Monsalvat had come to a crossroad in his life. For nearly forty years
he had gone straight ahead, never hesitating as to which turning to
take. But now, as though a complete transformation had occurred within
him, he seemed a stranger to himself, and he did not know where this
stranger was going.
Heretofore he had lived without criticizing the world of which he was
a part--which means that he had been fairly happy. But during the past
few months he had come to view life and himself from a critical point
of view, and he had reached the conclusion that as human beings go, he
was one of the unfortunates.
He and his sister Eugenia were illegitimate children. His father, of
the aristocracy, and rich with many millions, had, some five years
before, died suddenly without leaving a will. Fernando was intelligent
and had something of his father's manner and bearing; and as the
legitimate heirs of the Monsalvat fortune were all girls, Fernando
was given a good education while his father was still alive. In order
to keep him away from his mother, an ignorant, irresponsible woman
of the immigrant class, the boy was sent to a boarding school. It
was only during vacations that he saw her. Fernando remembered his
father's visits, the discussions with his mother, the admonitions he
himself always received. Once his father had taken the boy to one of
his ranches near Buenos Aires, a piece of property as big as an entire
state, on which were marvelous forests, a house as magnificent as a
palace, and paddocks full of splendid bulls and woolly sheep. More
clearly than anything else, he remembered how his father took him along
almost stealthily, and replied evasively when a friend, on the train,
asked who the child with him was. Later, at boarding school, some boys
who knew his father's legitimate family, enlightened him as to his own
birth.
When he left college he took up law. He was an excellent student; and
even before any regular admission to the bar, he was filling a place in
the office of a well-known lawyer. Later he became this man's partner,
made money, and won recognition. For a scruple he left the law office
and went to Europe, remaining there two years. When he returned he was
thirty-two. No longer wishing to continue in his profession, he finally
obtained a consulship to an Italian city. It was now six months since
he had returned, after seven years' absence, to settle permanently in
his own country.
Fernando's mother was still living. She was ill, and aged; indeed,
although not yet seventy, she seemed quite decrepit. Her son saw little
of her. She lived with a mulatto servant in a rather poor neighborhood,
in an apartment house facing Lezama Park. Of his own sister he had seen
little.
Monsalvat had lived as do most decent men of his social position. He
had worked hard in his law office, and as consul had rendered services
of distinction. From boyhood, books had been his chief companions.
He had taken up sociology, and from time to time he got an article
published. His opinions were respected and discussed in certain
intellectual circles. Though not socially inclined, and in spite of his
timidity and lack of confidence, he frequented the clubs and theatres
and race courses of Buenos Aires. He was not often present at more
private social affairs, for the circumstances of his birth prevented
his receiving invitations from certain quarters. While a student he
lived on an allowance from his father. Now, on his return from Europe,
he found himself possessed of no other income than three hundred
_pesos_ monthly from a piece of property which his father had given him
upon his passing his law examinations.
The knowledge of his illegitimacy had exercised an incalculable
influence on his character and general outlook on life. When he was a
student certain youths of good family had made it plain that they did
not desire his friendship; and later he had been socially snubbed on
several occasions. He was, however, inclined to exaggerate the number
of these slights. If an acquaintance failed to notice him, as he passed
along the street, he believed the omission an intentional offense. If,
at a dance, a girl chanced to refuse his proffered arm, he was beset
always with the same thought.... "She does not dare to be seen with
me.... She knows!..." If he received in his examinations a lower mark
than the one he thought he must have earned, he did not for a moment
doubt that it was the stigma of his birth which was to blame. Not a day
passed that he did not at some moment revert to this preoccupation. He
bore society no grudge; on the contrary, it seemed to him quite natural
that, dominant ideas being what they are, he should be thought less
of. Nevertheless he felt humiliated, with a vague consciousness that
his value as a social being was diminished by a misfortune beyond his
control.
All this, of course, tended to isolate him, and confirmed his
tendencies toward bookishness. He had no real friends. He felt himself
to be quite alone in life--alone spiritually, that is; for social
relations in abundance could not fail a man of his intellect and
professional position, whose character, moreover, was above reproach,
and who, in spite of an outward coldness and an almost savage shyness
that frequently took possession of him, was a kind and likeable sort of
fellow.
This sense of solitude was tempered, if at all, by one or two
experiences in love. His dealings with women were not those current
among the young men of his generation. Gossip attributed, nevertheless,
sentimental affairs to him, some of them with women of prominence in
the life of the Capital. For Monsalvat, as his acquaintances noted,
knew how to please. There was something that appealed to women in the
soft inflections of his voice, and in the deep seriousness of his
eyes. But the secret of his successes probably lay in the fact that he
awakened in women that compassion which is so ruinous to them--so much
so that Monsalvat was quite as often the pursued as the pursuer. Two
or three times he had thought himself in love--mistakenly, as he soon
discovered; and women for their part had loved him, and with passion.
But these affairs were, after all, nothing but passing gratifications
of the instinct of playfulness--little love episodes at best.
In other respects his life might have been considered a model and an
exception. He was courteous and simple in manner, with no violent
dislikes for anyone. Kind, always ready to do a good turn, he pushed
considerateness even to extremes. He lived scrupulously within his
means. He never paid court to those in whose power it was to further
his advancement. He never indulged in petty disloyalties toward his
friends nor paid off injury with injury. His relations with people
were always sincere and free from intrigue. A useful and an honest
fellow Fernando Monsalvat might have been considered by anyone. Yet,
these several months past, he had been coming to the conclusion that
he had lived in a useless sort of way, that his life had been selfish,
mediocre, barren of any good. He was most of all ashamed of his
articles on moral and social subjects, all of them colored with "class"
prejudice, mere reflections of the conventional, insincere, and rankly
individualistic standards which pervaded the University, and which
never failed of approval from climbing politicians as well as from
the cultured _élite_. Monsalvat despised himself for having lived and
thought like any other man of his social group. What real good had he
ever accomplished? He had lived for himself alone; worked for the money
that work might bring him; written to gratify an instinct of vanity, a
desire for prominence, for applause. Now he endured a hidden torment:
he was disgusted with himself, with society, and even with life,
repenting, in his soul's secret, of so many wasted years.
To generous spirits, such moral crises are natural; moments are
sure to come when they must view their own conduct critically; and
at such junctures they loathe their sterile past. But how many ever
succeed in changing the direction of their lives? Most of us stifle
this moral unrest in the depths of our consciousness; discontented
and pessimistic, we go on living a life we hate, tempering the noble
impulses that beset our guilty consciences with considerations of
personal, even petty, interests that bid us take things as we find
them. This latter was the case with Monsalvat.
Two trifling events of his days in Paris had cast a gloom over his
outlook on life.
Convinced that he ought to put an end to his solitude, he decided to
marry; and he paid court to a girl of good family with whom he had
been on pleasantly cordial terms in Rome. But no sooner did the family
and the girl herself become aware of Monsalvat's intentions, than all
friendliness on their part vanished. An officious friend intimated to
Monsalvat--he never knew whether at the girl's own request, or that of
her parents--that his attentions were not desired.
Later, at the hotel where he was stopping, he made the acquaintance
of another fellow countrywoman. Friendship and flirtation followed.
Monsalvat became interested to the point of believing himself in love.
He made an offer of marriage and was contemptuously rejected, as though
such an idea on his part were in itself an insult. In situations of
this kind Monsalvat did not suffer so much on his own account; it was
not shame of being what he was that hurt him, but a deepening sense of
the injustice inherent in people and in things.
He had given barely a thought to the imperfection, the inequalities, of
the world he was living in. Full of his own thoughts, his own books,
his own pleasures, he had paid no attention to the cry of anguish
rising from the depths of the social order--as an established, an
immutable order he had accepted it all along.
The fact that not till he had felt them himself had he opened his eyes
to the flagrant injustices of society aroused a deep self-reproach in
Monsalvat. It seemed to him that at the bottom of his new opinions
purely selfish motives lay. On the other hand, it was to the universal,
the human aspects of his own case that he gave his attention. Besides,
does not selfishness play a little part in our striving toward the
greatest ends?
It was some six months before the scenes in the cabaret, that Fernando
Monsalvat, disheartened and disillusioned, had arrived in Buenos
Aires. At first it startled him to find himself judging people and
institutions so mercilessly. Why did he see everything in its darkest
colors? Had he become an incorrigible cynic? Eventually he came to
understand that the severe judgments he was formulating were the
natural consequence of the critical spirit now aroused within him. In
the complex motivation of the finest, noblest, most heroic gestures of
men, how many small, unconfessable impulses always have their play?
One afternoon chance revealed to him in vivid colors the degree to
which his life had been self-centered. The taxi in which he happened to
be riding came to a standstill at a turning in Lavalle Square. A crowd
was coming toward him, singing. It was a Sunday afternoon. He noticed
that all the doors of the neighborhood were closed. The singing came
nearer, swelling up from the street, rising above the tree tops. It
was an irritated, exasperated, tumultuous mob which was approaching;
and a song which both alarmed and attracted him was resounding from
hundreds of mouths, its spirit typified in the red flag waving above
the multitude. He got out of the taxi, and at that moment a bugle
sounded. The mob fell in on itself like a punctured balloon. There was
a volley of rifle shots, and in the confusion he could see the police
charging blindly with their swords. The song continued, however, for
a time; then the regimented violence of the Law was stronger than the
impulsive violence of the _Internationale_. The rabble broke into the
side streets and dispersed. The swords of the police eagerly sought out
the wretches crouching for shelter in the doorways. Other wretches were
in headlong flight, their eyes wide with terror. No one was paying any
attention to the dead or wounded. Doors and windows remained closed
and silent. To Monsalvat, sick with indignation, his soul flaming in
outrage, this very silence seemed a horrible complicity in a crime.
His transformation, however, was purely an inner one. To be sure, he
had somewhat changed his manner of living: he no longer went to his
club nor to parties; he avoided most of his former friends. But, after
all, what had he actually done these six months past? Had he perchance
even discovered the road he really wanted to take? He was ceaselessly
tormented by these questions, which plunged him for hours at a time
into inconclusive meditations.
