"Why not?"
"Of course, because by selling the other they got rid of an old thing, which I don't know how they will ever sell now."
"Yes, but they would lose a customer who brings them much gain. Don't you see, Enrique receives commissions from the whole province?"
"That's true enough; but don't you know that these traders are blinded by avarice? Uph! what wretched people. I tell you I can't bear to see tradesmen, Ricardo; I can't bear to see them, nor painters either!"
After expressing this unfavorable opinion of commerce, which, in the tribunal of her mind, she made coextensive with all industry and to the mechanical arts in general, Doña Gertrudis again closed her eyes with a gesture of woe, and continued in this strain:—
"What I am sure of, my son, is that I am not going to see you married, and that you will be obliged to postpone the wedding on my account. I feel very ill, very ill; my heart tells me that I am going to die before the day of your marriage; and the truth is, that it would be better for me to die if I have got to suffer so much."
"Come, Doña Gertrudis, don't say such things. Who is going to die? You must surely get better gradually; you will be cured, and you will be well and plump so that it will be a delight to see you."
Instead of brightening up at these words, Doña Gertrudis grew angry:—
"That's nonsense, Ricardo; my illness is mortal, even if no one thinks so; my husband won't believe it, but very soon he will be convinced of it; I don't complain merely from habit, not at all. Ay! my dear, if you knew how I suffer, sitting in this easy-chair!"
It may be declared with certainty that from the day on which the priest had invoked the nuptial blessing on Doña Gertrudis, this noble señora had done nothing else but nurse her bodily woes and tribulations, dragging out a petty existence amid the strangest and obscurest ailments that were ever known. Before the birth of her eldest daughter, Maria, she had suffered from hemorrhage and consumption. Then for several years afterwards, until her second daughter, Marta, was born, she complained of a terrible pain in her heart, so sharp and cruel that many times she had fainted away. The symptoms of this disease, as related by the patient, would fill any one with terror. Sometimes she thought she felt her heart handled and squeezed to the last degree; at others she thought that it was freezing, and then they had her shivering so that all the furs and flannels which they put on her breast had not the slightest effect, until by an abrupt transition she went into a heated oven, where she was roasted to such a degree that her hands in her paroxysms tore into fragments whatever garments she had on; again, finally, she was conscious of some animal gnawing it with his teeth, and of causing such exquisite agony that she could not refrain from shrieking. Don Maximo, the young graduate in medicine,[16] was absolutely nonplussed by such a pathological case, and at each visit he prophesied the immediate death of his patient unless the remedy for spasms which he prescribed should not instantly restore her safe and sound. As Doña Gertrudis did not make haste to die, nor did her extraordinary malady disappear, Don Maximo came to lose all faith in her. He kept up his visits to the house, but always at his regular hour, from which he rarely deviated even though Doña Gertrudis often sent for him by messengers, begging him to play the old farce over again in her sick-room. Don Maximo ended by having the greatest contempt for his noble client's infirmities, and he went so far as to characterize them publicly in the apothecary shop, where he was an assistant, as woman's cajigalinas. The exact meaning of the word cajigalinas was never known by the public or anybody else, nor can it be decided whether it was a private invention of Don Maximo's, or whether it was derived from some very ancient, even some dead, language which the licentiate had studied. The word, from its root, seems to be of Semitic origin, but I do not venture to settle this question off-hand; let the wise men decide. What is indubitable is that Don Maximo intended thereby to mean something that was insignificant, mean, or of little account; and this is enough for us to know what to make of the opinion of science in regard to Doña Gertrudis's ills.