City of Wonders

by Eduardo Mendoza

Genres: City Life; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Eduardo Mendoza's classic novel about the birth of Barcelona as a world city, embodied in the rise of the ambitious and unscrupulous Onofre Bouvila

"Though historical in subject matter, this story of Catalonian enterprise and Barcelonan ambition is thoroughly contemporary in spirit" Jonathan Franzen

Stung by the realisation that his father is a fraud and a failure, Onofre Bouvila leaves a life of rural poverty to seek his fortune in Barcelona.

The year is 1888, and the Catalan capital is about to emerge from provincial obscurity to take its place amongst the great cities of the world, thanks to the upcoming Universal Exhibition.

Thanks to a tip-off from his landlord's daughter, Onofre gets his big break distributing anarchist leaflets to workers preparing for the World Fair. From these humble beginnings, he branches out as a hair-tonic salesman, a burglar, a filmmaker, an arms smuggler and a political dealmaker, in a multifaceted career that brings him wealth and influence beyond his wildest dreams.

But, just as Barcelona's rise makes it a haven for gangsters, crooks and spivs, vice begins to fester in Onofre's heart. And the climax to his remarkable story will come just as a second World Fair in 1929 marks the city's apotheosis.

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

Release date: January 6, 2022

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 496

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

1

The year Onofre Bouvila first set foot in Barcelona, the city was in a frenzy of renewal. The Catalan capital lies in the valley between Malgrat and Garraf, where the coastal mountain range withdraws inland, creating a sort of amphitheatre. The climate is temperate, not given to extremes; the skies are mostly bright and clear; the clouds few and white. Atmospheric pressure is stable, and rainfall infrequent, but on occasion treacherous and torrential.

Although still a matter of debate, it is generally agreed the Phoenicians founded the city not once but twice. What is known for certain is that Barcelona enters History as a colony of Carthage, allied to Sidon and Tyre. It is an attested fact that Hannibal’s elephants stopped to drink and frisk about on the banks of the Rivers Besós and Llobregat on their trek to the Alps, where they were decimated by the cold and mountainous terrain.

When they saw these animals, the earliest inhabitants of Barcelona were amazed. “Look at their tusks, their ears, what a trunk or proboscis!” they gasped. This shared sense of wonder and the stories told about it over many years forged a sense of Barcelona’s identity as an urban centre – an identity lost until the nineteenth century, when the inhabitants of the city made strenuous efforts to regain it.

The Phoenicians were followed by the Greeks and the Layetani. The former left behind traces of their craftsmanship; to the latter, according to ethnologists, we owe two distinctive characteristics: the tendency Catalans have to tilt their heads to the left when they’re pretending to listen, and the tendency the men have to grow luxuriant nasal hair.

Little is known of the Layetani, except that their principal food source was a milk product sometimes referred to as whey or lemonade, which was not very different from our present-day yoghurt. However, it was the Romans who gave Barcelona the stamp of a city and created its definitive structure. And yet everything points to the fact that they felt a haughty disdain for Barcelona. It didn’t seem to interest them for strategic – or any other – purposes.

In the year 63 BC a praetor by the name of Mucius Alexandrinus writes to his father-in-law and protector back in Rome complaining at being posted to Barcelona, when he had asked to be sent to the lavish city of Augusta Bibilis, today’s Calatayud. After the Romans, it’s the Gothic kinglet Ataulf who conquers the city, and it remains in the hands of the Goths until the Saracens take it without a struggle in the year 717 of our era. As is their custom, the Moors do no more than convert the cathedral (not the one we can admire today, but another, older one, built elsewhere, the scene of multiple conversions and martyrdoms) into a mosque, and little else. The French recover it for Christianity in 785, and exactly two centuries later, in 985, Almanzor or Al-Mansur, the Pious, the Merciless, the Three-toothed One, regains it for Islam.

These conquests and reconquests explain the thickness and complexity of the city walls. Straitjacketed between concentric bastions and fortifications, its streets become increasingly winding; this attracts Hebrew Cabbalists from Gerona, who set up branches of their sect in the city. They dig tunnels leading to secret Sanhedrins and purifying baths that were only rediscovered in the twentieth century when the metro was being built. Still visible on the stone lintels of the old quarter are scribbled characters that are passwords for the initiated, formulas for attaining the ineffable, etc. Following this, the city goes through years of splendour and centuries of obscurity.

