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Updated: August 1, 2024
"We are all from the same stem," he said with pride. "We all came to the conquest of Toledo with the good King Alfonso VI. The only difference has been, that some Lunas took a fancy to go and fight the Moors, and they became lords, and conquered castles, whereas my ancestors remained in the service of the Cathedral, like the good Christians they were."
Luna, busy with her drawn work, and all the little Lunas and the neighbors and their children foregathered in the window spaces behind the torn Nottingham curtains which partially concealed the interior from passers on the street.
It is to live in my house without fear of being shamed, to sleep at night without fearing to see in the darkness our father's eyes, asking why I allow a lost woman to live under the same roof that the Lunas won for themselves by centuries of service to the house of God; it is to avoid people mocking at our family.
The Lunas and all their relations more or less distant, who were really nearly the whole population of the upper cloister, were rejoiced at this promise; what else could Gabriel be but a priest?
We are all good people, though we have never seen as much of the world as can be seen from a skylight, and live here as though wrapped in cotton wool, but you Lunas have always been the best among the best, to say nothing of us Villalpandos, who come close behind. Ay! if your mother could raise her head! If your father were alive!
You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias.
In order not to sleep, he read by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias, uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the principal rôle; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he still found some of the freshness of his childhood.
He only wished to be the gardener, to die in the upper cloister like his forefathers, and to leave fresh Lunas to perpetuate the family services in the Cathedral. His eldest son, Tomas, was now twelve years old, and able to help him in the care of the garden.
It seemed impossible that from these Lunas, so quiet and steady, should have sprung a girl with sufficient pluck to run away to Madrid, where she had never been before, to join a man, without fear of God or of her own people. To whom could I liken the unhappy child?
The natives are at times disposed to shirk work without sufficient cause; the native lunas, or overseers, are not always reasonable, the Chinamen and natives do not always agree, and quarrels and entanglements arise, and everything is referred to the decision of the manager, who, besides all things else, must know the exact amount of work which ought to be performed, both in the fields and factory, and see that it is done.
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