La piedra angular: novela 📚💎
The Cornerstone: A Novel of the Countess by Emilia Pardo Bazán immerses us in a story where destiny and morality intertwine. Through her complex characters and tense situations , the author presents a world where personal decisions become the driving force of a profound and moving narrative . In this story, unexpected twists and raw emotions invite us to reflect on the limits of desire and responsibility in human life. Chapter 1. Already exhausted by the length of the consultation that gray and melancholic March afternoon, Dr. Moragas leaned back in his chair; he sighed, arching his chest; he smoothed his curly white hair, and involuntarily reached for the latest issue of the _Revue de Psychiatrie_, still untouched, lying on the table next to unopened letters and bundled newspapers. But before she could slide the ivory folding knife between the leaves of the first sheet, the door next to the writing table opened with a bang, and bounding, bursting with laughter and clapping her hands, a little girl of about three or four entered , who didn’t stop her dizzying run until she was clutching the Doctor’s leg. “Baby!” he exclaimed, lifting her up. “It’s not even two o’clock yet! Let’s see you get out of here. Who told you to come here while we’re busy?” The little girl laughed her head off. Her face was a poem of joy. Her little eyes, winked with delicious mischief, black and lively, contrasted with the somewhat chlorotic fineness of her complexion. Between her pure lips peeked a rose-colored tongue. Her blond, silky hair covered her forehead and spread like a skein of raw silk over her shoulders. As the Doctor lifted her up, she struggled to pull at his whiskers or hair, provoking the comical scolding that always resulted from such attacks . From the moment the child entered, the room seemed less severe, lit by two windows that let in the veiled light of the Marinedo sun. Nené knew the corners of that austere place well and knew where to direct her gaze and the imperious little finger with which children indicate the direction of their capricious will. Not at the thick curtains; not at the high shelves, through whose glass the red hue of a brand-new binding sometimes shone; still less at the lower part of the same shelves, where, gleaming with cleanliness and rigorously classified, the surgical instruments gleamed: the trocars, scalpels, forceps, and mysteriously shaped scissors in their leather and velvet cases. the forceps, presenting the steel concavity of their terrible spoon; the speculums, reminiscent of both an optical instrument and a torture device… Nor did the innocent woman find any attraction in the fearful busts that demonstrated the nervous and venous systems, and that stared sinisterly with their white, fleshless , eyelidless eyes; nor in the strange chair, which fell apart in all positions; nor in the wide basin surrounded by sponges and small bottles of carbolic acid; nor in the formless objects made of vulcanized rubber; nor in short, anything that was truly curative science. No! From the point where she passed through the door, Nené headed in an arrow-like direction toward a corner of the room, to the left of the Doctor’s chair, where, suspended from the wall by silk cords, was a light, satin-lined basket. It was the famous baby scale, the best way to check whether the wet nurse’s milk was adequate, nourishing, or malnourishing for the baby; and in its hollow cushion, like an image or symbol of the living baby, there was a picture of a cardboard baby, naked, crouching, leaning with his hands on the bottom of the basket, raising his chubby face and opening his enormous blue eyes. The picture was Nené’s idol , who stretched out his hands to reach him, shouting: “Nino selo, Nino selo. ” “Let’s see,” the Doctor would reply, “what do you want the Child from heaven to bring you today?” There were minutes of doubt, of uncertainty, of struggle between various equally fascinating temptations. “Tayamelos… rotilas… amendas… no, No, cookies… A lollipop….» The lollipop finally prevailed, and the Doctor, rising nimbly and executing the snatch with utmost neatness , slipped a piece of pine nut from his dressing gown pocket to the bottom of the basket . Then, lifting Nené up, the discovery of the desired treat was an explosion of shouts of joy and mutual laughter. Some comedy of this kind was in the making, for Nené was already heading towards the scales when a servant appeared at the side door, which undoubtedly led to the anteroom, and upon seeing the Doctor with the child in his arms, became undecided. Moragas, annoyed, frowned. “What’s going on? ” “Someone’s arriving right now… He says that if he could get in , he’d appreciate it very much; that he’s been here before, and since there was so much family….” The doctor raised his eyes and noticed the clock on the wall. It read five to two. A slave to duty, Moragas resigned himself. “Well, let Nené come in, to play with the girl…. Nino selo isn’t doing anything right now. You know that while there’s a consultation… ” Nené obeyed, very much against his will. Before turning around, leaving the door that cut him off from the girl closed, the Doctor spied the late client standing in the doorway. His presence betrayed an indefinable yearning, the pangs of breathing; and upon facing him, the doctor saw him motionless, hunched over, clutching the greenish, bisun-colored mushroom to his stomach with both hands. Moragas muttered a “sit down” and walked to his chair, nervously adjusting his gold-plated glasses and suddenly assuming a serious appearance. His gaze fell upon the patient as a hammer might, and a sudden and violent tension filled his memory. “Where have I seen this face?” The man didn’t say hello. Without letting go of his hat, and with a clumsy movement, he took the seat the Doctor had indicated; even seated, his breathing continued to produce that sullen, labored murmur, which was like a boiling lung. To the Doctor’s first questions, routine, clear, categorical, he answered in a reticent and confused manner, perhaps dominated by the vague fear and attempt at dissimulation in the face of science that characterizes medical consultations with low-class people; but, at the same time, expressing himself in more elaborate and select terms than his appearance promised. Moragas clarified the questioning, delving deeper, now completely dedicated to his task. “Have you been noticing these bilious attacks for a long time? Are the insomnias frequent? Every night, or seasonally? Do you work in an office? Do you spend long hours sitting?” “No, sir,” the client replied in a dull, slow voice. “I hardly work at all. I live a leisurely life; in other words, without any obligation.” Apparently, the phrase had nothing unusual about it, and yet it sounded strange to Moragas, renewing the pang of curiosity and the urge to remember where and when he had seen that man. He fixed his eyes again, even more scrutinizingly, on the sick man’s face. In reality, his features were hardly in keeping with the aristocratic affirmation of a leisurely life he had just made. His dress was the sordid and funereal attire of the most modest mesocracy, when it merges with the common people proper: a dirty and battered bowler hat, a black fly-wing suit consisting of a poorly cut jacket and narrow trousers, a shiny black silk tie, carelessly tied, a shirt three or four days old, a silver watch chain, cracked calf boots unpolished, and absolutely nothing in his hands: no umbrella, no cane. The rich don’t usually walk like that, for whom, by the grace of God, loaves of bread fall from the sky. “So you don’t do any exercise?” asked Moragas, who thought he was continuing the medical interrogation, but was going off on a tangent out of excited curiosity. “As exercise, yes…” the man responded opaquely. “I walk a lot. Sometimes I walk two or three leagues and I don’t tire. Some work is also done around the house.” He’s no slacker. “I didn’t say you were,” the doctor replied with a stern tone. “I have to find out, if I’m to know what’s wrong.” “Let’s see? Lie down there,” he ordered, pointing to a wide couch placed between the two windows of the office. The patient obeyed, and Moragas, approaching, unbuttoned the last buttons of his waistcoat, feeling and resting his open left hand flat on the hypochondrium. Then, with the knuckles of his right, he quickly checked the percussion, listening to the extent of the peculiar dull sound of the liver. While he performed these operations, his mobile face took on a firm and intelligent expression, while the patient’s revealed anxiety, almost anguish. “You may rise,” Moragas articulated, now returning to his chair, humming under his breath, a mechanical act for him. He fixed his gaze once again on the patient: now he was listening and feeling, so to speak, his physiognomy. Moragas, although he thought horribly of vitalism, was not the materialist physician who only treated the cortex: disregarding that scholastic little spirit called the vital force, no one granted greater influence than he to the phenomena of consciousness and to the mysterious psychophysical activities, irreducible to the merely physiological process. “There, in the brain or in the soul—let’s not argue over voices—is the human regulator,” he used to say. In many of the material failings, he saw what a cultured and astute observer must see: the reflection of intimate and secret moral states, which are not always consulted, because not even the sufferer has the courage to unravel them. Truth be told, Moragas admitted the reciprocal: sometimes he cured melancholy and character violence with aloe vera pills or doses of bromide. He knew that we form a whole, a harmonious whole, and that there are hardly any ailments of the body or spirit in isolation. In the client before him, his instinct pointed to a moral case, a man in whom the liver attack was due to the circumstances and events of life. “Do you drink?” he asked him tersely, with a certain harshness. “Sometimes… a spark of cane… ” “Just a spark? You don’t consult yourself well, my friend. You want to deceive me, and we’re not going to deceive ourselves here. ” “I’m not deceiving you, no sir; because for a man to take a glass or two, or three if necessary, it seems to me that it doesn’t make sense. There are times when you can’t go without, and I’d put anyone on the hook for not taking a sip… ” “Well, you shouldn’t take one,” the doctor warned, sweetening his voice because he noticed very bitter tones in the client’s. “I forbid you to taste him until at least Christmas Eve. ” But where the hell had Moragas seen that individual? When would the long, gaunt, and seemingly subdued figure cross his eyes? The silhouette that had something furtive about it, something that inspired an indefinable distance and suspicion? With each instant he reconstructed with greater precision the square, extremely broad forehead, the gray hair blown back as if by a violent gust of wind, the hollow eyes that seemed to stare inward, the slanted features, the prominent cheekbones, the marked facial asymmetry, a frequent sign of imbalance or disturbance in the faculties of the soul. If the doctor had a mirror in front of him and could make comparisons between his figure and that of the individual he was examining, he would better understand the impression of repulsion he felt, and would attribute it to the stark contrast. Moragas’s attitude was one of nonchalance, or rather, of that cordial petulance that commands sympathy: one seemed always ready to advance, presenting his chest, thrusting his head forward, extending his large, sniffing nose. The patient, on the contrary, seemed to be obeying the instinct of certain repugnant insects, constantly ready to retreat, to crouch, to seek a shady corner. Seeing the repulsion that the patient inspired in him, the doctor scolded himself, had an impulse of kindness, and while he took the sheet of paper to write a sort of directory to which the patient was to adhere, with his left hand he took a cigar from a mahogany cigar case, and handed it to him, saying: “Smoke.” At the same moment in which the tips of his fingers touched those of the patient, The obscure reminiscence floating in his memory gave a sharp throb and almost condensed. Moragas thought he was going to remember…, and still he didn’t. He saw a mist, behind it a ray of pale light… ; but everything was erased by the scratching of the pen on the white sheet of paper. While he was writing, he noticed without seeing it that the client hadn’t dared either to light a cigar or put it in his jacket pocket. Moragas signed, initialed, wiped the pad, and handed the sheet of paper to the patient. The patient remained indecisive for a moment, holding the sheet of paper in his hand, his gaze wandering over the carpet. Finally, he resolved, speaking clumsily, to call the doctor by his first name. “So… excuse me… and how much do I have to pay you, Don Pelayo?” “For that?” replied Moragas. “According… If you are truly poor, give me the least you can… or give me nothing, which is best. If you have the means… then two duros.” The man slowly reached into his waistcoat pocket, rummaged in its depths with three fingers, and took out two shiny duros, the child’s new coin, which he reverently placed in a bronze ashtray. “Well, thank you very much, Señor de Moragas,” he said with a certain aplomb, as if the act of paying had given him titles he hadn’t had before. “I won’t bother you any further. I will return, with your permission, to tell you how the remedies are working for me. ” “Yes. Come again. Observe the method, and don’t neglect the illness. It’s not fatal, unless complications arise; but… it deserves attention.” “If one didn’t have children,” replied the man, encouraged by those few slightly cordial words, “it wouldn’t matter whether one died a little earlier or a little later. After all, one has to die, right? Well, a year or so, it doesn’t matter much; I mean, it seems that way to me. But children are very painful, and to leave them perishing… Come, at your service, Don Pelayo.” The curtain over the door had just fallen; the client’s footsteps could still be heard in the anteroom when Moragas rose from his armchair, somewhat uneasy and nervous. “As I said; I know this bird, and I know there’s something strange about him; well, I have no doubt about it. It’s unusual that he doesn’t notice it at once, so fed up as one is here in Marineda with rubbing shoulders with every living creature. And he’s not a stranger, because… no; he promised to come back from time to time to see how the prescribed method suits him! ” What a stranger! Moraguitas, the Doctor used to address himself in this way: Why didn’t you ask that uncle’s name? Why didn’t you find out where he lives? Bah! There’s time; I’ll ask him when I get back. In any case, it’s strange to me that I can’t quite work out what kind of stitch this is… “Nené!” he cried, approaching the door through which the little girl had come out. But Nené didn’t poke her salty little snout out, and the Doctor, obeying another capricious excitement, returned to the table, took up the folding knife, and began again to cut the pages of the Revue. There was an article there on morphine addicts that must have been comprehensive and interesting…. His hands preoccupied with the mechanical operation of tearing the fold of the paper, the dull struggle of memory continued in his distracted brain, the impulse of the notion that wanted to make its way among countless others, deposited, as if on a phonograph record, in that mysterious archive of our knowledge. Without a doubt, a lively wave of blood refreshed the corner where the memory slept, because suddenly it stood out, clear and victorious. Moragas felt the well-being that comes with the cessation of obsession; but hardly had the rapid, almost physical impression of freedom and tranquility dissipated when the doctor noticed a deep shudder; his complexion reddened, right down to the roots of his silvery hair; His lips trembled, his eyes sparkled, his nose dilated , and Moragas, banging his fist on the table, exclaimed in a loud and resounding voice: “I know… The executioner…” A furious and round interjection. “The executioner!” Another more angry one. He immediately tore his handkerchief from his pocket; with the tips of his fingers wrapped in it he took the two shining coins; he opened She slammed the window and let the money fall onto the flagstones outside, where it bounced with a silvery sound. At that moment, Nené was pushing open the door. She came twittering; but when she saw her father turning around, closing the windows and flashing with anger and horror, she stood still on the threshold, with that instinct of children who understand the psychological situation better than anyone, and muttered under her breath: “Dad’s arguing… Dad’s arguing!” Chapter 2. Telmo, upon waking, put his fists over his eyes, regretting having lost his sleep, which was good. As if it were all about reviews, parades, and drills, and he had seen himself transformed into Captain General of Cantabria, wearing a uniform even more handsome than his full dress uniform, displaying feather dusters, plumes, braids, cords, stars, prancing around on a spirited, bay tan horse, and carrying a formal, formal saber, not made of wood, but of shining steel! Waking up could not have been more different from what he had dreamed. The boy saw around him the same old, ugly, sad scene: the sordid, neglected, filthy little room, oozing disarray and neglect from every pore. How melancholy the walls with their blackish plaster transpired; the uneven, ashen tiled floor, poorly covered here and there by ancient hems; the coarse, ill-cut, coarse cloth garments, dirtier than threadbare, dangling from nails; The two iron beds painted a cold, prison-like blue, with their blankets in dull, earthy tones, and their holey sheets, divorced from water and soap!
Telmo remembered, as one remembers a sweet dream, that before, when he was a child, he had had, if not exactly silk bedspreads and palaces for a home, at least a well-kept, cozy, clean interior: he supposed it must have been so, because he had remained, from that time now blurred by mists, with a sensation of warm warmth, of a nest of down that envelops and shelters. Back then, his clothes were clean and suited his body; the food was seasoned and tasty; in winter, a brazier heated the room; in summer, a clear, fresh ensemble of ironed curtains and net curtains that filtered the light was perceived. The boy didn’t detail all this with absolute precision ; Their memories blurred, and only one woman’s face stood out in full relief, and if we were to give Telmo any vote on matters of beauty, we would say she was supremely beautiful. Blonde or brunette? Very young or in her early twenties? Telmo didn’t know that; he only knew that she was beautiful, and spread a lavender atmosphere around him, a sense of well-being. He didn’t see her at his bedside that day either. The one who was walking by was the father, taking down his shabby hat, about to put it on without first using a brush. While the father was covering himself, Telmo received the admonition to which he was already accustomed. “Get up. Don’t loiter any longer. There’s your soup in the kitchen. Around two, go down Arroyal Street, where I’ll be leaving Don Pelayo Moragas’s house… you know it well, don’t you?” Well, wait for me there, and I’ll take you to Rufino’s house. He said this last thing as he was leaving, and the door latch fell with a harsh creak. The boy paid little attention to the advice not to “loaf around.” He knew he’d get just as much out of getting up as from staying in bed a little longer. The problem he needed to resolve every day was precisely how to spend a day, without duties or distractions of any kind. For him, there were no schools, colleges, or studies; and neither would friends be the ones to dazzle him, because that great incentive of childhood, the first manifestation of emotional needs and the first outlet for the sociable instinct, was unknown to him. His only option was to wander restlessly through the streets, wandering like a lost soul, looking for some corner where he wasn’t recognized. He remained between the sheets for about half an hour, closing his eyes to dream, if possible, more beautiful things of the warlike kind. What he is, no matter how hard he tries, he’d be a soldier. Not a troop, no; a leader, and one of the high ranks. A colonel at least. And with a saddle. Where else could there be pleasure like riding a gallant, fiery horse! That would be glory itself. He finally decided to throw one leg out of bed, and after that, his whole body. He put on his trousers, which, by the way, had more than a seven and the hem was festooned with mud; he hung them as best he could from the hem suspenders; he put on his new, decent jacket; he placed a shabby brown beret on his head, and it didn’t occur to him to go near the iron basin, where he might somewhat remedy the dirt on his hands and face, or to plow his tangled hair with the beater. The neglect of his education had taken root in his childish nature, and, as a legitimate idealist, he dreamed of shining braids and white herons, while his body, his clothes, and his home were disgusting. With the Five Commandments, instead of a spoon, he finished the pot of cold, lumpy soup , and now you have him ready to hit the streets. When he left the shack, it was clear that Telmo wasn’t handsome. Nor should we deny him a certain grace and gentleness, a certain attractiveness that characterizes rascals, no matter how dirty and defeated they may be. His tucked-up nose had its charm, as did his thick, vermillion-colored lips, marred by the shape of his teeth, which projected too far outward. His lobed forehead receded slightly, and his head was one of those smooth occiputs, as if it had received a cut, an ax blow—the heads of vain people, of ideologues—excepting, somewhat, the accentuated quality of this conformation, his beautiful black hair, curly and thick like sheep’s fleece. The boy’s infinitely expressive eyes, with their liquid, brilliant, bluish cornea, were two mirrors of the boy’s heart: in them, pleasure, sorrow, haughtiness, humiliation, enthusiasm, shame, were painted faithfully and instantly, reflecting an open and fiery soul. Those eyes demanded communication; they sought out people, the world, to pour themselves into it. Overall, the boy’s head resembled that of a black man… white, if the antithesis is permissible. Not only the design of his features, but the candid expression of comical pride that is evident in the physiognomy of already civilized and freed blacks completed Telmo’s resemblance to the African type, and his face also displayed the flashes of sadness and suspicious apprehension that characterize darker races, even when they have not yet erased the stigma of slavery. Upon crossing the door, the first thing Telmo noticed was a now-familiar sensation of well-being, under the caress of the outside air. He loathed four walls, and never before had a bird captive in a cage, a beast confined between iron bars, or gas sealed in a flask, yearned more for the fullness of space. If he liked the peaceful and beautiful, the grandiose, the immense, he was captivated by it. His second impression was different: he noticed that the sun, veiled by clouds, was already beginning to descend from the middle of the sky, a sign that he, Telmo, had become careless, and it was probably too late to join his father at Señor de Moragas’s door. This thought spurred him on. From his father, he had acquired the concise and coercive notion of literalism, of obedience to the powers that be, and he practiced it; He obeyed without reverence or fear, and he felt guilty for the fault itself, not for the consequences, since there was no true paternal rigor there. He took off at a run; the distance, although considered respectable in Marineda, was a game for the boy’s agile legs . Besides, everything was downhill, and with places where you could run like Campo de Belona and Páramo de Solares, which for many years had been fighting to become the square of _Mariperez_—name of the popular heroine of the beautiful capital of Marineda. Precisely, on the steep slope that descends from the high embankment, where the Infantry Barracks is located, to Páramo de Solares, Telmo found a temptation that made him lose a few minutes. At the end of that slope, the ancient street leads to a small house no less Broken down, the secondary school made do as best it could; and the boys, between classes, would scatter in a boisterous flock across the Campo de Belona, executing in their own way military evolutions and simulations of battles, not always bloodless, in which the deadly projectiles we owe to the advances of science were replaced by those that nature or the works of stonemasonry provide for youth. With what envy Telmo looked at that phalanx! How his eyes wandered after it! If he were _allowed_ to join the band and take part in their undertakings, who doubts that at the first opportunity he would win the braid and even the laurel cross! His expressive face darkened, and he had one of those moments of sadness, which were like fleeting eclipses of all hope for the future. He stopped, listening to the outrageous commotion, the boisterous shouting of those devils, and finally, resolving to do so, like someone who says to a tasty cake, “You’re staying there, because I can’t get my teeth into you,” he turned into Páramo de Solares, skirted the new arcades, and ended up on Vergara Street, which all the people of Marineda call Arroyal. He knew Moragas’s house well, and stood in front of the doorway to wait for his father to come out. His eyes, however, scanned the entire length of the street, and with one of those turns of his eyes, he saw his father’s silhouette disappear in the distance, under the arcades that serve as the vestibule of the theater. He had already left, and he wasn’t there! What could he have said! The boy was about to run when a singular incident stopped him. Moragas’s window had opened hastily, with a crash of glass; He stuck out an arm, a white shirt cuff, a long, flexible hand, and two silver coins, shiny and resounding, fell onto the sidewalk tiles…. All in a word, Jesús. Telmo rushed to pick them up, instinctively. Only when he had them firmly grasped in the palm of his hand did he begin to have certain scruples. Would he go up and return the coins? Let’s be blunt: his hesitation lasted very little. Telmo certainly wouldn’t take a cent from another’s property against its owner’s will; on the other hand, with the straightforward logic of childhood, he believed that whoever throws money out the window shouldn’t blame whoever picks it up. If for a moment the idea of going upstairs and returning his prey dominated him, he immediately dismissed it, mentally treating himself as a fool; and, with a resolute gesture, he buried the two duros in the deep pocket of his jacket. He was no longer thinking about reuniting with his father. That treasure gave him a different direction. For now, it suggested that he was ready to mingle with the other boys. It wasn’t a reflexive thought; rather, an instinctive calculation, which told him that money, in this rogue world, covers and facilitates many things. He couldn’t appreciate the small sum; he had never seen anything like it together in his entire life, or even close to it, and the forty reales bouncing around in his pocket seemed like an Asian treasure. With two duros, anything can be undertaken, and everything can be achieved. Telmo, owner of forty reales, couldn’t be the same Telmo he was every day, he who couldn’t find a boy to join him in his games, he who reaped a poisoned harvest of insults and rebuffs everywhere . His heart swelled with hope, so fulminating in childhood, Telmo, forgetting that he had a father in the world, set off up the Páramo de Solares, soon reaching the slope. How quickly he climbed it! From the summit, he dominated the expanse of the Campo de Bellona. Far below, next to the parapet, the group he dreamed of joining was bustling about. Ready to fire again. The group paid no attention to that little boy, who was running so fast that the soles of his shoes, from a distance, seemed to be spinning. The students of the Marinedin Provincial Institute were deliberating—damn!—and the deliberation had them worshipping. It was as if it were nothing less than a council of war! They had been thinking, from the beginning of the year, about the purpose, the heroic design of a memorable battle: they aspired to fight the greatest and the most Homeric _pedrea_ the centuries have witnessed. They had had enough of silly games, of innocent _pine cones_ being handed out left and right. What were such skirmishes worth? No; give me a real, effective battle, where the two leaders, Restituto Taconer alias _Cartucho_ and Froilán Neira, also known as _Edisón_, could gain everlasting renown. That day, luck was on their side: Mr. Roncesvalles, professor of history, had had the happy idea of staying in bed, I don’t know which one, entripado or alifafe, and the children had the entire afternoon for their demonic deeds; an afternoon that, moreover, with the sun having broken through the curtain of fog, due to its beautiful serenity, invited recreation. The difficulty was reduced to finding a place where the municipal guards wouldn’t smell the burning. This was the subject of the deliberation. The majority proposed the breakwater called Parrochal, and also Emperor, because it was a tradition—proven with solid arguments in a pamphlet by Mr. Roncesvalles—that the launch or boat carrying Charles V, Caesar, had docked at that part of the Marineda wall, at the foot of its old postern gate, when he came to hold Cortes and request subsidies in the city of Marineda. It was a very strategic point, as the wall was in ruins in pieces and had many openings and cracks that allowed it to evade pursuit by even the most active police officers. On the other hand, the area could be clearly seen from the windows of the Court, the Jail, the Captaincy General, and many private homes; and as soon as the first snuffed stream whistled through the air , some evil soul would warn the patrol leader and unleash his agents upon them. There was another beautiful place: conch shells , more exquisite than anything else; a place that had already prepared the stage and the plot for the feat of arms that those brave men were proposing to carry out… The Castle of San Wintila! There, there, the action could be adorned with all the requisites that, according to what they were taught in rhetoric class, tragedy requires: twists and turns, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe. There, indeed , rarely, or one might say never, did an agent of authority bring along, with his baton raised and his tongue scolding and insulting. There, yes… But what the hell! What was the point? The assault on the Castle of San Wintila was impossible without a hero, willing to sacrifice himself for the greater amusement and recreation of the others; a hero was needed , and no one wanted to be him; everyone aspired to the honorable position of assailant. There was talk of throwing in the towel and throwing out the towel. But no one was willing to trust in the vagaries of fate. Chance? Or tricks… Who knows! No, no; there’s no trust in the gang… Over this, a great uproar arose, a heated discussion. —”You’re all idiots, you’re no good for anything…” —”Yes, yes, then go ahead and serve yourself…; let’s see if you’re the one who sucks up the stones…” —”Well, by lot…; the lot is the same for everyone.” —”I’ll take the fall for the lot; you’ll always be playing fast and loose and swindling….” —”To the Parrochal, man, to the Parrochal, there aren’t those difficulties there…” —”But you’re playing cards!” “If the General shows his mustache right now and calls the municipal police to make us snort!…” Distraught, sweaty, and with his soul on the edge of his mouth, which he opened with a vengeance to avoid suffocating in his rapid run, Telmo then arrived to join the gang. “What does this guy want?” growled Cartucho, fixing him out of the corner of his eye with his malicious, squinting eyes. “Who is it?” asked a novice in the group. And the gunsmith’s son mysteriously spelled out: “Who is it, Barajas? The _buchí_’s puppy.” “Against! I don’t feel like playing with him.” “Leave him alone, Barajas! We already have _pandote_,” replied the leader with the firmness and foresight of the skilled strategist who, in acts of war, knows how to take advantage of every resource. Telmo had stopped, possessed by incredible timidity, a few steps from the host. All the excitement of his hope, all the childish aplomb that the possession of the two brilliant coins had inspired in him, turned into a horrible shrinking when he saw himself close to the society that was his he was what for the excluded woman, the severe aristocratic circle, more impregnable than an iron wall!, which she never manages to penetrate. Telmo physically felt the weight of his torn, neglected, and dirty clothes in the presence of those children who, even in the midst of the disorder of play, revealed in their more or less luxurious, but clean and well-mended clothing, the care of feminine fingers, the diligence of a mother, the possession of a home. How happy they were, with their notebook in their pockets, emblem of school fraternity, with their joyful companionship, with their hours of play, with their studies that were to earn them a place among the people, and how unfortunate he was, whom they had the right to kick away, like a mangy dog! He remained rooted to the spot, without the courage to say a word, his breathing labored, his cheeks suddenly pale, his heart dancing. The two pieces of silver on which he had based all his daring hypotheses now seemed more insignificant than two lead wheels. He felt an impulse to grab them and throw them too, imitating the person who had stuck his arm out the window at Moragas. What idiocy, to suppose that with those coins one could buy the right to join the boys of the Institute! They didn’t even have the courage necessary to boldly utter the sacramental phrase: “Will you let me play with you?” The plea was only uttered by his eyes, fixed with anguish on both leaders, who, in turn, regarded him with a certain disdain or indulgent arrogance. Finally, Edison, half-contemptuous and half-magnanimous, deigned to address him. “Let’s go to the beach at San Wintila. Do you want to come?” Telmo imagined the heavens opening and he was hearing the chanting of the seraphim. Paralyzed with emotion, he nodded his head in agreement. “You must obey like a recruit.” Another nod. “You must do as you’re told… and watch out for fear. ” A gesture of determination. “Then let’s go. Roll on!” At this war cry, the entire party took off running. Chapter 3. The castle of San Wintila is one of several forts with which Vauban-style engineers of the last century garrisoned the mouth of the bay, to protect the city from further attacks and onslaughts by the English. In order to better fulfill its defensive purpose, it had an artillery park attached, served by a powder magazine placed at a convenient distance. In Nelson’s time, when honor and the sublime notion of military duty were at their peak, and the inventions and machines of war had not been invented, refined, or perfected as they are today, the Castle of San Wintila was an excellent bastion, capable of holding and guarding the mouth of the estuary, harassing any enemy vessel that appeared at its entrance. However, as has often been the case in Spain since time immemorial, the line of forts that reinforced the coast of Marineda is not the most advanced of the period in which it was built: it bears remnants of the semi-eval fortification system, and the romantic forms of the rocky castle clash with the exact geometric layout of the casemate. Therefore, at dusk or nightfall, the Castle of San Wintila, already half- collapsed, possesses a certain mysterious beauty of ruin, and represents two centuries more than it actually represents. This charm is enhanced by its picturesque location. In the wild and deserted area that Marineda extends towards the ocean—a wide peninsula with undulating and capricious edges like the hem of a silk skirt—the coast, after gently notching the black line of rocks that border the cemetery, suddenly forms an inlet that, penetrating deeply into the shore, is almost closed to the sea by a narrow throat, a form due to the prolongation and widening of the reef on which the castle stands. On the opposite side of the narrow mouth, the strait or channel of the inlet, there extends a round, soft, white, delightful beach of very fine sand. Although this sandbank offers the easiest access by land for who wished to enter the castle, our party chose to descend past the chapel, a descent perhaps faster, but also with greater risk of breaking their necks, tumbling from some precipice to the reef or the bottom of the cove. The turbulence of early years delights in facing obstacles and encountering surmountable difficulties. Telmo took more pleasure than anyone in the risky exercise of running, or rather, rolling down those slopes, disdaining the open and straightforward path. He wanted to demonstrate to his companions for an hour that he possessed, like anyone else, courage, determination, agility, and skill to a greater degree than anyone else. They, leaving him to rush down alone, went in a flock, exchanging laughter, insults, excitement, challenges, orders, and shoves. At the head marched Froilán Neira and Restituto Taconer, without deigning to look at the _pandote_, whose presence and pleasure made the drama possible. Upon reaching the spring that cuts across the path, before it becomes more impassable and dangerous and descends to the beach, the group stopped to catch their breath. Some, breathless, approached the spring, eager to drink from the spout the famous water of Saint Wintila, considered medicinal. Some filled their caps with the liquid and, by tilting the visor, quenched their thirst in this way. Others, less thirsty and more eager for chatter, attacked some poor women who were watering two or three pairs of large red oxen at the trough. It was a deluge of dialect jokes. “Comadre, will you give me a drink?” “Sell me the oxen, comadre.” “—”How much is each horn worth?”—”Do you want two small dogs for a pair?”