We all piled in the front seat and were off.
I will not easily forget that scene at the morgue. Going down the narrow stairs to the basement of the building we met a chauffeur coming out. At the foot of the stairs we met two men whom I surmised were the police or something like it. They greeted Dr. de los Rios and moved a little away with him and spoke in a low voice. De los Rios motioned with his head in our direction and for the second time they gave us a careless glance. Then a voice behind us said to get out of the way and we turned, and it was an attendant wheeling a man stretched out on a curved tin rack. He looked small, shriveled. I noticed the blood, the bald spot on his head as he passed. He looked so puny and vulnerable, so incapable of coping with life and so easy to eliminate by death. The pallor of Garcia was ghastly to see in that light
“What are we waiting for?” he whispered and his words caught in his throat, but when Dr. de los Rios and the two men approached us and we started walking along the room, he held back shaking and saying that he could not go on, could not do it.
Dr. de los Rios held one of his arms tightly and propelled him gently forward. One of the men moved ahead of us and we followed.
We did not find her in one of the boxes as I had expected, but in a room at the far end, on a table. Sometimes the dead look small, shrunken, and sometimes they look big and swollen. She looked big and imposing, her whole body saying: “Here I am. It is your problem.”
Garcia stood like a swaying stone pillar. Here was the woman of whom he had been ashamed and there probably was a futile and sad attempt to control his emotions. I am sure that if he had been alone with the two men, it would have been easier for him, but we were there, his friends, Spanish, creating a self-imposed conflict of loyalties and inevitable embarrassment.
And then he leaped forward and threw his arms about her, the side of his face against her breast, his eyes shut.
One of the men moved toward him, but Dr. de los Rios was nearer and lifted an unresisting Garcia. He looked at Dr. de los Rios as if he could not make him out, as if nothing in this world made any sense to him, as if he could not understand his own emotions. His sorrow, crushed between bewilderment and shame, was horrible to behold, and suddenly his tenseness melted away. He sagged against de los Rios’s chest, buried his face in his shoulder and wept like a child. His muffled voice cried that he loved her, that he wanted to admit it to us at last, that he loved her and owed her that last confession.
Now that we were going out again, Garcia did not want to leave her there but stay with her or make better arrangements for her surroundings and he babbled that this was his duty, but again Dr. de los Rios prevailed and eventually we were outside. Once more we all piled in the front seat and Dr. de los Rios said that Garcia would stay with him.
During the ride Garcia mumbled persistently whether we thought it was suicide, that she was a good swimmer: “This last quarrel we had— I could not live with that on my conscience.”
Dr. de los Rios told him not to worry, that it was not suicide: “I got the whole report and it was an accident.”
“But she was a good swimmer.”
“An accident can happen to anybody. A cramp, an unsuspected weak heart, any number of things, and it is not likely for a good swimmer to drown on purpose. Don’t worry. Don’t think that way, Garcia. I assure you that it was an accident.”
When we arrived at de los Rios’s place I wanted to leave, but he nodded toward Garcia and asked me to come in for some coffee. We went in and de los Rios told Garcia that he was going to give him a sedative. He prepared it in a glass and told him to drink it. He coaxed Garcia to a couch and threw a rug over him. Garcia turned to the wall and we saw him shake with sobs. The sobs subsided gradually and then his breathing came regularly. Dr. de los Rios’s big dog came in, went to the couch and sniffed, and then he stood as if guarding Garcia. De los Rios opened one of the windows and I opened the other. The spring night air came in and it was still quite warm. I looked at the sky and although it was already paling, the stars were bright. I stood there while de los Rios prepared the coffee and thought that this would be another warm day, the kind that Garcia liked.
We did not say much as we drank the coffee. Once I said: “You knew about the affair and how he felt about it?”
“Yes, I knew that and I know Garcia.”
I was thinking that he was understanding. He may not have been sympathetic but he was understanding and tolerant. This was one of his marked characteristics differentiating him from Don Pedro. With the Moor one could discuss personal emotions and find him sympathetic and ready to generalize them into racial or national traits and even encourage and champion them, but one felt that acting these emotions, showing them to him, would have been a waste of time; they would have gone unheeded in his mad plunge after the explanatory and esoteric formula that would bring them into line within the vaster domain of philosophical generalization. He gave the impression of being personally not above or below emotion but outside of it. With Dr. de los Rios, one was aware of the Spanish characteristic which precludes intimate personal discussions, to which he seemed unresponsive, indifferent, distracted, and he even discouraged and shrugged away any rhetorical confessions or sentimental theorizing, but one felt that one could break down before him and give way to one’s feelings as one would in the embrace of a father. With the Moor, one could discuss onself. With Dr. de los Rios, one could be oneself; but thinking it over, I am not certain which one of them was understanding and which one sympathetic. I know that neither one was both.
Dr. de los Rios rubbed his eyes, then stared with them wide open, a habitual gesture with him. I moved to the door. He said that he was going to take a shower, and since he was up already and it was too late to go to sleep with all his early appointments, he would take this opportunity to catch up on some of his accumulated work.
At the door we shook hands, a thing which Spanish friends seldom do, and I said: “He will be all right, won’t he?”
Dr. de los Rios looked past me at the quiet avenue, the crepuscular opal of the park where, in this silence, the birds could be heard already: “Well,” said he. Then he released my hand and I departed.
I decided to walk across the park. The drives and pathways were violet under the fresh green trees. I looked, listened to the birds, and for once did not think about anything. When I reached my place, the light was still burning, the manuscript on the desk, yesterday still imprisoned in the room.
This day when I met Don Pedro, the Moor, he told me that he was on his way to see Bejarano and asked me to come along, and since I had nothing to do, I went with him. Bejarano was the male half of the dancing team Lunarito and Bejarano. The Señor Olózaga, the one who backed up the Spanish Theater and was said to own El Telescopio, a man with a remarkable interest in business, had brought them from Spain to New York on a brief engagement, but their dancing had soon captured popular fancy and after appearing several times with the Moor, I mean, Pete Guz and his band, they had gone into musical comedies, visited Hollywood, taken part in moving pictures and, now back in New York, were riding the crest of their success without knowing very well, according to the Moor, what it was all about, taking everything for granted in what the Moor described with one of his favorite phrases as seraphic optimism, refusing to have their style of life changed by this civilization, sincerely on the part of Lunarito perhaps, but more as a convenient pose where Bejarano was concerned, because as Don Pedro said:
“Culture does not have the merest information regarding their minds, and in the words of that Spanish philosopher, one could say that, at most, their ignorance has lagoons, but they are clever in matters of life. They may not know how to sign their names properly, but try to put anything over on them. Just try.”