Garcia read my thoughts like one of his own manuscripts: “Look: perhaps it is the drinks, but what is the purpose of drinking aside from the taste? This is an experiment for my own, and maybe your, satisfaction. Here we meet a compatriot, in this big city, at this hour, in this square of memories. To fail him is out of the question.”
“Of course it is out of the question, but you did not have to give him all you have. I could have given him some change.”
“I have not given him all I have. He will take what he needs and will bring the rest back.”
“He may decide he needs it all.”
“Oh no! When you give a Spaniard a foot, he does not take a yard, but returns eleven inches, and that is the experiment I am talking about. If he returns with the change, I know that Spain still lives. If he does not return. But tonight the opportunity has presented itself, and I must find out. It is worth much more than all I have. If he broke faith with a countryman, I wouldn’t give a damn what happened to me. ” Garcia was moved and his eyes were bright in the semi-darkness: “But I am sure he will come back. A faith like mine cannot be unfounded. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that he returns. ” His voice broke.
“You have, literally,” I thought, but did not say it, and then we fell silent and waited. Time dragged on, perhaps because we were waiting or because we did not speak, but Garcia smiled confidently to himself. He slid a little on the bench, his legs, one over the other, stretched before him and his hands in his empty pockets. I looked in the direction where the beggar had gone, started to say something and left it unsaid. We waited some more. One could not see the clock in the Metropolitan tower because of the trees. Garcia closed his eyes and bent his head down, a lock of white hair fell forward, and the contented smile remained. He was awaiting the verdict with serenity, with confidence.
And as I was about to plant the final stamp on my condemnation of mankind, with avowed contempt and abhorrence of all its members and an oath to trust no more such hypocritical duplicity, the man appeared walking from the opposite direction, his steps accelerated by solicitude as much as his age permitted.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, little masters,” he announced, “but I had to try a couple of places.” He patted the wineskin bursting under his arm like a fat jolly suckling and spoke to it: “Thank the gentlemen for the transfusion,” and addressing us: “She can’t talk, she is too full.” Then he took out some bills and handed them to Garcia: “There you are, little master, nine dollars and a little change.”
Garcia took the money in a matter-of-fact way. He had scored and I looked away. I was ashamed before him and the beggar, and to avoid thinking of it, I considered that wine must be pretty bad for that price, but that only made me feel worse.
“Good night, little masters, and may God repay you for contributing to the milk for an old man,” and he departed in yet another direction, merging into the shadows with furtive greatness, the wineskin held against his breast like a kidnapped child.
“Well!” exclaimed Garcia, coming to life with elation: “shall we move on?” He bounded along triumphantly and I tagged along somewhat contritely. At last I forced myself to say:
“Of course, I knew all the time that he would return. Never doubted it a moment. Once a Spaniard. ”
Garcia allowed me to come abreast of him and held my shoulder in a generous clasp: “I am glad to hear that, because I am ashamed to confess that I doubted.”
Again he had scored and then we both laughed and walked on very happily.
We crossed west and took the subway uptown. During the ride Garcia entrusted to me the last pages of what he had written on his story of the family, but had not read because of the interruption of our comments and the closing of the restaurant. He told me to look them over the next day or even that night if I wanted to stay up a little later. I got off with him at his station, which was the one before mine, and I suggested that we sit on the park side and smoke one last cigarette, but he said he was in a hurry for a bath. When we reached his corner, there was indecision and we only waved our departure without speaking. If I had mentioned seeing him later, this would have created compulsion, and if I had said good night, it would have acknowledged his weakness. So I walked the rest of the way home slowly. Then I noticed the roll of pages in my hand which I had been holding absently. I should have realized when he gave them to me that he was going home to stay and had decided on a reconciliation, but with the noise in the subway, one can’t think very clearly. Anyway, I was glad I had said nothing.
I crossed the street and walked alongside the park still conscious of Garcia’s manuscript in my hand. When I came to a bench, I sat down and began to thumb the pages. I did not want to go home yet. It had been a long winter and now one could not get enough of the outdoors. Also I felt well-disposed toward Garcia. He probably wouldn’t be around for a couple of days, then would call to ask peremptorily where had I been and invite me to come over to his house for dinner and to meet some of his landlady’s friends and perhaps her very young niece from Pennsylvania who was supposed to come for Easter and looked like my conception of a Valkyrie. All plain and merry people with whom I would have — what the devil! — a rousing good time, shoveling under the nose, as we say, and gulping Rhine or May wine with happy unconcern for the fine points of libation, out of sweeping pilsner glasses.
It was with these cuddling thoughts that I decided to go home to read the pages in my hand, at first carelessly and then gathering detached attention.
This part of the story described a trip that Serrano took with that Clotilde Bonafé, during which time he left Julieta without explanation and without money, and then it elaborated considerably on the obstinacy of her love for this undeserving and libertine character, harping strongly on the pathos of a woman abandoned with her ill-nourished children by her husband, a woman who has seen this thing coming and blames herself for loving him more the worse he treats her and for this passion which consumes her and drives her mad. The manuscript went in for much abnormal psychology and stormy emotionalism, leading to some more risqué passages on which my sight bounced along to something else, or had to digest without an opportunity to voice a protest Garcia must have had this in mind when he left the pages with me. Then the story said something about Paco gambling, contracting debts, mortgaging and eventually losing all his property, and wound up with a moralizing discourse in which he was pictured as a man who, having risen to an important and respectable position in society, falls prey to his vices and slowly but surely sinks to the lowest depths of moral and financial collapse, dragging down his household with him.
I found myself in disagreement with much of that section: its inconsistency, its presuming to lay bare and dissect what goes on inside the soul, or the head, or the heart of a woman, a thing which to me has always appeared pedantic in the extreme whether it applies to women, men, or animals, and a task to which, in my opinion, Garcia did not show himself equal, but rather dogmatic and scarcely qualified by his record. His cursory treatment of the subject, the masochistic delusions, the bait of salacity under the guise of pseudoscientific analysis and many other things. This section was corny, all right, and I suspect that this time it was not intentional. However, there was nothing I could do about it and I continued. Then I came to an amusing passage where Paco, having reached the nadir of depravity and spiritual callousness, tries to gamble with La Torre for his wife’s favors without bothering to consult her and La Torre answers: