Rice and tartana

The industrious Valencia and the popular festivals, serve as the setting for Arroz y tartana, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, a novel that tells the struggle between traditional commerce and the incipient market of the Stock Exchange.
Manuela is the heiress of a family of industrialists who made wealth with laborious work, and prudent investments. As a young man she married out of spite to a shop assistant. After being widowed and receiving her voluminous inheritance, she marries an attractive skull with which she quickly squanders her fortune.
In their environment many covet quick gains in the stock market. They wish to flaunt their riches in public: to wear expensive cars, to wear French clothes, and to have butlers, ignorant of the tragedy that lies ahead.

“At three o’clock in the afternoon Doña Manuela entered the Market Square, wrapped the airy bust in a coat whose skirts almost reached the edge of the skirt, carefully gloved, with the almoner in her fist and her face veiled by the faint blonde of the mantilla.
Behind her, forming a silent couple, marched the coachman and the maid: a brat with a cheeky and shaved face who breathed brutal jocularity, wearing with as much satisfaction as pregnancy the heavy borceguíes, the blue suit with bright reds and golden buttons and the rubber cap of wide plate, and next to him a brunette and pretty girl, With impeller hairstyle and pearl needles, completing this headdress of the garden his mixed suit, in which the ornaments of the city were mixed with those of the countryside.
The coachman, with a huge basket in his hand and a door no less on his back, had the resigned and pained expression of the beast that senses the load. The girl also carried a basket of white wicker, whose lids moved to the rhythm of the march, making the interior sound hollow; But he did not care about her, attentive only to look with a frown at the overly curious passers-by or to walk sullen glances from the lady to the coachman or vice versa. When, turning the corner, the three entered the Market Square, Doña Manuela stopped as if disoriented.”

Fragment of the work

Reference edition: Valencia, Editorial Prometeo, 1919.