“It really was quite an extraordinary case.”
“And it had also its romantic touches. Doña Micaela, drawn away from life by her passion, to join her lover in the lonely paths of nothingness. After all, not everything in love is obscene.”
“And you say that she is all right now?”
A Romance of Dogs
I. Students
After the death of my friend Garcia, Dr. José de los Rios, who had attended him in his last moments, brought me this manuscript which forms part of a kind of self-study Garcia had been composing during his life.
Dr. de los Rios told me that he thought the manuscript would interest me, as it dealt precisely with the time when Garcia and I were schoolfellows and he mentions my name in it.
Aside from the personal interest that this narrative holds for me as a document of my early friendship with Garcia, and the vivid recollections it brings of that period of our lives, I consider that it finds an adequate place in this book and, therefore, am taking the liberty of introducing it here.
This manuscript is perhaps a bit disorderly, obscure or even incoherent, but its deep sincerity renders it, I believe, worthy of a tolerant reading.
CHAPTER
All my memories around the age of ten are wrapped in a cloud resembling those heavenly clouds in the saints’ pictures which I used to be given and which I always put aside carefully with a dry and tasteless feeling of duty. All these memories are sprinkled with sadistic scenes portrayed in the pictures: A woman with her heart pierced by many arrows, a man on a cross, bleeding, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a celluloid picture with only a heart aflame.
There are many other pictures which I cannot clearly see, but these three stand out of the fog which surrounds my memories, they stand out as clearly as a man and a woman whom I also remember at that period and a subtle romantic feeling about their lives which either my childish intuition disclosed or my childish imagination fancied to be intimately blended with them.
Why my recollections of that period are so confused must not be held against my memory. I flatter myself at having developed a good ability to remember things and as a matter of fact I remember with amazing precision, as will be seen by the earlier parts of this autobiography, things which took place long before the ones I am about to narrate. But as I look back now, I know that I neither suffered at that time from an attack of amnesia, nor of stupidity. I simply was sleepy.
Yes, around the age of ten, I was terribly sleepy. I remember the things that happened then as one remembers things that happen when one is half awake. And indeed it was in that general drowsiness that many things began to wake in me, that I was lulled into greater sleepiness by the rocking waves of contrary streams of sentiments and emotions, of a great confusion of matters which I did not understand but suspected and into which I went with sleepy curiosity and drowsy fear.
When I was ten or twelve, I am not even sure which, my family moved to Vizcaitia, a village in North Spain where they had been in the habit of spending summers, and I became a student at the Colegio de los Padres Salesianos. I still remember the first impression I received upon arriving at Vizcaitia then. Even at that age I was conscious of the fact that the village had grown smaller since the last time I saw it. Soon after, an existence of hardship and suffering began for me.
Although as a child I had never been particularly fond of Vizcaitia, where I always felt like a stranger unable to mix completely with the other children who spoke Vascuence, a dialect which I was always loath to learn, I had always enjoyed there a life of freedom and a certain amount of play and solace. Now I had come to Vizcaitia to live and study, rather to study than to live.
I remember the period that follows, wrapped in a cloud of confusion and horror, which even to this day has left in me a decided feeling of hatred against everything that has to do with schools or study, and perhaps many other feelings into whose description this is not the place to enter.
I was not an intern. I lived with my family and there was a good two kilometers’ walk from my house to the school which I had to take twice a day, at seven in the morning and at nine o’clock at night.
The time between these two walks was filled with study, recitations, mental strain, discipline, punishment, fear. And then to walk home at night with a leaden heart and an eighty-page assignment of history for the next day. To study at home, to poison the few moments of freedom for which I had longed all day away from that scholastic prison, amidst the warmth of my family and the tolerance of my parents so different from the cruel strictness of those priests.
And as if that whole day had not been enough to shake my nerves, that walk home was the last bitter and fearful experience of the day. In order to get home I had to pass through a certain street and in that narrow, lonely, dark street there was a big dog, a dog which seemed to have made it his business to frighten me, to bark and to attack me. And I recall taking a long detour in order to avoid the dog or, standing cold and sleepy in the rain, waiting for the horrible animal to go away, and then I remember the confused thoughts that swarmed through my brain.
I had heard the priests repeat time and again that it was necessary to suffer in order to obtain happiness and also say that the devil likes to make us suffer in order to test our faith in Providence. All these things the priests said at the school and many other things which I did not understand very well. Even at that age I was faintly aware of the absurdity of such a tragic and self-punishing attitude about life. However, there was this dog. This dog was standing between me and the home and family which made me happy, and as his shadow loomed before me and as I stood there or circled around the village the priests’ words came back to me. There was a confusion of unpleasant experience and persistent teaching and that dog became for me the symbol of suffering before attaining happiness. That dog was there to test me or to tempt me. I did not know which, and I do not know to this day whether I thought the dog was God or the devil.
But I know one thing: that the dog became for me a nightmare, an enemy. It was an object of constant fear and this, together with the fact that my nervous system was weak due to lack of sleep and overwork, formed an obsession which haunted me day and night.
I left school at night and arrived home late. I had no appetite to eat my dinner and rushed through it in order to prepare my homework. Homework after fourteen hours spent in school. Every night as my mother pressed me to eat and asked me about school, I felt the same mad desire to cry and tell her to take me away from it all, but the idea of duty, study and sacrifice had been impressed on my young brain by that constant preaching and teaching always mixed with religious and mystic doctrines. I was too young to weigh matters freely in my mind. I was terribly tired and everything was confused. I only knew that there was duty, that I had to study, and even at that age I felt that should I speak, they would not understand, just as I did not understand them when they spoke.
I did not say what I wanted and that made things worse. I answered my mother that everything was all right and then began to study, my tired brain making a useless effort to memorize as we were told to, word by word, comma by comma, lessons written in a language too abstruse for any child, rhetorical and florid passages filled with empty words whose meaning no young person could understand, and I kept at this with fear in my heart until I fell asleep at midnight. Then my mother took the books and papers from under my head and said: no estudies mas but I could not hear her. I kept at it every night and I kept at it in vain.