On one point he was resolved: he would not resume his practice of
law. What need had he to earn money? To save it up? To spend it on
amusements? At any rate, he might give it away. But to whom, and how?
A friend, a successful lawyer, who had a high opinion of Monsalvat's
judicial learning, proposed making him a partner in his firm; but
Monsalvat did not accept the offer. He thought, finally, he would
prefer a clerkship in the Department of Foreign Relations, where his
seven years as consul would count, and where, too, he was already
looked upon with great favor. The Minister had promised him a post and
the appointment would be coming along almost any day.
Meanwhile he roamed the streets, gloomy and preoccupied, fleeing from
his acquaintances and the Centennial festivities of the fashionable
quarters to wander through the tenement districts and the slums.
Sometimes he would join the spectators of some street entertainment;
and as he listened to the talk of those about him, or spoke to them,
men and women, it surprised him to feel suddenly so much at home
with these poor people, so at one with them; till he remembered that
through his mother--born of laborers who had worked their way up to the
shopkeeping class--he, too, was _pueblo_, very much _pueblo_, a true
child of the proletariat.
One day he went to see the building--a small tenement--on the income
from which he was living. The house was a loathsome plague-spot in
which some fifteen wretched families lodged. How was it that it had
never before occurred to him to look this house up, he wondered,
disgusted with himself. And why had his agent never reported such
conditions? Then he remembered that he had visited the property in
person several times before his second trip to Europe; save that
then all this poverty and squalor seemed to him a natural, even an
excellent, thing! Was it not just this sort of surroundings which
pricked the ambition of these laboring people, spurred them to work
their way up to the comfort they had learned through hard experience
to appreciate? Was not this very misery the first rung on the ladder
of progress in this blessed country of opportunity, where "no one need
be poor unless he chooses to be"? Monsalvat thought with shame of his
earlier adherence to "economic liberalism," a toothless theory, surely
invented by the rich that they might continue to exploit the poor! How
much he would have given now never to have written those fine articles
of his! He went away resolved to mortgage the tenement, and put the
money into improvements which would make the building sanitary at least.
The people of his old world, his men friends especially, made fun
of his new views. He had not been talking much of his recent mental
struggles; but his aloofness, coupled with a few articles of his
giving voice to the protest within him, annoyed not a few of the
distinguished persons who had been wont to applaud him. Something had
gone wrong inside this man; and society commented on the change without
forbearance. Some said he was crazy, others thought there was something
off with his liver or his spleen. More than one of his old admirers
looked at him with a kind of fear. What was he going to do next?
Perhaps break with all established institutions.
Monsalvat, however, was nobody's enemy. Feelings of revolt could not
live long in his heart, but became transformed, soon after birth, into
a nameless anguish, a physical and moral uneasiness. He hated only
himself. His rebellion was a rebellion only against his own selfish
years.
What was it he wanted now? What was he looking for? What road was he
going to choose? He did not know. Around him he felt a great emptiness
that was ever growing greater. Wherever he went a sense of infinite
loneliness accompanied him. He spent hours pondering the future.
Meanwhile he had grown strangely sensitive emotionally; and it seemed
as though the moment had come when his outward life, as well, must
undergo its transformation.
One night idle curiosity led him to a cabaret. He knew little of this
form of diversion. The "show" entertained him; the tangos and the
orchestra stirred his emotions. This place of amusement seemed to be
a note of color in the bleak immensity of Buenos Aires. On the other
hand, he felt more alone than ever before. In all that dancing, in all
that music, he found, he scarcely knew why, the same sadness which was
in his soul. At times when the mandola wailed in a crescendo from the
depth of some vulgar popular tune--fraught with all the coarseness and
abjections of the tenements of the city--he seemed to hear in it a cry
of loneliness, despair, and bitterness rising from the dregs of life
itself.
It was on that night that his eyes first met Nacha's. They looked at
one another with surprise, and with a shade of embarrassment, as though
they knew one another. The girl lost her composure, lowered her eyes,
twisted her fingers nervously. For two hours Monsalvat lingered in
the cabaret, persisting in this flirtation. He did not understand why
he had never liked loose women; indeed, it all seemed to him rather
absurd--though the girl did have pretty eyes! Perhaps she was not what
she seemed! Perhaps she might some day love him, chance permitting.
Perhaps his loneliness would be more bearable if a woman like her were
there to sympathize with him. When she left the cabaret, he followed in
a taxi. With her companion, she went into a house. Monsalvat concluded
that she lived there. He got out of the taxi, and loitered about in the
middle of the dark street. She came out on the balcony for a moment,
casting two or three rapid glances in his direction.
A few nights later Monsalvat returned to the cabaret. He did not find
her there. His loneliness again became unbearably acute, and his
restlessness intolerable. It seemed to him more than ever imperative
that he find some purpose in life again, some clear comprehension of
his mission and destiny.
A few days later the scene in the cabaret occurred.