Читать книгу Weeds онлайн

55 страница из 71

Little work, little to eat and clean clothes: these were the conditions that Manuel found in the home of the baroness, and they were unsurpassable.

In the morning his duty was to take the baroness’s dogs out for a stroll; in the afternoon he had to run a few errands. At times, during the first days, he felt homesick for his wandering existence. Several issues of huge novels published in serial form, which Chucha lent him, allayed his passion for tramping about the streets and transported him, in company of Fernández y González and Tárrago y Mateos, to the life of the XVIIth century, with its braggart knights and its lovelorn ladies.

Niña Chucha, an eternal chatterbox, recounted to Manuel, in several instalments, the tale of her dear friend, as she called the baroness.

The Baroness de Aynant, Paquita Figueroa, was a queer woman. Her father, a wealthy Cuban gentleman, sent her at the age of eighteen, accompanied by an aunt, on a trip to Europe. On the steamer a young Flemish gentleman, fair and blond, as elegant as a Van Dyck portrait, had paid her much attention; the girl had responded with all the ardent enthusiasm of the tropics, and within a month after their arrival in Spain, the Cuban miss was named the Baroness de Aynant, and left with her husband to take up their residence in Antwerp.