Every time the student came home, his father gave him the same silent caress.  In course of time the duro had been replaced by a hundred peseta note; but the rough claw that grazed his head was falling now with an energy ever weaker and seemed to grow lighter with the years.

Rafael, from long periods of absence, noted his father’s condition better than the rest.  The old man was ill, very ill.  As tall as ever, as austere and imposing, and as little given to words.  But he was growing thinner.  His fierce eyes were sinking deeper into their sockets.  There was little left to him now except his massive frame.  His neck, once as sturdy as a bull’s, showed the tendons and the arteries under the loose, wrinkled skin; and his mustache, once so arrogant, but now withering with each successive day, drooped dispiritedly like the banner of a defeated army wet with rain.

The boy was surprised at the gestures and tears of anger with which his mother welcomed expression of his fears.

“Well, I hope he’ll die as soon as possible ...  Lot’s of use he is to us!...  May the Lord be merciful and take him off right now.”

Rafael said nothing, not caring to pry into the conjugal drama that was secretly and silently playing its last act before his eyes.

Don Ramon, that somber libertine of insatiable appetites, prey to a sinister, mysterious inebriation, was tossing in a last whirlwind of tempestuous desire, as though the blaze of sunset had set fire to what remained of his vitality.

With a deliberate, determined lustfulness, he went scouring the District like a wild satyr, and his brutish assaults, his terrorism and abuse of authority, were reported back by scurrilous tongues to the seignorial mansion, where his friend don Andres was trying in vain to pacify the wife.

“That man!” dona Bernarda would stammer in her rage.  “That man is going to ruin us!  Doesn’t he see he’s compromising his son’s future?”

His most enthusiastic adherents, without losing their traditional respect for him, would speak smilingly of his “weaknesses”; but at night, when don Ramon, exhausted by his struggle with the insatiable demon gnawing at his spirit, would be snoring painfully away, with a disgusting rattle that made it impossible for people in the house to sleep, dona Bernarda would sit up in her bed with her thin arms folded across her bosom, and pray to herself: 

“My Lord, My God!  May this man die as soon as possible!  May all this come to an end soon, oh Lord!”

And Bernarda’s God must have heard her prayer, for her husband got rapidly worse.

“Take care of yourself, don Ramon,” his curate friends would say to him.  They were the only ones who dared allude to his disorderly life.  “You’re getting old, and boyish pranks at your age are invitations to Death!”

The cacique would smile, proud, at bottom, that all men should know that such exploits were possible for a man at his age.