—”That one has a bone in its tail: wait, I’m going to amputate it.” The women broke into shouts and abuse, just as if they were being pinched. Telmo saw in the joke a pretext to join forces, to become intimate with the gang, and approaching nicely one of the oxen, taking out a small knife or penknife that he always carried with him, and hiding it in his closed hand, he surreptitiously plunged it into the animal’s snout, which leaped up enraged, bellowing and mooing, dragging the woman who was holding the rope after it . “God bless you!” It was no longer grumbling or growling; it was no longer shouting or complaining, but a death cry that the village women raised. “Help, help…. Lambs, little papules from hell, filthy, filthy gentlemen, we have to go to the judge who will throw you in jail…” At that moment one of the women noticed Telmo, whom she knew from her neighborhood, and her broken face became even more inflamed with contempt and hatred. “You should have been, son of a bad father, a swine, a mangy, a sprout for the gallows!…. Your father and you should be garroted, instead of you being the ones garroting the unfortunates!…. Brave little gentlemen of dung, those who join with a rottenness like you!….” It was like a sudden shot that scatters a flock of sparrows. The boys took flight, leaving in their wake a confused clamor, a long, mocking “ooo!”, a powerless device to hide their shame and inner tantrum. Telmo also clamored, also shouted “ooo!”; but his cheeks were crimson and his pupils were filled with a certain salty liquor that he reabsorbed with superhuman effort. They were now stepping onto the reef and stopping at the foot of the castle walls. There, a new council had to be held. Cartucho and Edison centered the circle, leaving Telmo outside. Instinctively, by a movement inherent in the human soul, and especially in the child’s, closed to generosity and fairness, the boys, feeling the mortification of the incident that had occurred, placed all the blame on Telmo, on Telmo, who was going to be their victim in a few moments. By putting the hardest and most dangerous part of the game on him, they imagined themselves to be righteous, righteous through and through. Hadn’t that woman said that Telmo deserved the garrote? The more they squeezed him, the more the law of justice would be fulfilled, which disgraces its own executioner until the fourth generation has passed—or rather, eternally. I wouldn’t swear that these philosophies would be reasoned and deduced with rigor by the students of the Marinedino Institute; but they carried the germ of them in their hearts and minds, and they obeyed their impulse. After conferring for about a minute, they informed Telmo of the military dispositions. “Listen, you… take charge… don’t bother us. You were the garrison of the castle, and we took it by assault. You go inside, and from there you defend yourself as best you can. But, you shuffle! If you hide, it’s no good. We have to see you in the windows or in the loopholes or at the gate or on top of the wall… in short, we have to see you. If you hide, you’re a coward, a sucker , a coward. Do you understand?” Telmo raised his graceful little white-black head; he vigorously shook his curly sheepskin; A vain smile spread across his thick lips, and, placing his hand on his hip, he responded energetically: “Against! I am neither fearful nor do I hide, you cards! To enter the castle, you will have to kill me. Eminently Spanish genius of the heroic defenses of towns and castles, in which a handful of men entertain and dominate a large army! Morella, Numancia, Zaragoza, Sagunto! Never did your spirit impel anyone more strongly than the gallant Telmo, when , leaping, on all fours, swift as a lizard, he climbed up the interior of the ruined and roofless fort to appear, his body completely uncovered, shedding courage, on the battlement. In the minutes before his ascent of the walls, he hadn’t wasted time to fill his pockets and cap with rounded, fairly small stones—the best for throwing—and to improvise a sling with his shirtsleeve, which he ripped off with a single jerk. Rather than that imperfect instrument, he relied on his strong, nervous arms. He was ambidextrous and relied on using his left hand to help him. The besieging army, drawn up in a compact mass at the entrance to the reef, let out a cry as they saw the garrison appear on the battlement. It was the howl that accompanies the bull’s exit from the bullpen. Each boy hid his projectile in the hollow of his hand: more than twelve arms simultaneously formed the windlass, and a cloud of stones, overcoming gravity, rose in pursuit of the intrepid leader’s head. The chivalric law of children’s stone-throwing, which mandates only the shooting at the legs, was not observed there; nor what law could be observed with such an adversary? But he, swift and cautious, dodged the cloud by running like a deer to the opposite side of the battlement; and without losing step or run, he turned the windlass in his turn, and the stone, whistling along the ground like a reptile, struck Cartucho’s shin, who let out a cry of pain. “That’s a game, he’s broken my shin! Stones, fist, stones on him!” As the others laughed, Cartucho muttered painful moans through his teeth; his eyes filled with tears, but his energy did not waver. On the contrary, it seemed that the fury of the blow had inflamed his courage. He had a reputation as an excellent stone thrower: he picked one from the ground, very smooth and unpolished, sharp as an axe, and before throwing it, he stopped. Telmo dodged the new volley of stones launched at him by means of a maneuver similar to the previous one: quickly fleeing to the other end of the rampart and taking refuge in a bucket. _Cartucho_ was waiting for this opportunity. He calculated where Telmo was retreating, and there he fired the pebble with a sure hand. The projectile hit Telmo in the shoulder. The besieged man stopped, undoubtedly paralyzed by the blow. However, he neither raised his hand to the injured part, nor did he open his mouth to utter a complaint. What he did was avoid the second peladilla, adopting the strategy of a savage. The ruined wall presented quite a few uneven surfaces, and the gaps between the torn or unhinged ashlars left room for a person to grab onto, hold on, hide, and take cover in case of need. Telmo chose one of these gaps, favorable to his plan of defense, positioning himself in such a way that if, in order to throw stones, he stuck his chest out from the rampart, when he saw the hail coming, he could lower himself down with one foot in the gap and be protected by the wall. His two arms, like windmill sails, extended over the rampart, hurling missiles with such accuracy that three besiegers were already limping. This revealed Telmo’s chivalry, who, harassed, besieged by numerous enemies, there alone to defend himself against an army, abided by the law of the code of honor: he fired only at the legs. The attackers understood, however, that it was only a matter of time, and this fueled their ferocity and courage even more. Of thirteen or fourteen stones thrown at once, wouldn’t one of them hit the defender? Wouldn’t they hit that head that was constantly rising and falling, like a devil in a trick box? In such an unequal fight, Telmo was bound to succumb. Froilán Neira Edison, the cleverest of the group, the only calculating intelligence of the group, had a brilliant idea. “We won’t do anything, fist!” while we’re crowded here…. So he knows where the stone is coming from and slips away…. To share it out. Callobre, Augusto, and Montenegro, over there…. Rafael and Santos, to the right…. The rest, on that high rock…. Me, on this other one…. And to the head! It hurts in the chest, but it doesn’t stun… To the head, between the two eyes, that would knock an ox dead. Saying and doing, the skillful Edison went to pericolate himself onto the reef, the spot designated for his feat. It was a black, sharp rock, made slippery by the green algae that covered it, and in its center, an excavation contained clear, warm seawater, a sort of miniature inlet, at the bottom of which one could see the crabs vibrating in their pincers and a bottle-green polyp sponging. The sea, the real sea, lapped at the foot of the rock, and Edison wet his boots to take up that advantageous position. He didn’t care. He stood firmly on the upper plateau of the rock; he watched, and when he saw the head of the besieged rising above the wall, he aimed at the curly lock of hair, raised his arm, and slowly stirred it three times… Ah! This is what he had hit. The head disappeared from the level of the wall… The besiegers let out a hoarse and fierce cry of triumph… But the head reappeared, pale, streaked with a trickle of blood; serene, frowning, sublimated by a radiant expression of joy and heroism, and both hands, at the same time, sent two missiles at Edison’s legs…. Both hit, and without causing serious damage to the leader, they nevertheless managed, due to the false position in which he found himself—similar to that of the Colossus of Rhodes—to knock him from his pedestal. He fell, and fell flat into the sea, and the brackish water penetrated his ears and lungs, stunning him. But since he had a footing there, the boy, guided by the instinct of self-preservation, stroked his legs and managed to get out onto the beach. The incident had distracted and even frightened his companions a little: they all abandoned their positions and headed for the sand, with the vague apprehension of some tragic event. Edison emerged dripping and snorting with shame, shaking his fist at the garrison of the impregnable castle. As if on cue, everyone in the party hurled insults at Telmo instead of the useless stones . “Coward, swindler, swindler! I bet you’re not standing on the wall like you used to!… You hide, and from hiding you shoot! It’s no good, coward! Treason!” With the serenity of the afternoon, the stillness of the waves, the silence of those solitary places, the insults reached the defender of San Wintila loud and stridently . And it is unknown which was sooner: to hear them or to climb through the crevices and present himself full-length on the battlement, his hands empty, his arms disdainfully crossed over his chest, his face bloodied, his clothes torn. His attitude was one of defiance and provocation, a proud challenge, that of a victor and a hero. The boys, without consulting each other, bent down to pick up each one his stone, and without concert, at unequal intervals, they made the windlass, they threw the projectile… Telmo, motionless, without uncrossing his arms, nor putting into practice his usual means of defense, without running along the battlement nor descending seeking the protection of the wall, he waited… Which of those stones hit him first ? Historical scrupulosity obliges us to confess that it is not known. Probably two hit him at the same time: one in the left arm, another above one ear, next to the temple. Nor is it known by which of the two he opened his arms like a bird about to fly, and plummeted backward, precipitated into the void. The boys were stunned by their victory. They did not celebrate it with shouts or triumphant clamor. Let us do them justice: their consciences argued with them. Their new and fresh hearts, their souls not yet battered by the conspiracies of experience and life, shouted to them that the laurel was stained with infamous mud. The deepest silence reigned between them . They looked at each other. The soft, dull sound of the sea crashing on the beach, the lapping of the waves against the channel’s rocks, seemed like accusing voices to them. “Against!” Cartucho, the most heartless guerrilla, dared to say. “We’ve made a fool of him, gentlemen! Hard, just to make fun of us. ” “Barajas! What if he’s dead? We did a good job…” Edison, the most forward-thinking, indicated, speaking very quietly in case the judge heard him. “Dead, no way! A sketch or two on the head… A bump or so,” opined Augusto, a lad of fifteen years and a few months, already an avid smoker of elegant drinks. “Let’s see it, let’s see it,” exclaimed Montenegro, bounding along the road to the fortress. The others followed him. The reef was dangerous, slippery; But the boys hopped about like seagulls. The entrance to the fort had no door; only piled stones obstructed the entrance, and large fallen voussoirs and powerful overturned ashlars formed a kind of barricade, made even more inaccessible by brambles and nettles. Once this obstacle had been overcome, the besiegers had to cross a low postern gate and enter what must have been the guardhouse of the fortress’s former defenders, for signs of a fire in the fireplace or kitchen could still be seen on the smoke-blackened wall. There, on a pile of rubble that had hit his body when he fell from the top of the battlement, lay Telmo, covered in blood, white as lime, motionless and without any sign of life. The victors were stunned. “He’s either dead or appears to be,” said Montenegro in terror. “What dead? He’s just pretending to scare us,” declared Cartucho. —Don’t be a barbarian, — Edison replied, always in competition with the gunsmith’s son, who outdid him in vigour, and whom he outdid in substance. — Don’t be a boor. It’s very bad. We made it, you cards! — Well now… there’s no other way but to get down to business. And quickly! — And that one? Should we leave him like that, like a cat that fell out of the attic? — What can we do? Do you want to stay and look after him? — His father lives nearby, next to the Cemetery, — warned Augustus the smoker. — We could warn him… — Shut up, shut up, blockhead… Let’s see if you’ll be nice to me… Warn his father? I don’t feel like going to his father’s house, right! —Not to me…. —Not to me…. —Not to me, even if they offer me a hundred duros…. —Well, go away, the police might catch us…. Each one going his own way. Giddy up! Chapter 4. The man who had consulted with Moragas was not surprised, upon leaving the Doctor’s house, to not find his son. He knew that the boy was fond of sleeping until very late, or rather, of staying in bed daydreaming, and he attributed the inaccuracy to laziness. It would seem that he was at Rufino’s house… or wherever God decided. The sick man took off up the street. As he passed in front of the building that encloses both the Civil Government and the Marineda Theatre, an instinct or a habit prompted him to seek the shade of the arcades, and before reaching the Calle Mayor, which could be seen in the distance teeming with people and bustling with activity, he turned to the left and went under another row of arches, which form the arcade of the dock: That was the reverse of the coin; there could be no more marked contrast than that of the shops of the main street—stocked, spacious, displaying beautiful high-glass shop windows, well lit at night by the clear gas—with its poor little shops and taverns, and the suspicious liquor stores in the Marina arcades, where porters, fishmongers, recently disembarked Havana men, dressed in drill and with mahogany-colored faces , soldiers and carters from the Olmeda neighborhood held their gatherings, who, before urging their yoke to drag the horrible weight of the barrels weighing down the cart, would spur on their own brutality with a dose of alcohol… Moragas’s client…— whom we will attribute the name of Juan Rojo,—stopped at the door of the most sordid, most sinister liquor store, the one frequented by the most outlandish people and from where the most wine-laced voices and the most vulgar curses could be heard . Before entering, he hesitated for a moment. Finally, the Doctor had ordered him not to drink a drop, not even to taste it. Rojo’s already imperious habit was struggling with the instinct for self-preservation, or the will to live, which , strangely enough, doesn’t abandon even suicides in the critical moment of attempting to end their existence. “When the doctor says so…” Ten seconds later, he was already yielding to a small glass, a half-quart glass, a pittance. “A little poison can’t kill,” he thought, shrugging his shoulders. And, extending a poorly defined hand—long and strong, with rough fingers—he poured the glass down his throat. That spur gave him resolve. As he left the tavern, his step was less furtive and cautious; his face displayed a certain provocative, arrogant seriousness , like that of someone determined to confront any hostility, asserting himself. “I feel like walking down Main Street ,” he thought. “The street belongs to everyone, and I’d like to know who can object to me strolling wherever I please.” He pulled his hat lower, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, and threading his way down Arancel Alley, he burst onto Calle Mayor, Marineda’s emporium. The people of Marineda, not being summertime, prefer to stroll before it gets completely dark; and fleeing the inclement weather and the damp north wind that blows in the Ensanche district, they crowd onto Calle Mayor, sheltered by its very narrowness. The street was filled with a well-dressed crowd eager to look at each other and have fun, when Juan Rojo entered. He made no effect; the crowd drank him in. The ladies went up and down, preoccupied either with criticizing each other or glancing at each other’s christening robes, and they didn’t even notice that man, who, if he could have interested the observer, must have gone unnoticed amid the bustle of such a crowded yet brilliant gathering. Of the ladies who displayed their best clothes and stopped to greet one another and browse the shop windows, not one recognized Juan Rojo. If any gentleman remembered his face and figure, it was obvious he had to play dumb. Juan looked left and right, finding nothing but distracted and indifferent faces. Nevertheless, at the door of the Casino de la Amistad, on chairs placed outside the lobby, Juan spotted a sizable group. It was composed of the President of the Provincial Council, the wealthy manufacturer and councilman Castro Quintás, Brigadier Cartoné, the young lawyer and occasional journalist Arturito Cáñamo, Magistrate Palmares, the Public Prosecutor of the Court, Mr. Carmelo Nozales, and the Mayor of Marineda himself. Rojo, as he approached the Casino, slowed his pace and, one might say, faced the group; he looked at them fixedly, and as, apparently, none of them recognized him , he greeted almost aloud: “Mr. Palmares… Mr. Mayor… happy…” The judge and the popular authority turned around, as if stung by a viper : their faces clouded, their lips exhaled a kind of muffled murmur, which could have been a response or an insult. Rojo, without taking his eyes off them, slowly continued on his way. At the end of the street, where it widens to descend slightly towards the Theatre, and where pedestrians are scarce, Rojo stumbled upon two people, a girl and a woman from people, modestly dressed, who stared at him . The little girl, crouching in the woman’s skirts, her eyes dilated with terror, cried out in a low, tremulous voice: “Oh, mother! The executioner!” Rojo felt the exclamation as if he had received a cold slap in the face. He turned and, approaching the child, who was no longer clinging to her skirts, but clasping her mother’s legs, convulsed and crying aloud , said sententiously, raising his bony right hand: “If you escape justice, you are quite free from me.” And he continued walking, or rather, running, because he had lost all his feigned composure due to the drink and had been strained upon crossing Calle Mayor. Once again, the impulse to seek out the shady corners, the deserted spots of the city, prevailed, moving him to filter through the most remote and suspicious streets and preferring, for his outings, the hours when twilight had cast its veil of mist . Leaning against the houses, protected by the arcades, he reached the slope that ascends to the Infantry Barracks, and once on the esplanade of Campo de Belona, he felt a certain relief. He was now in his own neighborhoods. There he found himself, if not among his equals—for Rojo has no equals—at least among the forgiving people, who forgive everything the wretched do for bread. Rojo’s sense of well-being increased as he crossed Rufino’s door. Rufino’s house was a small shop, one of those once called ” oil and vinegar,” and where today spices, petroleum , and groceries are mixed with matches, playing cards, hallelujahs, espadrilles, and other assorted items, for example, bars of pink and green soap , lettuce, and bottles of beer. Not all the liquids sold there were of Saxon origin, for in Rufino’s back room , and around a grimy table, a game of brisca would often take place in the afternoons, with very Spanish cups of brandy being played. The game was played by Rufino the shopkeeper; Antiojos, an old shoemaker; Marcos Leira, a tinsmith and plumber; and Juan Rojo. Perhaps some amateur meddler will want to find out how the cobbler and the tin artist could devote their afternoons to cultivating brisca and royal tute, abandoning the awl and the soldering iron. I will answer the aforementioned curious person that the families of Antiojos and Marcos Leira were organized according to the following usual pattern: the wife dehorned and worked herself to the bone, while the drunken husbands cultivated their leisure time with dignity… and with brisca. Antiojos’s wife was a worker in the Peninsulares workshop of the Tobacco Factory; her nimble fingers and those of her eldest daughter earned the family’s living. The youngest daughter, a puny one, who had not yet obtained the longed-for entry into the Granary, dedicated herself to “preparing work” for her respectable father, whose workshop consisted of one of the barracks that, like red mushrooms, swarm in the shadow of the Infantry Barracks, at the foot of Campillo de la Horca, today the Slaughterhouse. There, the miserable second mother of Antiojos spent her life, waiting for the troublesome arrival of a customer to run to warn the cobbler, who usually greeted her with bad words and much worse actions. Until the customer appeared, the girl, who, because she was unlucky in everything, had even received the ugly name of Orosia at the font, was certainly not standing around idle or fanning herself with her fan. She soaked the sole; she beat it on the flat stone, damaging her knees; she marked the distances from the nails with the awl ; she sewed the material; She waxed the thread and cut and glued the insoles; she opened the buttonholes, and when Antiojos arrived, shooting rays from his swollen nose and dazzled eyes, he had little left to do but what was essential to maintain his dignity as a master, which was especially reflected in the form, that is, in the wooden last into which the boot or shoe he had to restore fit. “Goat, dirty, cursed cow!” he would say to Orosia in his picturesque language. “If you touch my form… I’ll kill you.” strip!—And the unfortunate Orosia did everything… except for touching the form, which was apparently the mysterious key to the shoemaking art. Marcos Leira, the tinsmith, liked wine from different angles: from his good humor and his nonsense. If in the early morning, before killing the worm, he was usually seen dejected, with a sinister gloom, as he said he was throwing back the first glass of golden, honeyed cane—that excellent cane sold in the lowest tavern in Marina— honest Marcos was already as happy as a clam, and as sweet as velvet with his wife and little ones. Concha, the tinsmith, dark-haired, comely, with fiery eyes, swore that she didn’t know how some women complained when their husbands brought home “a little of that stuff to drink.” The cigar-maker, Antiojos’s wife, and Marcos’s wife were always at odds over this delicate matter . The latter, praise God, was never happier than when her husband had “the gout in his body.” She soaked the sole; she pounded it on the flat stone, hurting her knees; she marked the distances from the peg with the awl; she sewed the material; she waxed the thread and cut and glued the insoles; She would open the buttonholes, and when Antiojos arrived, shooting rays from his swollen nose and dazzled eyes, he had little left to do but what was essential to maintain his dignity as a master, which was especially concentrated in the form, that is, in the wooden last into which the boot or shoe he was to restore fit. “Goat, dirty, cursed cow!” he would say to Orosia in his picturesque language. “If you touch my form… I’ll rip you apart!” And the unfortunate Orosia did everything… except touch the form, which was apparently the mysterious key to the art of shoemaking. Marcos Leira, the tinsmith, was attracted to wine from two different angles: from his good humor and his nonsense. If in the early morning, before killing the worm, he would usually be seen dejected, with a sinister gloom, as he said he was knocking back the first glass of sweet, golden cane—that excellent cane sold in the lowest tavern in Marina— honest Marcos was already as happy as a lark, and as sweet as velvet with his wife and little ones. Concha the tinsmith, dark-haired, comely, with fiery eyes, swore that she didn’t know how some women complained when their husbands brought home “a little of that drink.” The cigar-maker, Antiojos’s wife, and Marcos’s wife were always at odds over this delicate matter . The latter, praise God!, was never happier than when her husband had “the gout in his body.” Then he not only showed himself talkative, affectionate, and gallant, but he would lie down on the bed or go out, leaving Concha and the officer alone, who worked much more alone. Gossips had their way with them, commenting on the beautiful tinsmith’s inclination to get rid of her husband; but perhaps it was excessive malice to gnaw on the drunkard’s wife’s legs, since her shop and business were in splendid order, managed by her, who, always clean and combed, resembled a queen among so many jugs, watering cans, sieves, lamps, lanterns, and basins, shining like polished silver. If the tinsmith had limped on her foot, as the neighbors suspected, her business wouldn’t have seemed so prosperous, her children so healthy. There were whispers, of course! Who isn’t whispered about? The gossips of the Barracks neighborhood could n’t agree that the beautiful woman ‘s house was “full of everything,” just as if her husband weren’t a very solemn drunkard, lazybones, and gambler; and the gnawing of envy was undoubtedly what moved them to attribute such dark motives, not only to the zeal and assiduity of the young tinsmith officer, but also to the visits of some lieutenant who lingered there for a while after leaving the Barracks. The four brisca players were four very different examples of alcoholism. We should almost exclude one, the tavern-keeper, Rufino. He didn’t drink more beer than necessary. to encourage others; he saved his own drink while filling someone else’s.—Marcos Leira was the abject being driven by drink to the atrophy of a sense of popular honor as energetic as chivalry, or forced to drink recklessly to forget his shame, and now even capable of cracking a joke when, unable to escape him, the lieutenant grabbed the tinsmith by the waist. Antiojos, the brutal drunkard , in whom alcohol awakened the dull impulse of bloodthirsty madness. Sometimes, as he staggered home, zigzagging on the uneven pavement of the wretched alleyways, a purple cloud would cross his dull brain, and his trembling, uncertain hands would feel a fierce tingling, an itch to crush and destroy… As for Juan Rojo, he rarely reached the state of true alcoholic intoxication: his head was tough, his stomach firm, his thoughts stubborn, and if drinking revived him at first, it took a long time to completely distract him from reality. All he asked for was oblivion… and oblivion was so slow in coming! That day, however , as he sat at the table in Rufino’s back room, he remembered the Doctor’s words and had resolved to restrain himself. After the first round, he didn’t drink. While dealing cards, his abstention plunged him into a kind of stupor—the unbearable stupor that no vicious person knows, if they have tried to mend their ways. In the deep and disconsolate dejection that gripped him, the memory of that group sitting at the door of the Casino gnawed at his soul . Those conceited gentlemen! Not responding to greetings except with contemptuous murmurs! Ah! He was already tired of swallowing absinthe, and if one day he spoke, he would tell the Mayor, the gentlemen of the Court, the President himself ! Wasn’t Rojo also a civil servant? Would anything the Court decided be worth anything if he weren’t there to carry it out? The Mayor! With what arrogance he had refused days before to admit Rojo’s son to the municipal school! Not to admit his son to the school! Did they want him to be a rascal, without education or occupation? Did they want me to…? Juan’s eyes turned toward the full glass. Nevertheless, with rare steadfastness, he resisted during the early hours of the evening. He heroically waged a battle. Finally, as the sun approached its setting and the dirty glass of the store made the scarce light even more murky, those shadows, whose gloom fell simultaneously on his pupils and his spirit, became accomplices in the transaction. He reached out his trembling hand toward the liquor and drained it, feeling with a hidden joy that his habitual sensations and feelings, warmth and hope, were responding to his call, and that a kind of moral lever was stirring him, pulling him out of the pit of gall in which he had lain moments before. A crude joke from Marcos made him laugh; And, to Antiojos’s outrage , he jokingly replied, “At the same time, he felt a certain vague uneasiness, the apprehension of an unknown illness, a uneasiness that is a normal state in hypochondriacs, but which, in hindsight, is usually called a presentiment. Where could the boy be?” The brisca game generally broke up at five or five- thirty, because Juan Rojo liked to retire early, have dinner with his son, and go to bed. Antiojos and Marcos didn’t retire so early: for all they were losing at home! They would stay there until ten or eleven, and Antiojos sometimes slept in the dead of night, because his wife, usually patient and long-suffering, had days of sudden rebellion in which she would barricade the door, swearing that she was “fed up with skins” and that maybe she would “make one” with such a bigot… Rojo left that day later than usual. Night had fallen, but it was beautiful: a peaceful night, one of those that herald spring and praise the Creator. To get from the tent to his home, he had to turn down Peñascal Street and go up Faro Street, but not without going along some high, smooth walls, a double line of walls that formed a narrow alley. In winter, paved with mud, in summer, with dust and filth. From one of the walls, Rojo heard what seemed to be a boiling of confused words: in their turbid articulation, they held something of blasphemy, and also something of complaint and bitter lament. He felt a compassionate impulse, mingled with that suggestion of vanity, which tells us, in the presence of misfortune we can alleviate: “Here you are needed; here you are useful; here you are valuable.” At the foot of the wall, a shapeless human figure was stirring, exhaling that confused melody. Rojo recognized it. Her neighbor was _Jarreta_, the professional drunk, whom the police picked up daily from different parts of the town on the street paving stones, sometimes at the Muelle, among the spoils of the sardine market, sometimes on the Embankment promenade, at the foot of some bank, sometimes in the arcades of the seawall, sometimes among the stalls of the Market Square, always “a temple,” always spitting from that stinking mouth, amidst the fumes of _perrita_, the dregs and foam of language. Without a doubt, the sudden attack of paralysis that accompanies a certain period of drunkenness had surprised the big woman a short distance from her shack, and those grunts, those muffled groans, and those furious imprecations were the fruit of her futile struggle with her legs, refusing to carry her. Rojo approached, saying solicitously: “Hey, Mrs. Hilaria… Upa… I’ll help you… you’ll see how I can get you on the way home… to the door… The drunken woman growled louder: her glassy eyes half-opened, staring at her interlocutor, at first vague, then astonished. As the light from the lantern and the dimness of the night allowed _Jarreta_ to distinguish the features of her savior, her pupils flashed with anger, the bilge of her mouth gave off a furious stench, and recovering speech , she roared hoarsely: “Get out of there, executioner! If you touch me, I’ll spit in your face! I haven’t stabbed anyone, do you understand? Nor have I stolen three lousy quarters, do you hear? So that you can lay your hand on my body!” “I’m leaving with Lucifer of Hell, not with you! If you come any closer, I’ll call the neighbors and the guards of the Maestranza! Get out of there… you’re staining the ladies!” Chapter 5. Rojo staggered. That was worse than the greeting to the magistrate and the arrogance of the Mayor. The magistrate, after all, although of the same rank, was a superior official, a person of respect… and could be disdained… But that miserable female, shame of her sex and mockery of humanity, should be willing to accept from him, not friendship or intercourse, but the most casual service, which is accepted from anyone! The Jarreta! See who was disgusting him! The Jarreta, that nonsense! He didn’t reply. The harpy continued shouting. The insulted man lowered his head and walked down Faro Street, heading for the lighthouse itself. As we continued along this slightly sloping street, heading for the cemetery and seeing in the distance, on the erect promontory, the mysterious Phoenician tower dressed by Charles III in a neo-Greek tunic, the houses became poorer, lower, and more irregular, until , near the cemetery, they disappeared completely to the left of the stream, which had become a royal road. On the right, only half a dozen shacks could be seen, each consisting of a ground floor and a garret loft, or “fayado,” as they are called in Marineda. The first five shacks must have been uninhabited, because a white paper stood out on the windows. Juan lived in the last shack, adjacent to the cemetery. The slate paint that uniformly covered the wood of the six huts, by day traced a bloody line on the greenish or leaden background of the ocean. Rojo arrived at his door, bent and hunched, like someone fleeing from the pursuit of a whip, and he lifted the latch and cautiously slipped into the house, like someone who sneaks into someone else’s home to commit a reprehensible act. Once inside, he threw in some matches and He turned on the kerosene lamp hanging on the wall. As if that light had served to illuminate him with a somewhat consoling thought, his worries redoubled, he thought of the boy again: Telmo? Where could Telmo have been? It was strange not to have seen him all day, and even stranger not to find him waiting or playing at the door at that hour, when his appetite, whetted by a whole day of wandering the streets, had to push him toward dinner. When his father was late returning home, the boy would usually wait for him at the home of a neighbor, the wife of a boatman from the Muelle and mother of four little children—a delight for Telmo, since that crowd obeyed and respected him, because he was older. Rojo would go to this good woman, named Juliana the Sailor, who was half-blind from persistent ophthalmia, for domestic services, which she remunerated quite generously; For example, putting the pot to the fire, patching her own clothes or Telmo’s, ironing a shirt, peeling potatoes, or scrubbing the floor—every six months at the most. Working almost in fits and starts, La Marinera did everything very badly; her patches were relief maps, and her ironings were clumsy; but Rojo wouldn’t trade her for a more skilled worker, since she served him with affability and didn’t disdain the money he gave her. Seeing, then, that Telmo wasn’t around his own house, nor was he even inside, Rojo thought he was probably at La Marinera’s. He went out to find out. No: the boy wasn’t there either, nor had he been seen all day. La Marinera, busy patching some of her man’s breeches, immediately dropped her work and offered to check the houses in the neighborhood, in case anyone had news of the boy. Meanwhile, Rojo returned to his home, hoping the child was already there. But as he entered, an impression similar to that of the icy air exhaled by a grave pinned him to the threshold… What was it? At certain moments in life, under the weight of the indefinable and limitless fear that overwhelms the spirit when it senses an evil without being able to assess its extent, this unknown evil takes the concrete form of another evil or a series of past evils, which resurface and emerge from the shadows like the corpse of a shipwrecked sailor from the sea, disfigured, livid, and terrible. The silence and solitude of Rojo’s home; the small pot of stew placed on the embers; the burning light; and, more than anything, the fear, the uncertainty, the inexplicable disappearance of his son, returned to Rojo six or seven years ago, reminding him of a very similar and very decisive moment in his long-drawn-out existence. That _hour_, or rather, that _moment_, had been brewing, preparing for some time, since it arrived, and above all, since a certain application for the position of _public official_ had been favorably dispatched. Rojo, however, did not see, or did not want to see, how the dense cloud had darkened. That his wife was thus distracted… that she was away from home for long hours… that at mealtimes, if her husband spoke to her, she hardly replied… that sometimes she remained as if in a daze, daydreaming, without understanding what was being said to her… that in their shared bed she would turn her back, drawing up her feet and curling up into a ball to avoid all contact… that she hardly looked after Telmo, nor caressed him… she, such a mother! That she carried out the housework badly and in a hurry, she, so industrious! And that one day, because her husband demanded an intimate and tender communication that was rightfully hers, she had suffered a convulsion, resolved in a flood of tears, she, so docile, so prompt in paying her debt of conjugal pleasure! All this, which in reality was to be noticed and warned, Rojo did not notice , perhaps because it had not been a sudden crisis, but gradual, insensible in its beginnings, and because it would not be as exact to say that it came from _the request_, as to affirm that it was already indicated _before_ by a thousand details, a fixed symptom, but rarely appreciated, of the transformations of the heart. Her husband, even if he perceived the coldness, the moral ice that was forming, did not attribute to it the importance it truly had, due to his concept of the _literalism_ of life, which led him to consider himself the _owner_, not in a figurative sense, but in the most real and positive, of that human creature. She was his wife! She belonged to him, to him alone, to Juan Rojo! And however hellish Juan Rojo’s destiny might be considered, María Roldán’s destiny was indissolubly linked to it! Upon getting married, María had accepted everything that came from her husband, both glory and ultimate infamy… Rojo believed this to be dogma, and if the change in María’s character stung him , he did not imagine that anything serious or radical would follow from this change … However unexpected it was, the blow was all the more forceful. He had felt it almost physically, like a blow to the skull. Now he seemed to feel it again, because external circumstances brought him back to that cruel moment. That night too, upon entering his house, he had noticed a strange solitude and fearful silence; the stew pot also lay on the embers of the hearth, tightly covered with the pot of live embers; only in the bedroom, and not in his own little bed, but in the middle of the marital bed, Telmo was sleeping peacefully: his mother had put him there, as if to fill the void she had left. And Rojo remembered everything with acute precision: the wait, the going out to ask the neighbors “if they had seen his wife,” the disdainful, ironic, rarely compassionate smiles that answered the question, the first news of the escape, not believed, the clinging to the conviction that it was all a joke Maria was playing on him, the night spent amid that anguish of doubt that precedes the conviction of a catastrophe and is a hundred times more intolerable than certainty itself, the desperate investigations the following day, the heart-rending cries of the child who at all costs wanted to be dressed, washed, and cared for by _mama_, the now certain news, acquired from the civil government, that Maria had been seen in a cart, on her way de Lugo, accompanied by an individual, the offers to bring her to her offended husband “through posts in the Civil Guard,” the unexpected form that the disappointment and affront took in her spirit, turning into a total renunciation of the right…. and the persistence she had maintained for many days in picturing Maria—who was still fresh and young—lost, driven mad by a delirious passion, delirious to the point of frenzy with another man, and excusable by the fever of affection…. But this conception of the reason for her marital desertion could not prevail…. Friends, neighbors, municipal guards, officious people, took it upon themselves to disabuse her day after day…. What love, or what…. The man with whom Maria had run away was almost indifferent to her!