NOTEBOOK

By dint of saving and scraping and picking up a duro (5 pesetas in the old money) here and a duro there the peons his great-great-grandfather had taken over in Sort had slowly scraped together enough capital to organize their own class system. At the top a few pear-shaped men, with long fingernails to prove they did no work, owned a hundred or so cork oaks and grew sweet peppers, cabbages and maize on a few hundred acres of land. At the bottom of this pyramid the village muleteer, self-employed and therefore working  for half the minimum wage decreed by the state, had trained his mule to deposit its manure only at the door of the inn, for which he received a glass of wine twice a day.

Norman Lewis, Voices of the Old Sea.