I do not know how I happen to be in this café. The clock strikes
midnight, the hour when the Christ was born. I am here, alone, in a
boisterous crowd. I have fallen to analyzing my life since I left my
father's roof, and for the first time I am horror-stricken at the
painful struggle of the poet in Madrid,--a struggle in which so much
affection, so much peace, is sacrificed to a vain ambition.
I have watched the bards of the nineteenth century writing the local;
I have watched the Muse, scissors in hand, making clippings; I have
seen men who in other ages would have written a national epic busily
patching up editorials to rehabilitate a party and earn fifty dollars
a month.
Poor children of God! Poor poets! Antonio Trueba, to whom I dedicate
this article, says,--
"I have found so many thorns on my journey that my heart aches, my
soul aches!"
And so much for my present Christmas Eve!
Then I travel back, in thought, through the bygone years. I am surely
missed at home to-night; and my mother shivers when the wind moans
in the chimney, as though those moans were my dying sighs. And she
says to the neighbors, "In such a year, when he was with us," or, "I
wonder where he is now!"
Ah, I cannot bear this! I wave you a farewell from my soul, dear
ones! I am ambitious; I am an ingrate, a bad brother, a bad son! How
can I explain it? A supernatural force leads me on, whispering, "Thou
shalt be!" The voice of damnation that spoke to me in my very cradle.
And what, pray, am I to be, poor wretch that I am?
"Soon we all shall be of those
Who come back--never!"
Ah, I do not want to go! I shall not go! I have struggled too hard to
fail. I shall return. I will triumph in life and in death. Is there
to be no compensation for the infinite anguish of my soul?