Indubitably, there existed an instinctive accord of the sentiments
between Amparito and him, an organic sympathy. She could feel for them
both, but he could not think for them both; each mental machine ran in
isolation, like two watches, which do not hear each other. She knew
whether Cæsar was sad or joyful, disheartened or spirited, merely by
looking at him. She had no need to ask him; she could read Cæsar’s
face. He could not, on his side, understand what went on behind that
little forehead and those moist and sparkling eyes.
“Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling sad?” he would ask her. He could
not reach the point of knowing by himself.
“I never succeed in knowing what you want,” he sometimes said to her,
bitterly.
“Why, you always succeed,” she used to reply.
Cæsar often wondered if the rôle of being so much loved, whether wrong
or right, was an absurd, offensive thing. In all great affections there
is one peculiarity; if one loves a person, one gets to the point of
changing that person to an idol inside oneself, and from that moment
it seems that the person divides into the unreal idol, which is like a
false picture of the adored one, and the living being, who resembles the
idolized object very slightly.
Cæsar found something absurd in being loved like that. Besides, he
found that she was dragging him away from himself. After six months of
marriage, she was making him change his ideas and his way of life, and
he was having absolutely no influence on her.
Previously he had often thought that if he lived with a woman, he should
prefer one that was spiritually foreign to him, who should look on him
like a rare plant, not with one that would want to identify herself with
his tastes and his sympathies.
With a somewhat hostile woman he would have felt an inclination to be
voluble and contradictory; with a sympathetic woman, on the contrary, he
would have seemed to himself like a circus runner whom one of his pupils
is trying to overtake, and who has to run hard to keep the record where
it belongs.
But his wife was neither one nor the other.
Amparito had an extraordinary insouciance, gaiety, facility, in
accepting life. Cæsar never ceased being amazed. She spent her days
working, talking, singing. The slightest diversion enchanted her,
the most insignificant gift aroused a lively satisfaction.
“Everything is decided, as far as you are concerned,” Cæsar used, to
tell her.
“By what?”
“By your character.”
She laughed at that.
It seemed as if she had chosen the best attitude toward life. She saw
that her husband was not religious, but she considered that an attribute
of men, and thought that God must have an especial complacency toward
husbands, if only so as not to leave wives alone in paradise.
Amparito held by a fetichistic Catholicism, conditioned by her situation
in life, and mixed with a lot of heterodox and contradictory ideas, but
she didn’t give any thought to that.
The marriage was very successful; they never had disputes or
discussions. When both were stubborn, they never noticed which one
yielded.
They had rented one rather big floor facing on the Retiro, and they
began to furnish it.
Amparito had bad taste in decoration; everything loud pleased her, and
sometimes when Cæsar laughed, she would say:
“I know I am a crazy country girl. You must tell me how to fix things.”
Cæsar decided the arrangement of a little reception-room. He chose
a light paper for the walls, some coloured engravings, and Empire
furniture. Female friends found the room very well done. Amparito used
to tell them:
“Yes, Cæsar had it done like this,” as if that were a weighty argument
with everybody.
Amparito and her father persuaded Cæsar that he ought to open an
office. All the people in Castro lamented that Cæsar did not practise
law.
He had always felt a great repugnance for that sharpers’ and skinflints’
business; but he yielded to please Amparito, and set up his office and
took an assistant who was very skillful in legal tricks. Cæsar was often
to be found writing in the office, when Amparito opened the door.
“Do you want to come here a moment?” she would say.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Look and see how this hat suits me. How do you like it?”
Cæsar would laugh and say:
“I think you ought to take off the flowers, or it ought to be smaller.”
Amparito accepted Cæsar’s suggestions as if they had been, articles of
faith.
Cæsar, on his part, had a great admiration for his wife. What strength
for facing life! What amazing energy!
“I walk among brambles and leave a piece of my clothing on every one of
them,” thought Cæsar, “and she passes artlessly between all obstacles,
with the ease of an ethereal thing. It’s extraordinary!”
It pleased Amparito to be thus observed.
Her husband used to tell her:
“You have, as it were, ten or twelve Amparitos inside of you; it often
seems to me that you are a whole round of Amparitos.”
“Well, you are not more than one Cæsar to me.”
“That’s because I have the ugly vice of talking and of being
consequential.”
“Don’t I talk?”
“Yes, in another way.”
_DOUBT_
In the spring they went to Castro, and the members of the Workmen’s Club
presented themselves before Cæsar to remind him of a project for a
Co-operative and a School, which he had promised them. They were all
ready to put up what was necessary for realizing both plans.
Cæsar listened to them, and although with great coldness, said yes,
that he was ready to initiate the scheme. A few days later, in Dr.
Ortigosa’s _Protest_, there was enthusiastic talk of the Great
Co-operative, which, when established, would improve, and at the same
time cheapen necessary articles.
The same day that the paper came out with this news, a commission of the
shopkeepers of Castro waited on Cæsar. The scheme would ruin them. It
was especially the small shopkeepers that considered themselves most
injured.
Cæsar replied that he would think it over and decide in an equitable
manner, looking for a way to harmonize the interests of all people.
Really he didn’t know what to do, and as he had no great desire to begin
new undertakings, he wanted to call the Co-operative dead, but Dr.
Ortigosa was not disposed to abandon the idea.
“It is certain that if goods are made cheaper,” said the doctor, “and
the Co-operative is opened to the public, the shopkeepers will have to
fight it, and then either they or we shall be ruined; but something else
can be done, and that is to sell articles to the public at the same
price as the tradesmen, and arrange it that members get a dividend from
the profits of the society. In that way there will be no fight, at any
rate not at first.”
They tried to do it that way, but it did not satisfy the poor people, or
calm the shopkeepers.
Cæsar, who had lost his lust for a fight, put the scheme aside; and
although it would cost him more, decided to have the construction of the
school begun.
The Municipality ceded the lot and granted a subsidy of five thousand
pesetas to start the work; Cæsar gave ten thousand, and at the
Workmen’s Club a subscription was opened, and performances were given in
the theatre to collect funds.
The school promised to be a spacious edifice with a beautiful garden.
The corner-stone was laid in the presence of the Governor of the
Province, and despite the fact that the founders’ intention was to found
a lay school, the Clerical element took part in the celebration.
When the work began, the majority of the members of the Club were
shocked to find that the masons, instead of working on the same
conditions as for other jobs, asked more pay, as if the school where
their sons might study were an institution more harmful than beneficial
for them.
Cæsar, on learning this, smiled bitterly and said:
“They are not obliged to be less of brutes than the bourgeoisie.”
From Madrid Cæsar continued sending maps for the school, engravings,
bas-reliefs, a moving-picture machine.
Dr. Ortigosa and his friends went every day to look over the work.
A year from the beginning of work, the boys and girls’ school was
opened. Dr. Ortigosa succeeded in arranging that two of the three male
teachers they procured were Free-Thinkers. One of them, a poor man who
had lived a dog’s life in some town in Andalusia, was reputed to be an
anarchist. They appointed three female teachers too, two old, and one
young, a very attractive and clever girl, who came from a town near
Bilboa.
Cæsar took part in the opening, and spoke, and received enthusiastic
applause. Despite which, Cæsar felt ill at ease among his old friends;
in his heart he knew that he was deserting them. He now thought it
unlikely, almost impossible, that that town should succeed in emerging
from obscurity and meaning something in modern life. Moreover, he
doubted about himself, began to think that he was not a hero, began to
believe that he had assigned himself a role beyond his powers; and this
precisely at the moment when the town had the most faith in him.