We were taking tea in the house of a lady who is a friend of mine, and
the talk turned upon the social dramas which develop from act to act,
unheeded of the world,--dramas with whose leading characters we have
been acquainted, if indeed we have not ourselves played a part in one or
another of their scenes.
Among numerous other persons whom I do not remember, there was a girl of
the blonde type, fair and slender, who, if she had had a lapful of
flowers in place of the blear-eyed little dog that growled half hidden
in the wide folds of her skirt, might have been compared without
exaggeration to Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
So pure was the white of her forehead, the azure of her eyes.
Conversing with the fair girl was a young man, who stood with one hand
resting on the _causeuse_ of blue velvet where she sat and the other
caressing the precious trinkets of his gold chain. In his affected
pronunciation a slight foreign accent was noticeable, despite the fact
that his look and bearing were as Spanish as those of the Cid or
Bernardo del Carpio.
A gentleman of mature years, tall, thin, of distinguished and courteous
manners, who seemed seriously preoccupied with the operation of
sweetening to the exact point his cup of tea, completed the group
nearest the fireplace, in whose warmth I sat down to tell this human
history. It seems like a fable, but it is not; one could make a book of
it; I have done so several times in imagination. Nevertheless, I will
tell it in few words, since for him to whom it is given to comprehend
it, these few will be more than enough.
Andrés, for so the hero of my tale was called, was one of those men
whose hearts abound with feeling for which they have found no outlet,
and with love that has no object on which to spend itself.
An orphan almost from his birth, he was left in the care of relatives. I
do not know the details of his childhood; I can only say that whenever
it was mentioned, his face would cloud and he would exclaim, with a
sigh: “That is over now.”
We all say the same, sadly recalling bygone joys. But was this the
explanation of his words? I repeat that I do not know; but I suspect
not.
As soon as he was grown, he launched out into the world. Though I would
not calumniate it, the fact remains that the world for the poor, and
especially for a certain class of the poor, is not a Paradise nor
anything like it. Andrés was, as the saying goes, one of those people
who rise, most days, with nothing to look forward to but twenty-four
hours more. Judge then, my readers, what would be the state of a spirit
all idealism, all love, put to the no less difficult than prosaic task
of seeking our daily bread.
Yet sometimes, sitting on the edge of his lonely bed, his elbows on his
knees and his head between his hands, he would exclaim:
“If I only had something to love with all my heart! A wife, a horse,
even a dog!”
As he had not a copper to spare, it was not possible for him to get
anything,--not any object on which to satisfy his hunger to love. This
waxed to such a point that in its acute attacks he came to feel an
affection for the wretched closet where he slept, the scanty furniture
that met his needs, his very landlady, that patron saint who was his
evil genius.
This is not at all surprising; Josephus relates that during the siege of
Jerusalem hunger reached such a point that mothers devoured their
children.
There came a day when he was able to secure a very small living wage.
The evening of that day, when he was returning to his boarding-house, on
crossing a narrow street he heard a sort of wail, like the crying of a
new-born child. He had taken but a few steps further after hearing those
doleful sounds, when he exclaimed, stopping short:
“What the deuce is that?”
And he touched with the toe of his shoe a soft object that moved, and
fell again to mewling and whining. It was one of those new-born puppies
that people cast out to the mercy of the rubbish heap.
“Providence has placed it in my path,” said Andrés to himself, picking
it up and wrapping it in the skirt of his coat; and he carried it to his
miserable lodging.
“What now!” grumbled the landlady on seeing him enter with the puppy;
“all we needed was this fresh nuisance in the house. Take it back this
minute to where you found it, or else look up new quarters for the two
of you to-morrow.”
The next day Andrés was turned out of the house, and in the course of
two or three months he left some two hundred more, for the same reason.
But for all these inconveniences, and a thousand others which it is
impossible to detail, he was richly compensated by the intelligence and
affection of the dog, with whom he diverted himself as with a person in
his long hours of solitude and _ennui_. They ate together, they enjoyed
their siestas together, and together they would take a turn in the
Ronda, or go to walk along the Carabanchel road.
Evening gatherings, fashionable promenades, theatres, cafés, places
where dogs are not allowed or would be in the way, were forbidden to our
hero, who sometimes exclaimed from the fulness of his heart, as he
responded to the caresses of his very own:
“Doggy mine! you can do everything but talk.”