He returned to the table triumphantly, armed with a book that lacked a binding, which he deposited on the mantel, holding out his hand to keep the others away from it:

“Now you will hear, noble sons of Spain, now you will hear the words of a Frenchman, translated in my own fair homeland, Barcelona, which is to say, outside of Spain …” The others, all of them Spanish, immediately began to protest this assertion of Catalonian nationalism, provoking Ripoll's firm insistence: “Outside of Spain! The Frenchman is named Goncourt, for your information, and he affirms that he learned what I am about to read in a book about Japan … just around the corner here, so to speak.”

He drained his cup of tea, rolled and lit a cigarette, and flipped through the pages of the book until he found what he was looking for. The keeper of the boarding house acted as if she were about to leave the room until Ripoll indicated with an expressive gesture of his hand that there was no need of that:

“No, doña Nicasia, your modesty will not be offended. Stay and listen. All right, here it is. Please don't interrupt …”

And, with a long drag on his cigarette and a rather Olympian glance over the heads of his audience, he began to read:

“The Legend of Tea. Dharma, a holy ascetic of China and Japan, decided to deny himself sleep, considering it too pleasurable and worldly. One night, however, he went to sleep and did not awaken until the next morning. Indignant at this demonstration of weakness in himself, he cut off his eyelids—two pieces of flesh whose contemptible weakness impeded his quest for superhuman perfection—and flung them away. And the two bloody eyelids took root in the ground upon which they fell, growing into a bush the leaves if which the local inhabitants have harvested ever since to make an aromatic infusion that banishes sleep.”

Not one of his listeners applauded or evinced even the slightest interest in what he had read. Ripoll's voice disappeared in a silence of utmost indifference, and the poetic legend was lost in an absolute void. The resident priest, don Práxedes Luro, known to the group for his Carlist conservatism, who had been rolling breadcrumbs into twenty little balls with which he amused himself by throwing them at an empty glass, spoke without looking up:

“Ripoll, my friend, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

This comment, unlike the reading, garnered applause from everyone, including doña Nicasia, who had begun to clear the table and reflexively reprimand the serving woman. The boarders filed past Ripoll, who blew smoke their way, patting him on the back, laughing at his failure, and repeating the curate's put-down with various additions of their own.

“Nice one, Ripoll!”

“Whoops … there go the eyelids!”

“Our engineer's such a funny guy!”

“Ripoll, a bit annoyed, shrugged and bombarded them with insults lightly veiled in jest:

“Bunch of ignorant savages! I should have known … You'll never understand anything but money. Jackasses! Not so much you, curate, as the rest of your countrymen here. Jerks!”