“Whereas you, always you … first, last, and always, no?” protested his listeners indignantly, and the curate let him have it with both barrels:

“Leave him alone, poor man. Let him vent. It's just histrionics …”

“Histrionics! Theater! And proud of it! Careful, father curate … don't mess with me … And here's another way,” he continued, turning back to the others. “Want to get rich quick without working a single minute? Well, then, just marry some ugly rich woman! I'd do it, but I love my freedom and doña Nicasia too much for that. I'm a free man, a republican, an artist, an anarchist!”

“A moocher is what you are!” said the moneylender and the Covadonga employee at almost the same time. Both had lent the actor money some months previously, and both despaired of ever seeing it again.

Such conversations would normally be terminated by Ripoll, shouting from his room that he needed a bit of quiet in order to study, or by doña Nicasia, more maternally, with a wave of her arms and a few hoarse and not too courteous admonitions to Isidoro Gallegos.

The actor normally withdrew, at that point, although not before helping to set up the card table. Pulling his mended wool cape off the coat rack in the hall, he went out, first to the theater, where he entered gratis in the name of professional solidarity, then to a café, and after that, to any of various nocturnal watering holes, inveterate night owl that he was. The departure of Gallegos brought the boarding house some tranquility, though the calm was still only relative, since it included various disagreements of the card players, which are inevitable in such games, and all the more so among Latinos. The game might go until midnight if one of the players were enjoying extraordinary luck, but if not, the session would conclude at ten-thirty or eleven, when the players calculated their winnings and losings and doña Nicasia, who sat by the lamp reading all evening, had already gone to bed. The consensual signal occurred when Sordo pulled out his gold watch—which attracted the converging gazes of the other players more because of its monetary worth than because of its power to tell the time—and commented that it was almost eleven o'clock, whereupon everyone settled up and trundled off to bed.

The Guipuzcoana Boarding House (so-named according to painted signs in the entry stairwell) then advanced into the night like a great frigate: lights out, hatches battened down, wrapped in silence and darkness, its intrepid Spanish crew undaunted by the great distance to shore or the treacherous waves that rocked them all, both the strong and the weak, cradling both their ambitions and their disappointments. The fragility of their vessel did not concern them overmuch. Life is always fragile, and yet, think of all that conquerors, pilgrims, and poets can achieve before they arrive at their final destination.