Weeds

CHAPTER I

The Studio—The Life Led by Roberto Hasting—Alex Monzón

Roberto had got out of bed. Dressed in his street clothes, seated before a table heaped with documents, he was writing.

The room was a low-ceiled garret, with a large window that overlooked a patio. The centre of the room was occupied by two clay statues with an inner framework of wire,—two figures of more than natural size, huge and fantastic, both merely sketched, as if the artist had been unable to complete them; they were two giants exhausted by weariness, with small, clean-shaven heads, sunken chests, bulging stomachs and long, simian arms. They seemed crushed by a profound dejection. Before the wide window extended a sofa covered with flowered percaline; on the chairs and upon the floor lay statues half swathed in damp cloths; in one corner stood a box filled with dry bits of scagliola, and in a corner, a tub of clay.

From time to time Roberto would glance at a pocket watch placed upon the table amidst his papers. Then he would get up and pace for a while up and down the room. Through the window he could see tattered, filthy women moving


 about in the galleries of the houses across the way; up from the street rose a deafening racket of cries from the huckstresses and the peddlers.

Roberto, however, was not at all disturbed by the continuous din, and after a short while would resume his seat and continue writing.

In the meantime Manuel was climbing and descending every stairway in the neighbourhood, in search of Roberto Hasting.

Manuel was inspired with the earnest resolution to change his mode of living; he felt capable now of embracing an energetic determination and carrying it through to the end.

His elder sister, who had just married a fireman, had presented him with a pair of torn trousers that her husband had discarded, an old jacket and a frayed muffler. To these she had added a cap of most absurd shape and colour, a battered derby and a few vague bits of good advice concerning industriousness, which, as everyone knows, is the father of all virtues, just as the horse is the noblest of animals and idleness the mother of all vice.

It is quite possible—almost certain—that Manuel would have preferred to these kindly, vague counsels, this cap of absurd shape and colour, this old jacket, this frayed muffler and the pair of outworn trousers, a tiny sum of money, whether in small change, silver or bills.

Such is youth; it has neither goal nor compass; ever improvident, it imputes greater value to material gifts than to spiritual, unable in its utter ignorance


 to realize that a coin is spent, a bill is changed, and both may be lost, while a piece of good advice may neither be spent nor changed, nor reduced to small change, possessing furthermore the advantage that without the slightest expenditure or care it lasts forever, without mildewing or deteriorating. Whatever his preferences may have been, Manuel had to be satisfied with what he got.

With this ballast of good advice and bad clothing, unable to detect a gleam of light on his way, Manuel ran over mentally the short list of his acquaintances, and it occurred to him that of them all, Roberto Hasting was the only one likely to help him.

Penetrated with this truth, which to him was of supreme importance, he went off in quest of his friend. At the barracks they had not seen him for some time; Doña Casiana, the proprietress of the boarding-house, whom Manuel came upon in the street one day, knew nothing of Roberto’s whereabouts, and suggested that perhaps the Superman would be able to tell.

“Does he still live at your place?”

“No. I got tired of his never paying his bills. I don’t know where he lives; but you can always find him at the office of El Mundo, a newspaper over on the Calle de Valverde. There’s a sign on the balcony.”

Manuel set out for a newspaper office on the Calle de Valverde and found it at once. He walked up the steps to the main floor and paused before a door with a large glass pane, on which


 were depicted two worlds,—the old and the new. There was neither bell nor knocker, so Manuel began to drum with his fingers upon the glass pane, directly upon the area of the new world, and was surprised in this selfsame occupation by the Superman, who had just come from the street…………………………..