I shook my head in silence.
“Thank you, señor,” I said in a moment and got up. “Your advice has been useful, as always.”
“I wish I could say the same,” the doctor laughed, also getting up. “Come on, come with me to visit Doña Maria Hermencia. That lass with the bad breath, remember? She is with child.”
“You don’t say!” I exclaimed. “It seems like only yesterday.”
“Time flies,” replied the doctor. Later, as we were leaving his study, he said: “Ditch those animals, Guimarães. Shit, manure, unreasonable peasants. . There’s no point. What’s the point of treating the lower species when you can treat the supreme species in the animal kingdom?”
“One could make some profit on it, señor,” I answered.
“Well, probably so,” said Dr. Monardes, adjusting his hat in front of the mirror. “But if you had wanted to become a merchant, you should’ve gone to study with Espinosa, not with me. But he would never have taken you.”
That was true.
However, over the next several days I continued wondering what to do. No, not about Duvar — Dr. Monardes had banished that thought from my head — but about veterinary medicine as a whole. Nourishing tobacco had fallen through, or rather, had gone to work for Señor Espinosa, but still, all was not lost for me. . In the end, however, I decided to give up on it. Of course, I could have continued to treat animals. There’s a place for everyone under the sun, as they say. The question is which place exactly. A painful feeling seized me. The world began to look narrow to me, somehow clogged up — like a spring covered by a huge stone slab. It could hardly trickle beneath it. You are surrounded by thousands of invisible walls. Some paths are permitted, while others are forbidden. The best ones are forbidden. A big stone slab is blocking them. You’ve got to be really sharp-witted, to be very strong, decisive, downright reckless to move that slab. And even then it’s far from sure. You are more likely to crack your head on it. Because it isn’t just sitting there on the path. They’re guarding it. Espinosa’s people are there, that Captain Alvarez is there, Duke de Leon and his friends, even Rincon is there, in fact, and he’s guarding it, too. You don’t stand a chance. No chance at all. You can pass by only if they let you. And why would they let you? There would have to be some very special reason.
At the beginning of the next week, the doctor and I were on our way to Utrera and passed through Dos Hermanas. It was a warm, sunny day and animals could be seen on the hills along the road — mostly pigs, but also cows, some shaggy white sheep here and there, donkeys, dogs, horses, buffalo. Animals. Sorrow suddenly gripped me. I stuck my head out the carriage window, my eyes teared up. Animals are good, especially when you are looking at them from a distance. I would say that after the tricks with smoke in the taverns, they were my first serious commercial undertaking. And a far more serious one, at that. I was a hair’s breadth from success. Animals could have made me rich. Just as they give food and provide a livelihood to so many people. Heartless humanity, which only torments them, uses them ruthlessly, and only feeds them so as to be able to eat them later, fattened up. Like a thousand-headed, thousand-armed predator. While animals are good. They graze gently in the fields. They wobble slightly, look around with their big, uncomprehending, good-natured eyes. I wonder what Pelletier would say about them? What would he say, if one warm sunny day he were travelling under the southern sky of Andalusia amidst the green fields, dotted with gentle (in most cases) animals, while his carriage drove even farther down, farther south, and they gradually disappeared from view? Farewell, animals! he would say. Good, gentle animals. Farewell! May God bless you and keep you! He alone can save you.
13. For the Healing of Scabs
Luisa, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old lass from Sevilla, had scabs on the back of her neck. Her parents called us to treat her. The girl wore her hair long, so the scabs couldn’t be seen, and they were not painful unless pressed, thus they had gone untreated for many years. Her parents said that she had had them since childhood. Recently, however, a new one had appeared, and the girl had asked to be treated. This, of course, was not a problem for us — tobacco heals scabs wonderfully. I stayed at the house on Santa Cruz while the doctor rubbed the scabs with tobacco, after which I parted with him and went to check on the health of a man whom the doctor had been treating for pain in the lower back. Around an hour later I returned to Luisa’s house, and what I saw downright astonished me. The girl was acting crazy. Moreover, shortly after I came in, she burst into such violent sobs that you’d think she were being sent to the gallows, and by all appearances it was somehow connected with me.
“Let’s go outside,” the doctor grabbed me by the elbow and nodded to the girl’s mother, who stayed in the room along with her little brother (her father had meanwhile gone out on business). “You seem to be upsetting the young lady somehow,” the doctor said once we were out in the yard, as he lit a cigarella with satisfaction.
“I didn’t do anything, señor. I don’t even know her at all. I saw her for the first time in my life today,” I said. And that was the truth.
“I know,” replied the doctor. “The girl isn’t in her right mind. She’s acting crazy.”
“Perhaps the lass has fallen in love with someone? That happens to them constantly at this age.”
“I don’t think so,” answered the doctor. “Her parents don’t know of her having fallen in love with anybody.”
“But would they really know if she had fallen in love with someone?”
“Oh yes, and how!” the doctor exclaimed. “Don’t forget, I have two daughters.”
“So why is she acting so crazy, then?” I wondered aloud.
“From the tobacco,” the doctor replied.
“But what all did you do to her, señor? Did you give her too much or what?. .”
“No, it was nothing out of the ordinary,” the doctor replied. “Tobacco simply has a bad effect on young girls. That’s not due to tobacco, but to Nature herself. Nature exerts terrible pressure on young girls for her own ends. It thrashes around inside them like an eel. A terrible business, I know that from my daughters. Young girls constantly look half-crazed, not quite in their right minds, somehow. This is Nature’s doing. Just add a little tobacco to that jumble as well and it turns into a complete mess. Once they marry and have children they start to pull themselves together little by little. Nature starts leaving them in peace.”
“Yes, she’s done her job,” I suggested.
“Something like that,” the doctor nodded and was seized with a fit of that prolonged, dry cough that had been bothering him lately.
“You haven’t caught cold, have you, señor?” I asked politely.
“No,” he replied. “I think it’s from tobacco.”
“From tobacco, señor?”
The doctor nodded, his cheek bulging, threw down his dying cigarella, and started coughing again.
“But I don’t cough, señor.”
“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years.”
Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.
“Let’s go inside to see what the girl is doing,” said the doctor. “If she starts bawling again when she sees you, go outside and wait for me in the carriage with Jesús. Where is he, by the way?”
“He moved around the corner, señor.”
“And what is he doing there?” the doctor wondered.
“Nothing. Just sitting there.” I didn’t dare tell him. In fact, Jesús was stomping out flamenco and collecting money in a hat. He had now started doing it in the city, too, whenever possible. I was amazed that the doctor didn’t notice the horses whinnying from time to time. He surely thought some carriages were just passing by on the street.