…. She had met him, one could say, overnight , and neither the sadness, nor the oddness, nor the previous distractions had anything to do with the _character_…. For the rest, the entire neighborhood knew that Maria was determined to take the fall “with the first man who came along….” He had let her say it many times…. “And if I don’t find a desperate man, it doesn’t matter; I ‘ll govern myself…. There are no shortage of houses with Nine Tiles in the world….” The House of the Nine Tiles, Rojo remembered, was an infamous place, so named because of the narrowness of its facade, crowned by only nine tiles, and famous for this same singularity on the map of vice in Marinduque. – It was not, then, the fatal passion that had destroyed Rojo’s home…, but another feeling, the one that drives one to flee from one ignominy by taking refuge in a different ignominy…. greater or lesser? A difficult problem, which the neighborhood gossips had resolved flatly in an unfavorable sense for their spouse. “Not even the queen can beat me as a good woman ,” said a manly bacon seller at the market, “but if God and the Virgin were to punish me by having my husband take such a job, By Colasa’s faith, I was going with the soldiers from the Barracks. ” And this was uttered by the gossip in front of her own legitimate owner and lord, who responded with great phlegm and conviction: “And you needn’t tell the truth, woman… Because certain things are embarrassing… I am a pig killer, pardon the Lord, and with great honor, so no one has any reason to despise me; but I would rather go and collect _filth_ in the stables than kill Christians.” A few months after María’s escape , when it became public knowledge that, abandoned by her accomplice, she had completely given herself over to the life of revelry in Vivero and was on the streets, the gossips had more pity for her, but more aversion for her husband. Only La Marinera openly said that she did not approve of María Roldán, given that María Roldán had a child. And this opinion, valiantly defended, had cost her the insults she devoured, because, according to the aforementioned gossips, “she defended Rojo because she served as his maid, which was a very indecent act.” If not precisely on these incidents themselves, then on everything related to them, Rojo’s thoughts were fixed when he went in to wait for the whereabouts of his son to be determined. So much so, that he had to make an effort to return to reality and concretize his thoughts in this one: “And Telmo?” Two quick, hurried knocks on the fist, followed by the Marinera’s plaintive voice, which, as she gasped, said: “Mr. Red…, Mr. Red… Oh! My goodness on guard! Mr. Red…, they say your child is very ill, very hurt, beyond movement!… Some of the women who go down to the Castle fountain told my little girl so…” Red rushed out, and taking Juliana by the arm, shouted: “Where is the boy? Where?” “In Saint Wintila… Crucified with stones… Go there, Mr. Red… I can’t see, if I did… ” The father was no longer listening: he was flying up the slope, and then hurtling down the winding path. The diffuse clarity of the night, aided by the silvery light of the rising moon, which was beginning to rise from the mountains surrounding the bay, aided Rojo, saving him from rolling and thrashing his body against the jetty. On the tranquil beach, mysteriously illuminated by the moonlight, which poured over the water’s surface like a shower of burnished silver sickles, the only sound could be heard but the soft murmur of the waves as they caressed each other; and the calm and stillness of the air, the blackness of the rocks contrasting with the phosphorescent green of the sea, the majesty that the dismantled castle assumed at such an hour and in such a place, were like a mocking irony of the anguish of the man who sought in those boulders and rocks the only thing he had and loved in the world. Rojo leaped over the jetty, heedless of the possibility of a dangerous stumble. In a few bounds, he was inside the fort. The moon clearly illuminated the interior; By its light, the father was able to save himself from the rubble, and on a pile of stones, he saw Telmo, bloody and lifeless: he neither moved nor complained. Rojo rushed at the inert body like prey and felt it with eager hands, roaring with joy at feeling the warmth and suppleness of life in the bruised limbs. A sigh expanded his chest; he took the child in his arms, hoisted him over his shoulder, and began the climb, without the same haste as before, because he had to take care of his priceless burden. Now the wounded man was moaning; no doubt the movement, however small , had revived his pain. Rojo multiplied his halting and anxious questions , his words of gruff tenderness spoken in a low voice, trying to accommodate the boy as best he could so that he wouldn’t suffer, resting his aching head on his own breast, holding Telmo with cotton hands, so to speak. Surely the child was neither dead nor dying….; but God, who forgives and punishes! Was he seriously injured? Did he have a broken leg or arm? Would a fatal complication befall him? Would he remain crippled and deformed for the rest of his life ? As Rojo was calculating these probabilities, he had already crossed the mountainous slope that slopes toward the castle and entered the road bordered by the walls of Marineda’s two cemeteries, the Catholic one and the Protestant or _dissident_ one. The small rotunda of the Catholic chapel stood out against the clear sky, and its cross filled Rojo’s heart with a desire to implore Divinity, to ask from someone who can do everything what he did not expect from men. That plea burst forth with immense energy, with savage impetus, with that force that seems sufficient to impose the will of a human creature even on the Arbiter of creation. Without any pretensions of heroism, like someone doing the most natural thing, Rojo faced his God—because he had one—and said to him, as if proposing a deal: “If someone dies, let it be me… Let the child who lives be cured.” As he made this reverential prayer, Rojo’s gaze shifted from the cemetery cross to the lighthouse lantern that rose in the distance; tall, solitary, sublime. And as at that very moment the intermittent flash of light reappeared with a pure gleam, shining among the clouds, Rojo perceived an inner voice saying: “He will live, he will be cured. ”
The door of the ranch had been left wide open, the lamp still burning, and Juliana the Sailor, half-groping as usual, and also dazed with fright, was turning around, moving a pot, stirring the fire, and repeating in a low voice: “Jesus, Jesus! Virgin of the Guard!” When Rojo entered with the child on his back, the woman let out a cry of pity, hurried over, wanted to find out… But already the father, with the delicacy of a nurse placing a child in a cradle , was placing the wounded man on the bed and turning around to exclaim anxiously: “Go get a doctor, Señora Juliana… For your father’s soul, bring me a doctor!” Chapter 6. Moragas’s exasperation took more than ten minutes to dissipate: he paced up and down his consulting room, forgetting everything, even the presence of Nené. He felt that unease, that dull, irritating malaise that takes hold of us after a nervous shock that brings no pleasure to the organism. Despicable insults , long disputes with people of little or ill-mannered mind, odious ingratitude, the sight of a repugnant insect—various moral and physical causes—can all engender such a painful state of mind. The Doctor began to feel relief through a purely accidental circumstance: the sun, finally overcoming the mist, beat joyfully upon the windowpanes; as if that beneficial ray had attracted her, Nené approached, and, still intimidated, with bewitching flattery, asked in her sham language: “It doesn’t rain… Amo alea?” Accustomed to the subtle philological interpretation required by Nené’s talk, Moragas understood perfectly and translated without hesitation: “Papa, don’t you see it won’t rain today? Let’s go to the village.” »
Moragas used to, once his daily consultations were over, order the little berlinita or the milor to be hitched up, take Nené with him, and set off on a three-kilometer stroll to his miniature villa, nestled on the side of the main road, on the top of Erbeda, a charming little hamlet populated by washerwomen and bakers and dotted with country houses. Four walls, neither too high nor too strong; a piece of iron fencing that allowed a view from the road of the honeysuckle arbors and the garden fountain; a dovecote in the courtyard; about fifteen laying hens; up to two dozen fruit trees; four or six fashionable conifers ; A few cabbages and many climbing plants enlivened the tiny dwelling where the Doctor spent the best hours of his life. And what more could a man of study and thought need, but that cool, quiet room, that study where the clematis and the French marigolds came in through the window to look at the books, that glass-enclosed gallery that offered the ever-bustling spectacle of the road, that dovecote full of nests and cooing, that dining room that Instead of rich porcelain, he had in the china cabinets clean crystal and white crockery, interspersed with fragrant gooseberries from the previous harvest—because there was no other fruit bowl? Besides, the Doctor saw in the village an excellent hygienic compensation for urban life, which in the long run could be disastrous for Nené. Widowed only a few hours after the birth of the little creature in whom he had invested the best of himself, the Doctor cared for her as a mother would… a physiologist. The delicacy and softness of that tender little flower always kept him on his toes, only instead of sheltering her from the north wind and the frost behind the glass walls of a greenhouse, he wanted to subject her to a treatment that would allow her to vegetate in the open air, defying the inclemency of the seasons. “Rusticating Nené” was the program. This rustication was carried out so strictly that when father and daughter were at Erbeda, the child would splash around in the trough, get muddy in the chicken trough, roll around hugging a duck, roll in the dust, and pull out her pretty blond hair all messed up—all to the great satisfaction of her father, who scolded her profusely if he happened to see her clean. “Come on, they had this little girl under a lantern today… Let’s see you play, let’s see you present yourself to me, a real swine…” Thus, when work wasn’t pressing, when there was a health epidemic in Marineda and no lady of Moragas’s clientele was about to branch out, the Doctor would go to Erbeda after his consultation, and sometimes he would return at nightfall for his visit, and other times he would stay and sleep, which was the height of his enjoyment. When he could acquire such a fortune, he would devote the evening to reading about politics or science, especially those burning questions of modern medicine that involve some metaphysical problem, some mystery of the spirit, some philosophical generalization. If Moragas studied curative medicine out of obligation, for recreation he was always busy with the little-known results of suggestion, the revelations of phrenopathy, and the effects of certain toxic substances on the human brain. He greatly enjoyed the study of what our ancestors called mental illnesses, and he was a frank admirer of modern physicians who boldly apply the positive and analytical method of contemporary science to problems of the moral order . Since much is written about this during the day, and Moragas had it all shipped from Paris in large consignments, his reading orgies had the Erbeda retreat as a witness and accomplice. It goes without saying whether he would gladly assent to Nené’s proposal. A quarter of an hour after seeing that first ray of sunshine after a cloudy morning, the father and the little girl, sitting in her nanny’s arms, were trotting along the mare along the high road. We already know it was one of those peaceful afternoons of early spring, which make you want to sing Faust’s song, “Christ is risen.” Above the clear blue sky, graced with flakes of white clouds as fine as swan feathers, the first swallows were fluttering; and in the air there was the healthy, mellow freshness of the good season. Nené was chirping happily, looking down at her socks, which, being wet, made her burst with pride. The child wouldn’t allow her father to take his eyes off the famous socks. The Doctor would hardly turn his head to look at the villas lining the road, at the landscape, or at the people on foot or on horseback, when Nené would grab him by the lapel and force his nose down. “My little socks… my little socks of flow! And yesterday Nené would always say _yesterday_ for _tomorrow_, yesterday you ayoha took me entanados, and see, and love them…, all cut, of flow, cut!” And the little girl would grab one of her father’s fingers and walk him from one fishnet to another, laughing. “Cut like this.” — “Well, darling…., I’ll buy you a hell of a lot of socks, cut like this…., but don’t pull my finger off. ” After an interval of two minutes, the Nené, asking in his own way if it would be permissible for him to show the socks to the chickens, the Holy Spirits, the pigeons, and Bismar, the mastiff, to see if they were to his liking. With the girl’s chatter, the pleasantness of the walk, and the hope of a delightful village afternoon, Moragas felt as if his soul had been restored. Of his former irritation, there was no trace. Their arrival at the villa and their burst into the orchard were triumphant. The gardener, a little old man of eighty, as deaf as a post, came out to greet them, respectfully removing the straw basket that covered his head. And the Doctor, directing his voice so that it sounded straight to the eardrum, asked him the sacramental question: “What’s the news, Mr. Jacinto?” —News….—the patriarch answered slowly.—News…. That the wind broke a pole of the flowering cacia…, and that a glass in the gallery is smashed to pieces…, and that the hen hit by stones is broody…, and that last night a man was killed in the parish church.—— “Was a man killed?” Moragas repeated without much surprise, because he knew the bellicose and rebellious nature of the Erbedan youths, and believed it must be some kind of tavern brawl. —They killed him by force at night,—the gardener continued, believing that his master was asking him the time of the incident. It’s Román, the cart driver who went back and forth to Marineda with carts of straw and firewood, and with sacks of wheat. He appeared this morning on the Sobrás mountain…., you see? there…. and the old man was pointing towards a fairly nearby spot. They smashed his whole head with a stone, or God knows what… He says he looks like a Ceomo… —Fantasy or robbery; nothing, a quarrel has broken out, thought Moragas, going into his study, eager for a couple of hours of peaceful and juicy reading. But he had hardly begun a chapter of a new book by Maudsley when he saw the nanny rush in, and he jumped up in his chair, fearing that it might be some incident that had happened to Nené.
—Young master, young master! Moragas, despite his white hair, still had a very youthful air, and the maids were taunting him loudly. Young master…., come out…., the Court is coming to arrest those who killed that carter! The girl spoke with the fearful tone that the townspeople adopt when referring to Justice, whom she named with inflections of terror that she perhaps lacks for thieves or murderers. Moragas stood up and looked out from his gallery, which overlooked the road, looking at the group with some curiosity. Riding in front, on unstable horses, were the Judge and the Secretary; following them on foot were two pairs of Civil Guard, four men with swarthy, military faces, and agile, graceful legs well shaped by their road gaiters; and behind them, at what might without metaphor be called a respectful distance, were about a dozen village women and children, a platoon that grew larger as the procession advanced. Moragas knew the Judge, and had even attended to a brother of his during a serious illness; And at the nod and the smile with which the representative of the law greeted him, he answered briskly, shouting: “Goodbye, Priego… Do you want to go up and get some refreshments? A small bottle of beer? ” “Thank you very much… Now, impossible,” replied Priego, stopping his horse for a moment, which desired nothing else. “On the way back. We’re in a hurry. ” “And… is that it?” asked the Doctor with a significant gesture. “Hmmm!” replied the Judge in a meaningful tone, which fully responded to Moragas’s expressive question, making it clear as possible: “Don’t think this is a common crime. I imagine there’s something to it.” And with a quick touch of the hat, the two officials got their mounts to a medium trot, and the group moved away, which, as it disappeared in the commotion, left, in Moragas’s opinion, a certain strange silence in the atmosphere. The doctor tried to resume his reading, but could not. His ideas had taken another turn; his fancy, distracted and excited, followed the group, attending the always dramatic and sometimes grotesque scenes that accompany what is called in technical language “raising the corpse.” There exists in every man, even the least literary, even the last bourgeois, what might be called a “natural novelist,” capable of concocting thirty complicated and bizarre plots in a few minutes. Moragas possessed this faculty to a high degree: he had plenty of imagination, even within the sphere of his professional studies; and, without being precisely of the condition of that individual who died of grief because his neighbor had been stripped of his short vest, he was nevertheless very interested in other people’s affairs, with truly altruistic interest; not out of curiosity, like so many, but due to the essentially expansive and generous nature of his character. Two minutes before, he had been indifferent to the death of the carter Román; but after the judge’s indication, his imagination worked on the theme of the crime and the probable enigma contained within it. At first, he didn’t realize the true source of that excitement, but he soon realized it had to do with the strange client who had come to his office a few hours earlier. “Whoever the murderer is, he’s worth more than that scoundrel. If I believed it was legal to scientifically murder a fellow human being, I’d believe it of that beast… whom I don’t even consider a fellow human being! May he burst from the sour guts God gave him! But come on, today is a day of black stone. That individual in the morning, and this event in the afternoon … we still don’t know how it will turn out.” To distract himself, Moragas went down to the garden, as big as a handkerchief, wandered through its streets, which seemed more like alleys, inquired about the state of the vegetables and greens, ordered a pavilion to be stalked, held parties for Bismar, was indignant because two or three insolent slugs were eating the strawberry field with all the shamelessness in the world… and at the same time, he kept peeking through the gate for the moment when “Justice” would return. A little before sunset, he heard shouts and saw a crowd of people coming down the road, heading for the city. Moragas climbed up to the small viewing platform that, from the angle of the wall, overlooked the road perfectly. Leading the way, as always, was a mob of barefoot urchins, the kind who go where there is noise and drama in the streets, and who recruit themselves equally in the laundries of Erbeda and in the small squares of Marina. Following them, grave and grim, were the four members of the Civil Guard, and among them walked a young woman, her long braids loose over her dark calico dress. As the procession passed beneath the Moragas lookout, the setting sun illuminated the figure of her prisoner. She appeared to be between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old: her face was covered in pallor; she was petite in face and body, with delicate and regular features, slender in shape, and with a certain purity of lines around her high, modest breasts on a flat waist. Her very black hair, parted on both sides, smoothed over the temples and hanging back in two braids, contributed to giving her an expression and an air of almost mystical modesty. Moragas felt a deep sense of surprise. Why were they carrying that creature among the Civil Guards? Could it be possible that she was a criminal? The crowd following the group of Guards and the prize was made up of villagers. They carried an attitude more sad than hostile, with the faces and attitudes of those accompanying a funeral. Only a few men and old women whispered, showing indignation. Some women raised their hands to heaven; others pointed at the prize; many turned their heads back, staring at the object at the back of the procession: one of those primitive-shaped country carts with a spokeless wheel, moving slowly, keeping pace with the team of reddish oxen, greatly enlivened by the relatively light load. Indeed, behind the woven wicker frame that would formerly have been used to hold the sand or stone cart, nothing could be seen but a small bundle, covered with coarse cloth. Moragas did not need He had to look at it twice to know it was a human body, a dead body… Neither on the cloths, nor around the bundle, nor anywhere else could he see a stain or sign of blood, and yet Moragas thought he noticed a reddish hue all over the cart… It was because the sun was setting, and its slanting light inflamed everything it touched… The crowd had already disappeared from the curve of the road; their voices were no longer heard, and Moragas still hadn’t moved from the lookout. That girl, so weak, so sweet in appearance, being led to jail by an accusing crowd, had left him deeply thoughtful. The woman’s appearance had awakened a lively curiosity, very similar to interest. We have, or rather, people of Moragas’s character have, those compassionate sparks that suddenly take hold of the soul. Moragas was what Rousseau’s time called a “sensitive man,” and what our hardened outlook today calls, with a certain tinge of disdain, an “impressionable person.” His painful profession, far from dulling his sensitivity, refined it every day. With the same vivacity with which he had thrown the two duros for Rojo’s consultation out the window, he would have gone down then… to what? To commit the ridiculousness of offering a drink, a coin, a piece of advice, a smile, anything in the way of comfort, to that woman so pale, with such a fixed gaze, with lips so convulsively compressed, with such a modest bearing… Ten or twelve minutes had passed since even the dust raised by the procession had been seen floating in the atmosphere, when Moragas descended from his observatory, because the trotting of two horses could be heard, and he had no doubt that they were the mounts of the Judge and the Secretary, who would return after completing their task of initiating the summary proceedings. And so it was : the trotting stopped before the door of the villa, and the officials quickly dismounted. The Doctor understood that they accepted the refreshment, which they must have been in dire need of, and as he went out to greet his guests, he called the nanny, giving orders that the beer, the currants, and the cakes, which he had fortunately brought warm from Marineda, should be served on the stone table in the gazebo. The Judge entered, panting like a man exhausted by fatigue, wiping the perspiration from his brow, more serious and worried than before. He was blond, stout, phlegmatic, jovial, and did not usually drown in shallow water, from which Moragas inferred that what worried him thus must be of real gravity. Once in the gazebo, where a delightful cool breeze blew, the jasmines smelled sweet, and the beer smiled in the clean tank, Priego’s face calmed and cleared, and exclaiming, as anyone in his position would, “Ugh!” he threw himself down on the rustic wooden bench and answered his guest’s question more with his eyes than with his tongue. “Well… a big deal… a big deal! Either I’m mistaken, or this crime is going to be talked about, not only here but in the court press… Oh, how grateful I am for this drink! I’ve sweated the kilo, and since it wasn’t something the Judge would have been doing to refresh himself with wine in the tavern… Yes, I too thought, when I received the report, that it was a brawl…; Here they are our daily bread, because I have never seen people more willing to go to batons than those in these parishes. But from the moment I first caught wind, I understood that it was something more… And in truth, I was not very amused, because if the newspapers start to cheer about these things, it is rare for the judge to come out unscathed. Whether he was, whether he came, whether he should have done this or that… And nobody likes to be publicly shamed. Sir! This beer comforts. “And the woman who is in prison, what role does she play in all this?” Moragas asked eagerly. “A trifle! Have you seen her so… like that… that it seems she wouldn’t break a plate? Well, either I’m very much mistaken… or she is the actual author… or at least a co-author and instigator of the crime. She is the wife of the dead man… or rather, the widow of the deceased,” Priego added cheerfully. beginning to munch on a puff pastry. Moragas had become thoughtful. “Are you saying that woman?” “As you see it! For now, strictly speaking, anything being said is premature; and yet, I’d bet my toga that it was her. ” “She alone? Do you think she alone murdered her husband? ” “Alone, no. The lover must be an accomplice. ” “Is there a lover? ” “I believe so. In villages, if you dig hard enough, you’ll find both toads and snakes, just as in large cities. We’re made of the same stuff here and there. There’s a lover, and the best part is that it seems to be a brother-in-law… one who was married to the dead man’s own sister. I haven’t taken a statement from anyone yet, except for the woman who’s in prison, who, for now, has only given vague answers; I didn’t press the issue too hard either. ” everything will happen, and at first you should feel things out more than delve into them; but the civilians had chatted with the village gossips, and since they informed me that she and her brother-in-law…” Priego put his index fingers together , I said to myself… look, here’s the thread. “And have you arrested your brother-in-law? ” “They’re looking for him… He’ll be caught. The rascal, just to put on an appearance, said yesterday that he was leaving the parish, that he was going to Marineda on I don’t know what errands and needs… and instead of leaving at night, he left at dawn, the scam already having been carried out…” The Judge continued the feat, understanding from Moragas’s expression, who was listening eagerly to the details, “it must have happened last night, when Román the cart driver was returning from taking a cart of sand two leagues away, to the top of Chouzas. ” As for the count, he used to come a little _peneque_. I don’t know how the bird and the bird managed to get him out of the house and convince him to go to the little wood, where they dispatched him with axe blows, smashing his head to bits…” “He’s in terrible shape,” the Secretary confirmed. “He looks like a crushed watermelon… What strikes me is seeing so little blood there, when the ground should have been soaked… ” “That’s strange,” Moragas indicated. “It smells to me like they killed him somewhere else…” “Isn’t it true that for now…” “We’re just getting started, Mr. Moragas; we’re just getting started,” replied the Judge, who wasn’t just getting started, but had just finished stoking the second tank of the _Rooster_. Now it’s up to you to issue an opinion… There goes the victim, in her own cart, to Marineda to have the proper examination and a formal autopsy… And as soon as we’ve put the bird and the bird in a safe place , they’ll sing and everything will come to light… Please note that I’ve been aware of the case less than six hours ago,” added the Judge, who was not, in fact, very dissatisfied with himself and his insight and sagacity in immediately picking up a clue. “And… her?” asked Moragas, who did not lose sight of the accused. “She… she, as calm and well-behaved as you see her, must have a hell of a thing going for her. She was calm, just as you are there, surrounded by two or three neighbors who had been with her since the body was discovered, and without shedding a single tear.” Nor did she throw them out when I questioned her, pressing her a little, and when I ordered her arrest. She answered my questions without boasting, without fear, without haste, with astonishing calm, saying that her husband returned last night at the usual hour; that they dined in peace; that he told her to go to bed, saying he had to go out and to leave the door ajar; and that, as he spent many nights in the tavern, she fell asleep, and only at dawn, upon awakening, did she miss her husband, learning around eleven o’clock that he had been found dead in the pine forest. “I tell you that the individual…” “Does this couple have children? ” “Yes: a little girl of three years old…. Her grandmother is in charge of her… ” “And you believe that she and her brother-in-law were the perpetrators… and for what? ” “Bah! Why would that be?” exclaimed the official, laughing. It seems incredible that you were a steward before being a guard! So that no one would get in their way; so that they would be free and have their way. The doctor shook his head. The crime seemed like a drama to him. vulgar of adultery; but he didn’t think the same about the heroine, in whom he sensed something strange, something worthy of that mysterious interest he felt awakening in his mind as an observer and a curious soul. Perhaps this disposition of his soul was greatly influenced by the coincidence of having seen and spoken, that morning, with the man who would probably unravel the drama, squeezing the throat and dissolving the vertebrae of that young and peaceful-looking woman: a prospect that had the power to make Moragas jump. The mere idea of seeing the scaffold rise, and for a woman, offended him like an insult to her very person! Already nervous, he asked Priego: “And that woman… will she go to the stake?” “I don’t think so,” the Judge replied with a certain merciful tone. “I suppose she’s the author, what she is the author… The dear one would make the stew. She ‘ll take the immediate one. And admit that you deserve it.” Moragas was about to reply, thinking many things on the subject, but his guests interrupted him, rising as if in a hurry to leave. The Doctor saw his carriage hitched up through the gate and proposed to the officials that they take them to Marineda. They would always be better off than on a hired horse, and would save time: as it was, he still had some calls to make before dinner. They agreed; they entrusted their mounts to a policeman; they climbed into the little carriage, which began to roll smoothly; and the divine peace of the afternoon; the beauty of the estuary that could be seen in the distance, tinged with carmine by the last, now expiring reflection of the sun; the stillness of the wind; the freshness of spring and the early greenery that the fields in full germination sent forth; the early morning vines that, already somewhat in bloom, peeked out from the walls of the country houses… all this was the reason that neither Moragas nor his companions ever mentioned the crime again, which seemed a profanation of the sacred beauty of nature. Exhausted by an afternoon of rustication, covered in dust, with stains on her dress and mud on those cute socks, Nené slept. Chapter 7. The Marinera left, hurrying as fast as her feet, guided by her almost invalid eyes, would allow, while the father struggled to undress the wounded man. She removed his outer clothing with the greatest imaginable care, leaving him only his torn shirt; and by means of handkerchiefs and torn linen , she staunched the blood that stained the forehead and neck of the defeated warrior as best she could. During these operations, Telmo groaned dully. But as he tried to remove the boot from the child’s right foot, the cry from the child was so sharp and pitiful that Rojo stopped, unable to bring himself to finish the operation. “Does it hurt a lot, boy? Does it hurt a lot?” he asked anxiously. The boy didn’t reply, returning to his feverish stupor. Undoubtedly, his head wasn’t up for speeches, nor his tongue for explanations. Only after two or three long minutes did he stammer out the exclamation of all the mistreated, of all the victims: “Water, water!