📖✨ Una Cristiana por Emilia Pardo Bazán | Drama y Fe en la Literatura Clásica Española 🕊️❤️
In the heart of 19th-century Spain, where traditions and religious beliefs shaped every aspect of life, the story of ‘A Christian’ unfolds. This novel by the Countess of Emilia Pardo Bazán immerses us in an intense drama, where love, faith, and duty intertwine in unexpected ways. Join us as we discover how the decisions of a woman, caught between her religious devotion and her deepest feelings, challenge the norms of a rigid and conservative society. Chapter 1. You will see the subjects the State forced me to take in order to prepare for admission to the School of Civil Engineering. Of course, Arithmetic and Algebra; needless to say, Geometry. In addition, Trigonometry and Analytics; and finally, Descriptive and Differential Calculus. Then pinned together, if I am to be frank, French-speaking; and basted, very quickly, the English, because I didn’t want to get my teeth into the German teacher even as a joke: Gothic characters inspired a deep respect in me. Next, the endless “drawings”: the linear, the topographical, and also the landscape, which I suppose is intended so that, while handling the theodolite and the staff, a civil engineer can innocently amuse himself by scratching some picturesque view in his album, no more and no less than the _mises_ when they travel. The short course followed the entrance, so called in diminutive so as not to frighten us. It only includes four subjects to whet our appetite: Integral Calculus, Rational Mechanics, Physics, and Chemistry. During the year of the short course, we didn’t get involved in any more drawings; But in the next one, which was the first of the degree itself, we had to do—apart from going into depth on Construction Materials, Applied Mechanics, Geology, and Stereotomy—two new little drawings: the pen drawing, “of solids,” and “washing.” I wasn’t one of the most exaggeratedly _nerdy_ students, but since I wasn’t one of the slowest either, although it’s a shame for me to say so, I knew how to hammer the iron as it should be hammered, and to resort to patience and tenacity in subjects where, while the exercise of understanding isn’t enough, you have to force the automatism of memory. I had some stumbles, as it’s not easy to avoid them when following a degree in which the screws are deliberately squeezed on the students, with the aim of getting just the right number to fill the vacant places. Give or take a year, success was guaranteed, and my mother, who financed my studies with the help of her only brother, bore my failures with relative resignation, as much as her character allowed, knowing that they weren’t many, and that upon graduating as a fully-fledged engineer, they had the nine thousand in their pockets… and subsistence allowance. Not all the setbacks were of the kind that can be avoided, even with the greatest diligence in the world. One year I was ill with anemia, later complicated by smallpox; and this incident and others that are irrelevant will explain how, enjoying a reputation as a studious young man and a moderately cultured person, I found myself at the age of twenty-one studying for the second year of my degree; that is, missing three years to finish it. The previous year, or rather the first year of the degree itself, I was forced to drop some subjects for the September exams. I attribute this incident, always unpleasant, to the malevolent influence of a certain inn where I stayed due to the temptation of the devil. The time I spent there left me with indelible memories that bring laughter to my lips and glimpses of indiscreet joy to my soul when I recall them. I’ll tell you something about this inn, and you can tell me if Archimedes himself would be capable of studying in such a burrow. There are still three or four houses in Madrid—for example, the Corralillos, the Cuartelillos, the Tócame Roque—very similar to the one I’m about to describe. Within its walls, the residents of a medium-sized town huddled together ; it had three patios with balconies, over which opened the doors of the hovels or cubbyholes, numbered on the lintels; and there was no shortage of shameless and quarrelsome tenants, its blind men intoning couplets to the sound of a discordant guitar, its neurotic cats running around From garret to garret and from railing to railing—sometimes prompted by amorous emotions, sometimes by some tremendous brick blow—her pots of carnations and basil, her diapers left to dry alongside tattered petticoats and patched shirts; in short, everything that abounds in this kind of den of the town and court, portrayed a thousand times by novelists and genre painters. The third floor from the right had been rented to Josefa Urrutia, from Biscay, former lady-in-waiting to the Marchioness of Torres Nobles, and former lady-in-waiting in another sense, because of “one of the mines.” Josefa ‘s flirtations had produced the usual results: at first, many endearments, then fruits of blessing without the priest’s, then boredom on the part of the seducer, tears on the part of the victim, abandonment, vows of revenge and plans of extermination, street scandals with the presentation of a baby in swaddling clothes, a complaint to the judge, and the latter’s ruling in favor of the victim, assigning a pension of six reales a day to each offspring. Except, by God! We were in very bad shape in terms of payment. By hook or by crook, today Father is in Montevideo and the bill hasn’t arrived; Tomorrow, the exchange rate on Spain is through the roof and impossible to turn around, the unfortunate Pepa would not have been able to fend for herself and raise the two children if she hadn’t had the happy idea of renting the aforementioned third floor, scraping a few pieces of furniture from the pawnshops and the Rastro, and with discarded sheets and pillows , a gift from the Marchioness, setting up the guesthouse, a nest of students and bedbugs. At first, business was average: cheating, cheating. Finally, Urrutia acquired a clientele, and when I moved into “the dining room alcove,” the establishment was at its peak: not a single room was unoccupied, and all guests paid honestly if they could, apart from a few bankruptcies, the origin of which I will reveal in great secret. The parlor, the best part of the room, was inhabited by a certain Don Julián, a Valencian, a joyful and cheerful man, a perpetual spendthrift, a lover of revelry and jokes, and an inveterate gambler. He said he was in Madrid pursuing a destiny, a destiny that never arrived; but the suitor lived like a prince, and instead of helping Pepa’s business with his pupilage money, it was whispered among us that he ate for free and even received from time to time a little hem destined to melt into the dangerous little skirt of the Jack of Hearts. These inward things and weaknesses of Pepa Urrutia would not have come to light as they are now being reported if it weren’t for the _green- eyed monster_, the sinful jealousy. The Biscayan woman, a pretty little neighbor who was quick to take the piss out of the border guests, was rabid with them, as I can attest. Spurred on by desperation, Pepa would scream without restraint, and there were “scamps, swindlers” here, and “if you had any shame, you’d pay me back what you’re sucking from me and what you owe me in no time.” In such cases, Don Julián would stuff his hands in his pockets, grit his teeth, and, as silent as a corpse, pace up and down the hall. This silence only inflamed the woman’s fury, and she would sometimes burst into nervous fits of tears; and after slapping the Valencian with the final insults, she would slam the door so hard that it echoed throughout the building. Then a stout, blond, bald man in his fifties, with a friendly and accommodating expression, would appear in the hallway and ask the angry landlady in a marked Portuguese accent: “Pepiña, who’s got it?” “I have nothing…” she would reply, bursting into the kitchen and muttering terrible curses in Basque. We heard her banging pots and pans, and soon the comforting squeal of the oil announced to us that, despite everything, potatoes and eggs were frying and lunch wasn’t far off. The bald, stout man who occupied the “patio room,” so named because it drew light from the main room of the house, was a doctor from El Puerto who had come to Spain to file a lawsuit against the Administration. for some slanderous rumor concerning a patronage. An enthusiastic admirer , like the Portuguese in general, of Spanish popular music , he spent the whole day in a chair near the balcony, dressed as scantily as possible, in his underwear and elastic—I must point out that this happened in the month of June—covering his bald head with a Scottish cap with two ribbons floating at the back, and strumming a guitar, to whose cat-like, off-key rhythm he sang the following lyrics: “Quiérimi sivillana — niña lousana — cándida flor qui al son di mi guitarra — pur ti palpita — mi corasaun…” Here he would interrupt his singing and look towards the small window of an ironing girl, rather ugly but no less lively and communicative. She was leaning out, laughing and winking. The Portuguese would exhale a sigh , exclaim in a stentorian voice, “Moy bunita,” and with double vigor he would torment the guitar, continuing the lyrics: “Oh, how pleasing is love, if there is an angelic soul. And how painful is it, if there is falsehood, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, flee from me, a fatal doubt!” The song over, he would take a straw flask, a box of matches, and a packet of cigarettes from the opening in the elastic . He hadn’t even lit the first one when a young man of about twenty-four, also a guest of Pepita’s, burst into the Portuguese’s room . His surname was Botello—I never thought to find out his given name—he was very handsome, of a good height; he wore his hair, not excessively long, but abundant and curly; He had a mulatto build, like Alexandre Dumas, with full red lips, a tiny mustache, bright eyes, and very fine brown skin, and we used to annoy him by calling him “Dumillas” all the time. Why had we, Pepa Urrutia’s guests, insisted that Botello was an artist? Today I don’t understand. Botello had never once made a brushstroke, nor destroyed a sonata, nor scribbled an article, nor perpetrated a sad drama, nor even a “toy” in one act, and yet we had it in our heads that Botello could be nothing but an artist, and a consummate artist. I suspect it was a conviction born—even more than from his original and sympathetic physiognomy, and his special way of life—from his defeated and mendicant way of dressing. He always wore a tight-fitting coat of blue cloth, which he called the “great fleece” because it had a wide, grimy collar around the neck and lapels, with its spotted sheepskin in front. This garment clung so tightly to his body that he went out in it, washed and shaved in it, and even threw it on his bed to sleep. His trousers were fringed; his boots had twisted heels, and the broken skin already revealed his sock, smeared with ink by Botello so that its indiscreet whiteness wouldn’t show through. Dumillas’s slender figure and handsome head, wrapped in such attire, hadn’t managed to lose all their charm; on the contrary, the almost rags, by adapting to his elegant torso, acquired a mysterious nobility. Another distinctive feature of Botello’s could be attributed to the artistic type: his happy indifference to life, his total contempt for work, his absolute ignorance of reality. Botello was the son of a magistrate and nephew of a magnate’s administrator. When Botello’s father died, the boy was left under the guardianship of his uncle, who housed him and gave him his five thousand reales a year for alimony, requiring only that he retire by midnight . He neither forced him to study nor did he try to educate him, and when he realized that the boy spent all his evenings at the gambling house or the flamenco café and returned home late and had a key to enter without being noticed, he raised a hue and cry, and instead of trying to correct him, he ignominiously threw him out of his home. Without a job or a salary, with twenty-one duros a month as his only cash, Botello rolled from boarding house to boarding house, each worse and more disastrous than the last, until in a gambling den he made the acquaintance of the The illustrious Don Julián, tyrant of Pepa Urrutia’s heart. Enticed by this friendship, he came to our inn. From then on, Botello had an exemplary curator in the Valencian. Don Julián was in charge of collecting the waiter’s allowance, and immediately afterward, he went to the gambling den to try his luck. If a windfall of one or two hundred pesos came his way, Botello’s twenty-one pesos would be religiously handed over, and he might even get a small tip. If luck was against him, Botello could sing the Mass for the Dead. Since he needed the money , the pupil would often get into a hell of a fight with his curator . “Let’s see, sir, what am I doing this month?” And then—in a providential apparition—Pepa would emerge in defense of her dear swindler, shrieking and threatening Botello. “Shut up… Shut up… I’ll wait… ” “Yes!” the wretch would respond; But the fact is, he hasn’t even left me a dime for tobacco . Pepa would reach into her purse and take out a shabby peseta: “Here… Buy a pack…” When Pepa’s pesetas were scarce—and even if they weren’t— Botello would resort to sneaking into the Portuguese man’s room as soon as he heard him strike the match to light the cigar; and between jokes and serious talk, half the pack would slip into the bohemian’s purse. The Portuguese, accustomed to Dumillas’s character and manners, whom he assured with profound faith that he was “muito artista,” never took issue with his antics, his prowling, and his depredations. On the contrary, it seemed that Botello’s pranks aroused inexplicable affection and benevolence in the guitar-playing doctor. And beware, because sometimes the bohemian’s pranks went completely overboard. I’ll mention one as an example. The Portuguese, forced to make visits and present recommendations to expedite the dispatch of his business, ordered a hundred highly glossy, lithographed cards, on which his name was written in beautiful cursive : “Miguel de los Santos Pinto.” Botello happened to see them and showed them to us around the rooms, amazed that a Portuguese man had so few surnames. He wanted to add at least: “Teixeira de Vasconcellos Palmeirim Junior de Santarem do Morgado das Ameixeiras,” to give a sense of character. We put it out of his head; but what he came up with next was even worse. Stealing my topographical pen and the India ink I used for my plans and drawings, he delicately wrote this little note beneath “Miguel de los Santos Pinto”: “Corno de Boy.” So as not to bother adding it to all the cards, he did so with only twenty-five, hiding the rest. The next day, the Lusitanian went out on a visit and handed out ten or twelve of the cards Botello had added. The following Sunday, he ran into an acquaintance on Arenal Street , who stopped him and asked, stifling a laugh: “But Don Miguel, are you really called Corno de Boy? Is there that surname in your country? ” “Me?” the Lusitanian responded, annoyed. “My name is Santos Pinto, and that’s all. ” “Well, look at this card. ” “Let’s see… let’s see…” the poor man muttered. ” And that’s it!” he exclaimed , astonished , upon reading the postscript. “It must be some mistake on the part of the lithographer,” his friend suggested maliciously. But Don Miguel didn’t buy it, and as soon as he got home, he showed the card to Botello, demanding a full account of the mess he had made. The great scoundrel made such fervent protestations of innocence that he managed to turn suspicions toward me. “Don’t you see,” he said, “that the ink and pen used to write that are in Sallust’s room? Don’t trust dead flies. The one who seems more serious…” As a result of this Machiavellian trick, I, who never interfered with the benign Portuguese, was the only guest he regarded with caution and suspicion. I firmly believe that his blindness was voluntary, since he couldn’t have left himself with the slightest doubt about Botello’s other pranks . One day, playing dominoes with his victim, Botello had the skill to give him a paper crown with donkey ears, so that the ironing nymph, who was peeping into the air, would burst into laughter. It was happening in the room. Another time he pinned paper tails to his coattails, and so Pinto went out into the street, the laughingstock of the scoundrels. Nevertheless, the Portuguese’s indulgence toward the bohemian was never denied. When Botello lacked the cash to pay for admission to a dance, he would go to Don Miguel and demand half a duro. Then he would exert his eloquence to convince him that he should let his hair down and accompany him to the little dance. When the Portuguese refused, claiming not to displease the ironer, Botello would reply by calling him a “panoli” (a fool); and since the Portuguese didn’t understand the word and seemed somewhat annoyed, the bohemian made a gesture of returning the half-dollar. “Take it, take it, since you’re angry with me,” exclaimed the lizard. ” My dignity doesn’t allow me to accept favors from someone who views me unfavorably.” “Aren’t you angry? ” “I can never be angry with you,” declared the Portuguese, forcing the coin into his hand. And turning to those of us who were watching the scene, he said with the kindest smile I have ever seen on a human face, “This boy… very artistic!” Then he went back to his window to pick at his little guitar. ” Come on, agree on this: there is no possibility of devoting oneself to arduous, abstract, daily study in a house where incidents like those I have mentioned occur constantly . The laughter alternating with daydreams; the running around in the corridors; the constant comings and goings of lazy people who, unable to kill time, are plotting how to waste it for the diligent ones; the irregularity of meal and dinner hours; the easy, trusting manner with which we all squeezed into each other’s rooms—” Staying up late and waking up at odd hours are not effective aids for the tasks of the Civil School. On the other hand, the contagion of jokes and gossip is inevitable at my age. There were other university students there, from Forestry, from Architecture; none of them were prodigious performers. I might have beaten them all; but since my subjects were more difficult, the fact is that that year I was stuck until September and had to spend the holidays in Madrid without enjoying the fresh breezes of my homeland. That summer would have been a boring, interminable one, if it weren’t for the presence of such rebellious and playful people, and if it weren’t for the Portuguese, eternal martyr of Botello’s inexhaustible good humor and chronic sycophancy. When there was no way to pass the afternoon, Dumillas would snap his fingers and say to us, shaking his handsome, sweaty head to push back the jet-black mane of hair that was suffocating him: “Let’s play a _saracinada_ on Corno de Boy. Who’s going to help me catch bedbugs? ” “Catch bedbugs? ” “My goodness. Let’s see if you can make a little cone and fill it with big, fat bedbugs, really full. Medium-sized ones are no good. Make them first-rate ones.” Each of us went to our rooms to go on this strange hunt. Unfortunately, the hunt wasn’t difficult. If we even scrutinized our mattresses or under our pillows, we’d gather a dozen disgusting creatures without much effort . We paid tribute to the inventor of the devilry, and he’d gather everyone’s bedbugs in a single box . As soon as we realized that the Portuguese was going to bed, in the dark, barefoot and suppressing our laughter, we would station ourselves at the door of his room. As soon as Don Miguel began to snore, Botello would gently lift the latch, and since the headboard of the bed was right next to the frame of the door, the devilish artist needed nothing more than to uncover the cone and scatter the bugs contained in the cardboard over the sleeper’s face and head. This operation completed, Botello would cautiously close the door, and we, huddled together and pinching each other in sheer excitement, would wait for the pitched battle to begin. Not two minutes had passed when we heard the Portuguese stirring. First we heard truncated and unintelligible phrases, then Clear interjections, then the flashing of a match and the bewildered repetition of the word “I believe!” We came hypocritically, asking if he was sick, if anything was wrong. “I believe!” the good man would reply. ” I believe! Persevejos here, persevejos there! I believe! Irra!” The next day we proposed to change his room, and so he did, hoping to find a remedy for his ills; only, as we repeated the hunt, the farce was also repeated. With such tiresome banter we cheated the heatwave; and what astonishes me most is that it didn’t even occur to the blessed Portuguese, the target of them all, to change his lodgings, or to one day slap his executioner across the neck. When I passed the subjects I still had to complete in September, I needed to make a forceful appeal to the higher power of the soul, that is, to the will, to resolve to do what I thought best suited the Lusitanian: to change my lodgings. The lure of laziness and the easygoing lifestyle; the entertaining nature of Botello’s company, for whom it was impossible not to feel a certain pity very similar to tenderness; the very defects and inconveniences of that inn were making me more attached to it than was just right. However, my reason won the battle. “Life is a treasure, and we shouldn’t squander it on childishness and insipid jokes,” I thought as I packed my things to go somewhere else with my music. “If that unfortunate Botello is a sleepwalker and has decided to die in the hospital, I, on the other hand, am determined to have a career, take it seriously, and be free and in control of my actions. ” There are nothing here but dreamers and people predestined to anonymous misery. Let’s go where there’s work. Nevertheless, the farewell weighed on my heart a little. Pepa was weeping profusely for such a good guest, who paid religiously and never “made me feel sorry even this much.” My eyes didn’t moisten, but, I repeat, I felt sorry, as if I were leaving very dear people, as I hugged Botello and squeezed the hand of the good-natured Portuguese. As I walked behind the porter carrying my trunk, I made the following reflections to explain my emotion: “This picturesque irregularity, this predominance of sentiment and humor, and this disregard for reality that I notice in Pepa Urrutia’s house and guests are attractive because they constitute a form of the romanticism innate in our race, a romanticism from which I also suffer. This house resembles a family institution, based not on socialist communion, but on a lack of gall and salt in their heads. I have met several people there who, despite being excellent, do not have and will never have an ounce of judgment or common sense. For this reason, I suspect that I will miss them very much in the early days; that I will always remember them with nostalgia, and that, as the years go by, even the bedbugs will seem poetic and precious to me. However, I am worth more than what I leave behind, because I am capable of leaving it behind. And I consoled myself with the pride of considering myself more formal and positive than the Biscayan’s pupils. Chapter 2. My longings lasted less than I feared. Each being prefers its natural element, and mine was not the disorder, the gibberish of the bohemian inn. My new inn was located on Calle del Clavel: a sunny, four-roomed inn with rooms not as shabby as those offered for thirteen reales a day. The landlady was also from Biscay, as half the landladies in Spain are; but quite different from Pepa Urrutia: spotless, an excellent cook of cod with tomato, tripe, paella, and other tasty national cuisine, and free of devastating passions, at least when they were visible, which is why all the guests settled their accounts or left quickly. In Doña Jesusa’s house—because she was of a mature age, we called her ” doña”—the beds, although rickety and narrow, were clean; the maid from Arganda often made Sabbaths; in the hallway outside the kitchen, a caged goldfinch sang; on Christmas Eve, they ate almond and sea bream soup, and there were also, in short, certain touches of humble well-being and bourgeois peace. It’s true that everything was very tight and just: usually, the five or six students who sat at the table left feeling unsatisfied, because the food was limited. I don’t want to complain about the chocolate, which was a blackened brick paste ; nor about the leathery tortilla; nor about the apples and pears for dessert, which seemed to be molded in wax, judging by the abstention we observed with them. “They should have at least given us the dessert for those sentenced to death: raisins and almonds,” said my countryman Luis Portal, who was, in all seriousness, quite the joker. I’ll also overlook the eternal monotony of the pasta soup, described by Luis as “alphabetical” or “astronomical,” depending on whether it represented letters or stars. I’ll dispense with the meagerness of the stew, with its bacon hidden behind a chickpea and already cut into portions so that a single guest wouldn’t gobble up the others’ portions; and I won’t reveal the worms in the fish or the flaccidity of the meat. At my age, it’s rare for sybaritism and gluttony to cause much trouble. On the other hand, on each pupil’s name day or on very important holidays with a grand opening, Doña Jesusa would treat us to a stew that she had devoted all her senses to, and then we would get even. Doña Jesusa always observed the classic days and distinguished them with some refinement at the table, and these extraordinary occasions helped to overcome the usual narrowness, mimicking the pleasant alternatives of the domestic home. Luis Portal, who was the son of a coffee grower from Orense and very pampering and skillful, devised that we could, without great expense, have coffee morning and afternoon. He bought a six-cup coffeepot at the Rastro; using the same means, he procured a grinder; he procured the finest roasted and unground coffee, two pounds of brown sugar, and dividing the costs pro rata, the delicious concoction was indeed very cheap. If only we could get down to half a glass of Fine or Mono… But that was where we’d hit the wall; our resources weren’t enough. The cognac was ruinous. Portal had a bottle brought from home at the bottom of his trunk; we imposed on ourselves the obligation to drain it, drinking only a thimbleful, and the rule was so well observed that after two days we could see the bottom of the bottle. In short, and to be honest: at Doña Jesusa’s house, one could study. There were hours, silence, stillness. Occasionally, our landlady would scold the maid; but this familiar and expected noise failed to distract us. Each one according to the extent of his or her abilities, we all studied, trying not to have to excuse ourselves when the teachers questioned us. The Machine Teacher inspired a bit of fear in us, due to his great fondness for going fishing, that is, altering the established order to ask questions about the lesson. I’ve already said that I didn’t stand out among my classmates for being extremely diligent, nor did Luis Portal: we both managed to exercise our understanding, skillfully bringing it to the surface, not letting it succumb under the weight of memory, because we feared the special depression that these arid and rigorous studies cause in poor minds, which Luis called “the mathematical wormhole.” On the other hand, two of the boys who lived with us were so exhausted and exhausted that we feared that if they finished their studies, they might end up in a hovel. One of them was a Cuban, endowed with a prodigious memory. With the help of this inferior faculty, but so indispensable and so capable of covering up the shortcomings of the intellect, he devoured books, and as long as it wasn’t a question of reasoning, or adding or subtracting from the text, he presented himself with admirable brilliance. However, the slightest objection, the slightest interruption, any of those circumstances that require an appeal to intelligence, would kill him; everything would become confused, and there was no way for him to answer straight, even to the simplest question. Portal called him “the little parrot,” and laughed a lot at his calmness, his languid tone, at seeing him always shivering, even over the brazier. When he let out In books, the Antillean was like a bird loosed from a lead collar. Then, lacking the mental vigor necessary to gracefully handle the weights and iron bars of the exact sciences, the poor exile displayed the trappings of a brilliant imagination, all light and color, or rather, all sequins and will-o’-the-wisps. In his mouth, the most vulgar phrase took on poetic form; it rhymed without meaning it and in a sing-song lilt; he could spend an hour speaking in well-measured and harmonious verse; but the satirist Portal said that the Cuban’s verses had exactly as much artistic value as the music we compose and hum while absentmindedly spreading shaving soap over our cheeks, and that they made the same sense read from top to bottom as from bottom to top. “Let’s call it the mockingbird, instead of the parrot,” she would add every time the Cuban foisted his poetic strings of glass beads on us, which usually happened after he’d stuffed himself with coffee. The other regular was a man from Zamora, with a narrow forehead and a dull mind, an orphan of both father and mother, who was pursuing his education at the expense of an octogenarian grandmother, already paralyzed, who had told him: “I don’t want to die until you’re a man and have finished your studies and secured your future.” A very thin thread tied the old woman to this world , and the young man understood this and displayed a silent and ferocious energy. Just as the Cuban plowed with his memory, the man from Zamora did so with his will in perpetual tension. His limited faculties forced him to work twice as hard; For him, there were no Saturday nights , no Sunday parties, no walks, no correspondence with girlfriends, nothing, nothing but the book, the eternal book, equation after equation , problem up and problem down, without a moment of discouragement, without a single missed visit, without a single day’s excuse. “Have you seen that animal, he never misses a beat?” my countryman would tell me. “He’s going to be an engineer before us… if he doesn’t give it his all. Because he’s very thin and sometimes his hands get feverish. I notice he has bad breath; his stomach’s definitely not working anymore. Of course, no exercise, no distractions… Salustiño, it’s good to get ahead, but you also have to look out for number one.” I got along very well with Luis Portal, eventually forming a close friendship, although our ideas and aspirations were very different. Portal liked to present himself as a shrewd and practical man, or at least he gave indications that he would be when he reached the age at which an individual’s moral complexion is established. We didn’t differ entirely in our criteria: we had common dogmas: Portal, like me, declared himself a supporter of self-help; he abhorred tutelage and impositions; he believed that a man should be self-sufficient and take advantage of his early youth to prepare for days of freedom or prosperity for manhood . “We don’t look Galician,” he would sometimes tell me, “because of the activity we display in everything.” I would point out to him the emigrant and adventurous spirit that has developed among Galicians recently here. “Disabuse yourself,” he would repeat stubbornly, “we’re more Catalan than Galician, kid.” If my friend and I were very similar in our understanding of the direction of life , we were not so similar in our appreciation of life’s main purpose. Portal used to present the following program: “Kid, I’m not going to mess around with nonsense or fool around. I’ll try to earn money to laugh at the world. Spending years amidst scarcity and privation is a joke. My father is D. Alejandro through and through; he doesn’t spare a cent; and at this point I’m unaware of the taste of many good things. I don’t know if, through professional means, I’m on the way to tasting them; it seems to me that, as far as profit goes, politicians and businessmen are better at it than scientists: it’s true that one isn’t declared incompatible with the other, and that Sagasta is an engineer. Anyway, let me have my hands free, and I’ll manage. Either I’m a fool, or I’ll get out of poverty. Applauding Portal’s gallant resolution, I understood that my dreams of The future was different from his own. Portal understood by ” good things” eating sumptuously, drinking rich wines, smoking superb tobacco, perhaps supporting a beautiful sinner, perhaps marrying a pretty and well-off young lady; I, without disdaining these goods, did not specifically aspire to any of them, but only to freedom, sensing that with it would come something very beautiful and worthy of being savored and enjoyed, but not in the purely material sense: something that could be glory, celebrity, passion, adventure, millions, command, home, children, travel, struggles, even misfortune; but that in the end would be life, a complete life worthy of the rational being, who is not to be reduced to vegetating or gorging himself on pleasures, but must run the entire scale of thought, feeling, and action. I couldn’t define what my hopes consisted of; But it would seem to me that I was diminishing them if I reduced them to something positive and sensual, like my friend Luis. This didn’t mean I considered myself a visionary, an enthusiast, or a dreamer. I understood, on the contrary, that if my forehead sometimes rose toward the clouds, my feet remained firmly on the ground, and that all my actions were those of a man determined to forge a path without being seduced by the sirens of enthusiasm. If our individualist creed had certain points of contact, in the collectivist one, Portal and I were more at odds. We were both republicans, understandably; but he was a Castelarian, self-important, opportunistic, almost monarchical by dint of concessions, and I was a radical, one of Pí’s followers, convinced that in Spain it is not permissible to compromise even a single point with the past; on the contrary, we must resolutely and once and for all embark on the path of profound and progressive transformation. “These compromises are ruining us; they are disastrous,” I objected. Transaction, in this case, is equivalent to deception. It’s called transaction, not to say capitulation and defeat. If our grandparents, those honorable people from 12 to 40, had played it cool and treated it with care, we’d be in a fine place now. The moment of extirpating a young wen hurts, and economic disturbances ensue, but the extirpated wen remains. I don’t understand this obsession with temporizing with yesterday, with absolute and fanatical Spain. Your “illustrious leader”—we used to call Castelar that—is a playboy, fond of pleasing duchesses, crowned heads, and that’s what he calls preserving tradition. Just a bunch of talk. Fortunately, neither the French in 1993, nor we later on, followed that method. Let me tell you the stories. At the rate we’re going, in a few years Spain will once again be populated with convents. It’s absurd to tolerate such a ruse, and even to protect it, as our very liberal government does. The Jesuits have another go at spreading their net; every now and then they tighten the mesh a little more. Any day now they’ll have us completely engulfed . Of course, the fat cats, once they get their cleavage on, couldn’t care less what comes next. The flood will follow me, as Louis XV’s old friend said. It’s beyond any reasonable understanding that to weaken and uproot an institution like the Monarchy, you start by consolidating it, flattering it, gently implanting it in the hearts of the people. I’m not buying that lure of compromise. Don’t give me that “shit.” Portal bridled and replied no less forcefully. “Well, you’re naive, to say the least. Those who think like you are just sucking their thumbs. With your system, in a word, we’d have the Carlists in turmoil again, and Spain a hive of mountaineering parties. I don’t want to think about what would happen to your famous federation either.” Two months after the establishment of the Galician canton, there was no way out: we all wanted to command and no one obeyed. If you start by hurting and wounding the feelings of a nation, the disarray that followed the September Revolution is bound to ensue. Disabuse yourself, Castelar, you’re a long shot. This is the minority of a Republic, not that of a King. Let the Republic fall on us , like a ripe pear… “That’s a different story… What everyone here wants is to continue ruling… Chacho, there is no ideal, that genre is finished. And we need to revive it, believe me…” “Stop with the ideals and the nonsense,” Portal replied, getting angry. “It’s because of ideals that all the damage comes to us. There’s no ideal but peace, and little by little, sorting out this whole mess.” Another topic of contention was regionalism. I wasn’t messing around : I wanted the independence of Galician territory. We would discuss annexation to Portugal: we would decide what was most convenient; but Portugal also had an interest in shaking up its old, Churrigueresque Monarchy and assenting to the “Iberian federation.” “I don’t know what it would give if you could see that filthy ideal realized in just twenty-four hours,” Luis exclaimed. “What happens in Galicia, if it were declared as a canton, not even the devil would stop it. ” Consider one thing: in Spain, administrative bodies… am I speaking correctly or not ? The smaller they are, the worse. The central government, as you call it, makes a thousand blunders: the provincial councils make two thousand; the town mayors, three thousand; and the village mayors, a million… Fortunately, talking about Galician independence is like talking about the sea with fish and sand. –So, according to you, the provinces don’t have the right to say, like individuals, _each one for himself_? –Look, leave me with the rights. Arguing about rights in this matter is going off on a tangent. With rights and andromenae, I’m capable of proving to you that now the true queen of Spain is Isabel II, and that her grandson has usurped the throne. In rational politics, there are no rights or mumbo jumbo. There is what is convenient and inconvenient, there is right and wrong, there is a flair and a tact that I cannot explain to you , but which are manifested in the results. With radical ideas, one descends into the logic of the absurd. Don’t apply algebra to politics. And forget about independence. The Spanish homeland is an indisputable reality, even if you think it isn’t. Irritated by this contradiction, he used to exclaim: “What a vain antiquity this patriotic thing is. The great thinkers laugh at the idea of patriotism. You won’t deny this.” ” Tell those great thinkers to go and think in a manger. If they gradually suppress the springs that have always moved humanity, we’ll run out of excuses even to live.” You know I’m not sentimental, but the homeland is like a family; damn if you need to resort to poetry and sentimentality to love it and defend it to the death. You fix everything by taking the Christ out of the antiquity. Because antiquities are inevitable, and necessary, and convenient. We live on antiquities. And this antiquity of the homeland isn’t the only one we carry in our blood. There are countless others, kid, that we won’t let go of even in twenty centuries. I believe that here, to foster ideas that will replace the antiquities, what’s needed is to interbreed with other races; all of us who are a little enlightened, let’s marry foreign women!