Luis Portal came from Orense to pass a week at my house, and his society helped to quiet me down. We took such long walks and ate such quantities of bread and milk that healthy fatigue and country life did their work, preparing me to listen calmly and even assent to arguments like the following:
“What is taking place in you,” Luis used to say when we were stretched out at the foot of a chestnut, where we had divided our lunch, “is a phenomenon very common among us Spaniards. While we honestly believe that we are preparing for the future and longing for it, we live infatuated with the past, and are really the bitterest kind of traditionalists at bottom, although we call ourselves Republicans. What charms and attracts you in your Uncle Felipe’s wife is precisely that in which she is most in opposition to your ideas, your convictions, and your manner of life as a man of the nineteenth century.
“You say that Señorita Aldao realizes the ideal of a Christian woman. Nonsense, my boy! Will you kindly tell me what attractiveness we can find in that ideal if we examine it carefully? The ideal for us ought to be the woman of the present, or, better, of the future; a woman who could understand us and share our aspirations. You will say that she does not exist. Then let us try to manufacture her. She will never exist if we condemn her before she is born.
“What are the virtues which you attribute to your aunt, and which you admire so much? In what do they consist? They appear to me negative, irrational, brutal. Don’t start up in that way,—I said brutal. She has married a man who is repulsive to her, given herself up to him like an automaton, and all for what? In order not to sanction by her presence another person’s sins. Who can be held responsible for anybody’s actions but his own? That young lady is either demented or a stark fool; and the friar who countenances her and seconds her,—well, I don’t care to say what I think of him, because my tongue would run away with me. He understands better than she does what she is binding herself to, and he ought to have prevented such a barbarous affair. I tell you that the little friar,—oh, well, a friar will be a friar; but we, who undertake to bring about social changes, must differentiate ourselves from him to some extent.
“A woman such as our modern society needs would go out to service, would take in sewing, or scrub floors, if she was not happy in her father’s house, if her self-respect was wounded, but she would never give up her liberty, her heart, and her person, to such a husband. You have caught the infection of Christianity. You must get rid of it. A perfect Christian woman! And why is it that you are charmed by a perfect Christian woman? Are you, perchance, a perfect Christian man? Do you aspire to be one? Or do you believe that the destined progress of society depends upon the wife being a Christian and the husband a rationalist?
“Salustio, wake up, for you are dreaming. Are you really going to fall in love with a woman, because her ideas are contrary to yours in almost every respect? Well, suppose she were single, and you should marry her, and that she should keep burning the torch of faith,—and—well—I would not give a fig for it all. Leave her to your uncle, she is just the thing for him. They’ll make a fine couple. But for you! My boy, cure yourself of romanticism and Christianity. That does not mean that you should not make love to your auntie; but do it in a human way, without any high tragedy business. If you like her, go on! That is, so long as you are careful to avoid family dramas. Leave the dramas for the Teatro Real; even there the greater part of them are senseless. Well, you understand me, no dramas. But if you dare to tell me any more tales about Christian women and Jewish men, I’ll give you a dose of bromide. And, above all things, grind away at your studies. I shall not waste any time next year, even if Venus herself should come and be sweet on me.”
Portal’s sensible remarks did not fail to influence me greatly. At least they made me ponder on the problem of my wild enthusiasm. It was true that my aunt’s ideas and feelings were radically opposed to mine; I did not believe at all in what she venerated as dogma; her ideas of morality differed from mine; the word duty had a meaning for her different from the one I put upon it; but, nevertheless, that very difference of ideals attracted me toward her, in the same manner that a white man is sometimes charmed by the olive hue of a mulatto, or a passionate gypsy woman by the golden hair of an Englishman.
Was Portal right in saying that we knew no woman suited to us, and that we ought to search for one, to fashion her in our own image, so that she might comprehend us, and her brain work in unison with ours? Or, on the contrary, was a piquant unlikeness of souls a greater attraction, and the having in one’s own soul hidden chambers, like Blue Beard’s, where a wife would never be able to enter? Why did I exalt that woman, seeing in her a perfect type of womanhood? Why did her self-sacrifice, which would have appeared so absurd in me, seem so sublime in her?
“Luis is right on one subject,” I definitely decided; “we must devote our minds to our books; a drama in one’s own life is an enemy of study.”
In fact, I took up my books in order to take advantage of the leisure of vacation time to do a little reviewing, and when I tried to concentrate my mind on inflexible mathematics, a fearful battle raged in my brain, which I used to call, in my private dialect, the war between straight lines and curved. The straight lines were the equations, the polynomials, the theorems, the problems connected with the cutting of angles, and other such demoniacal puzzles; while the curved lines stood for amorous reveries, hatred of Jews, and all the troublesome ebullitions of my youthful fancy. At first the curved lines had the best of it, but the superior tactics and precision of the straight lines finally routed that undisciplined army, which, in the utmost confusion, retreated toward the heart, its last refuge.