… I’m thirsty.” The father filled a glass and held it to the child’s lips, who drank eagerly, letting his forehead fall back onto the pillow. Rojo rested his hand on it… Extremely high temperature, dryness and aridity of the skin invaded by fever. Rojo found a chair, placed it at the head of the chair, and sat there, agitated and gloomy. Inside, he felt a tenderness, a delirium of painful affection that suffocated him; but the manifestation of that intimate feeling, so natural in fatherhood, was harsh and concentrated, like everything in him. Squeezing the brakes of impatience that spurs on the one who, at the bedside of a loved one, awaits the doctor and with him certainty, perhaps salvation, Rojo meditated on the event and glimpsed in it a new humiliation added to the already innumerable catalogue of those that had ulcerated his spirit. Only this one hurt more, because it struck at the raw flesh, at the feeling that, energetic and sovereign even in the wild beast, is stronger in man than death—because it is love. Why had they stoned his child? Was it right to vent the hatred Juan Rojo instilled in Telmo? Was it just to leave the boy, dying, covered in blood, in a deserted place? What harm did the child do to anyone? Wouldn’t there be forgiveness, forgetfulness, or indulgence for him? Wasn’t Telmo just like any other person? Why had they outlawed him —to the point of stoning him to death? These reflections were interrupted by the roll of a carriage, which resounded over the dry road as if over resounding metal pavement, and the voice of the Marinera, hurried, mad with joy, resounded, shouting: “Mr. Rojo… Thanks be to the Virgin of the Guard! Oh, what luck! To turn down Calle del Peñascal, pass in front of the Chapel of Angustia… and hear Mr. Moragas’s carriage roll by!” Oh, what a shriek I uttered! I grabbed the carriage door… I told him what was happening… And Mr. Moragas, being so humane, immediately ordered the coachman to turn around… Praise the Virgin! I must pray three Hail Marys to her today. Moragas was already getting out of his tired little sedan, jumping with a lively, youthful movement, and crossing the door of the ranch without even looking at Rojo, he went straight to the bed where Telmo lay, saying in a loud, animated, affectionate voice, like that of a doctor who, upon entering the home of the poor, knows that above all else he must comfort the afflicted: “What’s the matter? Who’s broken his leg? A child? A little trick, eh? Now we’ll set that broken head. ” He was already leaning toward the patient when the light that Rojo had taken down and brought closer illuminated the father’s face. The astonishment expressed by the man from Moragas upon recognizing his client from that morning, the one with the two duros lying in the street, is indescribable. Anger, astonishment, contempt sparkled in his round pupils, which rolled furiously, in the fine multiple wrinkles on his forehead, in his open mouth, in his instantly clenched fists. “You, you!” he repeated with the varied expressions of the feelings that agitated him. And suddenly calming himself by the very force of his anger, and looking at the child who was moaning muffledly and the father who lowered his eyes and tried to hide, he pronounced in a grave and incisive tone: “The child, is it yours?” “Mine, yes…. He’s my son,” declared Rojo in a muffled and earthy voice. “Well, that’s the worst illness that can befall him, and that, neither I nor anyone else can cure it,” replied the doctor, turning his back and heading for the door. He hadn’t taken three steps when he felt a hand clamped around the tail of his coat, violently tightening it. He turned around in disgust; he looked Rojo up and down as one looks at a very ugly toad, and said, his words vibrating like so many cracks of whiplash: “Don’t touch me, or I’ll make a fool of myself. That morning’s audacity was enough . I threw the duros you left on my table into the street, so as not to save anything you had laid your hands on.” Rojo let go of the Doctor; but turning quickly, he maneuvered so that , placing himself in front of him, he fell at his feet without a word. Moragas stopped. The child was moaning. “He’s very sick.” Wounded. I don’t know what’s broken in his body. Señor Don Pelayo, for the soul of your mother! Don Pelayo continued gaining ground toward the door, but at it he found another obstacle: the Marinera, who apostrophized him energetically. “Sir, charity. Charity doesn’t distinguish between persons, sir. And the innocent are not to blame for anything. God, our Lord, commands us charity even with dogs.” Moragas was struggling with himself; not between conflicting feelings, which is an easy, almost elemental struggle, but between analogous feelings, all kneaded with that semi-quixotic, semi-philanthropic generosity that, whatever the common people may say, is not at odds with the positive tendencies of the scientist. To abandon a sick person seemed to him, within his profession, monstrous; and to stay in that house, to care for that sick person, was, in his opinion, a degradation, a kind of a stigma that would later be seen on the hands. Moragas had lavished the aid of his science on very vile people. He knew by heart the stinking traces that vice leaves on the bodies of the dissolute and the whore. Although a man delicate in his interior life and in the meticulous cleanliness of his person, he had never flinched from any illness, no matter how repulsive: and when he attended to suffering humanity, thanks to a marvelous analgesia, the product of firm willpower—that analgesia that made a saint say that the sores of a leper smell of roses—he lost his sense of smell, mastered those of touch and sight, and dispensed with the suffering to dedicate himself entirely to his duty. For the first time, he flinched from a moral wound, and his vivid imagination redoubled the impression of horror, which, from its sheer force, was already beginning to seem ridiculous to him. In any case, given Moragas’s character, there was no room for that struggle to last; if he hadn’t left in the first moments, he wouldn’t have left at all; and the Marinera gave him the pretext for weakening , insisting and repeating with a kind of respectful severity: “Oh, sir!… Are you going to leave the innocent? Sir, God doesn’t command that. Look, how cruel such behavior is. ” “Are you the mother of that child?” asked Moragas. “Oh! No, sir, praise God!” replied the Marinera spontaneously and briskly. “My husband is a good man, a boatman from the Pier…” In spite of himself, Moragas smiled; he stretched out his fists, hummed, and like someone who is determined to think “chest in the water,” he went to the wounded man’s cot. With the skill of a veteran in these painful examinations, he quickly determined that the boy’s head was broken in two places. and, taking off his shoes, ignoring his complaints, he noticed that his ankle was dislocated. He didn’t address the bruises and contusions: they were numerous, but of no great importance. There didn’t seem to be any internal injury, but there was a very high fever. The Marinera was giving birth, and Rojo, motionless and as if stupefied, awaited the outcome. “How did this happen?” asked the doctor, interrupting his task. “Were they stones thrown at him, or did he also fall? ” “We don’t know!” exclaimed Rojo, dismayed. “I heard that the boy was at the castle of San Wintila, very badly treated… I went, picked him up, carried him in my arms, and I haven’t been able to tell him anything about the incident. ” “It must have been a stone thrown at him,” warned the Marinera. “Yes, but there are bruises all over his body… He fell from a height, there’s no doubt about it,” warned the doctor, while still feeling the boy. When the treatment was complete, the bandages applied, the dislocation reduced, Moragas straightened up, exhaling a “ugh!” of evident fatigue. Then—only then—Rojo approached the doctor and, with deep anxiety, asked: “Will the boy be lame? Will he have chest pain?” Moragas turned and, for the first time since he had learned his client’s social standing , looked him in the eye, as human beings look at one another . Chance showed him the man excluded from the social scene in the guise most capable of moving the fibers of his soul, if only by analogy of feeling. Moragas, Marineda’s greatest father , the childhood sweetheart, the spendthrift of toys and candy, the man who, after a tracheotomy, had mingled his tears with those of the family of the operated child! That was the first instant in which Moragas’s feelings, which were to have so much influence on Juan Rojo’s destiny, underwent a change of position, turned on their axis, so to speak, and the indignation and horror of a few hours before were replaced by a kind of strange interest, that fascination that repugnance itself produces, and which resembles the vocation of the chaste apostle who enters a house of perdition to convert prostitutes; because the utmost piety leads to the utmost evil. It was not the first time that Moragas had noticed this propensity, which he humorously described as _redemptorist mania_. This propensity had certainly cost him serious troubles, confirmations painful with black ingratitudes, gratuitous entanglements, countless annoyances and great distresses… The least it had cost him, costing him quite a lot, was money and time. However, at the slightest pretext, Moragas’s inclination resurfaced, and the perpetual illusion of redemptionism once again presented itself to him dressed in all the trappings and finery that our dreams ordinarily display. “If I thought, the Doctor, I was right to have been born in the Middle Ages, a time when the deficiencies of the social state and the legal system left so much room for individual initiative, God knows what I might have done! But in today’s society, there is no doubt that this foolishness of feeling the ills of others as my own, of meddling in things that neither give me nor take away, is very similar to the job of righting wrongs and undoing grievances that Cervantes already ridiculed.” When he noted that Rojo’s condition and status, Rojo! were provoking in him the first symptoms of the well-known illness, the redeemer laughed at himself. “Moraguitas, this is the end of it. Now you’ve taken to pitying this fellow. You’ve reached the extreme limits of benevolent madness, son. No, because here I’m not letting you off the leash. This man cannot even be considered a man. If you want to be interested in something rare and stupendous, take an interest, congratulations, in the parricide you saw passing today, among civilians, on the highway. She may be a criminal, and let’s admit, of course, that she is; but a criminal _in the heat of the moment_… , a passionate criminal, who in committing the crime acted, without a doubt, out of irresistible impulse, without caring that on the other side of the ditch she was about to jump over lay the atonement for a shameful death…! That woman, Moraguitas, is a sick woman like any other you see… That explains and justifies compassion… But with this guy, who in cold blood and without restraint has taken up killing… This guy, like a viper, should have his head crushed. While Moragas was thus reasoning, Rojo repeated the question: “Will he be lame? Disabled? ” “No,” the doctor answered in a stern voice. “Neither will he be disabled nor lame. More than his injuries, I am worried about his general condition… I am going to give you some prescriptions…” A writing note appeared there, not as bad or as crazy as might have been feared in that hovel, and Moragas wrote down his prescriptions. The only sounds in the room were the father’s anguished breathing and the sick man’s muffled moans. The doctor approached him, surprised that the treatment, instead of calming him, seemed to have produced more restlessness and anxiety. “It would be a good idea for him not to move, because of the dislocation,” Moragas observed. “But who’s holding him down? With that feverish fever… Wait, V… He’s already delirious.” Telmo was indeed stirring in bed, and his inarticulate moans were transformed into words that were painfully articulate, though clear and expressive. The doctor listened. “I am brave,” Telmo affirmed. “Who is it that calls me a coward?” Liars… You’ll see if… Throw, I’m waiting… You disdain me, because… Stones and more stones, against!…. I am a man for everyone…. You cowards…. Come on… throw stones!…. I am alone…. —What are you saying?—asked the father. —Bah!—responded Moragas.—It seems that a lot of children have gathered to stone him…. Which was to be expected…. Don’t be so shocked, man!—he added ironically, giving in to malevolence once more. —What? Don’t you find it very natural that humanity should stone you in the person of your son?…. —It’s wickedness!—exclaimed Rojo dully, leaning against the wall and hiding his changed face.—Let them stone me…., a saint and good man…., that is to say…., neither…. but, well, stoning… What a child… what a filthy thing to do, Señor de Moragas! And you will forgive me for expressing myself with such frankness… what a shameless indecency on the part of those filthy rascals! —Well, man… You thought that all there was to it was to bring children into the world, and that then, although V….. Gosh with this man… —But, sir,—the Sailor intervened with fire,—why should the innocent pay? Only black hearts do that, sir! —Come on, stop the stories,—the doctor ordered wearily.—Give him what it says there, it will bring down the fever…. Find some lemons or oranges, and let him drink, let him drink without a cup, some fresh orange juice…. Moisten the bandages with dissolved arnica…. No food… eh?, not even broth, or anything at all…. Careful… Red, humble, and dejected, he muttered as he approached the Doctor: —Mr. Moragas, I can’t pay you…. I mean, I don’t have the means… because if it comes to it, you won’t want…, come on…, to take the poverty I can give him…. For your father’s soul, don’t get angry… If all I’m asking is that you don’t leave the boy abandoned by me… If you knew that tomorrow he would have to return… Moragas hesitated for a moment. In the end, impulse prevailed. “I’ll return,” he answered firmly. “I promise. Tomorrow, at dusk.” And as he was leaning back in the corner of his little berlin, before the coachman could touch the mare with his whip, Moragas heard a woman’s voice saying fervently, as if praying: “May God and the Virgin of the Guard preserve your little girl! Don Pelayo, today he wins heaven. May Our Lord be with you, for Our Lord never disdained anyone in this world!” It was the Marinera who was speaking thus… Moragas stuck his head out, and to put a stop to the unfortunate woman’s blessings, he answered with wit and mischief: “Goodbye, you fine young thing.” Chapter 8. The capital of Marinedina awoke commenting, ruminating, distorting,—I was going to say savoring—the news of the Erbeda crime, if it didn’t seem like slander to me, because the people of Marinedina are not really as eager for strong emotions as the Parisians, and the unhealthy taste for blood and mud revolts their palate. However, the growing invasion of the criminal section in the Court press had managed to spoil it somewhat, the newsreel that records daily, and with a thoroughness worthy of the highest object, the most insipid and vulgar steps, movements, acts and sayings of the criminal subject to the action of the law, from the moment the public force catches him, until the Brothers of Peace and Charity deposit his remains in the tomb. The common people of Marineda, like the common people everywhere, had, thanks to the press, become accustomed to legal and penal terminology, to a certain sharp criticism of the law and its representatives and interpreters, a criticism that, if it did not put its finger on the sore spot, was at least an indication of that social discontent that cries out for renewal, demanding fresh water from new springs. Mixed in this movement of public opinion in Marineda, as in all movements of public opinion, was something mechanical and childish and something inspired and fruitful; a combination that, transformed into instinct, unwittingly aids the true conscious precursors of the progressive march of humanity. That morning, with the first light of day; with the first devout women who rose early to hear the Jesuit masses; with the first street sweepers who, still half awake, began to clean the streets and expel stray dogs and cats from them; with the first women from the surrounding areas, from basket to basket, who woke up the consumption supervisors to pay them the _alcabela_; with the first industrious maids or housewives who went out to take advantage of the early morning shopping; with the first _lulos_ who untied the docks to stir up the sardine and the hake; with the first cigar makers who entered the Factory; with the morning bustle of a town that counts tens of thousands of inhabitants, that has twelve or fourteen newspapers, six or eight factories, both large and small, Court, Captaincy General, Collegiate Church, Institute, port, customs movement… and all the etceteras that can still be added in honor and just praise of the gentle capital of Cantabria, it spread, rolled, grew, turned a thousand times, acquired more forms than a Proteus and The horrendous and memorable crime of Erbeda had more versions than the Bible . According to some, it was about a drunken and brutal husband who constantly threatened and beat his wife, and whom she, in a fit of rage already provoked by so much abuse, chopped with an axe. According to others, the passion of a poor day laborer for his brother-in-law’s wife had induced him to kill him in the solitude of a pine forest. According to those who seemed best informed, there was a bit of everything: the husband mistreated his wife, the brother-in-law loved her, she had an understanding with her brother-in-law, and between the two a plot was made for her death, which was not carried out in a deserted place, but in the couple’s own home, just as the victim was sleeping safely in the nuptial bed, with an innocent child, a three-year-old girl, at her side. This horrible version prevailed, and with the rays of the sun, as it ascended to the middle of the sky, it spread sinisterly and categorically throughout the indignant city. It was fully confirmed by the morning newspapers , which were sung and distributed between nine and nine-thirty, and around eleven o’clock a special notice was issued, a kind of very blurred flyer , announcing the capture of the lover and his imprisonment in the public jail. The two criminals were safely tucked away, but the excitement of the conversations didn’t subside; rather, it intensified at lunchtime. The afternoon, instead of calming tempers, only inflamed them, because it was precisely the hour when, in Marineda—and everywhere, but especially in towns where something is finally trafficked and negotiated—small groups, corner groups, shop gatherings, rock-heavy societies, and areopaguses on the sidewalk benches, along with other manifestations of human sociability, form. The morning opinion of a people is always democratic: it is formed by the early-rising, working, and poor classes , and these condemn crime with less harshness, as if they understood that it is an acute illness to which those who already suffer from two other, chronic and sinister illnesses, misery and ignorance, are predisposed. The evening opinion—which ultimately prevails—is condensed by the bourgeoisie, always more severe, more suspicious of indulgence, and more vigilant of the external moral order. In the afternoon, then, when the tide of discussions and commentaries was growing and bursting into foam against the _peñas_ of the two _governing_ societies—each in its own style and on its own terrain—which called themselves the _Pecera_ and the _Casino de la Amistad_, it was when an editor of a Marineda newspaper, charged with telegraphing to an important court publication, was able to entrust the wire with these words: ” True indignation reigns in all social classes. Excited spirits are commenting on horrible details.” We, eager to enlighten the reader’s opinion as appropriate, will be careful not to take him to the _Pecera_, a frivolous gathering of _chickens_ and _roosters_—still called in Marineda by those unemployed and opposed to warming their helmets by immersing themselves in scientific depths. For them, the Erbeda drama was a topic of profane, humorous, and piquant conversation. For the _Casino de la Amistad_, especially for a certain senate, not in the etymological sense of age, but in the symbolic sense of respectability and sanity, the Erbeda drama was something else entirely: it provided an opportunity to display profound legal knowledge and to assess and refine intricate and difficult points of criminal law. As it was, there gathered, associated by a common taste and profession, Celso Palmares, magistrate of the Criminal Division of the Marinedina Court; Carmelo Nozales, its public prosecutor; the never -beloved jurist Arturito Cáñamo, alias _Siete patíbulos_; D. Darío Cortés, delegate of the Treasury, a very learned person; Brigadier Cartoné, who never lacked his _tinturilla_; and sometimes, watch out! the young lawyer Lucio Febrero, nephew of a very old President of the court, who had died in Madrid. Lucio Febrero had a reputation for great talent—one of those exaggerated, dangerous talents, revolutionaries, who are often spoken of in the provinces, and even outside of them, in the same tone used to name a box full of mercury fulminate… what am I saying!… of panclastite…! Also often woven into this circle, formed by such competent entities, were other very profane ones, who did not even know Justinian by sight , but who, it may be said without obvious irreverence , bullfight as a hobby. Looking at it closely, what whistle did Brigadier Cartoné himself blow on certain matters? What did the director of the _Horizonte Galaico_ know about law? What did good old Castro Quintás, enriched by the honest industry of manufacturing stearic candles? What Ciriaco de la Luna, model of honest rural proprietors, the cream and mirror of detestable poets? What Mauro Pareja, temporary deserter from the _Pecera_, incorrigible bachelor? What Primo Cova, the eternal joker? How many others like them could we name! And they form that nucleus—renewed in some of its elements by the inevitable entry and exit of military personnel and employees, but sufficiently fixed, at its core, so that it can be calculated in advance what kind of opinion and form of discussion will prevail therein. The Casino de la Amistad counts among its greatest attractions a glass-enclosed vestibule, from which the sharp eye can register , to its liking, the main artery of the town, that is, the street called Mayor par excellence, although not in size, but only in importance and attendance. This vestibule does not presume to be compared to the Fishbowl, which owes its name precisely to the high glass panes that, surrounding it on three sides, turn it into a kind of transparent box; But anyway, as it is, it’s hard for the Amistad regulars to miss a rat, and the lobby is quite cramped, especially once the cold weather stops and you can have coffee there. On days when the news is in full swing, the lobby is overflowing, and the chairs spill out of their narrow confines, trying to invade the stream—because, truth be told, Calle Mayor doesn’t have sidewalks… On the evening of the first crime, there were no fewer than thirty people in the group. That was the grand complet. Versions were discussed, refined, and the definitive one was gradually crystallizing, the one that is no longer disputed. Mauro Pareja—alias the Abbot—a great indiscreet man, had the best possible news; he had just exchanged a paragraph with Priego, the judge who had been in Erbeda to remove the body and conduct an investigation. Pareja pronounced “instruct” with a certain subtle undertone, adding that he had no intention of violating anything , much less the confidentiality of such a tender, so-to-speak, prepubescent investigation ; but that surely, once the required hours had passed, the detention of the deceased’s wife and brother-in-law would be elevated to provisional imprisonment , and an indictment would be issued against both of them, because together they had done something funny. Pareja added another piece of interesting news: Priego was taking a break from his “painful task” at Don Pelayo Moragas’s estate , and Priego believed that Moragas was… in love, or almost certainly not, with the prisoner, judging by how he lavished praise on her modest and pleasant air, the modesty of her manners, and the sweetness of her face. Nothing less was needed to sharpen the malice of those listening. “But Moragas knows her?” “What do we bet that she did Moragas’s dirty laundry?” “Of course, both of them from Erbeda…” “An idyll…” “All these jokes, bittersweet in most cases, and bitter in only a few, ceased enchantingly when they saw the silhouetted figure, at the same time dapper and agile, the gray-haired head and the youthful, wiry body of Don Pelayo, against the background of the venerable pharmacy where the main street begins. He appeared more than ever profiled and dressed up, in a gray overcoat and white waistcoat, of smooth and fine piqué; his hat tilted slightly and fitted neatly, his gloves tight, a smile on his lips, chatting with a lady client of his, the Marchioness of Veniales, whom he had no doubt just met. As they were approaching the Casino, the lady said goodbye to enter a shop, and Moragas, now serious, like a man who, when left alone, recovers a concern, continued walking, his eyes fixed on the tiles. Then Cartoné, who was affable, lisped at him: “Moragas, my friend Moragas…” Moragas rarely entered the Casino, nor the Pecera, nor any of the circles and societies of Marineda. He didn’t have much time; his existence was as full as an egg, and he could hardly conceive of the pugilism of idleness that gathered, at the same time and around the same table, every day, the same people. Nevertheless, he hastened to accede to Cartoné’s suggestion, and in lieu of a cup of coffee, which would have upset his nerves between meals, accepted a sherbet, which he brought from the nearest café, since the Casino didn’t have a liquor cabinet. And questions and jokes began to rain down on Moragas. “The idea here is to arrest you as someone involved in the Erbeda murder… Wasn’t it your laundress who killed your husband? Let’s see, let the witness Don Pelayo Moragas testify… ” “Stop!” said Moragas cheerfully. “Not even as a witness can they drag me into that mess. This morning, when I read the newspapers, I was thinking to myself: isn’t it strange that, despite her living in the same place where I have my little vegetable garden, I don’t know that woman? Perhaps she’s one of the few there that I haven’t seen or even looked at. And she’s not bad- looking… ” “Hello! ” “Come on! ” “So she’s pretty? ” “Pretty… no.” What he has is an air of composure, a good manner… that are pleasing and surprising, for the very reason that they contrast with the fact that is attributed to him…. And I say attributed to him, because in reality, for now, nothing has been specified. —Well, keep us in the secret…. Your news is authorized…. You conferred yesterday with Priego…. —Confer!….—And Moragas laughed, decapitating the pyramid of sorbet through the mouth of the wafer.—If only I was in the gallery…, and as Priego was passing by, tired and annoyed with the task, he came in to refresh himself with a tank of German beer…. He himself didn’t know much. It was the first few moments…. —Let’s respect the secrecy of the summary!—said Primo Cova. —You. “They’re selling him for cheap,” Magistrate Don Celso Palmares observed with melancholy, shaking his pale, yellowish head, the color of an old file, rather saddened by the cobweb-like hue of his thinning hair; “but we… we, we have to bear the cross. I had hoped that a case like this would never arise in this Court… ” “As for this…” interrupted Carmelo Nozales, the prosecutor, “it gives me the feeling that Mr. Don Celso will not be able to remain faithful to his purpose of retiring without having signed a death warrant…” The magistrate’s face darkened even further, and his brows furrowed, as if indicating great displeasure with the conversation. Mauro Pareja understood that this was very indiscreet, and he twisted it, bringing it back to the ground of the present. —The truth is that crimes of this caliber are not seen every day, if the latest version is confirmed… which seems to be the true one… —Which version?—asked Lucio Febrero, who arrived at that very moment and joined the circle, without even bothering to say good afternoon. His arrival made an impression. Heads turned toward him; eyes sought his. —Are you all right?—exclaimed Moragas.—So much interest in criminology, so much rifling of French, Italian, and Russian authors, and you disdain the experimental part? Because, for you, the study of a crime is like that of a pathological case for me… despite what my friend Mr. Cáñamo may think, he grasps the sky in his hands with every thing you do or say. —Me?…—murmured the aforementioned jurist, with a smile that was meant to seem like syrup but was actually realgar heavily laden with arsenic.—No; Mr. February has me convinced. He keeps presenting me with such arguments that I give up: there is no difference between a criminal and a good man, and the guilty must be sentenced by the court… eat a pound of egg yolks. Lucio Febrero—a young man of good stature and gallant figure, worthy nephew of that handsome old man we met in _Morriña_—smiled with ironic indulgence, looking serenely at Arturito Cáñamo, who, for his part, avoided the gaze of the young lawyer, whom he hated to death. It must be known that Cáñamo, having just settled in Marineda, with the intention of sweeping aside—he calculated in his mind—the other important law firms, and convinced that to achieve this he needed to philosophize in words and in print, Arturito Cáñamo, I say, was an implacable criminal lawyer, and had already written two pamphlets advocating capital punishment—for which the Marinedinos, who are not lacking in mischief, had given him the nickname of Seven Gallows, and, although with less success, One Gallows on Each Corner,—just as the prosecutor Nozales was called Grotius and Pufendorf, for his fondness for always quoting these two writers together, as if they were one.—When Lucio Febrero appeared in Marineda, with his aura of brilliant studies, with the prestige of his figure and his energetic diction, and with the overwhelming force of his ideas “Solvents,” Cáñamo sensed, he scented in him the rival who could forever block his path to fame and glory. In truth, Febrero always made it clear that he had no intention of setting his sights on Marineda, but was residing there temporarily to conduct certain business dealings related to his mother’s estate; but wasn’t that a clever dissimulation? Didn’t his Machiavellian goal be to insinuate himself with the public and undermine him, Cáñamo, the very ground on which he was beginning to gain a foothold? Didn’t Cáñamo have in Febrero the natural enemy that stalks every human being? And even if that weren’t the case, was there the slightest doubt that Febrero would eclipse and tarnish Cáñamo? He was the innovator, the nihilist, the anarchist of criminal law, who with his senseless but fascinating theories would ruin Cáñamo’s hopes… and
the social edifice as a whole? The eyes of _Seven Gallows_ wandered around the table, escaping February’s frank, smiling, and disdainful glance: nevertheless, he continued, exaggerating his little smile soaked in bile. —Gentlemen, as I said: Mr. February has brought conviction to my soul. You have now converted me… to blasphemy, to legal atheism, to materialism, to unbridled and radical Darwinism. Nothing: I am becoming a disciple of Mr. February; one must adapt to the times and go with the flow. Here I am, ready to be the protector and defender of every murderer… I say murderer! There aren’t any! Mr. February identifies them with the blameless man…. For him, it’s all the same to him who strangles the mother who gave him life and to him who lovingly cares for and watches over her…. February looked at Cáñamo again fixedly, now with more contempt than malice, and searching his pocket for his money bag, he responded by shrugging his shoulders to his adversary’s attack. February was lively, passionate, and his nervous, sanguine temperament impelled him to argument, as the muscles of iron impel an athlete to fight. Nevertheless, he had resolved—and he was a man who kept his words to himself—not to allow himself to be led into polemical territory by _Siete patíbulos_. Two or three loose phrases, more or less forceful or festive…., that was enough. Cáñamo was driven to a frenzy by this system. “The truth,” Palmares asserted, “is that our friend February’s theories are… quite strong, quite strong.” They destroy the administration of justice. “If they were applied to the army,” Cartoné observed, “you would have dissolved it in a week. It would sow indiscipline and insubordination in the ranks… I repeat, there was no possible army. ” “Nor public administration,” argued the Treasury delegate. “We must severely punish attacks against property, whether public or private. The concept of crime is the basis of administrative responsibility . However, it seems to me that you, by stinging our friend February, who has already given up on us and is renouncing the right to defend himself, They attribute theories he doesn’t profess, or at least they interpret those he professes in a very violent way, taking them to extremes and giving them a scope they don’t have. Am I wrong, Febrerito? “You said it, Mr. Delegate,” responded Febrero, taking the first drag on a cigarette and raising his eyebrows, a movement that drew two or three wrinkles on his smooth forehead, well covered with black hair. “Of course,” agreed Moragas, a great admirer and sympathizer of Febrero. “Whoever hears Cáñamo will think that Lucio is determined to turn society into a loose prison, and that he’s going to establish prizes for anyone who spoils his mother-in-law and eats a newborn baby’s steak… What Febrero does is study these questions from a scientific point of view, and nothing more.” —Ah!….— Arturito shouted, his bulging, upright eyes, which Primo Cova compared to two hard-boiled eggs, becoming injected with blood and bile. —Ah! Well, therein lies the error, the most fatal error with frightful consequences! The point of view from which we must place ourselves in order to study such transcendental questions must not be scientific, but moral, moral, moral…. That is to say, this arduous, extremely arduous problem belongs by right to the sphere of moral and political sciences …. No, gentlemen; It is not by the criteria of inert and blind matter, of absurd fatalism and determinism, of Epicurus and Busner, of the falling stone, nor with the anatomist’s scalpel in hand, that certain things are to be decided…. Only, in these dire days, the partisans of evolution and selection, atavism and hereditary transmission, the blind slaves of phylogeny and embryogeny, persist, undermining our dignity, dragging it through the mud, in erasing our rational character, and in equating us with the orangutan, or rather, the anthropomorphic ape, as they say!… Upon hearing this erudite tirade, Palmares, the magistrate, became even more gloomy, as if he already saw himself as a full-fledged orangutan, or someone were showing him through a glass the face of the anthropomorphs from which he was descended; Moragas, surreptitiously and from under the table, mockingly made the gesture of someone winding a clock, and Pareja, nudging Cartoné with his elbow, said loudly: “Let’s see what Febrero answers. It seems to me that this speech is hopeless . Will you be capable of pulverizing Cáñamo? ” “Cáñamo is quite sure that I will pulverize him,” responded the young lawyer, deciding to speak and throwing away his cigarette. “How do you expect me to dare to argue with a person of such vast knowledge? I don’t even know what half of the things Arturo has just mentioned are, or if they can be eaten with a spoon. So… ” “So if you take these matters as a joke, then…” Cáñamo exclaimed angrily. —Not that, by God! —replied February, whose swarthy face flushed with blood and whose eyes shone. —Not that! I take them so seriously … that I will not discuss them with you. —My lord, that assessment… especially if understood literally … —My lord, you are quite free to understand it literally as you please… and to continue enlightening us… —No way! he responded, greenish with spite, _Seven gallows_; if it is you who is to enlighten us. From you we will learn that strange and curious news, that _crime_ begins in the vegetable kingdom…. What, you did not know? Well, Mr. Palmares, Mr. Nozales, one day you’ll have to judge and sentence some handful of alfalfa or some pepper to life imprisonment… because according to Mr. de Febrero… I bet he doesn’t dare repeat the eccentricity now? There are delinquent plants, thieving plants, and murderous plants… murderous, but don’t think that just any old way, but with premeditation, treachery, cruelty … all the aggravating circumstances! “And whoever said it would be telling the truth,” Moragas warned, remembering something he had read in his _Revue de Psychiatrie_. They are _insectivorous plants _… I bet they kill… The group’s laughter didn’t allow Moragas to explain the phenomenon. Arturito had gained a lot of ground by convincing his adversary to support such an extravagant thesis. Febrero signaled Moragas to be quiet, but Moragas insisted: “According to that, you’re going to laugh at the criminality of beasts? Well, there is criminality , and punishment too. Don’t you remember that, in the Bible, the law of Moses condemns to death any ox that causes the death of a man? Didn’t we recently read in the newspapers that a bull had been prosecuted, I don’t remember what similar outrage? ” “Yes, all that is very logical,” Arturito hissed, confronting Moragas. “Let’s admit that eggplants are criminals, and crickets are criminals… as long as man isn’t! You want to suppress the notion of crime; and by suppressing the notion of crime, the notion of responsibility.” and with the notion of responsibility, that of free will; and with that of free will suppressed, that of punishment to the ground; and with punishment, that of public vindication, that is, social conscience, and another notion even loftier, if possible: the notion of… —Give me some ideas—interrupted Febrero—and as soon as I finish, do me the favor of allowing me to be told the latest version of the crime! I learned yesterday that a parricide has been committed in Erbeda; but you say there is new information, and I, preoccupied with some books that arrived by mail, have not picked up a local newspaper this morning. Chapter 9. Well, there are details that are hair-raising—answered Nozales.—Of a ferocity worthy of savages, inconceivable, repulsive. —Are you already reporting?—Primo Cova asked sarcastically. —As if I were there,—the Prosecutor replied, not without impatience.—I do not prejudge anything, nor do the gentlemen point to Palmares, nor I, nor anyone else, should form their opinion on what is said today, but on the light shed by the summary; but let us provisionally accept that what the majority of the press says is true… and recognize that the crime is one of those clearly known…. At dusk, an honest worker, an unfortunate carter, retires to his home and dines peacefully in the company of his wife and an innocent child…. He lies down in the marital bed, to rest from the fatigues of the day…. As soon as his wicked wife sees him asleep, and the child also asleep in the same bed, what a horror! She goes out and goes in search of the querindango, who is, by the way, the very brother-in-law of the future victim…. And they come; and she hands her lover the knife, and places a basin under her husband’s head, and takes down the lamp, and lights it, and they bleed him like a pig, right there, where their daughter was sleeping, the innocent girl, who didn’t even open her eyes…. And then they empty the blood collected in the basin into the river, and dress the corpse, and the brother-in-law runs him through the back of a donkey and leaves him in a pine grove, not without crushing his head with blows of an axe, so that people will believe he was killed there, in a fight or God knows what… All to freely enjoy an impure and brutal passion! The group listened with interest to such an artistic tale. When Don Carmelo finished the narration, Cartoné exclaimed, swearing like the gallants in old comedies: “By life!