… Sometimes, over these metaphysical arguments, we would get into a great fight and shout loudly, after dinner or while eating our stew. As a rule, these disputes instilled in us a greater desire for communication and intellectual contact; Insensibly, arguing, we clung to one another, convinced that, even though we held different opinions, we were capable of understanding each other and of giving each other a little of our hearts. We had become inseparable. We helped each other study; we went for walks together, even when Luis went to visit the house of a certain snobby girlfriend he’d found; we sat together at the table at the Levante café; together, when some realejos were dancing in our pockets, we went to our favorite entertainment, the paradise of the Teatro Real. All the students staying at Doña Jesusa’s house were philharmonic students; we all loved the Africana or the Huguenots, especially the Cuban, a furious music lover who suffered from fits of musical epilepsy. His admirable memory was no less impressive for notation. for the rhyming word, and we would amuse ourselves, on our way back, by making him hum the entire opera. “Trinidad,” we would say to him, because that was the Cuban’s name, “come on, sing us the love duet, by Vasco and Selika. ” “Trinidad, the daggers. ” “Trini, the _o paradiso_.” “Trinidad, that thing about _coprefuoco_.” “Come on, Trinito, the Protestant psalm… Here, the entrance of the violins… the notes of the oboe, when Marcelo comes out.” The mockingbird trilled everything we asked him to, repeating with astonishing accuracy the slightest details of the instrumentation. Finally, tired by now, he would say to us in a pleading tone: “Let me go to bed, this is already sounding like a song.” Chapter 3. One morning, or rather one afternoon, almost at the end of the school year, we rushed out of school, and as always, we made a great run from Calle del Turco to Calle del Clavel, because it’s worth noting that from eight o’clock, the time we had our breakfast of baked clay chocolate , until one-thirty, when drawing ended, the classes went on and on, leaving us with nothing to sustain ourselves with except the occasional ensaimada (a type of pastry) we’d sneakily buy from the doorman, or a crust of bread we’d sneak from home to take with us as provisions. Sniffing at our lunch, we went upstairs two by two. Upon entering the dining room, I was surprised to find myself face to face with my uncle Felipe, who said to me without preamble: “Today you’re coming with me to lunch at Fornos. I imagine the bucolic scene is pretty much on the cards here. ” “I’d be happy to go… But there’s so much to study these days,” I replied, playing hard to get. “Bah!” You don’t lose a year for a day off. Come on, we have to talk… about many things,” he added with a certain mystery. The truth is, and it wouldn’t do me any good to disguise it, for it must stand out in the course of this narrative, that I never felt anything like sympathy or respect for my uncle Felipe; not even a hint of affection, not even gratitude for the benefits he bestowed upon me; on the contrary! I know I’m testifying against myself, and that ingratitude is the ugliest vice; but I also know that I’m not ungrateful by nature; and in order to justify myself, or at least explain myself, I will sketch the physical and moral profile of my uncle Felipe, for which I need to refer to some background information, some of which has the appearance of a family secret. My given name is Salustio; my two paternal surnames are Meléndez Ramos; my maternal surnames are Unceta Cardoso. Unceta clearly states that my mother’s father was Basque, from Guipuzcoa, to be exact; and Cardoso… The crux of the matter lies in Cardoso. It seems that these Cardosos de Marín—I was born in Pontevedra, and my mother’s family lived in the small port of Marín—were a branch broken off from the Portuguese stock of Cardozo Pereira, an Israeli by origin. How did the rumor reach me that my maternal grandmother’s parents were Jewish? Go find out who educates children! One day, when I was nine or ten years old, I couldn’t contain myself, and I asked my mother: “Mama, is it true that you and I are of Jewish stock?” She, with her eyes blazing, raised her hand and smacked me in the face, exclaiming: “You black man if you say that again! I’ll slam you against the wall.” The impression that the punishment made on me was that the Jewish stock was a stain; And two or three years later, when one of my classmates at the Pontevedra Institute threw it in my face, shouting: “Cardoso, Cardoso, you deceitful Jew,” I raised the slate I was carrying under my arm and smashed it in his face. I can assure you that I don’t know when what they call a religious crisis occurred in me , that is, that period in which young people examine their beliefs, pass them through a mysterious sieve, and finally throw them away, feeling the pain of losing their faith as if a wisdom tooth had been pulled. I don’t think that for me there was such a transition, nor such agonies of doubt, nor such remorse and nostalgia when contemplating a Gothic church. I was an unbeliever by nature and I entered, if not into atheism, at least into indifference, as my own territory. I was not “perverted” by reading any particular book, nor by conversation with people “with bad ideas”; no one “opened my eyes”; I imagine I brought them into this world already open. Just as it would be impossible for many young people to specify under what circumstances they lost their innocence of spirit in sexual matters, it is impossible for me to pinpoint the point at which my faith began to waver, since I don’t remember ever having had it very lively and solid. I believe I was born a rationalist. But here comes the strange thing: despite this being true, the insult of ” cheating Jew” always remains fixed in my soul, like the poisoned iron of a wild arrow. My classmates never dared repeat it in my presence; I, however, never forgot it. As I was about to finish high school, and already tall and lanky, I became friends with a certain Wenceslao Viñal, an eccentric but knowledgeable individual, something of a bookworm, erudite in bizarre details, and up to date with a thousand odd things about Galician archaeology, epigraphy, and historiography. This fellow lent me old books and sometimes took me for walks in the outskirts of Pontevedra, in search of picturesque views and ruined buildings. Being a diligent boy, I riddled him with questions. One afternoon it occurred to me that Viñal could clear up my doubts about the Jewish question, and steeling myself, I said to him: “Listen, Don Wenceslao, is it true that there are families in Marín descended from Jews, and one of them is the Cardoso family? ” “Indeed,” the bibliophile replied placidly, not even noticing my eagerness to ask. They’re families originally from Portugal. In Marín, they’re very disliked: they say they haven’t renounced their religion, that they still follow the Mosaic rite, that they move on Saturdays instead of Sundays, and that they won’t eat a piece of bacon even if they’re skinned. “And you believe that? ” “To me, it’s nonsense and old wives’ tales: I mean, the whole thing about still observing the Mosaic rite now. These people can’t deny that they come from a Jewish family . If I have time, I still have to rummage through some old papers and unearth a Juan Manuel Cardoso Muiño, a native of Marín, to whom the Inquisition of Santiago administered a few turns of the handcuffs and a few hundred lashes for being a Judaizer. He was also “a leper and a gafo.” You see how I’m into details, boy. I ‘ll look for… ” “No, no, there’s no need. It was just… to know. A silly curiosity .” Don’t bother yourself, Don Wenceslao. For a month I feared that the damned man would seek it out and the devil would tempt him to send some ridiculous little newspaper, one of those he published every two years, whenever he imagined he had discovered some unpublished and precious piece of information, capable of serving as a key to the history of the ancient kingdom of Galicia. I studiously avoided rehashing the conversation about the Judaizers of Marín, and this precaution shows that I wasn’t quite content with Juan Manuel Cardoso Muiño’s flogging. Later , when I had to leave Pontevedra for Madrid, in order to begin my preparatory studies for admission to the School of Civil Engineering, I often remembered the “stain” and tried to view it in the light of a sensible criterion. It seemed ridiculous to attribute importance to something that, in our current state, lacks it. In the eyes of historical philosophy, the Jews are a people of noble origin, who have given us “the religious conception “: a conception to which, taking it as a high elaboration of the mind or a sublime impulse of human feeling, I attributed great importance. Taking into account another fact, that of social opinion, it was no longer lawful to despise the Hebrews. The stigma of the Middle Ages has been so erased that the rich Jewish capitalists today associate with the most distinguished members of the French aristocracy, and give lavish parties and banquets, which the Spanish attend. If, leaving aside these external considerations, I focused on others of greater elevation and depth, I remembered that sublime thinker Baruch or Benito Espinosa, who, after all, was of Jewish lineage, the same as the poet Heine and the musician Meyerbeer… In short, I repeated to myself that there is no reason why being of Jewish descent should be so repugnant, not be the unreasonableness of an instinctive antipathy, the child of hereditary concerns. There was no doubt: the old Christian blood that flowed through my veins was the one that shuddered with horror at having to mix with drops of Israelite blood. Strange thing, I thought, that the most intimate part of our being resists the will and the dictates of the intellect, and that there exists within us, despite ourselves, an autonomous, instinctive depth where tradition reigns and the past triumphs. And here my uncle Felipe appears again. I don’t know if I said he was my mother’s brother, a little younger than her; when this story begins, he must have been around forty-two or forty-three. He passed for “handsome ,” perhaps because he was tall, handsome, a little fat, and had abundant strands of hair and a beard. The fact is that, from the first glance, my uncle offered obvious features of the Hebrew race. He certainly didn’t resemble images of Christ, but rather another Semitic type, that of the carnal Jews, who in paintings and sculptures of scenes from the Passion correspond to the scribes, Pharisees, and doctors of the law. In some paintings in the Museum, I saw faces similar to Uncle Felipe’s. Especially in paintings by Rubens, in those strong, sanguine Jews, with curved noses, greedy and sensual lips, suspicious and harsh gazes, and the profile of a bird of prey. Some, exaggerated by the coarse brush of the famous Flemish artist, were caricatures of my uncle, but very faithful caricatures. The reddish beard and curly hair made my uncle look like a executioner of the Pasos. And it was obvious: the _deicidal_ face of my mother’s brother was what instilled in me, since childhood, that angry, cold, invincible repulsion, like that inspired by the reptile that inflicts us no harm: a repulsion that neither my rationalist ideas, nor my scientific positivism, nor the protection and shelter I owed to such a hated being could eradicate. “These are,” I calculated, “art’s tricks. For five hundred years now, painters have dedicated themselves to combining in half a dozen physiognomies the expression of greed, avarice, gluttony, cruelty, hypocrisy, and selfishness, and thus they have managed to make the Jewish type so repugnant. Luis says it well. Tradition, sticky and adherent cement, mold that grows in our souls, is stronger than culture and progress. Instead of thinking, we feel; and it is rather the dead who feel for us.” There were times when, rather than admitting guilt for foolish apprehensions, I sought other grounds for the aversion my uncle Felipe inspired in me. I am very devoted to cleanliness, and my uncle, without being careless about his dress, was not overly clean in his person; sometimes his nails were not light-colored, and a greenish veil covered his teeth. My resentment also increased when I noticed that my uncle, without any merit, without moral or intellectual qualifications, had managed to carve out a position for himself. I won’t say he was a villain or an imbecile, but rather one of those hybrid products of the intermediate regions, a vulgar Juan, neither good nor utterly bad, but without scruples and without ideals. A fungus born amid the rottenness of our politics, raised in the Manzanillo shadow of electoral scams, my radicalism condemned him, with the inflexibility characteristic of my young age, to the gemonias of contempt. Although I didn’t see him as exalted as other fellow countrymen, his unjustified prosperity was enough to strike a nerve in me, a very sensitive nerve in my youth. When he graduated as a lawyer, my uncle owned an estate composed of rural properties, land, and a small house in Pontevedra: it wouldn’t have yielded a thousand duros a year at 5 percent interest. How this little fortune appeared, a few years later, quadrupled in bank shares and income bonds, let anyone capable explain. My uncle didn’t practice his profession: law was for him what it usually is for Spaniards mixed up in politics: an aptitude, a passport. He politicked cautiously, without principles, clinging to people, swimming and keeping his clothes on. He frequently became a provincial deputy, and he got into trouble. his taste in the commissions’ fig basket. In order not to waste time on electoral battles, he was content to come to the Cortes only once , in one of those vacancies that occur on the eve of general elections, and which journalists usually benefit from. With the favor of Don Vicente Sotopeña, the omnipotent arbiter of Galicia, he took advantage of the bargain, leaving without spending a penny, being sworn in the day before the end of the legislature, and thus becoming in a position to become governor, and later… who knows?, a Councilor of State or of Public Education. He soon became governor, sometimes interim, other times permanently. He did not neglect his interests, and in Pontevedra there was much talk about the expropriation of certain ranches belonging to my uncle, paid for by the City Council at a fabulous price. Let the curtain fall. Don Felipe was counted among the third- rate, forgotten politicians, who get a piece of the meat wherever they stick their spoon in. His method consisted of subtracting losses and adding profits. It was said of him, in a complimentary tone, that he was very tall. To me, such length seemed another sign of Jewishness, an assessment in which I was perhaps unjust, because many caciques of my land, of pure Aryan stock, are no shorter. Sometimes I became scrupled about how badly I loved my relative. He accused me of being insensitive, for I repaid with hatred the kindness I received. If my uncle was stingy, he deserved even more credit for paying a good part of my career expenses. And it couldn’t be denied that, in his own way, he showed me affection. When I was in Madrid, he used to give me tickets to the theater; two or three times a season, he took me to lunch or dinner at Fornos; he was never harsh with me; he treated me as one treats young people, joking and laughing. She would ask me about my dealings and affairs, about the pranks of my fellow lodgers, about the charming neighbors across the street, and she would even interfere , calling me a doctor and teacher in all the subjects of licentious and venal love. After dinner, when the wine, coffee, and liquors were drawing the blood from her cheeks, she would show off her knowledge by dealing with intricate points that sometimes made my stomach turn. I didn’t dare protest, because we men are ashamed of not appearing corrupt; but the truth is that my youthful palate rejected that rabid pepper. At night, the clumsy images evoked by the conversation bothered me and made me feverish, until, with the jug full of cold water, she would shower me down the spine. This heroic remedy cleared my mind and allowed me to immerse myself in books once more. Hatred is as powerful a spring as love, and I saw the end of my career as the end of a protectorate I found unbearable. To be my own master, to earn a living, to reimburse my uncle for his expenses was my dream, and I clung to its wings so as not to fall exhausted into the steppes of Machinery, Construction, and Topography. Now that I have a portrait of Don Felipe, I will add that when we met in the dark little lower parlor of Fornos—before the table where the waiter was placing a shell of radishes, another of butter puffs, Vienna rolls, and then the luncheon plates—the host said to me, patting me on the shoulder, without looking me in the face: “Guess what I have to tell you.” “How do you expect me to guess?” “Well, I don’t know what the point of so much study is,” he observed with festive pretensions. I shrugged my shoulders, and he added: “It’s because I’m getting married.” Chapter 4. No doubt to celebrate this news, I had ordered a carafe of iced Champagne, always a delicious treat, especially as the heat was beginning to set in and the Madrid atmosphere was scorching. I held the light glass filled with that cool, liquid gold in my hand, and upon hearing about the wedding, I made a movement of surprise and spilled a small amount onto the tablecloth. The groom avoided looking directly into mine, which were fixed on his face, dilated with surprise. He pretended to pick up bread crumbs and tuck his napkin into his waistcoat buttonhole, but out of the corner of my eye, I He was watching. Seeing my silence, he added reluctantly and without frankness: “I will be pleased that my marriage deserves your mother’s approval… and yours too. ” Meanwhile, I was thinking. “Come on, it’s understandable. This one had some qualms… Perhaps the next woman is widowed, or they want to legitimize the offspring… The same thing always happens to bachelors… ” Realizing that I should say something, I asked in an uncertain voice. “Does Mother know? ” “I wrote to her yesterday. ” “I suppose you’ll tell her the bride’s name? ” “I actually met her at Ullosa, at your mother’s house! You see what a coincidence…” Having broken the ice, he chatted quickly, like someone wanting to empty his bag. “It seems impossible that you don’t understand. Last summer, your mother and she became very close. Carmiña Aldao, don’t you know? Carmiña Aldao… from Pontevedra. ” “I don’t know her. The name sounds familiar.” My mother would write me something, maybe… I don’t know. Since I didn’t have a vacation last summer… “Well, right! Well, she’s the girl from Aldao, daughter of the owner of that beautiful estate called Teixo, named after an enormous tree… ” “Is that young lady unique?” I asked pointedly, thinking that perhaps the interest was the motive for the wedding. “Unique, no… She has a brother, also settled in Pontevedra. ” “Nothing; well, I don’t know her,” I repeated. “But if she marries you, I’ll have time to meet her. ” “Well! Of course. As in, I’m inviting you to the wedding, lad. You ‘re coming with me as soon as you take the exam. The thing won’t happen until the day of Carmen, and between now and then I still have to look for a house and furnish it… so you see. ” “Ah! Are you settling in Madrid? ” “Yes… It’s the bride’s wish. I’ll take you, you know. We’ll get married at Teixo.” Look, I don’t know how your mother will take this… You know she has a rather quick temper… How quick hers are! If you write, tell her she won’t lose anything by my marriage. Not until you finish your studies… “I’m not asking you such a thing,” I exclaimed; and for the second time the champagne glass trembled in my hand. “Well, I’m telling you; don’t get upset, there’s no need. I own my shares, and by getting married I’m offending no one. ” “Who’s talking about offenses?” I burst out, feeling myself turn pale with a burst of rage that made me want to throw myself at the man. “The way you take it… ” “I don’t take it that way… not even if I’m not. You’re free, and if you’re doing anything for me, it’s because you want to. And besides, I’m glad this conversation happened , so I can tell you that I’ll repay the money you’re spending on my studies, or I’ll have little time to live. ” My uncle changed somewhat. His lips pursed, and a spark of anger flashed in his eyes. “If you weren’t such a brat, I’d have felt like giving you a terrible answer. You can’t steal what you inherit. You’re like your father; there was never a more ungrateful and unregenerate man. ” “Please don’t bring up my father, because I won’t put up with it,” I replied, restraining myself from throwing a bottle in his face. “I’m not bringing up your father except to say that one’s always trying to be useful to you… and you’re always huffing and puffing. Anyway, I wasn’t going to get married without telling you; I can see you’re upset… Son, be patient. It wasn’t a good idea to consult you first… The bill, lad,” he added, jabbing his glass with his knife. We had raised our voices, and at the nearby tables some stragglers turned their heads and stared at us. I felt ashamed, and frowning, gloomy, I brushed the crumbs from my lapel and made as if to get up. It made me feel suffocated to see my uncle depositing a fifty-pound note on the slip of paper. I wished I had taken that note out of my pocket at the cost of my blood. I breathed a sigh of childishness when I saw that they returned quite a bit of money from the note. I felt sorry for having spent so much. With his index fingernail, my uncle pushed two small coins toward the waiter, and standing up, took his hat off the peg, saying curtly: “Let’s go.” But when he stepped out into the sunlight from the gloom of the Fornos dining rooms, he controlled himself, returned to his Yes, and with that ductility that characterized him in his business dealings and political entanglements, he extended his hand to me, saying almost jokingly: “When you’re in a better mood, come over… I’m eager to show you the portrait of your future aunt.” I went back to my inn in a foul mood, dissatisfied with myself, and unable to interpret the causes of my profound unease. All the dislike I professed toward Uncle Felipe didn’t prevent me from recognizing that, on that occasion, it wasn’t he who had behaved badly. Luis confirmed this when, that evening, having asked me the cause of my sadness, I revealed it to him. “Well, my friend, the uncle was perfectly proper, and you were impertinent. That he’d have to get married someday, you could have had it in your system…” ” I don’t give a damn if he gets married!” I exclaimed, pained. “What do I have to do with it? ” “You have to, cork!” “–replied the wise man from Orense. ” Every nephew has a way of getting married, a bachelor uncle, his mother’s only brother… You’re so upset about it, it’s a real pain in the ass to get married! But since you can’t avoid it, you have to put on a brave face and make the best of the situation. Compromise, boy, because to live is to compromise. ” “Stop this opportunism. It’s up to him, and then he’ll burst! ” “Be sensible. Your uncle’s getting married? Well, be patient, and get in the good graces of Auntie… Especially since she’s a very nice girl. ” “Have you seen her? ” “No. But when I was in Villagarcía last year, when I went sea bathing, some sentimental women from Cambados told me about her. I remember perfectly. ” “And what did they say? ” “Good things.” That she was pretty, and that she played the piano very well, and that her father was going to be made a marquis, and that the estate is royal. Her father has plenty of money. “And how does my uncle saddle himself with such a rich, beautiful, young woman? How could he not prefer a convent? ” “Shut up, madman. What’s so despicable about your uncle? He’s a young man of account; he has almost no influence in the province than Don Vicente; he’s held positions; he’s headed for a prominent position. Stop being childish. Go to the wedding, be nice to Auntie. Don’t complain, it will only end worse for you. ” “Come on! Anyone who heard you and didn’t know my character would think I was coveting inheritances and that I’ve been disappointed to see them slip away… ” “That’s not the point, cork!” my friend insisted, becoming more formal . ” I’m not saying you’re capable of doing any dirty deeds for profit; if that’s your heresy… you deny the divinity of money!” What I’m telling you is that until you finish your studies, you can’t do without your uncle, and since I imagine you don’t want to be left in the lurch… let’s compromise! Be careful! So a few hours passed, I began to suspect that my friend was right; and since our mistakes are revealed when they are committed by others whom we consider inferior in ability and culture, I understood the mistake I had made after reading a letter that the postman brought me a few days later. I recognized the handwriting on the envelope, and when I took it in my hands, I understood from its volume that it was full of furious complaints, the kind that spring from the pen or the lip at critical moments, in the face of unexpected events. So as not to be interrupted in my reading, I went in search of the peace and quiet of a small cafe near my house at such an hour. The waiter, after the usual “what’s it going to be?” A German girl brought me and left me in control of her. I drank the first mouthful, with its foam, and savoring the pleasant bitterness of the fermented hops, I swallowed down the three sheets of Spanish handwriting, clear and small, with a few minor spelling mistakes, especially the rolling of r’s, an indication of the vehemence of the character, and without a trace of punctuation or division of periods into a separate paragraph or capital letter, which, strange as it may seem, lends this kind of irascible and feminine letters a certain energetic monotony and rapidity that doubles their effect. What I imagined: a ferocious diatribe against Uncle Felipe’s wedding, embellished with historical data, some entirely new to me. I can reproduce several here. fragments, without adding a period or comma, or untangling the grammar, or removing repetitions. «You see Salustiño, all the hardships a poor mother has to endure, with no other hope than to see yourself well-off and someone today or tomorrow, and the main hope is what your phantom uncle could leave you, which he had a good obligation to do if he had a conscience, the worst of all is that he will have children and now you are left opening your mouth without yours, although I call it yours, I am not saying any nonsense, because you should know for your government that your uncle, in the divisions of my father’s inheritance, my mother didn’t have enough to fall dead on, but father left a very nice inheritance, and your uncle sucked almost all of it, and he left me almost at doors, I don’t know how he wrapped it up or how he set up the mousetrap, because I got four hard coins and he ate the soft crumbs, I don’t know how Ullosa left me, it was a miracle, he snatched up the houses and lots of Pontevedra, which he then made a good stew with the City Council, there he went down, brave men shady guys so when your father died what a mess Felipe gave him because he was a qualified clergyman and compromised him in a bad way, don’t you remember that you were little when your father died may he rest in peace, well then I told him with great dignity Felipe one thing is to be a good sister and another to ask for alms, today I have a son and you can say not even bread to give him I’m speaking to you very clearly, I’m going to review the divisions here there was deception, I can’t live like this how am I going to give the little one a career, and he goes and answers me very fat don’t worry I’m not abandoning you a career he won’t lack the best one a little one will be found for him stop with the lawsuits they are the ruin of houses and the fattening of the curia keep quiet silly for whoever it is to be what I have to the next world I will not take him to the next world and marry him I won’t marry let the devil marry the loose ox licks himself well I can swear that this is what your uncle said that I will not change a word. Without a doubt, upon arriving here, the need for punctuation marks suddenly took hold of my mother, and in order not to do things by halves, she planted a course of ellipses and two exclamation points together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
«Oh son, whoever trusts the words of men without religion and without conscience now comes out with the crow’s foot that he’s getting married suddenly came over him I don’t know what he saw in the girl from Aldao she’s quite ugly and of little health and of good principles I don’t know how she’s doing at home she sees enough bad examples her father involved with the maid who was her mother’s a thousand years ago and in the house two other girls it is not known if they are daughters or nieces of the whore so much that the girl says she’s burdened with your uncle just to get out of that hell they treat her like crazy they don’t give her anything to eat well I don’t know how your uncle Felipe treats her of low caste he seems to have taken the image of the Jews in the Holy Thursday procession I’m ashamed to be his sister for a reason God marked him and he will also punish him remember what I say that I understand myself God is very just and they want you to go on vacation to see the beauty of the wedding he will be a beautiful buffoon if he doesn’t tempt me the devil to bring home that Carmiña Aldao next summer if this trick doesn’t happen what is, I will be conspicuous by my absence and with you we’ll see how they behave if they leave you standing we will have to revise the little split because there will be toads and snakes your uncle won’t make fun of me I’m capable of litigating until I lose my shirt. Between gulps of beer I finished the letter. Reading it had the opposite effect on me to what my mother intended. The uncle’s schemes to reduce my inheritance; that thing about the _little split_, instead of causing me justifiable indignation, calmed my spirit. I was glad to have reasons for complaint against my uncle and not gratitude, and now informed of his bad behavior, it seemed to me that he was appeased by the painful pang of my mortal antipathy. I owed him nothing; on the contrary, I was his creditor. I could have detested him less. Without delay I wrote my mother a most prudent letter. I urged moderation, insisting on the implausibility of my uncle, having helped us up until then, abandoning us at the last minute, and I indicated how vain and useless any kind of demands seemed to me. The fait accompli had to be respected: a lawsuit would lead us to ruin. It was foolish to imagine that a robust man, in the prime of life, would remain single to fulfill our whim. A few words in the air couldn’t compel perpetual celibacy. As for attending or not attending the ceremony… we’d see. In the meantime, serenity and calm. I read the letter to Portal, who approved it with glowing words. “That ‘s the way to go, to compromise, to temporize, to sidestep the pitfalls… That’s how I like it, that you follow my system, and that you conform, at least outwardly; no one sees the inside…” “I don’t care, either inside or out, that my uncle gets married!” “How do you say things?” I exclaimed, hurt. Portal, half- convinced, shook his head, and I added, “Mom says my uncle’s girlfriend is ugly. ” “God knows! Maybe so… and it’s better. Such a close relative is dangerous… very pretty. On the other hand, the name seduces me: Carmiña Aldao! Don’t you like it? It sounds like a caress. You ought to win that lady’s affection,” Portal advised after a few minutes of silence. “It’s a great idea. Let her love you, kid… I don’t mean this to be mean… Let her love you like a brother… or like a son… or whatever you want ! Anyway, arrange it so she loves you. Do it discreetly, skillfully , without noise or scandal. The guy’s already got hard spurs. Her age fits better with yours… But be careful, kid!” You’re like that… romantic, like a young Werther… Careful, there’s no family drama. No business for Echegaray! Seriousness, and things… in a haphazard way. Chapter 5. I’ll skip the incidents of the end of the year and the exams, since the reader most interested in my future destinies will need only know that that year I passed my subjects: they were as smooth as silk. The Zamora native had the same luck. Not so Portal and Trinito, who were aces in some of them. The Cuban took it with the philosophy of his indolence; Portal, on the other hand, was tearing his hair out, blaming it on the professor’s animosity, recommendations, and influences wielded by other students, the practical result of which was to upset him. “They’ve split me open, they’ve ground me up,” repeated the unfortunate man, completely out of his mind, having forgotten his benign theory of accommodations, transactions, conformities, and waiting. His indifference turned to fury. So sure was he of taking out that devil of a year! I left Barrabas with him and headed to see my uncle to share the good news. A certain satisfaction, both sweet and angry, filled my chest: each step forward seemed like a victory over the detestable protectorate, one less link in the chain. Don Felipe lived in the Hotel de Embajadores; but the doorman said to me with the air of a well-informed person: “At this hour, he’s usually at the new house… Which is hardly worth it here. Doesn’t the young gentleman know? The house he’s renting… only he doesn’t sleep there yet… The address? Well, Claudio Coello, number…” I went down to Puerta del Sol, jumped on the neighborhood streetcar, and got off almost at the door of the new address. I went up to the second floor, which had been on the first and main floor and was, consequently, effectively, a third. I didn’t need to press the bell, for the door was wide open, and in the hall a mat maker, seated in Moorish style, was sewing strips of fine corded matting with an immense needle. My uncle, who was pacing around in a rather spacious little room, much stripped of furniture, was pleasantly surprised by my presence. “Hello!… showman! You this way! Come in, come in, you’ll see everything. ” “They told me the address at the hotel… I’ve come to tell you…” “But come in, come in, come in; I want you to give your opinion… Let’s see, what do you think of the house? Eh? Quite comfortable for the price.” The street isn’t very central… The living room is still in a state of innocence: they haven’t brought the inset, nor the large mirror, nor the draperies. It’s hopeless to deal with the upholsterers. The study and the bedroom are already more advanced. Come in, come in… I looked distractedly at the study, which was very ordinary, with its white marble fireplace and its furniture: silk noodling armchairs upholstered in darker plush; its tiny desk and its very theatrical dressing table, dressed in imitation lace and adorned with bows the same shade as the curtains. The narrow glass crowning the fireplace didn’t have a gilt frame, but was made of the same plush that adorned the armchairs and sofa. My uncle wanted me to notice such elegance: like all misers, when he decided on an extraordinary expense, he liked people to notice it. “You see the little mirror…” he would tell me. “They’re making a fortune like that these days… The whims of fashion.” And don’t think it’s cheaper, oh no! More expensive, son. That space in front of the window is for the piano… The bride is a teacher. From the study we went to the nest, that is, the bedroom, which had columns, spacious, stuccoed, and in its center the very wide, wooden bedstead, very low and with a carved tuft. ” The box spring and the mattress are missing,” my uncle whispered with a complacent smile. “Imagine that the upholsterer had taken it into his head to make them of satin. I told him that cotton damask was enough. If I don’t take the precaution of giving the house to your future aunt, who doesn’t know what Madrid is, they’ll wrap it up, exploit it, loot it… Look at the nightstands : would you believe they cost me twenty-five pesos for both?” “Luxury has developed to a certain extent… Come, come and see my office…” We went out through an escape door into the corridor and searched the office, now fully furnished, with its minister’s desk and its large library, apparently ashamed of containing nothing but massive administrative ledgers and half a dozen obscene little novels, all of them unbound and covered in grime. My uncle opened the glass doors and, taking the defeated group that included Paul de Kock, Amancio Peratoner, and the Chinese Da Gar Li Kao in both hands, presented it to me, saying with a deliberate chuckle: “I’ll give it to you, kid… Don’t get perverted, eh? Just to entertain yourself for a while and nothing more… Married people can’t keep this kind of contraband at home… Send for it, or do you want to take it now?” I replied that I didn’t have time to delve into such serious authors, nor, to tell the truth, did they amuse me. After the office, we had to visit the dining room, already equipped with sideboards and a lamp, and other more humble offices, such as the kitchen and pantry. Behind the dining room was a cheerful little room with a window overlooking the clear horizon of some clearings and vacant lots. “This one’s not necessary; we can have a guest,” my uncle suggested. After the inspection, we returned to the office, and my uncle took out a cigar and offered me another, not without much praise. But since I don’t smoke, I gave it back to him so he could, as he said, “do something for someone else.” When he lit the gift, I told him the good news about his passing year. His face lit up, revealing genuine joy. Two or three times I saw him reach into his waistcoat, muttering, his voice choked from holding the cigar between his teeth: “Well, good man… Another year, another… Only two more to go… Alsa, pilili!… At that rate, you’ll soon be building bridges over the Lérez. Leave it, we’ll push you into the Provincial Council projects… You have to know how to play the registers. You’ll understand algebra problems, and a lot of equations here and a lot of logarithms there; but I… I know the keyboard.” As I stood up to leave, he made up his mind and put his hand, not into his waistcoat, but into the inside pocket of his coat, taking out a small wallet, from which he extracted a single bill. How many times had I observed this struggle between Don Felipe’s stinginess and intelligent instinct , which dictated to him how and when it was necessary, productive, or extremely pleasant to spend! I never saw him part with a peseta. without perceiving the effort and inner anguish of his soul, the nostalgic farewell he gave to his monies. It was evident that reason dictated the spending, but he was always fighting battles with his genius. To superficial observers, if my uncle didn’t pass for splendid, he wasn’t the type of miser either; to me, who studied him with the cruel perspicacity of repulsion, avarice reared its owl-like beak, but hidden, latent and hidden, a state to which civilization reduces passions or monomanias that in other ages of greater individual initiative reached their tragic fullness. My uncle was a frustrated miser; the sagacity and appetites for well-being and enjoyment that modern society has developed counteracted his inclination, because nowadays the old-fashioned miser would be ridiculous; he couldn’t socialize. But beneath the man of our time, who knows how to acquire in order to enjoy, I saw the Hebrew of the Middle Ages, with greedy, hooked fingers, thrifty to the point of madness. Whenever I splurged on a sum, my uncle’s cheeks paled a little, his mouth sank, and his eyes wandered to the floor, as if he wanted to hide the expression in his eyes. Anyway, he handed me the ticket. “So you can go to my wedding. There are some round trips these days, do you understand?” Yes; the ticket is for two months, or I don’t know how long, and it’s very convenient. Of course, you’ll be going second-class: third-class is a very bad time. You can write to your mother the day you plan to leave. The sooner the better, because you breathe country air, and you save on inn fees. Your mother is in Ullosa. From there to Pontevedra and Teixo… a stone’s throw.” Show up a few days before the wedding… which, I don’t know if I told you, will be on the day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. There’s room for everyone at the Teixo; it’s a recently refurbished and restored Pazo. You won’t be in the way. Cheer up your mother: I’m afraid that with her peculiarities, she might not go. Evening was falling, and the matador considered his work finished; my uncle, pocketing the key, left the house with me. We walked down the street and boarded the tram. We arrived at Puerta del Sol; and instead of heading for the hotel, we boarded another tram, the one that goes to Calle Ancha de San Bernardo. “Come with me, come with me,” said the Hebrew. “Since you’re on vacation, damn it! The distraction won’t hurt you. You’re going to see some fine stuff!” Although I suspected what the “fine stuff” might be, I couldn’t help being surprised when a superior woman opened the door to a third-floor apartment for us on the far-flung Calle del Rubio. The beauty was wearing a maroon calico gown with yellow flowers; she wore slippers; she wore that hairstyle of exaggerated peteneras held up with elastic, which the women of Madrid’s lower classes have discarded today in favor of a pointed twist. I admired her jet-black hair, her graceful figure, her cheeks, where a fresh pallor struggled with the coarse, hastily applied rice powder; and her velvet eyes, bold but gentle in the shadow of her thick eyelashes, fixed themselves on mine and said something to me, to which I immediately responded in the same silent language . Behind this beautiful example of the Madrid type, a younger, less pretty, disheveled, mocking young woman poked her head out, as combed and powdered as her older sister. My uncle entered with the airs of a conqueror and master. “Let’s see… right away… everyone here … Today I’m bringing you a chicken… be careful how you give it to me.” Saying this, he led the way down the hallway of uneven tiles to a narrow sitting room with no furniture other than a sofa and two armchairs sheltered by calico nightgowns, a varnished mahogany console table, some “monk” cards, a small nightstand displaying several bottles of gum, chipped plates, paintbrushes, and scissors. On the chairs, sofa, floor, console and I even think on the ceiling and walls, there were scattered countless scraps of velvet, satin and plush, blue, purple, green, pink, all the colors of the rainbow, mixed and mixed with strips of cardboard, roundels of the same, Gold and silver paper cutouts, mats and braid, stamps and prints, little flowers, and a thousand other accessories belonging to the charming industry of covering and trimming candy boxes “for weddings and baptisms”: this was the _official_ trade of those barbarians. A woman of about fifty, worn, dirty, and with very tender eyes, was busy decorating a sort of lilac taffeta sack, gluing on each side a bunch of lilies and the face of an angel, which she cut from a sheet of stamps depicting at least five gardens and ten heavenly legions. She greeted my uncle with a rather curt “Happy Birthday” and continued gluing angels and lilies. Then my uncle, turning to the girls following us, grabbed them one by one by the chin and introduced them to me. “Miss Belén… Miss Cinta…” Then, approaching the table, he exclaimed in a joking tone: “It’s so busy here… What a mess… Let’s see if you can clear the air a bit, girls. We have to celebrate my nephew.” The old woman intervened, exclaiming sourly: “Yes; air; it’s time to waste the afternoon! When the time comes to deliver the work, we’ll tell the factory worker there was a chat, right? And let it be known that there’s nothing to eat here, but a meager supply of clams and rice.” My uncle’s lips suffered that special contraction that preceded an expense; but the shudder was instantaneous, and taking from his waistcoat pocket something bigger than a bill, he placed it in the girl’s hand, saying: “Cintita, bring in some sherry and pastries… and also some olives and oranges.” The argument was convincing to the old woman. “Come on, I’ll go to the other room to the music of hitting these dolls. So they can clear the nightstand and you can feel at ease.” The cakes and the bottle arrived; some greenish glasses appeared, brought from the depths of the kitchen den, and the scene livened up quite a bit. Belén took down a guitar and sang something or other, with that flamenco hoarseness reminiscent of a dove’s cooing, and with the charm of her southern beauty, showing off her tempting, curved foot resting on the bars of the chair. Cinta brought a tambourine and used it like a calañés, shaking her head, laughing heartily, and having fun throwing orange peels at us. Then she dug out of a drawer an old Manila shawl, fringed and embroidered with charro patterns, and began to contort herself, declaring that she wanted to “kill the snake.” There were olés, shoving, running, overturned seats, and silk clippings flying through the air; then they forced us to strum the guitar and cheer while the young ladies danced. A revelry broke out, and the sherry was flowing like a blessing from God. For lack of a corkscrew, my uncle smashed the bottle against the edge of the marble table, and as the liquid was disappearing rapidly, he ordered Cinta to bring up more. “I’m out of money,” the girl pleaded. My uncle frowned slightly. “I gave you four duros…” Miss Belén chimed in. “Galleguito, you don’t have to be cheap… We’re in desperate need of things here, and the store doesn’t want to give us credit because of our pretty face… Shut up, you scumbag, you miserable bastard.” Between scoldings and endearments, the pagan forked over another two pesos; and we didn’t lack something to soak our throats with. My uncle’s face was glowing; from every pore of his skin, one could say a drop of blood was oozing; his tongue, if not entirely tied, was moving with difficulty; on the other hand, his eyes shone more than ever, and an expression of beatitude, the joy of matter, was accentuated on his features. I, too, was aware of the effects of the liquor, which, although not very authentic, had risen to the top floor, and between this excitement and others very natural in youth and in the presence of two nymphs—one arrogant, the other spicy and salty, but both capable of driving a hermit mad, let alone a student—I found myself out of my mind. It would not be fair to say that I became tipsy. The ignoble brutalization caused by drink is a state I had resolved never to reach. I had often seen Botello completely drunk, stumbling here and there, now lying down, now agitated and frantic, and I never forgot the sight of that beautiful creature transformed into a beast, uttering absurdities or wailing like a calf. Luis Portal, the man of the golden mean in Epicureanism, used to say: “In jokes, to get the most out of it, you have to be a little enlightened, but never dizzy: you must maintain a certain composure, and amuse yourself at the expense of the drunkards.” I observed this maxim, and was able to remain on the edge of animation without getting intoxicated; I made fools of myself, understanding that I was doing them, and savoring the pleasure of doing them. The party was going well. My uncle ran to pay another three pesos; Cinta came down several times, now for chops, now for a little shrimp salad, now for sweets, now for fruit; at the last minute, some new sangria for coffee and liqueurs; in short, a delicious lunch and dinner was put together . The old woman must have wolfed down the rice and clam casserole they were all planning to have for dinner alone, back in the kitchen, because this homemade dish never came to light. We didn’t escape from that diabolical den until 3:30. Mother lit us up the grimy staircase, her hand shielding a kerosene lamp that emitted a stinking light. And when we found ourselves outside, the first breath of relatively fresh air surprised me like waking from a dream. As for Don Felipe, he was licking his lips. “How are the gachís? Huh? They’re the kind we don’t use in our country. Which do you prefer? Oh, of course, Belén’s is a real treat! What this, and what that, and what the indina has! Of course, I imagine you’re a proper man, and… hush! It’s not good for them to find out about these silly things we run around here; they’re innocent jokes that don’t harm anyone.” “You have to pass the time, kid, for the same reason you’re going to enter a very different state… A fling is always nice to let loose. And Belén and Cinta aren’t the most demanding, although if they can, you’d have to spend all day dripping pennies. ” “Why didn’t you give them a bill or two right away? That would be better than haggling over the penny now and the penny later. ” “Psstt! Apparently you’re some Russian prince? Well, with these birds, if one opens one’s hand… If I manage to show them one’s wallet… I was even reluctant to take it with me, because, in these stories it can happen…” He stopped suddenly, the sherry fumes completely gone, extremely alarmed, and hastily grabbing his coat, he exclaimed: “Well… my wallet… my wallet doesn’t belong here… Crowned devils! It’s not here, it’s not here… Those thieving women must have taken it! Three hundred-dollar bills, no less… Lightning!” Sparks! It’s not there, I tell you… Let’s get it out of him! “Look carefully…” I muttered, barely concealing my disgust. ” Look here… Stolen! What nonsense! I think the overcoat is bulging around here…” He took a deep breath: the wallet had appeared. He felt it with delight and paused under the light of a lantern to make sure the contents were intact. Regaining his good humor, and searching the corners of the wallet, he added: “And to top it all off, the picture of my girlfriend came with the money. It would be hell if they caught me. Belén is very capable of poking out his eyes with a penny pin. ” He handed me the photograph. She was a girl, a picture card, and I saw a youthful face, a simple hairstyle revealing a broad, convex forehead, and lively eyes, with a ray of passion and will that surprised me, because I had imagined my uncle’s girlfriend to be dull and sweet, subservient to all impositions due to her passivity. What I didn’t find was that she was as ugly as my mother claimed. She had one of those faces that, without radiating beauty, attracts the eye a second time. I left my uncle at the door of his hotel and went to pick me up at an hour not far from dawn. How Portal made me dizzy the next day! He would sniff my clothes and then pinch me, exclaiming: “Ah, trout, perdis, aim! Odor di femina!” Suddenly he burst out laughing. “What’s this?” Glued to the left leg of my trousers were two cherub heads , a rose, a lily stick, and I don’t know what other attributes. There was no choice but to sing straight away and give a faithful, detailed, and tempting description of the artists on boxes of sweets. Chapter 6. With what pleasure I set out for Galicia! In Madrid, the heat was already stifling, and on the ground, fresh air, saturated with country aromas. It seemed to me as if I had never breathed it before, and my parched lungs needed, to function under normal physiological conditions , those particles of delicious humidity. I am not one of those Galicians who suffer from homesickness; however, the first group of chestnut trees that appeared on the horizon seemed like a friend greeting me with a welcoming tone. My mother was in Ullosa, and I went straight there, partly by bus , partly on foot, as the location of the estate required. I arrived at sunset; My mother came out to wait for me at the road, and half holding hands and half arm in arm, we walked the distance between Ullosa and the provincial highway. When the dew that always appears on the eyelids of a mother seeing a child after a year and a half of absence had dried , the squabbling began: “So your uncle’s got a house, huh? Is it true he’s furnished it luxuriously ? That’s what those who can, not those who want to, do. They say the bed’s beautiful? And how much does he pay for rent? Surely an outrage, because in that Madrid everything is sky-high. And do you know if he’s hired a maid yet? It’ll be a miracle he doesn’t bring a scoundrel into the house. So much for nice furniture? Air, air to the City Hall. That’s what certain filthy things are made for. Don’t tell me no, Salustiano, I’ll go crazy . ” “But Mama, what does that matter to us?” “I exclaimed when I had a chance to speak out. ‘And what’s my fault that Uncle is getting married?’ “As you wrote me that he was right…” she replied, pausing to breathe, her lips trembling, like children when they get angry. “It seems that Uncle was going to be guided by what I said. You must comply, Mama, and put up with what cannot be avoided. I think it’s better to proceed this way, by all means, even for your own convenience.” Mama fixed her eyes on me. She was two years older than Uncle Felipe and remained very pleasant, thanks to her robust health, the hygienic and natural life she almost always led, and perhaps to a lack of deep thought and intellectual fatigue, to a birdlike mobility and a facility for becoming angry and calming that spread her bile and whipped her blood, lightening it. This fickleness, this inability to rise to the realm of general and abstract ideas , kept my mother’s strength for action. It was her will that guided her thought, and the predominance of the affective and active element could be seen on her smooth, narrow forehead, in the willful pout of her lips, in the restless and inquisitive look of her never-distracted eyes. My mother only retreated to Pontevedra during harsh cold weather, or during Holy Week and Easter, to fulfill her duties at Church. The Ullosa orchard sustained her year-round. With so much disavowal of the Cardosos’ lineage, my mother had much of the acquisitiveness, the sordid thrift, and the mercantile genius that characterize the Jewish race. How affection can do, and how it entangles the notions of logic! These qualities, which I found repugnant in my uncle, seemed to me to be virtues in Mama, and indeed they were, if accommodating one’s needs is a virtue. With a measly eight or nine thousand reales, which at most, and if squeezed well, could provide our assets, it was a great miracle to live in relative comfort, to cover a significant portion of my career expenses, and to stash four or six ounces in the change of a mattress for a pinch. Anyone who achieves this is no ordinary woman . Mama always wore the Carmelite habit, to save money. She wove clothes, of course; from the flax produced by her estates she wove linen, that tough, dark Galician linen that never wears thin, for shirts and sheets; from a vineyard of sour grapes she made claret wine to give me to drink on vacation; from the rye she earned she kneaded the bread I ate; with a pair of pigs, fattened at home, she made stew for the whole year; she raised chickens and collected eggs; she collected firewood in a patch of wood; she had a cow and resold it at a profit at the fair when it no longer produced milk; she kept other livestock in partnership with her tenants; from the grape marc she distilled brandy and preserved cherries in it; in short, she squeezed the most out of money and property, performing those wonders of good governance, frugality, and order that a woman exhibits when she lives alone. Forced by her sex to limit her sphere of activity, she made up for it by not losing even the value of a pin. Healthy, spirited, tireless, she spent every hour of the day doing something useful, and I even suspect that on more than one occasion she secretly embroidered or sewed for others. “The day you finish your degree and start earning your salary, I’ll be a queen,” she would tell me when I marveled at seeing her so busy and diligent. And I studied with gusto, thinking that my mother’s final years would be happy. A mistaken idea; because even if my mother thrashed about the money, she was bound to be just as restless, given her nature. She was so full of life; she was a being so full of energy and so determined to make the most of life, that far from inspiring pity, she must inspire envy in those of us who dwell so much on ourselves and end up making our imagination a cellular prison. My mother’s character is one of those that constitutes happy individuals, strong and armed against the shocks of reality. Strange thing! When I wasn’t seeing my mother, I idealized her, supposing she had certain qualities and weaknesses typical of her sex, to which she was completely unaware. For example, I insisted on supposing she had fervent religious convictions, and sometimes it happened to me to respond to the impious jokes of my companions or to exclaim when expressing a bold opinion: “God forbid my mother should find out!” If I ate meat during Holy Week, or recalled the time that had passed since I had heard Mass, I thought: “Oh, if Mother finds out!” And the fact is that Mother, despite her Carmelite habit, limited herself to fulfilling the most superficial of the Church’s commandments, without caring much about the state of my spirit. That didn’t mean that that spirited Galician woman lacked beliefs. Undoubtedly, through hereditary transmission from the Israelite lineage, my mother’s most deeply rooted religious conception was that of an angry, spiteful, and implacable God: the biblical God who “visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and fourth generation.” She wholeheartedly believed that God avenges everything, right here from the ground up; and she also imagined that the Lord was perfectly prepared to exercise those heavenly vengeances and reprisals against anyone who bothered her, Benigna Unceta, for any reason or in any matter. Thanks to her inability to generalize her ideas, she presumed that her personal grievances and resentments were of great interest to the divinity. So much so that when she paused on the slope that separated us from Ullosa, she had to exclaim in a prophetic tone, agitated with all the courage of the climb and the vehemence of her temper. “You’ll see how God punishes your uncle Felipe without stick or stone: you’ll see. Let time pass. It doesn’t escape.” I protested against such a strange supposition, and as if some voice descended from other regions joined me in rejecting anything but forgiveness and charity, the Angelus rang out in the nearby church with resigned sadness and a silvery, poetic double. My mother turned abruptly and questioned me: “Are you going to the wedding? ” “Yes, madam, and you should go too. It’s a bell you’re not going. ” “Stop telling me stories, I don’t feel like witnessing such a farce. Nothing more absurd has ever been seen, nor will it ever be seen. May God grant.” Don’t let your uncle be born with wind!… and he will be; that’s what he seeks. At his age, getting married! Would it be nice for me to get married now? I struggled with that invincible obstinacy, arguing that my uncle was too old to marry, and we would make a disgraceful fool of ourselves by getting angry at such a just and simple action. “The wind,” Mama retorted furiously. “You’re a brave fool defending yourself. I know what I’m saying, and I also know the words that were given to me. God will finally get him right. Don’t think I’m crazy; he’ll fall… You’ll see! And the girl who marries him, I tell you, she has no shame. I wouldn’t want your uncle even if he were covered in gold, and if he weren’t my brother…” My mother gave me a regional dish for dinner that she knew I liked very much. It was potatoes or cornmeal stew with fresh milk. She would take out the boiling potatoes, let them cool and form a crust, and, opening a hole in the middle of the paste, she would pour in the delicious milk contained in a clay pot. While I was preparing this delicacy of Homeric simplicity, she wouldn’t stop talking, asking me questions, and always returning to the starting point… my uncle. “Now he’s involved in something, I don’t know how he’s going to get out… A terrible brawl, from which it seems to me they’re going to give him a lesson… Another scam bigger than the one with the plots of land and the ranches… and watch out for that one!… This one is a matter of the contract for the market: they say your uncle shares the profits with the contractor, and that they granted him some atrocious advantages and the man hasn’t fulfilled any condition, absolutely none, and the Municipality is suing him. And today the Municipality isn’t what it was last year: your uncle isn’t in charge there.” He’ll have to go on a pilgrimage to the Saint… If Don Vicente doesn’t get him out of this, it’s a bad deal. With the rooster of Don Vicente’s protection, who doesn’t know what goes on behind the scenes, they’ll do whatever they want with this province. Since your uncle is leaving for Madrid, they’re going to rent him his house in Pontevedra for the mail… Another mess. We’re in a good mood. These days, everyone needs to wake up. I’m not a man; if I were, I’d also go on a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary. I’m telling you this here; but on the surface, be careful what you say… You don’t want these troublemakers to take a dislike to you: in time, they’ll be useful to you. Seeing her so expansive, I grabbed her by the waist, kissed her neck and cheeks, and decided to say to her, laughing: “Mama, in order to present myself at the Tejo with a bit of decorum, it’s essential for me to take a gift to my uncle’s fiancée.” He may be whatever you like, and he’ll have played us a thousand dirty tricks, but in the end he’s paying a large part of the expenses of my career. “There’s a reason he does it. My boy, be careful. If we were to claim what ‘s rightfully ours… And who knows if he’ll continue paying from now on? ” “Well, it doesn’t matter, Mama; it doesn’t matter. Even if he doesn’t pay. Just a little present. ” “But I don’t have a penny! Do you think they make money here? Yes, we’re here to make it! It’s expensive for me to get out of the day. ” “Well,” I answered resolutely. ” Then there’s no more to talk about: tomorrow I’ll go to Pontevedra and pawn my watch or my boots… There must be a present … Don’t leave me feeling ashamed.” The next morning my mother came in to wake me. She carried under her arm a basket of ripe cherries, which she placed on the bed for me to eat; and between her fingers two shiny little round things that she held up to the level of my eyes. They were two five-dollar coins. “What do you think?” “What a lot of work to put this together! Go on, go and squander it; spoil it, while you’re at it… I don’t want you to say that your mother leaves you in a bad light, when she could have left you in a good light, nowhere. ” I threw my arms around her neck and gave her three or four snorted kisses, while she defended herself poorly, exclaiming: “Clown… kiss-ass… I’ll hit you , insolent. ” With the ten duros I bought in the metropolis a safety pin or something similar, which represented two crossed anchors and a little cupid in the middle, with a small ruby and two pearls. Tacky charms she invents.” fashion and frowns upon good taste. But anyway, I was no longer going to the wedding empty- handed. Chapter 7. From Pontevedra to San Andrés de Louza and to the Tejo estate is more of a recreational day than a journey. I crossed the estuary in a boat rented in Pontevedra; I disembarked on the opposite shore, and I had to walk about a quarter of a league through the most picturesque region one could dream of. From the beach, whose fine sand still bears the imprint of a foot and is surrounded by large clumps of flowering aloes, to the paths covered with honeysuckle and the fields of corn whispering in the breeze, everything seemed like an oasis to me, and my spirit was filled with that vague happiness that in youth is born from the excitement of the senses and a kind of inexplicable presentiment, harbinger of the future: a presentiment that, without predicting happy events, announces emotions, extravaganzas of life. The villa of my uncle’s future father-in-law, situated on a hill, I saw it from the same cove where we landed. To put it more accurately, the only thing I could clearly make out was the square, crenellated tower and the windows whose glass was tinted red and gold by the setting sun. The rest of the building was covered by a mass of greenery, like a grove of trees. In any case, what I saw was enough to orient myself. I left my suitcase in the village, noting that I would send for it the next morning, and set off on my walk. I climbed the steep path, whipping with the stick I held the resounding cornfields and brambles from which the frightened butterflies flew. At one point, I was extraordinarily surprised by the sight of a man sitting on a stone… The surprise is not immediately explained, but the fact is that the man was a friar. For the first time in my life, I saw a friar in the flesh. I marveled, as if I believed that the friars could no longer be found except on Zurbarán’s canvases. All my knowledge of friarly attire was derived from paintings in the Museum and the Academy; from having seen Rafael Calvo, one afternoon, perform the drama of the Duke of Rivas, “Don Álvaro, or the Force of Fate.” I understood that the friar seated on the stone was a Franciscan: his cassock draped statuesquely over his legs; his hood was down, and in his hand he was holding one of those French abbé hats with curved brims, with which he fanned his sweaty forehead, breathing heavily. Then he placed the hat on the ground, and, turning his elbows outward and resting his open hands on his thighs, he remained thoughtful. I watched him with ardent curiosity, imagining that, by virtue of being a friar, this man must meditate on things either bizarre or sublime. He
raised his right hand and, slipping it into his left sleeve, took a huge blue-and-white-checkered handkerchief from the sort of pouch that formed the hump of the sleeve and blew his nose loudly. Then he stood up, gathered his hat, and started walking, just as I caught up with him. I didn’t know whether to fall in beside him, stay behind, or simply go ahead and say good afternoon. I was attracted to the man for no reason at all. I had two very opposite ideas about friars, which nevertheless coexisted in my mind: on the one hand, the chrome friar of Ortego, picaresque, gluttonous, lascivious, drunken, “a shameless man leaning out of a scrim window.” On the other, the friar of novels and poems, gloomy, exalted, visionary, his mind weakened by fasting and his nerves unbalanced by continence, fleeing women, avoiding men, full of flatulence, temptations, and scruples. And I wanted to know to which of these two sections the traveler belonged. As if he had guessed my thoughts, upon hearing my footsteps , he stopped, looked me in the eye, and said with an imperious tone: “Happy afternoon, sir. You will excuse me for asking you a question. Are you by chance coming from San Andrés de Louza? Are you going to the Tower of the Lords of Aldao?” “Yes sir, here I go,” I answered, somewhat surprised. “Well, if you don’t mind, we’ll go together. I know how to go, because I’ve been here before. I’m taking the liberty of making this proposal to you, figuring that in the countryside you don’t bother anyone… ” “Hype!” “On the contrary,” I replied, pleased with the Father’s martial demeanor. We started walking arm in arm, for the path widened and allowed for this luxury of sociability. Then I noticed that the friar was barefoot, wearing sandals that held the foot at the instep, leaving the toes free, which were well shaped and fleshy, like those in the sculptures of Saint Anthony of Padua. He began to ask me questions. “You must excuse me; I am a fan of frankness and of people getting to know each other. Are you perhaps related to Carmiña Aldao? ” “No, sir, to her boyfriend. A close nephew, no less. ” “Ah! I know. The one studying to be an engineer in Madrid. Benigna ‘s son . ” “Exactly.” “How are you so well informed?” “I’ll tell you: the Aldao family honors me with considerable confidence: that’s why I’m well-versed in these details. And how are you? How are you with your studies? I also know that you are very diligent, and a young man of great promise. I am very pleased to meet you; I say this from the heart; I waste few compliments. Ah! And now I realize that you still don’t know my name. As a poor religious man , he needs no introduction; the habit introduces him… My name is Silvestre Moreno, at your service. ” “I am Salustio… ” “I’m here, I’m here. Salustio Meléndez Unceta. ” “I see there’s nothing you don’t know. ” “I wish,” replied the friar, laughing heartily; and suddenly , stopping abruptly: “Could you do me the favor of a paper cigarette?” “I don’t smoke,” I replied with a certain pompousness, which later seemed ridiculous to me. “You’re right: one less need… But I, honey! I’m so addicted that… Well, it doesn’t matter; even the Tejo, patience. ” “How long have you not smoked? ” “Honey! Since yesterday afternoon. In Pontevedra I stopped at the house of a very respectable old lady, a widow, alone, who, as you can understand, doesn’t smoke, nor does her maid. In the morning, when I shaved, I cut myself a couple of times; I had a saw for a razor; and the lady was so charitable that she bought me a very fine English razor that cuts thoughts… here I have it,” she added, pointing to her sleeve. “I haven’t used it yet.” You see, after this gift, which must have cost you a few pesetas, I wasn’t going to be such a freeloader as to ask you for quarters for tobacco… “But,” I exclaimed, infected by the friar’s frankness, “don’t you have a penny with you? ” “Of course, many times I don’t, not even half a cent. ” “How is that possible? ” “And the vow of poverty, you sweetheart, is it a joke? ” “I’m terribly sorry not to smoke,” I exclaimed, “for this case only. ” “Don’t worry, my friend, we friars don’t worry either because we lack a bad habit. Besides, as soon as we reach the Tejo… you’ll see how Señor de Aldao will go out of his way to offer me cigars. ” He said this with cheerful philosophy and set off on the road with good spirits and gentle determination, walking smarter than any of your servants. A question was boiling on my lips, and I resolved to ask it. “Doesn’t going barefoot bother you?” The friar turned around in surprise. “No, sir,” he replied, thinking as if to recall whether going barefoot did bother him. “At first, I missed not shoes, but stockings, and they weren’t at all fine: my mother used to knit them very thick, and I never wore anything but the ones my mother knitted. I mean, yes… I just started wearing them not long ago… and they were made of the finest silk; just so you know, don’t think that because I’m a friar I haven’t lavished myself with such luxuries. But anyway, this is a separate issue. Coming to the matter of going barefoot, which is what you’re asking me, since I want to answer categorically, know that since I’ve been going barefoot, I’ve never had chilblains on my feet, or calluses, or corns, or anything like that.” As he said this, he stuck out his foot, which was, in fact, contoured and healthy, without that deformity of the toes that a boot produces. “And look what habit can do, sir. I think I’m cleaner this way. I imagine socks and shoes only serve to file away the filth. No one who goes barefoot has truly dirty feet, no matter how much work they do or how hot it is, especially if they have the habit I have… ” Saying and doing, he moved ten paces away, and reaching the small stream that ran along the side of the path, between reeds and willows, he left his sandals on the ground, rolled up his robe a little, and put one foot after the other into the running water. After he had dried the soles on the grass, he put his sandals back on and looked victorious. I smiled, driven by an idea, or rather by a very cordial feeling, which could be expressed in this way: “What a strange and charming friar!” “Come on,” he said to me, “I can guess what you’re thinking, sir. ” “Perhaps. You speak your mind, and I’ll tell you if you’re right. ” “Well, sweetheart! You think, to your own ears… that we friars are too lax with pleasantries, that we’re very democratic and very alien to the styles of society, and that we quickly get into trouble with people. ” “No, sir, it wasn’t that. I was thinking…” “Call me Father Moreno, or just Moreno, if it makes no difference to you. ‘Sir’ is too much of a luxury for a poor friar. ” “Well, Father Moreno, what I was thinking… But I’m afraid if I say it, it might upset you. ” “None of that, none of that. I’m dying for frankness.” “Well, I was thinking that friars don’t have a reputation for being like that… as devoted to bodily cleanliness as you.” As he said this, he looked at him sideways, quickly examining his hands, his ears, the back of his neck, everything that betrays habits of cleanliness. “I even thought you condemned caring for one’s person as a sin. They say the merit of some holy ascetics consisted in owning a million inhabitants and having their hair and beard… colonized. ” Instead of getting angry at such an irreverent supposition, the Father burst out laughing the most sincerely I’ve ever heard from a human mouth. “So you believed that?” he said to me when laughter allowed him to speak. “And you, who seem such an educated young man, don’t you know what the glorious Saint Teresa said? Well, she washed herself very well, and then exclaimed: ‘Lord, my soul as my body.’ So, to you, all we friars were solemn pigs?” Then you must have had quite a fright upon seeing me. Have you ever met more friars than this, your servant and chaplain? —In truth, you are the first I’ve ever seen; in fact, I thought you didn’t exist. Nonsense, because I know very well that the convents of various Orders are being repopulated in Spain; but frankly, I imagined that friars were only found in paintings, in church altarpieces, and so on… Nothing, apprehensions. —Well, you see them in reality. Among friars, it’s the same as in the 20th century, because there are very different geniuses and tastes, although they are governed by the same rule. Some are careless; others are more polished; but as you know, our holy habit doesn’t allow us to fuss with many sweet-smelling waters and jars of essences and ointments. It would be nice for a monk to wear _velutina Fay_ and _Kananga_ or _ganga_… or whatever the caramel is called, that perfume that is so popular now. “You sure know, Father!” I exclaimed, laughing in turn. “The thing is, I deal with very elegant and nice ladies… And don’t be surprised if I want to vindicate myself and the poor friars from the bad reputation you give them. Imagine that our Holy Patriarch was so fond of water that he even composed some beautiful verses in its praise, saying that it is chaste and clean. I speak to you with my heart in my hand; I like clean people; but certain extremes of neatness that certain men indulge in seem to me cloying. Sweet! That a young gentleman spends half an hour trimming and polishing his nails… it happens to women; it happens to someone who combs beards… Saying this, the friar crossed his arms and turned toward me as if he wanted to breathe and rest a little. In the reddish light of the setting sun, which so brightens figures, I noticed that his was in harmony with that profession of virile faith. He was muscular without being thick-set, and of a towering height without being too tall. His tanned and sallow complexion revealed a bilious complexion and the tanning fatigue of a traveler in sunny regions. His eyes were lively, cheerful, very black, well-defined, and wide open upon his soul. His neck, bared by the tonsure of his bangs, indicated vigor, as did his hands, large, agile, and robust, hands that served to delicately raise the Host as well as to wield, in case of need, the hoe, the club, or the carbine. His features were in no way inferior to his hands: accentuated as if by a skilled sculptor’s toothpick , they had the mixture of calm and firmness that is evident in certain altarpiece sculptures. Between his mouth and nose, as well as on the plateau of his chin, there were two dimples, almost always indicative of a depth of goodness meant to temper the strength of character. I even looked at his ears, noting that they were like those of a confessor, with a wide canal and almost movable; ears with a very characteristic appearance, as ecclesiastics usually have. “Wow, that friar, and how tender he seems!” I thought, surprised. We continued moving forward. Aldao’s estate must have been very close by now, but we wouldn’t arrive before nightfall, which was falling peacefully. The scent of honeysuckle was more penetrating; the dogs, leaning over the walls of the estates, barked at us with greater fury; the cry of the owl could be heard in the distance, and the moon’s bicorn, as fine as a brushstroke, loomed toward the estuary. The friar expressed with a trivial exclamation that he felt the beauty of the place and the time. “What an afternoon! Look, this country is beautiful! The more you see it, the more beautiful it seems. And so fresh! For my taste, it’s too much; I prefer the climate of Africa. ” “Have you been in Africa for a long time? ” “Well! I’m half Moor. ” “And have you traveled through the desert? ” “I believe so!” And without tents, or a box of provisions, or an escort, or any of those other nonsense that explorers carry. On a mule and with a pair of chickens tied to the saddlebow; drinking water from the puddles and sleeping under the canopy of stars, I’ve rolled more on those sandy beaches and have had more adventures and adventures! I would have gladly asked him about the African forays, but a greater curiosity pricked me, the memory of which was awakened by seeing the fence of the Teixo turn white and what seemed to me an enormous patch of trees turn black over the fence and under the tower. I wanted to verify the accuracy of my mother’s news by consulting a person who already seemed to me to be completely impartial and sincere. ” Tell me, Father Moreno, do you know my uncle’s future family ? What is his fiancée like? What kind of person is his father?” “Of course I know them,” replied the friar, applying a mask of absolute discretion over his open face. “They are a very respectable family, and your uncle’s fiancée… a very fine young lady. ” “And… is she pretty?” The friar wasn’t startled by the question; instead, he answered with ease: “I’m a bad judge: perhaps I’m mistaken. I confess that she doesn’t seem to me… well… anything to marvel at. I won’t call her ugly, but neither… And don’t believe it: although I say I’m a bad judge, it’s not because I lack reason to understand: because there in Tangier, Tetouan, and Melilla there are Jewish and Moorish women who pass for beautiful; and be amazed: I have such friendly Moors that one showed me his harem… I warn you that among them, it is a proof of the greatest esteem. ” “Ah!” I murmured, unable to repress a malicious expression. “So the entrance to the harem is open? ” “Yes,” the friar asserted, boasting of his naturalness. “And do you want me to tell you how the favorite Moorish woman was—well, the favorite of this Moorish friend of mine, who was a wealthy man there? ” “Let’s see how she was? Very tempting?” “I’ve already told you I’m a bad judge: I can only describe external details… and you’ll judge for yourself.” Her dress was of the richest silk, open at the breast, and adorned with necklaces of large pearls , diamonds, and precious stones: the woman had at least two or three necklaces . On her arms were bracelets like those painted by Cervantes in the novel *The Captive*… haven’t you read it? Well, like that. Then cushions, cushions, and more cushions; some under the arms, others under the hips, others behind the head; and the cushions were to prevent them from rubbing together, because the woman was bursting with fat, which is the secret of beauty among the Moors. She couldn’t move. And do you know what they fattened her with? Well, with little balls of bread, which can no longer be called fattening a woman, but rather fattening her. She smoked through a long tube like this… and she had a small nightstand in front of her, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with sweets and drinks. “Oh, you sly friar!” I reasoned. “You pretend to be very common and very simple, and you’re more cunning and more cunning than anything. You’re driving me crazy with so many Moorish slanders, so as not to spill the beans about my future aunt. I’ll squeeze you in, wait.” And I exclaimed aloud , “Father Moreno, you who describe the Moors so perfectly, will know better how to portray a Christian.” You can at least tell me if my uncle’s fiancée is fattened with dumplings, or if she has a figure like a desert palm tree. Come, Father… We were climbing the rocky path that borders the fence of the Yew tree. There was no room for the two of us abreast. The friar turned and faced me to reply. The last glimmer of the sun no longer illuminated him, as before, but even in the half-darkness his eyes sparkled as he answered me with an inexplicable mixture of joking wit and enthusiastic solemnity: “Sir, you must forgive a poor friar for speaking as the habit he wears and the rule he obeys command. Of a Moor, of an infidel, I can describe the body, because if God has granted her beauty, that will be the only thing that can be praised in her, since her soul is wrapped in the darkness of error. But you yourself have said that your uncle’s fiancée is a Christian.” And I know that she deserves such a name… excuse me if I express myself too vehemently… I was going to say such a sublime name. Of a Christian, the first and perhaps the only thing worth praising is the soul, and any other praise would sound bad in my mouth. A body that encloses a soul redeemed by the blood of Christ! Sweet! I’m not going to praise you with pretty words or rhetorical flourishes. By assuring you that your future aunt is indeed a Christian… I’ve said all I have to say. “Is she that good, Father Moreno? ” “Excellent, excellent, excellent.” The tone in which the friar tripled the adjective left no room for insistence. On the other hand, we had reached the door. However, when the Father grabbed the knocker, I couldn’t help but ask him another insidious little question: “And you, Father Moreno… are you coming to the wedding out of pure friendship? ” “Oranges!” “–” he exclaimed in the harsh tone that usually accompanies the most traditional interjections. “I’ve come to give the blessings!” Chapter 8. The gate opened. We were in a courtyard, all covered in bushes and thick with vines that climbed up the facade of the mansion, leaving little of its architecture unnoticed. The vines and bushes must have been covered in flowers, because it smelled like heaven, like that divine perfume, inaccessible to the science of the chemist and distilled only by Nature in its mysterious stills. Seated on stone benches and metal chairs, basking in the moonlight, we saw a few people who stood up as we entered. and they came to meet the Father with exclamations of joy. Since they paid no attention to him at first, I was able to clearly understand the composition of the group. In the foreground, my uncle, dressed in light denim, next to a young lady of medium height, with an elegant and graceful silhouette, who, upon seeing the Father, let out a squeal of joy. On the left, a man already weary, bald, with a mustache… the father-in-law; a very young priest, almost a child; a lanky girl about sixteen years old, and a little girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve. They all crowded around the Father, welcoming him. Finally, they remembered my existence, and my uncle introduced me: “Señor de Aldao, Benigna’s son, my nephew… Carmiña, Salustio…” The future aunt looked at me distractedly. The Father absorbed all her attention. However, after a few moments, he turned to me to ask “if Benigna would be coming, for she very much desired it.” I excused myself as best I could for my mother’s absence, and Miss Aldao persisted in offering the friar gifts. “Would you like water, orange juice, beer, sherry? A glass of milk? A little chocolate?” “Daughter!” cried the Father, pushing her familiarly, like someone shaking off a fly. “If you want to give me something I value… candy! Give me half a cigar, even if it’s a straw one. Chac… Rissch…” Two cigar cases, the father-in-law’s and the groom’s, were opened simultaneously, and several matches were immediately lit. The winner was a cigar belonging to my uncle. “You can smoke it with satisfaction,” remarked the latter, who was very fond of praising gifts. “It comes from none other than Don Vicente Sotopeña… ” “Ah!” Well, that one will have them sucking their fingers… oranges with him! “Sit down, sit down for a smoke!” they all begged. Already seated, with his cigar between his lips, he began to satisfy the questioners. They wanted to know when he had left Compostela, and how the other priests were doing, and what was happening there. I positioned myself a little isolated from the group, overcome by a strange distraction, a kind of psychic intoxication. Reclining on a bench, I noticed that behind me, like a green silk tapestry, the branches of a magnificent vine, the datura or doomsday trumpet, stretched out; it didn’t take much poetic imagination to compare its gigantic white flowers to cups filled with the most fragrant essence. Interwoven with the datura, a double jasmine vine spread along the wall. Those scents, swaying in the gentle breeze, rose to my brain, stirred the sap of my twenty-two years, and inspired in me a furious appetite for love, but a very super-fiery love, very delicate and profound, exclusive and determined to overrule human and divine laws. When we move—even if our fortunes don’t change— when we enter a circle of new and unknown people, our imagination and vanity are heightened, and those people who were once indifferent to us suddenly interest us, worrying greatly about the opinion they might form of us and the feelings we inspire in them. The employee, the soldier assigned to a distant province, has a vague idea of the place where he will reside: as soon as he sets foot there, the past is erased and the present dominates him, with the powerful force of the present and the stimulus of novelty and the unknown. So I, excited by new horizons, somewhat mortified because my presence went completely unnoticed, figured that from those people, barely glimpsed, strangers to me just moments before, something decisive for my heart must come out . I began to believe that within that family peacefully reunited—taking in the moonlight—a very strange moral drama was unfolding, the secret of which the friar surely possessed. “Everywhere ,” I fantasized, drunk on jasmine essence, “there are little backstage dramas and secret chronicles. There in Madrid, at Josefa Urrutia’s house, the drama has a grotesque appearance, but it is still a drama nonetheless. With Botello’s luck and life, the great dramatic farce can be made.” Here, the conflict, if it exists, is known to Father Moreno. Why is this young lady, who seems so distinguished, marrying my unpleasant uncle? Is it true that they mistreat her? No; my own mother, when I pressed her, confessed that this is a baseless saying. And these young women I see here, what role do they play? And the concubine of Señor de Aldao , where is she? And in this pair of future spouses, gathered in a place so suitable to excite the imagination and the nerves, is there love? And if there is no love, why is there a wedding? I was suddenly brought out of these reflections by the young priest, who, approaching me, said in a childish tone and with a Galician accent that was like picking up stones: “Forgive my curiosity… Is he Doña Benigna’s son? ” “The same one. ” “One who is studying to be a scientific electromagnetist?” As I didn’t immediately understand this hint of a joke, the priest corrected himself: “For clever, I mean, for an engineer. ” “Ah! Yes. ” “Then count me among your servants. Do you want something? Are you tired? Do you smoke? ” “And you, are you the parish priest of Saint Andrew of Louza?” I asked him in turn, to say something less incoherent. With the most unjustified familiarity, the priest put his hand on my head, and forcing me to lower it until it touched my knees, he shouted: “Get down… get down, Your Grace… Parish priest! Alas! With a clergyman _contentaverit mihi_… I have so far been no more than an apprentice, that is to say, a recruit in the sacred militia.” He sat down beside me and began to tell me a thousand inane things, to which I paid very little attention, because, in truth, I was thinking of quite different things; Meanwhile, the hour was approaching when the imperceptible fall of dew and the dampness that permeates the atmosphere make it unpleasant in Galicia to remain outdoors; and the master of the house, rising, ordered us to enter and go upstairs to a room highly decorated with chintz curtains, from where we went to the spacious dining room, where dinner awaited us, served by two servants, one with the appearance of a farmhand, the other somewhat more polished, under the direction of an obese old woman who shuffled her feet and who, despite her ruined physique, seemed to me to be the odalisque of Señor de Aldao. The two girls I had seen in the courtyard had evaporated: they did not appear at the table or in the room. Seated opposite the bride, whose face was fully illuminated by the lamplight, I anxiously satisfied my curiosity by looking at her: I drank in her face. At once, I agreed with Father Moreno: she was neither ugly nor pretty. Her elegant, swaying body was worth more than her face, one of those so- called mutton-like profiles, lacking that splendor