 

“You’ll be very comfortable here, you’ll see. The rooms aren’t big, but they’re well aired, and as for cleanliness, you couldn’t ask for more. The meals are simple, but nourishing,” the boarding house owner declared. This establishment, where Onofre Bouvila pitched up shortly after his arrival in Barcelona, was situated on Carreró del Xup. A gentle slope began a few metres further along this side street, the name of which could be translated as “alley of the well”. The incline became more pronounced until it reached two steps, then levelled out until it came up against a wall built on the remains of an ancient, possibly Roman, city wall. A thick black liquid oozed constantly from this wall, and over the centuries it had rounded, smoothed, and polished the two steps, making them extremely slippery. The trickle then flowed down a gutter running parallel to the pavement, and finally gurgled into the open drain at the intersection with Calle de la Manga (formerly Calle de la Pera), the only access to Carreró del Xup.

This entirely unremarkable, drab street could boast (although other corners in the same neighbourhood disputed the same dubious honour) of being the scene of a cruel event: the execution of Saint Leocricia on the Roman wall. This saint, probably an earlier one than the Saint Leocricia of Córdoba, figures in some hagiographies as Saint Leocricia, and in others as Lucrecia or Locatis. She was a native of Barcelona or its environs, the daughter of a wool carder, who converted to Christianity as a young girl.

Against her will, her father married her to somebody called Tiburcius or Tiburcinus, a quaestor. Inspired by her faith, Leocricia gave away her husband’s possessions to the poor, and freed their slaves. Tiburcius, who had not given permission for any of this, flew into a rage. As a consequence of her actions, and for refusing to renounce her faith, Leocricia was beheaded on top of the wall. Legend has it that her head rolled down the slope and didn’t stop, turning corners, crossing streets and causing panic among passersby until it plopped into the sea, where a dolphin or some other large fish carried it off. Her saint’s day is 27 January.

At the end of the nineteenth century a boarding house stood on the upper level of this side street. Despite its owner’s pretentions, it was a very humble establishment. The lobby was tiny, dominated by a light-coloured wooden counter, with a brass inkwell and a register on it. The register was always left open so that anyone could check the legality of the business by casting an eye over the list of the lodgers’ nicknames and pseudonyms. There was also a barber’s cubbyhole, a china umbrella stand, and an image of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travellers before becoming that of motorists.

Behind this counter, at all hours of the day and night, sat Señora Agata. She was obese, half bald, and so worn out she might have been thought dead were it not for the fact that her aches and pains, which obliged her to keep her feet constantly in a washing-up bowl filled with warm water, made her cry out ceaselessly: “Delfina, the wash-basin.” Whenever the water grew cold, she came to life once more and called out, and her daughter would pour in steaming hot water from a pan.

Señora Agata did this so repeatedly every day that the water threatened to overflow and flood the lobby. This, however, did not seem to bother the owner of the boarding house, whom everyone knew as Señor Braulio. It was to him that Onofre Bouvila spoke on his arrival. “In fact, if this place were in a better location, it could pass for a hotel with stars,” Señor Braulio confided.

Señora Agata’s husband and the father of Delfina, he was uncommonly tall with regular features, and possessed a certain mannered charm. He left the running of the boarding house to his wife and daughter, and spent most of the day reading newspapers and commenting on the news with the long-term lodgers. Novelties fascinated him, and since this was an age of great inventions he was forever exclaiming “Oh!” and “Ah!” Occasionally, as if somebody were insisting he do so, he flung down his newspaper and announced: “I’ll go and see what the weather’s like.”

He would go out into the street and peer up at the sky, then return inside and declare: “Clear” or “cloudy, chilly” and so on. This appeared to be his only occupation. “It’s this dreadful neighbourhood that forces us to charge much less than an establishment such as ours merits,” he grumbled. At that he raised a cautionary finger: “But we’re very careful when it comes to choosing our guests.”

