Pachín González: La Historia de un Hombre de Campo 🌾👨‍🌾

¡Bienvenidos a una nueva historia de ‘Ahora de Cuentos’! 📚 En esta narración de *Pachín González* por José María de Pereda, conoceremos la vida y los desafíos de un hombre de campo en la España rural. Acompáñanos a explorar un relato lleno de costumbres tradicionales, paisajes idílicos y, sobre todo, los contrastes entre la vida del campo y las nuevas dinámicas sociales. 🌄👩‍🌾

📌 ¿Te apasionan los relatos sobre el campo español? ¡No te puedes perder este clásico!

🔔 ¡Suscríbete para más relatos clásicos como este! [https://bit.ly/AhoradeCuentos]
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En esta historia, Pachín González se enfrenta a las adversidades del campo, con un trasfondo de amor, desdicha y las costumbres de su época. Con una narrativa que nos transporta a tiempos pasados, descubrirás los giros de su vida mientras las tensiones sociales y familiares afectan su destino. ¿Te atreves a vivir esta historia? 🌿🌾

👇 ¡No olvides comentar qué te ha parecido este cuento y compartirlo con tus amigos!

#CuentosClásicos #JoséMaríadePereda #LiteraturaEspañola #RelatosDelCampo #TradiciónRural #EspañaEnLaLiteratura #ClásicosLiterarios #CuentosDeAmor #CostumbresRurales #HistoriaDeCampo #VidaRural #LeyendasDeEspaña #NarrativaClásica #LiteraturaDelSigloXIX #AutoresEspañoles #MundoRural #CuentosParaTodos #TiemposPasados #CuentosDeLaRuralidad #LiteraturaPopular #RelatosDeLaHistoria

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In ‘Pachín González’, José María de Pereda transports us to life in the rural region of Cantabria, where family values ​​and traditions take on great importance. Through the story of Pachín, a young man whose life was marked by destiny and effort, we discover the customs and struggles of an environment deeply tied to the land. Join us in this tale full of humanity, which reflects the essence of daily life in northern Spain. Chapter 1. PACHÍN GONZÁLEZ. _Nihil in terra sine causa fit, et de humo non oritur dolor._ He left his house on the very day of All Souls, to be more precise, after hearing three masses from the parish priest of his village; a very sad day, certainly, for the living, if they have a memory to remember and a heart to feel, because there are those who neither feel nor remember, over whom these and other remembrances pass like the wind over rocks. Without the encouragement the priest gave him that very morning, God knows if his resolve would have been seriously shaken, for his mother wept profusely while listening to Mass and receiving Communion at his side, although the good woman claimed she only wept for the pieces of her heart that were rotting in the earth: for that provident and kind husband, for that beautiful and loving daughter, whose lives had been cut short by death three years before. Whether or not this was the pure truth, in the opinion of the son, who also wept contagiously and whose subtle imagination made no secret of certain things; but the reflections of the priest on the one hand, and on the other, the tempting work of a certain little devil who never rested a single inch in his imagination, painting picture after picture, the last always more cheerful than the last, managed to make him triumph, without great effort, over his weaknesses as a man and over his tenderness as a loving son. As for the day’s events , it was impossible to choose a happier one. The ship sailed on the 4th at mid-morning, and he didn’t have an hour to spare on the 3rd to properly attend to the essential tasks that awaited him in the city. So it was that mother and son arrived in Santander, as the young man handwritten in his brand-new wallet, “in the late afternoon of November 2 , 1893.” He had little more than twenty-four hours left to spend in this old world, on solid ground, familiar, his own… then the immensity of the seas, the remote, the unknown, the uncertain, “the other world,” from which so many adventurers never returned, or returned aged and disenchanted… But these somber notes of his joyful imaginative panoramas were no longer appropriate on an occasion like that. The die had been cast, and there was no turning back. Forward, then, with the impetus of the faith in his visions; and for now, he had to make good use of the few hours he had left at his mother’s side: he had to savor them like the last crumbs of the first treat we are given. Merciful God! May they not be the last of his life, consecrated to such a holy destiny! These winter gusts troubled him somewhat in the early hours of the night, even though he tried to distract himself, wandering haphazardly through the streets, gazing at the illuminated shop windows and delighting in stirring his mother’s admiring curiosity; until fatigue and the desire for supper brought them back to the inn. At dawn the next day, Pachín González was already awake and rubbing his eyes in bed. He jumped out of it with a bound; And before the blessed scapular, which he removed from his neck and hung from a peg at the head of the bed, he recited the usual prayers and a few more for the needs of the moment. Afterward, he went out with his mother to hear Mass at the nearest church. Thus, while serving God, he “killed time” until the offices and writing desks opened , and he could conduct his most important business. From the church and before lunch, he wanted to take a walk along the dock and take a look from there. He already knew that his ship was off to the right, leaning against one of the projecting boards of Maliaño. A guest who was to be his companion had told him this at the inn. A good ship, powerful and large, though less luxurious than the mail ship, the four-masted one that stood like a great lord at the mouth of the San Martín. On another occasion, he had visited a similar one, almost identical, anchored in the same place. What richness inside, with fine woods, velvets, and bronzes as good as gold! What grand salons, what resplendent mirrors, what pomp in the dining room, and what carpeting on the floors! It is true that the passengers who paid as little as he did did not enjoy such marvels; but, after all, one lives in the main house as much as in the attics. This steamer did not leave until the 20th, and it was sure to be packed with passengers of his modest class, who would not be able to move around in the hold. Two disadvantages compared to the other one, his own, which was leaving two weeks in advance, and, being primarily a cargo ship, carried few passengers: eight or ten at most, in good , uncluttered cabins, as would be seen later… That was why he had given him preference. All these and many other reflections, directed toward the same end, were made by the boy to his mother, who followed him, without opening her lips, with her black scarf on her head, her merino shawl over her shoulders, her black serge petticoat, an umbrella with a cover slung over her left arm, and looking and stepping timidly, as if she had trespassed on someone else’s property without the owner’s permission. The day, in all this, was beautiful, spring-like, resplendent with light, mild, and sweet in temperature, inviting one to live without pain or worry, and offering the admirable spectacle of Nature in its most brilliant autumnal finery to those with a weak spirit and those complaining about life’s setbacks, more or less. After lunch at the inn, the two returned to the street to carry out the agreed-upon after-dinner program: the passport at Customs, the ticket at the desk, etc., etc. For this and more, they were well equipped with instructions and money, and even carried a little note of recommendation for a certain wealthy innkeeper “over there” who was seen as only shortening procedures and overcoming obstacles of a certain kind. During these comings and goings, the same thoughts always ran through Pachín González’s head , but they expanded and grew larger, moment by moment, hour by hour, as the sun advanced in its course and enveloped the palaces of the pier in light, and sparkled on the vast glass of the bay, and the street filled with passersby, and with rumors, and with the rumble of the rough rolling of every kind of vehicle, from oxcarts to luxury cars. For him, all that feverish bustle, along with the grandiose stage in which it unfolded, had nothing but an appearance, a form, and a sound: money, lots of money… lots of money! With money , those “grand” houses were built, along with those steamships that smoked and bellowed in the port, pulled up to the docks or raising foam in the water, their hasty pace, trying to get as quickly as possible to wherever they were going with the cargo in their holds. It was money that drove those people who crossed paths with him in all directions, papers in their hands, or talking to themselves, or from a distance, shouting and without pausing, to others who didn’t pause either and also shouted back. Those arrogant and well-dressed ladies belonged to the wealthy and wealthy, leaving behind a scent even sweeter than roses and marjoram when they passed by him. And those luxurious carriages, pulled by spoiled horses, loaded with shining metal on polished straps, the work of the rich and for the rich, the powerful walls that held back the sea and disputed its land and even went so far as to conquer it. and those very tall palitroques planted in rows and holding skeins of wire that carried the word of men with the speed of lightning, through all the corners and hiding places of the population and even through all the regions of the known world; money was the prodigious talisman that set in motion, that gave life and value and prestige to all those things, beings and artifacts. Being rich meant, at the very least, being the main cog in that amazing machine; being able to sound and be heard amidst the noisy hubbub; being the mayor of the city, the husband of a beautiful and elegant lady , living in a grand house, riding in his own carriage, receiving greetings from other rich people and forming communion with them; and, among them all, exercising absolute power over everything, from the ships at sea and the finest mansions and the stones in the street, to the coffers of the bank and the City Hall treasury; being, in short, the soul, the life, and the mirror of a great city like that one. This… or nothing; That is to say, to remain in Pachín González forever, or what was the same, hunger, nakedness, ignorance, darkness, hard work from sunrise to sunset, the piece of bread, premature old age, and death, at last, in the unknown hut of his poor village… or perhaps in the remote hayloft that the charity of a stranger had offered him as a refuge for his bones broken by the weight of age and fatigue, and the pain of begging from door to door… Oh, money!… money! Lots and lots of money!… He knew very well where it was and where others had brought him from. He went there to look for it. Why should he be less fortunate? And as the ardor of these thoughts made his gait more determined and his bearing more handsome and martial, his mother, who saw and admired him while following closely behind him, was also thinking: “The truth is, he walks like a king, and it is a pleasure to see him with such a gallant and gallant bearing. What a physique he has, and how lanky he is! Who would say that he was not born to noble nobles to make a frock coat and a gold-tipped cane, more than the short vestment he wears? It is true that, to carry him, the very tailor who has just made him would not recognize him… Well, I tell you the look in his eyes and the fold of his mouth! It will be hard for him to go, hard for me to lose him, and God knows if it will be forever.” But if with that quick wit, and that wit he developed naturally, and that… well, wordiness, and the way he pens, and the schools he has, and the history and even the Latin he knows, he is destined for a better fate than his father had, grinding clods of earth all his life without even once seeing his hunger satisfied, why shouldn’t he throw his fair share of the sword? Indeed, when you consider the matter closely, he’s not one of those with the fewest chances in the game to dare to make a bet… Well, well!… He’s got good cards from those who love us and a secure position for the time being. How many, with less protection when they left home, have returned from there as princes, haters of wealth! And why shouldn’t you return as the wealthiest of them all? Yes, my son, yes, for God made us from less; and he who doesn’t take risks never crosses the sea… Neither will you ever know how dearly that handful of duros with which she sets you on the path to making a fortune cost your mother, nor will your mother live to rejoice in seeing you fortunate, if you achieve it; but others will see it, and you yourself will see, above all, that you well deserve it, however much it may be and however you look at it… When they finished their morning chores and saw that they still had some time until lunchtime, Pachín wanted to go “to the other docks” to see his ship more closely. He wanted to get to know it “from the outside” before visiting it from the inside, and very slowly, in the afternoon. Returning from this excursion, which her mother was reluctantly undertaking, for she was exhausted from wandering around the city like a squirrel in its cage, they heard some men staring at a steamer moored at one of the wharves say: “They say a fire has broken out on board.” The good woman shuddered and, with her eyes fixed on Pachín, exclaimed: “May the Lord save you, my beloved son, from such dangers! Well, look, I hadn’t counted on them. ” “Houses burn too,” replied Pachín, gently pushing his mother away from that place, but without taking his eyes off the ship. “For now,” he added, wanting to get down to business, “give me all the answers… and let’s go to the inn, it’s time to eat.” The food tasted glorious, considering their hunger and the seasoning provided by that guest who was to be Pachín’s traveling companion, a man already hardened by teeth, going to Havana to collect the inheritance of a dead relative there, and well-versed, as he claimed, in sailing “the local seas.” Everything looked as smooth and pleasant as the palm of your hand; and as for the steamboat fires, after not having had two in half a century, they were as easy to put out with the “machinery” that today is carried on board just for that purpose, like that cigarette he was smoking, as soon as he dipped the lit end into the water in the glass in front of him. And just as he claimed, he did. With this demonstration and those assurances, Pachín’s face radiated with pleasure, and his mother breathed with complete ease; so that long before the meal was finished, both of them had already lost even the memory of the steamer, with a fire on board, moored at one of the Maliaño docks. Without leaving the table, they arranged the afternoon’s program. First, they would go to their own steamer, which they hadn’t reached in the morning, to see the outside to their liking, because, once they had set out toward it, the journey was turning out to be longer than it appeared from a distance, and they were already very tired and eager to eat. They would see him in the afternoon, inside and out; they would approach the captain, ticket in hand; They would see the cabin designated for Pachín and everything they were allowed to see of the ship’s wonders, and they would find out when the passenger was to arrive on board with his trunk, and what time the steamer would depart the following day. After doing this, and doing it well, because it was their main business for that day, they would return to the city and visit, if they could find her, Juana Cornejo, daughter of Uncle Juan Cornejo, their neighbor, who had earnestly begged them to pay this visit to the young woman, who was serving in the house of Señor Don Pedro Redondo, a widower with no other address, and the young woman had been somewhat forgotten by her family for the past year and a half. Then they would go to thank the influential tavern keeper who had served them so well that morning, and had even supplied the necessary information to track down Juana Cornejo’s whereabouts, not as visible as her father had thought. This done, if possible, they would buy some trinkets that Pachín needed and that his mother gave him for personal ornamentation; they would see the Cathedral, if it was open… and, finally, they would take advantage of the remaining hours of the day and the early hours of the night for their already limited business, entertainment, and recreation of their spirits , minute by minute and moment by moment, as if they were the last of their lives. The inn’s well-known guest and their companion at table, who seemed a good person, invited them to coffee after the meal; a treat that Pachín did not accept without the condition that the other accept the gift of a ten-cent cigar and a small glass of Ojén. For this reason, the after-dinner conversation lasted somewhat longer than expected; And when the son and mother met at the entrance of the inn and said goodbye to the guest, who left in the opposite direction to the one they were about to follow, they heard the cathedral clock strike two. Fortunately, there was time for everything, and they didn’t worry too much about the time they had wasted in the dining room. As soon as Pachín had settled his feet on the sidewalk, the little devil began to give him something to do. Not even in those critical hours could the creep rest! On the contrary, the closer the moment of the poor boy’s final farewell drew , the more eagerly he felt him working in his head. “Look, Pachín González,” he said then, “and look carefully at the street you’re walking down: how narrow, how old it is; how gloomy, how silent, and how lonely it is, like all the ones that branch off from it on either side; compare them with what you saw this morning, filled with people, things, and sounds.” For this is the death of something that was; that, the robust and powerful life of what is to come: one is the shadow, the cold of hungry old age; the other, the light, the burning and life-giving heat of wealth. What a great difference, eh? Well, heed the new example, Pachín González, and don’t be fooled tomorrow or the next day, for you’ve been well warned. Walking and thinking like this, the son, and his mother following him—God knows with what thoughts, for the poor woman had them of all hues —they passed from the old zone to the modern one, where even the sun delighted in being more splendid and bathed everything equally with its golden rays, so desired and scarcely seen among the narrows of the fossil neighborhood. Even the people seemed different there, more diligent, more expressive, more talkative. Pachín had already noticed this that morning when he saw them walking in all directions; But what caught his attention was that the afternoon’s activity, while not less intense than that of the morning, was quite different: almost all the people who were out walking were heading in the same direction, toward the Maliaño docks. Why? And why was it that the more they walked , the greater the number of those they dragged along with them ? It was like a central current that was gradually absorbing the adjacent backwaters. But what force of attraction was behind all this strange movement? Where were all these hurried, busy people going? A ragged little rascal who ran past Pachín cleared up his doubts by shouting loudly, and without pausing, to another comrade who had questioned him from afar: “Let’s see a steamer burning, docked at the third dock! ” “This morning’s steamer!” Pachín said to his mother, who was left speechless . The innkeeper was well versed in the matter of putting out fires on steamboats! Without a word exchanged between mother and son, they both continued walking, or rather, letting themselves be carried like two more bubbles in the center of the current. Thus, they came within sight of the large esplanade where the crowd of onlookers was spread out, above whose mass, and along the blurred line it drew toward the south, rose a column of black smoke with hints of red flames, reminding Pachín of the lime kiln in his local mountains when it was often lit by a group of Asturian tile-makers. Unlike what was observed in the others, the mother and son shortened their pace as they approached the scene of the incident. This spectacle, so new to them, impressed them greatly , not to mention that, like good villagers, they were timid and suspicious. They walked in this way for a good distance, feeling the ground with their feet, looking cautiously around, and always seeking the most open and unencumbered spaces. Pachín directed the course, and his mother followed him mechanically, as if sewn into her clothes. Thus they reached the front rows, hearing from there quite clearly the sinister rumble of the formidable bonfire, but without seeing what the lad desired because of the momentary and intermittent gaps in the wall of people before him. These difficulties only inflamed his desires further: he took his mother’s trembling hand in his right hand , and without haste or violence, brought it with him, and did not stop maneuvering and weaving himself until he found himself with her before the first row of spectators and could contemplate the scene without hindrance. But since Pachín González’s curiosity was methodical, instead of satisfying it in one fell swoop, like a glutton’s hunger, he wanted to proceed in an orderly manner, and began by finding out, above all, which ship was burning. He could easily read it on the stern; there was her name stamped in gold letters: Cabo Machichaco. And the steamer was large. On either side of the dock to which she was moored, a third of her hull projected; and although the tide was low, the deck of the ship rose higher than the dock’s deck, in front of which there was a good space cleared by the Civil Guard and the police. The burning It was between the foremast and the engine. Through that hatch, through that wide hole, roaring flames rose amidst dense columns of thick, black smoke. It was compelling to look at and hear. Pachín couldn’t explain the reasons behind the idea of ​​having a ship in that condition moored against tarred wooden docks so close to the town. But what did the poor villager know about such things? Once it was done like that, it would have been well done. For now, the measures being taken to combat the fire were nothing more than a very plausible excuse: in the most remote and lonely part of the bay, it wouldn’t have been easy to fight the fire as they were fighting it there from land and from the ship itself, with all the resources at their disposal, inside and out, and a will and courage that excited Pachín. Firefighters, sailors, civilians of all stripes… there was everything in that legion of workers, and no one spared their strength or dodged the dangers: water fell in torrents into the burning holds, and through every porthole in the ship’s upper hull, swarms of well-organized men entered and left, moving everything that could be shouldered or carried by hand from the steamer’s cabins to safety from the fire on the dock: books, boxes, furniture, clothes, nautical equipment, papers, and a thousand other things, the fate of which Pachín González, in his ignorance as a villager from the interior, was unaware of. That’s why he paid close attention to what was being discussed at his side; and when he couldn’t get over his doubts in this way, he dared to ask a colleague, who never denied him the answer. Thus he learned that a few people gathered on the dock very close to the steamer were the civil governor, the port engineers, the commanding general, the colonel of the forces serving outside with the Civil Guard, whose chief was also there, the Navy chief, the mayor… in short, all the authorities of the city and its port; leaders and authorities who perhaps disappeared on the ship or among the crowds, because there was no peace there for anyone, no fixed post or place of rest for anyone. Orders and responses were often shouted between those on board and those outside; so loudly that Pachín understood them perfectly, and the anxiety always seemed greater among the men who could be called “from home” in relation to the ship than among the strangers who were contending with them. Meanwhile, the bonfire continued to roar and devour, seemingly neither growing nor diminishing, as if its voracity was fueled by the very elements used against it. Occasionally, however, the roaring of the blaze intensified, the flames shuddered and lengthened, and columns of smoke rose amid garlands and clusters of crackling embers. It seemed as if some monster was rooting about in the depths of that enormous brazier. That brazier! This was precisely the topic that most excited the curious people around Pachín. What was that brazier feeding on? How could it be conceived that, given that the steamer’s hull was made of iron, its ribs and armor were made of iron, and, it was said, most of the cargo contained in the burning hold was made of iron, that the fire had already raged for more than four hours without the slightest sign of being extinguished, despite the efforts with which it was fought? They were in the midst of these investigations when the bonfire gave a gigantic start, its bellowing intensifying to a terrifying level; and, crowned with smoke blacker than pitch, which writhed and coiled around itself like a monstrous, enraged serpent, it rose into the air to a great height. It was like a hurricane that swept the entire plain of people, with the heroic exception of the imperturbable sentinels, whom duty obliged to remain at their posts with firm footing. All the curious people fled in disarray, amid the shrieks of the women and the anguished wails of the children, who were rolling on the ground, crushed by the terrified crowd. For there was Children too, so many children! The afternoon, with its mildness, serenity, and beauty, tempted one to leave home; and once outside, what better place to relax than the Maliaño embankments, with the delight of a steamship burning beside them? Thus, the place became like the bottom of a chasm that was gradually swallowing up all the unemployed people of the city. But the phenomenon that had caused the rout disappeared in a few moments; the abnormal roars ceased, the column of fire descended to its normal level, and the industrious workers, who had been left with suspended spirits, attacked it again with greater vigor in the face of the phenomenon. All of this encouraged the fugitives and restored their tranquility and confidence. Little by little, they emerged from their shelters and hiding places and advanced in masses and lines to the place that attracted them with irresistible force. And when they arrived, Pachín González was already standing before them all with his mother, pale, trembling, and pulseless, begging him, by all the saints in heaven, to get her out of there, where nothing good could happen. Besides, the afternoon was passing too quickly, and they soon wouldn’t have enough time left for what they had to do on the other steamer, theirs. Pachín responded to all of this with very good and affectionate arguments; but it didn’t go any further: he was fascinated by the spectacle, and he didn’t want to lose sight of it until he saw what would happen. Just at that moment, another small, black ship arrived alongside the steamer, with people in uniform on board, and he heard them say that they were the captain, officers, and part of the crew of the Alfonso XIII, the mail steamer, the one with four masts, anchored at the mouth of the San Martín. For those martial and gallant people, with the multitude of devices they carried with them, would not have come to the burning ship for nothing. He asked his mother for at least half an hour to see the results of this important reinforcement, and the poor woman was unable to deny him. From the moment of the tumultuous dispersion, not a single person had gone by without Pachín hearing them talking about the probable causes of that unexpected and instantaneous outbreak of the bonfire, and the same thing continued to be discussed next to him after the waves of dispersed soldiers returned . He also observed that for a good while after that alarming incident, the spectators, including himself, were less calm. The prevailing belief was that there were plenty of flammable liquids and materials in the burning hold: petroleum cans, at least. Those tremendous flares from earlier, whose smoke reeked of “scorched demons,” could have been of no other origin . While talking about this, that afternoon, Pachín heard the word “dynamite” for the first time. Dynamite! He knew very well what it was: he was tired of seeing it used in the quarries in his town. With a single stick of dynamite, a rock larger than the Cathedral could be blown to bits. And it was being circulated around him, as recently confirmed news, that hundreds of boxes of dynamite were in the holds of the burning steamer. Impossible! At least those on board must have known; and knowing it, how could they have had the guts to leave such a frightful danger close to the city, when it could have taken them out to sea? This reflection was so humane and sensible that it was enough for Pachín to disbelieve the alarming rumors, just as he disbelieved the crowd that continued to grow and spread quietly and carelessly in all directions, from the Solares railroad station to the last piers of the breakwaters. But where the greatest density, the great mass of people, was around the three sides of the vast rectangle, the center of which was occupied by the burning steamer; a rectangle formed by the longitudinal pier and two others projecting perpendicular to it, and the outer line of boats of all types and sizes, some anchored there and others recently arrived to assist the steamer. Of all the mass of spectators, the most curious thing for Pachín was the The first row of them, seated on the edge of the three piers, their legs dangling. The majority of this tightly packed gathering was made up of children from the city’s underworld, “street kids,” those who had one, with no attachment to home, and no adherence to any kind of discipline, especially those of the schoolmaster; vagrants hardened by the elements and early vices, and for whom a spectacle like this, so imposing and enduring, is an inexhaustible source of joy, and moreover “from them” and “for them,” who have no other than those of the public street, and for nothing. Constantly waving their bare legs , they looked like the fringes of a balcony curtain moved by the air; because the hanging, in relation to these floating ornaments, was feigned quite well by the dense rows of people who stood behind, standing on tiptoe or perched on cranes, or on pallets of planks, or on the piles of gravel on the nearby reef. Pachín estimated in thousands the people who made up this great wall, crowned at intervals by the curly little heads of children, raised on the shoulders of their _zagalas_ to see “the burning”, just once and to their liking. Behind the wall there was another crowd, but it was wandering and dispersed, its attention divided between the events of the fire, hypotheses about its causes, and the delights of a stroll in such a lively place, in the splendid, warm light of the most peaceful autumn afternoon one could wish for… In short, in none of the directions of the square that Pachín dominated from his position, turning his head from right to left, or rearing up as he looked back, did he see any signs of fear of the exposed and formidable enemy; on the contrary, everything around him and within his sight revealed the most profound carelessness: even the throbbing and jerking of the bonfire, by being repeated so often, had ceased to be fearsome and had begun to be entertaining; At the edge of the dock, next to the steamer itself that was burning, the group of authorities chatted with the utmost tranquility, and a few yards from the ship, boats crowded with people who weren’t needed there, milling about. Shortly before, several crates had been seen being taken out of the ship; stacked one by one and with great care in the clearest spot on the deck; then an oxcart had arrived, loaded the crates onto it, and taken that way, but very carefully and guarded by two police officers, toward the outskirts of the city; and, finally, word had spread that those crates were the only dynamite the ship had in its holds. “We were all somewhat right,” Pachín then said to himself, as did hundreds, thousands of people as interested as he in that delicate matter. “There was a little dynamite: it’s been taken out, and in peace. ” From this sober reflection had come the absolute tranquility in which even the most suspicious rested; And in the midst of it all, the fire raged on for a very, very long time, giving the tireless spectators something to look at, and much, much to do for those who had been fighting it for hours and hours without success or rest. The poor village widow, whose terrors had gradually turned to indifference and then to exhaustion, no longer knew what to stand on, even though she was propping herself up with her umbrella; and she kept asking God for her son to get her out of there: it didn’t show any signs of being over or getting any worse; she was beyond help; the cathedral clock had struck four, and the afternoon was drawing to a close without the two of them having done what they had to do on their ship, which was urgent and important. “The pure truth, the pure truth,” Pachín responded to his mother, but without moving from his place or taking his eyes off the fire, around which, as well as on the bridge and in the portholes of the upper structure, an unusual movement had just been noticed among the people who commanded and served there. Eventually, this too lost its interest because it was continuous and lasting; Pachín became truly tired of it, and suddenly said to the numb and good woman, precisely at the moment when the Cathedral clock struck half past four: “Let’s go, Mother, and first of all, to our ship, because this one has already given all it had to give. ” Having said this, he took his mother by the arm, and without letting go of her, made a breach in the wall of people through the nearest gap, and crossed to the other side, from which, no sooner had he set foot on it, than he heard a knocking , like great hammer blows on sheets of iron. He stopped to gather some rumors that came from the very place he had left, and learned from them that an attempt was being made, as a last and supreme resource adopted by the men who understood, to open a hole in the hull of the steamer in order to sink it and extinguish the fire in one fell swoop. “This must be seen, Mother,” said Pachín then, “because it must be something to be seen and not long in coming.” His mother argued harshly against him, but she didn’t convince him. Far from it, without letting go of her hand or saying a word, he tried to break through the wall of people again to return to the front row; but finding it too compact and resistant, he gave up his attempt. Then he looked around, discovered a stack of timbers with empty seats, ran over, occupied one , and toasted his mother with another, who preferred to remain below, standing and grumbling. From that pedestal, Pachín dominated the spectacle to his fullest, because without the slightest effort, he saw not only the ship, but the crowd that filled the vast stage of that drama that seemed to have no end, like the patience of its spectators, whose curiosity grew as the hammering continued on the steamer, whose submersion was expected at any moment. But the minutes passed, and the ship didn’t sink, and even the hammering faded, echoing even as the ringing of a passenger train bell slowly pulled away from Solares station seemed to echo . With these delays, and with the rumor that the attempt to sink the ship had been abandoned, Pachín González’s patience finally ran out . He suddenly straightened up, as if the train bells, already ringing behind him, had given him the impulse; he stepped down the first step of the rough seating and said, as he prepared to leap up and jump: “You were right, Mother: this isn’t over. Let’s go…” What cut the words in Pachín’s mouth, the breath in his lungs, and even the blood circulating in his arteries, has no name in any known language. In the poor imagination of men, there is no comparison for the sound of those two almost simultaneous explosions; for that horrible crater that opened with them; for that immense column of fire that rose into space and at whose smoking summit human bodies floated, amid blackened spirals; for that infernal shrapnel of red-hot, twisted iron that the breasts of the steam vomited amidst infected waves of silt from the seabed, upon the huddled, unsuspecting, and defenseless multitudes; for the strange color of that light that dominated the air, dimming the light of the sun that was rushing to plunge into the sunset as if fleeing from illuminating so many disasters accumulated in such a small place and in such a short time. Pachín paid no full account of any of this. He suddenly felt as if he had been overcome by a nightmare, and dreamed that he was flying out of the pile of timbers, and that, flying along the ground with prodigious speed and force, he was sweeping with his own body, but without touching them, masses of people who bent and fell before him, like a furious gale blowing the green cornfields of his village. When he awoke from that dream, or whatever it was, he could not explain why he was lying between a splintered cart and a crippled and dying horse. His memory was almost gone: all he retained was a very loud “thunderclap” and a tremendous flash of flame. How long had he been In that place and in that way? A minute, an hour, months, years? Had he been born right there and for that very reason? He felt a great ache in his body, sharp pain in some joints, and a sharp stinging on the back of his neck. Mechanically, and not without difficulty, he sat up, and also mechanically he brought his hands to his head, because in his new position he was somewhat faint. When he withdrew them, he saw them stained with blood, and there was also a pool of it beside him, a pool that was fed by the blood of the limping horse that was expiring between convulsions and moans. When Pachín realized this, his astonished gaze discovered, a little beyond the horse, a man lying on the ground, his mouth contracted and wide open, his eyes dazzled, and his face ashen; he was missing an arm and a shattered leg . This sight produced a fierce, instant shock in the poor boy ; He wanted to flee from there, out of instinctive terror, and to make up for the agility he lacked and get up quickly, he grabbed with his right hand one of the spiral curves of a long piece of iron that lay between him and the splinters of the chariot; but no sooner had he done so than he uttered a cry of pain, withdrawing his hand and leaping to his feet by his own strength. The iron was scorching hot. Without even taking his eyes off the small space in which such strange things were surrounding and happening to him, he fixed and fixed his full attention on them, for he felt something that had been dormant a short while before was awakening in the regions of his mind, and he wanted to understand exactly what was happening to him. That man and that horse, dead, and not only dead, but shattered; the chariot, in splinters, next to some red-hot, twisted iron; Between him and the cart, the corpses, and the wayward iron, the ground strewn with the strangest and most disjointed things: horseshoe nails, rifle cartridge cases…; that memory, the only one in his memory: the “clash” and the flare… Associating these ideas and linking them well together, Pachín ended up asking himself, emphasizing the most luminous and firm: “What was I doing when I heard that crash and saw the flare?” And without much effort on his part, he managed to answer himself, acquiring one more idea and linking it to the chain of the others: “seeing a steamer that was burning.” With this recollection alone, the doors of his memory flew wide open , and one by one, all the dormant ideas were reawakened in his brain : the events of the fire, the crowds of onlookers, the alarming rumors spread among them, the places he had occupied… And from this, from this, the other idea was born, the terrible idea, the one that left him cold and breathless, just as the explosion of the steamer had left him: the idea of ​​his mother who had been with him then. Why was she not by his side now? Where had she gone? What had become of her? What force separated them at the foot of the timber rack where they had been together? Was she still alive, by a miracle from heaven, as he was living? Had she been killed, perhaps torn to pieces, like that other unfortunate man? And the unfortunate man trembled from head to foot; he beat his body with his closed fists; He felt a cold, pricking tingling beneath his skin that drove him mad with anxiety, and like a madman he cried out, his wide eyes rolling around him: “Mother!… Mother!… My Mother of my soul!” He wanted to run after her; but he didn’t know in what direction, as he cast his covetous gaze over the vast plain that he had just seen filled, teeming, with living, rejoicing people, and which now… Good God! God of great mercy!… how frightful everything he saw seemed to him! As if hurricanes and earthquakes had passed through there, everything was a field of desolation and death, ruins, rubble, and corpses amid the silence and the imposing immobility of the great disasters that had just passed. Everything that was still alive and moving when it was consummated had fled far away with terror in their souls and anguish in their hearts… But something still lived in that region of merciless and barbaric extermination; something placed there as if on purpose to give the picture a new tinge of horror; something that stirred on the earth here and there, and whose cries of agony must have reached Pachín’s ears, as if the air were feigning them to remind him of his mother’s martyrdom. He seemed to be the only one alive and well in that region of unburied dead; he, Pachín González, the wretched villager recently arrived in the city, a stranger and poor in it, unknown to all the survivors of the great catastrophe. Where and to whom could he turn his eyes to ask for help or advice in the bitter predicament in which he found himself? Who would hear his laments in that black wasteland? Who would value his unparalleled misfortune in the face of such an enormous accumulation of them?… He would never have believed that the loneliness and helplessness of a man on earth could reach such extremes!… And the poor boy began to cry from sorrow… and from fear. But the love of a son, overcoming everything in him, restored his spiritual energy, even with doubled strength; and, without wiping away his tears, he launched himself into the enterprise with a determination that bordered on despair. The strange “thing” that had carried him from the timber pile to the place where he had just awakened, must have carried his mother in the same way and in the same or very close direction, since they were both together then, although he was a little higher up than she… Well, first, he began to search there, around him and the dead man, whose sight terrified him… And he began to search, with eagerness and terror in his eyes; and saw more ironwork, resembling large, twisted and coiled rails; shapeless masses like metal cubes fused together; more horseshoe nails and more empty cartridges… shreds of clothing, bloody and smoking!… Further on, some closed buildings that looked like large warehouses, with broken eaves and shattered windows; below, on the street, more twisted ironwork, more melted cubes, and wrecks of machinery… On the same street, to the right, a train stopped and empty… the one ringing the bells, it could be no other, its breathing labored and exhausted, the cars battered by shrapnel from the volcano, one of them with its doors smashed, and inside… death too!… He fled from there, in the opposite direction, to the left… A group of spindly trees with torn branches. In the small square they formed, the ironwork was once again present, but tangled and entangled, like a struggle between infernal serpents; and among the piles, heavy iron plates, also twisted and contracted, two of them on edge and supporting each other, and behind them a body… the body of a woman dressed in dark clothing, almost black, face down. Stepping on tiptoe, livid with terror, with one trembling arm extended and looking without seeing, Pachín dared to approach the corpse; he stepped down, closed his eyes, and groping, with his clenched, bloodless hands, he lifted the head, whose face he longed to recognize… What the wretched man asked of God in those supreme moments, not even he knew: so contradictory and complicated was it!… Afterward, making a superhuman effort of will, he opened his eyes to see the face… That corpse did not have one. What had once been a face, perhaps a beautiful one, was a mass of macerated and bloody flesh and crushed bones. Pachín uttered a roar of terror from the depths of his chest; he let the mutilated head fall from his hands and sat up with a frantic leap. Virgin Mary! If that was his mother, it would have been better for him not to have found her. The very vehemence of his desire to have been mistaken moved him to make other and more detailed examinations; and then he became convinced that neither the cut, nor the color, nor the quality of the dead woman’s clothes were signs of what he was looking for. More calm now; that is to say, less terrified, but with the same anguish in his soul, he wanted, in order to better orient himself and to methodize his work a little, to find out where the pile of wood from which he had flown was… When he looked around to find it, he noticed that At the other end, toward the widest part of the plain, there were human beings, standing, alive, and moving among the obstacles in the ground, while many others were hurrying toward the city… Where and when had the first ones come from? Were they resurrected, like him? What did it matter to him? They were all living men: not all was death in that funereal scene, and love and charity were beginning to dwell within him . This consoled him somewhat, because he no longer felt alone and helpless, and he felt stronger and more courageous to continue his sad task. It didn’t take him long to find the pile of timbers he was looking for; but it took him long to reach it, because, although the path was short, there wasn’t a span of ground without the usual iron bars or pools of human blood. With heroic efforts of his spirit, he finally reached the pile; he walked around its entire perimeter and found nothing of what he was looking for, or anything similar. “My mother was right here… and I was there,” he said to himself, pointing successively to one spot at the foot of the stowage and to another on one of its steps… He then climbed aboard to accurately estimate the path he had taken through the air, and the direction of the impulse, or of the “thing” that had snatched him and could have and should have snatched his mother as well. Having learned the first thing, he searched, without moving, for the ill-fated steamer; and as he could not see it, he oriented himself along the dock to which it had been moored. Finally, he made out its remains: a mast fallen very far back, with a dirty rag at the end, and the bridge and the sterncastle sticking out of the water. The dock, dislocated in parts and partly burning; And on the other dock that ran to the right and left, and on the immediate reef, as far as the eye could see, a black, glistening sediment like the bottom of a recently drained pool; on top of this disgusting soot, more spoils of the horrible catastrophe, more corpses, and rickety carts and mutilated teams beside them… Pachín was horrified. Was all this the work of Lucifer, who would have taken pleasure in vomiting so many horrors into the slime of the infected pools of his infernal caverns? And if it wasn’t the work of such hands, what other could it be? Of dynamite, of those hundreds of boxes of it that had been so much talked about when the steamer was burning: that could not be doubted; but what did it matter? Without the evil spirit that had blinded those who knew it and deafened those who suspected it, how would all this have happened? If when his mother, once , twice, three times… begged him for charity… Oh! How deaf, how foolish, what a bad son he was and what a bad Christian, ignoring the warnings that God sent him through the mouth of the holy woman! He thought he would lose his mind with the piercing pain of these remorse, and he threw himself from the stowage crying inconsolably: “My mother… mother of my soul! Where are you? Alive or dead, I need… I want to find you! ” And he ran from one side to the other, with his eyes wide open and his hands on his head, bloody and naked. Although he had the rational conviction that what he was looking for could only be found in one direction, the unfortunate Pachín wanted to search in all of them; And in all of them he crawled and ran, leaping through labyrinths of rubble and pools of blood, mutilated limbs, garments with throbbing remains, and the corpses of men. Nothing impressed him in the matter of horrors, and above all he passed by insensible, more than insensible, mad, if it were not a garment or a limb that could have belonged to his mother. Thus he entered the zone of black mud, whose stench gave his senses the repulsive note that the scene lacked. Everything there was black, even the corpses. Over one who seemed so , a priest with wet robes and a bloody face bent over him, his knees sunk in the mud ; he exhorted him to die well, and absolved him, in the name of God, of all his sins, redeemed by the pain of his bloody martyrdom. Pachín remained absorbed, mute, possessed by stupor before that imposing scene; and by an irresistible impulse of his soul Fervently, she fell to her knees and prayed for the man, who expired with a shudder. “Lord, Lord!” she then dared, remembering her mother, to ask the priest, who was beginning to rise with difficulty : “What is this, which has never been seen in the world? What has happened here? ” “The wrath of God, my son,” replied the priest, wiping the blood that was flowing from his head with a calico handkerchief. And he left, gathering up his muddy clothes and walking with difficulty, in search of another dying man to help. Pachín was about to launch himself once more into his interrupted labors in that nauseating sea when he heard screams and wails towards the sea, as if in the direction of the submerged ship. They seemed to him to be the screams and wails of a woman, and therefore of his mother. It wasn’t rational that it should have ended up on that side, but on the opposite side, when the explosion occurred; but what contradiction was possible in such a frightful derangement of all natural law? Everything had to be seen and recorded , and there it went, diving up to its knees in the black pool, and leaping back, hasty and eager, over irons, corpses, and dying people. Near the submerged steamer, boats and launches were capsizing, manned by charitable people who were picking up shipwrecked people who were spending their last strength swimming a few moments longer, or clinging to the pilings of the dock, or clinging like limpets to the rocks of the breakwaters beneath the planks. The screams came from that direction; but not of the unfortunates sheltered in this way, who no longer had the breath to cry out, but of those who, like Pachín, were searching for something that did not appear, and they searched for it from the top of the docks, because somewhere there , according to their calculations, it must be either dead or alive. Living things were very rare, unfortunately; dead things… what a way to search for them! One of the boats was equipped with grappling hooks at the end of a rope: the grappling hooks were thrown to the bottom, the rowers rowed so that by pulling on the rope they could search for it; and when they hooked their irons to something, the boat stopped, the rope was pulled in little by little, and finally, a corpse… or pieces of corpses, which the silent rowers took aboard the boat. And what the unfortunates of the land expected never came out, from whose hearts, at every discovery, arose the cries of pain that had distracted Pachín from his investigations. When he tried to return to them, because he expected nothing from the ones being done there, he noticed a boy beside him, his skimpy, filthy clothes dripping and sticking to his body. The rascal, staring at him , said simply: “I saw that.” “Which one?” asked Pachín. “What happened there, in the canal itself, and swallowed up so many people… I saw it from that dock, the railroad dock: I was sitting on the same pier.” God, what a thing!… There were many boats against the hull of the steamer , and the fine launch of the Port Works, and the _Auxiliary_ of the mails with all the people of the _Alfonso XIII_… Many people, God!… and good and well-preserved, and with plenty of braid and embroidery: even the Commander of the Navy and the Engineer of the Works… and many, come on!… Suddenly, pliinn!… plaann!… I bless you! and at the same time, the water of that sea, above, with _base_ and everything! and below, the floor of the canal, clean as the palm of this hand; and on that ground… God!… sprays of men… whole or quartered… And in less than the sound of “Jesus” it was all… Because you see for yourself: the same wave that left the canal dry, swept me out to the other side of the dock, just as it swept many others who were with me through the air. I don’t know what happened to most of them, because maybe they weren’t as healthy as I was when we splashed down. God, what a mess! And the things that were in the water when I surfaced!… Then, I waded, waded, up to the wall; I climbed up it… and that’s what I’m coming back from… right now. Good heavens!… what one finds on the road!… But like this canal!… God!… “And tell me,” asked Pachín, who was listening electrified, “in those bunches of the carcass, did you see a village woman, dressed in black, with an umbrella in her hand? “I won’t say I saw her,” replied the scoundrel, very seriously, throwing back his hands. “But do you think there was time for that much?… From the traces, you’re looking for some of those signs. When she’s alive, was that woman here? ” “No: down there… ” “Well, you must look that way… for what’s left of her.” With that, the scoundrel went off to see more closely the sad maneuvers being made in the boats, and Pachín returned to the other sea, the one of mud, to continue his interrupted explorations. Poor boy! What he walked!… what he investigated! The desperate anxiety with which, no longer trusting his own initiative, he joined the groups searching for the wounded in order to rescue them, and went ahead of everyone when the victim was a woman! The holy terror with which he gathered from the ground every scrap, every shred of garment, every lock of hair that might have belonged to his mother! The courage, the life, the strength he spent in this superhuman endeavor, in the barbaric struggle of his voracious desire to find what he was seeking, with the horrible fear of finding it among the dead! To make his child’s heart the first weapons in the struggles of life’s setbacks , a battlefield like that! No cheerful calculations, no consoling thoughts were allowed there, not even the consideration that, while he was alive, his mother might also be alive, for the same reason that he could not find her among the dead or the dying; Because the classification into living, dead, and dying wasn’t enough for that exceptional picture: he needed another box for the section of the torn to pieces, which were the remains, the entrails, the limbs that Pachín found scattered, strewn across the entire plain among the piles of rubble or mixed with the black mud of the breakwaters. And if his mother was one of the victims in this section !… Nevertheless, the unfortunate man managed to see a glimmer of light in the midst of such dense darkness: he heard that in the first moments after the explosion, many slightly wounded, or those who seemed to be, had been taken to the first-aid post. Why shouldn’t his mother be one of those wounded? Well, to the first-aid post without stopping. Where was that post? Which way did you go? He would find out by asking, if he didn’t discover her by the bloody trail of the unfortunates who were flocking to her.
When he left Maliaño for the city, the evening twilight was just beginning, placid, tranquil, smiling, as if nothing had happened on earth; as if one of its most beautiful and flourishing parts weren’t covered in mourning and weeping over the bloody havoc of one of the greatest catastrophes recorded in the annals of the world. And in the dim light of those hours, the fire at the wooden docks, which continued to spread, was acquiring splendor and majesty, while the fire of another, beginning high above the great curtain of buildings that served as the backdrop, to the north, to the sinister scene of the horrific drama, rose resplendent. As Pachín turned onto the wide street by which he would enter the city, he couldn’t help but compare what he was seeing with what he had seen three hours earlier. Then, a swarm of busy, happy, and adorned people; buildings bathed in sunlight, all their openings open to the healthy joy of the splendid afternoon; rumors of life, hymns of its sovereign enjoyment; hopes, ambitions, and love achieved and satisfied; the external expression, in short, of the robust health of a fortunate people who live by their work and are prosperous . Now, gaunt faces; groups of dismayed people who neither move nor speak nor look at each other; doors half-open or rickety and off their hinges; broken walls and eaves; the ground covered with rubble, glass dust, and those cursed irons, shrapnel from Lucifer and the bolts of so many lives; the anguished groans of the wounded man who passes in the arms of charity; heart-rending cries of a mother searching for her son, or of a son returning without having found his father, and the distrust, terror, and sorrow on the faces of the less unfortunate. He was as saddened by that spectacle as by the one he was leaving behind, and he walked and walked, dodging the great obstacles in the path… until he came across one that filled him with terror… he, who had just seen so many frightening sights! It was a woman lying on the ground near the Fish Market, whose stalls were deserted and empty. That woman was already a rigid corpse; but a corpse such as he had never seen before. He had seen them without limbs, with a head without a face, a torso without a head, practically destroyed; but not laminated, like the one in front of him, near a block of iron, which could well have been the rolling mill… He closed his eyes so as not to see it again, and fled across the wide plaza toward the Riverbank. There, the same as what was left behind him: the same appearance, the same devastation in the buildings; the same motionless, silent, and dismayed groups; the same or similar debris and projectiles on the street; the same wailing, the same desolation throughout; and as a surprising detail that made him think of the immeasurable force of the diabolical mine, at the top of the slope and on one of the street’s sidewalks, an enormous anchor stuck between two slabs, beneath a shattered balcony. In the adjacent square, the neighbors in the middle of it, dressed in homely habits, as if they had hastily abandoned their homes after an earthquake and feared its recurrence. Pachín, a villager, inexperienced and childlike, was only affected by the impressions of these things by the connection they had, in his eyes, with the ideas he carried in his mind and that forced him to walk without pause. So, every time he passed by a small group of people, the same thought struck him: “But, sir, isn’t there someone among all these people who knows my mother from having seen her pass by with me this morning?” And he was tempted at every step to ask if they had seen her again after the explosion of the steamer. But fearing that they wouldn’t listen to him or that they would laugh at him, he limited himself to asking for the first-aid post… and so he arrived there. It was invaded, through all the narrow openings of its two facades, by a crowd that was already half-rioting, because there were so many wounded, little space inside, and very few men and resources to treat them. Pachín looked one by one at all the women in the invading crowd… None of them was his mother. Then he said to himself: “We must go in, and I will go in even if I die trying!” And he finally entered, swallowing, sliding, struggling, oppressed, trampled , and devouring the groans wrung from him by each blow he received to the wound in his head… but he entered; he entered, to struggle once again in the narrow passages and miserable crossroads of that sad asylum, a disgrace, for its poverty and abandonment, of a wealthy Christian city. The unfortunate man suffocated in the midst of that other crowd pressed between filthy, cracked partitions, and in an atmosphere permeated with every imaginable pestilence and the afflictive notes of every groan of pain. He didn’t even have enough light to find his way around the cramped enclosure. But everything was made up for by the ardor of the fever that moved and guided him. Thus he managed to see through the darkness and walk through the dense walls of people, and examine one by one the healthy, and the wounded who were waiting their turn to be treated, and those who were being treated, and those who lay on chairs, cots and in corners, already dead or dying… until he became convinced that neither among the dead nor among the living, inside or outside the asylum, was his mother… Nothing, then, remained for him to do there!… And where could his consideration turn now in search of even a hope? Neither in the horrible place, nor in that house, nor on the middle road had he found his mother, neither among the dead nor among the wounded. These signs could well be signs that she was alive; but if she was alive, Surely she had been searching for him as he had been searching for her; and had they sought each other in this manner, they would have both found each other. Dragging his weary discourse through these asperities, the thought occurred to him that, wounded or bruised or searching for him, his mother might well have returned to the inn. This glimmer of light somewhat illuminated his gloomy imagination and revived the strength that was failing him moment by moment as he lost hope. Thinking and acting were then one and the same for Pachín. With a quick glance, he sought the shortest and most unencumbered route out of those stifling thickets; he saw a half-open window near him, and through it he jumped into the street. Night, then, clear and serene above in a sky dazzling with stars, was black, tedious, and funereal below; The streets were dark or half-lit, depending on whether they had been more or less battered by the afternoon scourge, and those that weren’t entirely deserted were scarcely traversed by passers-by who moved noiselessly , like ghosts in a nightmare. All this doubled Pachín’s difficulties, as he was hardly practical in the labyrinthine streets of the city under the midday sun, let alone in the darkness of night—and on a night like that!—but sometimes making the right choice by instinct and sometimes by asking questions, he always made good progress and didn’t lose ground in his laborious stride over cobblestones never cleared of debris from nearby houses or the murderous shrapnel from the explosion. The worst part, for the unfortunate man, was the little faith that now animated him in his explorations, given the experience of the failed ones. But since he greatly trusted in God’s mercy, he often raised his eyes to heaven, conveying the prayers that rose from the depths of his heart. Thus he found some comfort, and thus reached the neighborhood and the street where his temporary shelter was located. The poor boy did not know whether to feel sorry or rejoice at reaching it, because as he walked, his desire to succeed in his endeavor was as great as his fear of a new disappointment. But more than these vacillations of his spirit, he was detained in his progress by the darkness and the obstacles in the street, and even by the desire to hear something that might be beneficial to his ends in the discordant and clamorous clamor of the small groups he encountered along the way, and he found one at every door. The entire neighborhood was in the open air and half-dark, some from fear of the solitude of their own home; others from the ruins and misfortunes of their own; Others to hear about friends or relatives who hadn’t returned, and almost all out of a justifiable desire to exchange sad impressions and find out more about what had happened, and what was predicted and feared for that night. This, the anguished young man gathered from the conversations he’d overheard as he passed by, and also that the glow visible above the line of buildings on the southern sidewalk, which was the reason the street wasn’t completely dark, had come from a major fire, that of another woman whose name, mentioned in the conversations, was unknown to him. But of what truly interested him, of the only thing that touched his soul and possessed him from head to toe, not a word. In these anxieties, his legs trembling and his heart pounding, he approached the small group blocking the doorway of his inn. Without moving his lips, he looked at all the women there, one of whom was the innkeeper; none of them was his mother. Then he dared to ask for her: if she was at home or if she had been there a short while before. The good woman, who couldn’t stop talking about the damage and suffering, recognized him by her voice and ran to embrace him, declaring with pitiful cries that he was the only guest in the house she had seen since the steamer burst. The poor Pachín, who was spending the last strength he had left in mind and body in this ordeal, didn’t hit his body on the stones of the street, because the innkeeper picked him up in her arms. Those good people performed feats of charity for him, who Seeing him by the light of a candle burning in the doorway, where they immediately brought him in, they even considered him dead. His appearance was not surprising , with his hands and face as pale as wax, where they were not stained with blood or stained black, like the clothes that covered his unconscious body, after having been summoned there by someone who had just seen him, cases of wounded or bruised people who, walking on their own feet towards the first aid station from the scene of the catastrophe, had suddenly fallen dead. But since, in the opinion of another, less pessimistic and talkative than the others present, there were still some remains of life in Pachín , each one went up to his floor and brought down with the remedy that deserved the most faith in a case like that: heads of garlic, strong vinegar, rosemary leaves, fortified wine. All this and much more was quickly and immediately used, simultaneously ignoring the busy ministers (for only the women were present), and as many as the remedies applied, until with them, or in spite of them, the fainting man gradually regained consciousness. He then stared at each and every one of those present with great determination, but to no one did he say a word; and in the same silence he brushed aside with his hands the remedies with which the charitable women relentlessly pursued him through his nose, through his mouth, through his middle finger, and behind his ears, until he estimated with his sense of smell the contents of a cup they placed between his lips, and eagerly sipped that invigorating liquor, which was generous wine. Feeling more revived by this, he tried to rise from the step on which he was sitting; he managed it without difficulty, and refused to drink any more of the wine that the triumphant neighbor offered him. He considered himself now in possession of the strength he needed for his proposed task; he spoke only to ask if anything had been heard from his mother during his fainting spell; he deduced a negative from the contrived replies given him, and he rushed out again into the street, no warnings or entreaties to the contrary succeeding in detaining him for a single instant. Where was the unfortunate man going? What plans did he have in mind? Not even he knew. To find his mother, to find out about his mother wherever there were people , dead or alive, or wherever notes of pity or groans of pain could be heard ; to all places and locations, except those where joy and rest reigned, if indeed any of these remained at that hour in the darkened confines of the battered city. Suddenly he reflected that since his mother was alive and well, and had not yet gone to look for him at the inn, it was only natural that she should be looking for him at that hour in the very place where he had looked for her as soon as he had risen from the dead. And he went there without hesitation. Walking and walking, along the same road that the two of them had taken that afternoon when they left home, he also saw himself, as before, well accompanied by passers-by as the streets he traveled widened and he drew near to the mouth of the widest of all in the vast basin. But between these passers-by and those of the afternoon, what a difference ! Those who were going the same way, how desperate or how dejected! Those he met seemed like the funeral procession of the dead or badly wounded that he met at every step, carried on stretchers by men with a measured and solemn gait. Thus he reached the end of his journey. Pachín thought he had already seen the scene that afternoon in its most imposing and intimidating aspect; but he was convinced, upon finding himself before it again , that he had been mistaken in his judgment. The fire on the docks had been feeding on the wood of the adjacent ones; toward the western end, new ones were rising, fueled by the bowels of large buildings, and the one he had left nascent above those enclosing the plaza to the north was now a formidable blaze that had devoured a third of the beautiful curtain and was spreading its tentacles of destructive flame over everything that remained upright within its reach. In the brilliant light of these enormous bonfires, the sinister reliefs on the black surface, illuminated in profile, seemed even more black and repulsive due to the abruptness and force of the chiaroscuro ; and like figures in a ghostly painting, the people who walked slowly or maneuvered, grouped together across the entire expanse of the plain. As a detail, also new to Pachín, were the neighbors on the burned-out street, mourning yet another misfortune over the ruins of their belongings thrown from balconies or piled up in the gutter, each looking out for their own, because on that fateful day no one was so free from their own misfortunes that they had ample time to attend to the misfortunes of others of such a caste. Where corpses numbered in the hundreds, what did the homeless matter? Pachín, young, intelligent, kind-hearted, and uneducated, though an uneducated villager, was something of an artist without knowing it; And that’s why the spectacle overwhelmed and overwhelmed him, more than by each of its sinister components, by the terrible grandeur of their entire ensemble . For a field covered in ruins, mud, and corpses, what light could be more appropriate and fitting than that of a conflagration like that? A horror illuminated by another horror. The poor boy’s work was going to be very different from what he had done there that afternoon. He wouldn’t search among the dead, which he already knew by heart, but among the living who were searching for something, as he had searched. But since the living were numerous and, even at a short distance from them, because of the blackness of the ground and the shadows of the light, they all appeared to him like shapeless figures, with men indistinguishable from women, he needed to examine them very closely, and, to do that, he needed to scan the field from end to end. The task did not daunte him, and he immediately undertook it without any hesitation other than that imposed by the difficult terrain, aggravated by the darkness. Tears now outnumbered moans in that enormous spoliarium, and so there were times when Pachín heard no sounds around him other than the incessant crackling of the devouring flames, and the occasional voice from those fleeing their ravages, or from those using the little strength left to fight them, in vain, by the tremendous shock of the other scourge. In these cases, the poor villager’s repugnance and fear were greater, and, doubting whether he was treading “Christian flesh” among the blackness of the ground, he dreamed of hearing even a groan of protest against the desecration committed by his feet. The unfortunate man sweated in these moments and tried to get closer to the faint light of the lanterns carried by some scattered groups and individuals, and he did so with the dual purpose of better knowing where he was stepping and more easily recognizing what he was tracking, if he had the good fortune to find it. But he walked and walked, almost feeling the people whose steps he followed, and never achieved anything but disappointment with each attempt. In this painful task, he preferred solitary figures, figuring that his mother, unknown and a stranger, could not possibly navigate there any other way. Once, following the path of the faint light of one of the wandering lanterns, truly cemetery lights, he stumbled upon two women. One carried a lantern in her hand; the other carried a jug of water, a basin, and a sponge in hers. The one with the lantern, although she wrapped her waist and part of her head in a thick cloak, seemed to him, from the whiteness of her complexion and the appearance of her person, to be a distinguished lady. By the light of the fires rather than the dim light of the lantern, Pachín saw that her eyes were red from crying and her cheeks were streaked with tears; and although he had ascertained that neither of the two was the woman he was looking for, he followed them in their task without hindering them for a good while. When they found the corpse of a man, _if he had a head_, the lady would move the lantern closer to it, and with the sponge soaked in water that the other woman offered her, she would carefully remove the soot from his face… and onward with her heavy cross! because it was never the dead person she recognized, the pledge of her heart that He was searching. Of all the sorrows Pachín had known until then in the same sad place, none seemed as profound, nor deserved as much respect as this one. Leaving the unfortunate lady to lose herself in the mysteries of the distant darkness, he ran toward the groups of people he saw on one of the docks opposite the submerged ship, illuminated by the glow of the one that was burning. His mother was not there either, among the women who followed with anxious eagerness the work being done in the water, work already familiar to Pachín, although on a smaller scale. Now there were more boats and launches, more grappling hooks being thrown to the bottom, and more debris that came up hooked, not to mention what was being collected floating among the timbers, cans, and a thousand other pieces of debris from the disaster, which were appearing, dragged by the current, without anyone knowing where it came from or where it had been until then. The scene was illuminated by torches of wind, whose light illuminated clusters of heads and was reflected tremulously in the turbulent, murky waters. Pachín fled from there, his heart oppressed by a new form of agonizing and suffocating pain, and sank back into the shadows of the plain, to continue his work with more vigor than hope. He noticed that the groups with light were always made up of single men, men charged with collecting corpses and carrying them on stretchers or piled in wagons to their designated place. This seemed very distressing to him, and yet he followed the groups, though without knowing if he did so to be better accompanied in his terrifying solitude, or to better guide himself by the light of his lanterns, or because he was drawn by the fascination of the tremendous, as one is drawn by the vision of the abyss. Exploring thus among the living and the dead, and devouring rather than seeing, with eyes already accustomed to the darkness and to deciphering the deceptions in which the sinister flashes of the flames enveloped the wandering people , he came across another group of men whose occupation was everything he had left to see there. These men were carrying very large black sacks, and into these sacks they were stuffing the remains they found scattered about: limbs, entrails… and
even blood, collected from the ground, soaked in the earth and thus already sanctified… With the force and speed of lightning, the memory of his vanished mother was associated with the vision of those frightful relics, and the unfortunate man could bear it no longer: he felt an indefinable anguish amid streams of cold sweat that bathed his body; his vision became blurred, and without the strength to stand, he collapsed onto a pile of rubble. When he regained consciousness, helped by those good men, in response to questions they asked him, he recounted his misfortune and his failed attempts. There, at that hour, he had lost his last hope. What remained unexplored? What more dead, what more wounded, and what more searchers for them than those he had already seen and identified? They told him then, perhaps to lift his fainting spirits a little , that there were many wounded and dead in the hospital of which he had no knowledge, and this was enough, in fact, to revive his spirits and make him believe himself capable of the impossible. Which way to get to the hospital? They showed him two routes: the shorter one and the longer one; but he chose the latter because the beginning of the first, as far as he could see from there, was blocked by two fires that were already almost crossing each other’s flames. Until then, the poor boy had not stopped to consider the increasing magnitude of this new disaster, and the extent and force it was reaching. On the north side, the flames formed a very high mountain range; and from the width that its base had acquired, from which the reddened tongues that protruded from all the corroded hollows of the buildings that served as its pasture and food, seemed to be the roots, it was easy to deduce that both sides of the back street were burning along almost its entire length. In turn, the first fire on the other side, the one to the west, curling and flaring , constantly feeding on the houses it had taken hold of, strove to spread left and right, but especially to the north, as if trying to draw more power from that other blaze in order to leap forward and join the one following it to the south, which also brooded and struggled to meet it. By God’s mercy, the voracious bonfires rose peacefully and straight into the air, where their embers sputtered among the swirling ashen smoke accumulated there in thick clouds. One breath of air that would bend the flames northward, and the whole city would disappear in a few hours. Human strength was inconceivable to triumph in a fight against enemies such as those of that day; a day no less ill-fated and terrifying than those evoked by the poet. those “…days of terror when atheists pray alone.” What strength sustained Pachín that made him capable of such endurance? Who among those who saw him pass by, outstripping all those who were most active in the streets, and suddenly retreating, or turning aside to examine a group of women, or sticking his head through the half-open door of a small shop because he thought he heard a voice that sounded like his mother’s, could even suspect what that creature had been walking, searching, and suffering, body and soul, since five in the afternoon? Oh! If those who scrupulously weigh and measure the strength and endurance of certain substances in the physical world could similarly estimate what the human spirit, placed under vibrant tension by life’s great misfortunes, is capable of and able to withstand , what a discovery for science and what a surprise for the sages of the alembic! For this prodigious force was what sustained Pachín, activating all his limbs and bringing his youthful intelligence to full light. It made him insensitive to the pain of his wounds and the laments of those unfortunate like himself, and skilled in the darkness of the night among streets he had never trodden, and subtle in exploring his path. If only he could have mastered his impatience, his weakness, and his anguish! And yet he wasn’t alone, for he was accompanied by many other pilgrims of sorrow. They all went there in search of what they hadn’t been able to discover elsewhere. Just like he did! And he continued with them, up and up the street, as if they were all one, although they were all strangers to one another. They spoke nothing to each other, nothing was said; but almost all wept in silence, and this was the only intelligible and familiar language of that town in those hours of misfortune, the expression of which could not be found in any human tongue. The hospital gate was open, for there wasn’t a moment when someone didn’t enter or exit. Pachín entered, moving a good distance ahead of those with him; and, allowing himself to be guided by the first light that his eyes discovered when he found himself in a gallery of massive stone arches, he took the right side, paying no attention to the nuns and other servants of the pious asylum, who were bustling past him; he then turned left, following the path of the nave; he found himself facing the mouth of a large staircase; he climbed it and found himself in another gallery like the one below, but more sheltered and less free from obstructions, because it was half-filled, and was still filling, with makeshift beds spread on the floor. While he hesitated whether to take one side or the other, and not daring to ask anyone, or perhaps having already forgotten how to wonder about things he didn’t know, he heard the sound of voices and wailing to the right, and headed that way. After a few steps, he came upon a door that led into a room packed with people. From there came the murmurs and wailing. The room wasn’t large, but it was luxurious, apparently belonging to a villager, with many portraits on the walls, and a floor so shiny and exquisite that Pachín He slipped as he walked on the little of it that was unencumbered. It smelled strongly of apothecaries, and there were mattresses and blankets on the floor, and on each of these beds and on every piece of furniture against the walls, a wounded or dying man. Beside the former, tending to their terrible wounds, were doctors with their white aprons in front of them, polished tools or bandages in their hands, and practitioners assisting them in the cruel work, and the holy servants of charity who cared for everything and attended to everyone as if they were their own. Beside a dying man, a priest was kneeling and leaning over him, almost embracing him; a priest very strange to Pachín, who remembered having seen him performing identical tasks in the first aid center. He was dressed in very fine purple robes. A gold crucifix hung from his neck and chest , and he wore a thick ring on one of his hands. His voice was sweet, like the look in his compassionate eyes, and his words were eloquent, persuasive, and loving. What things he could say to the dying man, almost weeping with grief! What courage he instilled in him, and how he consoled him! Pachín had never seen a bishop except in holy pictures, with a miter, crosier, and pluvial cape; and that is why he did not recognize the one of his diocese in that charitable and humble priest with purple vestments, a cut similar to the black ones of the other priests who were also there, both in the first-aid center and on the very scene of the catastrophe. But neither among those who were dying, nor among those being treated by the doctors or waiting their turn to be cured, nor among the living and healthy who mingled with them, was his mother to be found. He learned that all the hospital’s operating rooms were filled with wounded, and that was why this one had been hastily refurbished, its ordinary uses being quite different. He went in search of the other rooms, following the directions given to him. The trail of makeshift beds on the gallery, some already occupied, showed him the way along it; another, of moans and groans, led him to a room containing two large tables of very strange shapes, and several devices of unknown use even to the ignorant villager, although given their location and proximity, and above all, the “artificial” tools he saw gleaming at the back of a glass-enclosed cabinet, he presumed that none of it could be “for any good.” On each side, as one entered, there was a door, and each door led into a large hall filled with people, many beds, many groans, and a strong “pharmacy” smell. He took a chance on the right and entered that room, but with more ease than the first one he had visited, because not only was it larger, but the beds were made up in two rows, with their ends against the wall, leaving a wide passageway for people between the feet of each . Otherwise, there was the same lineage of sick people, the same torment, the same work of the doctors and their assistants, the same nuns in attendance, the same dying men with the priest at the head, the same horror on all faces, the same tears in many eyes, and the same busy coming and going of those who could not subdivide themselves to be everywhere at once. Pachín went from bed to bed, sometimes following the doctors , and other times as he could or was allowed; and only when he reached the last one did he realize that there were only men in that room. The one designated for women was the one opposite. He flew out of that one, through the one with the machines, and into the one that interested him most. It was an exact reproduction of the men’s hospital, with the same number of beds and patients, and an identical legion of doctors and assistants. It seemed impossible to Pachín that, with so many women gathered there, victims of the same cause, one of them wasn’t his mother. This greatly revived his wavering hopes; but at the same time, it greatly increased his workload. He had no other field of investigation than the faces; and any of them that wasn’t disfigured by pain, he found it difficult to understand. It was due to the wounds, or the bruises, or the black mud. She had to ask the sick woman herself, and she almost never got an answer, or she got an “Ouch!” that tore at her soul. To the most distorted of countenance or those sluggish with the heat of the fever, she would shout her own name into the ear, to catch a hint in a gesture or a vibration of that expiring life. When these investigations didn’t satisfy her doubts, she would ask the nuns, the doctors, any of the nurses about the sick woman’s origins, and finally, about the clothes she had arrived at the hospital in, and she would rush to examine them; and with even greater disappointment, she would return to the ward once more to continue her arduous labor, each time less successful and more difficult. Upon concluding it there, what a discovery, in the end, was hers! In the places directly struck by the catastrophe, he had seen countless wounded and dead; so many that he had become familiar with the heaped horrors, with the sooty black mud and tattered clothing. But in the hospital beds, following the heroic labors of the doctors, he had appreciated the horrors in all their nakedness and detail by detail, stripped of all disguise and standing out against the whiteness of the clothes. It seemed impossible to him that with those enormous bloody holes, with those horrific lacerations of the flesh, with those macerated limbs brutally torn from their hinges, the patients could live until, as he also now knew, they were operated on in the adjoining ward and in others like it, in the sunlight of a new day… if it was credible that sunny days could be born from a night like that. For a long time the unfortunate man stood firm in the middle of the room, his head bowed upon his chest, his imagination lost in a wilderness of despair, and his memory filled with recent sights that were renewed every moment by the laments that reached his ears from every corner of the hall. Feeling his strength weakening and not easily resigned to giving up his generous endeavor, he asked if there was nothing more for him to see and explore in the various apartments of that house. The questioned man, after raising his arms to his head and his eyes toward the ceiling, answered in the affirmative and gave him detailed directions of the route he should follow. With these in mind and his energy revived by the stimulus of a new hope, Pachín left the room. He retraced his steps on the way up, and when he finished descending the stairs, he crossed the inner courtyard in front of him, and then the nave of the cloister… There it was, wide open, the door that had been indicated to him in the reports. When he set foot on the threshold, he felt the chill of the night on his face, and his eyes met the thick columns of flame from the fires of Maliaño, outlined at their bases by the black line of the wall that enclosed the space in the foreground on two sides. It seemed to him that from there, if only he stretched out his arms, he could reach with his hands the shining locks of the infernal hair of those destructive furies , and he trembled with terror at the thought that at any moment a whirlwind of the air could sweep them down upon that holy asylum filled with victims of the other scourge. He prayed to God with all his soul to remove such a dark misfortune from there, and prepared to descend the four stone steps that separated him from the ground of that strange enclosure, which, from the first glance, seemed to him to be an open corral, well populated with people and watered with tears. The corral, patio or whatever it was, had no other light than that reflected from the fires above the walls, and, in this way, what happened there was what happened on the esplanade of the docks: with those indecisive and fantastic reflections, the shadows acquired greater intensity than usual, and the reliefs on the ground multiplied the deceptions; so it was very difficult for Pachín to orient himself on the ground. His vision was difficult to grasp in the gloom. At last, he found his bearings, though it would have been better for him not to have done so; for as soon as his eyes, already accustomed to darkness, discovered the mysteries of that scene, he turned them away, shuddering, and found himself without the strength to take another step forward. The enclosure was long and narrow, with the floor sloping sharply toward the south; that is, toward the sea. Opposite the steps, there was a shed leaning against the wall that bordered the courtyard on that side, parallel to the facade of the hospital; at the top, a carriage door; at the bottom, a blank wall; and between this wall and the visible corner of the hospital, a space enclosed by a fence. Immediately to the side of the steps, to Pachín’s right, from length to length on the floor of the courtyard and with its head pressed against the wall of the building, there was a corpse; further down, two feet from it, another, and then another, and another… and another; and so on as far as the eye could see, or as far as the crowd milling about among them could allow. An oxcart and a wagon then entered through the carriage door; and that wagon and that wagon were also loaded with dead bodies, which some living men then placed, one by one, face up against the wall, so they could be more easily examined and identified by the searchers who, like Pachín, had spent hours and hours searching in despair for what they couldn’t find anywhere. With the corpses in the wagon were some sacks: those black sacks whose fate had so frightened the poor boy a short time before, and he was even more terrified when he saw that, after being taken from the wagon to the shed, its bloody contents were piled up at the bottom. The sight of more dead bodies couldn’t have been very impressive to someone who had seen so many in just a few hours. But to see them as Pachín saw them there!… in that narrow, dark alley, arranged in a row facing upwards, with the chorus of moans from the people who were handling them and recognizing them one by one; above, the sinister light of the fires; below, the mysterious and gloomy penumbra, and in front, the black cavern of the shed filling with human remains and blood: all this presented such a pathetic and horrifying novelty to the eyes of the unfortunate little villager that it made him tremble with fear and he planted his feet on the threshold of the door. It cost him a lot of effort to recover; but he recovered at last, driven by the consciousness of his duty imposed by the laws of his heart as a son, and he descended the steps of the ladder with a firm and resolute step; And he had the courage, or at least the willpower, to approach the wave of dead, inspect them one by one, feel them, and move them around in search of better light, even though their shrouds were women’s garments. The line of them was now passing the corner of the hospital and entering the fence. But in that area, which was a piece of garden, the shape of the display changed, and the corpses appeared lying on the paths, with the velvety slopes of the baskets as a headboard. What a horrendous contrast! The mansion of flowers, which are the adornment and smile of nature, invaded and trampled by the spoils of death in its most repulsive and disconsolate aspect. Pachín noted the contrast in his own way, and in his own way he felt it in the depths of his soul, already wounded to its very core by a hallucination of his disturbed vision. The light from the fires, reflecting on the ground and on the faces of the corpses, contorted and disfigured, feigned convulsions and gestures that Pachín always deciphered as meaningless. It seemed to him that all those earthy, sepulchral faces, looking up to the sky, were imploring something from him: some, mercy; others, vengeance. This invincible and overwhelming obsession, and the distressing sight of those who, happier… or more unfortunate than he, finally found what they had come to seek in that funereal repository, forced him to abandon it. When, well informed, moreover, that there was nothing left for him to do there, nor in any other part of the city that night, was leaving the gates toward the carriage door that had just opened to admit other trucks with more dead bodies, he noticed a very old man sitting on a bench, stroking the head of a mastiff curled up next to him. He was surprised by the discovery; and to stave off the fear that was making him tremble, or out of an unconscious impulse due to his youth, he asked the man what he wanted to know. And the man, kindly, with a sweet voice and the bewildered syntax of all the peasants on his land, after removing from his mouth the clay pipe he was mechanically sucking, satisfied his curiosity. He had been a gardener “of the house” for many years, and the dog guarded the garden at night. The two were there together so that the mastiff wouldn’t bother anyone; and he didn’t keep him alone and tied up in his hut, so that he wouldn’t bark. “And what, barking?” asked Pachín. The good man looked at him with an admiring expression; and then, extending his hand and his eyes over the wave of corpses, he said: “Barking… barking!… and that’s all before it!… Praying, it’s better to pray. ” “But then,” replied Pachín, full of astonishment, “how long are you going to continue with this art?” “Until God dawns tomorrow, son… or later.” Everything in those terrible hours was extraordinary and grand, like the misfortune that had engendered them: even the piety of the simplest hearts. In Pachín González’s heart there remained only a spark of warmth to sustain him on the uncertain path with which he continued on his way to his inn: the faintest hope of finding his mother there, waiting for him. But this hope, too, proved to be a failure!… And whenever the poor man thought of this, the artificial vigor sustained by the tension of his spirit deserted him , and he felt faint; his head wounds ached , and he suffered from burning thirst, throbbing in his temples, and extreme cold in his extremities… In these alternations of life and death, he arrived at the inn; and feverish, in pain, disconsolate, he collapsed on the bed as soon as the landlady responded with a sad nod to the question he put to her with cowering eyes. Neither reasoning nor entreaties from the good woman nor those who accompanied her could pull him out of the stupor into which he had sunk. Seeing him thus, in an even more alarming state than the other time in the doorway, they thought of calling a doctor to assist him; But who could find a free doctor then, when all the town’s doctors were insufficient to attend to the great distresses of the sad places where the wounded were piled up? With such great misfortunes, “what did the fortunate patient who was dying in his own bed matter?” This recourse had to be abandoned and the householders had to be consulted. And they were immediately called upon. Whether he liked it or not, his wounds were bathed and treated with concoctions containing abounding white wine, rue, and oil; his head was bandaged, and he was even forced to undress and take to his bed, where he was made to swallow a good portion of fortified wine. The poor boy, at first insensible to everything, and then allowing himself to be governed like a machine, did not open his lips to utter a syllable, nor did he even open his eyes. Outside life did not seem to interest him in the least. He remained thus for a long time. Suddenly he cried, “Mother!” “Mother!” she put both hands to her head and burst into bitter tears. The unfortunate man wept a great deal, and in weeping he unburdened his breast of the anguish that oppressed him. When he had finished weeping, the landlady approached him, wiping away her tears, infected by her guest’s distress, to ask him if he was feeling better. Pachín answered her with a look that reflected more gratitude than an affirmative response… But the ice was broken, and that was what the noble woman was looking for, in order to ingest there another remedy of the moral order, in which she trusted greatly to disperse the clouds of that inflamed mind. She had to speak to him, to refer him “entertaining things,” to distract him, without straying from the circle of ideas that had him so daunted; because to stray into more cheerful conversation would be like mocking the poor boy’s sadness . And the story of the landlady, sitting at the bedroom door, followed this pattern . How and from where the darkest things came, Lord in heaven! How careless she was when… Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Suddenly she thought the gas pipes had burst, because they truly sounded like crashes beneath the balconies. Not a pane of glass was left unbroken; the whole house shook, and almost all the partitions were cracked: Pachín had one of them there, clearly visible, if he wanted to look. But what were all these trifles worth compared to what had happened in other houses in the neighborhood, as he was able to discover as soon as he went out into the street to find out what was happening? Entire ceilings and partitions had collapsed, staircases had been knocked out of joint, and what was worse, they were damaged in heaps by the bricks and rubble of the ruin… The gas pipes! Good and fat! When the truth was revealed, everyone was astonished that not a single soul remained in the city to tell the tale. For immediately, he became suspicious about the fate of those missing from his house: three people, not counting Pachín and his mother; but they had all returned, thank God, and were present there then, except for the poor woman who hadn’t arrived yet, but who would arrive, oh yes, she would! She, the landlady, had good reason to believe it… But what misfortune, Lord, and what a lot of them!… because it went without saying: first of all, all the authorities, from the Civil Governor on, and then… in short, they didn’t take into account the “lost victims.” This was the “truly bad” side of the matter. The other side, not the good side, because it wasn’t good from any angle, was already somewhat different. There were those who had disappeared; those who had been suddenly sheltered, swept away by the hurricane, in this store and the one over there, in this house or the other. For all of them would appear in their own time; but who knew the how and when of so many strange things that were to happen? For now, as soon as God broke dawn, all the public papers would hit the streets, filled with news, distilled from good sources; and in that news there would be something for all tastes and all the needs of many disconsolate people like Pachín. So there was no need to be completely discouraged, nor to lose confidence in God’s mercy… The truth was that with the innkeeper’s story and comments, reinforced by the well-declared acquiescence of those present, Pachín gradually moved from slumber to attention, and from attention to interest, until he finally revived and took the solid, comforting food offered by the landlady, which until then he had stubbornly refused. With this, and the fatigue of such extraordinary tasks as his and the imperative needs of his youthful nature, he fell into a deep sleep; and when the innkeeper was convinced of this, she turned out the bedroom light and tiptoed away there, like all her companions. Sleep gripped him so tightly that it didn’t let go until dawn. But the unfortunate man paid dearly for it then! It is a fact proven by the experience of many people that every man has a little devil appointed by Lucifer himself who is charged with collecting, the moment he falls asleep, all the sad thoughts that wander through his mind, and placing them before his eyes and through a magnifying glass as soon as he wakes up. A little devil of that caste was the one who tormented Pachín upon awakening, suddenly snatching away the placid visions of his dream and revealing to him the picture of his dark reality. He had never had a dream like that. He had felt happy, completely happy; and not because his ambitions as a great lord had been realized , nor because he already had the banknotes. and the gold of the Indies by the cartload; on the contrary, she had found happiness in the corner of her village. But what a corner that was! What meadows, what cattle! What fruit her estates had! What thick hills, and what music their green foliage! And the house, within the enclosure that looked like a garden because of its abundance, variety, and care in cultivation, so sheltered from the gale and with the south-facing sun; the vine, which grew leaning against a corner, forming an arch, tied to the turnstiles of the balcony; the stables, with beautiful mangers beneath the hayloft filled with fragrant hay, at the side; and inside the house, the abundance of everything indispensable for family life; the work of the fertile land, pleasant, free , and in the light of the sun; a clear conscience, and rest, like a conscience; a heart without hatred; And in the most cherished corner of it, a certain invigorating tingling, tempting to uplift and ennoble the spirit and awakening in the imagination memories of blue eyes, of placid smiles, of promises exchanged with tremulous words and cowardly glances; pictures, in short, of a new life of love and peace and well-being… And his mother!… the soul of it all, the warmth, the example, the healthy atmosphere, the light and wisdom of the house. How she loved him and looked out for him and advised him! And what legitimate vanity he had in considering himself worthy of a mother like that!… In short, Pachín had found the idyll of life and divined the plot of a fan-like landscape. For, finding himself in the midst of enjoying the most delightful part of it, it was when the little devil, his enemy, extinguished the lights of his imagination and placed before his eyes the picture of his true misfortunes. He moaned and wept a great deal, sometimes in the greatest despair, other times in despair. He cried out loud for his mother, prayed fervently for her, and asked God… for everything he needed most: for his mother, or for the strength to resign himself to losing her in such a way. He refused to eat breakfast or have his wounds treated, but he did want to get out of bed: this he did with great and repeated determination, against the advice and counsel of the innkeeper and all those who had come with her to comfort him. He wanted to get up and rush out into the streets again and search the entire city, house by house and stone by stone. But the work of the previous day and his mental suffering had exhausted his spirit, and he felt himself pinned to his bed by extreme weakness. In the midst of these struggles and jostling, the aforementioned guest came in: he was pale and ragged-faced. They plied him with questions, and he recounted what he had seen. He had left very early because he had slept badly, and curiosity had dragged him out of the house. The streets, in the light of the rising sun, had seemed sadder than they had been the night before; the people more dejected and distraught; the damage more noticeable, and the general appearance of the town more pathetic and distressing. The fires continued, but isolated and on the way to extinction due to lack of fuel and God’s forbidding the wind to blow them where there was plenty of it. Tempted by the devil and bad advice, he had gone to the hospital. Never out there! He got in without difficulty, as many, many people did, and not all of them in a peaceful mood and with the respect they should have. As he climbed the stairs, he began to regret having climbed them and was tempted to return to the street. But curiosity, mischievous curiosity!… The gallery where he walked was filled with mattresses on the floor, and on each mattress lay a wounded man; but what wounded! What monstrous faces, so black, if not yellow as the wax on graves! And above all, what shrieks those unfortunates and others like them heard from far away! According to reports, they had been like that since dawn, since “their wounds had grown cold” after being healed during the night. His legs trembled and his vision was blurred, but he was drawn by the fascination of horror itself, and onward, onward, onward!… Thus he reached a mouth, at whose door, badly closed, he stood as if nailed by the feet. What he saw through the cracks made him gnash his teeth: some very strange tables; on the tables, bodies naked from head to toe; and among those bodies, numbed by chloroform, mutilated, scorched, torn by steam blast , a swarm of doctors with bloodstained aprons, holding large, shining knives, chisels, or saws, cutting away mangled limbs, or extracting crushed ribs, or peeling and clearing away horrific holes clogged with bloody scraps; irrigating the raw cuts with incessant jets of foul-smelling water, and then blankets and more blankets of fluffy cotton and bandages over the operated area; and finally, in the arms of the orderlies, the wounded man was taken to another adjoining room. and another patient from that same hospital, or another just like it, to replace him on the operating table; and each of the wounded who had not yet been operated on, with heart-rending cries, begging for the mercy of the saw or the knife as soon as possible. The poor man was sweating with anguish , yet he could not leave; on the contrary, he was gradually and insensibly entering the room, and he did not know what fascinated him more: the horror of the torment and the blood, or the courage, the heroic and immensely charitable work of those tireless and skillful surgeons. At last, he began to feel his brain, his heart, his entire organism saturated, intoxicated by that constellation of terrifying things, and he fled in search of another environment and other spectacles. He ran, more than walked, through the galleries in search of the fresh air of the street, and he was invited to see the outside courtyard, now practically filled with the dead; But this invitation, far from enticing him, made him quicken his pace and search with doubled anxiety for the hospital exit… In one fell swoop, he had arrived home by the shortest route, unable to erase from his brow the vision of such great misery and so much carnage… At the end of this story, the arrival of a freshly printed newspaper coincided. When Pachín saw it in the hands of the innkeeper, he begged her, out of the charity of God, to let him read it with his own eyes. He didn’t trust anyone. He was eagerly obliged, and with feverish eagerness he immersed himself in that sea of ​​printed letters. It began with the story of the event, with declamations and commentaries that, at that time, meant nothing to Pachín. Then came immense lists of names, names of well-known and verified dead people; of the seriously wounded who would soon die, and of others less seriously wounded, and of the missing… Pachín read all these lists, name by name and aloud, without coming across the one the innocent of God was looking for. Then came the anonymous letters in piles, and then the summary of each series, in numbers, up to the time it was printed… There were more than two hundred bodies collected from the scene of the catastrophe and in the streets of the town; more than as many seriously wounded , and many more with relatively light injuries, those who had been treated in establishments and private homes and those who were supposed to exist of this kind ; finally, the missing, who were not few , and who, at that time, could be added to the dead. Afterwards, a list of the effects of the explosion on the city: houses in ruins, completely uninhabitable; others with great damage inside; The cathedral, whose bulk had saved the city from many misfortunes, was literally machine-gunned from the south side; the roof, collapsed at the top; in the garden of its cloister, piles of tangled iron beams, tangled skeins of metal cables, horseshoe nails, and empty cartridges; in such a house on such a street, a steam boiler shell on a closet rug; on the balcony of such another, a cabin frame; and so on ad infinitum. Then, examples of the incredible reach, the expansive force of the diabolical volcano: for example, a block of cast iron, weighing more than six quintals, that had killed a woman on the Corbán road, that is, three kilometers from the site of the explosion. Other examples of its strange effects: corpses without the slightest apparent injury; another, barefoot on one foot and with the corresponding boot at his side; another, that of a woman, with her coat intact, and one sleeve of the dress underneath torn off; children disappeared from the arms of their girls , unharmed; and conversely, on the roof of a warehouse near the esplanade, and without a single scratch or the slightest bruise, a young boy who had been watching the fire very close to the steamer; On the dining room table of a hotel opposite the pier of the disaster and occupied by several guests, the mutilated bust of a man fell, passing like a projectile through the nearby window… Finally, a notice from the mayor’s office imploring the owners to have the roofs of their houses examined, and if they found human remains on them, to carefully collect them for a Christian burial… What more? Was there anyone among those present, or among the city’s living or the entire world, who had heard of such things happening, or even dreamed of? Pachín did not even question this heartfelt remark from the innkeeper… The good woman’s complaint was largely related to Pachín, who had seen with his own eyes almost everything that was reported in the newspaper! But that was no longer the case for him, who could not avoid such misfortune, but rather find a way to remedy his own, if humanely possible, or at least attempt to do so with new investigations. People were reported to have been gathered in establishments and private homes… A good deal could be traced here, even in the vicinity of the abominable place, because it was not credible that his mother had been pushed alive any further into the center… But… And the unfortunate man writhed in bed, trying in vain to get up. Not only his weakness, but also the pain in his joints, the anguish of his entire body, had him tied down, glued to that rack of unbearable moral torment. He wept desperately again and prayed, asking God to give him the strength he needed to leave there, to go out into the street, and search the town from house to house—this favor at least, since he didn’t consider him worthy of the fortune of finding his mother alive after his searches were complete. This made the innkeeper weep again and the guest deeply moved, who promised the afflicted boy to go out into the street immediately and take his place in the endeavor that was forbidden to him. And as he promised, he kept his promise. Time passed, almost the entire morning, without the guest returning, nor did any news reach the inn other than what was circulating in every language and from every quarter. And Pachín, thinking that gaining the strength to get up quickly depended on eating a lot, didn’t stop struggling against the stubborn lack of appetite that prevented him from doing so. At lunchtime, well into the night, the diner returned, exhausted and sweaty, but apparently not discouraged. He had nothing of what he had come looking for; but he claimed to have found a trail that promised something good. Whether Pachín believed that charitable lie or not, no one knew; but the fact was that the excellent fellow returned to the street without swallowing the last bite, leaving the inn full of news he had acquired on his excursion: that legions of men with powerful firefighting equipment were coming from various parts of the province, and all the firemen from Bilbao, and the Minister of the Interior with a phalanx of high-ranking officials from Madrid, and a battalion of engineers from Logroño. For all of Spain had shuddered with horror upon learning the extent of the catastrophe, and generous demonstrations of this were coming from all quarters . With the commentary of this news and the acquisition of other similar news , the afternoon passed and Pachín entertained his impatience; because, in the meantime, the guest did not return… Until he began to Nightfall; and tired of crying, of suffering, and even of fretting, for a brief moment when he was left alone in the bedroom, almost in the dark, sleep came upon him; but so suddenly and treacherously that the little devil, his spy, had no time to gather his evil thoughts, and they all remained in his head. He dreamed of his village then, too; but how different from the other time! The whole country was an ungrateful wasteland: not even the sun deigned to shine on it twice a month, and it felt cold there even in August. He strained his body working, and nothing! He sowed, and what he sowed did not sprout; the cracked soil of his meadows yielded only miserable twigs and brambles; his little cottage was visibly crumbling to pieces. Hunger and ruin were destroying his livestock, and he found himself wearing the last clothes he had been able to buy, tattered and filthy from use, and also alone, completely alone! Because his mother had died as well. Climbing to the top of the mountain to make a load of firewood, the only kind still preserved in the whole place, but rickety and charred, as if it had come from the fire that had devoured the oak groves there, he had rolled down the rocks of a ravine, and he had barely found anyone, out of charity, to help him pull the mangled corpse from the bottom of the ravine. He could still see him lying in a coffin without a lid, because it was one for the truly poor, with four poles and four legs: one to be carried on the shoulders of four brothers of the True Cross; the other to keep it upright next to the grave and easily tip the body into it, without touching it with his hands. He had turned toward home after reciting the prayer service intoned by the priest over the grave, sprinkled with holy water at the same time, and he still kept walking and walking; but the more he walked, the less progress he made. Thus he spent the whole morning and almost the whole afternoon; and now the sun had set beneath the thick layer of ashen clouds, and night was coming . Some dogs, exhausted with hunger, had come out to bark at him from the corrals through which he had been passing, and they did not cease barking and chasing him. He walked and walked, waving a stick that he carried in his hand, resting on his hip, and he was beginning to feel afraid. For night was coming; and to the mournful beating of the dogs, human voices were added, and he did not know whether they were to pacify them or to urge them on further. Finally, night fell, and the barking and shouting were joined by a thrashing and squeezing that he felt on his chest and face, without being able to determine who or what was doing it; for the night was black, blacker than he had ever known , and all he saw around him was the impenetrable, massive blackness of darkness. The thrashing in his chest began to take his breath away, while at the same time his ears were pierced, not by the barking of the dogs, but by cries and calls that he could not define. And as the anguish, the suffocation in his chest, continued to constrict him, he made an effort to breathe, into which he gave everything he had left of his life… and he succeeded in his endeavor. Once those oppressive bonds were broken, even the darkness dissipated and the howling of the dogs ceased… and he saw, he saw before his eyes, devouring him with kisses and clasping him in her arms, oh wonder and charity of God!… his mother; but his living mother: not the one who had tumbled down the rocks of the ravine on the mountain of his delirium, but his true mother; the one who had disappeared when the steamer exploded and he had searched everywhere , already mourning her for dead. And he saw more: he saw, to the right of his mother, the innkeeper, and to the left, the guest, both with their eyes filled with tears, fixed on him… and moreover, that the innkeeper had in her hand a candlestick with a lit candle, by whose light, which dazzled him, Pachín saw the scene as if by the midday sun, and he clearly distinguished the people who were part of it in the shadows in the background. There was no doubt about it: this was not a continuation of his disconsolate and tiring dream, but The reality was evident. Pachín was awake, and his mother, alive, was beside him. He thought he would go mad with joy, as he had been two or three times before with grief. With a leap, he sat up in bed and threw himself at his mother’s neck, who continued to devour him with kisses and flood him with tears… Would that the chemists of emotion would find out which of the two hearts put the greater amount of fiber into that sublime embrace! The mother’s explanations were neither long nor detailed when the moment came to give them, nor could they have been otherwise. She knew very little of what had happened to him; and that, from references made when she no longer had any other thought or other desire in her than to know the fate of her son. Apparently, she had been found under some wood, at the edge of a doorway, by some charitable souls who brought her unconscious to her home. She remained in this state until almost midnight, when she began to regain consciousness. She hadn’t acquired the true and complete knowledge until two o’clock that afternoon. It was then that she was informed of everything about the ship and the way in which she had been found and rescued; but since they gave her no news of her son when she asked for him, she neither saw nor heard anything that was happening or being said beside her, nor did she think of anything except jumping out of bed and rushing out into the street as quickly as possible in search of the piece of her heart. She had no other ailment except a very heavy feeling in her head and a few bruises on her body, which hadn’t drawn any blood or raised the slightest lump, but which were somewhat painful… Well, everything went away, as if by a miracle from the Virgin, as soon as she insisted on having it go away with a few sips of broth and the need she had to feel well and strong. And she suddenly felt so spirited, so resolute, and so bold that she refused even to accept the company they offered her, for fear of what might happen to her on her explorations: those charitable people had already done too much. She rushed out into the street as if she were mad and insane; and when she found herself there, it occurred to her that, above all, she ought to begin by returning to the inn, where Pachín might be mourning her for her death. She walked and walked toward it, and halfway there, she caught up with that good man, the guest, who was overjoyed to see her, and informed her of what she most wanted to know. She praised God with all her grateful soul… and there she was, a little less buoyant than the day before and of a lower complexion; but in health without serious impairment… and even with her umbrella and everything, for she had been found clinging to it under the pile of wood, as she was later told. “And now, my beloved son,” she added, kissing him again with a frenzied eagerness, “now that you know more about this than is necessary, tell it, tell it yourself, for that is what matters and is relevant. ” Pachín wanted to leave it “for later,” because the story was long and his mother needed, above all, to be fed and rested; but she felt very differently. She persisted in her insistence; she settled herself in a chair that the landlady drew up for her by the bed; that good woman, the dinner guest, and all the people present also sat down, though at a prudent distance, and Pachín had no choice but to begin to relate his terrible odyssey. As his heart was so full of the matter, the narrator’s mouth began to paint it with such artistry that the fascinated listeners seemed to be seeing him printed on paper. And the horrors of the painting and the painter’s anguish were so vividly evident that when he was barely halfway through his task, his mother, out of the charity of God, asked him to finish what he had already said and leave the rest for another time. “You were right, my dear son,” she added, “in resisting telling me now. The wounds are still too fresh to be touched without bleeding. ” And with the evident intention of diverting his thoughts to some less sad place, she immediately said: “Moreover, we must put our hearts to the test and do our duty. What cannot be remedied in itself, cannot be remedied.” human strength; and when the Lord of heaven delivered you from such great evil, it must be because he is saving you for a better fate along other paths. Doesn’t it seem that way to you too? And if not, tell me: how far along are you, at this present time, from your business? Have you not even considered that the other ship might have sailed without remembering the saint of your name? “The other ship!” exclaimed Pachín, putting both hands to his eyes, frightened by the idea awakened in his mind by his mother’s questions , “the one that was to carry me across those seas, days and days, far, far away! in search of… I don’t know what? ” “The same one, my son, the same one. ” “Well, consider, mother, that for me all those details are now like the clouds of yesteryear.” Since yesterday, I have been quite different from what I was in seeing and thinking about certain things… That, oh, Mother of my soul!… I don’t know how to explain it well; but, although I am slow of understanding, it seems to me that it is like an open book that has much to read and no little to chew over. I lived somewhat mad for it, tempted by Satan, and yet I did not pay for my guilt where so many innocent people perished yesterday. What greater fate? What greater warning, Mother? And if I were not, I consider you as such and I cling to you… and I want to return to the poor little corner of our place sooner rather than later, to work for you… for both of us, pounding clods of earth as my father pounded them, who, working thus, lived honorably and in holy peace gave his soul to God… And, in short and in conclusion, what better fortune, Mother? Work that honors and brings peace, blessed be it!… but tyrannical cubicia, the hunger for money that comes with everything, because it never sees enough, cursed by God like the most harmful plague! The next day, or the next, because the information on this insignificant matter is not in agreement, the mother and son began the journey back to their village, talking little and meditating a lot as they advanced along the way. Pachín, above all, who had seen and suffered more than his mother, could not stop his thought from the picture that was burned into his memory, nor cease for an instant in his efforts to reconstruct it, to compose it, and to complete it in his imagination with elements acquired beyond the reach of his own observation. Thus, from a great distance, with his spirit at rest and in the serene light of his memories, he came to see him in all the magnitude of his complex of horrors, over which the specters of pain, orphanhood , and misery hovered, like a flock of vultures over a battlefield ; and when he then shuddered with terror, the noble and rude villager could not suspect that new lines were still missing in the black column of that terrible account; that the monster, although buried, was still breathing, and that, like the one in the fable under the weight of his mount, he would vomit forth new misfortunes upon the unfortunate city, as he writhed in the depths of his grave with the last convulsions of his agony. SANTANDER, December 1895. PATRICIO
RIGÜELTA REVIVED GILDO, “THE LAWYER” HIS SON IN COTERUCO PATRICIO
RIGÜELTA REVIVED GILDO, “THE LAWYER” HIS SON IN COTERUCO _Santander_, February 28, 1882. It is also clear to you, Gildo, that time, well used, gives you something for everything, no matter how much it may be, and that a man, if he understands his goings-on, can go about trading and stock exchanges in the same journey, without harming one when he gets tangled up in the other, because fate has put it before him. It is also clear to you that your father is not one of those who most often waste good opportunities. Let it be known that while you assert here the commitments that are known to you in the case I am discussing, I will take what is presented to me well on the other side, without damage to my personal finances and with greater enjoyment of my body. You will know, Gildo, how, motivated to the desired course by one of the commitments I have, I met a subject who, in times past, was a wolf of the our bed… and I tell you that I don’t emphasize the comparison, seeing that “Cueva” was the name of the meeting point we held; and that when it came to setting sail, rightly or wrongly, half the province was mountainous for us, with the excuse of the liberal vote. A good school that was, Gildo. There your father learned that fine workmanship that so many of today’s combs envy. Well, I tell you, I met this fellow; and when I met him, fate struck him right on time, no matter how perfect. The house shook like an earthquake, like the other guy who speaks, in rooms and corners; glasses and pots rattled, and the food in the kitchen was panting, which was a blessing from God. This was the occasion for a malicious question; the question brought a courteous reply and a solemn toast; And in case the fellow refused to repeat the subtlety, I seized on the first, which is the safest, and was as much a guest as the best of the friends who caused the osequio. I am hardly in my right mind when I find myself among people of civil appearance and polish; and don’t laugh at it, Gildo, because if those people can outdo me in subtlety of speech, I’ll outdo the most skilled in this business of separating the wheat from the chaff; and let one thing go for another. Anyway, son, I gave in; the time came, and off I went with the most handsome one. And I wasn’t one of the last, because I consider this to be impolite, and because, with only a foot and a half of space stipulated for each guest around the table, it wasn’t a good idea to risk being left without a bit of it, as was to be feared if the guests were numerous, as I was. The fellow received me very well, let’s say, with all the civility and politeness necessary; without daring to assure you that he had no other option, considering how little he did to convince me of my warning. The truth is, if I had been capable of stumbling upon such shortcomings , I wouldn’t have gone beyond the gate that time; because either my hearing deceived me, or some devil of a guard standing there, wearing a mask and a saber, called me “pegotón” (a snob) with a shamelessness that astonished mine. But I played deaf, as if he were calling someone else behind me , and it might well be so… and up, Patricio! You’ll soon realize, my son, that this particular matter I’m speaking of was a meal, although at the time it happened, they called it supper in Coteruco; but you must know that the subject osequiante was not called supper or lunch, but rather “Te masqué,” as these nocturnal feasts seem to be called among the currutacos these days, either because they happen on days of masking or public display, or because it is so stipulated by wealthy foreigners, who are the ones who give the point to these things, and it seems they understand it. For the rest, everything was burning, Gildo, and sparking; so much so that if you ask me for my opinion when I emerge squarely from the banquet hall, I won’t be able to give it to you. Because what I felt then—and you know I’m a serene man—was like a slap in the face that stunned me; I can’t tell you whether this slap came from the light, from the visual of the glass writing table, or from the clamor of the present lordship, because I swallowed it all together suddenly and when I least expected it. But that passed as quickly as it came; and taste, Gildo, your father in his own element and as comfortable as on the very bench in his kitchen; because you must know that, as a crown of privilege, he didn’t look around the table without bumping into people of my acquaintance. What comes from having traveled the world and drunk from many fountains! So , Gildo, hand-kissing from over there, nodding from the other side, greeting here, bowing there, I looked like a revenue inspector, at least, and not some poor fool from Coteruco, leaning all over that glittering table. Back to what I’m getting at, Gildo. Who do you think was the first acquaintance in that crowd who caught my eye as soon as the glare passed? Well, that same Don Pepitón from La Corralera. From the account that was made, it seems that he devoured the stew from his place, and came to taste it for that taste alone. Good nose, Gildo! He is so opulent and well-fed. Truly, he is a man of few wears and tears, and so faithful and well-ruled in his conduct, that he was capable of coming from his house to the subject’s without remembering any other woman but his own. I also exchanged a few courtesies with Don Ciprianito of Toranzo. A good lawyer! Three times he freed me from prison in a criminal case, and more than as many times we have worked together in elections for the cause of liberty. My, he is certainly a fine worker in these matters! He always seemed to me a good friend to his friends, easy-going and bold for them. They asked me whether or not he was now planning to imprison the civil governor and the judge of first instance. I won’t tell you that the saying is gospel; but if the man really sets his mind to it, watch them in the shade. Beside him stood, glove in hand, coughing and coughing and drinking, the friend who hasn’t let go of him for some time now, and that’s how I know him. This fellow, though he’s turning white from head to toe, is still a young bachelor, and it can easily be said of him that he’s turned gray in his youth, due to the years he’s been immersed in it and the attachment he has to it. He’s not a man of flesh and blood, though he couldn’t manage it if all the money he gave to our troops in the last war stuck to his bones. It seems he has a store in every wealthy house in the province; so when he ends up in one of them, he doesn’t get up so quickly. So, with these straits and those profits, the friend is bursting at the seams. Tell me this, Gildo, because you’ll remember that it was once said in Coteruco that the louse and poisoning brought by our neighbor’s son from the war, which eventually killed him, was the work of the ranch hand they gave him there. And there you have it how, sometimes, what chokes one makes another fat. It’s also known that this gentleman has a turkey. Towards my side, I ran into another old wolf from the Cave’s bed . He isn’t as strict with personnel as he was then, because years and bad tempers weigh him down and make him weak; but as far as his guts are concerned, he hasn’t changed one bit—I mean, with respect to ecclesiastical matters; because you must know that he always seemed to be a heretic in that respect. It turns out he’s been excommunicated now, and you can calculate how he’ll pray in the aftermath, although I think, given the route he was taking, he couldn’t stop at anything else… Here between the two of them: he too must have expected it, or the aspergus didn’t surprise him, because I’ve seen he ‘s still steadfast; and much better at the start. His name is Justo. So you can trust the names. Do you remember a measurer who spent a few days in our valley, flag here and flag there, marking mines for one person or another, mines that later turned out to be chestnut brown, and they said he would attack chickens whenever he wanted: according to some, for fun, and according to others, to lure them out of the coop and take them to his wife? Well, there he was with his glasses stuck in his plate… Man, since I’m lying about the plate, I must tell you that some little girls painted with a little jollilla on the bottom of a big one got quite a lot of praise from Don Cornelio’s youngest boy. The truth is, Gildo, that with how little they are and all that, they seem alive, and the boy understands it; but I wasn’t terribly surprised by the painting, because no matter how much the boy paints, he’s not capable of painting municipal accounts in the air like I am. Coming back to the point, you must know that, since there was so much there, there was also a marquis. By the way, for a marquis like that, he seemed pretty shabby to me, although this could be because, as far as people were talking, he’s in heat now; Not to mention that this matter of the ultimate territorial issue seems to have him quite worried , because, like me and other poor people, his uncultured nature has been revealed to him and the resulting contribution is going to break him. I could tell you about some more in this letter; but I don’t want to. lengthen it with more or less fine stitches. There were a lot of hungry lizards there, clinging to the manger more than to the esteem of the house, in my opinion ; long-legged and long-legged; jumpers, by trade, from other people’s gardens, some of them chastened and others repentant; I mean, Gildo, that they had already become parents, given over to the fat, untied woman; and single men with gray hair, living off the odd scrap behind the church… This much I could gather from the stories of both sides; I assure you, Gildo, that they were throwing them here and there in pure warfare, as if they were stabbing each other . The grapple seemed fine to me; but it would have seemed better if, out of all the blows that were given there, I had gotten at least one, to leave face up, the only man who had taken my peace with his presence that night. Because you must know, my son, that there was the deceitful rogue who shamed you, me, and all the exalted of Coteruco with slanderous deceptions in that book you know about. But the man must be very much in his element in those matters, because I didn’t have the consolation of being accused of a bad mistake where so many others came out with a serious fall. I was tempted, Gildo, to return to my attempts to embarrass him, because of the rage I felt; but Don Ciprianito had already told me on thousands of occasions that it was better for me to keep my mouth shut; and in case he spoke sense, I held back my anger. Tell me who you’re hanging around with, Gildo, and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me about the party, and I’ll paint you a saint; with that order, according to what I stipulate, look for the person who is following suit. A man, my son, must be caught in a good moon if you want to make a profit from him. Otherwise, whether you take him by the grain or by the grain, he’s the same: a pure fire; in other words, he sparkles and scintillates like a summer thunderstorm. Caught at his peak and in his prime, like that night, he doesn’t seem like his own kind, with respect to genius and other particulars; although when it comes to explanation, Gildo, I find him the same in all kinds of moons, except for his humor. I want to tell you that, whether he’s raging or triumphant, wherever he puts his tongue, he tastes the blister. Otherwise, he doesn’t bother anyone or gossip about anyone. That’s how I like people: the truth upfront and the words clear, without disrespect … and whoever falls, without calling them into question. This is always an advantage and, if necessary, a consolation. Furthermore, he is, by nature, as stingy with women as a demon; and it’s enough to see him, as I did, to realize that he doesn’t spit on the _melecina_ either; but if we’re going to talk about justice, this is the least a poor, helpless orphan like him can offer at his age. He also seemed to me to be loose-minded and quick-witted, because he spun a couplet there concerning a companion of his, who by the looks of it had thought of wintering in marriage, and I tell you he was doing quite well. Then go with the interested party, who let loose another one, he felt terrible sorrows on top of it, for he had no way out: I heard that the Government above had stipulated this one for him, as a conspirator in the couplet. In all this, I haven’t told you anything concerning the food, and the letter is coming to an end. As for the food, you must know that I thought it was better than the ballads, although, in terms of substance, it was no match for that beef thing, which you will remember. But man does not live by tricks and tricks alone, but also by good personal contact, eye-catching displays, and gratification of the mind, in relation to which there was a generous portion on the occasion I describe to you; I mean, with regard to people of appearance, table glitter, pompous flourishes, and elaborate readings. This, yes, was quite boastful of by both sides, every sip and every bite; so much so that I said to myself, without offending anyone: “I don’t know what would be left of those boasts if the fellow asked for so much more than the value of what you have packed.” I noticed that between praise and praise, a promise of another nocturnal festival was being gleaned from this one and that one; but I noticed, at the same time, that no one took it for granted: which I didn’t particularly like, because if something were remembered there, I might have assumed I was in on it. The truth is I thought those people, in regard to the case, were the kind of people who would be rude . The one who became a little more sympathetic, and as if he wanted to soften a little, was the wealthy man who owned the turkey. Whether he liked it or not, I have already asked for a letter of pledge for him, intending to give it to him on the day he orders his kitchen to be restored to an earthquake; something I will find out from the same servant who looks after the bird, by virtue of half a peseta I have offered him if he does his duty well, as I hope. I will speak to you at a suitable time about the outcome of this, with something to do with the masks of these days. In the meantime, you can relate in Coteruco whatever is most appropriate about this letter, because these osequios he receives from such wealthy and prominent people do your father some good . Don’t forget to tell Don Gonzalo. I suspect, Gildo, that he’s not the one to come out alive from a dinner like that. Not everyone was born with the wit and the gift of a nobleman, although it would be wrong for me to say so about this father of yours who esteems you. PATRICIO RIGÜELTA. AUGUST. BUCOLICAL MOUNTAIN. Chapter 2. Poor Uncle Luco Sarmientos couldn’t help it: mentioning the month of August was enough to send a shudder down his spine. And if we were to say that he hated it, good heavens; but the opposite was true. As he used to say: “There’s no need to speak ill of August in my presence regarding itself, or rather, its very month. It has no blemish in these particulars; and for the sake of enjoyment, I like it as much as the best of the year; _but_…” But the blessed man was excessively superstitious, and I even believe he had good reason to be so, if we agree, as we must , that it is very difficult not to see in a long and orderly series of coincidences the fatal fulfillment of a mysterious and inexorable law . Who isn’t somewhat superstitious in this sense? And he related the case in this way to his friend and neighbor, Mingo Ranales, in his sixties and stiff like himself. Between them, they had just knocked down a meadow of fifteen carts, of which the aforementioned had been cultivating, both his own and for rent, for years. They were preparing to have lunch in the shade cast by a cornfield over the edge of the aforementioned meadow. Uncle Luco was untying between his legs, spread at an acute angle over the freshly mown hay, the four corners of a homemade, shabby, and bisunto napkin that wrapped two pork rinds and as many cold pieces of cornbread. Mingo Ranales, seated at the womanizing table, seemed, for the moment, more attentive to the ration that awaited and was due to him than to the words and gestures of his compadre. Both had taken off the colodra they carried around their waists, clogged with grass—the colodra, that is, so that with their body movements they wouldn’t spill the water in which the slate was half-sunk—and they had carefully hidden the scythe among the damp and shady stalks of the cornfield, to protect it from the direct rays of the sun, which would upset his mouth. At the opposite end of the meadow, which resembled a piece of music paper, whose strictly parallel staves were the mountain ranges, or “lombíos,” that each dale had formed to the left of the reaper, a barefoot young woman, very full-bosomed, short-legged, broad-legged and broad-footed, and not at all bad-looking, was spreading the grass with the handle of a rake so that it might air quickly. Her upper eyelids were too bulging, and her lower mouth was somewhat droopy; but these defects did not add anything to the reputation she enjoyed in the town for a silly girl, nor to her inattentiveness. She even wore a twelve- quart handkerchief, adorned with red thread, which she wore over the kerchief on her round head. He had just arrived with the lunch his father was still holding, and in his attempt to scatter all the cuts while the two diners ate their portions, he scribbled on the ground with the stick, which peeled them off; occasionally he blew the grass in the air and, to make the task more bearable, he poured out songs, almost gushing, from the wide mouth of his mouth. throat, without a trace of harmony or measure. “Little breaths of my soul, olé yes, I know it well, and tell me who you remember when you’re alone.” And so on: sometimes in falsetto, and other times at the top of my lungs. The
voice, which was harsh and unsound, depending on the directions in which the singer’s abrupt movements placed it, was lost in the immense expanses of the harvest, gradually fading away, swept away by the breath of the rising breeze, or echoing in the nearby hillocks, and occasionally joining in the distance with other voices that seemed to reprimand her, or with the echoes of a manly neigh that seemed to whip her. Because at that hour the harvest was teeming with people. It was the month of harvest: in August, dew already falls at night, and the early mornings are used to mow before the sun absorbs the dew the scythe needs to properly feed the grass. The grass that had been cut the day before was in piles, or heaps, which were then broken up so that the sun, now warm, could finish drying it. So between the men who were cutting the last of the scythes, the women who were scattering them, and the people who were unpacking them, half the town was scattered about, filling the air with music and splashing cheerful notes of color on the immense tapestry of the countryside. This tapestry was a complete sample of greens, formed with geometric scraps of every imaginable shape, stitched together in the most whimsical disorder: the dry green of the unmown meadows; the straw of the newly mown; the juicy velvety, in a variety of shades, of the damp gullies; the dirty green of the hedges; the gray of the willows that festooned the gullies in places… even the lustrous black of the cornfields, somewhat less intense in the heights than in the hollows. As the sun rose, the northeast breeze intensified, and its waves carried a fragrance unknown to those who only know the fragrance of mown hay, through those false testimonies that industry raises in glass bottles with silk ribbons and twenty-five-color chromatics. It shook the corners of handkerchiefs and the folds of calico skirts; it swayed the grass of the prairies and the weak branches of the bushes; it swung the atoms in space between cascades of light and made the shining leaves of corn on the fields softly clash . Thus, if the sense of smell delighted in the aromas it saturates without becoming intoxicated, the eye and ear were no less delighted: the former, with the whims of the light sparking on the scattered bushes of enameled foliage, on the hidden cattails, and on the floating molecules, and swaying, in broad, iridescent waves, over the meadows and cornfields; and the ear, with other harmonies far sweeter and more harmonious than the music of female singers or the neighing of the reapers: the soft , continuous murmur of everything that moved in nature, like an endless lullaby of love, with its clicking kisses… Come on, much could be said about these things, which are never conventional and vain poetry around here, if there were time and space for it, and I knew how to say it. In the afternoon, new figures and different accessories will enter the picture , and the familiar ones will be employed in different tasks. The scattered and dry hay will crowd together, and the carts will arrive, at the lazy pace of the oxen, with their little bells smeared with mud to muffle the sound that attracts the horsefly that drives the beasts mad with its sharp sting; the carts, I say, with their high false armor, will be filled with grass, the improbable jumble being formed by the singular art of the girl who is heating it up above, and the work of the spirit and skill of the man who sends it to her from below… a matter, in truth, that stinks when portrayed on the fans and on the boxes of chocolates, and that, nevertheless, would leave the reader of these scratches enraptured, if I had the good fortune to point a finger at it. crops of my village… And now it occurs to me that the same thing could happen to him with what was described as with what was painted; for fear of which I leave it here suddenly and return to the beginning, where the two compadres await us “in sweet love and companionship.” Chapter 3. And I repeat that good old Uncle Luco Sarmientos expressed himself in the following way, while his compadre, now lying on his left elbow , brought the desired bacon to his mouth with his right hand to give it its first bite: “Well, as for what I was saying, regarding the case: we are already in August, aren’t we? And more than halfway through, to be exact; we are already in August… Current; the hardest part of the farming effort is over: breaking up the earth, getting it ready again, breaking it up again for sowing; the harvest, which is not weak in itself; the resallo, which is over there… and look at the cornfields here, a blessing of glory: they are blackening with pure health; you can no longer see the man inside them, the beard of the ear of corn pointing, and four fingers of a pennant outside the stalk. Everything that can be asked for in good faith. I like the herbage: it doesn’t tire the body, because it’s a few days’ work; in less than eight, as you know, I’ve filled the hayloft, almost for the quasi, with what I’m carrying from the meadows, except for this one, which will be sodden tomorrow, God willing… Are you getting it? –I’m telling you, without losing it. –Well, listen and forgive me. It’s already August: the cattle are at the ports; they won’t come until October, and on this side, no sleepless nights are worrying me. Item with item, I don’t owe a farthing that I have to pay this month; The third doesn’t fall until next year, and now I know where to get the amount of the contribution. I don’t do much with corn; but the same was true in July and the previous one, and it will be the same until the new corn, because the old corn was finished in May. “The last grain was brought down from my attic in February.” “Others brought it down in December, Mingo, and there’s a contributor in town who didn’t get twenty bushels. I’m going to say with this that it’s all the more in my favor for what concerns the present, if we were to look at things by their appearance and at first glance… Do you understand me correctly? ” “The best. ” “Current. Well, I’m still pointing out other advantages for the month of August… so you can see if I can properly balance the accounts in its favor… I am a man, as you know, more tempted by leisure than by trouble; I don’t feel the years weighing on me, nor do my eyes tire of letting a few gray hairs show whenever there’s an opportunity, without offending God or scandalizing people . I like to pick up a stick and put on my clean shirt with my Sunday best, as soon as a holiday hits anywhere that ‘s not too far away. Well, tell me if there’s another month in the year like August , for good pilgrimages and the best fairs, and at the doorstep, like the other guy who talks about it. Well, go with the rodero dog, and the good fig, for I’m going to get ready for it, and the najara apple , which tastes… like eighties, man, it’s so delicious! —And you have good fruit trees of every kind in the orchard! —Do I have them? A God-given beauty, my friend; and I feel a blow from the branches from the alley more than if someone had hit me in the back of my neck. And as I say to the boys more than four times: “Ask me at the door, damn it, and I’ll give it to you personally, without you stealing it from me maliciously, to the detriment of the tree and at the risk, for yourselves, of a taringa…” Because a man doesn’t have the patience in his pocket to use it when he needs it most. And to your point : well, give me the blackberry, while it’s already softening, and take it… ” “By stipulation, my friend: we’re up to date on everything you can tell me about that respectful one: the month has already been seen by that good face, which, by saying it’s good, I also say it’s truly good. Let’s move on to the next one. ” –I’m going to serve you, Mingo, and I tell you that even though I like this month as much as I do, there isn’t a quarter of an hour in the whole month without bitterness and fear. for me. –Why, man of God? –Because all the evils of my house have come in August, and not one has passed since I was born without some evil befalling me. That’s why I’m amazed that we’re already on the nineteenth, without the present year’s having arrived. –Are you expecting it as you say, Luco? –Like the morning sun, my friend. –Configurations of the imagination, and nothing more than configurations. –Count it by your fingers, so you can better understand it. It’s a miracle of God that I came into the world alive. –You take it from way back there. –It doesn’t begin any further than this. It’s not my fault. The struggle was so hard that while they were arguing about whether I should play along or not, or about whether I should or shouldn’t play along, my mother ran out of breath. Next week will make this sixty-two years, day by day… August twenty-third. I was raised poorly and by mercy, and they say I suffered all the illnesses that little creatures can suffer in the first five years of life. In all of them I was at death’s door, and they all struck me in August. When I became a boy, not a month of these went by without some serious setback for me or my house… In August my father fell because of a hole in the hayloft, and as a result he died a year later; in August the same misfortune befell my only remaining sister, which killed her of shame in a few hours, as is well known in the village… It truly seems as if an ill star is watching you so that as soon as you want to give yourself a shred of respite in that month, the gloom falls on you! “Something could very well lie in wait for it, my friend, in the fact that suspicion itself quickens a man, are you?” and it leads him, leads him, like the other one who says, to fall into the very mouth of the wolf, who didn’t remember him. “I don’t know what there is to the case, my friend, on the side you look at it; but more often than not, contrary to what you think, the bad blows have taken me suddenly… Here is this leg, knocked out ever since , that will not leave me as a liar of what I affirm… You know very well what happened. I had to go to Santander as if by post… I discussed it with you first. ” “There’s no need to relate the case, because I know it well. ” “The account of it is important here, to the matter at hand. The trip was motivated by an issue that interested me greatly, and it was believed that whether or not I arrived on time, with a debit, which fortunately was not needed later, depended on whether things turned out well or badly for my interests.” In these straits, I ventured to ask the Foreman for the horse, which, though not very spongy, was a stamina animal and rode well. The man agreed to the request, because, truth be told, he owed me some favor in the absence of my means; and at the break of dawn, I was already riding out of the corral. It had rained heavily the day before, and the stream below my house was somewhat fuller than usual . I took the paddle, which, as you know, is a bit of a backwater: there was about a foot and a half of water at full speed; the ground was as deep as the palm of your hand. So, sir, I gave the horse a spur and drew my knees in a little to keep my feet from getting wet in the spray, when I noticed the horse stop at the end of the paddle and begin to strike the water with one of the oars in front. “He wants a drink,” I said to myself, and I loosened the reins so he could drink. God forbid I had the slightest suspicion that the beast’s demon might be a drunkard! You know well that horses of this kind, as soon as they put their legs into the water, splash! They’re already wallowing in it. Well, the exact same thing happened there, my dear son: when I loosened the reins on the nag and she lay down at full speed in the middle of the river, it was the same thing. And he wasn’t content with that alone, which was already too much for me, since he had caught my right leg underneath, but the beast’s demon, seeing himself in his glory, began to kick his feet in the air and try to turn around. Make sure, my friend, that I would cry out to the true God there!… As if I thought the last thing had come to me. And so, I gave a cry and a wail that could be heard for two leagues around. As luck would have it, contrary to what I expected at that hour, a boy was nearby, the son of Antón Burciles, who was taking the cattle to the mountains. He heard me, came to my aid, grabbed the horse’s bridle, and made it rise with blows from the stake… and I tried to get up too, drenched and covered in water as I looked. Wriggle! Just like a rock. And the reason was nothing: the leg was broken, son, just like it sounds. People came to tell me about the boy, and they took me home as best they could… The twenty-fourth of August, my friend! Are you following along? I was in a splint for forty days; and between one and the next, nearly three months without letting go of the shins and wasting away what little I had. Did I ask for this misfortune? Did I go for her, what do you think? I remember the incident, my friend, and it wasn’t one I’d forget, nor one of those blinded by fear. Nor did the others, Mingo. One August I was widowed, at the height of my life, and in a couple of Augusts I lost my two sons, who were already helping me a lot with the farming. One broke my neck in the woods. The other was struck down by typhoid in four days. I still had that girl: she was born in August, so something good has come out of it. Don’t speak so badly of Narda, my friend; not because I took her from my parents, but because there are far worse ones. She’s a fool without a shred of sense. But honorable as she is, may God preserve her. That’s something to be seen of, my friend. Hereby, she is a fit of laughter, and gives me cause to be suspicious… What are you looking for at the corner, if I may ask? “Something to cool your throat, for the torrent, though cold, is calling for its own. “There is the jug, under that armful of grass. ” “Did you mean the jug, my friend? It must be a broth. ” “That won’t stop your sweat. Of what you desire, I can’t get a drop like on other days, and I don’t like tricks in the tavern.” God will improve the hours and there will be enough for everyone: you know very well that I don’t spit it out, nor, when I have it, do I hide it from my friends… That jug leaves you feeling bad, judging by the face you’re making!… Give it to me here, when there’s no sirloin… –There it goes, my friend, and without a damned thought for you to take out her true insides… And returning to the point, tell me what you were saying about the girl, if it can be told. I really like her and would like her well-being. –You also know what the consequence is. –Are you talking about Baldragas? –Just and fair. He doesn’t leave her a bit, nor does she lose sight of him. Every week he asks me for her; last night he repeated the solfa: since the empaye the day before yesterday, the lad has been a burning coal… and Narda almost less so. I’ll quarter her first! I’ve told him so. –We’re not at the same point on that, my friend; And you know very well that I’ve always spoken to you about this matter in this very vein. The flies are bothering you, and you’re shoving them in the eyes. You curse that boy, and every day you call him a worker. Because, that fellow does more than his duty. He works like hell, and there’s no job that can keep his arm… and I reckon that, by dint of seeing it and not tasting it, he’ll end up hating it… But you know the fault I’ve laid on him: here he fell like rain, being a child; and by serving one and all, he’s become what he is. All the houses are his, and he doesn’t sleep in any of them with good reason. He has known parents, because he claims so; but no one has seen them. Let the man be honest, the rest is rubbish. What other stains does he have? A very bad wine, the times he tastes it, which isn’t many. He smokes a fortune… I’ve never seen any other vice! When he has no tobacco, he burns the first thing he finds in his pipe: pickled watercress, if there’s nothing better… –He makes do with what he has, my friend, and that’s not a vice. –As for personal matters, he carries it in plain sight: it’s not worth three-quarters… In short, my friend, he’ll find me the money for tomorrow; and it’s God’s law that whoever asks for the torrendo must bring at least the block. –That’s already your cubicia, which could break your sack when your hands come out you’re counting on it. Doesn’t Ceto have another fault? Another, and a graver one. I know he’s an Augustinian: I heard it from his own mouth once. You said it: it only frightens you; and in cases like this, you sin against God, because one can’t believe in filthy things. And when Narda came to poke around with the rake handle near the feet of the two friends, they changed the conversation, taking as a pretext the cursed quality of the tobacco they were beginning to smoke in cigarettes. When Narda had scattered the last tufts of freshly cut grass, her father said to her: Take the water jug ​​and the napkin, and go home and look after the food. We stayed behind to turn the grass over again with the handle of the scythe before leaving. Narda obeyed without opening her lips, but without hurrying herself too much. And as he walked off into the corn, shaking his petticoat and singing songs, his father said to Mingo Ranales, I don’t know if to finish the conversation or to join it with another on the same subject, after a puff of smoke and a very loud belch: “It may be what you want, my friend; but there’s no one who can dislodge from my mind that that girl is going to do it to me, and she’s going to do it to me in August.” Chapter 4. The next day the sun reverberated over the field like fire at the mouth of a furnace, without a trace of cloud in the sky or hint of a breeze in the air. Great day for grass… and horseflies! In the morning Uncle Luco, with Narda’s help, had unraveled the grass from the meadow that had been mowed the day before, and when he turned it over around noon, it sounded so dry. At three in the afternoon, while the young woman was returning from the mill, throwing away her lungs because there was no flour dust in the house and it was necessary to knead early so that the workers could have supper at dusk, with a load of a bushel and a half left there in grain the day before, Uncle Luco entered the harvest with his own cart, on which sat, with her straw hat on her head and her red petticoat, the eldest granddaughter of Mingo Ranales, a precocious young woman who painted herself well enough to warm carts of grass. Between her mother, her grandfather, and Baldragas, they crowded the meadow, forming wide strips between which the cart had to be placed for loading. The oxen arrived early, for they were going at a pace that exceeded their owner’s taste. They placed a generous portion of food under their muzzles to keep them in place, often bending it over and shoving it down so that they could eat without lowering their heads. However, this attempt was only partially successful, because the heat made the flies swarm about in despair, and the tame beasts, their tails not enough to shake them off, charged headlong into the air with kicks and thrashing motions, causing the armor to creak, and even some of the poorly secured planks of the empty pole to shake and rattle . Just as the girl above began to truly show off her talents as a loader, artfully cementing the swell she was forming amidst the buffeting of the swell, That is to say, when the load was already half a fathom out of the cart on all sides, including the armor and the false tail, Uncle Luco said to Baldragas: “Hitch up my friend’s cart, and be here with him in a hurry, for you know what’s agreed. The two of you must leave the meadow together, so that we can pack you up at once and return for what’s left… and look, I’ll have to count your legs and minutes, to see how many you waste on the journey! ” Ceto, without a word, dropped the rake and, with his tailed pipe between his teeth, walked briskly out of the meadow. Narda’s father was right: the lad wasn’t worth three-quarters a barrel in a good sale. He was ugly, beefy, and short, but strong and healthy; He twisted his sandals, torn above the toes, and the legs of his tattered denim breeches, with blue patches and several unmended holes, did not reach his ankles. He secured them over his right shoulder with a selvedge suspender, over a shabby shirt without buttons. He wore his hair, which was somewhat woolly and brownish. He squinted a little with both eyes, and they were very white. His teeth, despite the vice that dominated him, were between his thick lips and frequently frolicking with his tongue. This, along with the protruding lower jaw and cheekbones, the sparkle of his small eyes, a certain shrinking of body that was habitual to him at the moment of great resolutions, and his mountainous liveliness, revealed a satyr-like nature , sensual and vigorous at the same time, built to withstand all the rigors of neglect and the elements. And it was true, as Uncle Luco affirmed, that since the last empaye, the lad had been more determined than ever to marry Narda, who, incidentally , made no attempt to get it out of his head. He couldn’t forget that: it was burned into his core. Uncle Luco, from the corral and perched on the cart, threw the forked sticks of grass into the gap in the hayloft; A worker would scoop up the inside of the anchovy and throw it to Mingo Ranales, who would throw it with his fork into the pile. Baldragas would then receive it and pass it to Narda, who would toss it where it was most needed to raise it equally. But her feet sink into the piles of grass and she would often stumble; and Narda, in running toward Ceto, would often fall, and Ceto, not having seen her (because the haystack is always pitch black), would fall on her as she ran toward Narda. It was difficult for him to find his footing on such spongy ground, and he would grab onto whatever he could; and many times, after getting up, in order to get back to the armful of hay, he would grab a piece from Narda, which cleared up the mistake, as his haste suggested ; but never with shouts that those present might mistake for something else. If Ceto had fallen, Narda would do what he had done when she had fallen, because the same thing happened with the tortilla in reverse. And so it went until Mingo Ranales threw the last protruding blow up, and they had to get down, letting themselves be sheep-like in the sink, Narda and Ceto, sweating profusely, red as ripe tomatoes, spitting scarlet, and pulling grass hairs even from their ears. “Shall I ask you again?” Ceto had asked him during their last fall. “As soon as possible,” Narda had replied, without letting him finish the question. And with that encouragement, he had gone that same night with the demand, for the seventh time, to Narda’s stubborn father, who, in addition to denying it, gave him a smack in the face. From that point on, she swore to the old man. Narda, for her part, had supported Ceto’s claims, and had also received the refusal with a slap in the face. By communicating these sad, mutual, and even painful impressions, barely received, he had strengthened his affection with new foundations and had probed her will with the outline of a plan. “The sooner the better,” she had replied, just as she had in the hayloft. And the outline arrived in a ready-made plan the next day, and Narda had also responded upon learning of the matter, which was already spurring on the urgent need, “the sooner the better.” He wasn’t so much bereft of supporters as of family; there was no lack of charitable lights with which to enlighten his understanding in matters that might touch his soul; he already knew how to tie the hands of the disheartened old man and make him pay in one fell swoop all that he owed her… And he was going to pay them very soon; sooner than even the clever ones who ridiculed his musings could imagine. “Go yoking my godfather’s cart.” I’d give him the cart… to take him to the gallows! “And be here in a flash.” If he didn’t expect another, he could wait for him sitting down! There was only one law there, the law of Narda: “the sooner the better”; and that law had to be fulfilled, and it would be fulfilled unless heaven and earth met, or the girl broke her word, which amounted to the same thing, and just as impossible “for the quasi.” In keeping with these thoughts, when Ceto entered the neighborhood, far from taking the alley that led to Mingo Ranales’s house, he took the opposite one that passed in front of Luco Sarmientos’s corral; but he didn’t reach it in one go, despite the haste with which he walked, but only after stopping for about half a quarter of an hour in another house, from whose back windows, on the attic floor and over the thick hedge that enclosed its garden, one could see even the doorway of Narda’s father. At the moment Ceto arrived home, she was in the kitchen, leaning against a table, on whose rough and rusty top was a kneading trough, into which the girl, with her arms rolled up to near her shoulders, was pouring flour, taking it with both hands from a sack, half-open at the mouth, that lay on the floor. She had arrived from the mill a moment before, and her face was still flushed from the fatigue of the journey, her headscarf pulled back and the knot at the corners half undone; the one around her rounded neck no more tidy, and her petticoat pulled up to near her knees. Ceto’s arrival did not surprise her in the least, because her heart gave it to her and she counted on her. So she continued pouring flour into the kneading trough, without replying to Ceto’s first words, until she had poured in all the flour she needed for the bread she was about to knead—the largest of all the year’s. Then she made a hole in the center and began to fill it with water. The servant, meanwhile , took a burning ember from the fire with his calloused hand and placed it in the snuff-pipe. He immediately approached Narda, just as she was plunging both arms into the dough. “If I were you,” he said to her, “I wouldn’t tire myself even with that… Let them lick their… ” “Let’s see if you can hold your hands still, Ceto! There are workers in the house, and they’re all good eaters. ” “Let them eat nails, Narda, they don’t deserve more…” But that’s not the point: I’m here for what I’m here for. ” “And do it with your hands!” See? “I’ve already dipped it in flour. ” “Well, add more flour and go to the post office… or leave it undone, which would be the wisest thing to do. Are you right, Narda? ” “I think I am. ” “Well, look what’s happening, it’s enough to put you to sleep. Your father’s cart is half-loaded; I came to yolk your godfather’s, so we can fly back there . I’m not thinking of such a thing…” Here a moment of silence: Narda stirring the dough, and Ceto sucking on his pipe. Suddenly she exclaimed: “I’ve already dipped it in flour!