66 ALBACORA 



the way to the hospital, I turned to Mario and asked 

 him where he lived. At once his wide smile vanished. 

 The smiles on the faces of his wife and children van- 

 ished, too. I had the uncomfortable feeling of having 

 fed him a straight line. As Mario prepared to answer, 

 I prepared to flinch. 



"Soon me no house," Mario told me readily. He 

 pointed toward his wife's considerable stomach. "Soon 

 me cinco nifios. Me wife, me brother, me mother-wife 

 live with me. No house soon. Muy malo." 



"Mother-wife," said Jo Manning, "that must mean 

 mother-in-law." 



"Is it a big house?" I asked him. 



"No big," Mario said. 



"How many rooms are in it?" 



It took a while before Mario understood, but when 

 he did, he told me that there were just three rooms for 

 the seven of them. The problem, he explained at length, 

 was this: the landlord wanted cash and so had put the 

 house up for sale. Mario could not afford to buy the 

 house. In Iquique, since business had been bad, so many 

 houses had been permitted to fall apart from sheer rot 

 that there was a severe housing shortage. 



In what I hoped was intelligible Spanish, I asked 

 Mario, "How much costs la casa?" 



"Twenty thousand pesos," he said, hurriedly, like 

 a man who has been waiting impatiently to deliver a 

 sure-fire punch line. 