Was that a veiled criticism of my appearance, Onofre Bouvila wondered. Although the boarding house owner’s friendly attitude appeared to suggest otherwise, Bouvila’s fears were well-founded: despite being still a youth, it was plain that he would always be short in stature, with very broad shoulders. He had a sallow complexion, pinched and coarse features and black curly hair. His clothes were patched, crumpled and far from clean: everything spoke of him having travelled for several days wearing them, and that he didn’t have any others, except perhaps for a single change in the bundle he had placed on the counter when he arrived, which he now kept glancing at furtively. Whenever he did this, Señor Braulio was relieved; when the young man fixed his eyes on him again, he became alarmed. There’s something in his gaze that sets my nerves jangling, he said to himself. Bah, it must be the usual: hunger, confusion and fear, he decided on reflection. He had seen many people arrive in similar circumstances: Barcelona was growing all the time. Yet another one, he thought, a tiny sardine the whale will swallow without even realising it. At this, his nervousness turned to compassion. He’s still only a child and he’s desperate, he told himself.

“And might one enquire, Señor Bouvila, as to the motive for your esteemed presence in Barcelona?” he asked. This overblown phrase was intended to make a big impression on the youth. And Bouvila was indeed silent for a few seconds: he wasn’t sure he had even understood the question.

“I’m looking for employment,” he responded timidly. He fixed the owner again with his penetrating gaze, fearing his reply might rebound against him. But Señor Braulio’s mind was already elsewhere and he barely paid him any attention.

“Oh, that’s good,” was all he said, flicking a speck of dust from his frockcoat shoulder. Onofre Bouvila was silently grateful for this lack of interest. He was ashamed of his origins, and above all wanted to avoid having to reveal why he had been driven to leave everything behind and come to Barcelona in despair.

 

Onofre Bouvila was not born, as some later claimed, on the prosperous, bright, cheerful and somewhat vulgar Catalan coast, but in the wild, dark and harsh Catalonia that extends to the south-east of the Pyrenees, runs down both flanks of the Sierra del Cadí and then levels out round the upper reaches of the River Segre and its main tributaries, before the river joins Noguera Pallaresa and begins the final stage of its journey, flowing into the River Ebro at Mequinenza.

In the low-lying areas these rivers are fast-flowing and flood every spring. Once the water subsides, the flooded fields become unhealthy and yet fertile marshes, infested with snakes but ideal for hunting. These regions of thick fogs and dense forests give rise to many superstitions. Nobody will venture into these murky mists on certain days of the year, when bells can be heard tolling where there were no churches or chapels; the sounds of voices and laughter can be heard among the trees; and sometimes dead cows are seen dancing the sardana. Anybody who saw and heard these things was certain to go mad.

The mountains surrounding these valleys are steep and snow-covered almost all year round. In the past, houses were built on wooden stilts, life was tribal, and the rough, surly menfolk still wore animal skins as part of their attire. These men only descended into the valleys with the spring thaw, to find brides at the celebrations of the grape harvest and the slaughtering of a pig. On these occasions they played bone flutes and performed a dance imitating a rutting ram. They continually chewed on hunks of bread and cheese, and drank wine mixed with oil and water.

On the mountaintops lived an even tougher race: they never went down into the valleys, and their only pastime appears to have been a kind of Greco-roman wrestling. The people in the valleys were more civilised; they lived from their vines, olive groves, maize (for the livestock) and fruit trees, cattle and honey. In this region, at the start of the twentieth century, some 25,000 different kinds of bee were counted, of which only five or six thousand survive in our day. These folk hunted fallow deer, wild boar, rabbits and partridge. They also shot foxes, weasels and badgers to ward off their constant incursions. They were adept at fly-fishing for trout in the rivers. They ate well: there was no shortage of meat or fish in their diet, or vegetables and fruit; as a consequence they were a tall, strong and energetic people who didn’t tire easily; at the same time they digested their meals slowly and were lethargic. These physical characteristics influenced the history of Catalonia: one of the reasons the government in Madrid gave for refusing its push for independence there was that this would adversely affect the average height of Spaniards. In his report to King Don Carlos III, who had recently arrived from Naples, R. de P. Piñuela calls Catalonia Spain’s footstool.

These people could also count on an abundance of timber, cork and a few minerals. They lived in farmhouses scattered around a valley, connected only by the parish church or rectory. This gave rise to the custom of giving the name of the parish or rectory as their birthplace. So, for example, there was Pere Llebre, from Sant Roc; Joaquim Colibròquil from Mare de Déu del Roser, etc. This meant the rectors bore a great responsibility on their shoulders. They were the ones who maintained spiritual, cultural and even linguistic unity in the region. They were also charged with the crucial mission of keeping the peace in the valleys, and between one valley and its neighbour, to avoid outbreaks of violence and endless bloody vendettas. As a result there emerged a kind of clergyman later praised by the poets: prudent, moderate men, capable of enduring extremes of weather and of walking incredible distances carrying the ciborium in one hand and a blunderbuss in the other.

