dark, sinister sadness that they cause in one unaccustomed to live in them; on the contrary, they seemed to him filled with attractions.
Every morning Rebolledo would leave the Corralon carrying a little bench and a wooden wall-bracket, from which hung a brass basin and a poster. Reaching a certain spot along the Americas fence he would attach the bracket and put up, beside it, a humorous sign the point of which, probably, he was the only one to see. It ran thus: MODERNIST TONSORIAL PARLOUR Antiseptic Barber Walk in Gents.
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