But even more than the bazar of objects of art, where so great a diversity of forms and colors, styles and artistic ideals, after all confused her, did one among the many stalls at the edge of the sidewalk near the Casino, interest Lucía. These stalls represented the modest and unpretending branches of trade. Here an old German cried his wares--glasses to drink the waters--engraving on them with an emery wheel the initials of the purchasers’ names in their presence; there a Swiss offered for sale toys, dolls, little boxes, and book folders carved in beech-wood by the shepherds; here lenses were sold, there combs and writing-materials. Lucía’s favorite stall was one presided over by a peddler of curiosities from Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Mother-of-pearl calvaries with simple carvings in relief, pen handles of olive-wood terminating in a cross, heads of the Virgin cut on shell, brooches and trinkets of enamel adorned with arabesques, cups of black bitumen, aromatic lozenges--such were the contents of the peddler’s box. All this was sold by an Israelite of not unpleasing appearance, with black eyes and yellow skin, wearing a dark red Arab fez and wide trousers, gentle, insinuating, a Levantine in everything, with a smattering of many languages and a good knowledge of Spanish, which, but for the use of an occasional archaism, he spoke like a native. In this man’s conversation Lucía found entertainment in the absence of other sources of interest. She would question him about the holy village of Bethlehem, the sacred house of Nazareth, Mount Olivet, and all the other holy places which she had pictured to herself as situated rather in some mysterious and remote paradise than on the earth. Between Lucía and the peddler there was thus established the habit of having a ten minutes chat every afternoon in the open air, which she enjoyed all the more when he told her that he was a Christian and a Catholic, catechized and instructed by the Franciscans of Bethlehem. Lucía bought specimens of all his wares, even to a rosary of those opaque greenish beads, called, not without some analogical similitude, Job’s tears.
“I don’t know how you can like that ugly rosary,” said Pilar.