Manuel Gálvez

“ That afternoon Monsalvat was reading as he lay in bed. The book beside him was the New Testament. On his face was reflected something of the serenity of late afternoon. When Torres opened the window to let in air and sunshine, everything in the room seemed to draw a breath, and grow animate. A bar of light like a luminous golden coverlet spread over the bed.
"Look at that!" exclaimed the doctor. "And you spend your time shut up here almost in the dark. You'll never get well that way. You ought to go to Palermo, stay out in the sun—and not read or write a line." ”

“ To go away with Arnedo, after all her struggles to be decent! To make Monsalvat suffer so, when he was so good to her, and had given up everything for her sake! To go down again into that evil world from which he had rescued her!
"But Nacha, you must not lose courage! I thought you were quite safe. It was you who saved me! Why must you go back again, if you don't want to?"
"I have to! It's Fate! I always said I was destined to be a bad woman! Every time I tried to be good something happened to break up all my plans. Now it seems impossible for me to be decent. Everything is against me! ”

“ How much longer could a self-respecting man hold out against the challenge of that brutality?
The rapier-thrust of a violin bow gave the death stab to a dying tango. The patoteros and their women returned to their table. The fellow who had wept vociferously before broke out again into mock lamentations at sight of Nacha's tears. He stood up, rubbing his fists into his eyes, and bawling grotesquely, like the dunce in school. His mirth caught the mood of the entire cabaret. Every atom of it quivered in titters of laughter. ”

“ Fearful of analyzing his emotion, fearful that his thoughts might dwell too long on this doubt, he tried to put all his feeling and enthusiasm into his story. His words summoned before Nacha, breathlessly listening, the long caravan of his dreams, his life of other years, and his life now; he talked to her of the ideals which tormented him, and without which he could not live; and he told her that at last he had found out the purpose of a man's life: to work for others, to live for those who have need of us. ”

“ Monsalvat sat at her side, caressing her hands; but he saw facing him the two men he had been in his lifetime, and he demanded an account of them for what his life had been, looking into their very souls, cursing them; and before Nacha passed the different women who had dwelt in her body, the bad woman, and the good, the victim and the weakling.
And in that dim light, they understood one another, these two suffering human beings. The light in the heart of each shone out to the other. ”

“ Evidently this courageous stranger who had broken his way into her intimacy so suddenly had most of the requirements for success. Riga was one of those men born to fall of their own weakness, even before the battle of existence overwhelms them. But both were generous, high-minded, incapable of envy, or meanness of any kind. What good luck to have met a friend like Monsalvat at just this moment! And what an irreparable misfortune to have lost him forever!
When Arnedo came home early in the evening, he brought his friends, and their women, with him as usual. Nacha was once more lost in gloom. ”

“ Monsalvat could listen no longer. He was quivering with indignation. Usually serene, quiet, and incapable of hating anybody, he would at this moment have enjoyed strangling the individual who was taunting him so flippantly. Now he realized that all the men and women around him were his enemies, representatives of his old out-worn ideas, of prejudices which he had come to abhor. On their faces he could see only insolent satisfaction with good living, a proclamation of inhuman selfishness, a spirit of evil, hypocrisy, pride, an absence of all human sympathy. ”

“ It is the only reason for our living. If we all accepted this principle, life would be inconceivably beautiful. And what other principle makes our lives consistent with our opinions and our ideals—granted we have opinions and ideals? It is an obligation we owe to those from whom we have taken their share of happiness. There are not many who pay this debt, not many who comply with this law. People not only resist the law of love implicit in sacrifice, but they will to be selfish, and bad. But doesn't that make it all the more our duty, Nacha, to do what we can? ”

“ He noticed neither the satisfaction of the plants and grasses in the stir of life within them, nor the delight shining in the faces about him. He was alone in the Universe, a stranger to the world he lived in, for that world was now his enemy; a stranger also, through birth and station, to the world of those who are down-trodden, and oppressed. His mother dead, his sister lost, and that other woman in whom his new life had taken form, as yet unfound, he was alone. The friends of former times laughed at his ideas and ideals, said he had a new "pose," thought him crazy. ”

