• Ecos de verbena (VII): The picaresque who hid in the 'houses of malice'

  • Ecos de verbena (VI) The photographer who documented the miserable Madrid during the Franco regime

Manuela de Pablo

herself

recounted

, back in 1930, that, fed up with the fact that her administration never received a worthwhile award, she made up to four trips to Zaragoza, and that in all four she

was lucky enough to see the Pilarica with his red cloak

, "which is an infallible sign of fortune," he assured the journalist for the newspaper

Crónica,

who collected his statements. "I asked for some numbers that occurred to me without knowing why, I sold them at home and the Christmas jackpot was with me that year, this being the beginning of my fame as a lottery."

His meeting with the press also gave enough of itself that day to list

some of the most disconcerting superstitions

of his large clientele, including the ritual of a certain woman who detailed the following to his interlocutor:

-A very cute black kitten is brought, he makes it place up

to six different numbers

on the counter

, releases the cat, and the tenth on which the animal places one of its front legs first, that is the one that is carried.

-And does this trick work for you?

- the journalist wanted to know.

-It's not bad at all with him.

Look, there are months in which she is awarded in the three draws, all for the cat, according to her.


There was, however, a day when luck did not smile on Doña Manolita.

In 1937, the old establishment suffered

serious damage from the bombing of Madrid during the Civil War

.

The shells exploded the shop window of the establishment.

According to the newspaper

La Voz

, it was "a sieve" and the lottery lost more than two-thirds of its clientele.

Time had to pass for the scars to fade from his facade and, above all, from his memory.

Upon Manuela's death in 1951

, the administration, which claims to be the one that has distributed the most awards, passed into the hands of her sister Carmen, who died in 1917.

Since, according to what is established in the Law of Lottery Administrations, these

can only be passed from mothers to daughters

and, if there are no daughters, it passes to a son to whom no one can inherit, it was a son of Carmen, Alfredo, who later took over.

Today its owner is Juan Luis de Castillejo y Bermúdez de Castro, Count of Cabrillas, who keeps alive the history of the best-known administration in Spain.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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