"Why, Mother will do it for you," she said.
Mother was an apt-looking spouse for the dust-cart, and was considered, we heard, the dirtiest woman in the village. Her foggy blue eyes showed white all round them, and she threw up her lips like a biting horse when she spoke Castilian (which she did very badly). I don't know why she made me think of the Red queen in Alice, but her silhouette was not unlike, and she had a queer trick of being in the house one instant, and in the next of having quite vanished--which was Red-queenlike. She was called "Aunt Roger" in the village, because of her ruddy hair. Aunt Roger cleared up the mystery of the Jijona fuel. She made bargains with boys, who wandered out over the hills, and returned looking like walking haycocks under a load of branches of mountain pine and other coniferous shrub. From then on we cooked over large bonfires built on the square hearth which was in our largest room.
Tia Roger was elusive in small matters, as she was in larger ones. She had a hasty Spanish way of agreeing at once to save herself the trouble of understanding my language, and we never knew whether she would come or no. She drew our pay without demur, but if an occasion offered for other employment she took it. We would return home at eleven o'clock worn out with a hard day's painting, to find the place uncleaned, no fire alight, no food either bought or prepared. This would entail on our part a rush down the steep hill into the town, to search for food. Probably on the way we would discover Tia Roger sitting amongst a circle of gossiping and pleased women, industriously cracking almonds. She would show no signs of conscious sin, but would grin and nod at us as we passed. Then we had to scramble again up to our eyrie under the full heat of the Mediterranean sun.
Tia Roger had many children. Her eldest daughter was married to a man who for some time puzzled us. We first saw him wandering about the upper streets of the old town during the fiesta. He carried an elaborate pair of sandwich boards. On the front was the well-known picture, "St. Veronica's Handkerchief," and on the back an oleograph representing two conventional angels--golden hair, nightdress, and wings. Both pictures were surrounded by flat wooden frames fretworked in the hideous art-nouveau manner. He wandered about thus, enclosed, as it were a slab of humanity between two slices of divinity; but we could not imagine what his purpose was. We imagined that he filled a semi-religious post, something connected with the priests, and their fiesta, and their cinema, and bull chasings. But on the fourth day of the fiesta, this wandering, apparently purposeless man tripped over a washing-basket. His language at once put to flight all our ideas of his religious functions, it issued straight from a nature by no means purged of old Adam, despite its devotional enclosure. Later, he fell over me as I was sketching, and he cursed me with gusto. I then saw he was blind. This had not been apparent to us earlier, for he took the rough and precipitous streets of Jijona at an extraordinary speed.