Our dinner finished, we sat ourselves down on a bench in the entrada and looked about us.
To one side of the entrance was a small stall which sold iced drinks. Men and women were sitting in after-lunch ease amid the boxes and sacks which lined the opposite wall, on low chairs, or on the bench with us. A dog, shaved all over its body, partly because of the heat, partly to keep off the fleas with which all Spanish animals are infested, was asleep on our mattress. The proprietor of the fonda was standing in a lordly manner in the middle of the floor. He was dressed in white shirt and flannel trousers, and must have weighed almost sixteen stone, although quite young. He looked as if he had been inflated with air.
We had noticed, though we have not before mentioned, a curious illness which seems prevalent in Spain. In Murcia were large numbers of monstrous children; boys and girls had reached enormous proportions before the age of ten years old. We came to the conclusion that it was a form of illness, because, though the children seemed healthy enough, we have never seen this development of monstrosity elsewhere, nor did large numbers of them appear to survive adolescence, though there were a certain number of excessively fat girls. The proprietor was such a monstrosity grown up. His wife, a dark-eyed beauty, was sitting in a rocking-chair near the kitchen door and her baby of about three years old, standing in its mother's lap, was having a great lark, pretending to catch lice in its mother's head. Thus do our ideas of innocent sports for children differ from those of other nations.
There was some coming and going amongst the fonda visitors. The guests seemed to be all peasants, the men in blouses, the women in pale skirts, black blouses and shawls of paisley pattern over the shoulders. Many had bundles of towels and of bathing dresses. One group we heard saying that they had come down to Alicante for a week's sea bathing.
As the afternoon drew on and the lorry delayed, we again interviewed the old man, who answered that probably it would not come that day. Accordingly, we spoke to the proprietor, who rather roughly said that we could have a room for two pesetas a night. The room was small, and the bed only just big enough for two. There were two doors, one leading into the interior of the inn, one out on to a balcony. The latter was half of glass and had no lock, and as there was plenty of traffic along the balcony, which was used for drying linen, underclothes and bathing dresses, one only had a chance of privacy by closing the shutters, leaving oneself in the dark, and no chance of sleeping with the window open despite the heat. But Spain does not believe in open windows or doors at night; it has "a robber complex."