… This is pure mud! ” “Add more water,” he replied; and immediately he added, while she was half-turning the scale over the kneading trough with both hands: “There isn’t a living soul in the neighborhood; The whole world is in the harvest… If I delay in returning there, your father will get suspicious and will head home… and if he finds us together, Narda!… if he finds us together!… “Don’t beat around the bush, man!… By swearing at me all this time, my hand has already slipped, and this is a puddle. ” “What remedy do you have? Add more flour. ” “Yes, yes!… But at that rate… ” “Did you hear what I said, which is what matters most?… The neighborhood is dirty… completely dirty!… Are you getting the drift, Narda?… I say dirty… and without a living soul… The steps are broken, and everything is in its proper place… Did you hear correctly? ” “The Lord, swat me away!” “What lance are they sticking into you now? ” “I thickened the dough again, and I can’t stir it.” “Well, add more water, you thrush, and don’t worry about it… The other one should worry you much more… By the life of…! Are you sure of your thirteen, or aren’t you? ” “I am as sure as I was, Ceto; but you have to look at my little shit… ” “May lightning strike me!… Now you come out with this?… What frightens you?” “My father’s anger, Ceto, and the talk of the people… ” “Your father’s anger!” “Virgin of Mercy!” “What ails you, Nardona of the devil? ” “This is a sea, and bad times are already taking me in the trough!” “Add more flour, and you’ll see how the broth goes down… ” “God grant I’ll have enough of what’s left in the sack! ” “Your father’s anger!… You’ve got it right there.” So that he may take to task what he does not will, let us set the trap… and now he frightens you!… “Trap!… And what a trap it is! For if I did not swear so much, I would not be distressed, Ceto. ” “Are you going back on me, Narda? ” “That’s for sure, Ceto; for no one can beat me in my true word!” –Well, lose this opportunity and don’t catch another so soon. That’s why I’m wasting away… that’s why my blood boils to see how procrastinating you are, as if you had time to spare… –Oh, Most Holy Virgin of the same Anguish!… –By my grandmother’s life! What other effort consumes you, Narda? –What will consume me, Ceto? You can see it clearly!… The flour in the sack is gone!… There’s no other flour in the house, and this has remained as broth as it was!… I made it good! What will those people eat? What will my father say? And it’s your fault, Ceto, for hurrying me up so much! God’s punishment, Narda, for wasting time that’s needed for something better… Let them eat lightning… Well, if you’re here when your father comes and makes more of this mess, think about the shroud, because at least he’ll split you open. Narda then folded her huge body onto the kitchen bench, and tried to groan a little, hiding half her face in her hands, which she hadn’t remembered to wash. Are you sniffling now? Baldragas asked her in disgust, sitting down beside her and putting an arm around her neck. “Well,” replied the other, raising her face covered in paste, “let me throw in a couple of glarimucas at least: it seems to me the situation calls for it… and see if you’ll stay still! ” Throw in at least a pitchfork of them, Narda; but it would be better if you had thrown them away on foot… Look how time flies!… Look how your father could come!… “You’re not lying to me, Ceto, if I only remember how he’ll be!” “It’s been talked about before: he’ll start smoking and will touch the beams with his nails; but he’ll sleep through the night with his anger, and he’ll end up taking to his heels. He needs a man to help him: what does it matter if that man is me or someone else? We were already at this, Narda, and with everything and with that, you said quite firmly that “the sooner the better.” “And I’m telling you now… Keep those hands to yourself!… Be careful, it’s all a lot of nonsense!… But get your act together, Ceto. ” Ceto, with his snouts plastered all over his face, was flying with those reservations, because time was running out, running out… and Narda still hadn’t quite thrown herself into it. Half an hour passed like this: Ceto urging, now with words, now with pinches and gropes, and Narda willing and enduring, but without going any further; until, suddenly, they both raised their heads in an attitude of listening. They had heard a distant creaking, slow, disconcerted, and clamorous: the _singing_ of Uncle Luco’s cart. They knew it well! “What are you saying now?” asked Ceto, sitting up. Narda did the same. She looked at Ceto, at the kneading trough, and at the unlit fire , and at the empty sack, and she remembered the haystack, and the following slap, and many others besides, and she answered resolutely: “As soon as possible.” It was, indeed, the singing of Uncle Luco’s cart. When he noticed that time was passing and his friend’s friend hadn’t appeared at the gate of the harvest , he began to fear something that worried him and made him throw down the forked loads of grass at once and in any way. On the other hand, the flies didn’t let the oxen rest for a moment, and he feared every moment a serious damage would be done on that side. The task was therefore shortened as much as possible; and after the loader’s girl, who usually returns from the harvest, got off with the load for fear of a possible mishap; Uncle Luco placed at the very head of the oxen, to whom he addressed compliments in a sweet and affectionate accent as if they understood him, and I believe that they understood him, and the other workers leaned on both sides of the cart with the rakes and forks raised, in case it had to be supported if it swung too sharply, he began the return home, crossing the meadows at a good pace, and when they reached the neighborhood, the oxen pressed with wild eagerness against all the walls of the alleys, to scratch their hides and scare away the flies that riddled them, with which the load was combed a little more than was convenient ; but Uncle Luco did not notice it, because the closer he got to his house, the harder the bad ones hit him on the head thoughts. Upon reaching the corral, before pulling the cart up against the wall beneath the gap in the hayloft, he shouted for Narda; but no one answered. The door was ajar. He rushed toward it, madly; he entered the house with a bound… and loneliness within. On the kitchen table was the kneading trough overflowing with water and flour, clear, very clear, and under the table the empty sack; in the hearth, the embers were dying, but no sign of a piece of bread cooking. It smelled of the stench of Ceto’s pipe. “That scoundrel has done it to me!” was the first thing he said, putting his hands to his head. He went out to the corral, recounted what had happened, expressed his misgivings, and prayed to God that those listening would help him find the scoundrel who was preparing such a fate for him. “Keep a close eye on the cornfields!” he said to the people who were already preparing to help him in his search. “Where you see one moving, hit it, for they or others like them will be, because today there is no wind to deceive you. If there is an open house, ask there, and the same birds of the air you meet along the way.” The cart was left abandoned, and the people dispersed through the neighborhood. Uncle Luco went back into the house; he searched everything, even the hayloft and the stable… Silence and solitude everywhere. He knew that the neighbor across the street was very protective of Baldragas. He saw an open window in his house, and he decided to go there; but first he walked around the orchard and the adjoining cornfield. Nothing… He then ran to the neighbor’s house. The door was closed. He jumped over the gate into the back garden, faced the open window, listened for a moment, and heard someone speaking inside. He knocked, and the voices fell silent. He knocked again… and knocked… and knocked, until there appeared at the window… the hated mug of Baldragas ! “Where have you got it, scoundrel?” Uncle Luco asked him, hoarse with rage. “Where you can’t get it,” the questioned man replied, very coolly, leaning his elbows against the window. “I’ll have to see you in prison, you rascal!… And as for her, I ‘ll find her, no matter how hidden she may be… ” “Hosticia protects her, and you won’t see her until the priest covers us with holy water. ” “May the lightning strike you, you sons of a bitch! Thief!… heartless soul!” At this point, blows and thuds were heard, and a sort of din of jumbled songs were heard coming towards Sarmientos’s corral. Ceto looked out of the window and shouted to Uncle Luco: “The beasts are getting angry!” Without hearing anything else, Sarmientos flew towards his house, his head in the air, the goad in his hand and his mouth open. The horsefly had finally done it ! The oxen had sensed him upon them, and, mad with rage, they took to their heels, ran into the dry wall of the corral, the axle broke, and the cantilever overturned; and the beasts, increasingly maddened, continued dragging the pole along the alley, stirring up the pebbles on the ground and leaving, as a sign of their furious race, dusty heaps of load… Uncle Luco, sprawled in the middle of the alley, his hair standing on end and his arms raised, his eyes turning as often to his neighbor’s house as to the oxen that were disappearing from sight, cried out in a voice of terror and despair: “This is my fate! Say no now, my friend!… There’s no need to give it a second thought!… I expected it, because it had to come, and it was always the same! The plague of my house!… The ruin of my estate! The dishonor of my blood!… AUGUST!… AUGUST!… Chapter 5. A POOR MAN’S PENNY. He carried in his coat pocket the letter he had just received from the highest authority in the province. He was strongly urged on the need to make the most of his time; he was told of his “well -proven zeal,” his “proven activity,” and his “unfailing self-denial for the benefit of the needy.” He wasn’t quite sure he had given the aforementioned authority reason to affirm all these things so emphatically, although he was sure that he was as good a man and as sound of heart as the first person he met, and that he had deserved from His Lordship’s kindness, in the two unspeakable years that he had been governing the municipal administration of his town, the favor of two enforcement commissioners, with thirty reales in allowances, for insignificant debts of the City Council; but when His Lordship stated it in such a definitive manner… Furthermore, His Lordship also assumed that the mayor would already be well aware of the “horrendous cataclysm” that had “almost wiped off the face of the Spanish earth” two “of the richest, most beautiful and celebrated Andalusian provinces”; and the mayor didn’t know a thing about it, nor could he learn it in the vague, pompous and, for him, convoluted context of the office; nor did he believe that it was appropriate for a person elevated to authority to declare himself _officially_ ignorant of events that should be well known throughout the world; And since the last Bulletins received at the Town Hall were still unfinished and in the secretary’s possession, he went to the priest to demand details that would be included in the proceedings; but the priest, who at that moment was hurrying to hear the confession of a dying parishioner, could only give him the vaguest notions of both the causes and the effects of the cataclysm mentioned by the governor. Nor was the doctor, whom the mayor went to as soon as he left the priest, very generous with his information, because he was going, riding at full speed on his shaggy gray horse, to visit a seriously ill patient. Fortunately, the mayor was not one to be foolish ; and since this was the case, he believed he had captured the argument for the matter in the air, and even managed to lock away in the pocket of his memory a good store of “central fires”, “geological phenomena”, ” subterranean landslides”, “compressed gases” and other terms that seemed like pearls to him, and more than enough to immediately carry out the task that His Lordship was pleased to entrust to “his well-proven zeal, accredited activity”, etc., etc. Because “the bottom line, in short”, was, for him, that there were many needy of bread and shelter, “motivated by catechism”, and that, for the love of God, alms had to be asked from door to door for them. The alms were to be collected, and it was the responsibility of someone who knew more than he to ensure that they reached the unfortunates. And he took the stick in one hand; He stuffed his office into his pocket with the other and set out, with the soundest of intentions, to explore the miserable, short, and hidden spot in the mountains, house by house. Thus he arrived at the house of a very special friend, and also a godfather. “You’ll know why I’ve come,” he said to him in the porch, where he found him rigging a hawser for the pole of his cart. “I really don’t suspect,” replied the other. “Well, it’s motivated by catechism. ” “Cate… what? ” “Cate… nothing, man: there are many poor, sick, and needy people to help. ” “Where? ” “In the face of the finest of Andalusia. ” “Plague, perhaps? ” “Much worse: catechism. ” “Cateckling!… You already said it; but what is it?” “Central game, it seems; earthquake in the resulting one.” –Earthquake, you say? –Just as you hear it. That’s scary. Bang, bang! Down with a house. Bang, bang!… Half a dozen of them to the ground. A crash here!… The church to the ground. A crash there!… The City Hall. –And the people, man? –The people, according to their respective fate. Some buried alive; others dying of hunger, with only the clothes on their backs, out in the open. –And that’s an earthquake? –A tremor of the earth itself. –You say an earthquake? I find it hard to believe. –The result is obvious. –I don’t deny it; but I’d take the case as a high-flying juriacan: higher winds… –Clear catechism; don’t tire yourself: cost on paper; pure earthquake. –It will cost; But if it wasn’t well noticed by the people… So don’t tell me that this ground I’m walking on, that this living rock that sticks out right here through the clay of the portal, that mountain over there in front of me… –It’s all nonsense, son; it’s all nonsense, apparently, as soon as the logical philomenon moves. –What? –The underground precipice. –What’s that? –The central game. –Make it clearer, if you like. –Well, the catechism. –You’re leaving me as I was. Where do those things move? –Below, way below! Deep inside, way deep! Boom! this way. Boom! that way… until, motivated by the retingle, everything above comes crashing down. –You know a lot, from what I see, and you explain it quite clearly; but even so , I also tell you now that it’s pure nonsense. –As you see fit; but for what I’m here for, I’m here for what I’m here for. –You decide. “Well, I say I’ve come to ask, for the charity of God and the mandate that this office requires from the competent authority, a handout for the unfortunates who wander through those lands without bread and shelter, from the Holy Empire itself. ” “That’s another conversation, and it seems quite appropriate. Today for you, tomorrow for me. ” “Exactly. And how much are you asking for? ” “According to what you ask. ” “The most you can give me. ” “What did the others give you?” ” I can fit it all in my closed fist. If only a good wish were worth it!” “That’s what I say. ” “Will you give half a peseta? ” “Throw in a fortune! Do you think I have any money? ” “Can you handle a real? ” “Or even half a real. ” “A big dog… ” “Don’t be so greedy, man!” ” Well, a small dog. ” “If there isn’t one at home!” “You know it well. It’s been a month and a half since I last saw the king because of the coin.” The last ones I had were taken by the collector for the last third… because that’s what he was saving them for… We eat from what’s hanging, and thank goodness there’s a little of it. Do you want a share? I offer it from my heart. “I know it perfectly well. But you want it with a ring, and it must be ringing, even if it’s a little. ” “Well, I don’t have that at present… nor do I suspect you’ll find it anywhere. When I sell the heifer, to pay with the profits, if any, the rents to the owner of it and of the few lands I work, from the surplus I’ll give you what I can, even if I eat less that day. ” “And you won’t give more for this?” “In ring, no more than that, and a good will for tomorrow. ” “Well, I’ll put that down for you, for whatever it is. And I guarantee it, because I know him well; and furthermore, I offer for it, for the pages of _Charitas_, these lines that I value, if they do not seem dear to my friend Matheu, at _a small dog_, a coin that the mayor was already content with. Chapter 6. CUTRES The drawing was my property, by spontaneous and undeserved generosity of the artist, as stated and remains in the dedication at the bottom, in his own hand; which, in itself, already gave it, in my heart of gratitude, an exceptional value. But as great as this value was, even greater seemed to me the absolute value of the painting, considered as a work of art and as the first and palpable revelation, in my eyes, of the talents of the artist, a young man from Santander, in whom the delicate feeling for his native land has not been dulled nor will ever be dulled by the constant contact with the vulgar jargon of arguments on official paper; as the varnishes of Madrid life will not penetrate the epidermis of its Campoo stock. I was pleased to think this about the artist in the presence of his painting, and to believe it wholeheartedly, because, for me, it is undeniable that certain delicacies of style cannot be had without an exquisite tuning of the feeling of the thing being treated; I inquired, as a layman, the procedures followed by the draftsman to achieve those effects of truth and beauty in his work; I admired as much the accuracy of the composition as the skill of the hand executing the thought; I rejoiced in making with my own hand quick excursions into the field of mountain art; I counted and classified the artists by order of genre and even by age; from such various, independent and rich manifestations, a common tendency, a perfect final unity, as is evident in the manufacture of the gallant monument with each and every one of the parts that comprise it and that seemed so different from each other, scattered and in the hands of the craftsmen who are giving them the form determined by the architect; the idea of ​​the _school_, the outline of the _region_, crept through this crack ; something of what may be illusory in these ideas, due to racial spirit or patriotic intoxication; much of what, although unrealizable, is good about the ailment, due to how fruitful it is in noble enterprises and generous _local_ efforts, which, in the end, shine for the benefit and glory of the common homeland… in short, I was even weighing and measuring the painting, which _was now mine_, remembering places and spaces, to choose the most suitable one to hang it, when I was told that “a man from there” was asking for me. It should be noted that these “men from there” always arrive at my house, and they arrive every day since my youth at the least opportune time and on the least opportune occasions for me to patiently understand the menial “particulars” that remove them from the place: usually “files” that “do not run” in these offices; differences over interests with the neighbor; lawsuits on appeal to the court of first instance; letters of recommendation for Priest John of the Indies, or for the Prince of the Apostles himself, gatekeeper of heavenly glory, “motivating the youth who wanders the world” and wishes to improve his fortune, or for “the deceased who died” the day before and could, “with good effort,” be freed from the pains of purgatory; often, because the harvest has been bad, the forgiveness of the rent or the advance “to overcome the greatest difficulty at present”; the bail for this or the advice for that, and so on, in that order, down to the little birds in the air or the horns of the moon, because, blessed by God, they don’t stop at nothing, when it comes to asking for the feasible and the impossible. In all these cases, endless reports and interminable digressions; the contentious points, extracted by me with pincers; spit on the ground, three pounds of ground mud stretched by stamping on the oilcloth, badly damaged, moreover, by the tacks of the armored boots; and a thick and suffocating smoke of the worst tobacco that the Estancas Directorate can supply, deliberately made to give it the worst… In short, these blessed people cost me a sense, in every respect, who, for the sake of finishing and “completion,” don’t thank me so much… Thank you, did you say? Good and fat! Thank goodness I don’t get an answer from a certain friend to whom I was praising the sweat and anguish it had cost me, over two months of struggle, to clarify a right of his that was unknown to a certain official center: “If you, when meddling in what doesn’t concern you, knew how to type properly, the result would have been sooner… and perhaps better.” And I had earned it with costs, and I had served him at his insistence and for free… and with money to spare! Really: there’s enough to beat them, very often. And even so, I suffer and esteem—what esteem? I love those “men over there,” for the most mangy of whom I wrap my blanket around my arm every hour, to deal with the wolf himself, as if the sheep were from my flock, blood from my veins, or fiber from my own flesh; and I frequent offices, and I write letters, and I bother friends, and I bore the most patient and esteemed of them all—I who have never “opened” a case of my own in any State center, nor, in all my life, said good morning to the most lowly civil servant on matters pertaining to me! Let it be known that I can’t help it, and let’s get to the point. I asked who the man was who was looking for me, and they answered, “a very obscure one,” whose name—they didn’t know if it was Blas or Juan, Roque or Gómez, because the man didn’t make himself understood. I didn’t understand from these indications. I asked for some more, and a little while later they gave me these others : “He says he’s Cutres . Cutres! Cutres in the city!” It had been at least twenty years since Cutres had set foot there. What river had overflowed its banks, or what mountain had sprung up in the place? Because, given the background of Cutres, and acquaintances as I knew them, would have needed a true cataclysm to make him come out of his shriveled coffins. In
any case, the announced visit was enough to make my flesh tremble; because Cutres was one of the men “over there” who gave me the most to do. He always had two or three cases pending, two petty offense trials “for next Saturday,” and as many on appeal; and all this because Cutres was the most stubborn man ever born; because of his damned determination to speak everything himself , after making things up to his liking in his stubborn brain. He heard or dreamed the insult, the complaint, or the advice; he lowered his shaggy head, furrowed his gray brows, closed his lifeless eyes, squeezing them shut… and there came that discharge of hoarse, bewildered, and ferocious sounds, untranslatable into ideas or words. He was called to reason with temperate reflections to explain the case, so that he would at least listen. Worse. The interruptions blinded him more, and the buzzing of his incessant and confused chatter reached the roar of a torrent at the bottom of a chasm. From time to time, a bang, a detonation, as if something had exploded inside. It was an interjection, or a shameless act, or an insult: “Garlic!… Your mother!… Thief!… Get out the blankets!” The only thing that could be clearly understood in his tremendous outbursts; and since there were witnesses, and he didn’t listen to anyone or want to “go back on what he said,” he demanded “the following,” and in verbal judgment “next Saturday.” In this vein, his business dealings with the Municipality or the Treasury; and the record was ready… and I’d be with the little owl the next day, verbally if I was near him, or, if in the city, by mail, in letters like letters that looked like they were written by his goddaughter, on ivory-colored paper, and the letter sealed with chewed bread. And this man had been cheerful and friendly, a singer and dancer, the joy of the place!… until the “carting” ended. From then on, and for that reason alone, he became elusive, gloomy, and unpleasant, and declared himself at implacable war with all of humanity. The world no longer worked for him, nor were the things that happened valid or did they produce rights for anyone. Everything was outside the law, even time, considered by Cutres as a more or less long “loose” that would have its end sooner or later, when it arrived, he would return to yoking… and go with your stuff along the same old path. But the release lasted and lasted… and lasted, and the weight of the years that passed, even though illegal, was breaking his spirit, wrinkling his skin and bending his shoulders. He had blind and tenacious faith in the return of the waters to the abandoned channel; but when would that happen? At the rate his frame, which had once been made of wild oak, was crumbling , when it came time to yolk and prepare the mostela again, would he have the guts to lift it onto the cart? And this made him impatient and consumed him, and with it, he was becoming, hour by hour, more ferocious and unbearable. At the time of asking about me, he had three files lying dormant in their respective centers; files forged in his own way based on the dreamed-up abuses of the municipality over there. They had deliberately and charitably allowed themselves to be put to sleep, because the least inappropriate of them all contained enough rudeness and cruelty to give the trial judge cause for contempt of court in the matter . Cutres didn’t want to see it that way; and in his single-minded determination to see the mayor in Ceuta, and the governor who “covered up for him” in jail , he had set me up to fight fifty times, verbally and in writing, supposing me at first lukewarm in protecting him and, finally , an accomplice and concealer of “the others,” for whatever might stick to me, “if it came to that.” Was there or was there not something that made my flesh tremble to know that Cutres was in the city, and at the door of my house, determined to meet me? I ordered him to be brought in; and he came in, little by little, at the pace of an ox, Marking each tread of his enormous boots with two taps; in his hand a short, fire-scored stick; dressed in brown cloth and wearing a cheesecloth shirt, in the fashion of thirty-five years earlier. He put the unlit end of the cigar he held between his bruised lips in a waistcoat pocket to bid me good morning, without even thinking of uncovering his head; and in the manner already described, from the very doorway where he remained standing, he fired the volley at me; but, to be honest, not with heavy artillery. Even so, the room was filled with noise, and two panes of glass, unsecured in their shrouds, rattled. I didn’t understand a word he said, because there was no insult, no interjection, no shame; which was appreciated, and I thanked him for it. Looking at him and admiring him, taking pleasure in contemplating his original and picturesque image, I let him vent as he pleased; and when he finally opened his eyes and could look at me and see me, with expressive gestures and signs, I invited him to come forward and sit near me. He came and sat down, little by little, very little by little, and at the side of the armchair pushed against the wall, almost under a telephone set, to be exact. How worn out the poor man was! How old, how stiff and wrinkled, and how he smelled of kitchen smoke, the signs of which were the goats that could be seen on his lean shins beneath the bells of his trouser legs! As he sat thus, the painting we were discussing was in front of him, very close, placed on a chair, just as I had placed it so I could contemplate it to my liking. Thinking of a way to ward off that storm that had suddenly come upon me, in the brief space of silence during which my man had his eyes fixed on the painting, and I was moving mine from the painting to him and from him to the painting, I remembered that in the wild and irrational nature of Cutres there was a sensitive chord , attuned to common sense and human language, and I tried to strike it, to distract him a little from the matter that had brought him out of the house, on foot and on foot, by the marks of the white mud on his boots, and because I was quite certain that his body was not moving in any other way, either in an ox-cart… The train?… First the thorn bushman, “dragged by his legs, or the gallows itself.” “What do you think of this?” I said, running the chair on which the painting was standing closer to him . The man, who, though looking at him, couldn’t see him, shrugged his shoulders in reply. I was counting on that, and I added: “Take a good look at it; there’s something there that interests you. ” “Me?” he exclaimed, half in admiration and half in disdain. “You.” He shrugged his shoulders again, and I insisted again that he look closely, pushing the picture in front of his eyes. “Like a broken bridge,” he said at last, after looking at the drawing with his head half-closed, now from one side, now from the other, his mouth wide open and his lips forming funnels. “And if he doesn’t swear by it,” he added gloomily, “then he isn’t. What’s the matter with me ? Damn it!” With those penurcas with which you stink up the house over there, and the one over here, from what I see, you’ll be spending fortunes that would have been better spent salvaging the outraged estate of a poor man like me. You cheapskates! I’ll come and see how it goes, damn it! And that’s all. The savage was getting away, he was getting away on the hills of his own accord if I didn’t hurry up and stop him. “Look here, you damn cheapskates, stubborn and obstinate,” I said , pointing at him with my finger, “do you see this little figure of a man, stuck in a big O? ” “You may see it,” he replied, looking again as before. “Well, it’s the image of a countryman. ” “Where is that from, cheapskates?” “From the face, the furry cap, the pipe, the cape… ” “From the… garlic!” Where are the zajones? Where are the albarcas with the slitted peak? Where are the black slippers with buttons? –I’ll give you another one! Don’t you see this is a portrait from the waist up? –And where have you seen Campurrianos who don’t have anything from the waist down, Cumbersome? And have I ever seen Cumbersome in my life!… Garlic! My man was already nailed. I explained to him, as best I could, what a half-length portrait of a man was, who had him perfectly in his sights, without Cutres falling off his donkey, of course, and I pointed out another detail of the painting. “What you think is a broken bridge is a piece of a famous church that is in Cervatos, near Reinosa. ” “Reinosa!” he exclaimed, shuddering. “Yes, sir,” I added, digging deeper into the open wound: “Reinosa. All these rocks, and these somewhat cloudy mountains, and this old tree trunk… and even these bootees that bathe in this pool, are things from over there, from Reinosa; and hidden in these folds of the mountains lies the royal road that you have trodden so often.” “Thirty-two years ago,” he exclaimed in a bellow that resounded throughout the house, “more or less, since my feet have set foot on him from Corrales onward!… Can one live like this? Isn’t it time things changed? Gar! Wasted thieves!” I tempered his anger somewhat, because it wasn’t convenient for me to let him get carried away with it on the ground I already had him on; and with the help of certain touches whose positive effect I knew from experience in dealing with him, I gently steered him along the path I intended, certain of hearing what he had already told me a hundred times, but also of thereby diverting him from the business of the proceedings; and yet I was still interested in why he had come to discuss them head-to-head with me in the city. “That was the Indies, the pure, shabby Indies!” he went on to say to me, pushing his hat back, his face somber, both hands on the charred club. “I made my living as a young man, with my father’s wagon: I earned a fortune from him going back and forth… gosh! what they call a fortune. I got married in due time: the wife brought some of her own money, I had a little from my father; we found someone who would rent us the rest, and like two boys, gosh! like two boys we ended up in the hunt… Two cows, a pair of Tudanca cows, the best of the fair… The master paid forty doubloons! That money was enough to buy a three-deck ship. The current pair, thirty doubloons, less than more.” The spoked cart that runs now was unknown : the Penaos cart, which cost an ounce, or the wooden rodal that didn’t cost more than four duros: the cart, because of its narrow rim, ate up the profits in pork loin; the wooden rodal, with a false rim, yielded a better return, and that was the custom among the most, except for the sailors of Bezana and around there, who got into the luxuries of gauged carts, double pairs, blankets and harnesses that had to do with it, chickens and sausages in the releases; and that’s how they went out to the settlement, cheapskates, when things stopped: naked and exposed to the elements of the royal road, which no longer yielded a _li_. We, just in case, always keep a fifth for the soul, like the other one who said… To what I was saying: the woman whom God has forgiven was an arm of the sea, the same with children as before having them; in such a way that, when I went to the port, the fault was not known at home, because she rowed for both of us and arranged for sixteen. At each stroke, eight or twelve wagons left the place, in each company. One of them, the most resourceful and astute of pen, kept the government, with voice and command, for the loading in Reinosa and the collection of the waybill in Santander. I was always one of these, shabby ones, always, a loyal subject and helper in accounts of retaliation. Well, sir, two days of review at the pole and the rod; who fixes this trick; who puts this executioner; that the awning’s cane, and the soap dish in its place; the time has come; and the soap to the soap dish, and the feed sticks hanging from the rear frames, and the feed bag inside… and pull it over, you cheapskates, with the couple in blankets, the axle well soaped by the heater, so that it wouldn’t sing, because if it started to sing, the road workers would fine… they would fine, damn it! they would fine… and