…. I swear to you!” And Moragas intervened vivaciously: “Sr. Nozales, it’s no use…. We’re not dramatizing an accusation here, à la Meléndez Valdés…. The honest carter was a very lazy and barbaric drunkard, who beat his wife every time… That night he was suffering from a _curditis_ that was unbearable; only that explains why he allowed himself to be killed without the slightest attempt to defend himself. And as for the fact that it was because he enjoyed an impure passion…, they say they were already enjoying it without needing to kill him, and that he was perfectly aware of the street…. So, there is something there…, some mystery, some psychological or physiological enigma, or both, and it is up to you, my gentlemen, to clarify it. “I’ve already said I won’t prejudge…” Nozales warned, biting his lip. —You do not prejudge…. but you accuse…. —Nothing…., to these gentlemen, do you know what you have to say to them, so that “Are you happy?” intervened _Seven Gallows_. “Well, we must tell them that every criminal is in a state of dementia, and that is the only reason he committed the crime. I have a little nephew who hits his sisters; and when his mother scolds him, can you guess where the boy comes out? He says he couldn’t help it: something rose up in his stomach, something …, and when it reached his hand, it turned into a slap…. These ones with the _irresistible impulse_ are like the boy…, and if we cured that one with whipping, these… ” “Would you give us a spanking?” questioned February, looking at Cáñamo with sovereign festive insolence. “I already suspected as much, Mr. Cáñamo.” I had already assumed that, for your pleasure , we would reestablish in all its splendor the rope treatment, the weights, the rack, the wedges, the six jugs of water poured through a funnel, with other refined ways of questioning that our illustrious forefathers used. And we would also put into effect the mutilation of hands and feet, the piercing of the tongue with a red-hot iron, the leaves of grass, women smeared with honey and feathered, men cut into quarters, and the red branding on their backs… All the infamatory and torturing punishment, of which you preserve with such zeal what little remains… And woe to anyone who touches those remains!… right, Mr. de Cáñamo? That is the _Holy of Holies_…. Hemp’s greenish face contracted, and his sharp cheekbones paled with anger: his voice was trembling and furious as he answered: —Yes… yes… I know that this is where it all ends…, that this is the objective of the supposed reforms, and the end to which all these infamous theories tend. They want to establish irresponsibility, in order to, in its shadow, tear down the only thing that sustains this edifice undermined from all sides, attacking society at its very foundations! They want to reach with the pickaxe the base, the mysterious center on which rest peace, order, justice, the concerted progress of the entire social organism! It is wanted!…., it is horrifying to say it!…., to touch the cornerstone, to abolish the ultimate punishment!…. Upon naming the ultimate punishment, a kind of riot broke out in the group: each one wanted to express his opinion, to object, to affirm, to deny, to reason. But above the tide of so many opinions that were going to illustrate the matter, the voice of Primo Cova stood out , shouting in a high falsetto: “Don’t touch that point with Cáñamo…. The death penalty! Well , that’s his sensitive part…. Didn’t you know? He has written about the subject in all the newspapers of the region, at court and in America, and it is estimated that the total of the articles he has published could weigh about thirty quintals…. The funeral companies have joined together to present him with a black bead wreath…. He has illustrated the subject with very profound research; He has gotten Becaria, Filangieri, and Silvela in his pocket. He has left us with only one doubt, a horrible uncertainty…. He has not been able to tell us categorically how to conjugate the first person of the present indicative of the verb _abolir_! He has not been able to decide whether it should be said _grandfather_ or _abolo_! Already desperate, he opted for the mixed solution and wrote this couplet…. You will see what a couplet! “My grandmother wants _grandmother_ to punish me with the death penalty: I am not a fool, and I do not _abolo_ the social guarantee!” Great bursts of laughter echoed Primo Cova’s impertinent wit. The conversation lost its serious character, erasing the somber tone that the story of the crime had given it, and amidst jokes and epigrams, fueled by the visible anger of the annoyed Arturito, a purely grammatical dispute ensued, in which everyone threw their two cents at each other over whether it should be said _abuelo_ or _abolo_. The opinion of Don Darío Cortés caused indignation and ardent protests. He affirmed that it is not said one way or the other, but _yo abulo_, and cited serious authorities and reasons. The fire with which they sustained such a petty dispute is incredible. The issues that had begun to stir, the degree of responsibility, were forgotten . of criminals and the appropriateness of the ultimate punishment; and that group—relatively conscious, enlightened, serious—suddenly more agitated than the sea on a stormy day, broke into bitter and combative phrases, placed bets, shouted until they brought down the Casino and the waiter had to warn them not to shout, “because it could be heard too much from outside.” Finally, several champions “risked their heads,” with a shady ending, like those Greeks of Byzantium who killed each other over the way they crossed themselves, while the invader’s horse’s hoof thundered ever closer ! February, too, refused to argue about this. Following Moragas’s example, who on another occasion would not fail to stir up trouble, just like everyone else, the lawyer and the doctor soon came out together, and without agreeing, without saying a word, as soon as they turned the corner leading to the Paseo del Embankment, they linked arms like people ready for a long conversation, to which they were invited by the serenity of the evening and the softness of the atmosphere, softened by the spring and enlivened from time to time by a salty breath from the sea. The lightest skiff of the new moon was already sailing across the sky, and the star was flashing, like a fixed and loving gaze from which tears seem about to burst. Neither of the two men—who were not united by ancient or strong friendship, but were united at that point by the affinity of their currents of thought and feeling—spoke a word until they were outside the area of dense, trimmed, and symmetrical trees that form the splendid and wide promenade of the Embankment. There were not only trees there , but also human beings, idle strollers. Once past the last row of plane trees and acacias, they found themselves on the Malecón, always solitary, with the then placid and gently rippling waters of the bay as its horizon. Moragas was the first to burst out. February was, although vehement, more concentrated, and already had the habit of restraint that true innovators eventually acquire . “Have you seen it? What a mob! Brave Areopagus!” So I never set foot there…. “I do go,” replied February. “I let them talk, I listen to them… and I learn, even though it may seem untrue. And yet they are quite reserved in front of me. I don’t know where they got the idea that I laugh at what they say. What I don’t do is take part in the arguments. Not at all; not for anything in the world. Being, as I am, a man who believes himself born for propaganda, I consider that for this oral propaganda, neither are the consciences ripe here, nor is the ground prepared. I won’t say that oral propaganda is entirely bad, as long as it falls on a select audience, capable of receiving the idea with a certain clarity, and of returning and communicating it, but without altering it too much. To throw it there, in the _Casino de la Amistad_, or in any Casino, to be soiled, disfigured, and trampled underfoot… that I will not do… That would be to profane it… and to profane it in vain. —Do not believe that it has not cost me much to learn to restrain myself, to smile and to keep silent, when I hear all kinds of atrocities and absurdities; to never lose my composure ; to avoid the attacks of malignant fools, like that Cáñamo, who are always looking to tickle me so they can say they refute me, and to impose myself by my own calm and reserve, which, sooner or later, have an effect on the crowd. So… I restrain myself and I will restrain myself, and they will not drag me into any ridiculous dance. You see what today’s conversation was like; a series of inconsistencies and extravagances, and at the end one of those grammatical questions so Byzantine and so cloying…, from which everyone will get what the black man in the sermon. No: there is no more propaganda than that of the newspaper without accepting journalistic polemics either, unless with well-educated and very important people, and of course I am referring to newspapers in Madrid, that of the book, and the partial action on the conscience of some educated, serious, duly prepared people, and that believe in God and in human progress…, as you do. —Absolutely—Moragas asserted, pausing for a moment and looking at the bay, a spectacle whose magic seemed even greater to him at that moment. —I think I never doubt the first thing; the second, I only get tingles and itchings when I see myself among so many people as there are today…. Cáñamo, above all, is a type…. It’s frightening to think that this man aspires to the magistracy…. Do you think he wouldn’t be capable of restoring torment? As if he could! —And what would be so strange about that? The times of torment are very close; they are from yesterday…., what am I saying!, from today; those procedures are still used in many places, and if we do the math, it turns out that there is still more humanity that accepts torment than humanity that rejects it. The world today has but a shell of civilization that can be lifted with a pin, with primitive barbarism appearing underneath. There’s no need to be impatient: resign yourself, have courage… and do what you can, which sometimes seems too little and other times too much… depending on my mood and the vantage point I’m in. Speaking thus, they had crossed the long section of the seawall that runs alongside the promenade and were approaching the point where the surface of the bay was astounded and obscured by many small, empty boats, their sails lowered, their oars crossed over the side, motionless. A strong, penetrating smell of iodine and seaweed rose from the water, and far away , the streetlights of the Olmeda neighborhood cast loose ripples of light across the surface. Without realizing it, our strollers headed in the direction of the wooden pier or Espolón, which tempted them, for at that hour solitude was no longer relative but absolute. They advanced along the swaying planks, always mysteriously shaken by the action of the waves, even on days of complete calm, as was this one. And they went deeper, deeper, as if, by advancing along that road that, pointing in the direction of the ocean, led only to a red light, they were advancing along the weary and deserted Via Crucis of the well-known progress. On either side they had nothing but sea; the poorly joined planks allowed them to see water beneath their feet, dark water; in the distance they could make out the enormous bulk of a German frigate, which had entered the port about an hour and a half before, and at the end of the very long jetty, the mast of the dredger, which rose toward the sky, as if affirming what Moragas had just recognized so explicitly: God and human progress . Already at the tip of the Espur, the two interlocutors stopped and, tempted by the pleasant temperature, sat on a thick beam, their faces turned toward the expanse of the sea, from which came that invigorating air and stimulating freshness that seem to dispose the soul to struggle and danger. The sheet of water, bordered on the right by a graceful amphitheater of rounded mountains, stretched endlessly to the left, and despite its complete serenity, it never ceased for a moment to utter that moan reminiscent of the dull murmur of a human crowd, or the howling of the wind as it engulfs the forests. Moragas turned to Febrero and, in a low voice, though no one there could hear them, whispered: “For me, crime is… an illness, and the criminal, a sick person. And that illness can be fought, and often cured. Punished… why?” Do you punish someone who has cancer, someone who suffers from an ulcer? —That’s where we begin to differ—responded February. —You are, as I see it, a correctionalist. I… either go further… or stay here… I don’t know. I believe there is a human type who, due to his organization, is disposed to be criminal. Don’t think that I suppose that this man is born as a strange being, as an anomaly of the species. On the contrary: it is humanity that in its origin was all criminal: the further back you go, aided by the scant scientific data that we already have, the more you will see the man of primitive times practicing as a common thing homicide, theft, rape, cannibalism… The acts that They are even more frightening today. There are still examples of what primitive communities might have been like on the globe, and they are the savages of certain races. What are the surviving masters of the Stone Age doing? To eat one another, to freely give oneself over to the most bestial instinct… And what in savages remains in collective form, in the countries we call civilized appears as an isolated case… but it appears… and that is what we call _criminal_, when really it should be called a _ghost_, a specter from another age, a resurrected one… or as it is said in scientific language, a case of _atavism_, not because in every criminal family there are criminal ancestors, but because the entire ancestry of man is criminal… What I am indicating to you, and that Cáñamo would call _infamous theories_ , is nothing but an application, to the study of anthropology, of two profound Christian dogmas: that of the _fall_ or _original sin_, and that of _redemption_…. That is why we can all cooperate in the redemptive work—although in a minimal part—, both adults and children…. —So I have believed always—Moragas interrupted with enthusiastic joy. —In my sphere, I have practiced it a lot… at least to compensate for the occasions in which we all have something of primitive humanity… which are, for my part, the sexual ones… In cold blood, I humbly admit it!…. Febrero smiled at the sincerity with which the Doctor expressed himself, well noted, in his time, for his fondness for skirts. —You see, V.—continued Febrero—that thinking this way, there is no slander more laughable than accusing me of being a defender and friend of criminals…. Upon hearing and reading certain criticisms made of those of us who want to propose the rational study and understanding of crime, it seems that our purpose is to sanctify the shackles and elevate murderers to the category of martyrs. I am a hundred leagues from that sentimentality…. But put that into the heads of Cáñamo and his company! —Something like that happens to me—interrupted Moragas. —If I don’t exactly consider criminals martyrs, I confess that I have a special indulgence, a special pity, for them… —Ah!—exclaimed the young lawyer. —I know: you didn’t have to tell me. You, those who believe in repentance, in correction, and in amendment, proceed motivated by sentiment; steeped in certain profoundly Christian ideas, you are _redemptorists_: for you, the phenomenon of recidivism, which gives us so much to think about, is of no value . Well, look, you: popular wisdom contradicts you: “The wolf will leave its teeth, but not its lies. He who has evil ways, sooner or never, will lose them. Genius and figure, until the grave…” Sentiment! It doesn’t matter that you are a man of science, nor that in the matters of your profession you are fully accustomed to applying the experimental and positive method…. In this study of crime, you also proceed from sentiment, just like Cáñamo…. Don’t be alarmed! Cáñamo’s fool obeys sentiment; but the evil, unspeakable, unworthy sentiment of resentment, fear, and revenge. The criminal, for him, is a personal enemy; the executioner, an ally and defender; the gallows, the cornerstone. Who doubts it? Cáñamo is inspired by the primitive law of humanity, which was that of retaliation: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And just as examples of primitive humanity still live among us, that spirit of personal revenge still subsists in the codes. The origin of the idea of justice is selfish; it begins with the feeling of self-defense; As for the pure, disinterested, moral concept of justice… that is still in a state of what the Germans call _werden_. Humanity is a collective person who, over the centuries, improves and corrects itself… and perhaps will end up becoming the great person!…. You see how I also turn out to be a _correctionalist_…. but not of the _individual_, but of the _species_! —So V…. you do not condemn the death penalty at all, which seems to me a disgrace to society?—the Doctor asked, alarmed. “I don’t condemn it at all; certainly not,” the lawyer confirmed with a certain solemnity. “What I openly and loudly proscribe is the death penalty as a form of reprisal and the concept of public vindication. That seems so odious and so repugnant to me that… I’m going to confess my weakness to you: despite the interest that this kind of study should inspire in me, and the obligation that I have, in a certain way, imposed on myself to practice it, in the days before an execution, when the newspapers begin to announce it, I get overcome with a restlessness, a kind of lion’s quartan, and I become so disturbed that I have to go to the country. It’s ridiculous, and I would like to be cured of it, because really… it suits me, it suits us innovators, in this field, and in all others, to have a lot of composure.” the impassivity with which you doctors amputate a limb or examine a tissue… Yes, believe it; the enemy we chiefly need to combat is sentiment, the metaphysical entities that obstruct the path of reason… We need to be an iceberg… an iceberg that thinks! “I believe, friend Lucio,” Moragas objected, “that you are not right about that. For everything, impetus, warmth, and enthusiasm are needed. Reason illuminates, but it only moves the will. The current young generation is cold, too measured, too aware of the inconveniences of propaganda, the ridicule, the slander, the contradictions of every kind suffered by those who try to overcome the cataracts of thought in some field. We who are almost old—for I am much closer to fifty than to forty—are the only ones who preserve the sacred fire. Here I am, and what I need is to make an effort to contain a certain quixotism, what you call redemptiveness, which springs up in me at every moment, and if I didn’t keep it in check, what would I know! Well, that, that, and not the perennial ice of reflection, is what is needed to cooperate in the work… to contribute one’s grain of sand…! You lack passion… —Perhaps… Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me…— February agreed.—Our aspiration is purely scientific. We want to suppress those moral conceptions that hinder us. We want to substitute the abstract study of the entity _crime_ with the concrete study of the subject _criminal_. We say, like you, that we do not know _diseases_, but _sick people_…. Away with ontologism…. What the common people call _guilty man_, we only call _dangerous man_…. We erase the idea of _punishment_, and replace it with that of _curative method_…. When we eliminate, our action will be analogous to yours when you apply a loose bloodletting to the hydrophobic…. And if we see a way to avoid this bloodletting, believe me that we will avoid it. —I hope so!—Moragas responded warmly.—Seek, investigate the way—there must be one—to erase from the brow of our time that grotesque horror called the scaffold, and to suppress that social enigma called the executioner! As Moragas said this, he thought he could hear, in the splashing of the water against the upright pillars and pilings that supported the jetty, Juan Rojo’s hoarse voice and Telmo’s muffled groans. “You know very well that the scaffold does not hold the odor of sanctity for us,” the young lawyer responded. “We have a thousand reasons to despise, literally despise, this apparatus of justice, as it is exercised today. Observe the movement of consciences: study it and note that one of the few semi-eval sentiments that persists and even increases, is the hatred of the executioner. The executioner is more of a pariah today than in the Middle Ages. There exists, indeterminate, but energetic, the conviction that he is nothing more than a murderer in the pay of society. And let’s go on… reasoning… what does it matter to take a life by saying “we decide that we should condemn and we condemn…” than by turning a lever? Well, the fact is that for the magistrate, respect, and for the executioner, disapproval. Note that in some very advanced nations, for example the United States, the only aspiration is to remove the executioner, preserving the ultimate punishment. Either he lynches himself—which reveals an anarchic, but frank and youthful state, in which everyone judges and executes—or he kills himself by electricity, in which the executioner does not exist. In any case, I am not much more horrified by a genuine executioner than by those supporters of the garrote, like Cáñamo… —According to that, wouldn’t you be afraid to enter into contact with the public official—asked Moragas hopefully—study him, get to know him?… —I won’t be afraid in a wider circle. Not here, because… my kingdom is not Marineda’s. For the rest, I believe that the study of the executioner, which is about to be done, would complete that of criminals. Every executioner is necessarily a _case_, a regressive anomaly, a psychological monstrosity. —Your situation is much stranger than that of the criminal. —But here… what the hell! It’s better not to see such a vermin.—Who we will see, and we will gather around to see her, if you wish, is the Erbeda parricide and her companion; not now, while the commotion and clamor of the first moments last, but later, when the case has been decided; in short, during one of those periods when the public forgets the criminal in jail. You say that woman looks sweet? —She does;—affirmed Moragas—so much so that you will be astonished if you see her. I cannot forget her appearance. I need to make an effort within myself, not to set myself up as her protector. Friend February: fortunate you for whom sensible objects take the form of an equation or an algorithm. Here I am , half a century old, with enough disappointments… and still capable, having seen a young, modest woman pass by, tied up and among civilians… of making a complete fool of myself. —Well, be careful! —warned Lucio. —Look, that’s what the Cáñamos want! Chapter 10. Having bidden farewell to February, Moragas went up to his house for five minutes, then came back down transformed: without a frock coat, without gloves, wrapped in his cloak, his hat slightly tilted. It seemed as if he were attending some clandestine meeting, or some conventicle of conspirators. —Anything but deafen the neighborhoods with the noise of his sedan chair. —He walked with that cautious and furtive gait called wolf’s step, and soon he crossed the Páramo de Solares and entered, up the Belona countryside, along Peñascal Street, which was to lead him to Faro Street. Once there, certain that no one was following or watching him, he looked around and inspected the place, which was quite significant and melancholy. The places a man inhabits and the mansions he chooses always tell the observer something about his spirit and soul. It was not for nothing that Rojo chose that shack as his residence, precisely the last house in the town, beyond which… only the cold white walls of the cemetery rose. That man had to be a neighbor of death, and live thus, in the gloomy shack with its red doors and windows, resembling a dirty cloth on which great patches of blood were spread. Not in vain were the five shacks that connected Rojo’s to the other houses in the town always uninhabited; undoubtedly no one had wanted to occupy those sinister shacks, contaminated by the immediate vicinity of the ignominious man. It was not in vain that the countryside of the outskirts, which until then had displayed sympathetic notes of a peasant nature—a haystack or hayloft of corn straw, an unyoked wagon, a small tree whose buds were just beginning to unfurl, a potato field about to flower—was clothed, around the infamous shack, in such a sullen aridity, breaking up into black, bald scrub or developing into barren, sandy soil. And finally, it was not in vain that the sea served as a backdrop to the shack and the cemetery ; but not that soft, lulling, murmuring bay sea, which at the tip of the spur had echoed with harmonious accent a dialogue of thinkers, but the wide, free, and thunderous Cantabrian Sea, which with a thump, now hoarse, now sonorous, now plaintive and gloomy, now angry and furious, lashes the breakwater, twists and bites the beach, scales the cliffs that guard the small promontory of the Lighthouse , and crown them with a snowy deluge of wild foam, now beaten, now dissolved. “The location says it all,” Moragas thought. “This man, the disgrace of society, could only live here, in a kind of wild beast’s den. But in good law and justice, if this is how this man lives, Cáñamo and those who think like him should be grouped together in a special neighborhood: the neighborhood where the Court, the Jail, the Penitentiary, the Hanging Field, and Rojo’s own house would be located. They, those who created this indefinable being, would do nothing less than lift the interdict and enforce what they understand by justice… Yes, well, go with that… They would be capable, by not getting close to him, of letting the boy rot, a victim of his father’s social status. Calculating this, and forgetting that the day before he had not wanted to help the boy either, which proves that Moragas had come a long way in twenty-four hours, he decided to carry out what he called in his heart a “descent into hell.” Turning around and squinting, he observed if anyone could see him enter the ranch. Assured that there were no onlookers around, he placed his hand on the latch… and this movement revived the aversion and repugnance of the day before, something that might be called a cold terror, one of those that are not accompanied by any positive and real fear. He overcame this impression; he also overcame the one produced by seeing in the hall, against the wall, a ladder, which reminded him of the one that executioners used to wear in their hats as a symbol of the gallows. And just as he had once thrown himself into a fetid puddle to rescue a drowning child, he threw himself into the sordid dwelling. La Marinera was nowhere to be seen: only the father was watching over Telmo’s bedside. The Doctor and Rojo didn’t exchange a word for the first few moments. Rojo stood up, and Rojo placed his hand on the patient’s woven head, and then the thermometer under his armpit. When he took it out, shook it , and looked at it in the light, he saw that he had a devouring fever of 40 degrees. “Has he eaten? ” “Not a word, sir. Orange juice. ” “Have you given him the antipyrine? ” “Yes, sir. Everything you ordered. In the morning he was quite alert, although he complained a lot. He recovered in the afternoon. ” “Well, tomorrow or tonight, when it clears up, some broth. Perhaps the fever is being sustained by weakness.” —That must be it, because he’s delirious; that is to say, now he’s drowsy, and suddenly he starts chatting and says things… tremendous. —Terrific things? —asked Moragas, leaving his cloak on a chair, because he was about to properly examine the child’s injuries. —And what terrible things are these that your son says about you? —He’s always saying that he’s brave and that he can take on everyone… and that they should throw more stones at him, that’s why he won’t give up… Everything turns out to him: ‘You’ll kill me, you’ll kill me, but you won’t say that I’m defeated… I’m General Haches and General Erres… I don’t have an army, but I’m enough; I defend the castle…. Bring on the stones…’ I suspect, Señor Don Pelayo, that the children of the Institute have played an atrocious game with this child : one might say that they’ve stoned him to bits. —If that’s so, it’s indeed tremendous… although natural and understandable. Rojo didn’t reply; he grunted dully, and returned to standing at the wounded man’s bedside. Moragas, meanwhile, gently lifted the dressing to examine the state of the head injuries, and, lifting the sheet, inspected the dislocated foot. Eager to probe into other pains rather than examine and study those physical injuries, he turned to Rojo: “I suppose that you will pay close attention to what needs to be done to the child, and will follow all my instructions… Because you must love this creature very much. ” Rojo shrugged his shoulders. “There’s nothing else you can do,” he responded dully. Having fulfilled his professional duty, having thoroughly examined the patient, and having given the verbal and written instructions, Moragas could to retire, but it is certain that instead of doing so, he took a chair and sat down there as if in no hurry. The day before, in the morning, he would have denied with boredom and anger anyone who had predicted that he would have to sit down in such a mansion. Acting distracted and mechanically stroking his sideburns, he fixed his gray pupils, full of light, on Rojo and asked casually: “Did you never have any other children? ” “Yes, sir… another died when he was very young… of measles… She was a little girl.” “Lucky her!” Moragas commented in an expressive tone. “Believe me,” he continued with the same solemnity, “if you call me to assist that child, and I see that her life hangs on a dose of any medicine or a cut from a scalpel… I, who to save a child am capable of throwing myself into a burning furnace… I think I’d put my hands in my pockets and let your daughter die without scruple.” Rojo neither protested nor showed that such harsh words revolted him. His gaze, shifty and wandering, scanned the cracks of the floor, and his violet-colored lips moved as if they wanted to utter ill-formed clauses and truncated reasoning. At last he stammered: “You are… you are absolutely right. The greatest favor you could do for… the little angel, was… to let her die.” She is indeed well. Lucky her! Hearing these words, Moragas’s spirits brightened, and it seemed to him that his questioning was taking a proper turn. “According to that,” he asked, “you understand perfectly well your position, and that of your children, caused by yours. ” “Should I not understand?” “But…” the Doctor insisted, “do you understand _completely_? Do you have a clear and exact understanding of the fate reserved for that poor boy who is delirious in that bed? Can you form any idea of his present and his future, of the hatred and humiliation you have left him as a disgraceful inheritance, of what he is today and what he will be tomorrow? Do you realize that this child, if he were capable of calculating, as we old people calculate, should, instead of asking God to preserve his father, ask that he be taken away?” Red gave no answer to these resolute words, so the Doctor got down to business, boldly cutting to the chase. Only his bewilderment could reveal that the Doctor had put his finger on the most bitter part of the wound. At last, he broke into interrupted sentences. “One takes on too much responsibility for everything…. One is not a person who neither sees nor understands…. And it is better that one neither speaks nor remembers about that, because when things cannot be remedied… ” “On the contrary!” Moragas interrupted forcefully. “One must remember that…; one must talk about it, and a lot! Since you have met with Moragas, it cannot be said that the meeting was useless and in vain.” You have come to consult me about a physical illness… and although you are ill, and a very serious one, this ailment is the least of your concerns… What you are ill with is your conscience, and you have infected this innocent man, who, through your fault, finds himself outside the law and on the way to prison. Doesn’t the fact that you yourself tell me make you reflect, that all the students of the Institute have joined together to stone your son? Don’t you see this clearly in the future for this boy? You are destining him to be stoned, and he will be stoned all his life. Why don’t you… strangle him, you who are supposed to strangle him? Moragas, carried away by the impulse, pronounced these words with such vehemence that Rojo turned, more than pale, livid, feeling like wire lashes on his soul; And not without some harshness, he replied: “Anyone can win me over to anything else, but not to love my son, and if it were up to me he would be king of Spain. If he isn’t, it’s not my fault. It’s one thing to talk, and another to go through the events of a man’s life. I won’t kill the son with my own hands; now, if God takes him… he’ll be the winner, and so will I.” These last words were accompanied by a kind of groan. hoarse, and Juan Rojo, forgetting all social etiquette, collapsed on a seat, hid his head in his hands, and showed signs of affliction, or rather, sullen pain. Moragas stood up. His desire to know Rojo’s story grew ever more intense . Once this was known, it was easy to calculate and understand whether Rojo was redeemable or not. Moragas was beginning to feel the generous fever, the desire to descend into hell to rescue a soul from it… and also a little bit of the desire to show Febrero that in every mud, in the most filthy and vile swamp, there is a pearl that, through kindness and self- denial, can be found if one searches hard enough. He approached Rojo and touched him on the shoulder, shuddering… Rojo did not move. “It’s no use rushing or losing heart. I have already told you that our meeting must have been for the best.” I have to do something for that child that’s worth more than applying some bandages and reducing a dislocation… Rojo stood up. His expressionless, angular, dark face was illuminated as much as it could be… with a dull light, outlining a kind of smile, an operation to which his lips were not accustomed; and as if, to save himself from drowning, he wanted to grab a column, he stretched out his arms toward Moragas’s body, who, Redemptorist and all, quickly stepped back. “What Rojo didn’t do was speak. Why? His attitude was enough. “Let’s see,” Moragas ordered, understanding that he now had that man at his disposal and will. “Sit down again… like this… far from the bed, so we don’t disturb the sick man… What’s his name? What’s the name of your son ?” “Telmo, sir.” —Well, so as not to bother Telmo, stand there…. near the window…. like this…. I’ve also brought my chair…. Good… Now you ‘re going to tell me your whole story, point by point…., and how you came to take…. such a filthy and vile job. —Don Pelayo,—answered Rojo, always in a hoarse voice, and waving his hands clumsily.—You will have to excuse me…. I… in ignorant and worried people…, well…. I’m not surprised when they say certain things. But in the case of an educated person…. it never ceases to shock me. Don’t take anything I say the wrong way…., because the poor explanation of people…. I mean, come on, that thing about a filthy and vile job …., I already know that the women in the square say it; even yesterday that drunken woman Jarreta blurted it out to me ; Look, V., what a princess, to despise anyone…. Now, V., who has a different education and other knowledge…, I truly believed that you would not give credence to these… apprehensions. I am tired… yes! very tired! of hearing at every step “infamy, infamy, vileness, vileness…” Infamy, why? Vileness, why? What am I doing that everyone sings to me the refrain of vileness and infamy? – continued Rojo, his tongue now free and his speech heated by indignation almost to the point of eloquence. – Do I steal anyone’s bread? Am I a criminal? Am I a forger? Do I not, even in this way, violate the law? No one but I respects it… and obeys it! Let me see, Señor de Moragas, if with your considerable talent you can clarify this enigma for me! Moragas listened, holding back his words. If he had felt any compassion upon seeing Rojo humiliated , when Rojo grew and rebelled against society, following his impulse, he would have spat on him and slapped him. Moragas ‘s silence encouraged Rojo, who continued: “Yes, sir: I am as good a man, or more so, as any of those who turn their backs on me and treat me like a dog! No one will be able to prove to me that I have committed the slightest crime. Crimes! Crimes! Because of me, they cease to exist: if it weren’t for me…, justice would go down the drain. I am not just any official… I am the first, the most indispensable.” Sometimes I walk down Calle Mayor, and the gentlemen of the Court, the Prosecutor, the President himself, are standing there, very stiff and very fat… You greet them, and they don’t even reply: they turn their faces away, and pretend they don’t see you… How it makes me laugh!… How I laugh… inside! Rojo laughed convulsively. Let them sentence… and that I don’t comply… and you’ll see what all this business of justice means! Imagine that I stand up… and that another like me stands up… that we public officials go on strike… and you’ll see the magistrates with the obligation to comply with what they have sentenced! To the magistrates!…. And what, am I not as much a magistrate as they are? I am the ultimate magistrate… the one who decides without any possible appeal!