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Updated: September 9, 2025
If the punishment of Zureda and his confinement in prison walls wounded her deeply, it was not on account of her broken love for the engineer. No, rather was it because this disaster had disturbed the easy, comfortable rhythm of her life and because the exile of her husband had meant misery for her, poverty, the irremediable overthrow of her whole future.
"Very small, indeed. What's your wife's name?" "Rafaela." "Yes, yes," answered Don Adolfo. "Rafaela's the woman. I know her well. As for Manolo, your son, I know him too." Amadeo Zureda trembled. He felt afraid, and cold. For a few moments he remained silent, without knowing what to say.
Rafaela was sitting in front of the stove, in the kitchen, her hands humbly crossed on her lap, her eyes full of tears, her white hair rumpled up, as if some parricide hand had furiously seized her head. Zureda took hold of his wife by the shoulders and forced her to get up. "What what's happened?" he stammered.
One evening Señor Tomás was enjoying the air at the door of his eating-house when Zureda passed by. The tavern-keeper beckoned the engineer; and when Zureda had come near, looked fixedly into his eyes and said: "You and I have got to have a few words." Zureda remained dumb. The secret, chill vibration of an evil presentiment had passed like a cold wind through his heart.
The engineer ran away and was already crossing the bridge, when a woman who had been following him at a short distance began to cry: "Catch him! Catch him! He's just killed a man!" A couple of policemen, at the door of an inn, stopped Zureda. They arrested him and handcuffed him. He made no resistance. Rafaela went to see him in jail.
Señor Tomás ended up with: "Well now, you know all about it!" When Zureda left the tavern, his first impulse was to go home and put it up to Rafaela. Either with soft words or with a stick he might get something about Berlanga out of her. But presently he changed his mind. Affairs of this kind can't be hurried much.
And they continued looking at each other, enwrapped by the same thought. Zureda asked: "Have you ever lived in Madrid?" "Yes, ten or twelve years." "Where?" "Near the Estación del Norte, where I was an employee." "Say no more!" exclaimed Zureda. "I worked for the same company, myself. I was an engineer." "On what line?" "Madrid to Bilbao."
Zureda, afraid of showing the tumultuous rage in his heart, said nothing more. The most ominous memories crowded his mind. A long, long time ago, before he had gone to jail, Don Tomás in the course of an unforgettable conversation had told him that Manolo Berlanga maltreated Rafaela.
Once more the words of the old conductor sounded in his ears, and prophetically took hold upon his soul: "Manolo does not appear to be your son." Without having read Darwin, Amadeo Zureda instinctively sought explanation and consolation in the laws of heredity, for the pain now consuming him. Never had he, even when a young fellow, been given to drink or cards.
Zureda, something of a stick-in-the-mud and in no wise given to pleasures, had never wanted to take her to any dances, not even to a masquerade. A swarm of joyful visions filled her memory. Ah, those happy Sundays when she had been single! Saturday nights, at the shop, she and the other girls had made dates for the next day. Sometimes they had visited the dance-halls at Bombilla.
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