with great care and reason, cheapskates! that to sing to that cart Such a pity of them, it would be impossible to live in the transient neighborhoods… Holy Christ of my father, how that royal road was in those days of the pomp of the cart-making! The sudden sight of it must have dazzled Cutres, because at the mention of it he raised both his big hands to his eyes, letting the stick fall between his legs; and thus he remained in the dark for a good while, snorting like a boar and stammering words I didn’t understand. “I tell you,” he continued, straightening up and taking up his club again, “that there were times when one didn’t know how to get into the line of the line when going down to the road, or when leaving the release, because there wasn’t a clearing to get into. That was the infinity of carts on both sides, one giving a rosary, and another returning.” What I felt when I saw that bustle… and when I was so worried, yes, sir, because it was anguish: the air was like heated soap, from so many axes, with its hint, too, of tavern steam … What I felt then is beyond words . It was the same as seeing me there, you had me with your daughter by the shoulders, my arms above her, then hanging forward; and in a jingle, in a jingle, as the couple walked and right next to the cart… A pure whipping boy, indeed, because he didn’t keep his mouth shut during the best part of the journey. The other companions, as I started out, gradually drew near ; and this one now and that one later, they all ended up singing along with me. Off! Garlic!… and be it known to you, in case you don’t know, that I was always and everywhere the same back then. I never knew until later what black evil meant, like this one that has been consuming me and finishing me off badly, because of the mischief of other men who have turned everything upside down in the affairs of this earth… May lightning strike you, you scoundrels! By the kidneys, garlic! Seeing him tremble with rage and with his eyes almost closed, sure signs of his evil intentions to set off again into the hills of his barbarism, I stopped him quickly, but with the utmost care so as not to infuriate him further. “Let’s,” I said, “get back to what we were talking about, and which I so enjoy hearing from you. When I’m done with this, I’ll help you throw a good load of lightning and thunder on those scoundrels who deserve it.” You were already on the main road, dressed like a tinkerer and singing like a goldfinch, between two rows of carts with no beginning or end, smelling of warmed soap and the aroma of taverns. And what else? “The first release,” Cutres continued, returning docilely, like an ox, to the road toward which I was urging him, “was in Somahoz. There, the bread and wine to accompany the torrent you carried from home. The dream, on top of the sack. The tavern by the gate where you left your estate in order, described as carters; those in the navy, treating themselves like royalty; the rest, like poverty; and the most sensible, managing their poverty in the frying pan of their property, right there on the gate, or starving the peasant to death with bread and a knife. I’ve always been one of those, damn it! always, save for one or two instances, and so it wouldn’t be said, in this commitment or in the one beyond… Because there were plenty of reasons to ruin the best of men there… Where aren’t there, you cheapskates ? Saint Peter sinned by denying Christ, and the most just man falls seven times, even if he holds on tight… With time to spare and the nights being long, there was everything in the loose games, even briscas at a peseta a game, which was all there could be; and with the cards and the wine being so expensive, it’s not too surprising that once in a while a brawl broke out among the most spirited, and the final blow was lit up with a blow from a club… But I repeat that these unpleasantries were countless; and it can be sworn that not a single knife was ever seen in them. Never from God! Always the goddaughter! And in good time I say it, that I broke more than four in the ribs of some and others, for protecting a companion: never because of me. Now, if when meeting our cart on the road, I paint the case, with that of the _litos_ of Guelna, who had what is called the habit of beating, would call one insulting or shameless, “Gee!” Things were different now, because it was not in one’s power to restrain oneself; and even good breeding obliged one to vent one’s ahijá first and foremost. But this, because it was not intended and very temporary in itself, I do not consider it to be the troubles of the wagon-driver. Already ascending the Hoces, the first release of the midday was in Santolaya, and the second, at night, in Lantueno. At dawn the following day, in Reinosa. Ready shot and at the current price, to load. So many arrobas in so many carts; eighty or ninety of them at the most, from a pair. The amount was stipulated in the _guide_, which I took with me, as well as the monetary aid given to each member of the company, for the due reduction of the total in Santander, and we returned down the varga by the same passes that had been counted up the varga. Without further ado, let’s go! Without further ado… and pull, pull, like silk to the door of the house, like the other one who said; let’s go, to the Stream… There one released, and the pair home, so that the poor animals wouldn’t get carried away… Let’s go! because they are that way: more sensitive and loyal than men themselves. With that standing and that recreation, we returned to the main road: the beasts as happy as can be, and I behind with the mustela on my back: the ration of the poor animals for what they still had to struggle with. To yoke on the fly, and forward again, you poor things! always forward. Pull, pull, Pedroga and Puente Arce there, a release in Bezana at night, and at daybreak in Santander, to unload as soon as the warehouses opened. There goes the load, this is the _guide_, it was in order, here comes the stipend, which was delivered to me alone, along the way and walking the distribution was made in the air, each one was given his due; and at nightfall at home, the cart in the doorway, the couple in the courtyard and well trilled, and at the top of the chest, by the woman’s own hand, the three and four napoliones of nineteen that one delivered to her upon arrival, clean and healthy, like the suns themselves, garlic!… Without further ado. Sometimes the load left Santander for some point on the way, as it left from _vena_ in Requejá for the ironworks of Portolín or Montesclaros going upstream; and this was even more important to the resulting increase in wealth. But the other thing was certain, which in itself could have benefited a great deal, as I benefited it, wow! I benefited it, because I knew how; I insisted on doing it, and I got away with it, cheapskates! I got away with it. Motivated by the yards here that were loaded up, no pair could drag, without breaking the bank, more than eighty arrobas: at most ninety. Three beasts were another story. Cheapskates! Let’s go look for the third, I said to myself, awake and dreaming. And think that you think and grab that you grab, and asking for the bit that I was missing, I bought the _sacaízo_. Wow! From that day on, one hundred twenty, one hundred thirty, even one hundred and forty arrobas… like silk, and the seven and eight duros net, at the top of the chest, every trip, a short trip… I say short, garlic! because ever since I had _sacaízo_, I wasn’t content with Reinosa, and I was carrying from Alar itself. Nine days round trip, and two hundred rials free, what a minimum. It was a pleasure, cheapskates, what a pleasure, garlic!… But, man, what a single beast in front of a team and pulling with it up the pole! It’s worth more than another pair with its corresponding cart. And what sacaízos I always had, the Virgin of Soledá help me! The last one in particular, the last one, garlic! the last one was the astonishment of the cart. _Tasugo_ was hairy, and a little thick-coated; But with the will, the width, and the firmness of oars!… The ropes would get around the neck of this arm when it pulled uphill. What a beast to pull! Damn! With the hoof and the chains rattling. The chains, lousy! Because I never wanted the quarter-stays, which might have rotted and left you empty-handed on the most demanding yardarm… Damn! Always chains, like a wise man; and because I am one, I always had them in your possession. ready all the wagoner’s gear… Once I was tempted by cubicia and I made it to Palencia. It took me fifteen days to go and come back: I got the calculation wrong, and I got no further. Try yours, the saying goes, and I stayed with mine, on the beaten path… With mine… Garlic! Mine until they stole it from me, you cheapskates! Those red-haired thieves, protected by bad Spaniards from here… May lightning strike them, cheapskates! May lightning strike them, amen, and by the kidneys, garlic!… I say it and I mean it, cheapskates! And it clearly showed that the big man wasn’t lying, judging by the way he banged the ground with his club and dazzled his eyes and twisted around in his chair. Tell him he was right before he gave me a serious upset; And after somewhat calming his anger, at my renewed urging he continued to relate his misfortunes to me in these terms: “The wagon trade having died as soon as the train was really running, a thing which I could not believe even when I saw it, I was not able to manage anything at home, nor could I think of where to earn a peseta… the peseta, you shabby ones! The peseta that is needed in the poor man’s coffers for the third that falls, for the new garment, for the half- sole… garlic! for what the earth itself does not provide, no matter how much one digs into it. To top it off, the carriage pairs, since there were no longer any, lowered themselves terribly, and I had to sell for eighty what had cost me a hundred and more. Out of this poverty I paid for the pledges I was in; And if I didn’t stay in the corner, like the sailors, it was because I never threw, like them, all my bacon into the pot in one fell swoop. But broken, that’s by the middle of the axis, more than less… Damn! He brought out the song, he brought out the jolt, and he brought out the happy life. Night fell suddenly for me, and it hasn’t returned to dawn until this hour… Nor will it dawn, you scoundrels, nor will it dawn until things return where they ought to return… And they will return, damn it! because it is the law, and God is in heaven to do justice. _Long pause_. The blow was fatal, believe it or not, for me and for many, damn it! for many who wept for him and weep for him as I do. There were men among them… that ‘s what it means to hurt the guts… and that’s what it means to be a man, damn it!… he was from Campurria and a friend of mine, a great wagon driver, even on the plains: from Alar to Reinosa. They called him _Neles_, because he was called Nel, like me Cutres, because of this habit I always had of saying it so often, without knowing why or being able to remedy it. I say his name was Neles, and perhaps you know it, because the case was even in the papers. Well, this man from Campurria became so doubtful and afraid of the brand new train that one night it met him back in his homeland, and, daughter in hand, insisted on giving it a go. The man, of course, ended up like a cake there, what is called a cake, damn it! but the will was seen, and death with honor: shabby, with many men like him, let’s see if flies would get into us at once… But my grandmother!… The days passed, and from bad to worse. In these dark depths, nothing came out right for me, and I saw everything upside down, as Pateta fixed it for me, the culmination of the work of the heretics of the train. My wife died, my children married, and I was left alone at home, alone in the place, and quite alone in the whole world. What did I have to do or what did I have to do with all the things about him? Other thoughts, other feelings of people, another way of dressing, another way of wearing shoes, another way of weighing, another way of measuring… garlic! even money was another thing overnight. There are those _decimas_, which I could never understand. Who brought them? What good are they, if not to drive me crazy with each peseta they exchange for me? Damn! Me, Cutres, who was a breeze at calculating quarter rials… Well, no rials, no quarters… no accounts to calculate, damn! if it isn’t what the heartless people who are to blame for what’s happening back then have to give to God… To expand a bit, even if I’d lower myself in the matter, I sent a post last month with an iron to the Corrales, the work of a gentleman with your namesake, as far as I know, quite trite in appearance and partly brilliant, truth be told. It’s been twenty-five long years, Cutres! since I last set foot on that road, from the town onwards. Damn! I would never have fallen for it. in the temptation to return to pisale! What loneliness they had! What a baseless village that was, one that had never been seen there before! And those long gates, like those of yesteryear, crumbling to the ground; and the sticky taverns, almost nothing like that, with nettles on the closed door, and fences and nettles on the window bars… tawdry! It was embarrassing to look at it; and to avoid seeing such disgraces, I got into the cart, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until the Corrales… While there, he passed by… he himself, damn it! with a croak, and a croak, and a fanciful air… damn it! just as if the land he was treading on were his and not ours… Tawdry! If even the best of the curses I heaped on him fell on him, he wouldn’t have reached Bárcena without falling off the cliff, damn it!… Well, I’ll tell you the city! I knew the dock edge by edge and house by house. The carts couldn’t fit from end to end; the peaks of the flour sacks poked through the windows of the offices, and the sea was within easy reach on all sides. Damn it! Go see him today; he’s so long he’s out of sight: find me the cart, find me the warehouse… find me the sea, which I can’t see anywhere, as if the heretics of the train had swallowed it up; and take portals like churches, and take troops of wild barouches… Respect the people, you know it well. I’m the stranger there. Neither charity for my years, nor justice for the little wealth I have left. Garlic! this is the Gospel. Swear here, swear there; I want to defend myself and what is mine, and then it turns out, you scumbags! that the law that protects others no longer applies to me either . Garlic! “But, man,” I said to him here, at the risk of ruining everything, “if you wish to live in peace with your neighbors, why don’t you take, like them, and like everyone else, things as they are and times as they come? How many times have I advised you! ” “Garlic!” he replied, hitting the ground with a tremendous blow with his club, “as many times as I have answered that I cannot manage these things or these times; and that I want that when my people return they find me in the same being and state in which they left me, you scumbags!… Have you finally understood it? “Yes, sir,” I answered him to finish once and for all, even if it was with a flick of the torch; “and because I understand it well, I’m not surprised by what happens to you so often… for being stupid, for being stubborn, for… Let’s see,” I added, without the slightest fear of the grimaces Cutres made, already stung by the blind barbarity that was assailing him, “why have you come today?… I mean, why have you come? How have you decided to do today what you haven’t done in so many years, without any special reason to justify it?” His shoulder overflowed to answer me; it overflowed as in the most impetuous accesses of his biliousness. The first waves were nothing more than thunder and the occasional perceptible squeal. Troubling him patiently and carefully, I managed to find out that he had come because, according to his neighbor, Güétagos, the mayor wasn’t going to Ceuta nor the governor to jail, because I was messing around with the two of them, and “perhaps” working so that between the three of us we could eat up the “poverty” that remained for him, in Cutres. In other times, he would have complained by mail; but, after the news had reached his heart, day by day he was becoming “less adept at writing and handling a pen. ” Furthermore, Güétagos had assured him that the train business was going from bad to worse, almost on the verge of collapse; and since I was taking so long to get there, he had decided to come to “take sides first , and as was proper,” about something so important. Arming myself with patience, I began by assuring him that all the “runnings” about the train were the pure truth: he could no longer cope, he was consumed by debts and worries, and at the least expected hour he would stop rolling, and the carriage would once again rule as in the days of its greatest pomp. He took my statement as a glory, and on account of this joy, I gave him a good run-through on the other case, Foolish, irrational, and ungrateful. I miscalculated, because the first impression, erased by the sting of the second, he was on fire; and burning hot he was, in his own way, when, as the telephone bell suddenly rang, which was half a yard away and almost plumb from his head, I saw him go silent and tense up , roll his eyes in alarm, bury his neck between his shoulders, and finally, sprawl out and curl up in a ball from his armchair, to look from outside toward the place where the din was coming from, which continued louder and louder, while I delighted in studying its effects of astonishment, surprise, and even panic, in the semi-savage nature of Cutres. Finally, I approached the receiver and asked who was calling. They told me it was from the civil government. A moment later, the friendly official who handled the most bitter of the three files Cutres had lying dormant around here spoke to me. “What’s going on?” I asked. “I just leafed through the file in question again, and the more I examine it, the more convinced I am that it’s not enough to put him to sleep, but that he must be killed. ” “Why? ” “Because it contains horrific amounts of contempt; and if anyone ever manages to move him, that beast of a man you call Cutres will go to jail, and he gives us so much to do. ” “Do me the favor,” I replied to the official, having suddenly been struck by an idea, “of waiting a few moments, without moving from the telephone. ” Having said this, I turned to Cutres, who was going from astonishment to astonishment, looking like a wild boar hunted by dogs. I told him to come closer, but at first he refused. Finally, he approached, suspicious and grumbling. “Take this,” I said, taking it off the hook, the other auditor, “and put it to his ear, like I did. ” The man picked it up as if it were burning hot: he weighed it, touched it, even smelled it; but he couldn’t quite put it to his ear. I had to do it for him; and when I had him conveniently positioned with his mouth facing away from the microphone, so it wouldn’t crackle, I called the official again, who answered immediately. By a strange coincidence, that day the telephone was so quiet that even people’s breathing could be heard. “Would you be so kind,” I begged him, “as if you would repeat what you told me before about that case and about the interested party?” “With pleasure,” he replied, and Cutres’s astonishment reached convulsive horror as he felt the tickling and ringing of these words in his ear. “Well, I say that whenever this case is moved, the irrational and stubborn perpetrator, that beast called Cutres, will go to jail. ” “Very well,” I replied, “and I’ll see you later. In the meantime, goodbye and thank you very much.” While I was speaking thus, the apparatus had trembled as Cutres, the auditor, let go in furiously; his bellowing and stamping resounded in the office ; and, firing off volleys of the crudest and most vulgar interjections , he swept his bloody gaze around every corner of the room. “Garlic!” he bellowed; “let that scoundrel, who’s missing and you’ve hidden somewhere, show his face!… He’s not making fun of me, you lowlifes, nor that old woman of yours… Garlic!… These are the men, you lowlifes! These are the friends, Garlic!” Seeing him boring into the wall where the telephone was hung, I quickly opened the back door that connects to the adjoining room. “Look. There’s no one hiding here either.” He poked his big head out for a moment and then pulled it back again. “Don’t doubt that voice was coming from the office…” And here I tried to explain to him what a telephone was, as if I were explaining it to a cobblestone. He stuck his head back through the back door, his whole body trembling and babbling outrageously. “Go deeper and you’ll be more convinced,” I said, pushing him a little by the small of his back. “Garlic!” he replied, kicking me but missing; ” this isn’t the door I’m looking for. ” “Which one are you looking for?” –The king’s, damn it! The street, because I’m risking myself in this hole, where they vilify me, you lowlifes!… –Ah! Then this way,– I said, showing him the way I had come. He followed me, whizzing along, like a distant storm; I opened the stairwell door, and he came out. I wanted to calm him down a bit, to disabuse him… What things he said! How he made me feel while he went down, with a thunder of footsteps, blows with clubs, and curses, as if something hard, heavy, and hollow were rolling from step to step! Damn… the scoundrels! Bang! The plundering of the poor… Bang, bang! With buzzing and vilification at more than more, you lowlifes!… Bang… bang! _Güétagos_ didn’t fool me, no. Bang, bang! Oh, how right he was! Some were shoring up… others were covering things up. Worse than those red-haired ones, those heretics on the train! Cheapskates, what a thief! Boom! Bad luck… right through the kidneys! Oh, boom! He didn’t shut his mouth until he walked out onto the street, and I couldn’t stop listening. But how glad I was, because he’d walk off and leave me alone… right up to the first one! I’m sure that as soon as he got home and his tantrum was over, he started throwing another fit. You’ll see how he consults me as soon as he catches me “over there,” and what he’s gradually getting me into, for the charitable work of “getting him through.” We can’t help it. Chapter 7. FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH I too, although a layman, am going to throw in my two cents, or if you prefer, because anything resembling a joke fits ill in so serious a case , to put my pen to the one that two enthusiastic and distinguished editors of El Atlántico have brought to light in the columns of the issue corresponding to last Saturday and Sunday. 5 In the first article, the matter is dealt with doctrinally and with the highest and most independent spirit of criticism with the authority and lucidity of an expert criminalist; in the second, without losing sight of this aspect of the question, an appeal is made to public sentiment with beautiful bursts of generous piety in favor of the prisoner condemned to death by this Court in the oral trial held before it a few days ago. Both writers affirm, and they affirm the pure truth, that the sentiment was extremely deep, and even greater was the surprise that the public received upon learning of this terrible verdict of the Court of Law. The sentiment is natural in this sad case and in others of a similar nature; but what is so anomalous, irregular, or unusual about this dark trial that the astonishment should have been as great as the sympathy among the people who were focused on it, considering that this was not a criminal in the style of the famous ones of the day, but an obscure, vulgar, and brutalized prisoner, completely foreign to the mountainous region and never seen by anyone here? According to the two aforementioned writers, and according to what could be seen and appreciated in the public hearing, the longest and most detailed part of which, due to its scandalous and moral repugnance, was held behind closed doors, the inconceivable demand of an absurd legal precept forced three worthy and upright magistrates to be, rather than just judges, inexorable men of the law. This is what has primarily moved the public conscience, what has given so much to talk about among scholars and laymen in the science of criminal law, and what excites and drives me now, who am neither a lawyer nor understand a word of the art of unraveling texts or applying articles of the Code, to pour out, by the grace of God, in half a dozen pages that are left in my portfolio, a handful of common reflections, for the relief and expansion of the feeling that has fallen to me, as a tiny and insignificant part that I am of this moved and astonished public. After all, and taking the matter to the point in which it now stands, it is no longer a question of any legal problem, but of a simple charitable work, in which common sense and a sound heart are sufficient and more than enough by titles of sufficiency. Juan Oller was serving three sentences at the same time in the Santoña prison: More importantly, for the crime of robbery. According to the well-proven statement of the defense, not a single blood stain was found in this unfortunate man’s criminal record. A thug, a hustler, from the Cádiz prison where he was imprisoned for homicide, who had gone so far as to commit another; quarrelsome by nature, drunkard as well, unruly, and possessing vile appetites, he was the rooster, the _cheche_ of all the inmates of Santoña; and of Juan Oller, due to the nefarious abuses he made him a victim of and the death threats with which he threatened him at every turn, a horrendous nightmare. The wretched convict repeatedly attempts to exercise the ridiculous rights he believes he has in that den of sadness and abominations, to free himself from the tyranny that terrifies him; and with these idle attempts, he only succeeds in igniting the tyrant’s irrational wrath. Fear and shame eventually rob him of sleep and drive him mad; he lives day and night terrified by the incessant vision of that monster who fills him with shame and brandishes before his frightened eyes the terrible knife adept at bloodying the hearts of so many unfortunates. One early morning last August, after a night spent amid the horrors of these visions, Juan Oller left his stable in terror, entered his pursuer’s stable, and found him lying on his cot wrapped in a sheet. Without considering that eighty other prisoners lying in the same position around the stable could see him, he threw himself upon him and stabbed him to death. Many saw him commit the crime; no one was weary of coming to the victim’s defense, not even with a word of threat or supplication. Everyone hated him, and very few were those who didn’t have some grievance to avenge against him. This is evident from the luminous summary provided by the most worthy president of the court; from what is known of the statements made by the defendant and the witnesses; from the brilliant and clearly masterful defense made by my young friend Don José Zumelzu, already a credit to the Spanish court; from the detailed and, from his point of view, conscientious report of the prosecutor; from the grounds for the sentence, etc., etc.; and such is the crime for which Juan Oller has been condemned to death, an abominable and horrendous crime, like all crimes; but at the same time, of such quality, due to the peculiarities of its genesis, that the most honorable man, putting his imagination, for a moment, in the place of the criminal—if a similar hypothesis is possible, even pushing his repugnance to the extreme—might come to think he would have done the same thing. Juan Oller, just look at him, is made of the stuff of criminals; but not of those who kill for the luxury of killing: their education, or their instincts… or whatever that mysterious and fatal motive is that takes root in certain natures like certain vicious plants in the mud of ponds, impels them to steal. This was also known that afternoon, from what emerged from the proceedings and the trial and even from the background information that vibrant curiosity investigates with rare diligence, in certain exceptional cases, and I knew it too before reading the verdict that produced in Juan Oller that indescribable shudder that Pedro Sánchez tells us about in his article, and that cadaverous pallor … and those silent tears that those of us closest to him could observe . I knew, in addition to this, because I had just read it in the newspapers, that a man had been acquitted, _for the second time_, in Madrid, who, dishonored, tormented and mocked by his wife, had stabbed her to death while she slept beside him, in the same bed that had perhaps, in better days, been a love nest for both of them. As a layman in the matter, the same case applies to Juan Oller… And Juan Oller, with all the aforementioned mitigating circumstances, and with a jury verdict that took them into consideration, and which therefore, in my layman’s opinion, was definitively acquittal, was sentenced to death by the Court of Law, as requested by the prosecution, adjusting its criteria to the precepts and the bare letter of a A harsh, terrible, absurd law, but a law nonetheless, and binding on the judges charged with applying it. In short, Juan Oller has been sentenced to death because he committed the crime while an unrepentant prisoner of his previous offenses. That is to say, with that same crime, that same Code, and that same Court, Juan Oller, freed, would have been punished less harshly, and perhaps acquitted. This is the singular and most striking aspect, for the general public, of this already flawed trial. Ah! What a terrible night the wretched condemned man must have spent, alone with his thoughts, darker than the terrifying darkness of his cell, with no other noise to distract him from the vision of the gallows than the sinister clinking of his chain with every beat of his heart, with every shudder of his flesh! “That’s fine,” he would say, in his own crude and savage way, weighing and measuring things in his atrophied brain and feeling them in the depths of his heart, however relaxed his emotional strings may be . “That law is fine, it exempts a free man from responsibility, and sends me, because I am a prisoner without proof of repentance, to the gallows. There must be deep, very deep reasons for the legislator to have arranged it this way; but looking at everything with the calm and prudence that should be observed in cases like this, so that the law is upheld without violating justice, who is responsible for the fact that I have not given, in prison, the proof of repentance that is required of me to save my life? Have I been put in a position to mend my ways, or even to attempt to?” If prison is to be a place of correction as well as punishment, why doesn’t the same law that condemned me prevail there, to protect me against the risk of reoffending? Why do all vices, all crimes, and all wickedness have absolute dominion and dominion in prison? Why is there no other law or will there than that of the shameless thug? Why does the gambler have cards, and the drunkard liquor, and the swindler victims and accomplices inside and outside the premises? And why, men of the law, when I wanted to kill, did I find the knife I needed? Does the legislator, does the State, know the infectious power of so much rottenness enclosed in such a narrow space? And knowing it as he must, because he is obliged to do so, and given that it is evident that a saint would be corrupted there, how does he expect men who, upon entering it, have already been criminals, to be corrected in the same place? So, what in all fairness should have served to mitigate my crime has been deemed an aggravating circumstance, and by the same law that could have absolved the most depraved of free men , I am condemned to the gallows because I am a prisoner who has not performed the miracle of correcting himself by living in a criminal atmosphere, not by choice, but by the rule of law that placed me there, and with the acquiescence of the State, which does not purify these places of correction. The sentence condemning me to death may, in short, have been legal; but what is just about it, O merciful and just God? If the unfortunate Juan Oller did not think this way that night, because such simple reflections did not fit in the smallness of his brain, or because he was disturbed by the weight of his misfortune, many of us thought it for him… It also seems that if it had been conclusively demonstrated that Juan Oller had killed his executioner driven by an insurmountable fear, the Court would have acquitted him. Insurmountable fear ! Where does it begin, and where does the other fear end? Who is the brave one who dares to draw the line between the two, without fear of being wrong? In the accumulation of impressions of anger, shame, anxiety, and terror that dominated the victim of so many, so frequent, such terrible and nefarious iniquities, what psychological alembic can give the exact condition, the unequivocal nature of the fear that placed the murderous sword in the hands of Juan Oller? It is sad, very sad and very disheartening, that in our criminal laws, to To do justice in cases of such gravity as this, there are distinctions as dangerous in their application as the two that send the prisoner of Santoña to the gallows, if the appeal filed by the defense does not produce in the Supreme Court the results that appear just, in the light of every honest conscience. And if, due to the tyranny of the law itself, due to the absurdity of its definitive precepts, those judges, whose rulings are unappealable, were to find themselves with the harsh necessity of leaving things as they were here, let the clamor that, in advance, has already been requested in _El Atlántico_ be raised, with the pious goal that what has been denied by justice be granted by mercy. After all, in Juan Oller, although degraded and miserable, there is an immortal soul that can, by decree of God, be purified and redeemed in the midst of the quagmire of a prison; and Spain is a people of Christians. 1890. Chapter 8. THE PRISONER OF P… The morning was misty and cold, and the light was scarce, for the sun had not yet crossed the eastern hills. I had “stuck to sleep” that day, and my time was very short when I left home; I feared being late and hurried my pace, thereby doubling the pressure and coldness of the early morning terrace, which was in front of me. As I entered the spacious station hall, I noticed a large number of townspeople coming out, a majority of whom were women. This was not unusual at that hour and in that place; but it was unusual for me that all the phrases I caught as I hurried past to get to the ticket office before it closed expressed the same idea, the same feeling. precisely the same, as I suddenly remembered, as those of some children who had crossed my path near the station: compassionate words, exclamations of sorrow, addressed to someone who was not specifically named. The pressure of time prevented me from immediately learning what was happening; so pressured that I don’t know which came first, my taking the first step toward the platform with the purchased ticket, or hearing the slam of the window closing. Having finally settled quietly, and only too well, in my assigned compartment, I leaned out of the window, tempted by the curiosity that had been aroused in me in the vestibule; but no one was passing by: all the people who remained on the platform after the carriage doors had closed were grouped opposite one of them, quite far from mine. Suddenly, a man I knew very well separated from the group: a very popular barber in the city, who had been serving for some time in the prison, entitled to the use of the braided cap that covered his massive head. I beckoned to him; and he, who was all carelessness and joy on his feet, came up to me with a distressed face and ashen complexion. “What’s so extraordinary going on here?” I asked him. “They’re taking the unfortunate man away… He’s in that carriage,” he answered me in a voice like a face. “Who is this unfortunate man? ” “The prisoner of P… ” “And where are they taking him? ” “To his village. ” “Why? ” “Well… to kill him as soon as he arrives. Yesterday it became known that he had been denied a pardon, and last night orders were given to transfer him there and have him imprisoned.” The executioner will also be on his way from Burgos by this time, and the picket will leave here today by the highway… “And does he know all this? ” “How can he know for sure, I think not; but he is afraid of it… We have told him that, since the pardon could take a long time and the jail here is full of prisoners, it has been ordered that he be transferred to the one in his district so that each man can hold his own… He agreed to this last night; but this morning, when he saw that there were four guards accompanying him, and not two as when he went to the Court, his color suddenly changed , and he asked us, by all the saints in heaven, to tell him the truth if we had deceived him. We swore and swore that what he already knew was true… except that since everyone present didn’t have the skill to pretend, although he’s not exactly clever… what do I know! I think he’s got it in his body… We’ve accompanied him this far, and I’ll leave him in the carriage, not daring to stay in front of him any longer, in case he reveals to my face what I don’t want him to know from me. “I see the farewell has made a great impression on you. ” “What do you want?… She was a fat one, and he deserves what it costs him by law; but I’ve spent many months knowing and observing him in prison; he’s a simpleton whom even children can fool; he has a corresponding heart, and… well, there’s no helping it. At this point, the train started moving; Nisio took off to greet me, and I sank down onto the cushion of my seat with my heart heavy and my head full of thoughts and visions. The man facing death carries with him much of what is peculiar to the gentle current of a deep river, to the tranquil sea, to the silent forest; to everything that is mysterious, abyssed, and lonely. An unknown impulse draws us toward it, and another, even more powerful force detains us there, and compels us to contemplate it, to meditate, to penetrate what is impenetrable, to plunge thought and spirit into the invisible. It seems only that by following the path of those mysteries, one arrives more quickly at the discovery of that “something” which is the constant yearning of the human soul. For I felt myself a slave to that same force as soon as I learned that the prisoner from P… was on the same train as me: I intending to spend a pleasant day in the country, and he destined to die on the gallows. This man was not entirely unknown to me: I had seen him once in the street, tied up, between two Civil Guards who were leading him to the Court , followed by a crowd of vagrant youths. I remembered something of his appearance, his height, his clothing; but what seemed almost too much to me at the time wasn’t even enough on this occasion . The first time, it involved a man who had not yet been tried, who might or might not be condemned to death, and executed on a day and place determined by human justice; a being who was exposed to dying at the hands of the executioner, as any good man is at every moment of his life, to losing it through illness or fortuitous accident; he was, in short, just another of those condemned to death who walk the world at all hours and pass by us with greater or lesser right to our curiosity. But on the second occasion, that same man’s hours of life were already numbered: he was condemned to die on a fixed and very close day. If he had any doubts, I was going to clear them up at any moment; If he possessed the certainty that the light of faith inspires, what terror he felt with a conscience so burdened with guilt! In any case, and not counting his natural attachment to life, what a state of mind he was in! He no longer inspired repugnance for the memory of his crime, but profound compassion for the certainty of the torment with which I was to repay him; now it was the gentle current, the tranquil sea, the silent forest, which attract and subdue, and compel one to meditate and feel. That is why such a strong desire to see him and contemplate him up close was awakened in me . And I satisfied them at the first station where the train made one of its interminable stops. I began by passing and checking many times in front of the car that was driving him: I was afraid of mortifying him if he noticed the determination that mortified me. He stood in profile in the center of the bench , his face turned away from the platform; And as I assumed he was doing this to avert his eyes from the stares with which many were following him, not only from the station, but from the other compartments of the car, separated by low fences, I stopped, approached, and even climbed onto the running board… and a civil guard who was blocking half the window with his chest even retreated towards the back of his seat, reading my wishes on my face . The prisoner was a large, fleshy young man who barely fit into his black, ragged clothes. His jacket either had no collar or was cut too low, as if the executioner had prepared it so that the welts on his short neck and the small neck worthy of a fighting bull would spill out, leaving room for the fatal ring of his profession. His shaved, not very large head was covered by a black cap, and his face was the color of all the prisoners: pale and sickly. His adipose figure and his almost absolute stillness, with his hands clasped at the thumbs on his round thighs, revealed a lymphatic temperament; and it was hard to believe, because there was nothing repulsive in his chubby, dull face either, that beneath that greasy , matted covering there could be found impulses as ferocious as those that drove him to commit the horrendous crime for which he was soon to atone… But, after all this, did he know it? Did he even suspect it? Was it credible that , even suspecting it, he could maintain such a calm and tranquil attitude? Could it be that the physical and moral organism of criminals is governed by extremely singular laws, impervious to the judgment, logic, and sentiment of honest men? I was wandering along here with my reflections when a boy, who had also climbed onto the stirrup and was rearing up, restless, bewildered, and nervous, to see the prisoner as he pleased, suddenly exclaimed, directing the question at me: “Is it true that they’re going to kill him as soon as he arrives?” I was frightened by the question, fearing that the aforementioned might hear it; I covered the boy’s mouth with my hand, and he leaped onto the platform, and at the same time I answered in a loud voice, intending to be heard by the unfortunate man: “That’s not true! They’re taking him to his own prison, because he doesn’t fit in the one in Santander. ” But he didn’t turn his face to the boy’s question or to my reply, nor did he show the slightest sign that he had heard them. It would be better that way; And it was better for those of us who pitied him if he had heard them and didn’t attach importance to the first because it confirmed what he already knew, nor to the second because he didn’t believe it… I stepped down from the step because the signal was heard indicating that our stopping time there was over; I went back into my apartment; the train began to glide along its rails again, and I began to think again about what that man, who was slowly approaching the end of his journey and his life, would think. We would take the same route to the T… station. There I would take my route, to the northeast; the longest, or the shortest ; the one that suited me best; and he… the one indicated to him, to the west, to reach his sad destination as quickly as possible… And on into eternity! At the T… station, I could see and contemplate him to my heart’s content, for there would be time and convenience for it. It was pointless to get off at the other two intermediate stations, and climb onto the step and mortify the wretch so many times with the impertinence of my prying. However, I got off at both stations, and on both I did the same thing as at the first, and always I found the prisoner in the same position, with his tied hands resting on his thighs, and his face turned away from the platform. There was no doubt about it: I was swept away by the mystery and attracted by the abyss. At last we arrived at the T… station, where the train was almost empty, which was, in the company’s jargon, a “short train,” that is, one that doesn’t go beyond the limits of the province, with the gait of a wagon. That’s why it took two hours for a four-league journey; and when we reached its end, the sun had risen above the mountains. and from a clear, blue sky, swept clean of every sign of cloud, its splendid light illuminated everything within sight from those heights: one of the most beautiful panoramas that can be admired in the mountains, the land of the great wonders of nature. The carriage in which the prisoner was riding had been left outside the platform next to the station and in front of a small garden very close to her; and there was not a single traveler who did not pass in front of him before handing in their ticket at the exit door. This pilgrimage, which had a certain solemnity, lasted a few minutes. I took no part in it because I reserved myself to see my man outside the carriage… as I saw him shortly after. I don’t know when or how he got out or was taken out, because, as I turned toward that side during one of the mechanical walks I took in front of the carriage in which I had arrived, my eyes met him, facing me, standing and as if rooted to the ground, like the trunk of a pollarded tree that had grown there: fixed, motionless, in an attitude and with an expression on his face impossible to forget. The sun shone on him slightly sideways; and on the sandy, almost golden ground on which the black mass of his body rose , his shadow was outlined, which was about to be lost among the green leaves and the fragrant flowers of the garden. The four guards came and went, pacing at his side, here and there; and there were curious onlookers , like myself, who watched him from a respectful distance. But he seemed to take no notice of any of this, his profoundly melancholic gaze fading into the invisible… Not a gesture; not the slightest twitch of a muscle on his livid face, slightly inclined toward his chest; not the slightest sign of blood pulsing in his arteries. He was the true statue of despair, of great melancholy, of the greatest helplessness. At this point, a half-filled sack fell at his feet, its mouth tied with a string. It was his petate: the four rags of his equipment. He didn’t notice it either. Why, even if the sack had been full of pearls and diamonds? For there was no doubt that the man then knew the terrible truth, either because indiscretions like that of the boy in question had revealed it to him along the way, or because he guessed at it or sensed it. His imposing expression of despair was incompatible with the slightest hope of living : only the certainty that he was being led to death, and on a shameful scaffold, could imprint on his half-savage nature that seal of bitter moral pain, devoured by the conscience of deserving it… And surrounding the unfortunate man, as if arranged by the cruelty of his misfortune, if not by the justice of God for greater punishment, what a spectacle! I have never passed by there without stopping for a long time to indulge my eyes ; but I do not remember ever having seen him as admirable as I saw him on that important occasion; and it is rare in this land of gray clouds and damp gales to find a sky so clear, so blue. a sun as bright and shining, and a tranquility and repose in nature, just like that day. Below, on the plain, joining the short slope that gives access to the station, the long reef between poplar groves, oak groves, meadows, and farmhouses; further on, at the end of the grove, the red mass of the first roofs of the town that gives its name to the station, the second capital of the mountain, not only for its wealth, but for its beauty: the queen and lady of the admirable plain, on one of whose edges sits the throne of her lordship; beyond the plain, which is lost from sight to the right and left between hills and mountains, the river basin covered in thick vegetation, among which the white notes of the riverside villages stand out; Then another valley, more likely guessed than seen through the transparent patches of bare trees and the veils of whitish smoke curling up from the chimneys of the slums; and on either side of these delightful valleys, more mountain ranges and more terraced hills and rashes of small villages… until the panorama ends and closes at that end with a stony mountain that serves as a barrier to the north to the restless waters of the ocean, and to the west, rising on a terrace of high, black mountains, the two colossi of the Cantabrian mountain range: Peña Sagra and the Picos de Europa, now covered in snow, illuminated head-on by the sun and outlining the gallant florets of his crown with the intense blue of the sky. For in this spectacle, always new and admirable to me, I found that morning a singular attraction that, in the end, mortified me greatly: first, the contrast formed by his beauty, inviting one to rejoice and live, with the moral state of that man who had him so close, without noticing him, or without daring to look at him; but especially because in the most magnificent part of the picture, in one of the folds of the foothills of the Picos, was the end of his journey: there he had been born, there he had committed the crime, and there he was to atone for it by the hand of the executioner. However brutalized his understanding might be, it was impossible that these reflections had not entered him when he fixed his gaze for an instant on that side of the panorama, or when he knew that, from the vantage point where he stood, he had him before his eyes; And as soon as the ideas began to coalesce in his mind, he would be struck by a vision of his home and the beings within; he would think that they knew of his journey and what was to befall him as soon as it was over, and he would see them all fleeing in search of a hiding place away from the place: a hole, a cavern in the woods, where they could hide and die of pain and shame. If that criminal had not thought thus at the time, I could see it in his face, whose expression was exactly in keeping with these thoughts; and that was why, because of what he would have suffered by thinking thus, I suffered when I laid eyes on what had so often been my own revellings of them. and I would have preferred to that brilliant light, to that august placidity of nature, to those invigorating aromas of the damp earth caressed by the sun, to that scene, in short, so awakening of all the noblest incentives of life, an ashen and stormy day, one of those that least influences sleepy imaginations and uncultivated understandings. Who doubts the power that external agents exert on the minds of certain men… and even on those of all castes of them?