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Updated: September 9, 2025
Slowly and silently memories began to rise and group themselves together in the enormous, black forgetfulness of those twenty years. Amadeo Zureda took out his tobacco-box and offered tobacco to his companion.
Body and soul both fell asleep there in the comfort of a happy and sensual well-being. It hardly takes more than a couple of years of married life to age a docile man; or at least about the same thing to fill him with those forward-looking ideas of caution, economy and peace that sow the seed of fear for the morrow, in quiet souls. One time Zureda was laid up a while with a bad cold.
Cautiously the engineer guarded against telling Rafaela that their son had returned. A little while before supper, giving her the excuse that Don Adolfo was waiting for him at the Casino, Zureda left the house and made his way to the inn where Manolo was wont to meet his rough friends. There he found him, indeed, gaming with cards. "I've got something to say to you," said he.
But already, even though Zureda had wanted to give him back, it was too late. Rafaela ran to the end of the platform, and there she had to stop. Pedro laughed and gesticulated from the blackness of the tender, bidding her farewell. The young woman went back home, in tears. Manolo Berlanga had just got home. He had been drinking and was in the devil's own humor. "Well, what's up now?" he demanded.
People coming in from neighboring villages reported him as given over to gaming. One night he showed up with a serious wound in the groin, a deep knife-stab. "Who did that to you?" demanded Zureda. The youth answered: "Nobody's business. I know who it is. Sometime or other he'll get his, all right!" To save himself from police investigation, Zureda said nothing about it.
They recall everything they have suffered and the uselessness of all their struggles, and they think: "This, that I am now beginning, will turn out badly for me too, like all the rest." Amadeo Zureda had altered greatly. His white mustache formed a sad contrast with his wrinkled face, tanned by the African sun.
"Now, as for living with you people," said Berlanga, "I'll be very glad to give five pesetas per. Or I'll better that, if you say so." "No, no, thanks," answered Zureda. "I don't want to be bargaining with you. We can all help each other. You and I are like brothers, anyhow."
The very same day when Amadeo Zureda got out of jail, he received from Rafaela a letter which began thus: "Little Manolo was twenty years old, yesterday." The one-time engineer left the boat from Africa at Valencia, passed the night at an inn not far from the railroad station, and early next morning took the train which was to carry him to Ecks.
Joyously the engineer waved his handkerchief at her, from the engine-cab; and only at times like these did his brow to which no smile ever lent complete contentment smooth itself out a little and seem almost happy. Amadeo Zureda desired nothing. His work was hard, but all he needed to make him glad was just the time between runs two nights a week that he spent in Madrid.
At Játiva a man got into the car, a man already old, whose face seemed to the former engineer to bear some traces of a friendly appearance. The new-comer also, on his side, looked at Zureda as if he remembered him. Thus both of them little by little silently drew together. In the end they studied each other with warm interest, as if sure of having sometime known each other before.
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