This made Garcia laugh and he said that there was no danger of that. He had wanted an experience and he had had it and that was enough for him. Instead he was going to work earnestly, and to prove this he went on to read a section which dealt with the oldest son of the Sandovals:
Enrique Sandoval was a tall, thin boy, the darkness of his complexion nearing a sinister shade. There were decided contrasts among the members of the younger Sandoval generation.
Enrique had an aquiline nose, sharp features, sunken eyes, very thick eyebrows and very black hair.
His intelligence was very limited. Compelled by his father, he had with great difficulty studied a business career, although as a child he had wanted to be a general of artillery and later a physician. His father, however, thought better of a business career and Enrique took it up. He took the examinations twice and the second time he managed to come through. He then graduated to his father’s shop to help him, gain experience, and complicate matters.
He did not seem to profit much by his education. The pursuit of pleasure was the sole object of his existence, whether at a gambling table, a café or in bed.
His somewhat warped nature was first encouraged when still a child by the maids of the house, who in more ways than one were responsible for his later development. From a very early age he showed a marked degree of discrimination about being punished. When his father did it, he showed very plainly that he did not like it, but if it happened to be his mother or one of the maids, he did not appear to mind it much but rather taunt them into it.
As a matter of fact, at the age of four or five, he was in the habit of going into the kitchen and addressing a husky washerwoman, after ascertaining that no one else was around:
“Spank baby,” he beseeched her and presented his buttocks with all the meekness of a monk before an irate abbot. He had developed a predilection for being spanked, particularly by the husky washerwoman.
She would spank him once and then send him away: “Go on, you little—” she would say wonderingly. “And don’t come back in five minutes and make me waste time. One of these days I am going to spank you real hard and then you won’t like it so well.”
“I wish you would. You never spank me hard enough.”
The description was built up out of several other such foolish incidents, then a cursory description of a life of excesses which in the end turned the boy into a full-fledged victim of epilepsy. I suggested to Garcia that he check up on his facts. He acknowledged my remark with a nod of his head without stopping:
It was soon after he began to work at the jewelry shop that he made the acquaintance of a certain girl who exhausted both his scanty vitality and abundant money and soon made a worse case of him. He was absent from the store for days at a time, burying himself in the room she kept on the Street of Jacometrezo, there to smother his epileptic attacks in her arms.
When he showed up at home, he was haggard, his eyes were more sunken than ever and he looked like a corpse. Then his mother would flare out in a fusillade against the girclass="underline"
“Look at him! See how he comes! That cheap puta is killing him. He could get better ones for one peseta, but who knows what she is doing to him. A boy in his condition! She is killing him.”
“Don’t talk that way before the girls, Trini. And please let me handle this, will you?” Fernando shouted.
“But look at him!” And then shaking Enrique by the lapels as if he were a rag: “What do you think you are? You are not even half a man. You can’t stand that life. You haven’t the physique for it. She will finish you like any other woman would and then throw you aside. Tell me, what is she doing to you?”
Then Enrique lost his temper: “Leave me alone. I tell you to leave me alone. I am not a child anymore and I suppose that I can take care of myself. You are driving me crazy with your constant bickering. I am going to leave this accursed house someday and never return.” He went into a frenzy and collapsed on a sofa, sobbing and cursing.
“Trini! I tell you to let me handle this. Who is master in this house? Or are we all going crazy too?”
Fernando’s handling of the situation only served to make things worse. He limited himself to an avalanche of insults and oaths, offering as pitiful a spectacle as his son, if not more so.
“Is that the way you are dragging our name through the streets with that prostitute?”
“I don’t allow any man to call my woman a prostitute, do you hear?”
“And damn it! I don’t allow any son of mine to get cocky with me. If you want to settle this matter as man to man, you can forget that I am your father, but remember that I am as much of a male as the next one.”
Trini could restrain herself no longer and joined in. This was too much to miss: “Now you are going off the main track, Fernando, and losing your authority.”
“You keep out of this. Does he think he is going to scare me?”
“No, I won’t keep out. I am his mother and I also have a right.”
“I am telling you to keep out.”
“Who do you think you are? You are as bad as he, boasting of manliness! I would like to see you before a real man. If the boy is that way, it is because he takes after you.”
“What do you mean? Let me tell you that my pants are well placed, very well placed, and the only way he takes after me is in having taken a street woman seriously.”
Then the fight became general. Lolita and Jorge joined in, Trini shouted and Enrique went into convulsions.
“What do you think you are?”
“Who is master in this house?”
“He is going to die!”
“My pants are well placed!”
“You are not even half a man.”
“We are all going crazy.”
“Help, help!”
It ended as usual in ridiculous noise, the neighbors listening and people gathering in the street below. Enrique was carried to bed in a fit and the doctor was summoned. The only one who kept out of it was Rojelia. As soon as one of these quarrels began, she locked herself in her room.
I stopped Garcia to ask him whether he had nothing to say at the opening of this second part regarding good old Ledesma, the administrator of the Sandovals’ interests, but Garcia dismissed him summarily by saying that he had not changed; he was still the same good old Ledesma. I insisted that the fellow deserved a little more attention and recognition and that he, Garcia, was in fact teaming up with the rest of his Sandovals in disregarding this fellow’s many virtues and displaying ingratitude for his long and faithful services.
“Never mind,” Garcia said impatiently. “I tell you the man did not change, he let me down. What can I do? And since you are so interested, let me inform you that I have a note somewhere about showing him asleep in an easy chair during that musical soiree I mentioned and then he wakes up when it is all over and I comment that he looked the same but older, and someone asks him whether he has enjoyed his after-dinner nap and he says yes, that he enjoys dreaming, brings back the past, lets him forget the present — memories, you know what I mean.” Garcia fumbled among his papers and came up with one: “See? I even expected to philosophize on the subject and had taken this down:”
As one grows older, one prefers what has been, scarcely tolerates what is and decidedly abhors what is going to be. The greatest virtue of a thing, then, is that it has passed, the greatest defect, that it is yet to come. In one’s opinion things are bad and are growing constantly worse. Every coming event means certain disaster. Among the things that are going to be, the vision of one’s own death looms as the most execrable, tainting the horizon with the most somber and depressing hues. One sees every future event through these funereal shadows, everything appears wrapped in ominous clouds of pessimism, whether it be social changes, new ideas or even the smallest change of routine. One dislikes everything modern, everything new, including young people, because all these things represent the flow of time, because everything that enters this world is taking the place of something that is leaving it. One becomes a conservative and wants things to stay as they are because perhaps thus one will stay as one is. All because the future harbors one’s death, man’s most implacable enemy of which one only becomes emotionally aware with maturity. One lives on memories because one does not dare look at such a dismal future.