of complexion and that correctness of features that are primary elements of beauty. But after fifteen minutes of examination, I was already inclined to vote, if not for her beauty, at least for the inexplicable charm of the bride. When she opened her black, passionate eyes; when she smiled; when she turned to answer a question, her moving face animated, life flowed through those features that I imagined placid and cold, despite having already seen in her portrait, by the light of a Madrid lantern, reflections of her soul. Carmiña Aldao laughed little, and yet she didn’t seem sad; there was the animation of her will within her. It seemed even extreme to me when, after dinner, and as I took the case out of my pocket with all my finesse, she lavished praise on the poor jewel. “Oh… what a tasteful thing! Papa, look… Felipe… It’s a darling. And you chose it yourself? A student! Come on, we can give you orders now. It’s beautiful, it’s lovely. ” Father Moreno also had his say in the safety pin. “Well! Truly beautiful. That’s what the powerful do. We friars don’t dare to be so rude: our gifts are simpler…” Saying this, he went to get a sack, his only luggage, which a boy had brought from San Andrés de Louza, and took out a mother-of-pearl cross, one of those from Jerusalem, which, although modern, have the figure of the Crucified One carved with a certain Byzantine rigidity. It must have been half a yard high. “It’s the only thing I can give you, daughter. The cross is touching the stone of Golgotha, where they planted the cross of Our Lord.” The bride replied nothing; with a quick movement, she bent down and ardently kissed—I don’t know if it was the gift or the hand that offered it to her. The friar was taking a variety of rosaries from his little bag, some of mother-of-pearl, others of blackish bones, strung on a string, not yet strung. “From the olive trees of Mount Olivet,” he said, unraveling them and distributing them to those of us present. When my turn came, I must have made some movement of surprise, because the friar asked me with noble courtesy: “Don’t you want it? Things are taken as they come from whom they come; we are poor by trade, and we cannot offer a gift of greater material value, Sir Don Salustio.” I put the rosary away, somewhat blushing from the lesson. People had come from San Andrés to help while away the evening and play the game of tresillo: the parish priest, the apothecary, Marina’s assistant. They offered me the fourth place at the table, but I refused: I was afraid of losing and finding myself penniless in a strange house. My uncle, sitting next to his fiancée, struck up a conversation; Father Moreno retired to pray for hours, and I found myself once again entrusted to the apprentice cleric. “Where is my room?” I asked him. “Do you know? He would gladly take me in. ” “I don’t know… but he who has a tongue goes to Rome. Come here. Hold on to my little finger. ” We crossed the dining room. The lamp was still burning, and the old woman was watching the lifting of the tablecloths, the emptying of glasses and plates, and the clearing of desserts. I looked again at the withdrawn sultana. Once upon a time, she would have passed for a pretty girl; today, her sparse gray hair, her erysipelas , and her excessive obesity made her abominable. She seemed hardworking, nagging, and at the same time humble, resigned to her role at the bottom of the stairs. The priest, in order to direct a question to her, squeezed her arm. “Oh! Serafín, stay still… What indecent jokes you make! ” “Mulier, you can pinch yourself without hesitation, for you are already beyond all temptation… Where is the cubicle, aka this young gentleman’s bedroom? ” “Right next to yours… May God grant the poor wretch patience to put up with nonsense… Candidiña, Candidiñaá!” A light… illuminate these gentlemen… The slender young woman from before appeared, candlestick in hand, fresh, blond, with innocent and even somewhat silly features, like a cherub in an altarpiece, but with malicious, chatty little eyes, which she tried to narrow so as not to betray her. She led us on ahead and, making us climb a rather steep staircase, led us to our rooms, located at the top of the tower and separated from each other by a narrow corridor. These rooms, which had not been affected by the general renovation carried out by Lord Aldao on the estate, had a shabby appearance, and probably under normal circumstances were only used to store the pumpkin and chestnut harvest. The furniture consisted of a bed, two chairs, a small table, and a washbasin. The young woman, placing her candlestick on the table, remarked: “Serafin’s there, and you’re here. You’re quite comfortable.” “You still fit, you little mule,” the apprentice clergyman shamelessly warned. The girl blinked and burst out laughing, waving her hand at Serafín; but instantly, turning to me, she assumed a modest demeanor and humbly asked if I had anything. I replied that I wanted some writing material, and he said he was flying for an inkstand. When he took the candlestick away again, I was left almost in the dark, lit only by the reflection of the moon. I looked out the window. In the foreground, I saw an enormous dark mass extending, a sort of vegetal lake, which seemed like a single tree, although its magnitude made me doubt it. In the distance, the estuary shone like a gray satin skirt sprinkled with silver sequins; the crescent moon multiplied in its midst, and the imperceptible sound of the gentle waves mingled with that of the night wind that shook the branches. nearby. A moist, cooling air caressed my face. Candidiña interrupted my contemplation by sneaking in without asking permission, holding in one hand the inkwell, which was almost overflowing with ink; in the other, besides the light, paper, envelopes, a quill pen end, and a small cone of sand. “Aunt Andrea says she has to excuse me, that everything is so… messed up. She says tomorrow without fail she’ll give him the sack. She says that in the village, one must forgive.” I began to arrange what was necessary to write to Luis Portal; but the girl, instead of leaving, remained standing there, contemplating me as if my person and my actions were something very curious. When she leaned over my shoulder to peer at how I was arranging the paper, saying with almost childlike astonishment and a very sweet, smattering of riverine Galician: “Oh, and he’s going to write now, as late as it is!” a whim crossed my mind and a current of emotion crossed my nerves, which I repressed with the relative effort it takes to dismiss purely physical suggestions : “Careful, Salustio… You’re very agitated today… Tread carefully…” Just to say something to the girl, I asked: “Is that just one tree you can see from the window?” “Don’t you know what the Teixo is? ” “Just a yew tree, that immensity! Santa Bárbara! It’ll take half a league of circuit. ” “Half a league! Oh, how funny! Don’t be so condescending. There isn’t even half a league from here to San Andrés yet. But look, it has three stories. ” “One tree, three stories? ” “Oh! Yes, you’ll see.” In one they dance; in another they drink coffee; from the other you can see a lot of land… and the estuary and everything. Chapter 9. Copy of a letter to Luis Portal: “Chacho: here I am at your service at Teixo, the country house of my uncle’s fiancée’s father… blow! It’s called that, not the uncle, but the country house, because of a colossal yew tree that, according to rumor, has three floors, as many as the best house in Orense. I’ve just arrived; I can’t yet tell you what I think of the fiancée and the people around her: these people are the father, an old woman who had something to do with the father, and two girls, daughters or nieces of this old woman, one of them already in her twenties, and although her name is Cándida… full stop. The future aunt is a young lady with an elegant air, with a face that is pleasing if you look closely: good eyes, even very good ones. I don’t know if she’s in love, but she seems quite affectionate toward my uncle. Son, I return to my subject. Do you conceive that an honorable and decent woman , as they say my future aunt is, would marry just like that, just for the sake of it, such a fellow? Is there not a secret story in her little heart? Or is it that, by dint of her very purity, she imagines that marrying a man is reduced to going out with him on your arm? “The matter worries me, because in a very short time I’ve formed a particular idea of Carmiña Aldao, thanks to information I received from a friar… Imagine! I’ve traveled with a friar, a real friar , a barefoot Franciscan and all. And he put my future aunt on cloud nine. He told me I was the model of the Christian woman. This, coming from a friar… “If you could see what a curious fellow this Father Moreno is! God hasn’t brought a more ordinary, down-to-earth, more sympathetic man into the world. He astounds me. ” He’s neither afraid of anything, nor intolerant, nor does he shy away from any conversation acceptable in society, nor does he treat anyone despotically, nor does he engage in pious nonsense, nor does he do anything that isn’t discreet and opportune. That’s why I tell you, don’t think the friar is pulling one over on me. What he is… On the contrary, I’m terribly suspicious of that very gift of sympathizing with others, starting with my own. I’ll study him, and I’ll be able to do little if I don’t tear off his mask. What’s that guy up to? Teach better catechism? Because there’s no doubt that with manners like his, you make friends. Or perhaps he’s disguising tendencies that aren’t quite in keeping with the cassock? Because he’s either a saint or a hypocrite, although of a different stripe than the hypocrites known to this day. Do you believe, lad, that a man can live surrounded by sirtes and pitfalls and not stumble over them? Forgo the vow of poverty, “I’ve seen that he didn’t even have the money to buy a cigarette. Let’s pass the obedience one, because soldiers also obey their superiors; but as for chastity… It doesn’t stick, right? ” “You can imagine that my uncle is as infatuated as he can be. To tell the truth, the bride seems like a bargain to him. This gentleman from Aldao won’t have much money, because they say he’s fond of showing off, and that his estate consumes his money, and that his married son bleeds him dry; but even so, my uncle being who he is, it seems to me that he’s achieved what he could never have promised himself. “The wedding will be soon: on the day of Carmen. My uncle is sleeping at the apothecary’s house in San Andrés; I, as I’m not the groom, have a lodging at the Tejo. I’ll tell you what happens. Write to me, lazybones. There you’ll be brooding over your opportunisms and your deals with everyone and even with the devil. You’re more of a scam! I almost forgot.” Tear this letter up… although, with your prudent habits, you would have done so without my asking you to. I had finished, and fortunately had even sealed the envelope, when the apprentice clergyman strolled casually into my bedroom. Were it not for certain circumstances that will come to light, I would not remember the physiognomy of that ecclesiastic in fieri with such exactness; but it is worth mentioning that he had a sort of rodent’s snout, a lipless mouthpiece that revealed his misaligned and badly positioned teeth when he laughed, a blunt nose as small as a chickpea’s beak, eyes sniffing at the core, which must have been little larger than a sparrow’s, a white complexion flecked with wide freckles, a beardless face, red hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. His physical type could be classified as something between a comical fool and a malicious monkey. I was unsure whether his face was simpleton or untidy. At the same time, there was something of the persistence of childhood about him that prevented anyone from taking his words or actions seriously. “Do you bathe?” he asked me, speaking impersonally, as was his custom. “Do I bathe? ” “In the sea, sir. In San Andrés. Because I go down to the beach every day , and I can accompany you. ” “Fine, agreed; we’ll soak. ” “I thought he was going to hate this bathing thing. His uncle also soaks every morning. He’s like a codfish. He’s not any cooler anyway . “Wait, wait! ” “The bad thing is I don’t have a bathing suit. ” “Oh! Neither am I. If he’s so fussy… If he goes to a little corner behind some rocks… ” “Well! ” “Or if he takes a spare pair of underwear… ” “Come on; come in.” At all this, the little cleric, who would rather call him the acolyte, leaned back in his chair, looking as if he wouldn’t leave all night. I understood that it was necessary to pretend he didn’t exist, and quickly undressing, I slipped into bed. “Is there a _soneca_?” Serafín asked me, leaning close to the bed and, with the greatest confidence, giving me a monkish pinch on the shoulder and a gentle rub on the cheeks. I squealed and instinctively returned a formidable smack, which made him burst into convulsive laughter: “Gui guíi, gui guíi!” He then insisted on finding out experimentally if I was ticklish, and also if I was a mistress, for which he firmly squeezed my little finger. This strange familiarity, more characteristic of a six-year-old than a man, and particularly of a man aspiring to the priesthood, exerted over me the irresistible contagion of a comical, and at its core, indulgent, contempt , and I threatened the acolyte with throwing a boot at him if he didn’t stay still. The threat had its effect; Serafín calmed down, and lying down like a little dog at the foot of my bed, he told me that he wasn’t sleepy, that he just wanted to chat a little. I authorized him to chat, and no program was ever more strictly followed . From that mouth came a river of nonsense and absurdity, of ridiculous pranks, mixed with strokes of theological science and traces of crude malice so accurate at times that they surprised me, leaving the question of whether that guy was a complete imbecile or a complete fool. You very clever scoundrel. “So Madrid… Oh, how nice it must be! I never was. There’s no money for the ferrancho ferril. Money! Who would have thought! Clean yourself up, Serafín, you’re out of your mind. And in Madrid the streets are… like… like those of Pontevedra? Wow! The cobblestones must be marble… Well, do people there also go to the other world raging or singing, right? Well, then I don’t envy the people of Madrid at all. In the face of death, everyone is equal, young master. And why do you study? For those who make ferriles and viraductos and rascals, I mean barrels? Ah! Then we must give you your honor. You’ll be minister of administration and make me an electoral canon. Although I’m better suited as a penitentiary, because I’m a penance.” And you, even if you become a better engineer than the one who came up with that damned engineering, won’t have the same career as your uncle. Do!… No, your uncle knows: he’s a fish. Nobody gets the cream out of Don Vicente Sotopeña like he does. The plots of land were already a good slice of the pie, and now they rent him the house for mail and pay him a million duros in rent… gui, gui! Then, when there are elections, he comes to pimp us swine… well, those of us who follow the sacrosanct career of the priesthood… But what a swine friend of mine told him: “Get on with it, vade retro exorciso te, liberalism is sin, and whoever doubts it will have the fundamental doctrine de fide, expounded by the Holy Vatican Council, thrust before their noses!” Here we are not of those palates spoiled by mixed sauces. Gui, gui, gui!… “And how do you think about politics?” –I asked, resolving to address the ecclesiastical scamp informally. –Me? In politics? Noble hearts only have one opinion… –Let us know what opinions do. –Well, I’ll say it through the mouth of one who knew what was being said: _Nequit idem simul esse et non esse_: do you want it any clearer? I am not a supporter of the hare Church in the greyhound State. _Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus._ –You speak in Christian or even in Galician. Are you a fool? –_Ego sum qui sum_; that is to say, beware of cross-breeding and distinctions and transactions! I made it very clear to your uncle, Don Felipe; and also to Don Román Aldao, who is a brave braggart and is blazing with the title of Marquis of Tejo or at least a Grand Cross. They say her son-in-law is bringing it to her as a wedding gift. _Vanitas vanitatis_, gori, gori. Carmiña’s little brother also asks for the breast: he wants the hospital administration’s chundina… I think poultices are too fattening… —Shut up, you’re turning my stomach. —He won’t taste them, his brother-in-law is worried about him. He won’t make the broth with linseed flour, nor will he throw boxwood hens into the pot for the poor sick people, just for show. Uncle Felipe is decent. He’s good enough. And he’s not that embarrassed. He’s getting married and all, and he still chases Candidiña around the threshing floor. Does he think so? Candidiña is a doctor too. She already knows more than many old women. _Ne attendas fallaciæ mulieris. _
“Don’t slander my uncle, miquí,” I exclaimed, driven by curiosity, for I figured that that buffoon, on more than enough occasions, never failed to hit the nail on the head. “Was he going to go chasing little girls in the very presence of his girlfriend ? ” “Yes, yes, believe it… If I saw other old fogeys who’ve had their fill of underwear chase after the monicaca… _Vinum et mulieres apostatare faciunt sapientes_, as the other one said. Cándida gives them rope: and don’t think it’s just to waste time. I tell you, Cándida knows where she’s casting her hook. Carmiña’s going to have a stepmother pop out from behind a cabbage patch . ” I sat up in surprise. “But this Candidiña, isn’t she… isn’t she the daughter of…?” The acolyte shrieked. “Gui, gui! I thought that…” He made a gesture of putting the tips of his index fingers together. No, man, no… Neither Candidiña nor the other little girl are figs from Doña Andrea’s fig tree… They’re nieces… I knew their father, who was a general… I mean, a corporal in the Carabineros. The old lady took charge of them because their parents died. And by all means, the girl… remember… Serafín Espiña tells you… she doesn’t pursue love affairs out of concupiscentia carnis… She wants to drag a silk tail… If we live, we’ll have to see miracles. Chapter 10. The next morning we swam in the beautiful beach, we strolled around San Andrés, getting into the mood, since our presence was an event in the little town, we visited the parish church, we collected limpets, mother-of-pearl and horns, and at nine o’clock we were at the Tejo, ready to finish the chocolate. Father Moreno had not accompanied us: he preferred to swim in the afternoon, since he didn’t like to miss his mass. My uncle had not shown up yet, nor would he come until one o’clock, lunchtime; and Carmiña, free from the obligation of chatting with her boyfriend, paid attention to me, and even gave me signs of trust and affection. “Last night you retired early because you were bored.” We don’t really know what to entertain you with, and if you don’t try to find some entertainment… In the country… “Don’t worry about that, Carmiña. I like the country very much. I’m never bored there. This place is beautiful. Today I took a more delicious bath… ” “And that ungrateful Benigna? I’m so sorry she’s not coming! Your mother is very nice, and I’ve always loved her. Now… with even more reason. ” “You see… It’s not easy for Mother to get around. There’s always something to do over there…” After these commonplaces, my future aunt and I were left at a loss for what to say to each other . She finally thought of an act of courtesy and kindness. “Since you brought me such a lovely gift… do you want to see the others I’ve received? We have them in a separate room, because otherwise, the little girls are so curious and so fond of messing around, that… This way.” She started walking, and I followed her. In the pocket of her suit, in time with her steps, several keys jingled, making a graceful, familiar sound. She took out the bunch, and once the mysterious door was opened and the curtains were drawn, the magnificence of the outfit emerged in all its splendor. When I say magnificence, I shouldn’t take it in an absolutely literal sense, because many objects smelled of the provinces, and others, although of Madrid origin, weren’t of exquisite taste, at least not as far as I can judge in these matters. The bride was explaining everything to me. That satin dress, embroidered with jet, was a gift from the groom, as were the earrings with the pearl surrounded by diamonds. Her father had splurged on a navy blue suit, made of rich silk and very well-stitched; and there were the matching hats. Another dress struck me as very pretty : made of off-white silk , it featured a subtle netting imitating pearls at the front, extended into a majestic train, and was adorned with jet. This one—Carmiña declared— was useless, a whim of Señora de Sotopeña, who was in charge of selecting the finery in Madrid, and who had insisted that the bride could not be without a society dress. The jewels offered by the father were repairs to an antique piece of jewelry: there was a beautiful brooch and I don’t know what other trifles. The Sotopeña family had contributed a very rich fan, the Vicaría de Fortuny, a shell-wrapped fan. The bride’s brother had contributed an ugly bracelet. Then a series of jewelry boxes, albums, knick-knacks, the thousand useless trinkets that are only bought or sold under the pretext of saints’ days and weddings. Behind them, in a corner, as if embarrassed, I discovered a very strange object: an enormous mousetrap… “But who gave you that?” I asked, unable to contain my laughter. “Who could it be but Serafín?” he replied, joining me in my hilarity. “But is it possible? ” And he came so proudly. I wish you could see him, with his mousetrap raised, saying: “At least this is of some use.” “But is this Serafín stupid, or crazy, or what is he?” “In my opinion, he’s no more than a child. His heart isn’t bad, and sometimes he has the sayings of a clever person. But after two minutes , his head is gone, and he talks a thousand silly things. He’ll be right, for example, in a point of theology or morality—I know this because Father Moreno says so—and yet he is so dull in the simplest matters that once, when we placed some snuffers in front of him and asked him to snuff a candle, he picked them up, looked at them, wet his fingers with saliva, snuffed them with his fingers, and, opening the snuffers, put the wick inside, saying very proudly: “I understand you well, little box!” We were laughing at this anecdote until we went out into the garden. The future marmoset showed me the outbuildings, the chicken coop, the stables, and the orchard, inviting me to taste the fruit from the sweet cherry tree, to pick flowers, and to try out the trapeze and the swing. Father Moreno appeared there , calm, communicative, even joking. He questioned me about certain people who had preferred to soak in the water rather than attend a religious mass; of Serafín, who hadn’t been there to act as an acolyte; of our triumphal walk through San Andrés. In turn, Señor de Aldao soon appeared. He came dressed, slicked back, with his mustache dyed, his head shining like a billiard ball; but he seemed to me to be a ruin, under the greenish shadow of the open parasol. He asked me if I had “seen everything,” with the tone of a Médicis wondering if a foreigner had made a close visit to his palaces and galleries. And then he added: “What about the Tejo? The famous Tejo? ” “Ah! A magnificent, surprising thing. ” “Oh! Last year, a sailor from the English fleet was here… enthusiastic, determined to photograph it. He took more than ten photographs, taken from different points.” Don Vicente Sotopeña has assured me that Castelar, in his speech at the Floral Games, when speaking of the beauties and wonders of Galicia, also brought up the Tejo… Castelar was a great orator, eh? Florid, above all, florid. The Lord of Aldao struck me as one of those people whose vanity is somewhat hidden from other men, outwardly and completely visible . I later learned that, in fact, he had always been guilty of vainness, and had placed his vanity in the most empty things. When he was young, he boasted of being handsome, of the cloying kind, with a twisted mustache and eyebrows pulled like a string. Then the tarantula of nobility bit him, and for a long time he took to wearing the uniform of a Maestrante de Ronda at every peal of the bell and dreaming of the Marquisate of Tejo. He courted this marquisate with a platonic court, becoming very close to the civil governors of Castile when he wished it, and to the bishops when he wanted it papal. This attempt at Haitianism was completely frustrated. Having reached old age, the absolute dominion exercised over the province and over much of the Galician region by Don Vicente Sotopeña had made Mr. Aldao understand that in our times, social importance is not based on more or less stale parchment. “Nowadays, politics,” he used to say, “absorbs everything. He who can distribute sweets with his right hand and lashes with his left, is the real character.” This assessment had greatly influenced the warm welcome given to my uncle’s marriage proposal by Carmiña Aldao’s father. He saw in it the means to cling to a wisp of the great Galician saint’s coattails and satisfy a multitude of ambitions he had harbored for years, which were already turning sour. the matter of the Grand Cross, the reawakening of the road project that was sleeping the sleep of the just, and I don’t know what other minor details related to the Provincial Council and the contract. No matter how deeply we delve into that labyrinthine abyss called the human heart, we will never be able to unravel the cause of certain unspeakable feelings. Envy, competition, and emulation apparently demand some analogy, and it is incomprehensible that these evil passions develop when there is not the slightest parity between the envious and the envied. Should a zarzuela singer envy Patti , or a modest bourgeois lady envy the queen? Well, they envy them, there is no doubt about it; and from the shadows in which they live, they try to shed a ray of light that competes with that of the star. Thus Don Román Aldao, a provincial gentleman with a moderate income, sometimes indulged in his competitive streak… with whom? With Don Vicente Sotopeña, the renowned politician, the luminary of the law school, the famous saint, the great chieftain of Galicia, the jurist overwhelmed with business, the powerful man, the millionaire, the universal influence. And in what area did Don Román want to outshine Sotopeña? Well, in the area of the summer residence. Don Vicente owned a sort of royal site in the vicinity of Pontevedra, a place of rest from his labors and solace for his rare leisure time, and every time the Lord of Aldao heard talk of the superb town, its orange grove, its eucalyptus forest, its marble statues, its stalactite chapel, its magnificent fence, and a thousand other precious things that the Naranjal displays, he would twist his face, his lips would contract with the pout of mortified vanity, and he would ask his interlocutors: “What do you think of the Tejo? Of my Tejo? A sailor from the English fleet, enthusiastic, determined to photograph it…” etc., etc. Beautifying his estate, in imitation of the Naranjal, was the unattainable aspiration of Don Román Aldao. Nature was an accomplice to this dream, because in addition to having grown that unique, giant Yew tree, it spread around it the charms of the corner of paradise called the Rías Bajas. The sun, the sea, the sky, the climate, the beaches, the splendid vegetation of the region made the Yew, unmatched by the Orange Grove in terms of human intervention, an oasis. Art may be displayed in the countryside, but the greatest attraction of a country house always depends on nature. Don Román didn’t see it that way. From the countryside, he didn’t feel the ineffable sweetness and repose that inspires forgetfulness of social life, but rather, the appearance and bustle, the glories of owner and host, and the boxing match with Don Vicente. Of course, Aldao wasn’t trying to copy splendors like the famous stalactite chapel, so praised by chroniclers and travelers; But if, for example, a large picnic area surrounded by jasmine arbors were erected in the Orange Grove , Don Román was already planning a puny chocolate bar covered in honeysuckle. Did they place precious statues in the Orange Grove? Well, Señor de Aldao would come out with his plaster busts, his Four Seasons, or his group of cupids, and plant them for me in the middle of a meadow. Did they install a warm stove in the Orange Grove, with its rubber trees, its ferns, its orchids? Imagine Señor de Aldao buying up as many discarded stained-glass windows as possible in Pontevedra to build a cheap greenhouse, crammed with the already unbearable and stiff begonias. Did they have rustic tables and benches brought from Switzerland in the Orange Grove? Well, the lord of Aldao taught the carpenter in his village how to saw pine cones in half and how to assemble each seat and piece of furniture with pine logs. And finally … the colossal tree! On the first day of my stay in Tejo, people from Pontevedra came to lunch: Luciano, the eldest son of the lord of Aldao, with his son, who could have been around four years old at the time, and a provincial deputy named Castro Mera, at the time my uncle’s closest friend, leader of the faction that represented his policy within the Pontevedra Assembly: because everything is relative, and in Pontevedra there were my uncle’s people, and my uncle’s “own policy,” governed by the rigid principles that the reader will imagine. Also present was the editor of the Teucrense, a small newspaper my uncle was fond of at the time, even though six months earlier he had been sniping at him; but for such watchdogs, there are magic cakes. There was much talk of the usual local politics, so minute they bordered on the microscopic. Coffee was drunk in the tree. For this reason, I focused my attention on that respectable patriarch of plants, destined to exert some influence on my destiny. The trunk, enormous, rough, whimsically veined with moss and with its bark, despite its age, still alive and healthy, supported well the weight of the majestic branches of the giant of the Estuary, as the Helenes newspaper reporters and Madrid newspaper correspondents poetically called it when they came to spend the summer. The way those branches grew and spread, their intense, dark greenery, had something biblical and solemn about them. It was impossible to look at the Yew without profound veneration, as a symbol of the exuberant and maternal nature that had produced such a sovereign creature. The Ocean, enamored with the grace of Galicia, lovingly embraces it with its waves, kisses and surrounds it with its foam, surrounds it, caresses it, and reaches out toward it with a blue hand, eager to touch the soft curves of the coast: the Estuaries are the fingers of this hand. In the Estuaries, the air is purer, warmer, and more fragrant; the vegetation is more lush and southerly. That Yew, king of other trees, only on the edge of an Estuary, and in soil fertile along its shores, could develop with such power and vigor. It was the true monument of the region. It gave its name to the estate; it served as a beacon to boatmen and fishermen when they were unsure of how to orient themselves toward San Andrés; from its highest canopy, one could command a view not only of the small riverside villages, but also of the group of islands, the famous Cassiterides of ancient geographers, and the limitless expanse of a sea almost Hellenistic in its serenity and beauty. To build the three superimposed viewpoints that adorned the Yew tree on the east side of the island, no great skill or architectural science was required; it was enough to take advantage of the graceful horizontality of its branches and build circular platforms on such a sturdy support, adorned around them with a light balustrade. The spiral staircase found natural support in the giant’s trunk itself. The thickness of the branches was such that from the ground, those drinking coffee or refreshment on the second floor, or those dancing on the first, could not be distinguished. And whoever climbed to the third needed to look out from the viewing platform between the branches to admire the view. Each floor had its name. The first was called “the ballroom,” the second “the gazebo,” the third “Vistabella.” And at Aldao’s house, one would often hear people ask: “Did you go up to Vistabella?” “No, I stayed in the ballroom.” In truth, the ballroom —it must be admitted, even if Mr. Aldao was dismayed—was not astonishing in its size. Nevertheless, one could dance a rigodon comfortably, to the echoes of the piano that was brought into the garden for these solemnities. And it was not without charm to dance under the green awning, between equally green walls, which barely filtered the sunlight. The room trembled a lot; such an exercise was like dancing and swinging. Chapter 11. That day, when we went up to the “arbor” for coffee, where there were already enough rustic chairs, benches, and tables , the Yew was more attractive than ever. A fresh breeze from the estuary made the branches sway slightly; the sun, striking its crown, gilded it and drawing from the tree that penetrating, somewhat resinous fragrance that increases the intoxication of life in our hearts. The height at which we were suspended might have persuaded us that we were birds; it occurred to me that the birds had a very pleasant dwelling in the bosom of the colossus; and suddenly, as if Nature were pleased to instill in me one of those impossible-to-satisfy desires with which she deludes mortals, I felt the urge, or rather, the yearning, to fly, to lose myself in those pure, immense blue spaces that we saw through the openings that the branches always offer. When I noticed that I was envying the seagulls that were descending far away on the rocks of San Andrés, I accused myself of being foolish and, making an effort, I listened to the conversation. As was only to be expected, Father Moreno was leading the way, affirming once again to his audience that he had always felt better in Morocco than in Spain; better among Moors than among Christians “of these people over here. ” “Don’t think,” he hastened to add, “that in Africa we make a life for ourselves. ” the friars. If I feel more at ease there, it’s because those poor people go out of their way for one and show great respect. I learned Arabic, though not like my brother in religion, Father Lerchundi, but enough to understand myself. Well, if you could see how useful it was to me! For those unfortunates, the habit is a commendation. In their language, they call us saints and wise men… Just the same as here! “The Father couldn’t say more clearly that he would like to convert to the Moor, ” Don Román remarked. “A Moor, I already was,” the friar responded briskly. “That is to say, ” he immediately corrected himself, “you can imagine that I didn’t become a Mohammedan, nor do I say Mohammedan, that is, a follower of Mohammed, but rather Moor, which means son of Africa; Mauritanian. ” “We understand very well that you didn’t renounce it,” my future aunt exclaimed, with the tone of gentle and tender joking that she always adopted when addressing the Father. “No, my daughter, no, I won’t renounce it: by divine mercy, I never got to that. ” “Then tell us how you were a Moor. ” “Come on! You have very little to tell! It’s a very long story… It was even in the newspapers: the _Revista Popular_ of Barcelona published an article about it. ” “Oh, tell me, for God’s sake!” The friar wished for nothing else, judging by the pleasure with which he agreed to tell his story. He reached for the handkerchief he had tucked into his sleeve and wiped his lips with the aniseed he had just drunk. “Well, you see… It was just before the Restoration, when political affairs here were at their most unruly and the Republic was bringing revolt to all of Spain. I was in Tangier, happy, because, as I’ve told you, I like Africa very much. But we are children of obedience, and look, I find myself with an order to play tablets for Spain… to Madrid, no less.” And the fact is, we couldn’t come in the habit: those were fine times for habits, gentlemen! Come on, Moreno,” I said to myself, “now it’s time to unshade ourselves from the outside and become a gentleman… You know that there we always leave our beards, which greatly contributes to the essence of the disguise, because one of the things that best identifies an ecclesiastic dressed as a layman is his shaving. We had rather neglected the crown: so by abandoning it entirely in the days before the trip and smoothing out the rest of our hair, we were in good shape. The attire was ordered from the best tailor. And the accessories… because a gentleman’s suit has a thousand accessories… the ladies I used to deal with took care of those, and especially those of the English Consul. These ladies loved me very much, and they were people who understood the contours of elegance, and how a gentleman dresses himself. They prepared me socks—silk, embroidered, and everything!