From outside, only one small light could be detected, as if belonging to the helmsman on watch alone through the night on the sleeping ship. And appearances were not completely misleading in this case. The light came from Ripoll's room, and the engineer's concern was, in fact, a vessel, though not the “frigate” Guipuzcoana, but rather, a submarine that he had invented and that he had come to América with the intention of selling to the Mexican government. Ripoll sat surrounded by blueprints and drafting tools, facing, on the table in front of him, a perfect scale model of his invention: a beautiful contraption of aluminum, replete with towers, railings, skylights, torpedo tubes, and even a pair of masts that could be erected when the submarine was on the surface and taken down when it submerged into the oceanic depths. The Catalonian inventor spent hours and hours with his papers and numbers, calculating velocities and resistances, determining defects and advantages. Armed with a variety of tools, he reinforced a screw here, removed a plate there, changed the position of the smokestack, and moved a ladder from the starboard to the port side, and then back. His precious invention filled his heart with hope but also tormented him. The boilers were just not right, and the clumsy revolutions of the propeller drove him to distraction.

Doña Nicasia and her boarders had a superstitious respect for the engineer and his invention—and even some superstitious fear of the kind that illiterate people sometimes feel for books and words and numbers. Ripoll had read much, he let fly words in foreign languages, and he opened large technical volumes as calmly as the curate opened his missal to say mass. He had a magical ability to execute arithmetic operations in his head: doña Nicasia's queries about the expenses incurred at the market, Izquierdo's requests for interest calculations on objects left in pawn. Gradually, Ripoll became the pride of the boarding house, displacing, at least in secular matters, the sway formerly exercised by the curate, Práxedes Luro, which was based on no more than the prestige of his priestly cassock. Ripoll was a wise man, and he was Spanish—yes, Spanish, of course he was—and his wisdom validated their pretentions to have come to América to civilize it, demonstrating once again the universal and absolute supremacy of Spain. Because the inventor was temporarily impecunious, doña Nicasia actually consented to lend him money following a sort of plenary session in which the other boarders gave their endorsement, expressed by Sordo:

“The important thing is, don't give up on the submarine. When the government buys it, when they pay you for it, above all, you can pay us back. But in the meantime, forget it, you just tell us what you need … okay?”