…. Justice, without me… what a brave nonsense! Justice… I am! he shouted, beating his chest with his fist. Moragas did not think it appropriate to undertake the refutation of these desperate sophistries, at least for then. Rojo’s words and arguments increased his desire to know his story, and to go back to the murky origins of that human existence. It seemed best to let the cursed man’s outburst of bitter arrogance pass, answering only ironically: “All that may be very true, and you will be right and you will be the supreme magistrate, and yet, you just told me not three minutes ago that you were glad to have lost a little girl at a tender age, and that, if Telmo were to die, he would benefit and so would you. ” “That’s another thing,” Rojo affirmed. “If you go that way… Worries and nonsense are what surround me, and I’m happy to put up with them anywhere, as long as they don’t stumble on the child… As for me… I’m very happy, and I won’t trade places with anyone,” he affirmed with a boast that his trembling lips belied. “But… children… hurt, they hurt a lot!” More than four brooding thoughts and four sleepless nights … are for them, for them… One can do anything… And if the infamy and vile deeds upset him, it’s because they stain the boy’s forehead… who is as innocent as the angels in heaven! Moragas moved his chair closer to Rojo’s; he smiled, bit the tip of his silky mustache, cleaned his gold-plated glasses with his white handkerchief, put them on, straightened the smooth, clean cuffs of his shirt, and, blinking his eyelids slightly, like someone who wants to concentrate his vision, asked Rojo: “Tell me…. Did you study in your youth? Have you followed a career?” And Rojo, as if saying the most natural thing in the world, answered: “Yes, sir…. I studied to be a priest.” Chapter 11. Moragas’s face, which due to its excessive mobility and flexibility sometimes seemed like rubber, expanded with surprise, and immediately afterwards , due to a strange infusion of humor into that funereal and bitter conversation, the Doctor let out the loudest and most frank laugh the walls of Rojo’s hut had ever heard . “So, a priest? Well… First-class! If you don’t tell me, I would have been able to guess. A priest! Well now, if you don’t mind… please tell me how you made the great leap, from the hyssop to…” An expressive gesture completed the sentence. Rojo, meekly, with that emphatic tone that the lowest social class adopts when recounting the events of their own lives, responded: “I studied Latin for up to two years at the Seminary of Badajoz. And I was quite into it… ” “Are you from Extremadura? ” “No, sir. I was born in Galicia.” My father was from here, and my mother was Portuguese. But my father’s career, which was in the military and of high rank, took us all over Spain. Some of my brothers were born in Badajoz… because I had eleven; and those of us were left orphans, and each one went his own way, living as best he could. —So you felt a calling to the ecclesiastical state? —Yes, sir… or at least I thought I did then. At that age, one hardly knows what’s best for oneself… psch! If only one knew when one was older! The seminary was happy with me. But the Bishop—who had half-offered me a chaplaincy—later refused to give it to me… and I saw no hope of making it in the profession. —What did you do? —I dedicated myself to following a career as a normal teacher…. As soon as I had finished it, a friend of mine took me on as an intern at a school he ran. The school was holding on… just like that… fluttering, stumbling. The bad thing is, it soon went bankrupt… And find me back on the street. ” “Bad fate! ” “Then I became a soldier. ” “So what? Did you take the poplar? ” “What a remedy! If I hadn’t painted the quarters on the wall to redeem myself… And I can say with all my might that my superiors were satisfied with my bearing. I didn’t receive a reprimand, because I obeyed like a machine. The superiors are the superiors, and they command and we keep quiet. “Well, I…., come on!…., since I knew a little more than my companions…., and I obeyed like a recruit… , I was promoted…., first to corporal…., then to sergeant…. And as soon as I served my time, I managed to go to Lugo, to run a school. ” “I see that you had a vocation for teaching,” Moragas observed. ” I didn’t dislike the profession….,” Rojo asserted; “only that I was stricken with need…. I suffered a lot of misery then…. and later! The worst was that I fell in love with a Galician woman…” The phrase, quite simple and with comic overtones, was pronounced in such a singular tone that Moragas did not smile. It seemed to him as if, in the moral auscultation he was practicing, a special sound had suddenly presented itself , betraying the true seat of the ailment. “Here lies the evil,” his medical instinct told him, applied then to the pathology of the spirit. “Here is the key. Until now you didn’t know what you were dealing with: the illness appeared to you hidden, deaf, latent, defiant of all investigation. You’ve got the thread now…. Pull the end, and you’ll unravel the ball of this soul!…” “You say you fell in love with a Galician woman?” he asked aloud. “But… that… what? You would have fallen in love with so many women! After all, you were young…” “No, sir. I didn’t fall in love with many women… I was always of good conduct, so no one could fault my habits. It was as if I had been fifty years old all my life… You see: I left the Seminary, and… the same as if I hadn’t left. I was never tempted by vulgarity or the vices I saw in others.” —But, anyway, Moragas interrupted, this time you really fell in love. —So really, that I got married, sir. —Ah! —Moragas exclaimed expressively. —And as you know… the situation of a married man is very different from that of a bachelor. Until then, I had had no anxiety about tomorrow: we were just getting through the day, and what is for me alone, bare… a cup of broth had to be more than enough. But my wife and children arrived… and I saw the world differently. With my schooling, I didn’t even have enough to put the pot on the fire. No one paid; at every step, clashes with the City Council, about whether I would get paid or not, and whether I was owed monthly payments or not… That wasn’t living, Señor de Moragas, and believe me, a thousand times I lacked the courage for everything… for absolutely everything. I remembered then that I knew Don Nicolás María Rivero quite well, that he had the upper hand … I went to Madrid, and I saw him, and also another very big fish from this land, who I remember told me… just as I told you: “Go back to Lugo… Before you get there, your host will have left.” And the host was King Amadeo! It was true. I wouldn’t have made it to Los Nogales… and the Republic would have been proclaimed. That gentleman didn’t forget me: he sent me to Orense, with a destination… “Destination? What destination? ” “In the police,” Rojo responded in a lower and more muffled voice than usual. “In public order? Green sleeves?” —No sir…. That was another police force, which existed then, and now I think that perhaps it no longer exists… As the Civil Guard concentrated in the towns because of the brawls, the countryside was handed over to the factional groups… In Orense and Lugo, especially, the villages were in such bad shape that an uprising was suspected from one day to the next. I was placed under the orders of the governor of Orense, who, by the way, was very exalted in his ideas. I went out to search the houses of the Carlist priests, and before I left, that gentleman, locking himself in the office with me, said to me: “Go, V. Rojo, search, raid, seize, break in, commit atrocities… Stand firm on those sharp-edged daggers, for those are the demons, those are the beasts that are bringing us trouble…” But I… “Did you object?” asked Moragas, searching for a ray of hope and light. “Did you refuse? ” “It’s obvious that I refused, as long as I didn’t have a piece of paper, a written order, very clear and definitive! What is ordered verbally is signed in the air. There goes the mandate… and the man who complies with it, when he is most satisfied, finds himself suffocated and compromised. The law has to be written, and when it is not written, it is no longer law.” So I… come on, without boasting! I didn’t back down, not even at the shouts the Governor was shouting at me. I stood to attention, I stiffened. “Come here and write some little letters in your own hand, Mr. Governor, and then we’ll talk and do what you say. I don’t go breaking and entering without a piece of paper. Paper in hand, let the world be before me.” And the Governor had no choice but to hand over the little piece of paper. With it, I did some… tremendous things. “Do you yourself declare it?” Moragas interrupted sternly. “No, sir…! When I say tremendous… it’s a figure of speech, because I did neither more nor less than what I was ordered: I didn’t overstep my bounds in anything. As you can understand, my obligation was to carry out the instructions, to obey strictly, and not to get into any deeper trouble.” “That’s what I disapprove of,” Moragas uttered, frowning severely, a gesture that traced thoughtful wrinkles on his rubbery forehead . “Do you believe that if someone writes me on a piece of paper now, ‘You will commit such an atrocity,’ and I go and do it, I’m free of guilt?” Rojo hesitated, finding no arguments against Moragas. “Well, sir,” he articulated slowly, “I believe, with your pardon, that by respecting authority and obeying the established laws, no one commits a crime, no one is guilty. And the proof is that I wasn’t held responsible for such acts. I was under orders, and obeying would save me. There were plenty of people who told me back then: “You’ll see, you’ll see. Now this mess is being taken by the trap, and you’ll pay for the broken windows .” And I, with my note in my pocket and the Governor’s signature clearer than the stars, laughed at them all. They really wanted to throw me in prison… but damn it! “And what did you do,” asked Moragas, increasingly interested, “when the trap was pulled off and your job of raiding priests’ houses came to an end? Did you dedicate yourself to what you do now? ” “Then,” the man answered gloomily, reflecting to remember the new rung of the social ladder he had climbed to, “then… I became a commissioner of distress. ” “Magnificent!” said Moragas, laughing sarcastically. “Very well thought out and very much in character! The Revolution pursued ideas with fire and sword ; the Restoration was more practical, and organized the pursuit of pockets…. It recruited a pack of bloodhounds… and off to hunt! ” “But, sir,” objected Rojo, “taxes have to be collected, and as for your fine taste, nobody would pay them.” “When they are excessive and brutal,” Moragas responded angrily, “when they are so heavy that they crush the taxpayer… Suppose you have a well-governed state, where there is abundance and economy, and you believe that such a state has no need for commissioners of enforcement. Anyway, the fact is that you…” “Sir… I had the girl at the time, and this boy was born later… And it was necessary to support them… ” “That is a better reason,” Don Pelayo answered. “But I would not be a commissioner of enforcement if it were a bad deed,” Juan Rojo declared with a curious display of dignity that almost disconcerted Moragas. “I have not been guilty of wrongdoing in that or any other of my actions , because I know very well what is a crime and what is not, and I could presently submit all my actions to a judge, certain that I would have no reason to be ashamed. I am completely honest; if I find millions in the street, I return them to their owner; I respect as much as anyone else what should be respected; but it was a matter of feeding my family… and I served the State, just as, for example, the Delegate of the Treasury served it… The argument must have impressed Don Pelayo, who either did not know or did not want to reply at that time. Rojo was also silent, and an embarrassing silence reigned in the poor little chamber. Suddenly a question occurred to the Doctor , which produced a very deep shock in his interlocutor. “And… with your wife… did you get along well? ” Rojo suddenly and visibly tremble, and answered, still trembling, in a barely audible voice: “Very well… We didn’t have a word higher than another. ” “I’ve hit the nail on the head,” Moragas thought. “Here’s the breach; here we find the tissues not gangrenous from the putrefaction of _legalism_. Good. That’s where the scalpel is; “There goes the cautery flask.” And in a loud voice: “Is your wife alive? ” “Yes, sir,” the almost extinct voice answered laconically. “And…” Moragas didn’t dare say more, because Rojo’s trembling was overwhelming him , while his medical instinct kept telling him: “That’s the living flesh. Search without fear.” He completed the interrogative formula with a circular look, which expressed something similar to the following: “And if your wife is alive, how is it that she isn’t at the child’s bedside, or tidying up this den a bit?” Rojo remained silent. A shaky sigh came from his chest. Then he patted the knee of his trousers two or three times and murmured: “My downfall was coming from Orense to Marineda. If I don’t come here… They tricked me here. Because I was tricked, Señor de Moragas.” Listening to advice… And they probably did it with good intentions! Since they saw I was in dire need… They persuaded me, they said to me: “Don’t be silly. This is a bargain, a fluke.” I answered them as confidently as you are sitting there on that bench: “But I’m not going to know!… But I’m going to do the ironing!”… And they answered me, just as I told you: “There’ll never be any work here. The twenty years go by without even a cat being executed… And you pocket thirty-seven duros every month, just to sit idly by, walking the streets… Thirty-seven duros!” You see, it ‘s enough to tempt anyone… “And… who told you that? ” “Friends…” Moragas smiled. “And your wife, what did she think?” Rojo, addressing his wife, contracted his expression again. Finally , he spoke quickly, as if apologizing: “She said no way; that she hadn’t married for that.” But at the same time, the truth was: money must have been good to her; because, as you can see, she was a well-bred woman, fond of comfort, and a great lover of a full house and fine linens. These words came out broken like sobs. It was as if Rojo were addressing his own wife and arguing with her. Moragas was beginning to understand the whole story of that man. He was seeing the woman, delicate, industrious, refined as much as possible within her class, and not refined only in material things, since she recoiled from infamy, even though that infamy brought ease, clean clothes, and rest. —Anyway,—Rojo continued as if eager to change the direction of his explanations,—my downfall was, sir, for God had it determined there. Will you not believe that there were at least six or seven applicants for the position, who had already submitted their applications, and with great care, with great efforts of all kinds, while I didn’t put in even a single wedge? In truth, I myself didn’t know what I wanted… Because they were prodding me and poking me to apply… I wrote my application, saying I had been a sergeant and adding my certifications, and I presented it just like that … Look at the fate of people! Eight days later, the decree was in my favor, and the recommendations were due, I was off to the moon of Valencia. —And…,—asked Moragas, like someone casting a sounding board into a place of great depth,—and…. V…. in the war…. or…. in other circumstances…. had you already had…. occasion to…. to wound…. or kill someone? —To wound? To kill?—answered Rojo with an indefinable expression of surprise and protest.—To kill? To wound? In the fifty-five years that I have been alive, _I do not remember having hurt anyone with my hands_. I never saw formal action. If the commanders ordered me to fire at the enemy, I would fire, what else! But the case did not arise. I was in charge of training conscripts for a whole year, and no one can complain that I had dealt them even a blow. —Well then…. how did you think you would manage with…. the job you were going to take? —Shouldn’t I tell you,—replied Rojo painfully,—that it was something that _came about like that_? I calculated: let’s live and earn, that there will be an opportunity to think about what is best when the difficult times come. It could happen that they never come; one could die without them arriving… and it was no use wasting away before one’s time… For now, I collected my small salary; we lived; in the meantime, perhaps another job would arise; and… calm and wait. Only the big one came, as always happens in this world, when least expected… and I found myself tied hand and foot… with the obligation before me… “It seems inconceivable,” exclaimed Moragas, “that you could resolve to… ” “And what did you want me to do? I was not going to resist the law. Don’t you know, Don Pelayo, that that was impossible? Oh, how well spoken! He who commands commands, and those of us below obey. ” “You could have said no… and we would see who…” —They would force me… —How? —They would call me to the office of the chief of the secret patrol… and… there… Rojo made the gesture of joining his two thumbs on the outside, the gesture of someone suffering cruel pain. Moragas showed expressive astonishment. —Torment! —he exclaimed, horrified, remembering Lucio Febrero’s statements and understanding the truth they contained. Rojo only answered with a nod, pressing his jaw to his chest. Moragas clenched his fists and let out a suit of clothes in a low voice. After a few seconds, the philanthropist controlled himself, and casting a half-pitying, half-ironic glance upon Rojo, asked: —So… in the end… you had to… _work_? And how did you manage? Because you _didn’t know_… —_I didn’t know_… you can see that you didn’t! And I feared… well… a failure, lest the public get into an uproar and hiss or stone us… But I got out of the predicament because the son of the public official who was in Marineda before me came to see me and said: “Don’t worry, Rojo, I’ll help you. You’ll come out of the situation all right. Word of honor! I ‘ve never worked; but I don’t need to: I already know how it’s done, and it even seems to have taken a liking to it. If I had, like you, the merits of military service, the place would be mine and not yours. Now you have it, and you will enjoy it for many years. But don’t worry, we shall remain _with honor_. I will go up with you on the stage as your assistant, in case there is the slightest difficulty; I will prepare the gossip for him, which must be as good as silk, and I will explain the skill to him there… This is the trade of the water carrier, which is learned on the first trip.” And so it was. He did it so well that I gave him three duros. Short of turning the stork around…, you could say the boy dispatched him. Moragas restrained himself. Following his sudden impulse, he would commit some very serious atrocity. But beneath the movement of indignation there was a persistent feeling of indefinable commiseration. Rojo’s abject and numb soul was his prey. The lay apostle did not want to renounce the romantic work of mercy. “And… how many times did you return to… work?” he asked restraining himself. “Five. ” Chapter 12. A mournful pause followed Rojo’s reply. Moragas froze . That number confused him as sophistic reasoning can confuse. The man in front of him had executed _five times_ the movement of the arm that sends another man to eternity. So Don Pelayo overcame his stupor and asked incisively: “And tell me… And the first time… at least… didn’t your conscience feel a tingling sensation? Or did you remain perfectly calm? ” “The first time,” responded Rojo’s sinister voice, “the eight days after, or perhaps fifteen… I dreamed at night… about him…. ” “Ah! At night! Did you see him?” “I saw him.” Another pause, and a more atrocious silence. “And… afterwards?” Moragas insisted. “Afterwards… That’s why sometimes a man… Only those who go through certain things… If it weren’t for the fact that I could hardly sleep, I wouldn’t drink even half a glass of cane in my life. ” “Did you start drinking cane then?” Rojo remained silent. That confession came out in tatters, bloody, bruised, like the intermittent complaint triggered by a paroxysm of pain; and Moragas, accustomed to seeing and healing so many wounds, understood that the gravest, deepest, most bitter thing of all had yet to rise to the surface. Moragas couldn’t guess what kind of corpse lay slumbering at the bottom, but he sensed it, far below, in the very depths of a pit of ignominy, shame, and human despair. His infallible instinct kept shouting at him: “Over here, over here… are the last vestiges of the heart, of that heart that beats equally in philosophers and judges, in criminals and executioners; the august portion that exists in this wretch just as in you… ” —And… he asked expressively and slowly, fixing his eyes on his interlocutor and weighing with his gaze, so to speak, on his spirit.—And… what did your wife of V… say about those bad dreams with garroted prisoners? Didn’t she dream too? —Those are things that don’t matter at all,—Red declared grimly.—It’s better not to talk about them. We’re wasting conversations here that are irrelevant … and now… it would be good to attend to the boy. “You’ll fall,” Moragas thought. “You’re not getting away from me. I know where it hurts. The universal fiber! That’s the one that always responds. Love, paternity… You’d have to be made of bronze not to wheeze that way… And it seems to me that you’re wheezing, and hard… Well, if you wheeze… we’ll attack you that way.” From the limited concept of _husband and father_, I can make you pass to the general of _man_. It will cost me some work to bring _humanity_ to the surface; but for the same reason… I will work for you. Ah, if Father Incienso and Father Fervorín felt these redemptive impulses that I feel! What infuriates me is the contradiction that such Fathers would be capable of calmly absolving the executioner, half an hour after having garroted his neighbor… and yet they would deny him absolution if he were to maintain that the Mass can or should be said in Spanish! This somewhat naive and pithy aside, the philanthropist looked at Rojo again, fixedly and deeply. Two images intertwined in his imagination: that of the alleged parricide of Erbeda and that of the cursed being he wanted to redeem. He saw the woman strangled by the man, with the permission of the law… “It won’t happen,” he calculated to himself. “This individual will never take anyone’s life again. Moraguitas, you’re either a fool, or this time you’ve finished off Marineda’s executioner.” The thought filled him with singular animation and even joy. That was a beautiful feat, true redemption. To save an existence and dignify a soul! “Listen, V…” he pronounced with irresistible force. “You are a man everyone despises. Are you convinced of that? ” “But it’s a tremendous injustice. ” “It isn’t. However, I want to grant you that you were one. Listen to me carefully. Is your son paying for this injustice, or is it not? Why do we have him there in that bed, his body smashed to bits by stones? ” “Because there are some very barbaric people in the world!” “I see,” Moragas exclaimed forcefully, “that you refuse to be reasoned with. I see that you wish your son to continue in the same social position. Well, good night! Go find a doctor.” Rojo let out a formless groan of supplication and protest, holding out his hands as if to stop Moragas. “Precisely,” added the Doctor, who despite having said goodbye had not moved from his chair, “I was prepared to take an interest in the boy, and to be of some use to him in resolving the problem of his education and his future. ” Rojo didn’t reply verbally, but he repeated the gesture of prostrating himself before the Doctor. The latter deviated, standing up and showing signs of leaving. “Let’s be clear,” he said, stopping in the middle of the huddle. “Let’s see if you understand me. I can be useful to your son and be of great use to you! What kind of education do you give him? Let’s bet none. ” “And what’s my fault, sir? They throw him out from everywhere! They don’t want him in the private schools. In the City Hall schools, the ghost of the Mayor tells me he has no place because he’s the son of a well-off father .” If he goes to the Institute, they’ll end up stoning him to death. I try to get him to learn a trade, and the owner of the gilding factory takes him on one day, and the next he’ll throw him out on the street because his apprentices are going on strike…. Is that unfair, or not? My son is as good as they are! Maybe they’ll have thieving parents! “Let them have them!” Moragas objected. “The worst thing is being your son! And if you don’t confess it right now… you’ll never see me again in your life. ” Rojo let out a stifled scream, a scream that was almost inaudible, a scream that was crying. “Well then… I confess it, yes, sir… Confessed… The devil does it… Being my son is the worst thing in the world! ” “And your son has no choice but to succeed you in the position… ” “Not that!” “First I’ll drown him… with my hands… without any instruments!” As Rojo uttered these words, he started running heedlessly against the wooden wall of the miserable shack, hiding his face in the corner. Moragas approached him and, almost in his ear, murmured, addressing him informally with a sudden inspiration of his apostolic rhetoric: “I can save your son and make him a man like the others…; I can give him an honorable trade and even an education and a higher career, if that’s what it takes!” Rojo turned and, looking the doctor in the face, exclaimed: “Then you win heaven; because you do a work of charity like that!” ” No…., I don’t win any heaven…., because I won’t do it for nothing.” The father remained silent, unable to guess in what coin they were going to demand payment for the good deed. “Are you willing to pay?” Moragas insisted. Rojo looked at the bed where Telmo lay, and without hesitation, responded with superhuman firmness: “Yes, sir. I will pay.” The Doctor remained silent, as if he wanted to let Rojo’s promise sink in . After a few moments, he repeated: “Will you pay? ” “It’s said… and that’s enough! Please ensure that my son stops being hated by everyone and that he doesn’t have to take my job, and I… ” “We’ll see,” Moragas warned. “I don’t trust him yet. I fear,” he added, mixing forms of address, “that if I tell you, ‘Do this or do that ,’ you’ll tell me that the law… and that the obligation!” “No, sir. Juan Rojo will do what you tell him. Have you heard? Whatever you tell him. I am a good man; I have not harmed anyone except by order of the High Court.” But since you have so many enemies… what if it takes is a scare!… “Great!” Moragas responded. “I’m not paying any attention to this bit of stupidity… You’ll know what I demand of you… and if you have an ounce of moral sense left, you will obey me with the full conviction that I’m right… And if you have to obey me, start now. Tell me right away why you don’t live with your wife. ” “But what does that matter to you!” Rojo moaned. “I don’t want to know anything about her… He left… “With someone else? ” “Well; what if it were with someone else?… God forgive her! I’ve forgiven her… May God look after her, because all I know is that she is the mother of my son… and… I’m bored!” “I won’t ask any more…” Moragas said, feeling an emotion so dramatic that it seemed ridiculous to him. “Always forgive, it’s the law” true, and not those you abide by! I too will make them forgive your son!… Goodbye, I’ll be back… Until tomorrow… Do you understand? Until tomorrow! Chapter 13. And Moragas could not return the next morning, because Nené woke up ill. It began with a slight catarrhal fever, and continued with one of those fevers that in a few days exhaust the nature of a small creature, like a live current of air that activates the combustion of a thin candle. Nené’s cheeks withered; a light glassy layer covered her sweet black pupils; her little hands grew weak, revealing the tender little bones beneath the flaccid skin. The Doctor forgot everything; he shut himself in with the child; he did not rummage through books, because he understood the origins of the illness, but he embraced him body to body, and by dint of restoratives and exquisite care, Nené began to show a shadow of improvement. And her improvement gradually began, and her cravings for sweets and toys began…. Moragas glimpsed the possibility of taking his little girl to Erbeda, and there restoring her complete strength, joy, and vitality. “We have Nené,” her studies told him, and he repeated his hope. One day he rushed out to buy a new American toy, some enormous mechanical butterflies that flew by themselves; and upon releasing them in the convalescent’s room, and hearing her laugh at the painted butterflies’ wings flapping against the wall, he remembered for the first time, with vague remorse, Juan Rojo’s son. Like any impressionable person, Moragas tended to fall from the heights of enthusiasm to the depths of discouragement. In the executioner’s cell, it had seemed an easy task to rehabilitate the boy, removing him from the atmosphere of ignominy in which he vegetated. He was then prepared to overcome worries and antipathies, break down the doors of schools and workshops, stand surety, and in a single day accomplish the salvation of Rojo and Telmo. Rojo would kill no more: Telmo would be a worker or a student…. And now, a month away, the plan seemed impractical and absurd. He realized the bondage of will, the ice that inhibits action, and he saw only the difficulties and even the compromising and semi-grotesque side of his projected enterprise. “Aren’t there other boys around to protect? I’ve gone to focus on that one, precisely that one… Moraguitas! Where are you putting the executioner’s son in Marineda? Everyone will grimace as soon as you mention him…” These fluctuations stopped at postponing and gaining time. He gave himself the excuse that nothing could be done during the summer, and summer was already approaching. “In these months, everything comes to a standstill. Vacation season… People are heading out to the countryside… I ‘d like to go for a little walk too… What colors Nené will throw at Erbeda! And to begin the redemptive campaign… better at the beginning of winter.» Moragas’s ardent resolutions were dampened by the fact that Telmo was now cured of his injuries. The child, healthy and well and running around Faro Street, seemed less worthy of his pity. Moragas even felt, out of selfish affection for his daughter, a certain hostility toward Telmo, so robust and vigorous, more alert, more determined, more martial than ever, and at least two inches taller. «I would like this idiot’s health for Nené… » At once, his generous nature reacting, Moragas became dissatisfied with himself , in a special state of mind comparable to suffering. He felt as if he were carrying a cold, hard metal bar through his body, whose weight weighed heavily on his soul and depressed it. “It is more tranquility not to see the ideal even from a hundred leagues away, than to see it and not reach it,” thought the doctor. Whenever the memory of Juan Rojo crossed his mind, Don Pelayo felt the impression of humiliating impotence that the debtor feels when he sees the creditor—the silent creditor, who waits without claiming the loan. Don Pelayo’s moral state is known and suffered by all those who, without reaching just, perfect or saintly levels, can call themselves good, sensitive and altruistic. The saint does not He suffers: he complies without fear: his will is of a piece. The good one… he complies or he doesn’t, but the wound of pity always bleeds. What most compelled Moragas not to forget Rojo were the conversations relating to the Erbeda crime. Neither in the country nor in the city was anything else being talked about. As Priego had predicted, the crime had had great resonance, even in the Madrid press, where extensive telegrams and long articles were devoted to it, some taken from Marineda’s diaries. The public hearing was awaited as one awaits an event: it was known that Paco Rumores, a son of Marineda’s, who had been hired as a news reporter for the newspaper with the largest circulation in Spain, would attend; that Don Carmelo Nozales was preparing a brilliant report , a prelude to his transfer to the Court of Appeals; and that, despite his resistance and reluctance to appear in Marineda as a lawyer, Lucio Febrero had been forced to take charge of defending the parricide. Moragas decided to attend the oral trial. But at the last minute, he was prevented from doing so by the daughter of the Marchioness of Veniales, who had been married for seven months to an engineer and was so averse to wasting time that, once that minimum period of time had elapsed, the human race would have increased by one child. The situation was tense and dangerous, and Moragas could not leave the rack where the premature mother was moaning. At the same time that a seven-month-old girl was entering the world, the jury and the Court were sentencing a woman and a man to leave it; the defendants from Erbeda were sentenced to garrote vil, “as was to be expected,” as Cáñamo said. The press was unanimous that night and the following morning, praising Nozales’s report to the skies and revealing discontent and surprise at Febrero’s defense. Faithful to the classic molds of forensic oratory, Grotius and Pufendorf delivered a kind of invocation to the Furies of criminal law, polishing his oration with avenging apostrophes. For this purpose, Nozales’s light literary training served him well, and Batilo’s accusation against Castillo’s two assassins made the most of it, without anyone noticing the coincidence of ideas and phrases, which might have seemed the result of a coincidence of crimes. Like Meléndez Valdés in 1821, Nozales spoke of the excesses, perversion, and brutal abandonment of customs, of the disastrous dissolution of social ties, of the immorality that pervades everywhere and spreads with the speed of the plague, of the neglect of all duties, and presented as a characteristic feature of the time the mockery of the marital bond; he spoke of the country’s consternation at such a horrendous attack, prosecuted with the greatest penalties from remote antiquity to the present time; he cited a law of the Fuero Juzgo and another of the title of _los omecillos_ in the Partidas; and he concluded with the usual effective speech in these reports, urging the judges on the significance of the verdict and the importance of the mission society entrusts to them, the need to inexorably suppress the crime and to be inspired not by a compassion at odds with the law, but by the memory of the victim “who can no longer speak and from other regions contemplates society and the judges.” The audience, hanging on Nozales’s lips, also paid eager attention to Lucio Febrero; only that, toward the second third of the young lawyer’s speech, he began to lose his bearings, and finally, confessing that “it could all be very scientific,” he agreed that it was strange and suspicious, and even fatal to society, from whose hands Nozales, with an artistic gesture, was snatching the usual avenging lightning bolt that he pretended to vibrate over the damned heads of the defendants. Furthermore, was it not an evident sophism, a lack of legal loyalty, the effort to demonstrate that the parricide, in giving herself to a lover, and in later arranging with him the death of her husband, did not obey the suggestions of lust, but those of a profound terror, of those that lead astray and blind, to terror? that her lover would strangle her, and then the terror that her husband, carrying out threats as repeated and horrible as they were credible, would suffocate her one night in the silence of the conjugal bedroom? Why support such a strange thesis with quotations from medical works, which demonstrate the stubbornness and moral disorder that fear produces in the human soul, and especially in women, where education and custom irrigate and cultivate this feeling? Why didn’t Febrero quote works of criminal law? Why didn’t he accept the natural and current version of the scoundrel who, in order to please her body, takes a lover, and to better enjoy the lover, eliminates her husband? Nothing, it’s clear that these current jurists will grasp at straws to declare the defendant irresponsible… You had to hear Cáñamo in the corridors of the Marineda Court. “I tell you that, at this rate, society will sink, it will collapse… As if the cornerstone, the foundation of the entire edifice, were being removed.” Tranquility was restored when the jury’s verdict was announced, proof that society wasn’t yet collapsing. A double scaffold would soon prop it up ! Two or three days after the sentence was made public, Lucio Febrero entered Moragas’s office, and the lawyer extended a burning hand to the doctor. “Do you know,” he said, throwing himself onto the couch, “that I have a fever in the afternoons?” Moragas felt his pulse. Yes; it was elevated, but almost unnoticeable. “Perhaps it is,” he said, “a manifestation of malaria; but I imagine what you’re having could be called a tantrum. ” Lucio didn’t reply immediately: he hesitated between remaining silent or speaking spontaneously. Finally , standing up, with the openness of someone baring their soul, he exclaimed, “I’m leaving Marineda.” “I’ll go hunting in the mountains for the rest of the summer, and with that, perhaps, I’ll save myself from hepatitis. Happy are you who don’t hold back, who give vent to anger as well as to enthusiasm! You say you have a low fever? Well, I thought I had a 100.5 degrees.” Moragas laughed and murmured, affectionately placing both hands on the lawyer’s shoulders, “You’ve taken it so seriously!” I didn’t believe it. It’s true that the case was noisy, and that Nozales went all out. ” “All the meat… Yes, the hackneyed meat; meat from a century ago.” But the audience’s thoughts were on the same date as Nozales’s arguments. He spoke to them in a language they understood!…. —And V. in Chinese— Moragas warned. —That theory of a crime based on fear would be very ingenious in the _Assises_ of Paris…. What it is around here… V. was too clever, Mr. D. Lucio. —What I was too much was sincere! —exclaimed the young defense attorney, sadly. —Sometimes the truth is not credible; I forgot; I wanted to make it shine in all its splendor, and all I succeeded in thickening the shadow. Nozales was certainly right. There is, for use in the courts, a kind of hallelujahs of the bad man and the good man that apply indiscriminately to any criminal: it is a classic mask, like those allegorical plaster figures that represent the Virtues, or the Seasons of the year. —Humanity is so varied, so different from one another!