—ties, shirts, and even handkerchiefs marked with my code. It was quite a sight to see me dressed up. “Father Moreno, after you’re dressed, you’ll come and show off… Father Moreno, we must give you the finishing touches, otherwise you’ll look like a vision… Don’t take away this pleasure from us, Father Moreno.” I stood to attention. “Am I some kind of monkey, showing off my skills? They won’t laugh at what belongs to the friar elsewhere. They won’t see me dressed up. If they want it that way, well, and if not, we’ll lose our friends.” The day arrived, and I dressed up from head to toe; I didn’t lack even the smallest detail, even cufflinks, which they had even given me. I dressed in the convent, and through quiet streets I went out to take a small boat that took me aboard. Do you believe that those good ladies managed to see me anyway? When they learned the steamer was about to sail, they stood on the balconies heavily armed with binoculars, and since I was so careless on the deck, they stared at me. They say I looked like someone else… Of course! Why , I was wearing my jacket, and my gray trousers, and a tilted hat, and gloves! There was an explosion of laughter in the audience at the thought of Father Moreno in such attire. “And then?” asked the bride, deeply interested. I landed in Gibraltar… what a rage it was to see the English pennant flying there! I boarded the ship again for Malaga. Nothing of greater importance happened to me. From Malaga, I went to Granada, and boom! I ran into an acquaintance, a judge I used to know back in the Canary Islands, who stared at me, obviously, in disbelief. I went up to him, and he had no choice but to be convinced. We explained ourselves, he invited me to coffee, and we arranged to see the Alhambra together with some of his fellow innkeepers. I made it clear that they wouldn’t know I was a friar. He promised, and you’ll see that he did even more than he promised. In fact, when we met the next morning, he was accompanied by three soldiers, two doctors (in fieri), and a priest; and when he spotted me from a distance, he started shouting in feigned surprise: “Hello, Aben Jusuf! Are you here?” “Me too!” I replied, understanding my friend’s motive. “By Allah, when I left Tangier, I didn’t expect such a pleasant encounter.” His already agitated companions whispered in his ear: “So what? Is this gentleman a Moor?” And, to be honest, he replied: “They’ll surely know him by name. I called him Aben Jusuf.” “And is he a friend of yours?” “Yes, I met him in the Canary Islands.” “Well! I’d like to invite him to see the Alhambra, just to see what he’d say.” “Corriente.” I accepted the invitation, of course: as if I had accepted it the day before. My friend, approaching me, extended his hand and said: “Aben Jusuf, I would invite you to come with us to the Alhambra; but I’m afraid of causing you painful impressions. ” I replied that, indeed, it must be sad for a son of the desert to see monuments erected by his ancestors and which they can no longer inhabit; but that in order not to disgrace their company and that of those gentlemen, I would go willingly… “And they still considered you a Moor?” she asked Señor de Aldao. “Well! A very Moorish one.” I played my part with complete seriousness. I heard one of those accompanying me say: “This Moor has a good breed .” At every door, in every mullioned window, in every courtyard, I stopped as if saddened, uttering broken phrases, grunts of sorrow: in short, whatever I imagined a Moor must express there. Once I laid hands on my beard… “Oh, Father Moreno!” exclaimed my future aunt. “I wish I could see you with a beard! ” “Oranges! You haven’t seen me, have you?” exclaimed the Moorish friar, letting go of the thread of the story. “Wait, woman… Wait…” And, rummaging in the hump of his sleeve, he took out a poor , deflowered wallet , and from it a photographic card that in a moment circulated throughout the entire society gathered on the second floor of the tree. The women cried out in admiration, and Candidiña exclaimed with malicious silliness: “What a handsome man he was, Father Moreno!” When my turn came, I couldn’t help but agree that he was indeed handsome. The length of his hair and the bushiness of his beard accentuated the always frank and manly character of the friar, who, having finished the incident with the portrait, continued: “Well, I laid hold of that big beard you see there, and with great formality I exclaimed: “If Spain continues along the path it has taken some years ago, Allah will once again drive the African horses to these plains, which still resemble the middle of the desert. ” » And then I turned to those present and said: «Forgive me, gentlemen, a son of Africa; these thoughts have escaped me without my being able to remedy them…» You should have seen those men excited about my departure! «No, no, it seems very good to us; Ole the sympathetic Moors…» The embarrassment arose when they began to ask me questions about what they believed to be my religion and the customs of my supposed country. One of them decided to ask me: «If it was true that the law of Mohammed authorizes marrying many women?» And then another, a cavalry officer by the way, jumped in saying… «Garlic! That is the best thing about the law of Mohammed…» This part of the story caused a general uproar. My uncle pressed his forehead; the Lord of Aldao his waist; Serafín hiccuped; Carmiña laughed at very good-hearted, and I played the duet with him. “Listen,” the friar continued when the hilarity had subsided . “I became serious, and said to them in a very natural tone: ‘Gentlemen, although they call us barbarians and fanatics, we know how to recognize the defects of our legislation. I have traveled extensively, I have studied the intimate constitution of many societies, and I can assure you that nothing charms me so much as a family of one man and one woman, dedicated to loving each other and protecting the fruit of their love. Neither the heart of man, nor the rest and tranquility of the family, nor the dignity of woman are enhanced and consolidated by polygamy.” “Bravo, Father! ” “First class!” And what did they reply? ” They were astounded. The Officer looked at me, and his mouth opened wide. Where do you think he came out so that he could regain his composure? Well, he faced me and asked very formally: “And you, Aben Jusuf, how many wives do you have?” The audience laughed again. “Oh, what a challenge!” “Gee, that was going too far! ” “And what did you answer? ” “The truth is, I stood still. But an idea occurred to me. “The gentleman pointing at my friend knows my tastes. I am a man who does not want to sacrifice his love of travel and his independence to the obligation of supporting a wife and family. I want to be as free as a bird, and that is why I have formed, from a very early age, the resolution never to marry.” “And were they satisfied? Did they ask no more questions? ” “None of that,” the friar replied. The conversation stopped turning to women. They talked about politics, and there I had the easiest way out. The doctors and two of the military men, who were more liberal than Riego, began to extol the benefits of the revolution. Then I told them that perhaps I, a Moor, understood this concept of freedom differently than they did. “Excuse me, for after all I am a foreigner here, and explain to me how it is that, with so much freedom for everyone, you have assured me that you do not allow some men whom we respect greatly over there; a sort of Christian saints who wear brownish tunics, their feet almost bare… and they are called… they are called…” The little officer shrieked: “Friars! They are good combs… Among Moors, let them be among Moors…” Ignoring him, I continued: “Over there in Morocco they are respected, and they contribute to instilling in us affection for this Spanish land that we consider our second homeland… I am amazed that here, according to your history that I have read, because I am fond of reading, they have barbarously slit your throats… Am I mistaken, or was it really so? We do not carry out this in Morocco with harmless people dedicated to praying and doing penance…” They remained as silent as the dead. One of them nudged the other , and I heard him say, “See how learned the little Moor is!” “He’s pissed us off, ” the other replied. “That’s what he said: pissed off. ” “And in the end, what came of all this business about the Moorish quarter? ” “Bah! You can imagine what came of it. As we returned to Granada and entered the winding streets, near my inn, I turned to those people and said very seriously: “Gentlemen, the Moor thing was a joke. I am nothing but a poor Franciscan friar, who, thanks to the prevailing freedom, has had to disguise himself as a Moor to come to his native country. In my true nature, I greet you.” I turned and left, leaving them stunned. We left the gazebo when it was almost nightfall. The bride was so radiant with spirit, commenting so happily on the Father’s story, that a suspicion crossed my mind regarding the Abencerraje in sackcloth. I tried to dismiss it; but it came out like this: “It will not belong to the father, but what belongs to the future… neither will it.” Chapter 12. This conviction forced itself upon me, and I do not know whether it was painful or pleasant. I know that it wrought within me a sort of internal revolution, renewing that feeling of invincible repugnance which my uncle inspired in me, and reinforcing it with all the lack of affection which I thought I perceived in the fiancée. At the same time I asked myself with rabid curiosity: Why is this woman getting married? Three or four days were enough to convince me that only my mother could imagine that Carmiña was mistreated in her house. Doña Andrea barely played a role, except as the passive role of a very senior housekeeper , well-versed in domestic mysteries and quite a slave to her work. I believe the only privilege Doña Andrea enjoyed as a retired odalisque was that of holding more frequent conversation than was appropriate with the wineskin of old Borde wine or the demijohn of brandy. Otherwise, she spoke affectionately to Miss Aldao, and she, in turn, showed confidence and indulgence to the old maid. Doña Andrea never strayed from her proper sphere, the internal management of the house, nor did she appear in the parlor, nor did she express any pretensions other than those compatible with her office. The only person out of her place there seemed to me to be Candidiña. She was neither a young lady who could mingle with Don Román Aldao’s daughter, nor a fregatriz who lived among the pots: she had something of both , and her presence and her ambiguous personality, admitted into the room but excluded from the table, were not easily explained. Her younger sister occupied a different, entirely humble position, without any justification for the difference. It was evident that my uncle’s fiancée was not living the life of Cinderella, nor was her marriage driven by the desire to emancipate herself, to reign in her house, which drives so many single women to welcome the first person who tells them something about love. So, why then? It was probably my uncle’s comfortable position, his undeniable future. She couldn’t help it. That girl was getting married, if not precisely out of calculation, at least because it is unreasonable to disdain an advantageous situation. Although Miss Aldao’s conduct was nothing short of sublime, it was not fair to criticize it either. On the other hand, and believing I could guess the true motive behind my future aunt’s actions , I noticed in her, upon observing her daily, in the intimacy of our close kinship, the similarity of their ages and the country life , something that contrasted with the reasonable and practical goals I attributed to her. Carmiña had bursts of vehemence and traces of sentiment that betrayed her passionate nature. At times her eyes shone, her nostrils throbbed, and a singular firmness sparkled in that dreamy face of ascetic lines. It seemed to me that beneath the surface there must be fire, and a lot of it, hidden. Since I’m not a novelist, I don’t need to skillfully prepare the transitions; and since I’m not a hypocrite either, I must record something that I don’t know if any observer or moralist has declared. And that is that almost always the first glance a man gives a woman—a man in my circumstances, a young man and willing to love—is also a look of amorous curiosity: a look that says: “Would this woman love me ?” “What would it be like if he loved me?” This isn’t a display of cynicism, nor is it to make humanity worse than God made it: it’s simply to indicate that the sexual instinct, like all instincts, never rests, even when repressed by reason. If I had professed affection and respect for my uncle, I would have immediately silenced the confused voice of instinct. But the opposite was true: my uncle irritated me, he secretly stirred my soul ; and, believing I detected in his fiancée the germs of a similar feeling, I felt drawn to her by a psychic fraternity that headed straight for infatuation. Without a moment’s doubt in me, without the matter surprising me in the slightest, nor did I hesitate for five minutes to confess it to myself—a confession always easier than a confession over the ear—I desired and determined to gently insinuate myself with Carmiña. Temptation seized me all the more easily because, as the marriage had not yet taken place , the brief internal struggle between desire and convenience had not even been waged in my soul . To tell the strict truth, what I proposed was not to seduce the future woman nor to oust the future woman. Regarding the fact that the verb “seduce” indicates a fatuity from which I do not suffer, I am not able to calmly combine what Luis Portal called it a family drama. All I aspired to was to find out if my suspicions were true, if the bride detested the groom, and if she could view me with tender indulgence. In good faith, I believed that, once this was achieved, my anxiety would be calmed. Life at the Tejo lent itself to closer intimacies. After the bath, we would have breakfast wherever and however we pleased; a freedom extremely conducive to finding the bride in pleasant isolation, in the orchard or the garden. To achieve this goal, I had a hard time getting rid of the altar boy, who had taken a liking to me and clung to me like a limpet. He would lie there reading newspapers, or playing checkers with Don Román, or picking cherries and strawberries with Candidiña, and I would slip away in search of Carmen. I generally surprised her as she was leaving the chapel, where she had heard Father Moreno’s Mass . When I ran into her, I offered her flowers and chatted with her. We talked about everything one might talk about with an unmarried girl: about whether Pontevedra is a lively town, the Peregrina festival, the dances at the Casino, the stroll, the love affairs and engagements of friends, and other such insipid things. I had occasion to flirt with her surreptitiously, sometimes praising how well her dress looked on her or how beautiful her hair was, sometimes inviting her to lean on my arm as she walked, claiming that I couldn’t be weary of such a pleasant burden. My aunt never offered the fierce face of virtue to these insinuations. She welcomed the advances with a gracious, malicious smile, as if to say: “Well, we’re all in the know: my future nephew is very kind.” She responded to the offers by supporting herself, without any hesitation, with decorous cordiality. Faced with the melancholic air I adopted one day for a change of attitude, she assumed I was ill and cared for me attentively, offering all kinds of physical remedies, when I pretended to request a moral one. In reality, I found no way through which to attack that little heart. I analyzed her attitude with my uncle. While with me, having already made the acquaintance, she appeared cheerful and cordial, to the groom she displayed, along with submission and complacent solicitude, excessive formality and correctness, which could be mistaken for shyness or modest modesty, but which to me, seen in the sinister light that illuminated my soul, seemed symptoms of absolute coldness. When I thought I had made this discovery, I felt a surge of sympathy for the chaste bride. If she indeed felt the same aversion to her future as I did, what stronger bond could bind us? “It repels her. Perhaps she herself doesn’t realize it, but it repels her. This proves her good taste, her delicate skin.” I was saying… Then came the eternal question: “So why is she marrying him? Why is she marrying him?” While I posed this enigma to myself, my respectful siege continued. It seemed to me that the only thing indispensable to achieve my purpose was time: the wedding day was approaching, and it was evident that , in order to deserve not only the tenderness, but only the complete friendship of that young lady, I needed frequent and assiduous acquaintance, in which each hour would bear its fruit, little by little, like the wrinkled and folded leaves of a Rose of Jericho, which part when their stems are impregnated with water. “Naturally,” I reasoned, seeing her so amiable, yet so reserved when it came to matters of the heart, “this woman is not going to hand me the key to the treasure right away. It is not easy for me to learn from her mouth the reasons she has for accepting my uncle. ”
Meanwhile, I entertained her, took courteous liberties, trying to gain a few inches of ground. The first joke was to call her Auntie. At first she didn’t like it, but then she decided to call me, also jokingly, as Nephew. As soon as I heard from her lips a name that already implied a certain familiarity, I asked permission to call her Auntie Carmen. These two names, the first tender and childish and even more so the second with its fragrance of youth and beauty, seemed charming to me, and from that moment I linked them in the Miss Aldao, whom I never called by any other name. There was a moment when I imagined that Aunt Carmen had already entered that period when, deliberately or inadvertently, we reflect something of another’s feelings, and through contagion, we experience the evil that is being suffered at our side . It was one afternoon when my uncle wasn’t in San Andrés, but in Pontevedra, handling and playing that keyboard of petty politics that he claimed to know so perfectly. To distract us, Don Román arranged for us to go out fishing for panchos in the calm waters of the estuary. This fishing is done on calm days, letting the boat move very slowly, and casting hooks baited with miñocas or earthworms. It is, in reality, a trip by sea, at the sweetest time one can enjoy in the countryside. We were in a launch. Titi, sitting beside me, teased me because on my line I never felt the nervous tug of the fish, while hers never ceased to tighten and bring small catches to the surface. I suggested changing lines, and she agreed, but the fish weren’t fooled and continued to snub me. Taking advantage of the fact that Candidiña was quarreling with Serafín, and Father Moreno, whose perspicacity inspired me with fear, was having fun and enjoying himself fishing like a child, I dared to tell Titi I don’t know what silly and expressive remarks. She responded by smiling and staring at me, with a look that I can’t explain except by saying that it seemed made of a mixture of light and angelic mischief. If that was mockery, it would be mockery seasoned with honey, adorned with roses, and seasoned with the sweet salt of affectionate laughter. Suddenly, it seemed to me that Gloria’s eyes were veiled with profound sadness; that a sigh came from that chest… a deep sigh, which did not and could not express anything more than this: “Very well, future nephew, but unfortunately I am already attached to your unpleasant uncle and it turns out we cannot understand each other. Stop being childish, or I will have to call you _late piache_.” The coming of night put an end to the fishing. We returned to the Tejo on foot, along the familiar path. The moon was shining, that moon that seen in the countryside seems more silvery, sadder, larger than when it lights up the cities. Tití went ahead, leaning on Candidiña, and sometimes turned around to speak to Father Moreno or me. To make a long story short, we crossed fields and even entered a threshing floor, braving the fury of a mastiff that wanted to taste our meat. Upon reaching the Yew Tree and entering the room where a multitude of butterflies and moths were circling the large lamp, entering through the wide-open windows, Titi uttered an exclamation: “Alas! As the threshing floor has passed, I have been filled with _loves_!” I understood perfectly the meaning of the phrase: those little flowers had stuck to her skirts , or rather, plants bristling with hooks that cling so tightly that there is no way to dislodge them. At once, I knelt down and began to pick off loves here, loves there. The damned ones clung to the fabric of my clothes; without changing my position, I raised my eyes to the bride, murmuring: “They’re sticking to me.” My attitude must have expressed a lot. There are movements that betray passion. Shortly after, a black creature crossed the window, a treacherous bat. Flying with the clumsy and fatal flapping characteristic of such birds, it circled the room several times, appearing in corners where we least expected it, and flapping against the walls or landing, when we were most careless, on our heads. Laughter came and screamed, we all armed ourselves with whatever we could find: handkerchiefs, chair covers… and we hunted down the ugly monster. Serafín was the first to lay a hand on it. Despite the sour shrieks it uttered at being captured, the acolyte seized it, called for two pins, and, stretching its membranous wings from tip to tip, nailed it to the wood of a window. Then he stuck a cigar made from a roll or arrow of paper into its snout, lighting it with a match; and while the animal shuddered in agony and convulsions, its executioner He was making a thousand faces. It was a grotesque scene, enough to roar with laughter, and I was busy savoring it when I heard the bride ask impatiently: “Cándida! Where is Cándida? ” The girl was nowhere to be seen. Then Carmen, leaning out of the window, exclaimed: “Papa, Papa! Come up… Come and see the bat we caught…” From the garden, the voice of Don Román Aldao answered “I’m coming,” and the old man entered the room, his eyes flashing with excitement. The bat’s torment amused him greatly. But the bride interceded for the victim. “Serafín, leave the poor animal alone. Killing it, fine; but tormenting it, no… Don’t be a Jew! ” Chapter 13. After fishing, every afternoon my uncle came to pay court to his future wife, and those glimpses, perhaps imaginary, of understanding between her and me vanished . The wedding was approaching, and the ferment that precedes great domestic events was noticeable in the house. One morning my uncle went to the Orange Grove with the intention of getting Sotopeña to honor the ceremony with his presence; but the Saint was bothered by bilious colic and was just preparing to leave for the waters of Mondariz, with his multiplicity of affairs and important occupations not allowing him to postpone or modify his plans for even twenty-four hours. This refusal was a setback for my uncle, whose influence in the province would grow upon receiving a public display of friendship from the tutelary of the region, a man who was popular even among his fellow countrymen in the Antilles and South America. The Lord of Aldao, on the other hand, was reassured when he learned that Don Vicente would not be visiting. What opinion would the owner of the Orange Grove form about the improvements and ornamentation of the Tejo? The instinct for the preservation of vanity, which he possesses, and which is very strong, dictated to Don Román the suspicion that Sotopeña might laugh, there inwardly, at the iridescent little balls reflecting the landscape, the plaster busts, the colored windows in the chapel, the large boxwood shield depicting the Aldaos coat of arms, the greenhouse made of stained glass, and, finally, every detail and requirement of the wedding and the banquet. As the solemn day drew near, and gifts arrived from friends and relatives, and the groom used and abused his privilege of conversing with Carmen, I found myself further separated from her by inaccessible barriers. On the other hand, I was already clearly aware of the marmoset’s icy coldness toward her future. In this, I certainly couldn’t be mistaken, as another person less interested in observation would be. Two or three times I noticed swerving movements, gestures of nervous impatience, at moments when the face of the woman, seated near the one she loved, lit up with joy. I also noticed that the fiancée displayed no great pleasure or tenderness when speaking with her father or her brother. She was respectful, cordial, affable; but nothing more: she lacked effusion. And this effusion, impossible to conceal, because it is betrayed by her eyes with their light and her voice with its inflections, was displayed by the tití when speaking with Father Moreno: in view of which I engaged in shameless soliloquies. “The little friar doesn’t fool me. With those dark eyes, that resolute air, that explicit character, and those bearded portraits… Ah, ah! This Aben Jusuf…” I confirmed these suspicions when I ascertained that between the Moorish Father and my tití, significant glances sometimes exchanged, sometimes quick, sometimes long, and full of meaning. It seemed as if the friar and his fiancée were trying to come to an agreement, with some grave purpose. Once, in the garden, I heard them exchange a few words quietly. “Will they see each other at night?” I ventured to think. Studying the layout of the house, I realized it was impossible. Father Moreno had been given the best room, except for the one intended for the bride and groom; this bedroom of the Father’s connected to that of Señor de Aldao, so that the friar couldn’t stir without Don Román noticing. Candidiña and her sister slept next to my uncle; how could they try to escape? No nocturnal activity that wasn’t known? In this respect, my barbaric malice found no firm ground either. And yet, I could have no doubt that the friar and Miss Aldao understood each other, and were on the lookout for an opportunity to meet clandestinely. I noticed these planned meetings on various occasions: I saw the culprits try to slip out into the garden after having coffee; I noticed that in the morning, at the time of hot chocolate, they tried to whisper in some corner of the gallery. Their conversation was always interrupted by my interventions, Candidiña’s pranks and mischief, Serafín’s nonsense, or Don Román’s obsequious banter. The annoyance was visible on the girl’s face. The Father concealed it better. Reflecting on what I would do in their case, I came to understand that they only had one good hour left to meet in secret: dawn. An early start solved the problem. In fact, when the Father said his early Mass, most of the villa’s inhabitants would stay sprawled in bed. Waiting for my two prisoners to come up with this ruse, I began to get up very early. I went to bed at nine, but not without a fierce struggle with the apprentice clergyman, who insisted on chatting until the wee hours. Daylight had not yet broken when I left my idle pens; and, having barely woken up, I would rush into the garden, which, to tell the truth, was delightfully fresh, watered by the night dew, filled with the mysterious shudder of the leaves awakened by the dawn, and perfumed by the faint scents coming from the garden of daturas, mignonette, and heliotrope. The sound of the fountain was more melodious than ever, sweet, and alternating, as if it were falling from heaven into a crystal bowl. All these charms predisposed me to dream and even made me forget my stalking. By the second morning I practiced it, it was already secondary to me, and I got up early for pleasure, fearing that I wouldn’t be able to find out anything and that my skillful ambushes would only give me the pleasure of seeing the delightful orchard. Nevertheless, I continued getting up early, and on the fourth morning, as I breathed with delight the first breath of fresh air, it occurred to me how beautiful it would be to climb the Teixo and watch the sunrise over the sea from there. No sooner said than done. I climbed the stairs, passed the ballroom , ascended to the gazebo, and from there to Vistabella. I stopped in surprise at the panorama that unfolded at my feet. In front of me, very close, the gentle slope where San Andrés de Louza sits ; Chestnut groves, cornfields, meadows, a few mills dotted by the twists and turns of the stream, like pearl clasps on a necklace of diamonds that the sun had not yet made glitter. It barely glimmered, like the telltale reflection of a vast bonfire, over the part of the horizon where sea and sky met and the blackish stain of the Cassiterides was outlined. It was a diffuse light, similar to the first uncertain glance of beautiful pupils half-opened. The mist still veiled it. When the first rays of the red globe began to ignite the prodigiously serene sea, a mysterious shock shook the surface of the waves, which were tinged with opulent colors, as if the hand of some magician had sprinkled gold, sapphire , and molten carmine on them. At the same time, the landscape was coming alive, the waters of the stream were already sparkling, and the beaches of San Andrés and Portomouro emerged white and pristine, as if washed by the waves, with the silvery hue of their fine sands and the green festoon of their seaweed. The clumps of tall aloes in bloom displayed their yellow plumes against the purity of the sky. The red of the roofs could be compared to polished coral. Suddenly, like a bird flapping its wings to test flight, the lateen sail of a sardine boat emerged from the infinite blue of the estuary at the foot of San Andrés, and after it many others emerged, huddled together like a flock of doves. I was spellbound. I don’t know what inner warning made me change my gaze. turning it toward the orchard and the villa, silent and closed at that hour. The coat of arms of trimmed boxwoods, the baskets and flowerbeds of roses, pansies, and petunias, the grove of fruit trees, the basin, seemed, from Vistabella, like drawings of a geometric garden, traced against the background of a tapestry. The windows of the silent house sparkled. Suddenly… An event well foreseen by the imagination and which rationally seems implausible to us, causes strong emotion, although deep down it may not matter to us. My heart sank and my hands went cold when I saw Father Moreno and the titi emerge from two different doors of the house, almost at the same time. Undoubtedly, they were competing in exactness; they had agreed on a fixed hour, and neither Carmiña’s saboneta nor the Father’s onion chronometer, a gift from the wife of the English Consul, differed by a minute. The young lady and the friar, upon seeing each other, approached quickly, like people who have longed to be alone and have something very important to discuss. My tamarin bent down and kissed the Father’s sleeve. Then they seemed to argue for a moment heatedly, seriously and animatedly; and suddenly the Father stretched out his arm and pointed at the yew tree. I knew they could not see me. Out of an instinct of prudence, I had crouched behind the branches. So I understood the meaning of that gesture. “It is in the yew tree that we shall be best, and we shall be able to chat quietly.” Realizing this and having a sudden inspiration were one and the same. I wanted it, I needed it; I longed to hear that conversation, whether criminal or innocent, but certainly of immense interest to me. I guessed that the first thing they would do, before speaking openly, would be to search the tree, although at that hour they could not reasonably suppose it to be inhabited. Accordingly, I looked around for a hiding place. The branches of the yew were, besides thick, solid, dense, and suitable for hiding a person; but towards the top they thinned out. I saw no way to hide except by lowering my level, that is, by placing myself at the arbor. Wherever the Father and the young lady were positioned at that height, I could hear and see them. So I went down, and, clearing the railing and disappearing among the dark branches, I mounted the strongest and most resistant. Many creaked, two or three small ones broke, the thicket groaned, and some frightened birds flew off, fluttering away to escape my supposed attack. Fortunately, the friar and his bride were then passing beneath the paths covered with the espalier, and it was neither possible for them to look towards the yew, nor to see even if they did look. Otherwise, they would have noticed the swell of the branches, comparable to that of a pond when a nutshell from a small boat falls into it. They were still whispering and shuddering when I heard the clatter of marmosets and Father Moreno’s reverent footsteps on the stairs. They sat very close to each other. They had positioned themselves so well at the top of the viewing platform that I could see them head-on, although a little from below ; and since they were in full light and I was in relative darkness, I could better observe the expressions on their faces. I even heard the gasp of Carmen Aldao’s chest rising and the creaking of the wooden seat as the Father’s full weight fell upon it. He was the one who spoke first, celebrating the wise choice of location and the agreement to take refuge where it was impossible for anyone to overhear their confidential conversation. “True,” the young lady stated, satisfied. “It also seemed to me that here or nowhere else we would be able to speak with complete freedom. In the garden, Serafín or Salustio would drop down, stick to us, and then it would be impossible.” Even if they get the habit of getting up early, it’s pretty certain they won’t even think of coming to Tejo. And have you seen how annoying they are? Chapter 14. “Particularly your future nephew,” replied the Father. “I don’t know what ‘s wrong with that gentleman, he even seems to be spying on us. Sometimes I feel like sending him to the double-barrel. Because if he and every living creature hadn’t been watching us, damned if we had any need.” I don’t like these cover-ups, which I don’t like, my daughter, I don’t like them; because they can give rise to malicious interpretations, and it’s not enough to be good; you have to seem it too. That’s true; but if I didn’t unburden myself to you, I think I’d die. Certain things can’t be explained well in the confessional. It’s normal; let’s hope God gets us out of this mess… Little girl, open your heart and say what you want; Father Moreno is here to listen to you and advise you, not as a confessor, but as a friend. I am very truly one… and you know me, and that’s enough of an introduction. Well, Father, I have no friend other than you: my bad reputation is such that it’s not possible for me to consult with either my father or my brother, because there’s no union of souls… I think you already suspect the subject of my consultation. The father took his chin in his right hand, thinking. “As you told me, you’re getting married to avoid greater evils… I think I’ve understood…” “No, Father, it’s not that… Look: whatever evils befall us here, I can’t avoid them now: I’ve done my part as much as I could; I’ve become a civil guard, a policeman, a henchman, everything one can become… a rather snubbed role sometimes… but I’m convinced that a woman who doesn’t want to guard herself, no one will guard her, and that the whims of older men are harder to combat than those of children. My… ” The aunt hesitated a little. “My father,” she finally said resolutely, “is about fifteen. Blinded by that girl, blindly following her around, putting up with her teasing and drooling if she makes a silly gesture. God knows I wouldn’t mind if… after all…” “You’d want her to get married… ” “Naturally.” May he who gave me life not condemn his soul… and I resign myself to everything else. You know the campaign I waged on behalf of Doña Andrea. While she and my father lived… thus… my only aspiration was for them to marry. She would have my mother’s maid as a stepmother ; but Papa would live in the grace of God. Doña Andrea is a wretch, believe me, of excellent substance; she has never given me what is called uneasiness; she has cared for me with a tenderness that I cannot describe; only she has no… how shall I put it? –Moral sense. –Yes. She is good in her own right; but she doesn’t distinguish between good and bad. –That’s what I call, –said the father, — having an idiot conscience. –Exactly. Well, as soon as he realized that she was old and a wreck, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to bring that girl home, no doubt with the intention of regaining the influence she exercised over my father, or for a member of the family to inherit such an honorary position. “Little girl, since you’re going to get married… it’s better to be clear so we can understand each other. Before, your father lived with Doña Andrea, and now… no longer. ” “Sir. Not now. ” “Well then… it doesn’t matter much whether your father marries her or not . If the sin has ceased… It’s true that since she lives in the same house, the scandal continues. ” “No, sir. I mean, I imagine. Doña Andrea is so horrible that she doesn’t scandalize anyone,” the aunt remarked with a gracious and somewhat malicious smile. “So much the better… although, my dear, people don’t look at whether a face is pretty or ugly to be scandalized.” “Father, unfortunately, there is or will soon be another stumbling block here. Don’t think people overlook anything… Not so much. I feel ashamed when I notice someone noticing certain things… ” “You have nothing to be ashamed of, my child. These shameful things weren’t made for you,” the friar murmured in such a flattering and affectionate tone that my aunt blushed a little, I think with pleasure. “I can’t help it,” she stammered. “A father is so sacred that you don’t know how much it takes to realize that we can’t respect him as he should and as God commands. Outwardly, I haven’t lost my respect for Papa; but inwardly… No, it’s not possible to live this way.” There are times when I imagine I’m going mad. “Tururú!” the friar exclaimed festively. “Crazy, no less! I’ve told you; that head of yours is a volcano. Go on, then. So Candidiña…? ” “Yes, sir. She’s chasing after her like a cadet. I don’t know what saint to commend myself to. These days, because of the people and the guests, she controls herself; but when we were alone, she was like overflowing. I won’t give details; it even seems ugly to me: suffice it to know that one day I saw such a scene that at night I threw myself on my knees at Papa’s feet, praying to God and the Virgin that he either marry the girl at once or send her away to serve. ” “And the girl, does she keep him going? ” “Yes, sir. She’s always going to keep him going: but at the same time… in serious matters… she defends herself, she defends herself, and leaves me disappointed. Anyway… I ‘m not obliged to look out for her.” I have persuaded her well, scolded her well, advised her well; I have her in my own room: her mother would do no more. What horrifies me is that my father… And believe me, he doesn’t know where he’s at. He’s gone mad, completely mad. Mad for the girl. That was the basis on which I begged him to marry; but he comes up with the world… and the people… and his standing… Ah, Father, I can’t resist any longer! I can’t. “Good heavens!” sighed the friar. “What blindness… and allow me the phrase, what stupidity! Sweetheart! At your age! At your age!” “Imagine that he went so far as to say to me: ‘I won’t marry because it’s crazy; but if Candida goes out one door, you’ll go out another…’ And with a tone and an air that… I wept more tears then than if my father had died. If only he had died in a state of grace! If only! A thousand times I’d seen him in person, and not like this, staining his gray hair! When she said this, Miss Aldao seemed very beautiful to me. Her eyes sparkled, and enthusiasm and indignation made the wings of her nose throb. Her breasts rose and fell at intervals. The friar looked at her in dismay. “You’re right, you have plenty!” he finally exclaimed. “How much better it would be to die than to wallow in disgusting sins! Dying is the law of nature: we all have to pay that tribute… but, child, at least let’s not pay another to the devil, so he can laugh at the indecencies with which he deceives us… How little man is, my child, and through what filth he is lost! Lucifer’s sin was pride: it is a bad sin, but at least it isn’t filthy and nauseating… eff! And the friar made the movement of one who recoils from seeing a disgusting creature. “Unfortunately,” added the young lady, trying to calm herself, “there’s everything here, and pride plays a large part in the matter. If it weren’t for pride, Papa would marry that girl who’s got his brains in her mouth; people would laugh a little, that is to say, a lot… but there would be no crime or shame: I wouldn’t see around me what has cost me so many bitter moments… and besides… I wouldn’t have… ” Here she hesitated, finally making up her mind. “I wouldn’t have any need to marry.” The revelation was so serious that the friar remained in suspense, shaking his head and pressing his lips together, like someone saying to himself: “Bad, very bad.” “So you… Without hesitation, Carmiña, here we are, in a certain sense, in the confessional. You don’t marry willingly. ” “Yes, sir; I am happy to marry because I have made up my mind, and when I make up my mind… I made the resolution the day my father told me that if Candidiña went out, I would go out too. Everything, except hearing and seeing what I have heard and seen. I cannot protest in any other way: filial respect ties my hands, and even my tongue. But the sanction of my presence… not that! “And your brother?” asked the friar briskly. “My brother… My brother has a son every year… He needs money… my father gives it to him… He turns a blind eye to everything… and he has even scolded me many times because I give Father certain advice. He calls me foolish because I am looking for a stepmother. Once I thought of going back to my brother’s house; but his wife does not want me there, nor does he… I shall not to stick myself where they have no desire to have me. The Father remained silent for a moment, his brow furrowed, his hands busy tormenting the knots of the cord. His face revealed the greatest anxiety, and he coughed and breathed heavily before deciding to speak, as if what he was about to say were extremely important and decisive. “Well, child,” he finally pronounced, “my advice here can only be what any person of average judgment would give you. Getting married is no joke, nor is it done in a day. No, my child: it is the most decisive step in the entire life of an honorable woman, such as you are; by the mercy of God. Honestly, does that man… repulse you? ” “Repulse me…” There was another moment of silence, quite long. I was even holding my breath. The roughness of the yew branches dug into my flesh, and the hand with which I was clinging to the tree was beginning to go numb. Finally, the bride’s agitated voice was heard again. “Repulse me… I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t feel any affection for him, or any of that enthusiasm… Don’t be alarmed, Father; I don’t say enthusiasm… loving. Let me see if I can explain myself or if I’m talking nonsense. When I get married, I would like to consider the husband I am to receive before God as a person worthy of everyone’s esteem… Father, do you think Don Felipe is… like that?” “My child, with my heart in my hand… I haven’t heard of any crimes against him; but he has a middling reputation when it comes to political maneuvering… and he enjoys little sympathy… Since you ask… I must tell you. ” “My lack of sympathy,” the bride warned with rare sagacity, ” isn’t because of his political maneuvering, because, Father, in that respect, everyone is the least and the most… I imagine it’s for something else… Have you noticed Felipe’s face?” “Yes, I’ve repaired it… It’s… Sweetheart, what a rush! ” “It’s Jewish,” the bride stated definitively. “It will seem strange to you that I should say so… I dare not say it except to you. It’s Jewish; yes; nailed on. That’s why, when you asked me if it repulses me… I was undecided. That face… it took me quite a bit of work to get used to it. I don’t call it ugly or pretty: nor would that matter much to me, if it weren’t…” I was listening with all my soul, when, due to a circumstance unrelated to the conversation, I was seized by true anguish. The fact is that I thought I felt the branch on which I was straddling begin to creak slowly, as if warning me that it wasn’t made to support birds of my size. Nevertheless, I continued to pay attention. “Well, woman,” the Father decided, “with that antipathy or repulsion—for in truth it seems to me that it is—you shouldn’t get married; no. At least, consult your strength… Consider carefully what the married state is. Consider that the husband you take, whether you like him or not, is the companion of your entire life, the only man you are permitted to love, the one who will be with you in one flesh; thus, thus says the Church: in one flesh. He will be the father of your children, and you owe him not only fidelity, but love… do you understand? I’ll repeat it to you: love! Little girl… reflect, now while you still have time. Don’t worry: I know it would be a fuss to break up the marriage; but as long as there isn’t an indissoluble bond… damn! These are things that give fodder to the tongues of fools for a couple of days, and then they’re blown away.” The other thing, daughter… death, only the death of one of the spouses remedies that. Do you understand what the sacrament of marriage means? Do you know what a husband means to a Christian woman? I want you to pay close attention. Don’t say later that your friend Moreno didn’t warn you. When I arrived here, a cold sweat, a sweat of anguish, began to appear at my temples. It wasn’t apprehension: the branch creaked. The danger of falling from such a height wasn’t enough to frighten me at that moment: I was more weary of the shame of being caught in indiscreet and unworthy spying. Because then I saw clearly that the spying was unworthy, my curiosity an offense, and my ambush a bad deed. The creaking of the wood dry, that dull and agonizing “crrraá! crrraá!” they said to me in their obscure and truncated language: “Impertinent busybody, novelist, buffoon.” And I thought I heard the Father’s harsh and contemptuous voice, slapping me with these categorical words: “I had already seen through you. I noticed that you were spying on us. Fool, you believed that we were all complacent slaves to matter, and that this young lady and I… You must have seen with shame that decent people exist.” Refusing to hear the rest of the conversation, I tried to slip down the branch, ride another, and, from branch to branch, descend to the ballroom, and from there to the ground. The operation, like gymnastics, was not difficult; but it was impossible to perform it without making a noise, and a noise that had to attract the attention of both interlocutors and immediately betray my ambush. The trials and tests I’d tried to measure the distance had already caused a prolonged rustling among the branches. The only option: remain calm, bear it, not breathe, commend myself to God , and hope for everything from the firmness and complacency of the branch… With this in mind, I tried not to lean too hard, and I remained half-in-the-air, in an extremely awkward position. What drove me to despair was not being able to fully pay attention to the lecture, which was then more animated than ever. I don’t know if I heard the last part correctly; I imagine that this is more or less what the bride said: “Of course we cannot do without God’s grace, but I believe it is not vain to assure you that I must fulfill the duties I impose on myself. If you only knew, Father, how that “duty” sounds to me!