It was probably also thanks to these priests that the region had almost completely avoided the nineteenth-century Carlist wars. Towards the end of the conflict, Carlist bands had used it as refuge, winter quarters, and a supply centre. The locals let them do so. Every so often a dead body appeared half submerged in the furrows or among the bushes, with a bullet in the chest or the back of the head. Everyone pretended not to notice. Sometimes it wasn’t a Carlist, but the victim of a personal quarrel resolved under cover of the war.

 

All that is known for sure is that Onofre Bouvila was baptised on the feast day of Saint Restituto and Saint Leocadia (December 9) in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-four (or seventy-six), that he received the baptismal waters from the hands of Dom Serafi Dalmau, and that his parents were Joan Bouvila and Marina Mont. It is not known, however, why he was given the name Onofre rather than that of the saint whose day this was. On the baptism certificate he is described as being born in the parish of San Clemente, and as the first-born child of the Bouvila family.

 

“Splendid, splendid, you’ll live like a king here,” Señor Braulio said. He took a rusty key from his pocket and waved airily in the direction of a gloomy, foul-smelling passage. “The rooms, as you will see . . . Oh, my goodness, you gave me a fright!”

This exclamation was due to the fact that the door he had been about to unlock had suddenly been thrown open from inside. A female silhouette appeared in the doorway, framed against the light from the balcony.

“This is my daughter Delfina,” said Señor Braulio, recovering from the shock. “She must have been tidying the room so that it meets your expectations. Isn’t that so, Delfina?” When Delfina made no reply, he added, addressing Onofre Bouvila once more: “Since her mother, my wife, is not in the best of health, all the work here would fall on my shoulders were it not for Delfina. She is a real treasure.”

Onofre had already seen the young woman in the lobby a few moments earlier, when she was refilling Señora Agata’s bowl with hot water. He had barely noticed her then, but now that he was able to study her more closely, she seemed to him utterly repulsive. Delfina was more or less the same age as him; she was skinny and clumsy, with buck teeth, cracked skin and shifty eyes made unusual by their yellow irises.

He soon came to realise that Delfina was the one who in fact carried out all the chores in the boarding house. Dour-looking, filthy, unkempt, ragged and barefoot, she ran at all hours from the kitchen to the bedrooms and back to the kitchen and the dining room, carrying buckets, brooms and floor cloths. In addition, she attended to her mother’s constant needs, and served at table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. First thing each morning she went out to do the shopping with two wicker baskets, and returned dragging them along. She never said a word to any of the lodgers; and they in return pretended she wasn’t there.

In addition to her sullen nature, she always had a black cat at her heels. Going by the name of Beelzebub, it only tolerated the presence of its mistress: anybody else ran the risk of bites and scratches. The boarding house furniture and walls bore the marks of its ferocious nature.

For now, however, Onofre Bouvila was unaware of any of this. He had just entered his allotted room, and was surveying this cramped, austere cubicle for the very first time. This is my room, he was thinking with a surge of emotion. I’m an independent man now: a true citizen of Barcelona. He was still carried away by the novelty of his situation; like all new arrivals, he was fascinated by the big city. He had always lived in the country, and had only once visited a town of any size.

That visit constituted a sad memory. The town was called Bassora, situated some eighteen kilometres from his home parish of San Clemente or Sant Climent. At the time when Onofre Bouvila visited it, Bassora had been experiencing rapid growth. From being an agricultural and above all livestock centre, it had become an industrial city. According to the statistics, in 1878 there were 36 industries in Bassora: 21 of these produced textiles (cotton and woollen mills, silk spinners, fabric and carpet workshops, and so on); 11 were chemical factories (phosphates, acetates, chlorides, dyes and soaps); three iron and steel works, and one for timber. A railway line linked Bassora and the port of Barcelona, from where Bassora’s goods were exported overseas.