… Walking in these and other similar meditations, and without taking my eyes off the prisoner, who was so deeply contaminating me with his sadness, he suddenly straightened up, as if emerging from a lethargy, and, at the command of the guards who were watching him, he began his walk with a firm step towards the exit door, to which I approached to get a closer look. Once outside the station, they led him not along the road that branches off into two curved branches, but across the middle hills, which were then open. From my vantage point, I saw him walk briskly down the hill, occasionally leaping over bushes, and I followed him with my eyes until he disappeared among the buildings and hedges of the lower plain. Then I remembered that the carriage was waiting for me; I got in , my thoughts fixed tenaciously on that unfortunate man; and after half an hour, I arrived home, still watching the criminal, his hands tied, his face pale and anguished, standing motionless between the station garden and the train that had brought us both. Strange! From the moment I learned he was traveling with me until he disappeared from my sight on the road to T…, I never once considered the crime he had committed: it was always feelings of pity that his memory or his presence inspired in me. The human heart is like that, more prone to pity than to punish in the presence of a repentant criminal. And the truth is that in the need for it to weaken in some sense: that organ, which, in the opinion of a great man who was also a great tyrant, is the one that rules the world, had better weaken on that side. I say this because precisely for this reason, or for something similar, I began, after a few hours and in the solitude of my garden, to immerse myself in another order of ideas to relieve my spirit of that tiring compassionate obsession. Does this man deserve, I came to ask myself, the bad times he is giving me? Can anything be conceived more abominable or more deserving of the punishment that awaits him, than the crime he committed? It is well to say mercy, and it is even divine law in every Christian heart; but what about justice? And that poor victim so barbarously sacrificed? And that treachery and that ferocity more typical of a tiger than a man? What right to life does someone have who kills in cold blood and out of sheer malice? Aren’t beasts that do that pursued to the point of extermination ? And aren’t men beasts in such cases? And the exemplary nature of the gallows, and…? In short, I imperceptibly began to slip into the sinuosities of the eternal dispute over the death penalty, something that wasn’t to my liking, and that’s why I changed course as soon as I fell into it; because what I urgently needed then was not to be found among the dry and cold arguments of reason, but in the spontaneous and generous springs of feeling. With this well -founded hope, I began to reconstruct in my imagination the crime in question, just as I preserved it in my memory, and as it appeared in them well attested and even recounted by the criminal himself. One day, a neighbor of his, a man well advanced in years and the father of several children, went to sell I know not what fruit in his oxcart at a fair being held in another town in the same region. A lonely road, frequently overlooking great precipices, separated the two towns. On his way back from the fair, at dusk, with his cart empty, he was met, in one of the most abandoned spots along the road, by the young man in my story, his friend and neighbor, never suspected by anyone, and very often the object of the gossip of many, because, if he was guilty of anything, it was that of a fool and a drone. The two neighbors greeted each other in their own way, and even began to engage in conversation, with the cart stationary. Suddenly, the young man strikes a tremendous blow with his club on the stallholder’s head and throws him to the ground, where he finishes his work by crushing his skull with two stones. Then he searches his pockets; in one of them he finds the handful of money that had earned him “his poverty,” and finally , he throws the corpse, still bloody and throbbing, into the immediate precipice . He then climbs onto the cart’s pole, sniffs and searches with his eyes and hands among the grass scattered on the platform, and finds nothing but the remains of his victim’s snack: some miserable cold cuts and some crumbs of bread wrapped in a handkerchief . He also seizes these paltry relics and eats them quietly, sitting comfortably on the tail of the pole. When not a shred or crumb of all this remains, he straightens up, urges the oxen to bring the cart to the brink; and once he has achieved this, he exerts all the strength of his body on the wheel on the other side and tips it over the precipice. With this precaution, he considers the traces of his crime erased. A cart driver thrown into the depths of a ravine, and his cart overturned and hanging from the yoke of the oxen stopped at the edge, are nothing to write home about in those rugged regions: the sudden fright of an animal, while its driver is asleep, is enough to cause a similar disaster . And with that, he returned, free from all anxiety and all sorrow, to his village and his home. When or why had the thought of that frightful savagery occurred to his brutal brain? Because, having no grievance to avenge against his unfortunate neighbor, he was not unaware of the small value of what he had gone to sell, nor did he have the slightest need to seize it, because he was a son of a family and did not lack the essentials in his house. A fearful mystery, certainly worthy of exercising all their inductive powers on it, those gentlemen who know so much about weights and measures of the sane and the unsound! I was at a loss in such an abstruse matter, and everything made me look for terms of comparison outside the human species, because within it I could not remember a single one. Well, not even then! The horror of these things, the impression of these memories, although they tempered in my imagination the dazzling coloring Of the others, at last the machine of my reflections was imperceptibly making a change of direction, and the most recent event was once again embedded in my memory, the gallows figure of the melancholic man, his head bowed, motionless and as if nailed to the ground, with the miserable mat at his feet, flooded by the sunlight, as if to make his shame and ignominy more evident. That picture was much more suggestive to me than the deep current, the calm sea, and the silent forest; it was a closed book in which, undoubtedly, there was much to read. And determined to read it, I returned to seek him with my thoughts at the point where my eyes had lost sight of him; and I saw him following the reef toward the town, amidst the horror and pity of the passers-by who crossed his path; settling in; that is, to allow himself to be accommodated in the vehicle that was to take him there, because he no longer had the right to desire or ask for anything: he was the property of the law, of the executioner; leaving behind valleys, towns, and sanctuaries, through which he had passed so many times, free and master of himself; counting each stretch of the road traveled, with the anguish of the miser forced to hand over, one by one, to the thief who surprises him, the cartons of coins from his treasure; seeing, at the end of his journey , the terrifying picture of his own torment, and, what would be more anguishing than the vision of the hoa and the garrote, that of the poor peasant, honest until that day, burying his head in the dust and cursing the hour in which such a monster was engendered. Here the machine of my reflections stopped, and the son was no longer the principal subject of those I accumulated in my brain, but the father, the good man, the honest peasant; And then the whole town, closing doors and windows, while the shameful scaffold was raised and the strange multitudes gathered at its foot, descending in files along all the paths of the nearby mountains. A day of terror and shame for a mountain people, Christian and hardworking! Of this caste were my thoughts while I returned to the city that same afternoon and during the first hours of the night, and I believe I am not lying if I say that also while I slept. I do not know how many of those fateful pictures I saw and drew then, thinking, speaking, and dreaming. From the mouths of those who heard my stories and comments, and went so far as to call my worries “crazy,” I learned that a new attempt had been made to obtain a pardon, taking advantage of some anniversary, which was already very close, a task two or three days away, and that, in order to prevent the prisoner from being executed before that date, it had been ordered that the picket should not use the railroad as far as T…, but that they should travel by road on foot in three days. To comply with this order, I had left in the morning. “God grant that such charitable intentions may be realized!” I said to myself, remembering then, more than the prisoner, his unfortunate father, perhaps a fugitive at that time among the crags and ravines of the mountain. The day following that one so cheerful and splendid, dawned wintry, inclement, and like the harshest of mountain winters: it snowed in the afternoon and continued to snow through the night; And when the new sun shone upon the land of this little piece of the world, there was a snowfall more than a foot deep—that was in the valleys. Less than a yard high up in the air? And so it was; so the firing squad couldn’t get past the Deva Gorges, and was detained in one of their villages for two days. Meanwhile, the anniversary of the Palatine arrived; the requested pardon was granted; the prisoner emerged from the chapel where he had already been confined, and with it, I felt my spirit relieved of a great burden. But what effect had the pardon had on him there? In what way had the prisoner expressed his natural joy? Weeping, praying? And his father? Who went to look for him on the mountain to tell him the good news? Had they found him alive in his hiding place? If he were still alive, was there still any sensitive side to his moral character, so battered by the cruelty of his pain? Had they been able to convince him that having a criminal son is not the same as being the father of an executed criminal, because, more than in the crime committed, the ignominy lies in the gallows where expiation is made? Had they managed to convince him to return to the village and his home, where he might already find his family weeping with gratitude and praising God for the mercy they had received? Would he see his son afterward? What would that scene between them be like?… There are no numbers of reflections of this kind that I had during that day and the next, because it is the pure truth that, having been cured of a great worry by the pardon, I had plunged into another, not as unpleasant as that, but, on the other hand, much more vehement. Finally, communications between P… and the capital were opened, and a newspaper there published correspondence from _there_, received by the last mail. According to her, the first effects of the pardon gave rise to a most unusual scene between the prisoner and the executioner. The latter stated, half in jest, half in earnest, that the other’s neck was, among those already “put in the chapel,” the first to fail him since he began practicing his profession. And what a neck!… And hence the groping and measuring of it with both hands, the squeezing of the throat with his fingers, the other beast laughing to celebrate the farce, the sticking out of his tongue and trembling of his feet and hands, and making all sorts of faces to imitate a condemned man; and even the desire to know the instrument and how it works. and the spectators of the scene supporting him in his brutal demand, and finally, the executioner agreeing to it and giving a long lecture right there on the spot on the handling of the screw and the ring, his own failed victim serving as a model for execution. The newspaper fell from my hands and I did not want to read any more or meditate on what I had read, so as not to mix the colors of the new picture with the memory of the other one, of the melancholic man from the T… station, and much less with that of his father, the unhappy, the simple, the honest peasant who would again be on the point of dying of indignation and shame if he found out about that infamous comedy performed in the P… prison. A few days passed, and with them the most salient memories of my son faded from my memory ; But the same did not apply to the image I had formed of his father: I venerated nothing more than the old age of an honest poor man, crushed by sorrows; and in this sense, far from the crystallized idea of ​​that old peasant growing smaller in my mind, it grew larger the more I thought about him, and I thought about him often. One day, when there was still much talk of the events referred to, I heard a knock at my door, and I was told that “a villager of an age” was asking for me. “What is his name?” I asked in turn, without much curiosity, for I am well accustomed to calls from that lineage. “He says he is the father of the prisoner of P… ” “The father of the prisoner of P…” I exclaimed, shuddering. “And why does he ask for me?” “What’s that good man thinking?” I added, quite ready to send for him to come in so I could meet him and have a chat. “I’ve already asked him, and he replied, ‘Let’s see if you can give him something…'” “Something of what?” “Money… alms… ” “For what saint?” “Well, he also told me: for the saint that he is ‘the father of the prisoner of P…”. Apparently, he goes from door to door like that. ” Something like a speck of smoke that had been illuminating the figure of a venerable patriarch in a little corner of my mind suddenly went out, leaving the saint and the niche in darkness. “Tell him I’m not at home!” I replied, intending that the postulant might hear. “The father of the prisoner of P…” or, as it were, the real, the authentic Dauphin of France. The blessed God had dedicated himself to exploiting his son’s black reputation in this way! I will not comment, pious and just reader: do so if you wish and are one of those aforementioned lynxes who spend their lives evaluating brains and hearts, to distinguish between the sane, the imbeciles, and the unbalanced; in the certainty that everything reported in these pages is exact and rigorously true, and of a not remote date. 1898. Chapter 9. THE WISHFUL FILE. NOTES FROM MY WALLET. Barely a glimmer of reason illuminated the darkness of his brain; his eyes could already see mortifying obstacles, and he felt in his heart the desire to free himself from them. The primer was his nightmare, because he envied those who read “in Fleury” and wrote “with stick figures.” He managed to do them, and was uneasy about the expert hand that guided his weak and clumsy one; he wrote alone, and cursed the method that forced him to trace the letters freehand between parallel lines; He then wrote freely and freely on the white surface of the paper, and his memory lessons, his first arithmetic problems, and the vigilance of the nanny who accompanied him during his breaks in the squares and on the promenades kept him awake at night. He longed to reach that age when the tiresome tutelage of the rods ends and the child begins to come into his own. That age arrived early, too, because time flies; and they exchanged his short bloomers for long-legged breeches, his loose blouse for a tyrannical jacket, and his graceful cap for a stubborn hat. They strapped many books to him with a strap, the most entertaining of them in Latin , and he was required to study a little of each subject every day, under the rule of as many teachers, each more sullen and unsociable than the last. And from that moment on, he began to envy the fate of the university student, who didn’t need to enslave the spirit of his temperament to the cumbersome and unalterable law of declinations and conjugations; who was a young man with a beard and smoked without hiding his cigarette behind each puff; who dressed like a gentleman, traveled alone, and lived in complete freedom. Meanwhile , every hour of lectures seemed like a year in chains, every exam drove him crazy, and the weight of pending lessons ruined the few free moments he had left to play tag on the sidewalks and tag in the public squares. Thus the years of his high school passed, years that seemed like centuries in his eagerness to see them passed quickly, and he too arrived at the university. By then, the down on his face was already turning black; and since he was a full-fledged young man, the horizons of his imagination were beginning to expand, flushed and springlike; His heart beat with joy in his chest, brimming with life and hope, and his whole being was drowned in a gulf of delight, bottomless, shoreless , and stormless. But this sea had one reef, just one, against which he dashed every course his restless imagination charted: the University itself, his status as a student with fixed lecture hours, his lack of money and frock coats, his lack of true independence. What was he, in essence, at that time? Among men, a child; among children, a man; that is to say, he was everywhere superfluous, an outsider… everywhere, except at the University: precisely where he didn’t want to be. So all his “ideals” were realized outside the region in which duty and age placed him… Ah! the tassel, the tassel! When would he wear it on his temples! The tassel was freedom, independence, character, the true letter of citizenship! The tassel on his temples meant having a beard, being a man, speaking in public, writing, being a leading actor on the world stage, acquiring fame, perhaps glory; certainly , riches. And the day also came to don the tassel, after many courses earned God knows how, and without having paid all his tailor’s bills; but passing the pains of Purgatory, so that in so many years his father would not know the hardships of his life. Doctor, I don’t know what, neither did he find in this new hierarchy what he had thought he had glimpsed in it from afar. His person faded into the confusion of a thousand other doctors of his own ilk, and he even observed that it wasn’t those most favored by the public spirit who had the greatest merits, but rather better sponsors; nor were these the most fortunate, since each leap they gained only served to covet with doubled desires another greater one. This invincible obstacle to his career mortified him, and therefore, that point wasn’t the one that satisfied him enough to stop and settle there until the end of his life, his ambitions now fulfilled, and his desires dead, or at least appeased. He was also bothered by living among insubstantial clutter, which he couldn’t sweep from his desk, because it was his bread and butter; clutter accumulated by the mechanical movement of his doctor’s brain, not the product of the feverish boiling of his imagination, which dragged him in quite different directions. He was also weary of the solitude he experienced within his own home, and he sighed, longing for the noble and generous affection of the companion chosen by his heart, and granted and blessed by God, to encourage his work and comfort his toil. Fortunate that moment when these desires of his were finally realized! Why more toil and more trying? And soon the longed-for “tomorrow” arrived. But his insatiable desires were not silenced. Something was missing from the picture of his happiness; something that is to the domestic hearth what the breeze and the birds are to the forest: harmony and joy. Those little angels with blue eyes, moist lips, and golden curls were missing… And they came too, as the days and years passed ; they came with their first cry before opening their eyes, a kind of protest exhaled by the soul, the breath of God, upon feeling the contact of the earth, a heap of clay of wickedness. But the tender beings were only angels in appearance; and they caught indigestion, whooping cough, and measles, and a breath of cold air would put them to death. The statistics showed a horrifying number of victims at that age. What a pity when they fell ill! What a horrible thought that they could die, when they assaulted him from all sides, and ate him with kisses, and searched his pockets, and stunned him with their endless questions in a language whose grammar only his parents knew! Years! More years!… His incessant longing was for the years to pass, so that those tender lives, with greater development, would run less risk. Besides, isn’t every child a problem that time must solve ? And what curiosity is more legitimate than that of a parent to know that solution? What will become of that innocent who is distressed by the breakage of his toy, and laughs like a madman at the fly that crashes against the balcony window, a faithful image of reason without guidance? And what things parents see in these contemplations, in the light of their love and their desires! What figures, what pictures are painted on the canvas of their imagination!… Illustrious poets, wise engineers, undefeated generals, captivating tribunes… perhaps glorified art, transformed science, an exalted homeland… because all this can be the work of man, and for these aristocracies of genius, there is no cradle of preference; and if there isn’t one, why shouldn’t each parent dream of it in their children’s? It’s true that there isn’t one for monsters of crime either; but God hasn’t wanted to give parents the frightful torture of being able to imagine themselves, in the innocent being they caress on their knees, the hero of the prison or the executioner’s prey. Let the hours and years fly by, then! Let the mystery be clarified! Let the problem be resolved! And time flew by, and the innocent child became a rebellious boy, and the boy became a presumptuous lad, and the lad became a bearded man; and in each of these phases or stages of his life, others like the life of his father were portrayed, whose desires, far from being appeased, at the age of self-denial and disappointment , grew and multiplied, because he lived for everyone and for each and every one of his children; and their cares and worries were his own cares and worries… until one day, when he looked around, he saw himself alone, alone in his home! Some dead, others absent… no one remained there anymore!… no one but himself, burdened by his old age and his infirmities. Short, very short, slippery and steep was the road that lay before him, and it still seemed to him that his walking was slow and that time was not running enough; he still hoped for “tomorrow” to relieve his pains and soothe his sorrows. What had once been the sturdy tree of his life is now a weak filament; and yet without ceasing, it bites and thins him with the file of its implacable desires; And the longing for something else only ceases when, with the last breath of life, the soul sheds the coarse wrapping that has bound it to the earth, and, free and purified by resignation and martyrdom, flies to its true homeland, where time does not run, nor does light fade, nor does happiness end. Such was, in broad outline, his life. Let each person, with their memories and experience, supply the details missing from the picture; the petty, prosaic desires of each instant; from the oppressive boot, the tiring work, the suffocating heat, and the numbing cold, to the awaited feast, or the promotion, or the relief, or the expected crust. Always desire pushing! Always the file biting! Always, finally, the soul, as if exiled in the world, yearning to leave it. It is none other than the malady that plagues our incessant and never-satisfied desires: nostalgia for our homeland. It’s a pity that the wise men who have taken to boasting about their illustrious offspring of gorillas and chimpanzees pay no attention to this! If only, by virtue of their prodigious discovery, they were cured of the malady of desires! But where are there more insatiable desires than among the struggles of pride, engendered by the impulses of an unfettered and unhindered reason? Those outlined thus far are traits of the life, let us say, of the good man; who, good man and all, never found a place of perfect repose in it, nor did he ever undertake a journey that, at its end, he wished to go no further than there. For to complete the picture, let us pay a little attention to those dark regions where intelligence atrophies and the heart corrupts. where vice is the law, and misery prevails with its dark attributes of ignorance, envy , and resentment. Who is capable of measuring the thrust and the dizzying speed of those desires? They are no longer a file that bites into those hectic lives: they are, at the same time, a hurricane that devastates and precipitates, and a fire that devours. What, then, is this thing we call _living_ in essence? What treasure is this, for the safeguarding of which so many injustices and so many evils are committed on earth? To what is the space between the memory of the last, already past, and the first desire for _something better_ reduced? It is possible that the paths and progress of the peoples would be very different, if we men had, if not the breath to overcome our native weaknesses, eyes, even, to recognize them, and the courage to confess them. 1900. Chapter 10. STORY TALE. There once was a small village bordering my own, small in size and with meager wealth, but rich in the finery and ornaments of nature: flowery meadows, shady forests, rugged mountains, the sound of waves, the breezes of the sea… a coastal place, in short, a mountain place, and that’s all there is to it. It was inhabited by poor peasants, so poor that they could barely extract from the bosom of Mother Earth, given many turns each year, the necessary juice to poorly nourish and half-clothe their emaciated bodies. On the other hand, they enjoyed a well-earned reputation for being the cleverest people in the entire region. They knew something about print, and they strove to be up-to-date with the things and events of the world. At the same time, there lived a nobleman of the court who had taken the grace to visit that place often, tempted by the greed of his natural beauties. This nobleman did not seem so because of the simplicity of his bearing, nor the gentleness of his character, nor the patriarchal simplicity of his customs. It was finally understood there that he was not “one of the lesser men,” due to the vociferous reputation that had already made him well known throughout the world; And the news was a source of great astonishment to those villagers, not only because of what it suddenly revealed to them, but because they could not understand how a man of such an upright forelock and such great power could be content to climb the mountains there, paint villages and rocks on some planks, collect snails and shells in the sand, and see and observe everything, large and small… and from a distance, so as not to bother anyone, without ever asking them for anything, not even a vote for a candidate for mayor of the place, nor a plot of wasteland as a hook for many others that he would fish out little by little, until “one day” he would acquire the entire communal territory. On the contrary, he was very generous with his own things, especially with those most in need; and his heart and the doors of his house were always open to the sorrows and needs of others. Since these qualities alone had already earned him a cordial and high regard there, when they saw him as a wealthy and distinguished gentleman, simple affection verged on admiration. A sensible old man said one day to a Sunday gathering where the matter was being discussed: “I tell you, that fellow has his skin in his mouth, and is worth, in knowledge and intellect, more than all the weight of gold he carries.” And it was agreed upon, without a single disagreement. At this point, the gentleman, who did not seem so, bought a plot of land on the highest plains along the coast and built a house on it. “The gales will blow you hard there,” said the sensible fool, “and I don’t praise your taste for that; but since it is yours, as it is, may God grant you good life and health for eternity.” Things being thus, he returned to court, as the wealthy gentleman was accustomed to do from time to time. And returning to court, he did one of his most notorious tricks there, so much so that the next day the noise had already reached the kitchens of that village. “That’s good,” said one idiot to another who was discussing the matter with him, “and it’s clear that if that fellow is determined to extract gold from the stony ground of the coast, he’ll extract gold. You say that you have the losses in your skin… Well, I tell you that he is the same Pateta in body and soul; and I tell you more if it comes to it: I tell you that being what he is and worth what he is worth, it is not enough to feel and know it, as we know and feel it, if we keep quiet about it down there, as we have kept quiet up to now. Courtesy demands more from the respectable; After all, the guy is already a householder, and like the other guy who said it, he belongs to one of us, yours, and mine. “Did you hit the same nail I hit not so many hours ago?” the listener responded. “I won’t say no,” the first speaker replied. “And what nail is that? ” “Well, the same one many of the local people have already hit. ” “Stipulate it more clearly and at once. ” “I stipulate and say: that when the time comes to have that guy within reach, you will correspond to him, if not with what he is and what he deserves, then at least with what we are and can do; for, as you say, only God knows about silent words and cultured deeds; and a man who has an honorable feeling should tell him, because if he doesn’t say it , it’s as if he didn’t have it.” And as for that wealthy man, it’s time he knew our feelings, so he can see that he doesn’t live here in a land of ingratitude or melons. ” “That’s the point, and I was aiming at it when I told you what I told you. So understand each other, and there’s nothing more to say for now.” From this conversation arose a discussion that had something to do with it. Not a single neighbor was missing from it. The point being brought into question, and it being agreed at once and without dispute that each of those gathered would go “on his day” to the lord’s house to “pay homage to him,” they came to the subject of how, and one of the attendees said: “Well, I’ll take him, for the record, two of the best birds I have in the barnyard. ” “Current,” said the sententious idiot who was in charge of the business there. “But are you going to hand them over straight away? Aren’t you going to accompany the nicety with a bad word? ” “Exactly,” replied the one with the birds, “and I was already thinking of that. ” “And you were counting well,” replied the other. “But what are you going to say to him? ” “Man,” replied the person addressed, “whatever is reasonable and comes to the point. ” “Just seeing him is enough. ” “Well, I’ll tell him, more or less, that… this way, that… that way; that if you are this; that if you are worth that; “Blessed be the moon on which you were born, and the hour in which you settled here… and… and… ” “Well, look, he’ll have to hear it all, as you know it well. And you?” added the goldfinch, turning to another of the guests. “Well, I,” replied the aforementioned, scratching his neck, “if I don’t have birds to take to that fellow, there must be something of account at home, or in the waters of the sea, with which to paint him the good faith I have for him; and at the auto of the word, I won’t fail in its hour and point. ” “Give a _simen_ of it.” “Well, to the _simen_ of what you just heard from my friend: that… above, that… below; that what you know, that what you can, that what you’re worth; “Let not even the suns of the day nor the stars of the night compare with you, and blessed be the hour… ” “On to someone else,” said the fat cat, winking at him at the same time. And the other continued singing the exact same tune as his predecessors, like each and every one of those who followed him in line. Then the sententious cat said: “The attempt is good, and the good feeling that moves us all will be appreciated ; but, for what it’s worth, I’d like to tell you that, as there are so many of us, there’s enough row for a week of one-on-one talking, and the tale will be, for the wealthy, the end.” The objection was considered very sensible, and it was agreed that they should all make the visit together. “It’s a worse point for the gentleman,” a somewhat malicious attendee explained, “if each osequio has to be accompanied by a harangue from the osequiante, and all of them intoned in the same solfa, as has been seen here; because in this way he will have to bottle up from one alendá what he could have sipped little by little over the course of a week from the other, and without any physical distress.” From this new conflict arose another idea: to go all together, but speaking only one. Thus it was agreed, and it was also agreed, _némine discrepante_, to entrust the harangue to a faithful heirloom, present there, who hadn’t said a word until then, nor was he very helpful in it, let’s say; but who, on the other hand, was one of the oldest in the group, one of those who most admired the wealthy man, and the one who had conversed with him the most and best knew his tastes and “genius.” The embassy frightened the man; But thinking that great occasions require great sacrifices, and counting more on his enthusiasm than on his strength, he accepted without complaint. Days passed; the wealthy gentleman returned from court, and when he least expected it, the neighbors invaded his house, their christening rags on, the modest treat well hidden. The faithful man rushed forward, clearing his throat loudly and stepping awkwardly; and confronting the wealthy gentleman, who, as his expression indicated, was with him in anguish and distress, he tried to launch into the tirade he had painstakingly “cooked”… but his idea slipped away: he tried to find her by shortcuts and more beaten paths, but words failed him; and finally, determined to extricate himself from the conflict he found himself in, with an excuse, even his voice failed him. So, rather than throw himself out of the window facing him, he flung himself onto the only handhold he could reach to escape the quagmire alive: in his own way, with his feet on the ground and God’s help; and so he began, wading toward the assembled crowd, his eyes fixed both on the baskets in which they carried their respective “fines” and on the compassionate face of the wealthy man being celebrated. “And finally, here are these fellows, and here I am; and they and I, and what they bring and what I also bring, these poverties that are plain to see, and the heart that, with a little penitence, can also be seen as more valuable than in the palm of the hand; all of this and all that we are and are worth and hope for, belongs to Your Grace; and yet, even though we give all we have, we do not give a cent of what Your Grace deserves. In this regard, order and command; and you will see how our good will to serve you falls no short of words. And with this I will tire you no more. ” He said; and without waiting for a reply, he placed his basket on the ground; his clients imitated him and went out in a crowd to the street, as little satisfied with the value of their offerings as with the harangue of the faithful, who had abandoned his deeds, from whom they had promised themselves something better. Well then, mutatis mutandis, we are dealing here with a case very similar to the one in the small village in my story, and that is precisely why I have brought it up. You, illustrious diner, admired companion and close friend; you are, and pardon the way I describe it, the wealthy and affable lord; we who have gathered around you to celebrate you without attacking you; the simpletons of the small village, men of a healthy and spirited nature, many of them somewhat given to the vice of letters, and all of them, as a whole, fervent admirers of the great masters, like you, in the art of cultivating them; And I, the faithful one, abandoned by deeds, who accepted, at an ill-timed hour, the task of delivering your harangue, and who, when the fierce moment of fulfilling his mission arrives, feels, anguished and sweating, that he lacks words, and his voice is clogged in his throat, and knows nothing of the whereabouts of his thoughts, to tell you, even, what is coming. In such a dark situation, leaving aside useless rhetoric, and attentive only to the faithful fulfillment of the honorable mandate, I call your consideration, with due respect, not towards the humble baskets of our poor offerings, but to the deep feeling that beats in our hearts when we present them to you, to the good friendship, to the fervent admiration and to the affectionate respect that we consecrate to you. All this, and much more that is better understood than explained, together and in one piece, seasoned with the warmth of our joy, and among the fragrant leaves of the virgin bay laurel that grows so profusely in the flowery soil of the little land, which has expanded its boundaries by swelling with noble vanity since you declared it your second homeland; all this, I repeat, we offer you, and I serve it to you with heart and soul, as the final course of this affectionate feast, in the sauce of my profession. Chapter 11. OUTLINE. His subject is not a purely Spanish product; but, right or wrong , we already have it here, and as acclimated as many other things that pass for Spanish, because in Spain they live and grow and even multiply; and if they do not rigorously conform to our genuine way of being, we are adapting ourselves to them, and it matters not. It did not appear on the face of this earth through the slow and gradual work of a gestation subject to the unalterable laws of Nature, but through the violent effort of an artificial cultivation, similar to that which produces tomatoes in December, and lively, effective chickens without the warmth of the hen. It was brought to it by the arbitrary law of a necessity of the times; a whim of today’s people, who demand, to feed their voracity, not the succulent delicacies of yesterday, but in large and very small doses, but the incessant gossip, the continuous, stimulating, and caustic parvity that keeps the appetite in perpetual activity. Giving him, then, a letter of citizenship in Spain, and studying him a little from here to properly identify him, it can be stated, without a shadow of a doubt , that he descends in a direct line from that very modest _gazette_ or _localist_, who, a few years ago, exercised the precarious profession quietly and hidden from the people, out of respect for the proverbial Spanish quixotism, which held him in little esteem and lumped him in with all the “lazy vagabonds” and other “bad-living and pernicious people”; of that excellent young man who, from time to time and in very extraordinary cases, would be seen, with one hand in his pocket and his top hat in the other, at the door of a public office, asking twenty times in a low voice for permission to go a little further in, with the modest purpose of asking a fourth-class officer, or a police agent of the lowest rank, if the current news among the public about this robbery or that disaster was true, in the certainty of being answered, on the fifth or sixth attempt, with a shamelessness or a snort that caused him anguish and sweats, well deserved in his humble opinion; but that it still seemed like a joke to him if, upon leaving there and having flown into the editorial office, he was allowed to write, for the next day’s issue, a little piece of news along these lines: “With news from a reliable source, we can confirm or deny what has been circulating for half a week in the squares, social gatherings, and cafes about this or that.” Thus was born, suddenly and with a bang, and this is how this personage, or rather , this institution with its own jurisdiction and unlimited jurisdiction, who bucks the public powers and flaunts their respect wherever it falls as if rained from the sky, come to him with his snorts and hisses, those unsociable officials who closed the doors to his father! For much less than that, for the slightest blunder or delay in providing him with the news he desires and has requested, he will make them tremble with a fulminating threat: he will tell the governor, he will tell the minister, or the head of state, if necessary, if they push him a little “and that happens again.” For him, there is no obstacle there to stop him, no reasons to contradict him. The entire house is his, and he enters it as if into a conquered place, without answering the doormen who greet him reverently, asking for whoever accommodates him and slipping in wherever he pleases. For the usual and ordinary, he even has his little office in the most inaccessible to the common people and most _sacred_ part of the place, with the news he desires already on the table, so that he has no more work than that of obtaining it. If they seem too little, you also have the right, because you have everything, to call the official you need to give you more, and the right to enter the office of the chief, who will gladly serve you after having entertained you with a hug, two regalias , and a handful of candy. The news acquired in this way, news often related to the deepest and most secret aspects of politics or state administration, news of _sensation_ most of them, will be published a few hours later in the second or third edition of the several published each day by the newspaper that pays you. When you don’t want to bother going to collect them from the respective centers, the officials of the Nation, the same ones who are accustomed to receiving with sour faces and little less than a blow with a broom the meek taxpayer who gives what they consume, will take care of sending them to the editorial office, with the request that they forgive you for the small amount and send what suits them. On the street, he works with the same luck and handles things with the same aplomb. If the scaffolding of a facade breaks or topples over before the lame bricklayer lets out his first groan, he’s already at his side, pencil and paper in hand, not to lift him up or rescue him, for now, but to harass him with questions. “What’s your name?” “How old are you?” “How many children do you have?” “Are you a widower?” “Where do you live?” “Where are you from?” “How did you fall?” “Did the rope break?” “Did the scaffolding tip over?” “Whose fault was it?” “The owner because he was mean? The architect because he was careless?” ” Then the stretcher will arrive; the bricklayer will be taken to the First Aid Center, and he will go first and enter the house before the sick person. And while the doctor is feeling what is injured and what is not, he will question him, to write down the answers with his everlasting pencil: “Is it a fracture?