It was with the moneys which stuck to his fingers from his collectorship--just as the King meant that they should stick, in reward for his good fighting--that Don Rodrigo built for himself his fine house in the street that is now called, because of the bridge that once was a part of it, and because of the raven's doings, the Puente del Cuervo. If that street had another name, earlier, Señor, I do not know what it was.
This Don Rodrigo, as was generally known, was a very wicked person; and therefore he lived in his fine house, along with his raven, in great magnificence--eating always from dishes of solid silver, and being served by pages wearing clothes embroidered with gold. But, for all his riches, he himself was clad as though he were a beggar--and a very dirty beggar at that. Over his jerkin and breeches he wore a long capellar that wrapped him from his neck to his heels loosely; and this capellar had been worn by him through so many years that it was shabby beyond all respectability, and stained with stains of all colors, and everywhere greasy and soiled. Yet on the front of it, upon his breast, he wore the Cross of Santiago that the King had given him; and wearing that cross, as you know, Señor, made him as much of a caballero as the very best. In various other ways the evil that was in him showed itself. He never went to mass, and he made fun openly of all holy things. The suspicion was entertained by many people that he had intimacies with heretics. Such conduct gives a man a very bad name now; but it gave a man a worse name then--and so he was known generally as the Excommunicate, which was the very worst name that anybody could have.
As to the raven, Señor, Don Rodrigo himself named it El Diablo; and that it truly was the devil--or, at least, that it was a devil--no one ever doubted at all. The conduct of that reprobate bird was most offensive. It would soil the rich furnishings of the house; it would tear with its beak the embroidered coverings of the chairs and the silken tapestries; it would throw down and shatter valuable pieces of glass and porcelain; there was no end to its misdeeds. But when Don Rodrigo stormed at his servants about these wreckings--and he was a most violent man, Señor, and used tempestuous language--the servants had only to tell him that the raven was the guilty one to pacify him instantly. "If it is the work of the Devil," he would say without anger, "it is well done!"--and so the matter would pass.