… In all honesty, if I thought I would fail in my duty in the future, I would want to die a thousand times sooner.” Neither my father, nor my husband, nor God will ever have any complaints about me. Thus I will live… or die happy. Otherwise… I would drown! I am marrying knowingly… circumstances place me in this special situation… because knowingly I will be good. I want no apologies in advance. I will be good… even if the world falls apart. Let the reader laugh: these words drove me mad with enthusiasm, making me forget my difficult position. I stood up as if to applaud, stretching out my hands toward the angelic marmoset. When, by inevitable movement, I descended heavily onto the branch, a tremendous crash was heard, which sounded to me like the roar of the most violent storm; and without delay I understood that I was falling, that I was falling slowly, the extensive and dense branches serving as a parachute, but the beaks of the small branches and the roosters of the thick ones causing me countless bruises and scratches . The fall seemed to last a century, and in the midst of my confusion, I thought I heard exclamations, shouts, and a confused clamor up high in the tree . Finally, my descent accelerated, some piece of my clothing tore , and I lay flat, face to the ground, on the grass. I don’t know which came sooner: hitting the ground or bouncing like a rubber ball and running like a hunted deer. What I intended was to hide, to disappear, to conceal, if possible, my crime and my ridiculous failure. And this thought spurred me on, gave me wings, and I even believe it sharpened my instinct, leading me to take to the alley of fruit trees, completely covered with a canopy, the safest refuge, since they wouldn’t see me from the Yew. From there to the copse there was no step, and from the copse to the honeysuckle picnic area, a very short distance. I climbed up, and without noticing my bloody and scratched hands, without noticing the consequences of the fall, excited, crazy, I lowered myself down the wall, and already outside the orchard, I didn’t believe myself safe until, by shortcuts and paths, I fled to the beach. “A sure alibi… I was bathing.” And I undressed in a jiffy. Chapter 15. On the day of the wedding, two days after this episode, I woke up with the impression of feeling deep inside, deep in my ribcage , the grinding of the fall. By dint of applying cloths of the arnica I had secretly bought at the San Andrés pharmacy, I had managed to keep the bruises and abrasions on my back from showing. My face and hands. Only the lining of my jacket had been torn from my clothes; thank goodness. The only two witnesses to the scene had undoubtedly agreed to remain silent; but they glanced at me from time to time, and I felt an unpleasant shock when I met Carmiña’s sad, severe gaze , or the Franciscan’s eyes, in which I seemed to detect a humiliating mixture of anger and disdain. That was why I lamented that my body was so broken. “Have I hurt or broken something,” I thought, “and now the truth is inevitably revealed ?” The physical decline was accompanied by a rather lyrical spiritual state , as some paragraphs of my new letter to Luis will demonstrate: “Chacho, I don’t know how to tell you what’s happening to me. I discovered the secrets of my future aunt, by chance, and I’ve convinced myself that she is an angel, a seraph in the form of a woman. It was with good reason that the friar asserted that Carmiña embodies the type of the perfect Christian. There is no doubt that in such a woman there is something that commands veneration, something celestial. I was wrong to doubt it and to even imagine that she was not a saint. And if you saw how unfortunate she was, what self-sacrifice she was! I will tell you what happened… and you will tell me if greater heroism, or more dignity, is possible. I have been absorbed since I penetrated the motives of her conduct… ” He explained them at length, praising Tití’s admirable resolution , and added, to finish unburdening my conscience: “The friar also seems good to me… I am leaning towards the fact that he will keep all his vows. Nothing, my boy: he will keep them. Virtue exists, beware if it exists! There is still a homeland… I don’t know what I feel: I don’t know if, since I have seen clearly, I love Tití more, in a very refined way there, or if she no longer matters to me as a woman. What is certain is that my uncle does not deserve the treasure. I will not find a woman like that, if I ever get married!” I wrote this epistle on the eve of the fateful day. At dawn, I found myself, as I was saying, exhausted and bone-deep, with an irresistible urge to stay like that, lying face up, without moving, thinking, or even breathing. But the damned altar boy came into my room and came straight to lift the sheets. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “He’s like cats when they lie down after falling from rooftops. What’s wrong with the young master? Shall I give him a rub?” I straightened up with difficulty, and, threatening him with a closed fist, I exclaimed: “If you mention falls… ” “Well, we’ll talk about whatever your pleasure decides…” “Ne in furore tuo arguas me!” “I’ll kick you with my shoe if you don’t keep quiet… ” “Hey… it’s no good throwing punches.” Arribiña, they’re already putting bells on the bride… Can’t you hear the orchestra of the Royal, Imperial, and Botanical Theaters? Well, they’re playing like crazy. Indeed, light, country notes rose from the courtyard, seeming to dance with pastoral joy. It was the bagpipers tuning up and preluding the dawn. That fresh, jubilant music oppressed my heart. With an effort, I stood up. I seemed to feel a kind of depressive malaise in my chest , as if I had a heavy stone there , an intolerable malaise. Reluctantly, I washed, dressed as best I could, and went down to breakfast. Most of the wedding guests were doing the same. I noticed that Señor de Aldao was restless, and I learned that his anxiety stemmed from a letter that had just arrived from the Naranjal. It was written, on behalf of Don Vicente Sotopeña, by his godson and protégé, Lupercio Pimentel; who, after many very courteous congratulations and great protestations of friendship toward my uncle, declared himself commissioned by Don Vicente to attend, on his behalf, if not at the ceremony, at the meal. And here came Don Román’s difficulties, fearing that he might not have all the qualities required for the presence of such an important person. Aldao would almost have preferred to have to deal with the Saint himself. After all, he was the quintessence of simplicity, and by offering him regional dishes and jokes in dialect, he would not notice any fault. On the other hand, the godson… God knows! Young, elegant, accustomed to court feasts… Once the chocolate was served, we entered the room. Women’s voices and exclamations were heard in the hallway. The bride appeared, surrounded by several friends from Pontevedra who had been invited to the ceremony, followed by Candidiña, Doña Andrea, and the little girl, who were jostling around to get a better look at her. Carmiña Aldao was pale and had dark circles under her eyes; her black eyes had the purple rims that come with sleepless nights. She wore a white dress with pearl netting, a black mantilla held in place with jewels, a sprig of natural orange blossom on her chest, a rich handkerchief, long gloves, a prayer book, and a mother-of-pearl rosary. After greeting her fiancé, who greeted her somewhat embarrassedly, and smiling at the others, she stood, not knowing what to do, standing in the middle of the small room. But when Señor de Aldao, responding to a nod from my uncle Felipe, said, “Let’s go,” the young lady stepped forward and with simplicity and vivacity approached her father: “Forgive me if I have offended you in any way,” she said in a vibrant yet restrained voice, “and give me your permission, so that I may be happy.” As she spoke these words, she fixed her father with an eloquent, profound, almost terrifying gaze from her concentration. Señor de Aldao turned his head, murmuring, “God bless you.” I think I noticed a certain sparkle in his pupils… There are things that unnerve one. The little friends busied themselves arranging the bride’s flounces and gathering the little pearls from the embroidery, some of which were already lying on the floor. And without arm in arm, we made our way in disorderly formation to the chapel. It was fragrant with flowers, all carpeted with fern and anise, the altar lit with countless candles. The ceremony was long, because they were married and veiled at the same time. I heard the clear “yes” of the wife and the opaque one of the husband. I heard the reading of what everyone calls the Epistle of Saint Paul, although it isn’t. There the husband was assimilated to Christ, the wife to the Church; and in confirmation of this virile superiority, the embroidered stole fell over the bride’s head at the same time as the groom’s neck. Carmiña Aldao, crossing her hands on her chest, bowed her head, submitting to the yoke. Among the crowd of spectators were village men and women, who had come out of curiosity, and who jostled, with respectful murmurs, to see something over the heads of the noble family. When the Mass was over, the fireworks exploded, the bagpipes let out their characteristic snoring, and the people crowded around, pouring out in droves, the bride surrounded by her friends, who pinched petals and orange blossoms and kissed her. It was an awkward moment. Where to go, what to do, how to entertain the gathering? Castro Mera, who was young and lively, suggested that we move to the Tejo, take the piano out to the garden, and have a dance while the bride and groom and Father Moreno had breakfast, since they hadn’t been able to do so due to Mass and Communion . The idea was accepted. The dancing hadn’t even begun when the bride reappeared, now without her mantilla; she had taken a sip of hot chocolate and was coming to fulfill her social duties. She played the first rigodon from the garden. The second was played by a young lady from Pontevedra, and Castro Mera danced it with the woman I can now call my aunt. Then, a young lady from Saint-Andrés suggested a waltz of turns. I had danced the dragged rigodons, just so they wouldn’t notice the grinding and aching in my ribs; but as soon as I heard the waltz, a Vertère-esque flash flashed through my mind. “I’ll embrace her before her fiancé’s arms have touched her.” And rising vigorously, already forgetting the fall, I suggested the waltz. She refused, smiling, but her friends pushed her, and then, making a gesture that might have meant “just like that, it’s the last time,” she placed her left arm in mine and let me encircle her waist with my right. As I hugged her, I understood by a sudden intuition that I was in love with that woman, already irrevocably linked to another man. To have her entwined like that—in that vegetal, aromatic dressing room, sprinkled with gold by The sun, which sometimes filtered through the branches and threw a playful little star of light onto the bride’s hair or forehead, drove me mad. I noticed the delicate lines of Carmiña’s graceful body; I felt bathed in her breath, and the crazy idea became such a vehement feeling that I had to restrain myself so as not to hold my partner close and hurt her. My rapture was, nevertheless, among the purest and most elevated that has ever been seen in these amorous transports. I felt a celestial illusion, if I may express it that way, a divine illusion, noble in its origin and development. What exalted me was the thought that I had there in my arms the holiest and purest woman on earth, and that this woman, although belonging to another, was still virgin, untouched, like the calyx of a lily, like the orange blossom that was still clinging to my breast, and that as it began to wither gave off a strong and intoxicating aroma. We twirled very smoothly, and between turns, I think I said to her: “We’re related now; may I address you informally?” ” Naturally: all that’s missing is for you to address me formally, in a very polite way. ” “Will you be angry? ” “No. Why?” I remained silent. The folds of her silk dress caressed my knees, and I felt my heart, agitated by the movement of the waltz, beat rapidly. Then, with an invincible impulse, the truth rose to my lips. “Titi,” I murmured, “forgive me; I behaved badly toward you. Don’t you know? I was indiscreet… But I’m so, so glad! Because now I know everything you’re worth… and look, because I know it, I’m beside myself. Don’t you see? ” “Shut up, silly,” she articulated, her breath coming a little short from the movement of the waltz. “If you were indiscreet… what do you want me to say? You did very wrong. Very wrong!” “I know,” I replied contritely. “That’s why I ask you to forgive me. Come on. Will you forgive me? ” “Well,” she murmured, like someone who grants a child’s whim. “How saintly you are!” I exclaimed deliriously in a low, deep voice. We twirled around a few times. We were getting dizzy from turning in that cramped space. She stopped for a moment. Then I asked her: “Titi, do you plan to dance again in your life? ” “No. This is the last waltz. Married women don’t dance. ” “The last? ” “Surely. ” “Then give me, for God and for the Pilgrim, that little sprig of orange blossom. Give it to me. ” “What do you want it for? ” “Give it to me… Otherwise, I’ll do something stupid. ” “Here, nephew!” she exclaimed, stopping, “and don’t hide in the trees again.” I put the bouquet away like a thief would a stolen prize, and looked at my aunt, staring deeply into her eyes. I didn’t think I noticed any severity or anger in her when she made that frank declaration of having surprised me with my mischief. A little alarmed modesty was evident, yes, in her eyes; but this grave demeanor was tempered by a half-smile and the animation of her face, ignited by the movement of the waltz. As far as I was concerned, this dance would never end. Silent now, because the force of my feelings tied my tongue; carried away to the fifth heaven, unable to restrain myself, I must have convulsively squeezed her slender waist… because suddenly my aunt stopped, and with a changed face and a firm voice, pronounced: “Enough.” Chapter 16. We didn’t sit down to table until three in the afternoon. The dining room was barely room enough; The huge horseshoe-shaped table , decorated with symmetrical vases of flowers and bouquets of sweets, almost occupied the entire table. I don’t know how people and more people had gathered at the wedding: there were more than thirty guests. There were many noblemen from San Andrés, many priests, many doctors, the Navy’s assistant, two or three rural landowners, mayors, local chieftains, young ladies, political friends of my uncle, and even the good Don Wenceslao Viñal, who sat next to me for the pleasure of having someone to talk to about his archaeological and historical fantasies. Lupercio Pimentel, the godson of Don Vicente Sotopeña, occupied the place of honor to the bride’s right. He was handsome, correct, well-spoken, cordial, and joking, in the manner of politicians of this current period, who replace the influence of ideas and principles with that of personal sympathies that incessantly accumulate. From the moment the meal began, I noticed that he didn’t miss a beat, that he was trying to attract that audience, those “elements,” as he would say. He looked around, and leaning toward my uncle over the bride’s shoulder, I heard him murmur: “And the mayor of San Andrés, how is it that he isn’t here? ” “You see,” my uncle responded. “He’s so close to us… ” “For the same reason, for the same reason. It would be fitting that friend Calvete include him among the guests,” he added, pointing to the editor of the Teucrense, who bowed, highly flattered. After a moment’s reflection, Pimentel added: “Let two of them go and get him… Let them bring him by force if necessary.” As soon as he gets to the toasts… Castro Mera and Marina’s assistant rose docilely, and under a scorching sun they set out for San Andrés, in order to bring us the refractory element. While the soup was being served, the Saint’s godson spoke in a low voice to the groom, but in such a way that his words would make an impression on the audience. “Cánovas has made himself impossible… He has reasonable opinion against him … The Regency is not viable with him… A conservative situation would not be viable… ” It seemed to me, I don’t know why, that some of those present did not understand the meaning of the word “viable”; but anyway, they realized that not being viable was a bad and extremely damaging thing for Cánovas; and when Pimentel said that Pí’s party was a utopian party, they did understand it very well, and there were murmurs of approval all around. I could barely hear. I was at the Tejo, waltzing, feeling the ground sway with each turn and the green branches tremble with a prolonged whisper… By the time I was at the second course, I had to snap out of my abstraction because the apprentice clergyman, sitting to my left, went out of his way to pinch me, push my elbow, and squeeze my foot with every word Pimentel spoke. I don’t know what grass that Serafín had trodden on; perhaps the two small glasses of rich red wine from the Borde he drank while swallowing his soup stimulated his impoverished blood and brought him out of his childish dullness, turning him into a biting satirist. What I’m saying is that, along with the nudges and stamping, he started to make tremendous observations worthy of a Juvenal in a cassock. “Look,” he said softly, “what do you think, Salustio? What do you think of how shameless we Galicians are?” We left the temple of the Lord deserted , and worshipped the golden calf… _Fecerumque sibi deos aureos!_ They don’t go on pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Snows… and they go to the Saint of Oranges to suck on destinies, to suck on nougat… They all go, not one is missing… He who doesn’t go alive will go dead… You can’t escape. You’ll pray to the miraculous Saint. And if you don’t pray to him… let him invent magnetic bridges or electric highways… damn the attention your countrymen will pay you. Who told you not to be a Saint too, fool? Fortunately, the size of the table, the number of guests, and the buzz of conversations prevented the ecclesiastical monkey from reciting the nonsense from being heard; but I couldn’t contain my laughter when I noticed the bewilderment of Don Wenceslao Viñal, sitting to my right. The Saint had just performed one of his miracles on the blessed archaeologist, granting him a small salary as a librarian for the Provincial Council, and the deepest terror was evident in his frightened eyes. Pimentel would only hear those shenanigans and attribute them to him! Despite the usual sleepwalking of bookworms, Viñal pricked up his ears, aware of the horrible risk his blessed six thousand reales were running… “Salustius,” he pleaded in anguish, “make that fool shut up… He’s exposing us… For the blessed souls…” The excitement of my nerves prompted me to contradict the peaceful scholar. I, too, was inclined to bitter and pessimistic criticism . What irritated me was my uncle’s appearance, brimming with satisfaction, courting Pimentel more than his fiancée; offering him the performance, “You lowlifes!” I thought, “if you want to bow down, bow down congratulations to Father Moreno, who represents the sacrifice of one’s life for an idea; to that newlywed, who personifies virtue and duty, but not to the one who hands out the free lunch… I, too, feel like letting off steam. Serafín is not far off the mark.” Not knowing how to vent my impatience, and ignoring Viñal, who was tugging at my sleeve, I took advantage of the first opportunity to contradict Pimentel. I think it was in reference to Pí, to utopias , and to things that are _viable_ or not _viable_. The fact that I dared to raise my voice in such an inconsiderate manner caused general astonishment, and my uncle looked at me with an expression that redoubled my courage. “The republic is not _viable_ here? And why, let’s see? What cannot continue is the gentle anarchy in which we live… We suffer the disadvantages of the monarchy, and we do not enjoy its advantages. There is no cohesion, there is no unity, and political mores have become so relaxed that the statesman who aspires to set an example of morality makes a fool of himself, and the one with convictions, the same.” Pimentel turned to me, responding calmly and courteously: “What you desire, and what deep down we all desire, in other races, in races of the North, pssch! it could be; But here, with the Arab blood in our veins and our eternal indiscipline… oh! impossible, impossible… No one was a more ardent defender of liberties than he, his sacrifices were well known… Everyone agreed, but let us not confuse, gentlemen… let us not confuse, gentlemen, anarchy and license with just, rational, viable liberty. The countries of the North produce statesmen because the multitudes are already educated for political liberties ; it is a hereditary transmission, let us say; hereditary. And if not, look at Thiers’s theories, English opinion… Not knowing what to do, I clung to Thiers like one clutching at a burning nail. “It must be French opinion, sir. Because you cannot ignore that Thiers…” I deliberately paused, during which my adversary looked at me with a certain anxiety. “That Thiers was French.” The Curé of Saint-Andrés, from a corner, timidly said: “Of course he was French. As he was the one who pacified France after the Commune.” Looking around to judge the effect of my words, I saw Señor de Aldao’s face express disapproval and surprise; my uncle’s face, flushed with anger; and Father Moreno’s, brightened by a mischievous smile. Pimentel replied: “Of course he was French… It wasn’t about that, I think… We were saying that English opinion… because there’s no doubt, England is the country of self… of self-government, as the distinguished Azcárate so aptly demonstrated… and we… our idiosyncrasy… Implement here what in more… nations will not be viable: because every ruler must take into account the innate tendencies of the race… ” “All that is just talk,” I argued. “Generalities that prove nothing. Let’s be specific, if you like. We’re not dealing with race.” There’s talk of the Spanish Republic, to which everyone in power today had made commitments, and which they surrendered for thirty pieces of silver like Judas. Would they have done the same if the Restoration hadn’t blown their budget wide open? I only understood the impertinence of my aggression when I heard Serafín, clapping his hands, exclaim with a shrill shriek: “Over there, over there… Gui guii. That’s where it hurts!” Pimentel, wiping his mustache with his napkin, turned to me, and instead of responding angrily, agreed with me with a smile. “It’s quite true, Mr. Meléndez. The Restoration’s tact in accepting revolutionary elements has made viable what perhaps under other circumstances…” The period was interrupted by the arrival of the mayor of San Andrés, who was half-dragging the young man’s two commissioners. They must have all climbed the hill very quickly because they were breathless. The mayor was sweating profusely and wiping his cheeks with a large handkerchief. He stammered a few sentences to say that he “didn’t consider himself called to sit at such a banquet,” and Pimentel, a fool, shook his hand and found a place next to him, sparing no means of catching the eye of his political adversary. I can’t describe what the menu for that heavy meal looked like. It seemed to me that every dish listed in cookbooks was coming out , and that the clumsiness of the servants and their inexperience in serving prolonged the feast indefinitely. The most difficult things to list would be the desserts, the liqueurs, the wines, the endless pastries, the crammed sweets from Pontevedra, the cakes sent by Fulanito and Menganito, who were there, and whom I could not snub. I drank five or six glasses of champagne; but they produced no effect on me except a resurgence of the fighting spirit that had led me to provoke Pimentel. I felt warlike, aggressive, quixotic, eager to take on anyone and everyone. And beneath that singular effervescence, I felt the dull throb of a very deep sorrow, a kind of nostalgia for something I seemed to have lost. I couldn’t explain it: it was one of those subtle and piercing feelings that sometimes correspond not to the profound needs of our soul, but to certain whims of the imagination, disappointed by reality. The bride—whom I glanced at from time to time furtively—had a dejected and weary expression; It was probably nothing more than fatigue from the long feast, but I imagined it was sadness, the bitterness of the chalice, the aftertaste of the bitterness of the drink… And why not? Didn’t conversation in the tree exist? Didn’t I know that my uncle inspired in him an indefinable repugnance, and that only to fulfill a moral duty, the categorical imperative of his faith, had he approached the altar, a true altar of sacrifice? I wanted at all costs to penetrate his soul, to see that aching spirit from within. What does he think? What does he hope? What does the white bride fear? Meanwhile, the champagne, which had only excited my imagination, was taking its toll on the table, and there was no lack of flushed faces, flashing eyes, somewhat unbalanced voices, and unjustified , excessive and vehement loquacity, high-pitched laughter, and causeless effusions. Castro Mera was intent on defending the merits of the law; a young gentleman from San Andrés was challenging another from Pontevedra to see who could drink the most curaçao; the Navy’s assistant was arguing with the mayor over prohibited fishing gear; Serafín was laughing convulsively, because Viñal tenaciously maintained that he possessed documents proving how Teucer had founded Helenes, and he even boasted of knowing where Teucer might be buried. The lord of Aldao decided to adjourn the meeting, telling the guests not to bother themselves; he was going to show Pimentel the estate and get some fresh air. The bride left arm in arm with Pimentel, and the groom and father-in-law, very friendly. With their departure, the atmosphere at the table grew intense, and the hubbub was such that no one there could understand each other. Some argued, others laughed, others argued, throwing punches at the tablecloth, sometimes staining it with wine and sometimes spattering the spun egg that fell from the cakes or pieces of fruit in a jam. Fragments of frozen cheese melted on the saucers , mixed with cigar ash. No one ate; they only drank, making an extraordinary expenditure of liqueurs and sweet wines. The young man from San Andrés, the one with the bet, had had to lean out the window to get some fresh air, while the one from Pontevedra, undaunted, Despite the prodigious number of drinks he’d drunk, he was now busy trying to drive Serafín crazy. He’d already made him drink a quantity of aniseed from El Mono, and now he was busy pouring sherry and Pajarete, all mixed together, through a wafer placed like a funnel. The acolyte sometimes protested, sometimes swallowed, and we could see the effects of the alcohol on his pale, drawn face. There was a moment when he became formal, and shouting in a bullish voice: “No more, I don’t feel like it, onion, pine nuts, _quoniam_, I’m not a sponge!” He pushed away his hand, and the sherry fell on his chest, soaking him. Suddenly his pallor turned into an apoplectic redness, and climbing onto his chair, he began to harangue. “Gentlemen, I’m doing very wrong staying here. It would be well served to be drowned with Pa… Pajarito… or some other liberal poison. You are liberals; The first is proven _per se… per se…_ “Per _só_!” Castro Mera and his assistant shouted. “Being a liberal is a greater sin than being a murderer, an adulterer , or a blasphemer… I can prove this second with Sardá and the Fathers of the Church on my fingernail… Then I, who drink Pajarito with you… am subject to greater excommunication _latæ setentiæ_! Don’t you know what a big bird in the ecclesiastical hierarchy said? Don’t you know, you little birds? Gui, gui! Well, he said: “_Cum ejus modi nec cíbum sumere_.” Eh? I think he sang it quite clearly. “_Cum ejus modi nec Pajaritum su… sum…_” I looked at him curiously. I couldn’t doubt that at times that toad was extremely sincere in his racket, and that genuine feeling was pouring out of his chest. The acolyte believed himself to be nothing less than an apostle, and spoke, threatening us all with his clenched fists. His shouts grew hoarse; his throat tightened, and his eyes, like two white balls, bulged from their sockets. After a frantic gesticulation, shifting from the eloquence he demonstrates to the violence of force, he brandished the bottle he had in front of us and threatened to throw it at our heads. What ignited his fury were certain projects of Pimentel’s civic-political procession. It drove him mad. Strange effects of drunkenness! As sheepish as the poor apprentice theologian seemed when he was in his normal state and free from the influence of the spirits of the vineyards, so bellicose and propagandistic did he become under the influence of alcohol. He spoke horrible things to us all and unleashed his anger, especially against Sotopeña. I saw the moment when everything was going to turn ugly; because Castro Mera, also somewhat bright-headed, began, shouting and waving his hands, to defend the political ideas the little cleric was attacking. As the latter responded with unbridled invectives, or rather, open insults, I suddenly saw him foam at the mouth, heard his laughter, punctuated by madness, and noticed his fists clench and his wandering fingers search through plates and glasses for a weapon, a knife. I restrained Castro Mera, saying in a low voice: “It’s a fit of epilepsy as big as a house.” Indeed, Serafín was already writhing in the arms of those who were trying to restrain him. With Herculean strength, or rather with formidable nervous tension, a momentary virtue of the epileptiform aura, with kicks, bites, and punches, he defended himself like a wild beast, and there were moments when we believed he could do more than all of us put together. At last we managed to tie his hands with a napkin; we doused him with cologne, cold water, and vinegar; we seized him by the feet and by the shoulders, and with some difficulty we carried him up to the tower and threw him onto his bed, apparently immersed in a drowsiness that was occasionally interrupted by short spasms. Chapter 17. We went down to the garden: evening was already falling, and the breeze was not amiss to clear our heated heads. I thought I had not the slightest hint of what is meant by drunkenness; and yet I attributed the strange heaviness I felt on my heart, the infinite melancholy that took possession of me, to the effects of the wine, which sometimes produce that painful tedium, falling into the soul like stones into the depths of a well. That The boisterous, cheerful, joking crowd, who took the wedding for a joyful event, caused me annoyance and inexplicable hatred: it seemed I had never encountered such unpleasant people before. They scattered about the estate, enjoying themselves and laughing, and I tried to remain alone with my dark thoughts and gloomy ideas. My imagination grew more and more clouded, as if a great misfortune weighed upon me. I instinctively headed for the most remote part of the orchard, and opening the rotten little door that led to the grove, I rushed through, hungry for silence and solitude. A clear and energetic voice pronounced: “Where are you going, Sir Salustio?” By voice and words, I recognized Father Moreno. The friar was sitting on a stone bench, leaning against the wall, reading a book, an occupation he stopped when he saw me. “I came here,” he said, “looking for a suitable place to say my usual prayers. I was just finishing up. And you… may I ask, do you also leave the garden to pray? ” “No,” I replied in one of those bursts of sudden frankness that usually come from having bottled a few glasses of strong wine between my chest and back. “I came because I was bored with so many people, so much noise, so much rejoicing, and so much foolishness; because the bestial and unfounded joy gave me a headache . ” “Bravo! My lord, now I say that you are quite right. I too was sick of the dining room and the food. It is an unbearable racket, nothing unusual that would frighten a friar; but you… ” “Father Moreno, believe me, there are days when, convictions aside, one feels like becoming a friar and turning the world upside down.” The friar looked at me, his powerful, serene, and perceptive eyes fixed on mine. “Is that really what you’re thinking?” You won’t be surprised if a poor friar replies that, in my opinion, you’re already at the beginning of the path of wisdom, and even of happiness, as far as human life allows. Seeking peace and detachment isn’t virtue: it’s selfishness and calculation. Believe me, sir, I envy no one… and on the other hand, I pity many, many people.” My lay pride didn’t stir when I heard such words. Afterwards, I reflected that I should have been angered by the friar’s compassion, probably ironic, since, given my ideas, my way of thinking and feeling on religious matters, and the absurd significance that monastic vows had for me, it was I who should have pity for Moreno, just as one pities the victims of absurdity and useless sacrifice . My strange acquiescence in Father Moreno’s words can only be explained by supposing that there exists at the bottom of our spirit a perpetual tendency toward self-denial, toward renunciation, so to speak, a tendency that derives from the Christian subsoil on which our superficial rationalism rests. The thought occurred to me in that moment of depression: “Which is better, Sallust? To continue studying, finish your studies, pursue your studies, get married, burden yourself with children, suffer the impertinences and frictions of life, endure all that it necessarily brings with it: pain, disappointments, conflicts, and quarrels, or to spend it like this man, who on his wedding day takes his book and comes to pray in the woods?” “I do pity many,” the Father continued, taking my arm familiarly and leading me through the thicket to a small meadow bordered by a hedge covered with paraieta and wildflowers. To people who judge… thus, merely on the surface, it will seem that today, in the midst of all the bustle, I may feel a touch of envy, considering my state, so different from that of married people, eh?… Well, I assure you, and you will not believe that I am telling you one thing for another, for you know that my character is very frank, that it rather seems as if the bride and groom inspire me with a kind of pity, when I think of… well, the work that awaits them, however happy you may suppose it to me: even if God distributes to them in generous hands everything that is understood by happiness. The friar’s feelings at that moment were so in accord with mine that I would have embraced him willingly. And giving in for the second time to the urge to vent my feelings, I sat down on the fence and said, “To me, Father Moreno, this marriage seems like pure nonsense; either I’m seriously mistaken, or it’s going to have disastrous consequences. Carmiña is an angel, a saint, an exceptional being; and my uncle… What do I know! I have my reasons for knowing him. ” The Father’s face suddenly changed. His eyes became severe; his brow furrowed; his mouth contracted, going from kindness to seriousness, almost to austerity. I saw in his face an expression they rarely wore: it was the habit coming out onto his face: it was the friar and the confessor reappearing beneath the affable, courteous, communicative, humane man. “You speak lightly,” he declared, “and forgive me for tying you down. Perhaps you think you have something to back up your case, and, truth be told, I’m sorry you ‘re forcing me to remind you of that… I wanted to forget that you were more imprudent and curious than is proper for a person who, by virtue of your education and the scientific pursuit of your career, should set an example of seriousness for all. You know I didn’t allude to this matter… If you yourself present the opportunity, I won’t waste it. I believe you acted this way out of natural confusion in your few years; that to be anything else… sweet nothing! ” “What are you referring to?” I said, feeling my pride awakening and looking at the friar with a defiant air. “Bah! As if you didn’t know. But I’m not one for half -measures. I’m referring to the tree… the Yew. Even clearer? To the thump you took from listening to things that didn’t concern you.” –Careful, Father… Habits don’t give you the right to everything… I… –You were listening to us. Yes or no? No rhetoric. –Yes, since you want to know. Yes; but with the spirit… –With the spirit of listening to the conversation. –No, sir… Wait; let me explain… You may beat me in prudence, Father Moreno, and on this occasion I recognize it; but in purity of intention and loftiness of purpose… What you are in that…! With all your vows you can’t beat me, I swear by the faith of an honorable man. –I admit, and it is no small thing to admit, –the friar murmured calmly, –that this is true; and I admit it because I have liked you from the first moment, because I have seemed to know and discern your character well, and I see no diabolical malice in you, nor a corrupt heart, nor any perversity. Come, you won’t say that I am not doing you justice. But in the case at hand, it seems to me that you suffer from an impertinent romanticism that leads you to right wrongs like Don Quixote, and from that itch of unhealthy curiosity that induces us to interfere in things that do not concern us, nor has God given us a mission to fix. “The thing is that my uncle’s wedding… ” “It may concern you because of what affects your interests; but if through Carmiña it is going to be happy or unhappy, it is either good or bad… In that you have as much to do with the affairs of the Emperor of China as I do. Just the same, Señor Don Salustio; and it does not seem proper to attempt, through an indiscretion, to enter the sanctuary of a spirit and the recesses of a conscience. ” “Father,” I answered firmly, because I was stimulated by the anger of the reprimand and the very certainty of my guilt, “you can say what you will about my conduct; I will respect your words, not because of the habit you wear, which in my opinion means little, but because of the dignity with which you carry it. We agreed that I am indiscreet, imprudent, meddlesome, and whatever else you might like to add; but that does not negate my reason when I predict ill of a wedding that took place under certain conditions and circumstances. Since you are not unaware that I have reason to know, since I admit the crime of espionage, do not deny that what you did today in the chapel is the sanction of a horrible disaster … The friar continued to look at me, his brow furrowing more and more. Under other circumstances, perhaps his evident displeasure would restrain me; but in At that moment, there was no one who could silence me. I grabbed his arm and said forcefully: “Listen, Father. Unconsummated marriages are very easy to undo under canon law. You know that better than I. Speak to me sincerely: I appeal to your honesty. We can avoid a terrible disaster. Would you mind if I went up to Miss Aldao and said to her: ‘You poor thing! You don’t understand what you’ve gotten yourself into, but you still have time: your marriage is invalid: protest and throw it all away. Don’t want to make things worse. Free yourself from that atrocious thing… In your innocence, you can’t imagine what it’s like to be my uncle’s wife. A horror… I assure you. I won’t see it. I’d rather my eyes be blinded. Father Moreno, a good man, advises you the same.’ ” Come on , take courage… break, break the chain… I’ll help you, and Father Moreno, and everyone… Cheer up!” “What I swear,” declared the friar, “is that you are either crazy or on the way to it. And if not… Stop it!” He slapped his forehead and added: “How many glasses of sherry have you had today, sir? ” “Do you think I’m drunk?” I shouted, standing up in a fierce attitude. “I give you my word,” he declared spontaneously, “that I don’t believe you are in that shameful state. I only want to say that the wine has excited you somewhat, producing that moral rather than physical disturbance, which translates into speaking orderly nonsense, interfering in things that are none of our business, and arranging the world our way—sweetheart!—when the one who should be arranging it is God. ” “Well, and if I were to ask Carmiña about breaking up the marriage… what would she reply?” “I would advise him to take care of himself, and probably in these terms: ‘Wet your head, son, it’s like a furnace. ‘” “So you think there’s no remedy?” I exclaimed vehemently and pained. “That we should let iniquity be consummated and catastrophe occur with our arms crossed? But don’t you know my uncle? Don’t you realize the nature of his character, the smallness and vileness of his soul, especially in the face of the goodness of this incomparable woman, whom you should respect like the Virgin Mary, because she is so good…” I couldn’t continue. Already annoyed and inflamed with anger, with all the vigor of his character and the spirit of his nature, the friar covered my mouth with his broad hand. “Candy and caramel! I feel like sending you, I know perfectly well where, and I would send you, if I didn’t see the abnormal state you are in.” Serafín drank the straw, and you have the smoke in your hooves. I didn’t believe it before, but now… I couldn’t conceive that what you said was a “jumera”; but if you’re going off on a tangent, the greatest favor I can do you is to assume you’re enlightened. I stepped back, offended. “Father!