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Updated: June 9, 2025
At about the age of thirty, tired of living all alone with no one to love, Amadeo Zureda got married. This Zureda was a stocky fellow, neither tall nor short, dark, thoughtful, and with a certain slow, sure way of moving. The whole essence of his face, the soul of it to speak so was rooted in the taciturn energy of the space between his eyebrows.
For you know there's no difference between the truth and a lie that everybody's telling. And if you decide there's nothing to this except what I say, come and tell me, for I'm right here and everywhere to back up my words!" The tavern-keeper grew silent, and Amadeo Zureda remained motionless, struck senseless, gaping.
A good many times he had told Zureda how much he wanted to find some respectable house where he could live in a decent, private way, paying perhaps four or five pesetas a day for board and room. "Suppose, now," went on Amadeo, "that Manolo should pay five pesetas a day; that's thirty duros a month thirty good dollars and the house costs us eight dollars.
It seemed almost as if the clever little fellow had set his mind on looking like everybody who had stood near his baptismal font, so that he could win the love of them all. Zureda worshiped the boy, laughed at all his tricks and graces, and spent hours playing with him on the tiles of the passageway. Little Manolo pulled his mustache and necktie, mauled him and broke the crystal of his watch.
He had never cried, but had eaten whatever they had given him and had slept like a top, on the coal. When Zureda kissed his wife, he noticed that she had a black-and-blue spot on her forehead. "That looks like somebody had hit you," said he. "Have you been fighting with any one?" She hesitated, then answered: "No, no. Why, who'd I be fighting with? Much less coming to blows?
That run was terrible indeed, packed full of inward struggles and of battles with the rebellious locomotive an infernal run that Zureda remembered all his life. With due regard for the prudent scheme that he had mapped out, the engineer set himself to observing the way his wife and Manolo had of talking to each other.
Now, then, in my house, right here, people are saying your wife is thick with Manolo Berlanga!" The eyes of the tavern-keeper and the engineer met. They remained fixed, so, a moment. Then the eyes of Zureda opened wide, seemed starting from their sockets. Suddenly he jumped up, and his square finger-nails fairly sank into the wood of the table.
Then, after a brief moment of silent struggle: "Darling! Don't you see? It had to be this way !" The wife of Zureda did not, in fact, put up much of a fight. A year later, Rafaela gave birth to a boy. Manolo Berlanga stood godfather for it. Both Rafaela and Amadeo agreed on naming it Manolo Amadeo Zureda. How pink-and-white, how joyous, how pretty was little Manolín!
One after the other you might erase all the lines of that face, and so long as you left the thick-tufted brows, you would not have changed the expression of Amadeo Zureda. For there dwelt the whole spirit of the man, reserved yet ardent. His marriage rescued Rafaela, whom he made his wife, from the slavish toil of a work-woman.
Why did you do it?" Stolidly Zureda answered: "Oh, it was a quarrel over cards." "Yes, that's so; they told me about it." Amadeo breathed easy. The conductor knew nothing; and it seemed probable that many others should be as ignorant as he about what had driven him to kill Manolo. Don Adolfo asked: "Where have you been?" "At Ceuta." "A long time?" "Twenty years and some months." "The deuce!
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