Although there was still a regular horse-drawn coach service, in general people preferred to travel to Barcelona by train. Several streets in the town had gas lighting, there were four hotels or inns, four schools, three social clubs and a theatre. A rocky, uneven road linked Bassora and Sant Climent. It crossed the mountains through a pass or gorge, usually blocked by snow in winter. Weather permitting, an old horse and trap made the journey. There was no regularity, timetable or fixed stops on its trips. It brought farming tools to the farmhouses, all manner of supplies, and any correspondence there might be; on the way back to Bassora it carried surplus produce. This was dispatched by the Sant Climent rector to another priest in Bassora who was a friend of his; he in turn saw to it that it was sold, handed over the earnings, generally in kind, and kept accounts no-one asked him for or cared about.

The driver of the trap was called or went by the name of Uncle Tonet. In Sant Climent he spent the night on the floor of an inn that backed on to the church. Before going to bed he would relate what he had seen and heard in Bassora, even though few of his listeners put any store by what he said: he had the reputation of being too fond of wine and of making things up. Nor could anyone see how the wondrous tales he told could alter the course of life in the valley.

 

Now, however, Bassora itself shrank into insignificance when Onofre Bouvila mentally compared it to the Barcelona he had just arrived in, and of which as yet he knew nothing. This attitude, in many respects rather naive, was not without justification: according to the 1887 census, what is now known as the “metropolitan area” – that is, the city proper and its outskirts – contained 416,000 inhabitants, a total that was increasing year on year by some 12,000 souls. Of this census figure (which some people question), in the city of Barcelona itself there were 272,000 inhabitants. The rest lived in neighourhoods and villages outside the perimeter of the old city walls. As the nineteenth century wore on, it was here that the most important industries were concentrated. Throughout the century, Barcelona had been in the vanguard of progress. In 1818 the first regular coach service in Spain had been established, linking Barcelona and Reus. The year 1826 saw the first trial of gas lighting in the Patio de la Lonja. In 1836 the first “steam engine” was installed, the start of industrial mechanisation. The first railway in Spain had been the one between Barcelona and Mataró, dating from 1848. In addition, the country’s first electric power station was built in Barcelona in 1873.

All this meant there was a huge gulf between Barcelona and the rest of Spain, and the impression the city produced on any new arrival was overwhelming. But it had taken an immense effort to produce this development. Now, like the female of some exotic species that has just given birth to a numerous litter, Barcelona lay back exhausted and torn apart. Out of the wounds flowed pestilent liquids; stinking gases made the air unbreathable in streets and homes. The city’s inhabitants were weary and pessimistic. Only a few simpletons like Señor Braulio saw everything through rose-tinted spectacles.

“Barcelona is full of opportunities for anyone with imagination and the determination to seize them,” he told Onofre Bouvila that first night in the dining room, as the new lodger sipped the colourless, brackish soup Delfina had served him. “You seem honest, bright, and hard-working. I have no doubt you will soon resolve your situation in a highly satisfactory manner. Just think, young man: never in the history of mankind has there been an age such as this: electricity, telephones, the submarine . . . do I need to go on listing its wonders? God only knows where it will all end. By the way, would you mind paying in advance? My wife, whom you’ve already met, is very particular when it comes to accounts. The poor woman, she’s so ill, d’you see?”

Onofre Bouvila handed over all he had to Señora Agata. He paid a week’s rent, but was left without a peseta. At first light the next morning, he set off in search of a job.

2

Even though at the end of the nineteenth century it was already a cliché to say that Barcelona lived “with its back turned on the sea”, daily reality did not bear out this claim. Barcelona was and always had been a port city. It had lived from the sea and for the sea; it was fed by the sea and gave the sea the fruits of its toil. Its streets led any pedestrian’s footsteps down to the sea, and it was the sea that connected it to the rest of the world. Its air and climate came from the sea: the not always pleasant smell, the humidity, and the salt that corroded its walls. The lapping of the sea lulled its inhabitants to sleep for their siestas; ships’ sirens marked the passage of time, and the sad, mournful cry of seagulls was a warning that the sweetness of the shade offered by the trees lining the avenues was merely an illusion. The sea peopled its backstreets with outlandish characters who spoke foreign tongues, had a rolling gait and a dark past, and were all too ready to wield a cut-throat razor, pistol or blackjack. The sea covered the tracks of those stealing a body from justice, those who fled leaving behind them heart-rending cries in the night and unpunished crimes. The colour of the houses and squares in the city was the dazzling white of the sea on cloudless days, or the dull grey of stormy ones. All this was bound to attract a man from the hinterland like Onofre Bouvila. The first thing he did that morning was to go down to the port to look for work on the docks.