“ Dread of the man's violence, fear of being once more abandoned, and forced to return to her former precarious circumstances, mingled with the anxieties the day had brought her. Carlos Riga, she had only that morning learned, was dying in a hospital ward. Yet curiously, what tortured her more than grief for her former lover or fear for her own life, was the uneasiness aroused within her by the memory of how she had treated that unknown man who had so chivalrously come to her defense in the cabaret. ”

“ As he walked toward his lodgings, he tried to convince himself that this incident was not a proper cause for discouragement; that, on the contrary, it emphasized the need of going on, of struggling with these people, even against their wills, for their own good. Their ignorance was the natural consequence of such absorbing poverty. When had culture ever existed apart from a certain amount of material wellbeing? And how really poor in every sense were these unfortunate tenants of his; their minds dulled by the grind of daily toil, their vision blurred to the most obvious beauties of life. ”

“ Monsalvat was unruffled. He looked into Arnedo's eyes with so quiet and peaceable an expression that the latter could not but restrain his violence.
"Why do you take things that way?" said Monsalvat. "I wish you would listen to me with a little patience. I did come to see Nacha, not with the intentions you may have supposed, but for her good. I know that she wants to lead a decent life. Don't you think it is only just and human to encourage her? If you have ever cared for her, don't stand in her way now! At least let her save herself, if she can!" ”

“ It was one o'clock when Monsalvat came out of the cabaret. As he stepped out on the sidewalk the cold, waiting thief like at the door, leapt at his throat and face. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and walked slowly away, careless of direction, his eyes following the sidewalk in front of him as a wheel follows a groove.
At the first street corner he paused. People were leaving theatres and cafés, whirling away into the dark in taxis and automobiles. The trams were crowded. ”

“ Monsalvat protested that all this might be true from a superficial and worldly view of his life, but it only proved how false were society's standards.
"Useless and selfish," Monsalvat repeated. "Not less so than prominent politicians or ranch owners, lawyers, and men in society. We are all selfish. I do not condemn myself only. I condemn all the rest as well. The world is full of evil, selfishness, meanness—and I have shared in it all. That is why I despise myself, and abhor my past life." ”

“ Every problem in life has an answer—if we can only find it!"
She drew his head towards her and kissed him on the forehead, while her hand caressed his neck and eyes. At any other time Monsalvat would have been startled by such tenderness on her part. Only three or four times, on the occasion of some surpassing emotion, had they ever kissed; and then as brother and sister might. But now he did not know how to interpret her caresses. Was it possible that Nacha loved him? Loved him as a lover, and not as she had so persistently believed? ”

“ Youth too will leave you; and the day will come when you will be old, sick, worn out, a human rag, falling lower and lower. At last you will be, not only morally, but physically, a slave—The trader who is even now awaiting you will get you into his clutches. You will become a beast of pleasure, locked up in a house of evil; and you will have lost life, and hope—and love, too; for love has little to do with the criminal instincts of the men who will live on what you earn. ”

“ Season of awakening grace and enchanting harmony, with nothing of the torpor of hot climates, the over-vivid colorings of the tropics, nor of the sluggishness of those lands where nature puts human energy to sleep through a long winter! Springtime in Buenos Aires! The air quivers with a dust of gold, which seems to float [Pg 149] down from the brilliant sky, emanate from the trees, the flowers, and the grass, enveloping the buildings and transfiguring the human beings who pass through it. Springtime in Buenos Aires!
But for Monsalvat the spring was a season of sadness. ”

“ On some nights a sudden outburst of noise, from end to end of the hall, cuts the tango in two, as it were, with an enormous, quivering gash. A man's persistent ogling of another fellow's girl, a violent collision of dancers, the suspicion of ridicule or insult, bring threats from mouths contorted with anger, while revolvers are flourished in the air. The patota, the inevitable leading actor in such scenes, is a group of wealthy roisterers whose greatest pleasure is to annoy, insult, attack with fist or weapon, in short, transform peaceable pleasure seeking into a tavern brawl. ”