…. Each soul is a world! But Nozales, and the magistrates… Damn them! “Come on, you see, no one is made of bronze,” Moragas warned. “You have taken an interest in your client… What’s so special about that? ” “No, Moragas… It’s not that,” responded Febrero, forcing himself to speak without violence or anger. “She… is almost indifferent to me, and the dear one, unsympathetic. My interest is purely ideological. They matter to me… as a concept. I see that _she_ is going to die… not because she is a criminal, but because she is cowardly. Her crime is horrible, nauseating; it has circumstances that are horrifying; they are in agreement; but if we were to consider the internal situation… she shouldn’t die. ” “Do you think any woman should be garroted?” Moragas asked ardently. “You know how I feel about that matter… I am not an abolitionist… But women, since the law considers them _minors_ for infinity of cases, and political law excludes them, they should find before criminal law the protection and indulgence that are due to the minor. – And go V. with this to the gentlemen of the margin! – That criminal of Erbeda, for example, would not have committed the crime if she were not educated under the regime of _manly terror_. She has told me her story. As a child, her father beat her to force her to step on gorse. As a girl, at the pilgrimages, the young men would take her out dancing by pushing her or hitting her with a stick… _rustic_ gallantry! As a married woman, her husband did not sing much about her, that is why Nozales said, parodying Meléndez Valdés, who was a man of _good_ nature; but one day when he came home drunker than others, he wanted to put her in the oven and draw a fire…. The beloved comes along…. and…. one day he wins her over, by violence, with threats and blows; They establish a concubinage… the husband catches them almost in the act, and turns a blind eye… undoubtedly out of fear of the Cyrenian… but as soon as he turns his back, grabs his wife by the wrists, takes her to the oven… and then lets her go… and through words, through looks, through intuition, she understands that his intention is firm, that her husband has decided to kill her and is only waiting for an opportune opportunity. Thus he murders her little by little, out of fear. When he goes to bed he always tells her: “When you least expect it, you’ll wake up in eternity.” And the woman suppresses sleep, wants to avoid being caught, to be able to resist, to scream… Do you understand the psychic state that determines not sleeping for many months? Naturally, she confides her terrors to her lover, who also becomes alarmed on his own account… and of course, the idea of the crime arises… There you have the genesis… Fear! —Well, no one has believed it, you know—Moragas warned.—In general terms , the husband died because he was in the way… —Leave him—February responded with a sigh.—What does it matter? I’m going hunting, fishing, the mountains…anywhere… And I won’t hear, or understand, or run into Cáñamo, or Nozales, or Don Celso Palmares, who after going around saying he would die without signing a death warrant, has signed this one… I’ll be free from the ridiculous spectacle of the fickleness of the crowds; I won’t see the same people who today were crying out for “public vindication” telegraphing to the Deputies and Senators to obtain that other absurdity they call a pardon… —Would you be sorry if they pardoned your client? —I know they won’t pardon her: the winds of severity are blowing. But the pardon revolts me. Either not to condemn, or not to pardon on a whim. Ministerial or royal clemency is equal to historical justice… Well, goodbye, Señor Don Pelayo; unless you wish to accompany me to the jail… I’m going to say goodbye to that unfortunate woman and encourage her, making her believe a thousand lies. Will you help me lie? Yes? How glad I am! Chapter 14. The Doctor still hadn’t made up his mind. He was in one of those periods in which the heart demands more rest than struggle. How fragile is the thread of human destiny! How insignificant can be the psychic movement that perhaps decides an existence! Moragas looked at the panes of his window and noticed that it was a radiant sun, a splendid and not hot June day; and because of this and because of the sympathy that Lucio inspired in him, he thought, “chest in the water”; He put on his gray overcoat and went down the stairs in a very cheerful mood. The Marineda Prison is located at the lower end of the Barrio de Arriba (Upper Quarter); on one side it faces the sea, on the other—where its main entrance is—an irregular, sloping square, between whose tiles grows grass. The appearance of this square is one that would enamor an artist and unnerve a councilor who promotes urban reforms. To the right, the Gothic mansion of a nobleman; to the left, the high wall of the Court; in the foreground, alleys and streets, and far in the background, a blue bay. Built in the last third of the last century, the Marineda Prison holds some funereal memories of our political unrest: the dungeon from which several were released is shown. liberals to be hanged, and certain royalists to crew a ship that sank in the middle of the bay, dragging its bound crew into the abyss. “Do you know,” Moragas said, pausing before entering the door, “that the prison is distressing and sad even before one sets foot in it? Those triple bars, eaten away by rust, look like cobwebs woven by coercion and boredom. ” “Well, you should know that this is one of the best in Spain. There are some prisons around! In some, the prisoners live with their feet in water… or worse. Remember what we discussed a long time ago at the Espolón: the idea that the accused can be tortured has not been extinguished, not by a long shot.” “This prison,” Lucio added, stopping and familiarly grabbing the Doctor by the lapel, “is a marvel of construction, according to those intelligent in architecture.” There they will tell you—should you have the patience to listen—that if the jailer drops the bunch of keys to the building on the floor in your room, the crash can be heard from any cell, and that in turn , from his room, the jailer does not miss a single thing about what happens in the prisoners’ cells… Despite such marvels of acoustics, bottles and more bottles of brandy enter through the low bars, and the last day I was to see my client, there was a prisoner recovering from two stab wounds, inflicted in a fight after a binge… What a world, this penal world!… And to say that there, and not in moth-eaten folios , is the future Law, the one we will create! Come on, you will see sadness… although there no one complains or cries: everyone is stoic from the moment they cross that threshold. They entered, and a solicitous employee, accustomed to visits from Lucio Febrero, who was at home in the prison, placed himself at their command . Moragas, unfamiliar with the place, gazed with dismay at the walls covered with inveterate filth, a grime that seemed the exudation of crime; he spelled out the signs drawn on them with smoke, and, like a doctor, resisted the indefinable stench, a mixture of insipid cooking fumes and unclean people, that floated through the hallways and even the courtyards. Although the two friends went straight to the women’s department, located on the upper floor, Febrero dragged Moragas toward the main courtyard, where the men were relaxing . The prisoners, who routinely pretend to be indifferent to anything outside, did not change their posture or interrupt their occupations. Most of them, it must be said, were occupied with nothing: given over to the detestable idleness of prison life, they strolled in groups around the cramped confines, chatting or humming in low voices, and staring sideways at Febrero with cold, hostile glances. Moragas felt those treacherous glances, which pierced his face like razor blades. One prisoner, in particular, inspired such sudden repugnance in him that he would gladly go up to him to scold him and slap him. “What a bird!” he murmured, nudging Febrero with his elbow. “The bird did, indeed, deserve some attention, even though its type did not offer a singularity typical of Marineda, but rather a variety, common perhaps to all penal establishments in the universe. It was the Adonis of the prison; the one who in Paris is called _pâle voyou_, in Madrid chulapo, and in Cantabria lacks a proper name, because it is an exotic plant: a beardless youth, of a broken complexion, with a certain perfection of form that, instead of attracting, repelled, like an obscene picture repels. He wore a dirty undershirt, which revealed the neckline and the protrusion of his nipples; cream-colored cloth trousers, tight like those worn by dancers; and tight, brand-new boots with light-colored shafts. His head was bare, and his hair was plastered to his temples in a shining hook. He walked with an indecorous swaying of his hips, and in a provocative attitude he approached Moragas and Febrero’s group, as if to say: “Look at me, here’s a _cruo_ youth.” The guard who accompanied the two friends pushed Febrero discreetly, and approaching Moragas’ ear, he whispered, winking the eye: “That one is cared for, dressed, and equipped for everything by one… ”
But Moragas’s attention was already being drawn to another matter; he had just spotted, in the far corner of the courtyard, two children who must have been between nine and eleven years old at most. “Look!” he exclaimed, turning to Febrero. “I didn’t think there were monkeys there too! ” The boys, huddled on the ground, rose at the voice of the orderly, who said imperiously: “Here.” They both approached: the eldest, haughty, serious; the younger, smiling, cynical, displaying on their faces that mischievous expression which, accompanying innocence, has something celestial about it, and which, withered by vice, makes the heart clench. “Let’s see, why are these two combs here?” exclaimed the Doctor, surreptitiously handing them some small change. February was about to explain, but the guard got ahead of him. “The youngest is the one who climbed a chimney to open the door for the thieves when they came to steal the chalices and jewels at San Efrén. The other one… who looks eleven years old, but is already twelve and a half… is the one who, at Campo de Bellona, killed an assistant with a stab in the groin.” Moragas stared at the precocious murderer. “Is that true?” he asked with more pity than anger. “You can’t lift as high as my cane… and you’ve already killed a man?” At the same time, he looked at him with surprise, noting that the boy looked like a Filipino child; his face was earthy, bunched, expressionless; his eyes were slanted, his mouth pale. “Why did you do that?” Moragas repeated insistently. “Because the assistant hit my brother,” the boy replied in the hoarse voice of a chicken changing its voice to brag. Febrero diverted Moragas’s attention by pointing to the door of a low cell, through which the figure of a man peeped. “There you have the co-author of the Erbeda murder; the one sentenced to death.” The Doctor turned sharply, but Lucio stopped him by placing his right hand on his arm. “Let’s approach discreetly…. That individual has hated me ever since I defended his brother-in-law, because he thinks I tried to shift all the blame onto him…. If I speak to him, he lowers his head and doesn’t answer…. But from here, you’ll see him very clearly. ” “What a sinister expression!” Moragas exclaimed. The murderer, leaning against the doorframe, looked out at the courtyard, and the sunlight shone brightly on him. Indeed, his face and appearance were characteristic. Moragas noticed his sunken head, with its somber mane of hair, similar to the wigs of a villain in a comedy; his bay gaze, his sinister pallor, his ill-proportioned face, more developed on the right side, his large, knobby hands, and his prominent, beastly jaw. Beneath his blouse and linen trousers, a vigorous body could be seen, and his canvas shoes outlined the flat, sturdy foot of a common villager. The position he had adopted as he leaned against the door was somewhat awkward, as he was shackled , preventing him from crossing his legs. “This one doesn’t lie,” Moragas murmured. “What a brute! Quite a leading man for a crime of passion!” —Well, you’ll see,—answered February.—If people were observant, just by looking at his face they would laugh at Nozales’s pathetic apostrophes and all that stuff about guilty ardor and criminal fire. Does that man inspire passion? Gentlemen! He is a muscle from the prehistoric ages; he is the cave bear…. Let us go up, and observe the contrast between Romeo and Juliet, who from above can contemplate him, if she pleases… But she will not contemplate him! If the unfortunate woman can have any relief, it is to find herself free from such a beast! And I warn you that when he is questioned, he swears in a plaintive tone that she incited him, that she lost him… While February was speaking thus, they were climbing the damp and pine stairs, and leaving behind the dark and solitary kitchens, with their blackened and sordid hearth, they arrived at the prisoners’ apartment. In the corridor could be heard the long, mournful howl of a mad woman . furious, locked in a separate cell, while her transfer to the asylum was calmly arranged. When they entered the chambers designated for women, the Doctor could have believed himself to be in a hell with a view to paradise. The walls were brown and stained; the roof was black and hollow; the floor was worm-eaten; there was very little space for the flock of prisoners who crowded together, seeking support from the ruined platforms—where only a flimsy mattress poorly supplied with pomace or dried corn straw invited sleep ; the atmosphere was mephitic, and the dusty bars restraining it had tripled. But beyond the bars, so close that shreds of turquoise satin were almost visible, was the wide, majestic bay, shimmering in the sun, populated by graceful minuets, barges, and heavy launches, and dominated by a magnificent ocean liner, the Puno, which, with its boilers still quivering, the gray plume of its tall, slender chimney barely erased, had just dropped anchor, and on whose deck the passengers swarmed, awaiting the Sanidad dinghy so they could throw themselves into the swinging skiffs… Indifferent, good without any intention of being so,—like nature itself,—the bay sent the inmates the perpetual relief of a brackish and invigorating air, which in aromatic puffs slipped past the bars…. The warden warned Moragas that of those females,—excepting the parricide,—not one She was there for more than minor offenses, thefts, and hair-grabbing, insignificant things that allowed many of them to boast of being decent women. However, with the mysterious fraternity that is established in prison, everyone treated the woman sentenced to die cordially. Seated in a corner, dressed in strict mourning, Moragas spotted her, warned by a nudge from February. “The individual,” the lawyer pronounced more with his eyes than with his mouth, and the doctor went straight to her. The prisoner was already rising out of respect for her defender, and was having a happy day; and upon hearing her thin, timid voice for the first time, Moragas experienced the same sharp and intense impression of pity that he had noticed when he saw her cross the road among the Civil Guards. Perhaps it was greater, more poignant, because he saw the criminal emaciated, bent over, as if her back were bearing, not figuratively, but in reality, the terrible weight of the law. Because of his small stature and extreme thinness, he looked like a boy disguised in women’s clothes: beneath his black shawl, crossed despite the heat, no woman’s form could be distinguished, and the polka-dotted chintz scarf, falling over his forehead, framed his shadowy face, the color of wax, sharp, sunken. Moragas contemplated those small features, those eyes reddened by insomnia, and that contracted mouth that showed no characteristic sign of sensuality. “How are you? How are we doing?” asked the defense attorney, approaching the prisoner, in a tone that was meant to be friendly and jovial. “So… so…” the woman answered painfully. “Now they’ve moved you to another room, huh?” “You’re better off here,” February observed . The room was no better or worse than the other. “Psch… Yes, sir… I’m fine everywhere,” the prisoner murmured in a subdued tone, emphasizing the word “fine” a little. “And… your spirits? Look, you know I don’t allow you to get down,” February added in the tone of a doctor prescribing emetics or some other repugnant medicine for a patient. “My spirits… are very bad, sir…” the condemned woman responded, fixing her large, dark, and hard eyes on the lawyer. “I dream things… Yesterday… I dreamed I was already on the scaffold. ” “You brave fool!” February exclaimed, forcing a laugh. “If you dream such silly things again… I’ve told you a hundred times that the Supreme Court will overturn the sentence, and even if they don’t overturn it, it doesn’t matter, because we’ll process the pardon. And in any case… you fool!” We still have the whole summer ahead of us! The courts don’t operate during vacation time … You know very well that nothing can happen until autumn at the earliest …. The prisoner didn’t reply. She lowered her eyes, and a slight shudder shook her small body. “Look,” added the defense attorney, “so you can see I haven’t forgotten you for a moment, I’ve brought you a very respectable and influential person, Doctor Moragas… He can do a lot for you… if… if the case should arise… You’ll see how… among all of us…” Moragas moved closer to the prisoner, enveloping her in that penetrating and reassuring glance he knew how to have at the bedside of a patient given up for dead. The woman in turn raised her eyes, and the doctor reached out and took the guilty woman’s hand, placing the pad of his thumb on her wrist to feel her pulse. The skin was cold and slightly clammy; the pulse was withdrawn, almost insensible. “Courage,” Moragas uttered in turn, but in a tone completely different from that of February, with faith, ardor, and communicative persuasion. “Courage. Thank God, today is a good day for you. What do you think? Do I look like I’m lying or deceiving? Well, I affirm that you will not go to the stick. ” A lively, rapid stream of hot blood rushed from the wrist Moragas was squeezing ; her pulse quickened, and her skin acquired a gentle temperature. The woman fixed her moist, shining eyes on Moragas , exclaiming: “You look like you’re telling the truth.” “Well, courage and hope, and no more dreams of the gallows… ” “Won’t they kill me? ” “No, and no, and no!” Don Pelayo did not fully understand what he was saying: it was not his reason that spoke, but his will, something that brought imprudent phrases of hope and consolation to his mouth . How could he prevent that woman from perishing on the gallows? How?…. “Well, I don’t want her to die. Moraguitas, this game must be won… Shame on you if you don’t win it!” When the doctor and lawyer, leaving the prison walls, went out to eagerly drink the sea air, February stopped and said to the Doctor in a thoughtful tone: “I am convinced that the common people can be manipulated as they please, and that we can do them a lot of good, not by enlightening their reason, but by utilizing their credulity. Leave my client as I have never left her… Just like a glove. That woman has a characteristic characteristic of criminals: you know, a lack of vascular reaction… and insensitivity. I have not seen her turn red even once, nor have I ever surprised her to shed a tear. Well , today, as you spoke to her, she blushed and her eyes moistened.” You have done well…. You have pardoned her the worst of the punishment, which is her _idea_ and her _fear_. To die! We must all die… and who knows if before her. The only thing we have an advantage over her in is not knowing the time. How many consumptives will you assist at the first leaf that falls!…. The cruel thing is not to kill, but to slowly torment with fear: the law here, inspired by the criterion of Cáñamo, premeditates the murder and carries it out with progressive cruelty; each day that passes adds torture: insomnia, frightful dreams, waking up trembling, the last hours, when one is already counted in seconds…. That woman killed, it is true; but the dead man passed, almost without suffering, from sleep to eternity; and the law, in reprisals, has kept the garrote in front of her eyes for half a year…. Believe me, that woman has already atoned for her crime just with what she has been thinking these past few days. Well, V. has provided him with some relief…. There are beneficial lies. Moragas did not reply immediately. From a silver matchbox he took a match to light his cigarette. He fixed his glasses, stroked his lapels, and suddenly, giving Febrero a very expressive shove, said slowly: “And V., what would you say if they weren’t lies?…. Come on, what would you say?” Febrero smiled with affectionate incredulity, and taking the Doctor’s arm , replied: “Don’t think I don’t know the winds that blow in high places…. Even if you interest half the Congress and half the Senate, and Lagartijo and the Nuncio…., it’s a waste of time. These guys are going to hell…., and I’m leaving so I don’t see you, or hear you, or read a newspaper, or open a letter in four months. “I am neither a deputy, nor a senator, nor a bullfighter, nor a plenipotentiary…,” affirmed Moragas, stopping and blowing a puff of smoke out to sea; “but… Enough; hush; everyone understands for themselves. ” “What,” asked Febrero humorously, “are you going to climb the prison or dig a mine? Leave that alone, Doctor. The life of a person, more or less, believe me, matters nothing. The only thing that is serious, and the only thing that should be defended tooth and nail, are ideas. When an idea fails, that’s when it’s appropriate to ring for the dead, cry, dress in mourning… The rest… Psch!” Chapter 15. It was one of the last days of summer that afternoon, or rather one of the first days of autumn, although it must be noted that in Cantabria, autumn triumphs over summer in peace, beauty, and splendor. The fields, now mown, presented the melancholy note of stubble on the earth somewhat cracked by the drought; but on the other hand, the foliage of certain idle plants, which can afford not to die until winter, sprouted more lush and thick than ever, and the walls of the farms that face the high road boasted a superb diadem of roses, Virginia creeper, clematis, and bignonia. Dr. Moragas’s tiny garden also displayed its finest decorations. There was a magnolia tree that, being so young, had not put forth flowers all year; but the last gusts of heat had undoubtedly stimulated its virgin buds, and a snow-white amphora, still closed but already beginning to betray itself indiscreetly by its subtle fragrance, was dawning among the glossy leaves. Nené, who had been eying the new flower for days, crept slowly, with hesitant steps, toward the arbor where his father was reading a newspaper—so entranced, despite all the other signs, that he neither felt the creature approaching nor paid attention to the repeated calls of its golden little voice. The lines that absorbed Moragas were from a newspaper conceived in these terms, plus minusve: “The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal for cassation filed against the conviction of the defendants in the famous Erbeda crime, of which our readers have already had extensive news. It is believed that the press and societies of Marineda will actively lobby for the pardon, to avoid a day of mourning and mourning in the cultured capital of Cantabria. “Daddy!” shrieked the girl’s voice, somewhat capricious and furious now. “Daddy! Are you deaf? ” “No, darling… I’m not deaf,” replied her father, laughing unwillingly. “Let’s see, what’s going on? You won’t let me read? ” “For the buebo abió… Amela. Queo for. For, for!” “Amen!” You’ll pick it yourself from the branch…. The Doctor lifted the little girl up, and she grabbed the precious, still half-open magnolia, tearing it to pieces because her little fingers couldn’t cut it…. Finally, daughter and father separated the coveted piece from the tree, and Nené, no sooner had she succeeded in seizing it than she ran off as fast as the vestiges of that still badly cured organic weakness would allow , in the direction of the little house. Nené had her plans regarding the use of the first magnolia in the garden.
As soon as the Doctor was free of the tyrant, he recovered his newspaper with feverish skill and reread the extract, as if he hadn’t understood it, despite its being so trivial and clear. He twitched his beard and wrinkled his brow like someone meditating on very difficult problems; then he got up and went, filled with agitation, to walk along the single narrow alley of trees in the orchard. The sun played on the grass in the squares, gilding it and lending everything a peaceful and joyful hue. Moragas spoke to himself, uttering frequent exclamations, gesticulating, because for him reflection was action, movement, and an internal turmoil impossible to repress. “There you have it, Moraguitas, the conflict that’s coming upon you… Come on, son, now is when you have to tighten the screws… What a brave defeat is being prepared for you! Not even Waterloo… You offered to interpose yourself between that woman and the club… But it was as if you were offering the moon, unhappy one!… They’ll garrote her… and You will have patience. These are not the poetic times of the _Knight of the Red House_, who by unlikely and romantic means freed captives from their dungeons… While he was thinking this, in the secret recesses of his intention and will , something else was stirring, a singular hope, which had the impetus and energy of a presentiment, or rather, of the calculation of probabilities based on intimate data, the value of which only he could estimate. Without knowing what he was doing, he leaned back against the arbor of virgin vine and began to pluck dry purple leaves that rustled between his fingers… Because Moragas’s orchard was so small, the noise of traffic on the road could be heard from the garden, and Moragas, in the midst of his distraction, occasionally overheard the whisper of a certain childish conversation. Who was Nené talking to? With some little beggar, one of those who crouch on the side of the road waiting for the carriages to pass? No, because if that were the case, he would have already come to demand a speck from his father to help him out of his need…. And the chatter continued, growing animated, punctuated by laughter and joyful exclamations…. With whom?…. Moragas finally emerged from his absorption, moved by springs of curiosity. He climbed the garden stairs, crossed the dining room, and came out at the door of the small parlor…. He remained half petrified, as if he had seen the famous classic face of the Gorgon… although in truth he saw only the curly, graceful, resolute head of Telmo Rojo, so close to Nené’s blond little head that they were almost touching. The two children were playing a game that consisted of building nothing less than a proper fortification with the stones or pebbles the roadworkers had piled up to prime the road surface. Nené had no idea what a fortification was and had begun by confusing it with another public building, exclaiming, “Casa Papá Selo!” that is, in her language, a church; but Telmo, constant in his ill-fated warlike inclinations, took the trouble to explain in detail to the little girl the fundamental differences between a church and a fortification, and the special use to which the latter is destined. “Look, there are no priests here, no saints, no Virgin of Sorrows… This house is full of soldiers… who go around with their rifles, don’t you know? Hit, hit, hit…; and then they blow the bugle….: tararí, tararí.” And then the officer in charge….: turn to the right…. arrr! Then come the cannons…., which are placed here…., and they are to scatter the enemy…; boom! boom! With each shot, a hundred…., or a thousand…., or many more die. If you could see how beautiful! And the Captain General comes, galloping…., backwards…., and the General Staff…. back and forth, back and forth….; and the fort is in the middle of the sea…., don’t you know, like Saint Roch…. and the ship entering the bay salutes it….» Nené, at each word of Telmo, burst out laughing and clapped her hands, mad with joy. There’s no doubt he didn’t understand the full depth of his newest friend’s teaching, but he did understand the sonority, the vigor, and the elegance of that “patatris!” and “booum!” With his velvety eyes fixed on the boy’s face; with his candid mouth half-open; with his hands trembling with joy and his feet dancing, Nené followed the course in military architecture, and grabbed handfuls of the gravel as best he could, wanting to contribute to the speedy completion of the fort. The Doctor, now recovered from his initial shock, took two steps, determined to grab the boy by the arm and slam him against the pile of stones… Because Juan Rojo’s son needed audacity and impudence to fraternize with Moragas’s girl, a candid little angel, preserved in cotton wool, a bud that one day would be the white rose of the social garden, the mysterious sanctuary called “a marriageable young lady”! Nené playing with Rojo’s son—with that dregs of society, branded on his forehead, just like with a hot iron, with shameful scars from stones! Nené and Telmo together!…. The girl, happy as she hadn’t been for a long time; animated, her eyes lit cheeks; his little arms open to embrace, his face extended to the kiss of the only child who cannot be kissed! Moragas felt again the anger of those first moments, the one that had moved him to throw the two duros out the window, the one that had advised him to withdraw from Rojo’s shack without treating Telmo’s wounds, and the one that then impelled him to destroy the boy, awakening in his soul instincts of destruction so savage that perhaps their very force consumed them instantly, like a splinter by the impetuous flame that springs from its breast…. For five seconds, the Doctor was capable, in intention, of a crime… and that vertigo, in its same horrible fever of rage and blood, brought with it the reaction, corresponding to the action by its force and suddenness…. “Are you the one who wants to redeem, to work miracles, to save a human being from the gallows and another from debasement? Have you not promised that this child will have a career and a future, and be welcomed by society without being reproached for his origins? Well, you will be making a good start in your work of mercy if you dare to kick him to pieces, crush him against the pebbles like a poisonous bug! You intend to rehabilitate the boy… Begin by not closing your house on him and not denying him your daughter’s kiss of peace. While he was thinking, or rather, feeling this way, a feeling clothed in sudden light and beauty taking over, Moragas approached the door and Telmo saw him. The pebbles fell from his hands; his right hand felt for his beret on his head and pulled it off with respectful haste; The boy stood to attention… and the doctor, serious and resolute, as if he had entered a hospital ward filled with plague victims, extended his hand, placed it on the boy’s curly hair, and murmured: “I’m glad to see you, Telmo… Come in, come in, we’ll give you something to eat.” He paid cash for the Doctor’s good deed, seeing a vivid impression of happiness and gratitude painted on his protégé’s face , which transformed him. Moragas was then able to notice Telmo’s physiognomic character, that kind of vain candor, of comic conceit for his age, but almost tragic in contrast to the usual situation of the rejected and humiliated boy. Those who accept humiliation without protest acquire either an expression of sublime resignation—they are the minority—or of sinister and vengeful baseness —and the latter is the most common. Telmo was far from both extremes; He showed himself to be the victim of an injustice, and neither understood it nor wanted to suffer it. He intuitively knew the value of his soul; he recognized himself capable of great feats… and he admired him more every day that, instead of treating him like a dog, they had not already placed him in charge of the Marineda garrison, or reserved for him the command of one of those beautiful ships of the fleet, the Villa de Madrid or the battleship being built in the shipyard… Leaving Nené and the pebbles, he climbed the two small stairs, entered the living room, and approaching the doctor, said with ease, though not without inner shock: “My father sent me here. He says that you offered me to enter a school, and then find me a job, and that they will give me work wherever I want, and that I will learn a good trade.” But I… “Don’t you want to work?” asked Moragas, who was already smiling, lying in a rocking chair and examining the boy better. “Yes, sir; but… ” “But what? Let’s see, tell me… ” “If I am anything,” exclaimed Telmo resolutely, “I want to be a soldier .” “You’ll become a soldier. ” “No, a soldier all my life… An officer, come on. ” “Well, that’s a trifle! And why do you want to be an officer, you rascal?” asked the Doctor, between kindness and seriousness. “To have soldiers, and win many battles, and carry a sword and… to skewer anyone who insults me.” Moragas remained silent, reflecting, and instead of rebelling against such intentions, he found them sympathetic and well-placed. In that being who aspired with all the energies of his soul to rehabilitation, he fell Military aspiration was marvelous, and it could be considered a true vocation. Moragas still didn’t know if it was possible, and he already thought he saw the boy with his stars, his stripes, his Teresiana ribbon, and his sword at his belt. “You’ll go to school and institute,” he affirmed with warmth. “And then… God will say!” “Pay close attention… You’re going to take this message to your father… I’m taking you into my house, with me. ” “With you here?” The impression was so profound, so upsetting, that beneath the tan of his air-baked skin, a tinge of pallor could be seen spreading. Telmo didn’t know what was happening to him. It was a selfish, invincible, sovereign joy that had hints of pain. In the boy’s soul, Moragas’s proposition took the form not only of freedom, of redemption from the affront, but of a magical transfer from the dirty and gloomy ranch to the oasis of a garden filled with magnolia flowers, similar to the one Nené held in her hand, and where they would always, always play at building fortifications… What unexpected, intoxicating joy! To lose sight of the Faro neighborhood, to leave the cemetery, to leave the shack, and… Telmo couldn’t define this… for had he been able to define it, his good heart would have refused…; but _deep inside_ it was true…; not to live with his father anymore, not to breathe the cursed breath that suffocated him!…. “Don’t you want to come here?” asked Moragas, also noticing an inner satisfaction originating from very different motives from those that caused Telmo’s. —I… want to…,—the boy stammered.—I…. Am I staying tonight ?…. —Tonight?…. Come on, you’re in no hurry!—answered the Doctor, smiling.—It can’t be tonight, monkey; because we need your father’s permission. Everything will happen…. Look, I’m thinking it’s better if you don’t tell him anything in advance…. Don’t be scared: I’ll tell him myself…. Take him the following message: that he shouldn’t worry about you… and that one of these days, since I’ll have to visit that neighborhood, I’ll go there… and let him wait for me…. Listen, Nené. Throw away those stones and that dirt, you great calamity, you’re making me lose my way…. So, clean up Nené…. Do you want this child to have a snack with us now? The creature smiled in an angelic way; He stretched out his muddy hand as if to grab Telmo, and with his head even more than with his golden little voice, he said three times: “I want, I want, I want.” And then, in a reflective tone, like someone providing a solution to a serious problem, he added this, which we shall repeat, with its translation at the bottom: “We don’t love him a cake… We don’t give him a sweet… because that’s everything to me, and more than there was. We don’t love him a roco, nor do I fancy him coming to eat my donut. We love him a buebo fito, we give him a fried egg. Ete. This one; the well-known magnolia flower, in the state the reader will imagine. Chapter 16. The news from the Madrid newspaper has been confirmed in all its parts. The appeal for cassation having been dismissed, the prisoners from Erbeda are to be imprisoned. Today, just as five months ago, Marineda is boiling, and in homes, in casinos, in cafes, at fountains and taverns—which are the casinos and cafes of the common people—no one speaks but of a woman and a man…. But how the accent with which the couple’s names are pronounced has changed! How diverse the words that describe them! What a rapid turn the weather vane of will has made! How irreconcilable the impulses of then and those of now! The most active fermentation is in the newspaper offices. Telegrams go back and forth, abusing the well-known formula of “avoiding a day of mourning for a highly cultured population.” The first telegram was launched by the liberal press, taking as its intercessor the famous Cantabrian Saint, the great jurist and formerly omnipotent politician, the shoulder to cry on for all the people of his province who roam the world hunting for bargains and jobs. And the Saint has already responded, in a cordial and affectionate tone, regretting not weighing today what is happening under Sagasta’s command , and indicating that, in any case, he is ready to do everything possible and impossible to please their fellow countrymen. And the Marinedinos, upon hearing the answer, grumble plaintively, murmuring that if it were a matter of Compostela… the beloved Santiño would fix everything very well. For their part, the conservative and related press turns to Don Ángel Reyes, a leading figure in the party and rival of the Saint. “Let’s see if, out of competition…” But Reyes’s telegram, frank and decisive like his character, comes to pour a bucket of cold water on the hopes of the press. “I will manage, but I completely distrust success.” Such is the laconic response of the man for whom the chair of the Ministry of Grace and Justice is already softening…. The indultistas are not discouraged by that; only that their imagination, abandoning the paths of rational probability, seeks new, novelistic, and strange paths. The Cardinal Archbishop of Compostela is requested to send a telegram to the Vicar of Christ, and His Holiness, in very pathetic phrases, transmits the request to the Regent. The wire is working, sending eloquent encouragement to the Marquis of Torre Cores, a celebrated poet born in Marineda and resident at the Court of Spain, to perform miracles with the lyre and with his voice, pleading everywhere for mercy for the unfortunate prisoners. And, no doubt, to encourage Torre Cores by example, the local poet and opportunist Ciriaco de la Luna felt inspired, and published no less than three long compositions in three different newspapers—an “Ode to Clemency,” a “Description of the Last Moments of a Man Facing Death,” with a motto by Victor Hugo, and a “Deprecation to the Queen and the Mother,” with a motto by Antonio Arnao. The ice having been broken, tearful pages abounded in the Marinedin newspapers; but the conviction now floated in the air that for those of Erbeda, no magnanimous heart would be softened; that they would ascend the mast in their time, and that time is closer than the authorities admit—it is already imminent. “Too many pardons have been granted in these two years,” Nozales, the prosecutor, confides . “They agree with pardons, as with everything, a certain give and take, and now it’s time for the pull. ”