Although Barcelona’s economic development had begun towards the end of the eighteenth century and would continue until the second decade of the twentieth, it had not been without its ups and downs. Boom periods had been followed by periods of recession. The flow of migrants into the city did not diminish, but demand for workers did; to find work in these circumstances presented almost insuperable difficulties. Despite Señor Braulio’s optimism, when Onofre Bouvila headed out into the streets in search of a living, Barcelona had for several years been going through one of these recessions.

A police cordon barred his way to the docks. When he asked what was going on, he was told there had been several cases of cholera among the stevedores, the disease doubtless brought by a ship arriving from distant lands. Peering over the shoulder of one of the policemen, he glimpsed a tragic scene: several dockers had dropped the loads they were carrying and were vomiting onto the flagstones of the quay; others were excreting a yellowish liquid at the feet of the cranes. So as not to lose their day’s pay, as soon as the attack was over, they staggered back to work. Those unaffected gave the sick men a wide berth, threatening them with chains and hooks if they tried to approach. The police were violently driving back a handful of women trying to break through the cordon to go to the aid of husbands or friends.

Onofre Bouvila carried on walking in the direction of Barceloneta. In those days, the majority of ships were still under sail. The port installations were also very rudimentary: the wharves did not allow ships to come alongside, but they were forced to moor by the stern. This meant that loading and unloading had to be done using lighters or launches. Swarms of these vessels plied the waters of the port at all hours, fetching and carrying goods. Old sailors with weather-beaten faces thronged the quays and nearby streets, usually wearing trousers rolled up to the knee, striped jerseys, and Phrygian caps. They smoked cane pipes, drank liquor, ate salt meat and hard tack, and sucked avidly on lemons. They had few words to say to others, and avoided all contact, but talked to themselves the whole time. They were quarrelsome, but more often than not were accompanied by a dog, parrot, turtle or some other pet animal on which they lavished care and attention.

In fact, theirs was a tragic destiny: having gone to sea as cabin boys, by the time they returned to their native land they were old men, bound to it only in their memories. Their rootless existence prevented them from having a family or long-lasting friends. Now they were back, they felt like strangers. However, unlike real foreigners, who can more or less adapt to the customs of the country receiving them, these old tars carried the burden of memories distorted by the passage of so many years, so many idle hours wasted in fostering dreams and projects. Faced with a changed reality, these idealised memories made it impossible for them to adapt to the present. To avoid this mismatch, some of them preferred to live out their days in a foreign port, far from their homeland.

Such was the case of an almost one-hundred-year-old seadog called Sturm. No-one knew where he came from, but he had become famous in Barceloneta, where he now lived. He spoke a tongue no-one could understand, not even the professors in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, where his neighbours had once taken him. His entire capital consisted of a wad of banknotes that none of the Barcelona banks was willing to exchange, but since it was a very large bundle, people thought he must be rich, and the neighbourhood shops and bars gave him credit. It was said he wasn’t a Christian, that he worshipped the sun, and that he kept a pet seal or manatee in his room with him.

Barceloneta was a fishing village that had grown up in the eighteenth century outside the walls of Barcelona. Subsequently absorbed into the city, it had undergone a process of rapid industrialisation, and now contained the main shipyards. Walking along there, Onofre Bouvila came across a group of cheerful, plump women laughing as they sorted the day’s catch. Encouraged by this apparent good humour, he went up to them to seek information. Maybe these women can tell me where I might find work, he thought. Women will be more forthcoming with a youngster like me. He soon discovered his mistake: what he had taken for cheerfulness was in fact a nervous tic that made the fishwives laugh uncontrollably for no reason. Deep down inside they were bitter about life, and seethed with anger: without warning they would brandish their knives and throw lobsters and crabs at each other. Seeing this, Onofre took to his heels. He had no better luck when he tried to sign on as a seaman aboard one of the vessels unaffected by the quarantine. When he approached one of these craft, the sailors leaning on the gunwale advised him not to do so. “Don’t climb on board lad, if you don’t want to die,” they warned him, and told him they were all suffering from scurvy. As proof, they showed hi