The mother's grief was surely intense, but the father's affliction
was still more profound. She was transpierced with sorrow,--his pain
was aggravated by the stings of remorse. This is how it came about.
It will no doubt seem very childish to some people; however, let
them bear in mind that nothing is more open to childishness than a
deep, pure sorrow, free from any touch of worldly interests or the
secondary sufferings of unsatisfied egoism.
From the very first and all through her illness Celinina's mind was
filled with dreams of Christmas,--of the poetic celebration supremely
delightful to children. We all know how they long for the joyful
day, how crazed they are by the feverish yearning for presents and
Bethlehem mangers, by the thought of how much they will eat, by the
prospect of satiating themselves with turkey, sponge-cake, candied
almonds, and nut-pastes. Some little ones ingenuously believe that
were they only allowed to do so, they might easily stow away in their
stomachs all the displays of the Plaza Mayor and the adjacent streets.
Celinina in her intervals of relief gave her whole soul to the
engrossing theme. Her little cousins, who came to sit with her,
were older than she, and had exhausted the entire fund of human
knowledge with regard to celebrations, presents, and Bethlehem
mangers. The poor child's fancy and her longing for toys and sweets
accordingly grew more and more excited as she listened to them. In
her delirium, when the fever dragged her into its oven of torture,
her prattle was of the things that preyed upon her mind; and it
was all about beating drums and tam-tams, and singing Christmas
carols. The darkness of her brain was peopled with turkeys, crying,
gobble! gobble! and chickens that said, peep! peep! mountains of
nut-pastes that reached up to the skies, forming a _guadarrama_ of
almonds, Bethlehem mangers full of lights, and in which there were
fifty thousand million figures at the very least, great bouquets of
sweetmeats, trees laden with as many toys as can be conceived by the
most fecund Tyrolese imagination, the pond of the Retiro filled with
almond soup, red gilt-heads looking up at the cooks with coagulated
eyes, oranges falling from the skies in far greater quantities than
the drops of water during a rainstorm, and thousands and thousands of
other inexpressible prodigies.