Dr. Moragas was leaving, in the early afternoon, after visiting a man suffering from jaundice, the magistrate Don Celso Palmares—he who had intended to end his career without signing a death warrant, and yet had signed Erbeda’s. Moragas jumped into his waiting sedan and ordered the coachman to head for the telegraph office. He got out at the door and dismissed his carriage there, quickly climbing the stairs and entering the dark, dirty, and cigarette-butt-carpeted corridors. Moragas had been instructed by Palmares to telegraph the magistrate’s brother, who lived in Córdoba, since Palmares was feeling truly ill and longed to have a loved one at his bedside. And Moragas was in a hurry to carry out the task in order to then attend to very urgent, very important matters in the Belona neighborhood…. The ticket office was intercepted by the back of a man, who was acting as if handing the telegraph operator the draft of an “urgent, very urgent” report. The telegraph operator read it aloud, and Moragas could hear: “Undersecretary Grace of Justice… In the name of charity, I beg you to interest Minister Reina in pardoning prisoners Erbeda to avoid an ill-fated day, capital dignísima.” The clerk hesitated as he spelled out the signature. “Is it Arturo Cándamo?” “No, Cáñamo, Cáñamo,” repeated the sender, with a look of displeasure and impatience at seeing that they were not familiar there with his surname; and when he turned around, Moragas was able to ascertain that the charitable supplicant for a pardon was none other than Siete patíbulos…. “Will you ask for the same?” he exclaimed confidently, greeting the Doctor. “That telegram you have in your hand will be for some bankrupt in Madrid. ” “Nothing of the sort…” declared Moragas. “I don’t ask for pardons, nor for heads either. And you, what miracle? You, the defender of the ultimate penalty… ” “And what does that have to do with it?” responded Cáñamo with astonishment. “I demand justice, and at the same time I recognize the rights of piety. Should I not admire the Monarch, exercising the most beautiful and most sublime prerogative? But you positivists and materialists are hard- hearted, you lack bowels, and you want to deprive the head of state of the precious faculty of tilting, with a word of commiseration, the scales of the law… Ah! Even if the head of state is a woman, will you not be moved to see her stop the fall of the terrible blade with a gesture? There you have the fruits of soulless science … What two pesetas? – he added, changing his tone and addressing the telegraph operator. – Let’s see… is that more than fifteen words? Yes, yes; already; current… I’ll go get the stamps…. Moragas transmitted the report in the meantime, and a smile played on his lips, while his memory evoked, clear and distinct, the image of Lucio Febrero, who at such hours would climb hills and cross streams in pursuit of some flock of partridges, there in the crags of the rugged district of Mourante, and would forget, savoring the divine henbane that nature and solitude give us to drink, that there are in the world convicts, executioners, press that asks for pardons and Ministers who advise or advise against them… —”Where science ends, feeling begins, and in the domains of feeling, the absurd is real”—thought the Doctor when wrapped in his cloak he ascended on foot the steep, irregular slope that, awaiting a majestic future ramp, is for now the only access to the neighborhood of Belona. —And a mad and limitless hope, a delicious pride in which his spirit floated as if falling into the blue ether, prompted him to turn and look down from on high at Marineda lying at his feet. Never more than at that decisive and supreme moment had his eyes been struck by the resemblance of the lovely city to a woman’s body, her slender waist tightly cinched in a twisted corset, the folds of her full, flowing skirt flowing from it . Two seashells filled with emeralds seemed to be the two seas, that of the Bay and that of the Varadero, which compressed the slender figure of the city on the right and left; and the snowy houses, with their facades of thousands of crystals, struck by the west wind, mimicked that exquisite figure with the twisting of sequined embroidery, flashing in the light of a red torch… “I’ll spare you the spectacle, Marineda,” the Doctor murmured gallantly, as if promising something to a lady. “On the day of the crime, you wanted the death of the guilty party, and today you want their life. I’m going to give it to you.” And he ran, just as if he were twenty years old…. In front of a hut or sentry box painted with slate, one of those that huddle in the shadow of the Barracks, and that from a certain distance look like a string of corals, adorning the sinister Campillo de la Horca, a circle of commoners surrounded a human body, no doubt—a human body, the only thing on which popular curiosity is so silent and pious. Someone recognized Moragas, although he was muffled and walked so furtively and cautiously; and the cries of “Come, come here, Don Pelayo!” They stopped the doctor, who was trying to escape, reluctantly. He approached and, breaking through the crowd, saw on the ground a poorly dressed girl, ugly, wasted, and rachitic, with a face that was bluish rather than pale. Two charitable women were supporting her, and she, with her eyes closed and sunken, her mouth half-open, her nose sunken, was breathing laboredly, or rather, she was arching her throat. Moragas recognized her pre-agonizing gasp from the first instant. “A misfortune like any other, Señor Moragas!” officiously murmured a patrolman who was walking by, approaching Don Pelayo. “It’s Orosia, the daughter of that drunkard Anteojos, an old shoemaker who works in that shack you see; or rather, it was the girl who was working.” The father does nothing but go around splicing drunks…. The daughter vomited blood yesterday morning , and—here the agent winked—it must have been from some _badly_ delivered blow that the brute father must have hit her in the stomach with the _way_, because he was used to it…. And he says that this morning The neighbors heard her complain a lot because her father had forced her to come to work, and the poor woman couldn’t take it anymore…. Now we find her like this…. What do we do? ” A chair or a mattress to take her home,” replied Don Pelayo. “To her house!” objected a neighbor, sobbing. “Oh, sir! She’ll come to mine …. Hers is locked; her mother, who’s a cigar maker, keeps the key in her pocket because she’s afraid that damned drunk will set fire to everything…. But bring my mattress, we only have one… and we’ll put her there…. You, Cándido, go and tell the parish priest… and God willing, there’s enough! ” “There won’t be enough,” responded Moragas, who was pressing the dying woman. “Anyway , let her go… And let’s see if we can move her… That mattress!” They had already brought him in, and Orosia was laid on it without having regained consciousness, in that death-like swoon that was a prelude to resurrection to a less horrible and bitter life. Her clothes, unbuttoned by the attempts of the good women to rescue her, and torn in places, revealed some fragments of mortified nakedness, and on her poor, thin flesh, bruised bruises and still-fresh marks of brutal cruelty. The gossips wiped their eyes with the corner of their cotton handkerchiefs; some men swore and uttered muffled threats. The mattress was lifted into the air by its four corners, and the procession set off, heading for the home of the compassionate duenna. But upon arriving there, it was seen that Don Pelayo had been right on the mark. Orosia no longer needed human help, and as for spiritual help, if God had not forgiven her… God would not be what He is, in an eminent and supreme degree. Chapter 17. At nightfall Moragas entered Juan Rojo’s house once more. He now set foot without hesitation in that sinister hovel, which at that moment seemed doubly so. The streetlights were barely lit; the beds were unmade, in disorder, and no one was to be seen in the room, until Rojo hurried out of a shadowy corner, offering a chair, and stammering with joy at seeing the Doctor. “I thought you’d never come again, Don Pelayo. ” “I don’t usually break my word,” exclaimed Moragas, sitting down and with an imperious gesture pointing to Telmo’s father the other seat, the only one left in the little room. “Yes, sir; I know too well… But since he didn’t come… I… took the liberty… you must excuse me… from sending the boy there… well… And he brought me in reply… that you… that you would already arrange… You can well know, Señor Don Pelayo, that things are urgent. The lad is wasting the best years of his life, the ones he could have used to become a man. Either in school, or in a workshop, or wherever you see fit, he must be put… Time flies… I’ll be gone from this world before you know it… and it’s necessary that he be settled now, so that it doesn’t occur to him… —I know, I know what shouldn’t occur to him—Moragas warned. —Enough. Neither you nor I need to get lost in further explanations. We’ve talked everything over. I made you a promise, don’t you remember? I’ve come to keep it. At the cost of my credit, my position, my money, all that I am and am worth, I will make your son a worthy man, accepted by society, and to whom no one will have to turn their backs. “Will it be so?” Juan Rojo questioned, shuddering at the touch of such fortune, like that of an electric current. “So it will be.” Rojo made a gesture of frenzy, and Moragas, more sullen and serious than ever, added: “But not for nothing. You know that in return I demand… ” “Whatever you want! Everything!” Juan exclaimed, raising his arms and waving his hands as if to take heaven as his witness. “Everything? Now we shall see…” Moragas gathered himself like a wrestler who draws back his elbows to gather his strength; he put on his gold glasses, rubbed his hands together, and said solemnly, measuring his words: “In twelve hours, tomorrow morning, the prisoners of Erbeda will be brought to the chapel.” The day after tomorrow, at seven o’clock sharp, there is order that they be garroted. The pardon, which was negotiated, will not come. The Government does not want the Queen to exercise her prerogative. You, then, lack a day and a half to take the lives of two of your fellow men. Life for life. I demand theirs, in exchange for the one I give, morally, to your son. Rojo remained motionless, his mouth open, his face half idiotic. Truncated syllables emerged from his lips. “I… don’t… yes… I don’t know… ” “The lives of those two prisoners…!” insisted Moragas. —I… but how do you expect me to… —You, you, and only you, can now save her,—continued the philanthropist with extraordinary energy, hypnotizing Rojo with the steely lightning of his pupils. —You, and only you. Where the Societies, the authorities, the Cardinal Archbishop, the deputies, the Pope have failed, you will win, and without needing to take any more trouble than saying “no.” When they call you to exercise your functions…, you refuse. They exhort you. “No.” They command you, they shout at you, they try to stun you. “No, no.” They ask you to explain your conduct. “No.” They take you before the chief of police, they want to squeeze your thumbs…. Suffer if necessary, and “no,” and more “no,” and “requetenó” a thousand times. This case will not come to fruition; I am watching; I will prevent the slightest harm from being done to you… by Moragas’s faith! Sleep peacefully and rest, for not a hair of your head will be lost… Since your refusal is to be made on the very morning of the execution, they must suspend it by force… and then you publish a statement in the press, which I will draft, saying that you did not wish to perform your duties because your conscience warned you that it is not lawful under any circumstances to kill a fellow man. And I will take care of the rest, and believe me, the convicts will no longer die by garroting. Juan Rojo remained silent, as if the world had just collapsed on his head. And it was indeed the world that was collapsing around him: the world of his beliefs, his ideas, his social notions…. —But, sir….—he murmured.—But, sir…., I…. Come on, you must allow me to tell you one thing…., and that is…. justice…., criminals…. —V. Street!—Moragas responded in a thunderous voice.—Who are you to reason about criminals and justice? Who? Justice! There remains right now in this neighborhood, lying on a mattress, the corpse of a murdered child…, the daughter of Anteojos the shoemaker… don’t you know him? Her father murdered her by dint of mistreatment, atrocities, blows…. It won’t cost the villain a day in jail… Or do you believe that all crimes end at the turn you make through the turnstile? Let’s save words, I’m not here to waste time or to engage in discussions with you… Is the deal in your interest, yes or no? The redemption of your son for the lives of those convicts! —Don’t bother yourself, for God’s sake, Senor de Moragas…. I… I’ll do whatever you command! That’s finished…. There’s nothing more to say…. And find me a job too, because I’m going to find myself without bread…. Enough, what’s said is said… Whatever the cost…, I’ll do what you…. I say I will, Don Pelayo! —Well, of course,—responded the doctor, getting up, as if he didn’t want to let the man’s resolve cool. —Your son is now redeemed from you…, and so are you, to boot. With that action, all your previous infamy will be washed away. Telmo, from today on, it’s on me. Let him gather his clothes… and go there whenever he likes; Today a room is being prepared for him in my house. Moragas said this as he walked toward the door, and consequently turned his back on Juan Rojo. As he put his hand on the latch and opened his mouth to add “Goodbye,” he made a hoarse sound, a sort of bellow like that of the waves of the sea when they engulf a narrow channel that compresses them and breaks them into foamy tatters. He turned quickly. Telmo’s father was the one who was roaring or complaining. “Sir… Don Pelayo, no… let’s understand each other… the boy… What…?” And suddenly acquiring, driven by pain, rapid and even Eloquent, he broke out thus, placing himself before Moragas in a resolute attitude, as if in attack: “No; what that is, you will not see, nor will anyone born: taking my boy away, taking him away from me, who am his father, his father, his father!!! Taking him away from me as if I had cholera or were a criminal! Because I am not, no sir, but a good man, who has always respected all that ought to be respected, and I can walk around with my head held high, more than many who disgust me! I do not stain my son, and I do not want to part from him, I do not! He is my son, I have no other, nor do I have but him in this filthy world!” Moragas measured Rojo from head to toe with an icy gaze—an icy gaze that burned, an icy gaze that tore at the skin like a whiplash; Almost without transition, he passed from this contemptuous look to an effusive and pious reaction ; and appealing to Rojo’s familiar form, as he always did when he wished to influence his spirit more decisively, he murmured: “But don’t you see, unhappy man, that the basis of the good I propose to do for your son is precisely to renew his atmosphere? By your side—don’t you understand—he will always be _the executioner’s son!_; a being who will be looked upon with disgust and contempt by the same people who, by dint of entreaty, admit him to the most vile and ill-paid occupation. You may be an irreproachable man and a great person; but… look at the devil! The sewer cleaners don’t want your son as a companion! We’re not just trying to ensure that Telmo finds education and work: he must also find honor, which is something we’re short of. Ah!” If it weren’t for honor… Moragas interrupted himself, searching for a conclusive, straightforward argument . Juan remained motionless, wordless, although his fatigue was more apparent in his always labored breathing. From time to time, he moved his head from left to right, as if exclaiming, “No, and no. ”
And the Doctor, experienced in deep incisions, inserted the scalpel fearlessly, certain of his success. “It is necessary,” he said, emphasizing each word, “that you part with your son now, so that he doesn’t have to imitate his mother’s example at twenty , and leave you alone with your infamy…” The cut had been accurate; accurate, and penetrating to the marrow. Rojo trembled, and something that was the embryo of a sob and a wail of agony died in his throat, to which he raised both hands, wanting to undo the bow of his tie, which really couldn’t be much or little constricting. This instinctive movement reminded him of another, one the Doctor forbade him to perform…. He thought of the prisoners. If they knew they were about to be taken to the chapel, would they also perceive this horrible constriction of the gullet, this sensation of saliva turning into hot pins? “Your wife,” Moragas continued with surgical impassivity, “left because she couldn’t bear to be called the executioner’s wife. She preferred to disappear, and there are those who praise her taste: believe me. The boy, once he grows up and can distinguish colors, won’t resign himself either… to the evil shadow of being your son. He won’t see any land to run to in order to escape you. Ah! Did you think you could make a living wringing necks, and that that was compatible with love, home, family , and the pleasures of parenthood? You brave fool!” It’s less bad to be the son of those convicts who want to hand you over so you can have their throats slammed than to be your own. They don’t stone convicts’ children. Those only killed one of their fellow men, and you’ll kill a hundred, if they order you to, for thirty -seven duros a month. Let your son go if you don’t want him to get away from you. Isn’t he already itching to get away from you? added the philanthropist, turning the blade in the wound. Rojo let out a cry of protest. “No, sir… That, you must forgive me, but… that’s what they say, talking for the sake of speaking! My boy is fine with me… I treat him perfectly… I even spoil him, as far as possible… I’ve never raised a hand to him in my life… He fulfills his whim before mine… The boy is either a damned scoundrel… or he owes me “want!”—Thus ended the father, groaning. “Yes?” Moragas said with a certain irony, winking his eyes and cleaning his glasses. “Now we’ll clear up any doubts… Look, I think your boy is coming in…” Telmo’s footsteps could be heard, and his hand had lifted the latch; but noticing that someone was visiting the little room, the boy was perplexed, unable to decide whether to go in. Moragas called him; and Telmo, upon recognizing the doctor, entered jovially and arrogantly. “Hello, good boy! Where have you come from at this hour?” the Doctor asked, opening the way. “From the Marinera’s house,” the rascal replied. “His eyes have gone bad; that’s why he couldn’t come here today. One of the children is complaining about his head. It looks like a hospital.” “And you used to take care of them?” the doctor insinuated. “I think you’re a loose cannon, that you spend your life away from home.” Telmo shrugged his shoulders, and the Doctor continued slyly: “Apparently you’re not here at your center. You should keep Papa more company. It’s awful that you wander around all day. ” “And… how much I’m missed here!” Telmo exclaimed. “The other children go to the Institute… They have to go somewhere…” Saying this, the boy looked at the Doctor inquisitively, as if urging him to remember his pending commitment. “Precisely so that you… can… go to the Institute, and everywhere … I was just now… talking with your Papa. He agrees that I should provide you with the means to study, and to have a career, and to join the military, which you like so much.” He only fears that your companions will play another trick on you, like the one at the Castle of San Wintila… Do you think they will? Tell us what you think… Telmo looked at his father and the doctor, reflected, felt his instinct turn into light… and like someone determined to swim from a great height, he exclaimed impetuously: “Standing in your shadow, they won’t play tricks on me… If they play tricks on me today … it’s because of what it is. ” “Do you want to lean into my shadow? ” “Good heavens!” In this reply the boy put all the liveliness of his spirit and all his soul, still childish but now illuminated by humiliation, adversity, and perpetual martyrdom. It was the longing of a captive asking to have the stocks and shackles removed; it was the wild cry of human selfishness aspiring to happiness. Rojo did not move. He represented the image of stupor, the culminating phase of grief. But suddenly, because of his rough and inflexible physiognomy, emotion broke loose like a torrent. His eyes rolled, showing the whites; he compressed his lips; his nostrils flared; and with the impetus of animal ferocity developed in his soul by his profession, he rushed at the boy, his hands open and his fingers contracted, rigid, eager to squeeze a neck… It was instantaneous, because his fingers immediately loosened , and gently pushing Telmo towards the Doctor, he said in a voice that was barely audible: “Take him. But it must be right now. Right now! I put no other conditions. Tonight… he must not sleep here. I… will obey. Take him, for God and his Mother, Señor de Moragas! ” “No.” Think it over carefully, Rojo, before you decide, Moragas warned slowly. You have tonight… tomorrow… plenty of time to think it over. That’s for sure: once you’ve made up your mind, let it be irrevocable… because here it’s no good going back on your word, and now yes and then no. For that very reason… think it over, think it over. It’s been thought about, Rojo responded with brusque firmness. I only ask that you not keep the boy here one more minute. It seems to me that, at least, that favor…! Telmo, half understanding, looked at his father and the philanthropist. The latter, moved to compassion, was now yielding, proposing palliatives, wanting to soothe the pain in his paternal flesh, which throbbed beneath the edge of the steel. —You will see your son whenever you want… and after some time, you may even be able to reunite…—he murmured in Rojo’s ear. —Your voluntary retirement from the profession, having saved two lives by just saying _no_, they will return the esteem of honorable people to him…. If we redeem you too, man…. Take charge…. If you don’t take charge immediately,—because you are stubborn,—you will be convinced in a few days….! Cheer up, don’t let Telmo find out…. It’s better…. Juan Rojo turned his head; and approaching his son, he took him by the hand and made a gesture of urging him towards the Doctor. The latter, accepting the gift, actively and warmly grasped the boy’s hand. —Tomorrow the clothes will arrive,—Rojo pronounced in a dull, subdued, but resolute voice. —Take them, Señor de Moragas. It’s my pleasure. Go on; and remember that now… you have no other father than the Señor! Telmo wanted to say something; His heart sank, half from joy, half from something else… and without action or resistance, he allowed himself to be led by Moragas. They came out into the open air: behind them the cemetery wall was white; in front of them they had the expanse of the sea; and, to the right, the city, illuminated by a thousand lights. The philanthropist smiled: ineffable pride expanded his heart; his lungs drank in the salty breeze; his steps were elastic, even; he didn’t stumble on the stones; he believed he could fly. More powerful than the Head of State, he had just pardoned two human beings and regenerated two others! And when Telmo didn’t follow him as quickly as possible, and even turned his face back from time to time , looking toward the cursed shack, the Doctor bent down, put his arm around the boy’s neck, and murmured tenderly: “Go, my son.” EPILOGUE The day before the sinister day dawned, the sky covered with leaden clouds. In the afternoon, they took on a coppery hue and swayed and rolled across the firmament like waves on a sea of molten, red-hot metal. Rippled by the land breeze, the bay acquired tin tones under that sinister cloud cover, and instead of the cool winter gusts that had been blowing days before, a most unusual heat descended upon the town ; scorching gusts shook the heavy atmosphere, and that suffocating vapor that precedes a gust of wind rose from the ground. This hot and terrible air is common in Marineda, weighing on nature as much as on the spirit. It seems that under its lethal breath, vegetation withers, the sea shudders, the light turns livid, and man falls into a deep slumber or an insane vertigo. Dull anguish oppresses the lungs, and never with greater reason than at such a time could a poet of sorrow say like the Hebrew prophet: “My soul gazed with tedium upon my life.” The people of Marinedo observed the atmospheric state, and although it was not unusual, it seemed to them that it had, on such an occasion, something of fateful symbolism. A workshop owner, threatened with losing the parish of the Audiencia, Regency, and Captaincy General if he did not accept the horrible commission, had bought the day’s wages of two unfortunate workers, who, guarded by the police and amidst the jeers and murmurs of the common people, had begun to raise the fearful armadillo of the scaffold. The posts driven in, the ladder nailed down, God knows how, they postponed the rest of the nameless work until the darkness of the night protected it: they feared that the placement of the post and the stool would earn them a stone; At the very moment when the carpenters, feigning retreat, grabbed their tool baskets and tried to get drunk through suspicious alleyways, heads bowed, pale with shame, and eager to quickly find a tabernacle where the liquor would give them courage to finish their task at midnight; at the very moment when Brigadier Cartoné entered the jail to take a bundle of cigars to the prisoner who was in the chapel, and to the prisoner, on behalf of the Brigadier, a scapular of the Virgin of the Guard; at the very moment when the clock of the Marinedina Court, or as they say there, of the Palace, struck a single, vibrant, solemn chime—five thirty—a man, who was keeping close to the wall and keeping to himself, skirted the lonely plaza. where the main facade of the aforementioned Palace stands out, and, avoiding the sentries guarding the Captaincy General, he slipped through the door of the Court of Appeals into the gloomy hallway that leads to the Courtrooms of the Tribunal of Justice. The doorman, seeing the man, made a significant gesture, as if to say, “I know why you’re here,” and, taking down the lamp that lit him up to read a newspaper, preceded the newcomer, and both went into the corridor that leads to the Criminal Courtroom. Before entering, the man paused, overwhelmed by the sight of the wardrobe where the lawyers’ robes and caps hung. In the dubious light, and in such a place, the flaccid togas, with their sepulchral folds, looked like the black specters of hanged men. The mortarboard, distant from the toga, leaves a gap that resembles the face, and the slight flutter represents the hand. Mastering his first instinctive movement, he continued onward. The doorman opened the hall; he applied a match to the nozzle of a gas arm, and the bright blue and gold light flashed, fully illuminating the room. “Is it for that?” inflected the doorman, who was an old man with a cold and trembling face. “Well, it would be better if I brought it here. You can’t see anything there, and with so much clutter, you can’t even move… Come on, I’m going for everything. Wait.” The man remained alone in the temple of the Law. His eyes wandered aimlessly around the room, which, solitary and silent, now took on a strange majesty, something that would inspire respect in the least reflective person. The walls were dressed in venerable crimson damask, the fabric of etiquette and officialdom in Spain, which harmonizes so well with the gilded moldings and provides such a rich background for the austere heads of the clergy and the judiciary. The armchairs were of the same fabric, over whose dull gold carvings the scales of Themis and the avenging sword flourished. The table and the Prosecutor’s tribune were covered in the same shade of intense purple. Under the President’s canopy, King Alfonso XII, yellowish, insulted by the brush of a bad portraitist, fixed his intelligent and sad eyes on the spectator. The arrogant coat of arms of Spain, embroidered in gold, decorated the backs of the pews, made of threadbare maroon velvet. No doubt due to the state of his soul, the man believed he was swimming in a pool of blood. That vivid color that surrounded him made him want to tear, to tear out; impulses of a hunted bull, destructive, ferocious, blind. “If only I could tear the courtroom to pieces!” he thought, while in his deranged head furious voices resounded. He was momentarily brought back to his senses by the entrance of the doorman, carrying two rectangular boxes in his hands. “They were the instruments that are kept in the Court, in a dark cubbyhole, hidden as if they were evidence of a crime, until, on the eve of the execution, the executioner collects them to fit them to the pole… The doorman placed the boxes on the table, not without a certain visible repugnance, and Juan Rojo, apparently calm now, serious and possessed of his role, approached and lifted the lid in order to examine the contents. Beneath the oil-soaked cloths, shining and clean as if freshly rubbed, appeared one of the two garrotes: the one modified exactly according to Rojo’s instructions. This deadly device, which produces death by both strangulation and asphyxiation, has the defect that the iron shaft where the stork is connected occasionally recoils , and if the tourniquet fails to shatter the cervical vertebrae quickly enough and reduce the neck to the diameter of a piece of paper, the victim’s agony can be prolonged for a period of time that would allow for infinite horror. Not so much for this consideration as for fear of failure and a shout, Juan Rojo had devised to fasten the claw that secures the lever or stork in an ingenious and secure way, and he was proud of his work. That perfected club was the first he registered…. Then he examined the second, making sure that both turned well; and closing the boxes and wrapping them in torn cloth of black serge, he hid them under his cloak, without saying a word to the doorman, who didn’t seem too talkative either. Seeing that Rojo was carrying his clothes, the old man coughed, gurgled, walked around the gas station, and taking up his smoky torch again, silently led the way to the door. Until Rojo crossed the threshold, he didn’t say to him in a tone more ironic than friendly: “Well, boring… Feeling in your hands. And enjoy!” Rojo could no longer hear him, nor could he hear anyone but himself. After the stubborn and delirious insomnia; after having replaced food with drink, without achieving the beneficial intoxication; after a whole day of turning over the same ideas in the narrow, aching cavity of his skull, close to bursting, Juan Rojo always stumbled against a hard rock wall: the impossibility of disobedience. “Authority commands…. I can’t refuse! I’m a civil servant…. They have rights over me!” He remembered his promise, of course; but what does a _free_, voluntary promise mean, against a higher command, an _obligation_? “No, I can’t refuse…. Who am I to refuse?” A problem without a solution for Rojo…. I’m lying…. A solution had occurred to him in the hours of solitary despair he spent without sleeping, seeing Telmo’s bed empty, and the room empty, emptier than everyone else… And during the day the solution presented itself again, clear, simple, comforting, and tremendous…. It was in the afternoon, when the first gusts of _sunny_ air came, like vapors from an infernal cauldron, to shake the atmosphere of Marítimo. Rojo had just tied the ends of an old shawl, a shawl that had belonged to his wife and that would serve as a trunk for Telmo’s clothes. Juliana was in charge of taking it to the Doctor’s house. The sight of those remains of the shipwreck of his life evoked in Rojo the memory of past and present agonies. He saw again, as if he had them before him, with the lucidity that one acquires in the supreme hours, María and Telmo; but not Telmo now grown, but just as he had been in his mother’s arms; he saw his chubby little hands emerging from the warm shawl in which he was wrapped and groping for his maternal breast… Mother and child, thus squeezed, full of intimacy, of communicative sweetness, laughed, flattered each other; But as Juan Rojo drew near, the group broke up: the mother threw the baby far, far away, and fled so quickly that it seemed as if it had dissolved into smoke in the air… “So as not to disobey and at the same time keep one’s word…” Rojo thought again a few hours later, as he headed toward his hut, clutching the two rectangular boxes under his arm. They were no longer visible when he entered the loft: groping—he refused to turn on a light—he searched for something on a table, and, setting his load down, found what he wanted: a bottle and a glass. He took a long drink and seemed to see his dark destiny more clearly, confirming himself in the fact that he had no other way out, no other relief to hope for. The only way was to fulfill the duties he understood bound him to the Law, to social Justice, and to public Vindication—entities that are children of conscience, and which, for that very reason, cannot rise above their august geniture…. —Another sip… and courage. —A shudder, a horror ran through the veins of the man whose job it was to kill. He savored the absinthe of that fright, and faced it, and managed to make it less bitter. Bah! A second, a kick, even less, the convulsion of a tied body, as a screw sinks into the vertebrae… That and nothing more is death. —He muffled himself and left. They were ringing the Rosary in the nearby chapel, and Rojo hesitated at first, and then entered slowly, and knelt among the groups of women. The sacristan’s nasal voice rose as he began the prayer, but Rojo took no part in it: his throat could not articulate sounds, and he felt it, because he was a believer and longed to pray then. A neighbor recognized him and pointed at another with her finger, showing displeasure and disapproval. Rojo felt a boil of anger. “They don’t allow my company here either, spark! Point me out, point me out, old woman of the Devil, for what you have to show me… He went out again, and with a calm step, deeply absorbed, he took the road to the Tower. The light from the Lighthouse attracted his eyes; he imagined that from there, rather than in the chapel, someone was looking at him piously. However , after ten steps he turned back; he entered the hut again, and picked up the wrapping of the boxes. Carrying them well, he began the ascent again. The road wound, and through barren fields surrounded by rocks, it climbed to the promontory, where the Phoenician Tower rises imposingly, justifying its title of sentinel of the seas. The thud of the Ocean could be heard ever closer as it bounced against the rocks, and a powerful, vivid air, as rough as the coast itself, whipped Red’s gray hair. —Now at the foot of the high platform resting on the breakwater, Rojo stopped, and instead of climbing the steps, he entered the wastelands and marshes that lead to the sandbank of Las Ánimas, which perhaps owes its funereal name to the many victims who succumb each winter in the barnacle fishing in such a fearful place. Before Rojo could set foot on the sandbank, he was stopped, freezing his blood in his veins, by the lugubrious and terrifying roar of two swollen, concave waves, which, as they broke, splashed him with foam… And it was not a stormy day, nor was it perhaps the highest tide of the equinox; But the Cove of the Souls must have such a special make-up that the ocean, pouring into it, finds itself captured, wounded, subjugated, and rages and leaps in a crushing whirlpool, and wants to scale the sky…. Juan Rojo felt both frightened and deafened at the same time. The waves, with their mysterious whiteness close by and their colorless immensity far away, flattened his soul, and like a sailor throwing ballast over the side, he threw the boxes he had clutched under his arm into the surf. The waves did not interrupt their hoarse clamor, like an ardent pack chasing a beast. Telmo’s father turned his back on the sea and, not seeing it, recovered his courage; he left his cape and hat on a rock; he took a handkerchief from his pocket; he contemplated the light of the Lighthouse intensely for a minute; Then he folded the handkerchief and bandaged his eyes, pulling it tight so that it also covered his ears, so as not to hear the voice of the abyss, which would make him retreat. And so, blind and deaf, he walked with his arms stretched out before him , until suddenly he felt enveloped, caught, dragged, and the water, flooding his lungs, smothered the supreme cry. At the end of this intriguing novel, we find ourselves with a reflection on the weight of our decisions and the influence they exert on our lives and those of those around us. The Cornerstone is not only a tale of love and sacrifice, but also an exploration of human nature, showing that every action, no matter how small , can change the course of history. Thank you for joining us on this literary journey; we hope it has been as fascinating for you as it was for us.
¡Sumérgete en una historia fascinante de intriga y reflexión con *La piedra angular: novela* de la condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán! En esta obra, la autora nos transporta a una trama llena de giros inesperados y personajes complejos que exploran las emociones humanas y las luchas internas. Acompaña a los personajes mientras enfrentan sus propios dilemas y el destino que les aguarda. ✨📖
🔹 **Una novela de misterio y profundidad emocional**
🔹 **Explora los conflictos entre lo racional y lo sentimental**
🔹 **Una obra clave de la literatura española**
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