Right through this whole part, of course, and while everyone and everything was going to the dogs, Rojelia and Ledesma stood like two towers of strength, two regal examples of serenity and wisdom, seeing things falling all about them and unable to do anything; but with the entrance of Captain Albarran into the scene, they had another ally in their superiority and nobility of character even if in the end it did not seem to do anybody much good. Rojelia and her husband went to live on his farm in order to get away from all these terrible things. On the farm the reader would meet the captain’s mother: an old, wise peasant, a kindly though silent woman — one of those wonderful Spanish peasant types, in Garcia’s own words — and the younger brother, a fine upstanding lad, portraying the modern trends in country gentry, who listens to serious music and reads books, who in less ponderous moments, and quoting again from Garcia, could show his youthfulness by indulging in wholesome, clean fun. For this part Garcia had ambitious plans: everybody engaging in philosophical discussions, discussions of music which Garcia undoubtedly expected the Moor to edit, and discussions of books, which he, considering himself an authority on the subject, would handle all by himself. A sort of working-out section.
I felt that aside from the very popular idea that cities are sources of evil and the country the site of virtue, Garcia was leaning heavily on concepts gathered well outside of Spain. All this about wise old peasants and progressive youth on a milk farm where people go to take the cure is nothing but a shameless commercial that anyone can recognize and unmask. I made this clear to Garcia and said that he was on his way to becoming an imitation hack writer and that obviously he had in mind foreign consumption, as he had already confessed once before. We argued the matter animatedly until we got sidetracked from the main issue and reached the irrelevant point where I asserted without proofs and simply because it came into my head at the moment that one cannot get any good milk on farms because the best is sold to the cities where they pay well for it. Garcia was no better informed than I and therefore in no position to challenge my baseless denunciation. He stated for the record, however, that at no time had he said that it was a milk farm and went back to his book.
Here Garcia would have an opportunity to liven up his narrative by jumping back and forth from the country farm to the city dwelling, confront the reader with abrupt contrasts between a place in the sun that bathes our body and soul and the sordid lair of a clan living in discordant greed, lust and ignominy, between mind-and muscle-nourishing walks, discussing topics of intellectual interest among exuberant meadows in which everyone on the farm joined except the old lady who, on their return, greeted them with sagacious twinkling eyes to ask whether they had solved all the problems of the world, and humiliating quarrels over the last material remains of a fortune squandered in evil stupidity, where a brother and a sister lived in sin and their mother was too disillusioned and their father too weak-minded to interfere or even take notice. A blasting contrast between pastoral spiritual meanderings of succulent peripetetics and gloomy retribution of debasing rapacity.
I shook my head in dismay, but Garcia went on elaborating his grandiose plans. It was here that he expected to use what he claimed was a stroke of inspiration. On the farm, Rojelia had her first baby— subsequently Garcia never mentioned a second one — and he had conceived the daring project in those days of shocking stories of describing minutely the last stages of pregnancy and the complete delivery of the child, with country doctor blissfully devoid of newfangled ideas, the captain as attending nurse because the good doctor with unerring bucolic criterion had concluded that a husband should always be present at his children’s births and thus acquire respect for motherhood with accruing interests to his wife, and last but not least, the understanding old lady, a veteran of many such battles — she only had the captain and his brother to show for it — talking sententiously about life.
Garcia expected to dedicate a full chapter, no less, to the delivery and for this he was going to consult books on obstetrics and whatnot. He did not say, but I could see more projected assaults upon Dr. de los Rios’s busy schedule. He was convinced that this should prove a surefire trick with the readers, a courageous literary challenge to prudish critics. His persistent attacks on the harmless squeamishness of others did not stop there. He had saved for this point his most subtle contrast, what he might call the brochette that bound his plot together, when the reader, who had been dealt with as a pendulum throughout, finally came to well-deserved rest. Garcia here read a scene where Lolita, on her way to some village where she was to meet her brother Jorge, stops off at the farm for a short visit with her sister. There the horror of her life is brought to her with mind-shattering force, she breaks down and sobs in her sister’s arms, there she knows repentance and the desire for expiation, there she kisses the captain’s hand and blesses him for having saved her sister and made her so happy, and also there she meets the captain’s brother and they both fall in love. But the subtle touch, which Garcia thought that of a masterful hand, was that during the whole visit Lolita kept on a dark cloak carefully wrapped about her person. Garcia said that he expected to make his novel magnificently shocking.
The implication, too obvious to miss and too disgraceful to contemplate, considering the background, only seemed to elate Garcia. The love between Lolita and her young intellectual, nature’s nobleman, was to culminate in marriage during an epilogue or apotheosis on the sun-drenched farm which Garcia had all but written for the end of his masterpiece.
I was speechless and only continued to shake my head.
“Now what?” Garcia demanded.
The whole thing was ridiculous beyond conception; not only an objectionable plot, whether true to life or not, but the final affrontery of a young Spaniard of those days indulging in clean fun and marrying a girl with a past like that of Lolita’s — even if one lets her keep her cloak on. All that obsession with sunshine and normality, health and wholesome living intended to relieve the hangover of pornography, or perhaps to justify it; that true story alibi for militant salacity, disclosing an even more insidious fundamental prudishness; all that progressive youth and ideas nonsense, paraded like a drum majorette in shorts before the ogling eyes of those who would never visit a brothel openly. Everything was absolutely un-Spanish in its well-schooled hypocrisy and, what is worse, it was absolutely unlike Garcia. It reminded me of these diligent dirtmongers, pitchmen of smut with a holier-than-thou attitude in reverse who, in their craposanct exultation, invoke misrepresented laws of biology and even the freedom of the press to advance the cause and promote the sales of the biggest industry yet: organized sex with all its ramifications and agencies, from intimate underthings to the bridal gown, from the peep show to the maternity ward.
I thought all those things, but I only said: “I think that you are giving Spain an awful black eye.”
This was a great day for El Telescopio. When we arrived the place was resplendent with decorations and luminaries of the Spanish colony. The sun coming through the windows added to the gaiety which was not mitigated even by the joyful gloom of the Spanish music filling the rooms. There were farolitos, those paper lanterns that look like colorful concertinas, hanging from the ceiling, to be lighted later, and the whole place was decorated in very Spanish style.