A servant's tale

""Ruina! Ruina!" my grandfather, Isidro Sanchez, had scrawled at the end of his farewell note to my grandmother, which, she recounted, in a voice still astonished after all the passing years, he had written only an arm's length from where she sat mending a tear in the shirt he was to wear the next morning when he had been summoned to see Antonio de la Cueva, the proprietor of the sugar plantation of Malagita, to answer, among other serious questions, why he had not fulfilled his cane quota and therefore could not guarantee his rent for the coming year."