I was looking at Garcia and remembered a description in his novel of a bullfight; full of stock situations and cast-iron sentimentalities and impossible feats of courage and skill; something in the manner of “Casey at the Bat,” or the Kid’s last fight. He felt that in English this should prove very edifying and instructive to readers and help them understand the Spanish soul. We had argued the advisability of introducing it in his story and in the end, I convinced him by saying that it would be as silly as getting sentimentally technical in Spanish with descriptions about baseball, or to translate the Merriwell series.
Then my attention was disturbed by the meek, servile fellow, Fulano. He had spoken little and with great respect, prefixing every sentence with Doctor when addressing de los Rios, or Maestro if addressing the Moor, and Diestro and Bailador if addressing El Cogote or his brother. Garcia and I were still caballeros, and apparently he did not dare address Lunarito and the women Carmen unless spoken to first
He had finished eating and was looking attentively at my dish and then, in order, at the dishes of all the others. He was one of those persons who eat with rapid voracity, as if trying for the title of the fastest thing on teeth, and then, having won the race, sit contemplating longingly, with deep regret and unconscious indelicacy, the plate and the mouth of those about them. They do not make good dinner companions and this particular one was one of the best. Even Lunarito, who was very much engaged in conversation about women here and in Spain, and asking innumerable questions of Dr. de los Rios, noticed it:
“Have some more paella. Why don’t you help yourself? Go ahead; you are in your house.”
“Oh! Excuse me,” he answered, startled out of his reverie. “I really don’t want any more. It is only—” His arm dropped to his side and he half turned his head as if to avoid facing the audience while baring a secret: “— This habit acquired from a life of privation and misery, of hurrying to get it while one can — absolutely uncalled for here with your generosity and — You have the souls of hidalgos—” The man was almost in tears and thirstily took a long drink of wine. It was good acting and I bet he was enjoying it, feeling it was in the manner of a partial payment for what he alone priced as a debt of honor.
The consequent embarrassment fanned the fire of conversation, but I was not listening. Something extraordinary was happening. Dr. de los Rios’s eyes were sweeping from me to Fulano and back again, not focused upon us but going through, far beyond us, expressionless, cold. His gaze was like a blank abyss upon which we oscillated dizzily. I averted my eyes and looked at Fulano and for a moment felt as if I were falling into a deep well, rushing past strange visions that gradually took on very clear shapes. Perhaps it was his insignificant yielding personality which offered no resistance, perhaps it was the thick lenses of his glasses that were like little transparent wells leading into his head. I even wondered if Dr. de los Rios had anything to do with it, but I could swear that I had entered the man’s mind and was seeing and hearing him think, and at the moment he was casting himself in a sad role.
He was a heroic martyr sacrificed in the interests of his country. He was not definite on which his country was. He considered this irrelevant to the generality of the formula.
In order to carry out a secret mission that would save his people, he had endured untold tortures in silence, both physical and spiritual. He had undergone floggings and public dishonor. He savored the intimate secret scene with the ruler when he had been entrusted with the mission.
Guarding his secret against superhuman odds, he had witnessed his friends, his family and his wife cast him aside in revulsion as the treacherous man he must pretend to be for the sake of his great mission. Only the ruler of his country knew the truth, but must keep silent, because the country came first and this would in addition to his country save the world.
This inhuman torment went on, the little man seeing himself kicked from cell to dungeon, every right of a decent being denied him, until in the end, when the mission was accomplished, the whole world found out the truth and he was publicly reinstated and acclaimed.
Then a great ceremony was held in a public square and the moment of public and glorious recognition arrived. He marched very quietly between great dignitaries, at last wearing once again his beloved uniform, but he was a faltering, shaking, broken and prematurely old man and he knew everyone was saying or thinking: Look at him, see what duty has done to this man, this greatest of all men who was dishonored for the sake of honor — a pleasantly involved idea which pumped fast the lump in his throat.
Then came the great moment. He, everyone, stood at attention and the great ruler spoke:
“You, greatest of all patriots, man of unequaled courage, pride of your country, valiant—” and then: “All men will long remember—” Only the telling phrases of the speech appeared clearly: “We can never give you back your—” and ending: “—but your country, the world, will—” and the great ruler embraced him and pinned a special decoration made for the occasion, because no decoration big enough existed.
The lump in his throat was already like a goiter, his eyes were misty, and then, with great solemnity, the flag was raised for him alone, or they did whatever it was that had never been done for a man before, and the thunder of applause was deafening, but he did not hear; he looked down that long vista of suffering, leading darkly to a broken cross. His task was finished, his duty performed, but the price exacted had been too great and he knew that he was through, that the man had been the task and was finished with it. To all these honors heaped upon his broken frame, he simply answered:
“Long live my country.”
By this time his self-pity and exultation had reached the overflowing point and he wiped a furtive tear. I could not believe it myself. I was actually seeing a human being’s mind at work and, in this particular instance, it was rather foolish.
I shook myself from this, which I still considered a hallucination induced by too much wine or too much paella, or perhaps a state of self-hypnosis due to the way light struck the thick lenses, but the thing that left me uneasy was that Dr. de los Rios was no longer looking through him and through me at some unfathomable distance, but only at his plate, and he was eating with great repose.
The conversation was running from tall women to tall people in general, which all admitted were more frequent in this country than in Spain, and the Moor was expounding a theory about a race of lilliputians which he insisted would be the only salvation of the human race. He contested that producing big people by the method of eating and living was a suicidal error, racially speaking, in which the Nordics could unfortunately indulge because of their greater material facilities. By Nordics he meant Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Scandinavians, and so forth, regardless of the latitude where they lived. He claimed that Spain was saved from this fatal error because of its lesser degree of industrial development, but that the true salvation of the human race must lie in the opposite direction, by becoming smaller and smaller in size. He predicted dire results for those who, insisting on developing bigger and bigger people, must necessarily come to the stage where they cannot have enough food or room in their own place and will have to expand at the expense of others. But even this is no salvation. A time would arrive when the earth itself would not suffice, and even long before that their own size would prove their undoing. He pointed out that as every structure grows, it must reach a critical point, depending on the qualities of the material, beyond which the result must be unwieldiness and collapse. An elephant will be badly hurt by falling a few times its own height, whereas a mouse may fall many times its own height without any considerable damage, and as for a flea— It has often been said that one of the main difficulties with this world is that there are too many people. And yet science, which is supposed to use a modicum of common sense, continues to do everything possible not only to increase the span of life but the size of people, and immediately must concern itself with the production of food and the solution of traffic and living congestion problems which it has created. Completely absurd. They don’t know what it’s all about. It is logical to increase the span of life, because with its growing complexities, the lifetime of a human being is already too short to find out, if not what it’s all about, at least what some of it appears to be about, and even this would reach a dangerous limit for reasons similar in some respects to those applying to size. What should be done, and without any waste of time, is to develop a miniature human race. This would eliminate, or at least postpone for a considerable time, the problems that face it. Food would go much farther, a room would be like a building and a building like a city, a park like the jungles of Brazil, and one could go on making such comparisons for a very long time. Any of the machines which we consider necessary could remain the same. It should not be difficult for any of these miniature men to run any of them with but a few adjustments.