“What more bitterness do I want than the pangs of starvation! Here, you who preside over the culinary department, may I be permitted to know with what delicacies you intend to assuage to-day the pangs of hunger that are gnawing my vitals? Have you prepared for me celestial ambrosia, nectar from the calyxes of the flowers, or tripe and snails from the Petit Fornos? Relieve me from this cruel uncertainty?

(Suppressed laughter in the kitchen.)

“Bring this crazy boy his breakfast, so that he may hold his tongue!”

Mother and son being seated at the table, the drops counted out and drank, the steaming soup was set before them, followed by the couple of{10}

{10}

“Suppressed laughter in the kitchen.”

fried eggs, round and crisp-edged, and the beefsteak, invariably sent in from the neighboring café. Only on this condition would Rogelio eat it. No matter what pains Fausta, the Biscayan, might take, she could never succeed in supplanting the cook of the café. The succulent piece of underdone steak would come between two plates, with its accompaniment of fried potatoes, tender, juicy, and appetizing. While Rogelio cut and ate the meat,{11} his mother watched him eagerly and anxiously, as if she had never before seen this delicate youth, so different from the ideal of a Galician mother. Twenty summers run to seed, a pale, dull complexion, eyes black and sparkling, but with the eyelids drooping, and surrounded by purple rings, a sarcastic mouth, the lips delicately curved and somewhat pale, shaded by a light mustache, hair smooth and silky, a head narrow at the temples, a slender throat, the back of the neck slightly hollowed in, flat wrists and a graceful shape made up a figure still immature, interrupted in its development by the chlorosis which is the result of a hothouse existence in which the plant that requires the pure, free air, dwindles and wilts. So that Doña Aurora did not enjoy a moment’s peace of mind because of this son who, if not exactly sickly, was of a nervous and delicate constitution, as was evidenced by{12} his moods of childlike gayety followed by periods of causeless gloom. Therefore it was that she watched him at his meals as eagerly as if every mouthful he swallowed were entering her own stomach after a two days’ fast. In thought she said to the succulent meat: Go, strengthen the child. Give him muscle, give him blood, give him bone. Make him robust, manly, independent. Make him grow to be like a young bull—although he should have all the savageness of one. 

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