… you have to watch what you say, and not hurt…” Passing seamlessly from anger to cordiality, he patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t be formal, honey! Listen to me calmly, if you can. You’re a little jumera… very serious and sublime, which reveals that you have deep within your soul a storehouse of good feelings that come to the surface when you are least in control of yourself; precisely at the point where you speak with complete freedom, “ex abundantia cordis.” I observe this, and I declare it to you with the sincerity of a religious man, who does not disguise his thoughts or mince words. I will grant you more. It could happen that you, in the midst of your… disturbance, clearly see the future and are a prophet in maintaining that this marriage has been, humanly speaking, a mistake. But you ignore the help of grace and Providence, which is never lacking for the good, for the simple of heart, for those who fulfill their duties and trust in the word of Christ. Peace of soul is a real good among the many false goods the world offers. Do not pity your aunt, nor me, nor anyone who walks upright and knows how to laugh at matter… Blessedness does not exists around here, and we, those of us who pretend to mortify ourselves, are really selfish: we get more out of life than anyone else. Moreno’s reasons penetrated my brain like iron into a wound. Or rather, it wasn’t the reasons themselves, but the tone of conviction and truthfulness with which they were delivered, helping to produce such an effect on me, my state of mind and the foolish tenderness instilled by the _jumeras_ “for the fine and the sublime,” as the Father said. The fact is that the pessimistic philosophies and the desire to put an end to this roguish existence, or at least to its harmful illusions, remained in me. And repressing the temptation to embrace the friar, I exclaimed: “Oh, Father! How right you are about that! If only I had your beliefs and wore a sackcloth! Explain to me if a rationalist could enter the convent . I believe so.” I’m sadder… sadder…! It seems my life is coming to an end! The friar looked at me with singular perspicacity. His eyes were two scalpels searching my heart, dissecting my tissues. His accent took on harsh inflections as he said to me: “Be careful that you never lose your shame, nor your resolve to conduct yourself as a dignified person! Although, all things considered, as long as it doesn’t end for others…, do what you want.” I didn’t turn my head, I didn’t narrow my eyelids, I didn’t blush. If the friar’s pupils were accusing, mine confessed explicitly: they almost challenged: “Agreed: you guess me, I don’t hide. Before my moral law, what I feel is no crime. The crime is having blessed that marriage.” I turned my back on him and, jumping over the fence, entered the land. Chapter 18. I don’t know whether it was an impulse to get away from the Yew or a desire for greater solitude, but I walked very slowly toward the beach. It was already night. The moon, which had risen red and inflamed, was regaining its serene placidity as it ascended into the sky, and the waves of the sea, also asleep and lulling, came to crash at the foot of the rock where I sat, stunned with grief, ready to surrender myself to all the dreams and fancies of my imagination, warmed by the aftertaste of the champagne. The soft murmur of the calm estuary; the tremulous gleam of the moon on the surface of the water, and the mysterious outpouring of Nature, predisposed me to the following monologue: “If she and I had been married today, I would send away the importunates and bring her here on my arm; I would seat her next to me, on this very rock, which seems made especially for such an unforgettable scene.” Encircling her waist, resting her forehead on my chest, without frightening her, without hurting her modesty, I would gently prepare her to share the rapture of passion; to willingly compromise with the fatal unfolding of human love. And the most beautiful moments, the delightful moments we would think about all our lives… would be these, these. What quiet, profound joy would overwhelm us! What a sweet silence ours is! Perhaps such a fortune will be too great for the heart to bear. It weighs so heavily that no one can overcome it. That is why it lasts so little and is rarely found. And,” I said, continuing my soliloquy, “the fact is that you will never taste that happiness again , my son. Aunt Carmen is like all women, who have only one innocence. Today she will lose it; today another man cuts the lily; today they profane what you most respect in the world. No matter how many years pass and how many favors you obtain from that woman, it will not be possible for you to bring her to a beach, under the moon, at night, along paths where honeysuckle grows on either side, to experience unfelt emotions, to enter life through the door of illusion. In substance, and no doubt in a more disordered form and with greater vividness of imagery, see here what occurred to me during the paroxysm of grief, while I struggled with the dejection caused by semi-drunkenness. One thought floated confusedly, dominating the rest. “If Carmen’s owner were not my uncle, I would not be so mad. My romantic enthusiasm for _her_ is the eternal precaution against _him_, which acquires ” I climbed the Yew, more desperate than if I were beset by some real and positive tribulation. I believe that on the way I threw down and furiously trampled on the orange blossom branch so sought after that morning. I controlled myself so as not to do any more extremes, and upon entering the villa, I fled from the crowd and went straight to the bedroom, eager to lie down on the bed to curse, or wallow, or doze off, overcome by fatigue. As I climbed the tower stairs, it occurred to me that I had the key to Serafin’s room in my pocket, and that I had to see how the apprentice clergyman was faring. “Is he snoring, that calamity?” I thought as I opened the door. I shielded the candlestick with my hand, trying to see what the poor drunkard was doing. As I looked at the bed where I thought he’d be lying, at my feet, from the floor where he was on all fours, the acolyte stood up like a monkey, laughing and showing me his ugly teeth. “You idiot, what are you doing there?” I said. “You’ve caused quite a stir today. What a shame about these lashes. Were you praying for your sins? Go to bed immediately, or I’ll spank you. ” He sat up. His little eyes glittered with a catlike phosphorescence; his face was still distorted, and the bristling red hair completed the strange and diabolical appearance of his appearance. “I don’t feel like sleeping,” he answered , grinding his teeth. “I’m doing a free show in the main box. Balcony by preference. ” “What are you saying, toad? ” “The truth is. Look over there.” A sudden light illuminated me, and hastily kneeling down, I focused my gaze on the spot the acolyte was pointing to. The bridegroom’s chamber lay exactly beneath the tower: I knew it, and I remembered it at that instant, before looking, with sudden lucidity. The ceiling wasn’t a ceiling, but a wooden one with beams and rafters; and through a gap in our floor, as the lower room was illuminated, I could see perfectly, with total clarity, everything that was happening there. A twitch of nerves contracted my nerves as I convinced myself that my eyes were indeed searching the bridal chamber. It was true! I could see it, I could see it! A terrible discovery! I restrained myself from screaming and remained motionless, instead of scratching the floor and beating its boards with foolish anger. Fortunately, by chance, by God’s decree, nothing was happening in that alcove . It was entirely empty and deserted. On either side of the dressing table, rose-colored candles burned in brass candelabras with crystal pendants. Behind the large gilt-bronze bed, on the nightstand, another candle, in a small porcelain candlestick. On the dressing table, on the table, on the desk, in flower boxes hanging from the wall… flowers, flowers, flowers, particularly roses. Desecration of nature! Roses for that wedding night! The very solitude of the place, the mysterious silence, so stirred my imagination that I thought I could breathe in the scent of roses, their regal perfume diffused in the tranquil atmosphere. Through the open window, I thought I could hear the voice of the nightingale, which at such hours sang in the large orange tree, and its fluttering in the vines of the patio. The whiteness of the half-open sheets; the sweet peace of the room; The grace of the muslin and lace dressing table, whose folds fell vaporously to the floor, all caused me excitement and fury, increasing the confusion of my soul. My temples throbbed, and I felt in my ears like the roar of a stormy wave: the position in which I had placed myself rushed the blood to my head, and inspired me with a desire to roar. The ecclesiastical monk touched me on the shoulder. “Hey, monsieur, comrade… that’s not what was discussed!” he growled. “I am also of God and I have eyes to see! ” “If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll crush you!” I responded ferociously. “Well, at least tell me what you see! ” “I can’t see anything, you kestrel!” I replied. “Nothing, nothing, nothing! ” “Haven’t the actors arrived yet? Hasn’t the curtain risen? Isn’t it playing?” the orchestra? “I said, shut up immediately!” I shouted angrily. From that moment on, the intransigent man remained silent, although I later understood that it was not out of prudence or virtue. I continued to lurk, ignoring him completely. The bridal chamber remained empty, suggestive, tempting. I saw the smallest details with desperate clarity : hairpins on a crystal plate; pins in a pincushion; an enormous, richly embroidered coat of arms in the center of the pillows; a boxwood branch on the holy water font… I counted the moths that came in through the window to scorch in the light; I counted the crystal tears on the candlesticks… It seemed to me that my heart had split when I heard voices at the door, a confused murmur of farewells; the latch was raised, and a single person entered the bedroom with a light and somewhat bewildered step; Aunt Carmen… Oh God! Strength, strength not to scream, not to faint… In her white dress, already worn from wearing it for so many hours, came the enchantress. The first thing she did was lean out of the window, as if she were gasping for air. She remained there for a few minutes, and I could see the pretty line of her back, and I understood, or thought I understood, her thoughts. Then she moved away from the window and looked at herself for a while in the mirror, in my opinion with more curiosity than coquettishness. It seemed to me that her consultation with the mirror was in response to the following thought: “Let’s see what kind of face I’ve assumed since this morning’s great event.” Then, with an agility that demonstrated her habit of dispensing with her maid, she began to remove her earrings, jewelry, bracelets, brooches, and pins, placing them carefully on the glass plate, with that intelligent composure that characterized her purely mechanical movements , where passion had no place. And raising her arms, she unclipped the pins from her hair one by one. Then I saw that magnificent feminine adornment loose and in all its beauty. Unbraided, it fell with a gentle snaking, first to her waist, then to near her knees, in jet-black waves. A cruel unease took hold of me. The unbraiding and loosening of her hair seemed to me a prologue to other liberties of intimate coiffure that I was to witness… and that just imagining them already inflamed my blood with a painful furor. Fortunately—I would once again fall on my knees to give thanks—I saw that the emancipation of my hair was not what I had expected, but a preparation for convenience, for it didn’t take long for her to whisk it and gather the entire mass into a low chignon, with great simplicity. This operation completed, she placed her elbow on the dressing table and rested her cheek on the palm of her hand, pressing her lips together and moving her head up and down, like someone struggling with grave reflections. On his face I discerned a painful contraction: he had the face of someone who, alone , freely gives himself over to worry and allows his countenance to express what his soul feels. His pupils clouded; he bowed his head to his chest; he dropped his hands to his lap, and… this I heard clearly: he sighed, a deep sigh, torn from his depths… Then he raised his forehead and remained for a few minutes fixed on an ideal point in space, probably without looking. Suddenly he breathed deeply and stood up, like someone making a decisive and firm resolution. And at the same instant… Alas! I don’t want to see, I don’t want to! A man enters the room, furtive, serious, foreshortened, and irresolute… If my gaze had the power of a basilisk’s, the bridegroom would have fallen dead there, charred by the lightning bolt of my will. The silhouette of the deicide appeared on the window frame , and I saw his white shirtfront gleam. The candles shone brightly on his face, more repulsive than ever, his copper beard, his impious eyes, which I felt capable of tearing out… Behind me, a foolish and mocking laugh sounded clear and distinct. I turned, sat up, and saw the acolyte, on all fours, bending over another crack in the floor. He still held the knife with which he had widened it. A murderous shudder ran through my veins: trembling with rage, I clasped Serafín’s throat with my hands, and, cutting off his breath, I shouted: “I’ll break you, I’ll destroy you, I’ll suffocate you right now if you look again. Do you hear that, toad? Woe to you if you never apply your eyes to those slits! I’ll kill you, without any remorse.” “Well, you were looking quite well… jeers! smack!” shrieked the wretch, almost hiccuping, when I allowed him to breathe. “What manner of manners! smack! She dug her fingers into my Adam’s apple! ” “I’m not looking anymore… and neither are you… We were brutes… If we had any decency, it wouldn’t have occurred to us to look. Serafín, Serafín, we’re not beasts, we’re men. No, not looking! ” “Now you’re crying… You’re crazy, come on,” exclaimed the apprentice theologian. “You must be the madman and the madman,” I replied, making an effort to suppress the ridiculous tears that remained burning between my eyelids. “I don’t cry. If I did, I’d be ashamed of having knelt there. I’m going to lie down; but since I’m not sure you won’t get down on all fours again, I’m going to tie you to the bed. ” “No; formal, formal, Salustiño… Pateta!” cried the intransigent, terrified. “Don’t tie me up, I give my word of honor not to look… ” “Word of honor! These are good times for honors… There’s no trust in the gang. I won’t hurt you, you wretch… You’ll see how I don’t hurt you. ” As I said, so it was done. I tied his hands with a handkerchief, his body with a towel. The slightest movement would have been enough for him to break free; but he was so cowed and subdued that he didn’t even stir. I only moaned occasionally. I lay down on the bed. Who would sleep in my place? The hours of that interminable night passed, and I passed them by tossing and turning, hiding my face in the hollow of the pillow, covering my ears and eyes with my hands, as if both were forced to suffer the torment of the sounds and images that poison jealousy. At dawn, I jumped off the rack, washed, and got ready; I didn’t let Serafín go; I gathered my clothes, and without saying goodbye to anyone, without seeing anyone, I went down to San Andrés, and from there to Pontevedra and Ullosa, like someone fleeing from the scene of a crime. Chapter 19. My mother, with her relative sagacity and attention to detail, immediately recognized that I was worried and gloomy; but she mistook the cause. “You’ve been given some slight at the Tejo. Don’t tell me it wasn’t.” They played dirty tricks on you, for sure. If not, why did you come here like a rabbit in search of a bucket, without saying goodbye or anything worthwhile? Come on, confess your disappointment to your mother. No matter how much I swore and swore that I had received nothing but attention, she wouldn’t buy it. “Fine, fine; keep quiet, keep it a secret… I’ll know, everything is known. Those outside will tell me.” I had to tell her the circumstances of the wedding point by point: I say it incorrectly, she was the one who anticipated my explanations, showing herself to be aware of details that astonished me. She was into details that I was unaware of. It was a condition of her quick and sharp intelligence to master the microscopic nature of life, while remaining ignorant of its eternal, profound laws, visible only to superior spirits: those that must govern it until its breath dies out and the universe grows cold from lack of love… The first few days of my stay in the village, I felt a great relief. The frenzy of the wedding day had calmed down with the lack of sensitive species to rekindle it, and it seemed to me that the enthusiasm for the marmoset, the jealous fury, and the poetic meditations on the beach were nothing more than a trick of the imagination, which likes to feign profound feelings where there are only whims, effervescence, and mirages. The company of Luis Portal, who came from Orense to spend a week with me, helped to calm me down . We took such walks and such gorges on bread and milk that healthy tiredness and rusticity did their work, preparing me to listen calmly and even give assent to reasons like the following: “What happens to you,” Luis told me on the occasion of our two Lying at the foot of a chestnut tree, where we had _taken_ our siesta, it is a very common phenomenon among us Spaniards, who, believing in good faith to prepare and desire the future, live in love with the past, and are always, deep down, staunch traditionalists, even if we call ourselves republicans. What enchants and attracts you in your uncle Felipe’s wife is precisely that which least fits your ideas, your convictions, and your way of being as a man of your century. You tell me that Miss Aldao embodies the ideal of the Christian woman. Nonsense, kid. Do you want to tell me what we find beautiful in that ideal, if we examine it closely? The ideal for us should be the contemporary woman, or rather, the future woman: a woman who understands us and shares our aspirations. You’ll say she doesn’t exist. Well, let’s try to manufacture her. She will never exist if we condemn her before she is born. “What are these virtues, and in what do they consist, that you attribute to the mare, and that you admire so much? To me they seem negative, irrational, brutal. Don’t be alarmed, I said brutal. Marrying a repulsive man, surrendering to him like an automaton, and all for what? For not authorizing the sins of others with her presence? Who is responsible for more actions than their own? That young lady is either insane or completely stupid; and the friar who condones and sponsors such things… I don’t want to describe him, because my tongue would slip. He understands better than the mare what the mare is committing himself to: he should have prevented such an atrocity… I tell you , the little friar… Good heavens! But, in the end, the friar is the friar; and we, who seek to innovate society, must differentiate ourselves from him in some way. ” »A woman like the one the new society is demanding would serve, sew, scrub floors, if she wasn’t comfortable in her parents’ house, if she believed her dignity was being violated; but she would never alienate her freedom, her heart, and her body to go off with such a husband. »You’ve become addicted to Christianity. We must leave you. A perfect Christian! And why does a perfect Christian seduce you? Are you a perfect Christian, perhaps? Do you aspire to be one? Or do you believe that the orderly course of society consists of the Christian wife and the rationalist husband? »Salustiño, wake up, you’re dreaming. You’re going to fall in love with a woman because she thinks the opposite of you on almost everything! She’s single; she reciprocates your love; you’re getting married; she keeps the torch of faith burning… and I don’t want you to give up on the profit. Leave her with your uncle, for he’s perfect. They’ll make a great couple. But for you! Chachiño, cure yourself of romanticism and Christianity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make love to your aunt; but in a human way, without the music of Poliuto. If you like her, go with her! I mean… you should always be careful to avoid dramas… The dramas, at the Teatro Español… and even there, most of them come out empty. Anyway… without drama… you understand. But if you tell me stories about Christians and Jews again… I’ll give you bromide. And above all… study. I’m no more of a loser, not even if the goddess Venus comes to make me garatusas.» The observations of the very discreet Orense native didn’t fail to persuade me. At least, they induced me to meditate on the problem of my crazy enthusiasms. Indeed, my aunt’s thoughts and feelings were radically opposed to mine: I didn’t believe in anything she revered; her morals differed from mine: the word duty on our lips had a different meaning, and yet, I was more attracted to her by that disparity of ideals, as a white man is sometimes attracted by the sallow color of a mulatto woman, and a fiery gypsy by the golden hair of an Englishman. Was Portal right when he said that we were without a woman of our own and that it was in our interest to seek her out, to make her in our image so that she would understand us and her brain would work in step with ours? Or, on the contrary, was the spicy opposition of souls more attractive , and the fact that I had dark chambers in my own, where, like Bluebeard’s , she would always be forbidden to penetrate? Why did I exalt to that woman, seeing in her the very perfection of the feminine type? Why did her sacrifice, which in me would have seemed absurd, seem sublime in her? “What Luis is right about,” I finally resolved, “is that it is good to study, and that inner drama is the enemy of work.” Indeed, I picked up books to review a little, taking advantage of the leisure time of the vacation, and as I concentrated my faculties and applied them to inflexible mathematics, a tremendous battle was taking place in the field of my brain, which I called in my intimate language, the “war between straight lines and curves.” The straight lines were the equations, the polynomials, the theorems, the problems of angle sections and other similar demons ; the curves, the amorous reveries, the Jewish antipathies , and all the mischievous ebullience of my young fantasy. At first, the curves had the upper hand, but the tactics and precision of the straights eventually prevailed over that undisciplined army, which retreated in the worst possible order toward the heart, its last refuge. The holidays were already drawing to a close when we received an unexpected visitor. The intransigent Serafín came in person, without a trace of bitterness or resentment, as sycophantic and clingy as a dog, to settle in Ullosa: I couldn’t remember ever inviting him, and Mom swore she hadn’t either. We welcomed him without ceremony, and from the first day my mother dedicated him to trimming espaliers, picking fruit, and feeding the chickens, tasks he performed with great pleasure. When we spoke without witnesses, far from showing the slightest anger, he gave me a tight hug, tickled me, and began to rant, in his crazy way. “You don’t know?” he asked affectionately. “So you left, I got loose. ” If they caught me tied up, we’d have a good time. What a joke! That looking wasn’t right. But it was a joke, it was a silly one. The Pajaritum was to blame. The bride and groom went to Pontevedra that same afternoon. Now they’re wandering around there very foolishly, showing off their finery; the Saint treated them to a great meal at the Naranjal; there were fried taxpayers’ brains ; and pickled litigant’s tail… For dessert, nougat; it seems his uncle’s house is already rented out as a post office. Eh? Gui, gui! Mr. Aldao has been dealt some kind of cross, with much perliquitencia treatment… And doesn’t he know what’s good? Haven’t you read about the mockery, I mean, of the procession of the Divine Pilgrim? I’m amazed that fire didn’t fall upon her from heaven, as the other one said: “Pluit super Sodomam et Gomorrham, sulfur et ignem a Domino de cœlo.” Man, how come she didn’t go to Pontevedra that day? Another one like it, not in twenty years. Even the newspaper vendors and the Masons lit up. I tell you they did. And then the Teucrian called the procession a “festival.” What is a festival? Like a Saturnalia, no doubt.” Then, lowering his voice, he added: “A bishop also gulped flies there, and not for love of the Peregrina… But don’t be amazed at that. Nestorius was bishop of Constantinople. And who promoted the schism of that most magnificent swine, the King of England, but another swine of a heretic bishop named Cremor or Cremer…? Leave me alone with the bishops.” The Pope and the clergy alone must regenerate the Church … I mean, no, the apprentice clergy and a few courageous laymen… send whatever the Encyclical _Cum multa_ pleases. I assured him that I didn’t know what such an Encyclical could command, and I casually asked him about Candidiña. “Oh! Good piece… guide, guide. Now, all alone with the old man… She’ll turn it upside down.” He also told me about Father Moreno, and I learned that the Moorish friar, having finished his sea baths, was planning to spend two days in Ullosa. The announcement was soon confirmed, and the Father appeared, all dusty from his long day on the stagecoach. My mother, who loved him very much, immediately received him rather coldly: she couldn’t forgive him for having blessed the wedding. I, on the other hand, was extremely polite. I would have liked to have been able to say to Aben Jusuf: “Those deliriums are over. My sentimentality has deflated. If you could see how well I feel! The same as someone applying a remedy to cure neuralgia, and it works . My toothache from love has already ceased. It seems incredible to me to have been the one who almost broke his neck throwing himself from a tree, debased himself spying, threw himself into the sea on a wedding night, or asked you for the novice’s habit. Here you have a respectable young man, a student of Engineering and son of Benigna Unceta, a very practical lady. I’m healthy.” If it wasn’t this very thing, I told him something very similar during a walk the friar and I took in the mountains. I remember that he seemed sincerely pleased, and he must have replied what you will see. “Excellent, but don’t trust it. Heart fevers don’t last as long as they should, God help us! Only they keep coming. And they keep coming because of us, that we’re coming close to the fire. In that lottery, they pay for approximations. Do not approach. Respectful distance. Sanitary cordon. “If you do anything else, I won’t consider you an honorable man.” _Mutatis mutandis_, so Father Moreno expressed himself. After the first few moments, my mother, who has a heart of gold and hospitable instincts, treated him with hospitality, insisting on feeding him well at all hours, to the point that the friar comically rebelled. “No more chicken, even if you feather me… No more ratatouille… What a lady! Soul of a mortar, heart of a date, do you want me to burst here? You rule your bustle, madam, I’ll rule my stomach…” The exaggerated gastronomic indulgence didn’t last long; two days later, the Father left us for his convent, leaving a great void. His vacation season had also expired, along with his superior’s permission to bathe and nurse his health, and the Moor in sackcloth was resignedly returning to his gloomy retreat in Compostela, where, due to the humidity, the walls were sweating and the stone joints were turning green. Despite the fortitude with which the friar declared that he was content to fulfill his duty, I understood that this half-Saracen Spaniard, enamored of the light of Africa, must be suffering greatly in body and spirit, finding himself banished to such a damp and gray climate. I watched him leave, remembering with surprise that I had envied him that sackcloth and even that chain of vows. “I have inevitably suffered a kind of psychalgia this summer. Now that I am convalescing, I understand.” In the few days remaining before my departure for Madrid, since we had no guests or much entertainment, I buried myself in reading two or three very interesting books: philosophical works, among them Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Free, it seemed to me, from all deceptive hallucinations, from all morbid exaltation, with what pure delight was my intelligence, tamed by the study of mathematics, imbued with the teachings of the philosopher! With what sweet firmness did I feel those truths of criticism penetrate the innermost recesses of my brain , which, far from leading to skeptical negation, instill in us a serene conviction of the vanity of our attempts to understand the external world, and enclose us in the beneficial egoism of the study of our own faculties! When, after reading Kant, I went out to walk through the copse, the meadow, the modest outbuildings of the family farm, and the peace of the evening infiltrated my spirit, I felt fortunate, saved from my madness, enclosed in the straight line. “Understand and you will be free,” I repeated to myself with youthful pride. Chapter 20. As I stepped out of the carriage in Madrid, at the Estacion del Norte, I first saw the red beard and repulsive face of my uncle Felipe, who extended his hand and called a porter to give him the check for my trunk. Then, getting into a cab with me, he gave the address of his house: “Claudio Coello, number so-and-so…” ” Aren’t we going to my inn?” I asked, surprised. “You see…” replied the Hebrew with that difficulty of phrasing and contraction of face that accompanied in him the manifestation of avarice. “It’s foolish to go around with pleasantries among relatives… In my house there is an extra room, which is of no use; it was occupied by some junk… She’s cheerful and capable… You’ll be better treated than at the inn, boy… And for your studies, all the peace and quiet you want. I understood the petty calculation. Paying for my boarding had to cost her more, no matter how cheap it was, than staying at her house. But I _there_… At first, I don’t know what effect the idea had on me. The truth is that I exclaimed: “My aunt won’t be pleased with that arrangement. ” “I’ll tell you,” replied the husband. “At first, she thought the boarding house would be more suitable for your purpose… She was a little stubborn… But I’ve convinced her… She’s agreed now and is waiting for you.” I remained silent. I noticed the unpleasant impression one experiences upon stepping out of a temperate atmosphere into a cold draft. Life at La Ullosa had been a parenthesis, a rest, a kind of pleasant drowsiness; And that abrupt summons to the outside world, to agitation and phantasmagoria, precisely at the moment of resuming my studies, of needing all my will and mental strength to devote to my arduous tasks, unhinged me. And yet, youth so loves risk, the swell and the storm, that I felt a thrill of pleasure when my uncle pressed the copper disc of the electric bell, and the door behind which Carmiña Aldao stood opened. With what an intimate trembling I greeted her! My whole blood swirled through my body, rushing to my heart; I recognized the signs of the ancient flame, and my tongue, pressed to the palate, could hardly articulate the greeting. Don Felipe’s wife received me properly, without showing either detachment or excessive cordiality. Fulfilling her duties as a housewife, she installed me in my room, learned what I needed, showed me various pieces of furniture where I could place books and clothes, and gave me practical advice on how to make the most of the four walls… “Here you put your nightgowns… On this hanger you hang your cape… The table here, by the window, where you can study better… Look, this is the washbasin… Always keep your towels here… I found you this green-screen lamp, it won’t spoil your eyesight…” While she explained such details, I looked at her with such a thirst to see her that I drank in her features and devoured her beloved image. What I was seeking was that revelation that, when well studied, every married woman’s face contains: the current account of happiness. No, she wasn’t happy. The purple under her dark circles didn’t come from a fever of love, but from hidden sorrow. Her mouth didn’t dilate with laughter or flattery; She was withdrawn like that of any wrestler who mortifies the flesh or the spirit alone. Her temples were somewhat withered. Her figure was flatter : it hadn’t acquired the graceful and majestic roundness seen in brides a few months into married life, even if they aren’t mothers. She wasn’t happy! How my imagination labored on the basis of this supposition! It didn’t take long, however, for me to accustom myself to living with Tití, and it did n’t seem so dangerous to me. Proximity is always an incentive, but living together, by taking away dramatic interest and novelty from the opportunities for meeting, perhaps diminishes the risk. Although the last years of my engineering studies were far from as absorbing as the first, and the difficulties gradually eased as one climbed the steep slope, studying was enough to occupy my leisure time. Tití’s life glided by so much isolation from mine that, living under the same roof, we hardly ever ran into each other outside of mealtimes. In the morning we both went out, I to my classes, she to go shopping and for very long devotions. At lunch, I noticed in Carmiña a certain animation, an inexplicable contentment. She was coming from church: it was obvious. My uncle, also content and talkative, wearing slippers and no tie, chatted with me, asked me questions, commented on the news from the previous day, the conversations with Don Vicente Sotopeña in the conference room and in the corridors of Congress, the nature of politics, the insinuations in the newspapers, the Regent’s last confidential conversation with the Austrian Ambassador, which a well-informed person had repeated at the Casino from beginning to end. No doubt I provoked the couple’s talkativeness, since Carmiña, in turn, told me the Pontevedra Gazette, the innocent gossip her friends wrote, and details concerning the neighbors on the first and second floors, whom she used to visit at night, following the mesocratic custom of Madrid, which organizes a neighborhood gathering in each house. In the afternoon, my uncle went out, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife; I needed the time to work or walk with Luis, and goodbye until dinner! This was sadder than lunch: my aunt was nervous and excited, or flat and distracted, without being able to hide it. At night, she went upstairs to her home gatherings or worked by the fireplace, and my uncle took me out of the house, sometimes taking me to some small theater for hours. No danger. The order of my tasks saved me from the suggestions of idleness. The devil didn’t know when to tempt me. You can guess who I unburdened myself to. What are thoughtful and discreet people like Portal in the world for, if not to hear the confidences of maniacs? I believe the confessor’s own displeasure incited me to make a full confession. His harsh censures were whiplashes that stimulated me to delve deeper into the recesses of my spirit. “Chacho,” my formal friend told me one day, “I’ve already guessed what you’re suffering from. I know the remedy. Follow my lead and you’ll be cured in fifteen minutes. Your illness has this technical name: compressed foam of youth . The remedy is called… guess what! It’s called… Belén. ” “Belén? How absurd! ” “What, don’t you remember now?” Belén, the black-eyed houri, the one who glued little angels on cardboard boxes. Did you forget her that much? Outcast! Well, I’ve tracked her down… Boy, a transformation like a magic show. You’ll see our neighbor in her prime. We haven’t even brought the car yet… but everything will come together. “Really? Has she found her _great Paganini_?” I asked indifferently. “I don’t want to tell you anything until you judge for yourself… You’ll be absorbed. ” A few afternoons later, the man from Orense guided me to a good house on the street, central yet solitary, of Las Hileras. The entrance was decorous; the staircase was comfortable and bright, and the mezzanine door we knocked on had an air of seriousness and discretion, and gleaming metals. A middle-aged woman dressed in black, a cross between a maid and a housekeeper, opened the door for us. Luis’s first words told him to go into the living room, as he would call “the madam.” “Hey? How’s it going?” my friend exclaimed. “What do you think? The madam from above and the madam from below… Buttercup-colored rep chairs … a mirror with a rosewood frame… a well-carpeted rug… fine jute curtains… two bronze and porcelain vases… an inlaid sewing box… an inset… his lamp with an umbrella shade… I don’t think the stockbroker is far from being a slouch. ” “What a metamorphosis! ” “You’ll see… Times _change_.” On the other hand, the metamorphosis was foreseen. The girl was getting tired of sticking stickers on cones; But she hadn’t had any other bargains except that miserly uncle , who, after giving her money for sweets, would later take the bill in pennies. When good old Don Telesforo Armiñón appeared, determined to get her out of trouble—help me feel!—he saw heaven open. The first thing the poor girl asked for was shoes… Your uncle had her toes sticking out… These people from Madrid have their vanity in their feet… Now there’s every little shoe…! Portal blew a kiss in the air. Here it comes… Get serious. Skirts roaring… Belén made her solemn entrance. Damn! It was true; no one could recognize her. Her hair done with the classic modesty of ladies, she wore a velvet gown the color of a dried leaf, and two little diamond studs in her ears. In her hands, already refined by idleness, some stone also glittered; and as they walked, the famous little shoes could be seen, narrow, high-heeled, made of dark satin, a pair of cuteness. She seemed heavier to me, with calmer and more languid movements, with an even paler and fresher complexion than before, comparable only to the satiny finish of a magnolia leaf. “Have we come at an unwelcome time?” Portal asked. Before answering, Belén noticed me and squealed with joy… “Hello! You’ve finally made your mark! Are you a bad person? I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing you once, and then the one with the smoke… On vacation , eh? Well, the rest of us have put up with the heat and the suffocation here. When did you arrive?” she added, changing my name. “Two days ago,” Portal interrupted, “and always yearning to catch a glimpse of good people.” She wouldn’t let me live with “let’s go say hello to Belén… Although since she’s such a lady now, she might not pay any attention to the poor students… I’d get sick if I didn’t see her… As I said, I’d have an attack of… something…” ” Come on, you deceitful Galician!” replied the beautiful woman, who, fixing her darting and haughty eyes on me, enveloped me in a gaze that was both fiery and humble. “He didn’t even remember me, nor did he have the desire… Nothing; after that day of commotion… if I’ve seen you, I don’t remember. And me… of course, what’s one to do? Considering the extravagance your uncle spent… He was just as squalid as ever! They say he’s married… The woman must be amused… Anyway, now I feel like the rose itself… These are other Lópezes. Come on!” she added, without giving us time to sit down, ” let’s see my little house; It’s the big house… Study with a fireplace and everything… They haven’t lit it today because it’s not cold yet, you know? But I’m going to order them to be lit, right away. Olé! Come through here… the dining room, small, but they don’t hold banquets… a beautiful kitchen… a trunk room… Go in there… a columned alcove and everything… “Daughter,” Portal warned, hoping to drive her crazy, “you don’t convince me. You’ve gone from a miser without a mask to a hypocrite. Armillón has millions, and he hasn’t even given you a car, nor has he dressed your furniture in silk; so… don’t tell me he’s behaving. He owes you the satin divan and the elegance, just as I owe my life to my father. Sevillana and Concha Ríos are around, looking like queens in their carriage. What good are rich dresses and little gem earrings to you if you can’t go to the Retiro to remove ribbons?” “Hush, hush… Leave the cars to me. The car makes me dizzy,” replied the sinner, annoyed by the mention of respect, but unable to help herself. “What do you think, that if I ask him for a car he’ll refuse it? But I won’t ask. I have a lot of dignity, you know. When I see decent people, and not like that Iscariot of an uncle… God, what a fellow! He can’t be a real uncle of his. Maybe Grandma…” Then she drew a portrait of her stockbroker. “The best thing about him is that he rarely comes. Never until he closes the… the stockbroker,” she repeated, confirming what she had said. “And there are days when he doesn’t even bring in anything. Today, for example. He’s warned me, so I’m in a great mood… ” “What if he decides to show up suddenly? ” “What a problem! Not to open the door… He doesn’t have a key.” If I tell you , it’s better to have a man’s money… If I shout “car,” he’ll answer “a six-horsepower mail.” Well, if he comes… tomorrow I’ll tell him I went out with Fausta to see my mother and Cinta… He believes me point blank. “And those?” Portal asked. “Who? “The others?” Well… son, insufferable. If I give them Peru, they ask for Potosí. All I do is shake them off, because they suck my blood. Every row they give me… And don’t you know? Cinta’s taken to lecturing me, and she keeps telling me that before she’ll submit to a man for money, she has to work and make a living… Determined to get into the zarzuela soprano. The trouble is… she has to learn music theory. But I’ve convinced my master to rent me a piano and pay me a teacher, and the girl will come here to give lessons. You have to squeeze the lemon… What’s the use of a rich man, let’s see? Well, today you stay here; today you do penance in this house… You’ll see what lovely dishes and what silver cutlery… I mean, Meneses: because it wasn’t a matter of exposing herself to theft. I’ll put on the good French faille dress she gave me not long ago, on her saint’s day… Nothing, I’m glad you see my finery. I’ll wear my watch for the first time. It doesn’t work well, but it’s gold… Luisillo can get lost if he has to: you’re not going anywhere! A few days after Belén’s party, while I was walking with Luis through Recoletos, my friend said to me, half severe and half envious: “All scoundrels have fortune. Belén, crazy about you: no woman more infatuated has ever been seen. Yesterday I had to give her good advice so she wouldn’t ditch her stockbroker and go back to living in an attic, in order to receive you with complete freedom. I told her to hold on to Señor de Armillón until someone else comes along who has more drive and sells landau and gives away fine silver instead of Meneses. Just as I preached to her!” Not even a missionary… But you’re luckier than a hanged man, you idiot. Watch out, you’re going right into that girl’s eye like that!