–Is it a dislocation?–Of the tibia?–Of the femur?–Do you have a fever?–Is it serious?–Will it heal?…” Until, he, tired of asking and the other not tired of answering, he will leave, without worrying too much about the bricklayer’s fate, although upon reading later in the newspaper the account of the event with all its details, anyone would believe the narrator to be “on the house,” from how he wails and groans about the fall, and thunders against the inhumane people who construct or supervise buildings, without regard for the health and lives of the miserable workers who help them with their dangerous work. He arrives at a fire before the sound of the bells that announce it, and much before, of course, the pumps, the hoses , and the picket; and not out of any charitable anxiety, for this particular matter does not concern him much. What matters to him is finding out before anyone else, so as to be the first to publish, how and where the thing started; what people live there; what they do and where they escape or jump to save their skins; How many bones are broken in these situations, or how many pieces of furniture are shattered; what hosemen, what authorities, what acquaintances, or what forces of the garrison have been the first to arrive; and while some give orders, almost always the opposite, and others carry them out as they see fit, and this fireman climbs up the facade digging his nails into the cracks and protrusions of the wall, if he has no better handholds, or he stands at the top, in the imposing light of the voracious bonfire against the black background of the starry sky, wielding his axe to knock down the peak of the roof; or another peeks out from the scorched balcony door, amid a thick column of smoke laced with sparks, to breathe a little oxygenated air that isn’t inside; or the men who move the pump arms or direct the heavy nozzle of the hose sweat a kilo in the street ; or they pile up dilapidated furniture , clothes and mattresses, cages, hatboxes and junk, amidst the clamor of those who command with right and those who cross out the mandates for the luxury of crossing them out; of the lamentable wails of the wounded; of the moaning of women over their shattered trousseaus; of the beating of the butts of the picket on the hard cobblestones, and of the continuous murmur of that whole compact and seething crowd, which sways and oscillates like a piece of the sea, he goes and comes, and enters and exits, and slips and squeezes through all the cracks in the mass, and crosses the line of soldiers, and leaps over the ridge of piles and the billowing sleeves, and tramples and conquers everything, so that he may know before, if possible, any other of his profession, the names of the fireman on the roof, and the man who broke his collarbone, and the neighbor who climbed out through the balcony; where they’re from, what they do for a living, and what their status is; what nickname the thief arrested by the governor has, and why he was arrested, etc., etc. Then, flying off to the editorial office to publish that little bit, and then returning to the scene of the incident to quickly gather notes on what’s happening, until the blaze is extinguished by the efforts of the men or by lack of firepower. Then a last-minute tirade; and to top it all off, a summary of what happened, with an assessment of the damages, and compassionate tears in memory of those injured and wounded; a volley of reflections on the poor fire service, another of praise for the “worthy authorities” and other people who have been accommodating to him, and special praise for the heroic firefighter on the roof. A big fire is great theater for a man like that to show off his diligence and sagacity. But there are still others that lend themselves better to the exercise of the rare talents that he possesses by singular privilege of his nature and by law of the custom that has formed him: for example, the noisy crimes, the _causas celebres_. This is where one must see him to admire him in all the pomp of his absolute power and lordship! Wherever the investigating court goes, there he is already, who is also judge and magistrate, and Court and Supreme Court and everything there is to be; he has been there since long before, hand in hand with the supposed criminal, or Witness, or accomplice, whose statements are being sought. –How many stab wounds did you use to kill your victim? –Sir!… I didn’t kill anyone: the judge knows it well. –What judge or what dead child! There is no judge here but me, nor any court but the one I represent, which is the court of the press, that of the public conscience; and it is public and well-known that you did it, so no one but you should pay for it. So, sing outright. –I repeat that I am innocent. –Where were you at eight in the morning on the seventh of February of last year? –I don’t know! –What were the signs of a certain woman who, on that occasion, while you were greeting the sprawling man, passed by on the opposite sidewalk? –I don’t remember anything about that. –You’ll remember it on the gallows. What color were the boots of the barbarian woman you stopped with on the same street eight months later at about noon, and why, as you said goodbye, did you fix your gaze on the balcony of a third floor, and did she nod yes ? “Nor do I remember any of that. ” “And you also don’t remember who the demure lady was who came out in the company of a very elegant gentleman, with the collar of his overcoat turned up and the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes? ” “Where did these people come from?” “From the very doorway of the deceased’s house, three hours after the crime had been committed. From what floor were they coming down? Where were they going, and why did they meet a man at the end of the street, and at that moment this man threw down the butt of the cigar he was smoking, and as he threw it, his elbow touched the lady’s arm, and the lady turned her face toward him? ” “But why should I know these things?” –Because the man with the cigarette butt was you, and the modest lady and the gentleman with her, your accomplices and those who covered up for you, as will gradually be proven. –By Jesus Christ!… But, sir, even if it were true that I threw a cigarette butt in that place you mention, and at the same time knocked a lady over the arm, and that lady turned around to look at me, what does all this have to do with the crime committed three hours earlier… I don’t know where? –Through that back door, historical justice seeks to escape criminal responsibility on your part; but that lady won’t give it to me with frills and ruffles… And let’s move on. At what time that same night did you deliver a package to the Prime Minister ? –Me?… –You, yes. You see how everything gets known. And for what other reason, more or less, did you have an interview with the nuncio, and give him a letter that a gentleman of the Palace had provided you at the request of the Russian ambassador? “How outrageous! It is likely that while the journalist is engaged in an interrogation such as this, justice will arrive to fulfill its duty, and that, warned of this, the questioner will haughtily respond to the official who warned him: “Let him wait.” Because there have been cases in which justice obeys him and waits for him to finish. After the interrogation, he will be sent to the editorial office to be thrown out, corrected and annotated, or, as it were, put in the stimulating sauce that the public craves and savors; and if it suits his purposes, before or after this procedure, to the presidency of the Council of Ministers or the Supreme Court. If the president is busy, let him be free; If he’s resting, let him forgive him, but let him receive him. He needs to see him, and he will see him. And he sees him at last. He sees himself with the exalted personage, inaccessible to the anonymous mass of mere mortals; and not only does he see him like that, but he questions him and admonishes him about how crooked the rod of justice is in that crime, and he even speaks to him about the aforementioned package during the interview between Jetas and the Nuncio, and about the gentleman’s letter, and about the intrigues of the Russian ambassador, without anyone throwing anything at him or crowding around. At the oral trial , he will have a place and seat of preference, designated by the judiciary, so that he can take and make notes and sketches as he pleases, and he can, after the trial, offer the public, for their enjoyment , the new directions that the criminal business is taking in the separate case he is pursuing against the accused. With the same right and with identical prerogatives, he will attend academic ceremonies if they are public, and if not, to collect the notes that will be provided to him of what some do and what others say, to give a detailed account of everything, and to decide immediately ex cathedra, whether the contest is about agriculture, mathematics, navigation, or theology. It makes no difference to him, because he understands nothing about any of them; but he is clever and possesses the art of pretending to understand everything well, and with this he has more than enough to carry out his task gracefully. As soon as the ministers leave a council, or a small group of deputies leave a secret meeting, he is already at the door to stop them and demand an account of what has been said and agreed upon at the _secret_ meeting. As soon as a notable person arrives, or publishes a _sensible_ document , or produces a split in Parliament with his words or actions , he requests the corresponding _interview_; and without waiting for an answer, he plants himself before him and subjects him to the tyranny of his inevitable interrogations: “What have you come for? What day did you leave Paris? What was the true object of the conference you held on that day with the German ambassador in that capital? What judgment have the eminent men of that Government formed of our latest crisis? In publishing the letter that gives so much to talk about today, did you propose solely to satisfy a need of your political conscience, or did you somehow plan to annoy the Government and make its situation more difficult? Was it the work of your own exclusive impulse, or was it also by the agreement of your political friends? In this case, were you only aiming to wound, or were you aiming to kill? Are the motives on which you declared your act to be the only and true ones?” Are there not other reserved areas of a very different nature? “Can any credit be given to the version, current in the corridors, that your unexpected disagreement is due to the efficient cause of the President of the Council’s denial of a portfolio that had been offered to you in the last ministerial change?” Here too, nothing is thrown at him, nor is he denied the most insignificant of the answers he requests. If on that day or the previous one some scandal with transparent initials has been bouncing around the columns of the periodical press, or a spark of wit has been “discovered” in the theater or in the novel… to that at once in order to throw him naked into the street, before he grows old among the veils of mystery. To the outraged husband: what causes could have influenced the origin of the events that brought about the catastrophe? And so on. To the bankrupt banker: did politics play a part in the disaster; how much are the liabilities and assets; What kind of victims are the most numerous, and whether they are resigned, etc., etc. To the playwright or the novelist: if it’s true that “in his early days” he was a Civil Guard member, or a seminarian, or a lieutenant of the General Staff; that he robbed a dancer and fought with a knife with a Public Order officer; that he writes face up, and that in his village he eats raw meat and sleeps in the hayloft… Anyone who understands even a little about the ailments of weak human nature will think that this man, who hasn’t stopped moving, seeing, speaking, and writing all day long, will collapse in bed in the early hours of the night. No, sir: he’s also a correspondent for ten or twelve provincial newspapers; and after having sent as many letters by mail in his own handwriting , at the last hour, that is, at two or three in the morning, when there’s nothing left to snoop around in the gatherings of the Ministries and the footlights of the otherworldly stages have gone out, he will rush to the telegraph, and there, with the speed of lightning, he will send to the furthest reaches of the Peninsula the quintessence of everything he has learned since getting out of bed, so that , a few hours later, the subscribers of the provincial newspapers who pay him for this invaluable service can enjoy it for breakfast. In short: he knows neither fatigue nor closed doors; he is everywhere and at all hours of the day and night, witnessing all the events that can be narrated in print… or waiting for them to happen, because only by supposing him to be endowed with a prodigious instinct for divination or foreboding can one conceive the punctuality with which he attends to everything that happens everywhere, public or secret, great or small, auspicious or inauspicious. Nor do distances exist for him. He saves them at any time of year , for free and first class—another astonishing privilege in that proverbial fiefdom of railroad companies!—or whenever necessity demands, sometimes for free too, of course, and he’s already there moaning about the ravages of an earthquake, or the victims of an epidemic, or the spoils of a shipwreck; singing the triumphs of science at the inauguration of a new artifact; describing the pomp of an exceptional party, or listing the snares and intrigues at this or that summer “rendezvous” spot for the distinguished ladies of “our elegant world.” But the breaths of this man, usually a simple snooper (on the cheap) go much further . When the occasion demands it, he knows how to elevate his profession to epic heights. And it is admirable then how one day, because in the most remote part of the world something happens or is about to happen that is not seen at all times or in all places, he crosses seas and mountains, braves the dangers of storms and unhealthy climates; and in his right hand, the pencil, the sword of this newly minted conqueror, after having settled with the captain of the ship or the guides of the mountains or the desert, as a preamble to the work that worries him and tears him from his home, if he has one, he attacks the Shah of Persia, or a Rajah of India, or a Patagonian savage, by signs, if he cannot do it otherwise, and frees his conscience from the sheets of paper in his inexhaustible wallet. The event that brings him to such distant confines is, as a rule, a barbaric war between two great nations over a “take these straws away from me.” He is now duly installed in the headquarters of one of the belligerent armies. It is a mounted square; and if he does not have rations and bedding in the commander-in-chief’s tent, he will have them in the one that follows. Before the battle begins, he has already counted the combatants on each side, with their respective fighting elements, described the terrain conditions, and predicted the final success. The first cannon shot is fired, and he, after consulting his watch, records the important moment in his notebooks. From then on, as if his profession were that of warfare, oblivious to the dangers he faces, he is all eyes and activity to fulfill his duty, not as a scrupulous chronicler, but as a diligent newsreader; and he will be seen running here and there amid the dust and smoke of battle, driven by the desire to see the most salient events for himself and to record them with the greatest possible detail . And if he deduces from some of them, strangely disastrous in his field, that a new warlike device is being used on the frontier, he will be capable of putting himself under enemy fire and not stopping until he sees with his own eyes the deadly device and how it works. If he succeeds, what victory will be like it? But whether he succeeds or not, whether the device exists or not, whether it sneaks into the enemy camp or not, whether the latter loses or wins the battle, he, always indefatigable and with the roar of the last cannon shot still in his ears, will leave the troubled and bloody field at full speed on his horse, and will cross plains and defiles, and will travel leagues and leagues without a point of escape. rest, to the nearest telegraph station or post office. There, perhaps without having even had breakfast, he will coordinate his notes and, in the manner convenient to his purposes, send them to their destination. The next day, the same hard work begins again with very slight variations, until the end of the conflict… if before then he has not ended up living through some bad mishap that he had not dreamed of in the intoxication of his insatiable and dangerous curiosity. Such is the extreme that the mania of this new knight-errant can reach, and has reached more than once, for whom, while exercising his free profession, the common laws of the State do not apply either! And all of this, in short, the great and the small, the serious and the comic, of this subject, why and for what? … Well, because of the desire, as has already been pointed out, to be the first to collect facts and sayings, so that the newspaper that pays him is not the second to sell them on the public highway to a crowd of disdainful lazy people and to as many impatient readers, who have to forget them, barely swallowed up, by the hunger for new ones, and who still find their ration dear in the misery it costs them of a small dog. Truly worthy of higher destinies are the wit, the freshness and the superhuman efforts that are needed, and ordinarily employed, to carry out conscientiously the office of reporter. 1892. Chapter 12. FROM MY MEMORIES. A gray afternoon with intermittent warm sun; A poor, old church on a stony plateau with shreds of grass and clumps of wild bushes; a vast green countryside with distant backdrops of rolling hills and upright, gracefully terraced mountains. In the church porch, groups of villagers were talking and stomping quietly, out of reverence for what was happening in the holy place on such a significant day. Inside the church, the old priest and one of his parishioners, not much younger, were sitting on a high-backed pew in front of a tenebrarium, singing the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In the main chapel , filled with lights, was the monument, its framework covered with very colorful quilts and handkerchiefs, which then extended in two wings, to the right and left, to the respective walls of the church. At the foot of the monument’s steps, the cross is draped on a black cloth , its arms resting on two pillows profusely adorned with colored ribbons, silver chains, pincushions, and reliquaries. The faithful, who fill almost the entire unoccupied part of the church, pray fervently or walk in groups around Calvary, and sometimes, as if to accompany the murmur of prayers or the chanting of the darkness, the faint sound of a humble copper coin falling into the saucer placed next to the recumbent cross. In the main part of the church, the two floats, on their corresponding floats, that will be used in the procession: that of Our Lady of Sorrows, which is not very large, and that of “the Jews,” which is large and heavy, since it represents Jesus tied to the column, scourged by two executioners: three sculptures, certainly not art models, but of good size and quite solid; That’s why their floats have eight arms. Finally, the last candle on the altarpiece goes out, and the priest claps his hand on his now-closed book; and the children who swarmed among the men at the gate, most of them armed with clubs, begin to beat wildly on everything that makes a sound, such as the posts that support the ailing roof, and even the very leaves of the main door. The lucky ones who have a ratchet, start to knock it down furiously, and those without a club or a ratchet, start stamping their feet on the ground with their well-shod clogs. The point is to make noise… until the priest appeared on the platform of the portico. He stopped there; everyone fell silent as soon as they saw him, and he said in a loud voice to those at the gate: “Six men for the Virgin’s passage. ” “There are four,” replied a handsome young man, pointing to three others who accompanied him. The priest thanked them with a gesture, and looking around the entire courtyard again, he said again: “Eight for the Jews. ” “There are six,” replied a burly young man on one side. “There are four!” said another, even burlier, immediately coming forward from the opposite side with the three who were still maintaining their daring start. This boldness aroused rumblings of enthusiasm among those present, and on the priest’s face a certain expression of pleased astonishment. With this expression on his face, he considered the matter concluded and returned to the church, where the young men who had triumphed in the bidding followed him , and the people at the portal prepared to follow him . They did not follow him immediately because two penitents appeared inside through the gap to the north, whose unexpected presence suspended everyone’s spirits. They wore long, coarse tunics with high hoods and drooping masks. They went barefoot, their feet and clothes covered in mud, and they carried on their backs two very large, heavy, rough wooden crosses. This occurrence was not unusual in the entire region, nor new in that church; but it was unusual. According to some strangers, who out of curiosity accompanied them from their village, whose sanctuary they had already visited, the penitents had been traveling six stations at that time; that is, they had traveled through six towns, which they named. The narrators learned this from other curious people who had followed them to their own. What was not known with certainty was where they came from, who they were, or for what sin they were performing that harsh penance, which must have begun in the morning and could not have ended until well into the night. No one had seen them eat, drink, rest, or even take to the cross to defend themselves from the showers and hailstorms that had fallen around noon. They arrived, therefore, very weak, and their gait was clearly visible, especially when they climbed the steps of the portico to enter the church. Behind them followed all the people outside, and they saw how those inside , very admiring and respectful, made way for them to the steps of the monument, where they knelt, one on each side of the cross, without relieving their shoulders of the weight of their own. While they prayed there, venerating the sacrament, the procession was forming , which was to follow its customary route around the church, along the longest and most difficult route: a rough and uneven path, festooned, in places, with hedges, willows, and elder bushes that were already beginning to turn green. This entire route had to be covered without a break; and at that point , the brave young men were to call the shots to lead the floats, especially that of “the Jews.” Finally, the procession set out, led by a barefoot man, dressed in a discarded alb, his face and head wrapped in a white cloth, and holding a large crucifix upright. This figure was known locally as the “Pharisee.” Behind him came the float of “the Jews,” whose float creaked under the weight of the three statues, poorly secured to the platform by long iron supports that often squeaked in their rusty sockets. Next, at a regular distance, came the Virgin; and between this float and the schoolchildren who preceded the priest and his companions, the two penitents, having already completed their visit to the monument, were placed . The mass of parishioners brought up the rear of the procession, which gradually entered its course. From the nearby houses and the alleys and paths that converged at that point, the last stragglers were hastily leaving the place and joining the pious procession: the women covering their heads with a scarf or a formal shawl, and the men putting on their Sunday jackets. The houses were deserted, the animals gathered, and the hearths unlit; and, like the vast countryside , the misty mountain range, and the sky itself, somber and cloudy, everything was silent, motionless, and melancholy. Everything seemed immersed in deep meditation and hanging on the psalms intoned by the poor priest of village, with a tremulous and labored voice, the only sounds that could be heard throughout the entire expanse of that grandiose scene of saddened and solitary nature. As the procession moved slowly forward, men and women would occasionally disperse from the mass of the fervent cortege, advancing along the high slopes of the road to the steps; and from the timidity of their gait, the respectfulness of the appearance, and the yearning of their gaze, whenever they fixed it on them, it seemed as if they were seeking in that tangible, living representation of what was being commemorated there, an imaginative force more powerful than that of their meditations: in the blood that ran down Jesus’ back from the blows of his executioners, in the blood that dripped from the wounds opened by the thorns of his crown, and in the rope that tied his hands, like those of a criminal, the magnitude of the sacrifice of the Son of God for love of his creatures, the same ones who so mercilessly tormented him; On the bitter face of the virgin mother, the intensity of her unspeakable anguish and pain; and who knows if from the fulfillment of her pious desires; from having seen and felt, through this means, all that they longed to see and feel then, was born that singular expression of her eyes when they fixed them later on the two unknown penitents who were dragging heavy crosses from town to town in relief of their own faults, which perhaps were minor, and in reparation to the Redeemer of the world, so offended by the pride and ingratitude of men? Worldly criticism, which prides itself so much on the superficiality and theatrical apparatus of things, how much would it have found worthy of its mockery in that spectacle so devoid of the finesse of art and the pomp of luxury! And yet, there, in the laughable form of the two penitents and beneath the poor and motley appearance of that crowded gathering of honest peasants, who knew how to discover the reality of pain in the imperfect images, and feel and weep for it in their hearts, sheltered, as if in its own shelter, the unclouded, simple, deep-rooted faith; the powerful force that moves mountains, redeems villages, and dignifies homes. When the procession returned to the church, all the faithful fell to their knees and, led by the priest, offered up a prayer to God for forgiveness. And that was all there was to hear, that chorus of voices of every imaginable variety, dense, harmonious, filling, clamorous, and resonant, the depths of the temple! A truly sublime scene, both for the occasion and for the grandeur of its simplicity. As soon as the church fell silent again, the two penitents emerged from it, already approaching dusk; and taking the road to Vega, they were soon seen to disappear into one of its hollows, followed by some boys who were soon to turn back for fear of the night that had already fallen, and of the blessings of the people who admired their heroic piety and applauded their edifying example. Chapter 13. TO MARCELINO MENÉNDEZ Y PELAYO _How weddings are still celebrated in a certain mountain region, nestled in a fold of the most rugged part of the Cantabrian mountain range. Dear Marcelino: If it will not interfere with the book that is being printed in your honor; if it does not seem to you that it will be a discordant note in its concerted seriousness, help me to arrange for the publication of the contents of the enclosed pages on the last page, outside, if you will, the domains of the index, and even behind the back of the colophon itself; in short, in the most hidden place, where no one but you will find out about it. What matters, on the side of my ardent desires, is that not a single branch of the laurels from my garden be missing from the wreath that is being woven for you today; because I cannot resign myself to the fact that, when your admirers try to erect a monument to your glory, the very one who admires and loves you the most should fail to contribute his modest little stone to it , no matter how much others admire and love you. After all, and considering the reasons well, the humble tribute that I offer you falls within the program of that book. He, then, is the fruit, albeit trivial and insubstantial, of my own _research_, and of a subject, not only Spanish, but from this, our native land of the mountains… In short, “just seeing it is enough,” and off it goes, without embellishments or trappings, and just as it appears, six years ago, in my notebook. “What might be called a bridal procession, composed of the most slender and rosy-cheeked of the town’s youth, _they_ with tambourines highly adorned with ribbons and bells, and many of _them_ with shotguns on their shoulders, and all of them with the best of their equipment on their backs, has been forming up, since sunrise, next to the bride’s house; and as soon as she and the groom, accompanied by the best men, appear at the doorstep, the girls greet her with a song alluding to the event, and the boys with an explosion of neighs… and a full volley of shots. Once everyone has set off in proper and orderly formation towards the church, at a slow, steady pace marked and determined by the incessant and monotonous beating of the tambourines, the young women go singing to the bride and groom, to the priest, to the parents of the bride and groom, to the godparents, and to any other notable people in the area who form part of the procession or whom the singers remember. The young men sometimes respond to the young women’s songs with other well-neighed ones at the end, and those carrying shotguns often fire salutes. Thus they proceed to the church by the longest route, to the obvious joy of the people, who open doors and windows to watch the wedding go by, and the procession is constantly swelled by the idle young men and girls tempted by curiosity; always a flowery and smooth path… except when the groom is a stranger; Because, in this case, this first day of the festival has a rather original and very curious variation. It happens then that, perhaps as the wedding party is walking along this road, up to half a dozen young men appear, emerging from this and that crossroads, jumping and rearing, howling, neighing, and firing their shotguns, with the noise and fearful appearance of a horde of savages. They stop the procession and seize the bride, who from that moment on is kidnapped or, as they say, pawned, with all those present, the town and the entire region knowing full well that the wedding will never take place if the groom, or failing that, the best man, does not redeem the bride with the sum of three duros, which are to be spent later in honor of the newlyweds and for the benefit of the young people, who, at this price and in this way, give the foreign groom a letter of citizenship in the place. When the bride, ransomed or not, has arrived at the door of the church, the young women of the procession sing this song to her: When taking holy water, Say goodbye, companion: The first as a married woman And the last as a single woman. «Where it is evident that the wild muse was not very attentive to linking the meaning of the last two verses of the song with that of the previous ones. «After the ritual ceremonies and the mass, in which the bride and groom receive communion, now «tied to the yoke for infinity», the procession returns to the street, with new songs from the young women, to the same rhythmic sound of the tambourines, and with the same neighing of the young men and the same salvos from the shotguns as before. «This time the picturesque and cheerful group heads to the groom’s home; that is, to his parents’ home; and as soon as it arrives there amidst the vibrant curiosity of the neighborhood residents, it stops in front of the door, and the tireless young women sing in this way: Lady… So-and-so, Come out to receive your daughter-in-law, And treat her with affection And take care of her. «And the invoked mother-in-law, dressed in her Sunday clothes, and pale with emotion as one might imagine, comes out, in fact, and takes her daughter-in-law by the hand, kisses her on the cheek, and leads her to her house, where she is followed first by the groom and the godfathers, and then everyone the cortege, if it fits inside, even if it doesn’t fit very comfortably. Then, with the crowd arranged in the largest and most respected room, and each in their corresponding place according to the role they play in that true solemnity, the newlyweds kneel before the moved woman, who remains standing at attention, and say to her: “We ask your forgiveness if we have offended you in any way. ” To which she responds: “You are forgiven. ” And he holds out his hands for them to rise. “Immediately, the best man faces her and asks: “What do you assign to your daughter-in-law as a pledge? ” And the mother-in-law responds: “Such and such a property, such and such an animal, or dress, or piece of furniture, etc., etc. “The best man then, turning to what could be called the public gathered there, says: “You are witnesses to this promise. «Then the girls sing to the sound of their tambourines: May God grant the bride health and wealth on this day, And wheat for her year, And then eternal glory. «With this, the people who had invaded the house leave, including the bridegrooms, and, already in the street, the singers say this farewell: The house is in mourning; The tiles want to cry; Inside remain the parents Who can console them. «It is very noteworthy that even though the father-in-law is alive and present at the ceremony, the bridegrooms always turn to the mother-in-law for forgiveness, and to the best man when he asks for the bride’s pledge. «The procession now returns to the house of her parents, with the usual songs, neighing, and salvos; and as soon as they arrive , the girls sing in this way: Open the golden doors And the silver locks, For here comes Mr. So-and-so With his white dove. «And the doors, which are not usually made of gold or have silver locks, open, and the bride and groom, their relatives and godparents, and the young women of the retinue enter the house. There, the table is set and the wedding meal is prepared, which the priest will preside over. The singers will not participate in this moment, but will simply witness the ceremony… and sing for it. «When this first part of the ceremony is over, the bride’s father stands up and, addressing her and her husband, blesses them in farewell in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All those present respond: «Amen»; and with this and a brief exhortation from the priest as he takes his leave, the table is abandoned by the dignitaries. It is then that the young women with the tambourines approach it ; The young men are called, still neighing in the corral, and the real revelry begins, which doesn’t end until late at night unless the diners first surrender to the weight of their food and the disruption of the dancing, as is often the case. Such is my offering. You see that, although meager, it falls within the requirements of the program, and, moreover, an unprecedented case! It teaches you something you didn’t know, knowing as much as you do. In any case, even supposing it were in my power to offer you something better, everything would seem small and bad to me when I considered the magnitude and height of his destiny. Thus concludes ‘Pachín González’, a work that not only presents us with the challenges of rural life, but also invites us to reflect on the values ​​that define us as human beings. José María de Pereda offers us a faithful portrait of the society of his time, highlighting the importance of family, work, and honor. We hope you enjoyed this literary journey and that you continue exploring the great classics of Spanish literature with us.