“What are you going to do after lunch?” Alzugaray asked him. “Have you got a sweetheart in one of the old-clothes shops of the quarter?”
“No. I was thinking of taking a walk; that’s all.”
“Then come along.”
They left the tavern and went along a street between sides of sand cut straight down, and started up the Cerro del Pimiento. The soft, vague mist allowed the Guadarrama to stand out visible.
“This landscape enchants me,” said Cæsar.
“It seems hard and gloomy,” responded Alzugaray.
“Yes, that is true; hard and gloomy, but noble. When one is drenched with a miserable political life, when one actually forms a part of that Olympus of madmen called Congress, one needs to be purified. How miserable, how vile that political life is! How many faces pale with envy there are! What low and repugnant hatreds! When I come out nauseated by seeing those people; when I am soaked with repugnance, then I come out here to walk, I look at those serious mountains, so frowning and strong, and the mere sight of them seems like a purifying flame which cleanses me from meanness.”
“I see that you are as absurd as ever, Cæsar. It would never occur to anybody to come and comfort himself with some melancholy mountains, out here between an abandoned hospital, which looks like a leper-asylum, and a deserted cemetery.”
“Well, these mountains give me an impression of energy and nobility, which raises my spirits. This leper-asylum, as you call it, sunken in a pit, this deserted cemetery, those distant mountains, are my friends; I imagine they are saying to me: ‘One must be hard, one must be strong like us, one must live in solitude....’”
They did not continue their walk much further, because the night and the fog combined made it difficult to see the path along the Canalillo, which made it possible to fall in, and that would have been disagreeable.