… So what, aren’t you happy yet? Are you still wandering around in the imaginary? If I break your wing… “Break me as much as you like,” I answered frankly, condensing my disappointments into a sigh. “My boy, there’s more to the world than the satisfactions of matter. If you push me, I’ll tell you that matter doesn’t exist… It’s a myth. Two minutes after saying goodbye to Belén… nothing, I’ve even forgotten that such a woman lives in the world. I leave there more spiritualized than a devil. “I can’t listen to you rambling like that,” Portal shouted furiously. “What spiritualism or what nonsense? Go off on a tangent and be a jerk. Where is there a pearl like a Belén, a woman who is only thought of when necessary? Belén is the jackpot for you.” What’s happening to you is that you’ve been bewitched in that cursed house of your uncles. The atmosphere of hypocrisy and stupidity in which you live is slowly drying up your mind. Why don’t you come to my inn? You’d be perfect. We’d drive the demons out of you immediately. Trinito, more famous than ever this year. Do you believe he sings us not only the operas, but everything he hears at the concerts at the Salón Romero? He’s got us fed up with Lohengrin and Tanhauser. And the best part is, he’s thinking of becoming a music critic. Yesterday we almost threw the coffeepot in his face because he broke our eardrums with *The Death of Iseult*. Come on, idiot, come closer to us. “Luis, I’ll be as simple as you want… but I can’t resist that girl. I know she’s pretty, that she’s right up my alley, and even so… Come on, it just doesn’t work for me.” Let’s see if you, who started this mess, can undo it. One day I’ll tell her to her face that I hate her, which would be a foolish cruelty. Nothing; let it go. Vice and shamelessness may entertain for a while, but they’re tiresome. “Fool, where are such shamelessness and such vices? Why, Belén, morally, is worth a treasure! Belén truly loves you ; Belén would give the Meneses silver and the satin shoes for you… Belén has a heart and your aunt doesn’t, at least not for you, child. Go on with virtuous women! They stink to me. More virtuous is a plaster statue, which neither feels nor suffers. ” “What do you know,” I murmured, allowing, as if in spite of myself, hope to overflow , “what do you know if that heart exists? And if it did?” Portal suddenly became worried and serious. His brow furrowed, and in a somewhat altered voice he said to me: “God forbid that such a thing should exist. I’ve thought about the case, and I swear the best thing that can happen to you is that it never happens. Do you hear that? You crazy lunatic! I wish Simarro would recognize you. Suppose the marmoset really loved you; well, that heart were to reveal itself. Well, after revealing itself and loving you very, very much, like Francesca and Paolo, what do you do? Let’s find out. Come on, this love program! Are you running away with her? Are you giving her an apartment? Are you desecrating your uncle’s paternal home with all your nerve? Answer me, you fool!” His interest in me irritated him. His bulging eyes glared at me angrily, just as they would at a boy determined to cut off his finger while driving. a knife. “I don’t know how to answer you,” I said thoughtfully. “What I understand is that I would be happy, do you understand? Completely happy, if that woman loved me. That she loves me. I don’t ask for more. I’ll leave her, I’ll go to the North Pole, but I’m sure that she loves me. That’s what I hope for and that’s why I live. I respect her like the Virgin… but let her love me, let her love me. ” “Let her love me, let her love me,” Portal hummed, imitating my voice and gesture. “Well, that’s a huge nonsense, snails!” and I can’t stand you saying it. I needn’t warn you that I don’t speak like that for the sake of morality or respect for the home. Kisses! Morality… let each one sort it out; the home… as we know it today, is an outdated institution, and whoever undermines it the most deserves the greatest reward from the country. That’s not it, radishes!” It’s a matter of convenience… of your own convenience. You’re losing your mind and you’re going to waste the year, why? Because of a ghost. At our age, we all dream of women, and it’s quite natural that we should dream; but we should dream of the woman cut out for us, and not precisely the one who would make us unhappy if we were to unite with her. Your aunt is very good, very pure, very saintly! Passive goodness; submission to fate; moral routine, son… and that’s it, that ‘s it. You, married to Aunt Carmen, would act like Don Felipe: you wouldn’t speak to her at mealtimes, and you would leave her alone as much as possible, because you wouldn’t understand each other, nor would you resist each other . A more complete divorce of soul is inconceivable. Believe it. Don’t harbor foolish illusions. Would you be a close friend of an uneducated, carefree neo-Catholic? No? Well, not your wife’s either. And what you consider virtue in her, seems prudish to you in the Neo-Catholic. “Luis,” I exclaimed, “do you dare deny the heroism of a woman who, in order not to witness her father’s excesses, sacrifices her youth and marries a man she cannot love? We spoke of this before, and it infuriates me that you do not esteem such a noble and rare action. ” “Well, that’s why, well, that’s why!” Portal shouted, already beside himself. ” I reply from my point of view: Do you dare to call a virtue the action of a woman who accepts a repulsive husband, and does not prefer to go out singing in a theater like Cinta, or scrub floors like the Alcarrian woman who serves us at Doña Jesusa’s house? Well, how is your dream angel different from Bethlehem, for example?” Belén suffers an unpleasant protector because it suits her… because that’s how she spends and triumphs… And your aunt… “Shut up, shut up,” I shouted, rising in my turn, furious. “If you say one more word about that, I’ll think you’re a scoundrel and I’ll slap you, just as surely as my name is Salustio. Don’t mention Carmiña to me after mentioning Belén. Don’t go looking for three feet on a cat… ” “You’re the one looking for a fight, you scrap…” “Recual, I don’t… ” “Well, go fry asparagus… ” “And you weed chives… Etc. I won’t add anything more, because the discreet reader will easily guess what two heated friends would say to each other. For two weeks I didn’t look Luis in the face. The fact is that it seemed to me I was missing something: the practical reason for my life, the Sancho who moderated my quixotic fantasy. I was never without his warnings, his mockery, his anger , and his lessons. When it was time to look for him at his inn, I felt uneasy, restless, and even unspeakable nostalgia. I missed the inveterate habit, the sweet custom of communication, of the intellectual spark, of contradiction itself. There were days when I came to the conclusion that the old friendship was more indispensable to me than the dream of love. “I would have known,” I thought, “that I needed this man so much. I walk without a shadow. But I don’t bend. Let him come if he wants…” And he came, he came, proving to me once again that in our mutual dealings he represented good sense, or common sense, or whatever we choose to call that pleasant and modest quality that takes the emphasis off our actions and teaches us not to embitter life with foolish stubbornness and dramatic fussiness. The reconciliation took place with the greatest naturalness: a One day, as I was leaving school, Luis nudged my elbow and asked, smiling, “Has the kid gone too far? Are we going to make up?” I confess, I hugged him with all my heart, stammering, “Luisiño, my darling !” And he laughed, saying, “Get out of here, idiot… it seems you’re coming back from America after twenty years of emigration.” We left there arm in arm, and that afternoon we chatted more than ever. “I won’t contradict you again,” my friend warned with mocking resignation. “Fall in love like an African dromedary or like Marsilla from Teruel… I’ll let the water run. You have to convince yourself. To be happy, we need educated women who think like us and understand us. Well, I think so; But you ‘ve been so set on the path that we’re better off with 13th-century ladies or Gothic saints painted on a gold background… Go ahead. You’ll fall off your high horse. Aside from the fact that the tit… boy, not even that. The struggle with the impossible will eventually tire you out. Don’t get so worked up. Tell me how your love is going; open that little heart. ” Luis,” I murmured mysteriously, “I don’t know if she loves me or not . But I’m certain… pay close attention! That she can’t stand her husband. ” “That shows good taste. ” “I’m not mistaken, no. I watch her, Luisiño, I watch her. The poor thing looks pale; she hardly eats: in the mornings, when she goes to church, and especially on the days when she takes communion, she displays a certain serenity; but at night… Oh! I think she has the daily fever of aversion. ” “And her husband? Does he get distracted there?” “I don’t think so. He retires at reasonable hours, even if he goes out to confer with Sotopeña or to the Círculo. He doesn’t try to see Belén: I know for a fact. My uncle is miserly, you know, and for economic reasons he’s capable of being content with what’s at home… Luis, I swallow a lot, but it consoles me to know that she’s sad and suffering. ” “A lovely consolation. And God knows if you’re mistaken, and if that woman gets along perfectly with her husband. ” “It’s just that if I saw her completely enraged with him… I don’t know what would happen to me. ” “The wind would leave your head. The devil be on you!” We were having this conversation as we left Calle Mayor and entered the famous Viaduct or suicide place. The afternoon, magnificently serene, invited us to lean against the high railings and admire the view through its gaps, perhaps the most beautiful in Madrid. Without bothering to rummage through the old books, most of them textbooks , almost all of them grimy and battered, that an old man with the appearance of a maniac was selling in the open air on holy ground, we brought our faces close to the ironwork and were enthralled by the grandiose panorama to the left: the red palace of Uceda with its white coat of arms, supported by fierce lions; the thousand domes and rotundas of temples and houses dominated, slender as a palm tree, by the Mudejar tower of San Pedro. Then we turned to the right, enchanted by the fresh greenery of the small garden that, far below us, spread a carpet of conifers and flowering shrubs. Far away, the Manzanares River traced an S of white metal over the green meadows, and the Guadarrama River raised its white, gleaming line behind the severe, stark contours of the nearby mountains. But what fascinated us, the sublime note of that ensemble, was Segovia Street, at a terrifying depth, down below, down below… Luis squeezed my wrist, saying: “Son, this Viaduct explains all the deaths that have occurred on it. ” “It seems to invite you to throw yourself down,” I responded, still gazing into the abyss of the cobblestones and already feeling the tingling of vertigo in the soles of my feet . “Look at a suicide, kid,” Portal suddenly exclaimed, pointing out a man with very defeated features, also leaning on the railing. ” Whatever he is, he’ll throw himself down at any moment.” I curiously approached. The presumed suicide turned… how long it had been since I saw his noble and expressive face, his black eyes, his His gallant bearing, his filthy and shabby clothes! Poor Botello! I felt joy at finding that incoherent being, that social rubble, harmless and useless. “Were you going to kill yourself?” I asked him, smiling, after the first effusions and the first embraces had passed. “Oh, no,” replied Pepita’s guest. “Just to pass the time, I was meditating on how wisely I would act if I threw myself headlong into it. That street, with its hard stones, was calling me loudly. That way, all the traps and all the miseries would end… Don’t you know? Pepa has practically thrown me out on the street… She insults me daily… I hardly smoke… I have a room to sleep in, but eating is a luxury I don’t know. The Biscayan woman is furious because Don Julián did the smoking, and she refuses to support me. They’ve seized my pension. Will you pay for a steak?” We went out to Bailén Street and soon settled into a tavern, in front of some very appetizing grilled lamb chops. The perdis said to us melancholically, “There are days when I’m so desperate, it even occurs to me to work at anything. But at what? And besides, those are absurd ideas, born of weakness or liquor. No; when I have a peseta, I write it down and earn a hundred. I’m not good for the ignominy of work. Keep it for the blacks. And afterward, you always find good friends who won’t refuse a penny to whoever asks. Don’t think I live off the sword, children, no; a rip-off is when someone offers to pay… and I never offer such nonsense. He who lends me, gives me a gift. Do you know what Mauricio Parra and Pepe Vidal played on me this Carnival? Do you know them? One in architecture, and the other in mining.” They’re guests at Pepa Urrutia’s house. Well, a well-dressed guest came to us… a widow from Cordoba, even more savory…! And I… I was looking at her a bit. One night I found out she was going to the Real ball… And I didn’t have a penny! Mauricio and Pepe encouraged me and took my ticket… they went with me… The little masked girl approached us… I knew her perfectly… “I’m thirsty… Will you treat me? Are we going to the buffet?” I saw heaven open… and hell, because I didn’t have a lousy penny. I put my hand back, and with it I signaled to Mauricio and Pepe… I felt a coin being pushed into the palm of my hand… God! What could it be! Definitely a duro… although it seemed small. Without looking, I pocketed it, and bam! I go up so intrepidly… She begins to eat pastries, to drink sherry… I tremble lest the bill go over a duro… The good lady never finished swallowing… Finally, she decides to finish, and I take the coin from my pocket and say to the waiter with great pomp: “Collect it.” “But, sir, if you’ll give me a big dog!” My children, what a scene there was! I thought they were taking me straight to the guardhouse… And what a joke! Well, that’s how one lives, and that’s how one always is: more excited today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today. You can imagine that my little Portuguese boy has returned to Portugal; on the other hand, I have a provincial deputy from Cuenca, who has taken it into his head to be a playwright, and I accompany him behind the scenes, because he fancies that I ought to know the actors and actresses intimately; and indeed I do know them; who doesn’t know every kind of human being here? but I don’t know what role I play in Lara, in Eslava, and in Apolo; the fact is that the ushers take me for an actor, the actors for a crazy author, and I’m there, up in arms, with my provincial deputy, determined to get his purpose, or toy, or revue, or whatever it is, performed for him… “Don’t you know for sure? ” “No. He tried to read it to me a hundred times; but for now I’m holding off. We’ll see if I can manage it to the end. Goodbye, my saviors… My thoughts of death have already dissipated. Thank you. “Today heaven and earth smile upon me; Today the sun reaches the depths of my soul; Today you gave me cheat sheets, two cheat sheets! Today I believe in God. ”
Declaiming thus, Dumillas shook our hands with his filthy, mournful ones, and left… “There you have Romanticism,” Luis murmured disdainfully, raising his shoulders–. How greatly this man and those like him need a course in _common sense_! Chapter 21. Let Portal say what he liked: I studied Carmiña’s physiognomy and actions, and with the second-hand vision of passion I verified a deviation that was ever more accentuated and profound… Playwrights who lavish poisons and daggers in your gruesome creations; poets who sing of horrible tragedies; novelists who commit as many murders as chapters, tell me if there is a conflict more tremendous than the one whose events unfold in the depths of the soul of a woman united, subject, linked day and night to the man whose presence is enough to shake every fiber of her being with horror. And those who believe that psychology is –like positive, exact, physical, and natural psychology– a science of facts will say: so why should that husband disgust her wife so much? There is no sufficient reason. He did not offend her in anything. Queen and mistress of her home, her husband commits no infidelity, but rather shows himself assiduous, fond of his home and the young wife who awaits him there. Ah! The antipathy was unreasonable, and therefore stronger, deeper, more impossible to combat. One fights the adversary when he has a body, not when he is an impalpable shadow projected into the cavern of the spirit. There are husbands who mistreat their wives, who betray them, who ruin them, and yet are loved, or at least not repulsive. Who can say precisely where this aura called repulsion blows from? It is not hatred. Hatred has a reason, it is based on motives, it is reasoned and justified: and if at times I have allowed myself to say that I hated my uncle, I have expressed myself badly, inaccurately. It was not hatred that his wife and I felt toward him. Hatred can turn into friendship, even into love; as it is born from positive causes, other positive causes cancel it out; But the mysterious repugnance, the revolt of the depths of our being, never ends, never is eradicated, never is transformed: against unreason there is no reasoning, no logic against instinct, which works in us like nature, intuitively, by virtue of laws whose essence is and will remain for us, for ever and ever, an indecipherable mystery. Let us agree that Aunt Carmen did not hate my Uncle Felipe. In her goodness there was no room for hatred. My uncle had given him his name, his position, just as he was; My uncle didn’t mistreat her, nor did I notice that he was stingy with money, although I clearly saw that the wife, if she were mistress of her own free will, would increase her almsgiving… My uncle’s marriage was, then, like so many seen today, apparently peaceful and even happy, united by that bourgeois harmony that is fashionable in our society, where customs, like the streets, are drawn in a straight line, each day more straight and symmetrical. But just as within the houses of those straight-line streets tragic episodes unfold , and love, vice, and crime throb, so beneath the veneer of good harmony and mutual consideration of that couple I guessed the bad match, the tyrannical and petty disposition of the husband and the unconscious, cold, tremendous repulsion of the wife. Sometimes I said to myself: “Be careful, Luis is right and I am stupid. I shouldn’t care much about the repugnance I sense in Carmen. What might worry me would be the feelings I inspire in her. If she loved me as I love her, would it matter if, like certain heroines in plays and novels, without ceasing to love me madly, she also bestowed upon her husband a most tender affection and a filial, fraternal, or conjugal, etc., veneration and respect? Let her reciprocate, and the rest is smoke. I gain enough from her looking askance at her legitimate owner if she doesn’t look at me. Well, I wouldn’t gain anything: but the fact is that I noted the signs of antipathy with intense joy. When we suspect whether the woman we love will reciprocate our love, we eagerly await a glance, a smile, a fleeting blush, the passing of an emotion that, piercing the veil that envelops the feminine soul, reveals the hidden fire; I, less so. Happy, I studied the barely muffled sparkle in her eyes, the barely perceptible tremor in her lips, betraying the distraction my rival inspired. At mealtimes, I would tenaciously spy on her, feigning distraction, playing with my fork, or following political conversations with my uncle—almost always arguments. I’m convinced that everything can be faked, everything can be subject to willpower; everything, even the expression on one’s face; the voice, never. Tití managed to control her muscles, dim her pupils, and immobilize the nostrils of her thin, throbbing nostrils; she couldn’t keep her voice, with its deep, thick, and well -sounding notes when addressing other people, from being dull and muffled when speaking to her husband. And beyond this, there were a thousand clues. The clearest was her eagerness to prolong the evening. For her own good, that woman wouldn’t retire. Ah, what a delightful impression it was for me—the few times I managed to accompany her at night—to see her put off her work on a thousand pretexts, to immerse herself in her work, to claim that she had set herself homework, that she wouldn’t go to bed until it was finished, that she still had a few letters to write to her father or to her friends in Pontevedra! I could only make these observations on some Saturday night; the rest of the week I had to go to bed early because of my classes. I used to sit by the fireplace, in the study next to the bedroom, whose columns were adorned with a canopy of plush and moss-green damask, revealing the furnishings of the odious chamber where the iniquitous mystery of the absolute intimacy of two beings who neither loved nor perhaps esteemed each other, nor had any point of contact other than the fact that the Moorish friar had draped them in the same robe at the same time, was daily celebrated. One morning I received a letter from my mother, written in her usual hasty and incoherent style , without punctuation, needless to say, and entirely devoted to telling me some strange news. «You don’t know the carnival, the old fool Aldao fell for that brat Candidiña, she wrapped him up, made him dizzy, made him crazy, made him mad until he agreed to get married, but not in public, but in secret, very quietly, the priest denies it when he is questioned, the old man still does the same, but I know it from someone who saw it and witnessed it with his own eyes, and in Pontevedra there are some very indecent verses about the phenomenon, it seems that the director of _El Teucrense_ wrote them, it’s a laughable thing, what a shameless little girl can’t achieve, she says she gave her a mantilla and a black silk dress, God preserve our sanity and keep us from being senile, I don’t know if her daughter knows, if not, keep quiet, let it be known outside, because her henchmen will write it to Felipe, she did well, she already has a stepmother, I’m glad she made fun of us.» It seems unnecessary to say that as soon as I was able to pick up the marmoset alone, I hurried to read her the strange news, not without great preamble and fuss. Far from being frightened or distressed, the daughter of the Lord of Aldao revealed satisfaction. “God has heard me,” she said briskly. “God rewards me, Salustio. At my father’s age, it’s better to be married than… otherwise. For his dignity, I’m glad: you can believe I’m glad, although I would prefer he had a different choice. Did he already do it? Now… may it turn out well. ” “I don’t want to give you a bad time,” I replied, “but, Carmiña, at your father’s age, a man exposes himself quite a bit, in the realm of his own dignity, by marrying girls of sixteen. ” “That’s up to her and her conscience,” replied the marmoset. “Probably, now that she’s married, she’ll be very careful. Before, she could have been excused for some informality.” “And she was a weather vane, tití… and she will continue to be one because of her nature . Be careful with the girl! Taking that man to such an extreme! I assure you, your stepmother is a complete idiot. I don’t see the future clearly. ” “Well, God above all. Let’s let the grace of the Sacrament do its work. ” “Do you believe in the grace of the Sacrament?” I asked, remembering Luis and smiling despite myself at a language that contrasted so much with my ideas and convictions, and yet, on my aunt’s lips, it seemed to me the essence of moral beauty. “What a question! Should I not believe?” I would be lucid if I didn’t. When God instituted the Sacrament, He obliged Himself to assist with His grace those who enter into it. Without such help, marriage would not be possible. “Grace consists in loving one another, Carmen,” I murmured, leaning a little closer to her and fixing my eyes on hers. I didn’t wish, God knows, to convince her or seduce her, but on the contrary, I wanted her to display all the adoration of her theological knowledge and show off before me, like a seasoned Amazon, the well-tempered weapons with which she shielded her virtue. But Easter fell on a Friday, because Tití wasn’t up for controversy. She simply replied affably: “It’s natural that you think that way, being a boy and having the ideas you have, unfortunately not very religious. The years will disabuse you, and you’ll judge better.” You’ll settle down. “Well, Carmiña; if a word from you were enough to settle her… Are you saying that loving each other is nonsense? Well, I believe it. But at least you won’t deny that to be happy, no matter how saintly you suppose them to be, married couples need to profess some affection for each other; well, at least not hate each other, not repel each other. Am I mistaken? Carmiña paled and her eyelids fluttered slightly. She looked at me sternly and pained, as if to say: “That’s forbidden conversation, and it’s strange that you’re bringing it up.” I took from that brief exchange, interrupted by my uncle’s arrival, a greater source of hope. Don Felipe hurried in, ill- humored and extremely flustered. As soon as he saw his wife, he took a letter from his pocket.
“Carmen! What’s this? Did you know something?” “Because Castro Mera writes to me saying that it’s rumored all over town that your father secretly married his housekeeper’s niece!” Titi steadied his voice before answering, and he did so without fear. “It must be true, because Benigna also writes to Salustio. ” “And you tell me like that… with such phlegm!” shouted the husband. There are moments when the curtain is drawn back, the naked soul is surprised, and its mysterious forms are seen, no matter how quickly it tries to cover them up. In that shout I saw Don Felipe’s soul evident, dry and hard, self-interested and vile, similar to many others wandering around hidden in bodies of less Jewish appearance. “I find it funny how you take it!” he continued, confused. “Don’t you care that your father has gone mad? Because that is senile madness, and your brother and I will join together to annul the wedding and incapacitate the fool. Getting married! Well, man, it’s a joke!” “That’s called laughing at the world and giving the chestnut to the unwary!” His eyes sparkled; his crooked nose accentuated the expression of rapacity and greed on his face, dilating; his complexion had become injected, almost matching his beard in hue; and his convulsive hand grasped and released, with a mechanical shudder, the knife, the fork, the napkin, from the table set for lunch. “What do you want?” his wife responded firmly, taking her place as if we were going to lunch peacefully. “My father is the master of his shares, by the same token that his age authorizes him. It’s not true that he’s senile, and the respect we owe him forbids us from attempting anything against his resolutions. Patience. It would be worse if he lived causing a scandal. ” “You’re a fool,” exclaimed the husband, breaking down for the first time, ready to throw everything into disarray. At your father’s age, my daughter, there is no longer any scandal, nor Christ who founded it: what there is is nonsense and madness and ridiculousness, and the greatest of all, that of marrying a girl of a few years, a servant!, only to find, a month later , that her head doesn’t fit in her hat. You women don’t understand anything, nor do you know what you’re talking about. Lack of experience and worldliness, you neither know it, nor have reason to know it. That’s why most of the time you would do very well to keep quiet, you idiot! And your father—since you want to hear it—before marrying his daughter, would proceed It would be better if I had said to my future son-in-law: “Felipe, even though my pants are falling off, there’s no need to trust me; I’m in high spirits, and it won’t be long before I remarry . And since at my age one always has children, two or three boys will come along who will leave my daughter _aspergis_.” How nice, eh? How nice! My aunt remained silent. The lividity of her cheeks, the yearning in her chest , and the brightness of her eyes indicated her inner indignation and the boiling of protest… But instead of opening the valve, she restrained herself, picked up the glass of water that was near her, and I felt the glass clash against her teeth as she drank, indicating the trembling of her pulse… My uncle, disregarding that courageous silence, getting excited by his own words, continued: “Right now I’m going to send him a hot little letter, telling him what’s relevant… He’ll hear me, I swear.” This mischief must be on her face , or my name isn’t Felipe. I’ll create such difficulties for her that she’ll have to remember my saint’s name… Does she imagine I’m going to allow you to associate with that precious stepmother? “In the first place,” my aunt responded slowly, making an effort, “I believe the marriage, for now, is a secret; and secondly, she was associated with me when I was there… exposed to worse things. Why shouldn’t she associate me, now that she’s my father’s wife, if she behaves herself ? ” “Behave yourself! Come on!” my uncle exclaimed ironically. “Behave yourself! The young gentlemen of Pontevedra and San Andrés will tell you about it at mass … Anyway, I don’t care about that… ” “Well, that’s all that matters to me,” my aunt replied vehemently , no longer able to restrain herself. May my father not be ashamed of his choice, and the rest be as God wills, for in the end, so it must be. Oh, the inveterate hardness of the Hebrews, how rightly Christ chastised you! Those words, dictated by the impetus of faith, would have moved a rock; but my uncle was worse than the rocks themselves, and he rose from the table, throwing down his napkin, snorting through his teeth. “About holding the fuse, they come up with stupid and silly things. He’s got a soul, man! Look at that scoundrel getting married now! Hearing him defend himself here, to my face!” He left the dining room. I followed him, wanting to know where he was going; I had my objective when I left Carmen alone. I heard Don Felipe close his study, no doubt to write his father-in-law the “hot” letter. Then I stepped back, and suddenly entering the dining room, I approached Carmiña, and murmured tenderly: “Don’t cry, tití… Go on, don’t cry… Silly girl, don’t pay attention.” I hadn’t been mistaken in my supposition. She turned her head, and I saw her eyes filled with tears, which her energetic will instantly wiped away. In a trembling voice, she answered, diverting me a little: “Thank you, Salustio; it’s over now… It can’t be helped sometimes. He has such silly things… ” “He speaks to you in a way that infuriates me. I had a hard time not jumping. And you, how can you resist…” “No, no, not that; don’t even say that. He’s my husband and he shouldn’t be choosing his words. ” “Yes, he should. A woman like you, who is holiness, goodness incarnate, is spoken to in this position… like this… you see?” I sighed, sinking to one knee. “If you don’t get up, I’ll be angry, and if you say that again, I’ll be angry too,” he replied, rising resolutely. “I don’t thank you for this consolation, Sallust: it seems more like flattery, and flattery to me… wasted time. Do you want me to tell you the truth? For the fault of this uneasiness is mine, mine alone. I should not have contradicted Philip, but let the initial anger subside, and then reflect with him. It’s easy to understand why he was upset about Papa’s marriage. Let’s be fair. No husband is irritated with a wife who doesn’t answer him. All marital dissensions come from the tongue . Our role is to keep silent. ” “No, silly girl, your role is to speak when you are right; just as we often speak when we are not. So if your husband utters a huge outrage… that there is no God, let’s suppose, you shouldn’t squeak? –As long as he’s irritated, no… because what will I achieve? Adding fuel to the fire, never persuading. But as soon as he calms down, gently and affectionately , I can present my objections to him, as best I know how… and then he’ll really hear me and be convinced. I didn’t know what to reply, because even though a thousand objections occurred to me, the monkey’s opinion completely subdued me, seeming to me the only one worthy of it. It was a very cloudy day; the dining room looked out onto the patio, and the thick curtains, blocking out the light, contributed to making it even gloomier. The folds of those curtains, of a brownish color and dense material, seemed to me, by a sudden whim of the imagination, to be the pleat of a friar’s habit, the thick cord that tied them together and held them to the tie-back contributing considerably to the resemblance. The arabesques of the curtain, at a certain height, I imagined very accurately depicted the face of a man. It was a phenomenon of autosuggestion, which evoked there, overhearing our conversation and mocking me with a sneer, the shadow of Father Moreno. “Cursed friar!” I said mentally to the curtain. “You’re going to be disappointed. Because nothing violent and absolutely contrary to human nature lasts, and this heroic self-denial and this strength that my aunt exerts in her feelings cannot reach an indefinite limit. There will come a time when the spring will spring… and I will glimpse it, I swear to you, silly friar, for you have not tasted the only true happiness in this life.” By chance, my uncle was fixing his gaze on the curtain, with that intensity of people who look without seeing and are distracted by a sad thought. I imagined she saw the same thing I did in the wrinkles, and that for her too, the figure of the friar stood out there, silent but eloquent in its attitude… How eager I was to penetrate the secret chambers of that feminine mind and read the revolutionary proclamation written there , surely by an invisible hand! The wife let nothing out . Rising, she went into the kitchen and inquired about the progress of lunch. “Because you’ll be hungry soon, Sallust,” she said, re- entering, serene and self-possessed. Chapter 22. How did it happen that a ray of divine joy descended upon my soul, a senseless and delightful hope, a light, in short, similar to that which popular tradition supposes penetrates the darkness of Limbo on Candlemas Day? Let’s see if I can remember it with all its insignificant and even comical details, with its mixture of dreams and realities, so inseparable that I don’t know where the former ends and the latter begins , nor can I swear that the latter ever existed except within the subject who perceived them in my own representation, for myself the supreme truth. The fact is that Trinito, our Cuban philharmonic orchestra, having received some money sent from his island, spent it without rhyme or reason or grace, carelessly, as he did everything; and among his extravaganzas was inviting us to seats at the Royal Opera House to see the premiere of a Spanish opera, much discussed and commented on beforehand by the newspapers. We vainly demonstrated to him the futility of this waste, for we would be much more at ease in paradise, among cute, pretty girls and competent amateurs of the _divine art_. But he, who only wanted to make a name for himself and cheer on the debut of a certain tailcoat, played deaf and dragged Portal and me toward the coliseum. The man from Zamora, not even in pieces, agreed to accompany him. Neither Portal nor I owned tailcoats; we just stopped being small and crammed our frock coats into the bottom of the trunk, hoping that no one would notice us, and all eyes would be on the Cuban, so resplendent and dazzling he was. His new evening dress shone with the special polish of the fine cloth, and the narrow satin lapel, descending to his waist, highlighted the very white front. The man, in order to not spare a detail, had He had spent his little peset on a fragrant gardenia, which he wore in his buttonhole with irreproachable correctness. Clac didn’t buy it for lack of time; but he entered the theater hiding the bowler hat under his cape, so as not to spoil the curls and the exquisite parting of his hair. We took our seats, somewhat self-consciously hoping that no one would look at us or see us; but Trinito, standing tall with his back to the orchestra, sticking out his chest, where his fine shirt was puffing out, and running his gloveless hand through his well-combed hair, looked like a most tiresome pest. Although the Cuban’s sense of sight was as keen as his hearing, he had rented large binoculars and alternately focused them on the boxes, mezzanines, stalls, and rows of stalls, reviewing the beauties, the necklines, the finery, and the jewels. Portal, very huddled and curled up, amused himself by telling him sotto voce that Doña Cristina was shooting her long-handled glasses at him, and that Infanta Isabel was signaling to Infanta Eulalia to take notice of this new dandy, as unknown as he was fascinating. But no sooner had the curtain risen than Trinito was struck by a fit of musical epilepsy, and he was absorbed in the opera, which, for five hours, shook us from Wagner to Meyerbeer, and from Donizetti to Rossini, for there was everything in it except something new and Spanish. Trinito, in his exaltation or with the implacability of his retentive music, wouldn’t let us live. “Comrades, this is pure ajiaco! The man has slipped in the largo assai from Mendelssohn’s 32nd opera. Come on, come on, he’s jammed his way through the entire allegretto from the introduction of Don Juan!” “Take that… that ‘s from The Enchanted Flute: at least fifteen bars are the same, copied to the letter… This majestic one is in The Phantom Ship or Parsifal!… “Or in Green Beans,” Portal added sarcastically. “No, don’t laugh, there’s something from Green Beans, or something similar: because I’ve heard that kind of tango in zarzuela… Now we jump to the Symphony in U minor of the Sublime Deaf Man… Comrades, I’m indignant. I’m going to protest. From this to go out onto the roads with a blunderbuss…” In the second act Trinito’s indignation reached a crescendo no less resounding than that of the final concertante; On the third day, he bored us all with his searches for reminiscences and plagiarisms, insisting on shouting, calling the attention of the spectators, for the fragments of a Mozart tarsus or a Beethoven shinbone that were scattered about; and on the fourth day, his indignation reached such overwhelming proportions that he prevented us from hearing the end of the play. “Let’s leave before they call that counterfeiter onto the stage. I’d whistle if I were staying, and there’s no reason to make a fuss here. Let’s go then: be prudent. I’m so sickened, I don’t know what I’m doing. Hold me down, take me out into the street.” Amazed by this rush, no less surprising in the sweet and gentle Cuban than in a canary or a lamb, we resigned ourselves to leaving before anyone else and headed through the lounge toward the door. Without transition, from the sweltering, vibrant, buzzing atmosphere of the hall, we moved to the corridor, which was all the more frigid for being deserted, as only two ushers were milling about. A draft , sharp as a stiletto, snuck through my mouth, half-open to laugh, instantly reaching my chest, where I felt a pang. “Cover your mouth, gentlemen,” warned the practical Luis. ” We’re going to catch the great pneumonia of the Christian Era. Cover yourself, Sallust, don’t be foolish.” I reached for my handkerchief to protect myself with, but alas! I already felt that strange warning, that dark, dull pang of the illness, which has treacherously crept into our bodies, taking advantage of our carelessness, like a thief who sees the key in the lock and sees no opportunity to search the chest. “I think I’ve got it,” I murmured with some trepidation. “Don’t be apprehensive.” Let’s go to Fornos for some punch. Come on, you’ll see. “How warm and how good,” my companions said, as we left for the Plaza de Oriente wasteland. And we went to Fornos and drank the punch, all on Trinito’s dime, who once again wrote us a monograph on opera plagiarisms and rhapsodies, and hummed his indignation to us and even typed it out for us on the table. This time he decided to write a musical critique. Oh, yes, he did! He was going to crush the composer, or rather, the rat caught red-handed visiting Wagner’s pocketbook. I retired late and slept badly. The next day I woke up feeling inexplicable fatigue and discouragement, with that kind of slumber that precedes serious pathological disorders. Tití noticed that I looked very bad and begged me to go to bed, gently scolding me for the impossible hours at which I had come the night before. I agreed; I felt so exhausted that, as we say back home, not a single bone in my body cared for me. As I left, I said to Carmiña in a pleading tone: “Will you come see me? ” “Of course! It’s obvious I will. To bring you a cup of well-boiled mallow flowers to help you sweat… That’s a cold you have. You must have done some crazy things. I had barely gone to bed when, bam! The fever, fatigue, and congestion in my respiratory organs declared themselves victoriously. I began to wander, to lose my bearings: this certainly wasn’t delirium, but rather a kind of free and capricious voyage of the imagination through the most beautiful regions for me when I felt completely in control of my faculties. In the lucid intervals of drowsiness and amidst the anguish of pulmonary dyspnea, I saw the Yew again, with its dark green foliage, silhouetted against the divine blue of the sky and the luminous, pale greenery of the estuary; I heard peasants’ songs, bagpipes ringing out the dawn, rockets, piano chords, and there were moments when I swore a black bat fluttered through the window and, pierced by a pin, lay dying before my eyes… Of course, Father Moreno was there, and sometimes his presence comforted me, and at other times it irritated me to the point that I would have gladly thrown anything at his head. During the rage of the fever, I must have sung, and I must have also enunciated formulas and posed mathematical problems. What I do know is that above the delirium, the fever, the horrible oppression, the constriction of my bronchi and lungs, a delightful sensation fluttered. Titi never left my room; Titi applied my medicine, straightened my sheets, waited on me, and attended to me in every way; and when, in an involuntary movement, brought on by the fever, I threw my arms around her neck… I thought… was it delirium? That this strong, unbreakable woman, far from making the slightest move to move away from me, returned the affectionate demonstration. I could swear her eyes looked at me with immense tenderness; that her hands caressed and flattered me as one flatters and caresses a child; that her mouth murmured honeyed phrases, the sound of which was music to the heart… And allowing myself to be carried away by my fantasy, I thought, as I fell asleep under the action of a powerful medicine: “Titi loves me, she loves me, there is no doubt about it.” “If I don’t die, I’ll be very happy!” I sighed, turned around, and if I could put into words the feeling that flooded my spirit, I would add: “Even if I die. ” Thus concludes ‘A Christian,’ a work that invites us to reflect on the power of personal convictions in the face of social impositions. The Countess by Emilia Pardo Bazán leaves us a literary legacy that questions the structures of her time, revealing the complexity of the human soul. Thank you for joining us on this journey through the pages of a story that, although written in the past, continues to resonate strongly in the present. Don’t forget to subscribe for more stories that connect us with humanity’s deepest emotions .
Descubre la profundidad emocional y espiritual de *Una Cristiana*, una de las obras más emblemáticas de la condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Esta novela, publicada en 1890, explora temas como la fe, el amor, la moral y las complejidades de la sociedad española del siglo XIX. Acompáñanos en este viaje literario lleno de pasión, dilemas éticos y reflexiones profundas. 🕯️📚
**Sinopsis:**
– *Una Cristiana* narra la historia de Carmen, una mujer devota que se enfrenta a un dilema moral cuando conoce a un hombre que desafía sus creencias religiosas.
– La trama se desarrolla en un entorno donde la religión y las normas sociales dictan las acciones de los personajes, creando tensiones dramáticas y momentos de intensa introspección.
– A través de diálogos profundos y descripciones vívidas, Pardo Bazán nos sumerge en un mundo donde la fe y la razón chocan, y donde las decisiones personales tienen consecuencias eternas.
**¿Por qué leer *Una Cristiana*?**
– Es una obra maestra de la literatura española que combina drama, romance y crítica social.
– Explora temas universales como la fe, el amor prohibido y la lucha interna entre el deber y el deseo.
– Perfecta para amantes de la literatura clásica y aquellos interesados en la historia y la cultura española.
**🎥 En este video:**
– Analizamos los personajes principales y su evolución a lo largo de la historia.
– Discutimos los temas centrales y su relevancia en la actualidad.
– Te ofrecemos una lectura dramatizada de los pasajes más impactantes de la obra.
**🔔 ¡No te lo pierdas!**
Si disfrutas de la literatura clásica y las historias llenas de emociones intensas, este video es para ti. Suscríbete a nuestro canal para más análisis literarios y lecturas dramatizadas: [https://bit.ly/AhoradeCuentos](https://bit.ly/AhoradeCuentos).
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