“ You will be sold like a thing, at auction. 'How much is this woman worth? So much—take her! She is yours!' And then you will fall so low that only the dens of the underworld, only the gutters of the slums, will be open to you; for you will be old, your beauty eaten away.... Then finally you will die and no one will know that you have gone. Then Nacha, you, you whom I am speaking to now, will be tossed into the potter's field like a dead dog. ”

“ Nacha reddened. Mlle. Dupont, watching her out of the corner of her eye, and a little constrained, reddened also. "Oh, I can tell at a glance! You are not like some of the other girls I have known. As for me I admire goodness so much that I cannot understand how some women ... I don't know how it is! ... you see I was brought up on very religious principles; and I can't help having such high standards about character that I really can't endure the thought of the slightest slip.... No, I always say; let a woman have all the faults she likes: but let her morals at least be above reproach!" ”

“ Failure appeared constantly in his path. For the hundredth time he went over the confession Nacha had made to him in Julieta's presence on the eve of her abduction. How could she possibly fear being attracted by Arnedo, brutal and tyrannous as he was? How, after several months of an honest and decent life, could it be so easy for her to go back to a vicious world? ”

“ When she saw Amelia she greeted her with flattering warmth, and immediately left the room with her. The stranger looked at Nacha and seemed about to speak. But Nacha was lost in wonderment over all the things that may drive a woman to her ruin. Amelia was frankness itself, and if she said she had married with the hope of leading a decent life, it must be true; so then it was her husband, on whom she had built all her hopes of decency, who had thrust her back into vice! ”

“ To generous spirits, such moral crises are natural; moments are sure to come when they must view their own conduct critically; and at such junctures they loathe their sterile past. But how many ever succeed in changing the direction of their lives? Most of us stifle this moral unrest in the depths of our consciousness; discontented and pessimistic, we go on living a life we hate, tempering the noble impulses that beset our guilty consciences with considerations of personal, even petty, interests that bid us take things as we find them. This latter was the case with Monsalvat. ”

“ Nacha went on to say that she did not love the man she had intended marrying, nor could she ever love him. Why should she sacrifice herself?"
"You are right," Monsalvat exclaimed. "A sacrifice without a purpose, of no real utility, is absurd—more than that, is immoral! We ought only to sacrifice ourselves when we love our sacrifice. I believe, Nacha, that sacrifice ought to give us our highest spiritual enjoyment!" ”

“ Pitiful salaries, with debts they can't avoid, drive them into the power of vice. A few of them may, indeed, be degenerates—off-spring of feeble-minded or alcoholic parents for whom, in a more roundabout way, we are perhaps just as much to blame. But, on the whole, the cause of the social evil, as of other evils, is in me, in Ruiz, in you, in the man going by there in that automobile, in the factory owner, in the store proprietor, in the criminal laws which give a sanction to economic injustice, in our moral ideas, in our conceptions of life—in our civilization, in short. ”

“ The boarding house to which Nacha had fled belonged to an old maid of French extraction known as Mlle. Dupont. This elderly landlady quite won Nacha's heart with her amiability and delicate ways, her politeness and her unquestionable respectability. Poor Nacha had never in her whole life been so well treated; the years she had last lived through had prepared her to be particularly surprised and pleased by the attentions with which she now found herself surrounded. ”

“ Monsalvat, sitting with one elbow on his knee, and his chin resting on his hand, was looking at her as though trying to drink in her very soul.
"We have to make ourselves over," Nacha continued, "change our natures as well as our names. [Pg 60] Do you think it is only out of shame, or because of our families, that we hide our identities? No, it isn't wholly that. Taking another name makes us seem different somehow. It's like the Carnival. Under a disguise, you can do and say all the crazy things that come into your head. ”

“ Earlier in his career Monsalvat would have been amazed that of all these people, a good sort after all, no one but this girl should understand him! But now it seemed to him quite natural. He had learned that girls such as she know the full meaning of suffering; and he knew now that grief was the school for kindness and understanding. Moreover, a girl of this profession, even though born into the laboring class, does not belong to it. Through her dealings with the rich, she acquires the ways of the rich and she learns to understand these ways. ”