The Inhabitants
The flat roof is inhabited by a debtor that is always imagining ingenious ways to evade his creditors, and by a poor black cat that is always been tortured by a cruelly ingenious mouse.
The third floor is inhabited by a clumsy thief who's always stealing useless things and his long-suffering wife. Next door, there are a family with three mischievous young boys.
In the second floor there lives an elderly woman that's always having trouble with the animals she buys or adopts (usually dogs, but she also had others, including a whale), and a hopeless tailor with a lot of nerve (before this, a crazy scientist lived there with his monster, in an obvious parody of the monster of Frankenstein).
In the first floor dwell an incompetent veterinarian with an equally impossible clientele, and an overcrowded guesthouse run by a stingy woman.
In the ground, there's a grocery run by Mr. Senén, a distrustful and stingy man who's always cheating on his clients with the weight and genuiness of his merchandise (though sometimes he does get his comeuppance). At his side, there's the porter's lodge with its gossiping porter. Mr. Hurón lives in the sewer's entrance in front of the building, and is often seen chatting with the porter or fending off the hazards which come with living in the sewer.
Lastly, there's the elevator. Through inanimate, the elevator's troubles are a running gag on the strip. Either it does not work properly, it's stolen, removed for repairs (and replaced with alternative elevation methods like a cannon or a bellow), or replaced by newer versions commissioned to a mixed list of builders (like a maker of chess pieces or a glassworker).
Sometimes, another of Ibañez characters, Rompetechos, also visits the building, mostly causing Mr. Hurón some form of grief.
Read more about this topic: 13, Rue Del Percebe
Famous quotes containing the word inhabitants:
“The inhabitants of the Cape generally do not complain of their “soil,” but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry their fish on.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)