“They played a joropo. From the rough, coarse, toil-worn fingers there spread out across the sensitive chords of the instrument, the flower of Venezuelan music. A flower made of race-blood, old age and its dreams; music that had come from very far away, from the inexplainable melancholy of our Carib Fathers—music, indolent and brutal, love-lustful, and cruel; music dripping through the clear nights of tropic moons like tears down the black faces of fugitive women ... plaintive, filled with rebellion and energy, like flame of hatred across the fragile cane, then again thunderous, a fitting call of bronze for war across the spaces.... In the joropo dwells the soul of our fatherland.... It is a sepulchre to guard the ashes of our dead.”
Again Garcia, enamored of music, writes: “Listen I tell you! Here comes a Creole waltz-song. Ah—how many times I have heard this song float languid and ardent like our Creole women on the sad and indifferent arms of lovers, heard it float on like a sparkling diamond-gas, across the surface of sleeping night-water ... seen it take on life and glow in the deep eyes of ranchmen at the rodeo ... in the dimming twilights of the solemn pampa.”
Passion, emotion, such as this is what I seek in story art. Cheap work does not know it. Garcia has written two books I commend. They are Búcares en Flor and Oro de Alquimia. These books hold the prose, great poets make sometimes in youth ... but seldom twice. Never in the twilight of years, because regret, although it may own a light all its own, can not gild like joy.
De Cela writes interestingly of Lima:
“Lima! Your legends and your women are beautiful. Your palaces romance-freighted and imposing; your cathedrals mysterious and solemn. In your streets dwell the Middle Age, and the age-old soul of Spain.”
The New World seems to embrace Old Spain. In Humos de Rey, by León, an old nobleman soliloquizes:
“... No one understands me. Everyone speaks an unknown tongue, and people look at me as if I were a fossil. It is not easy to find a single individual who thinks, feels, or judges as I do....
“Another age has come, with other men; there is a new world which is more than strange and inimical; more than indifferent.
“I do not need to go to cities to feel the winds of change strike me. Right here in this poor, little, old, Castilian village, dozing in shade of the tall cathedrals, where eternities have dreamed the same dream, the strangeness of a New World begins to play about me—a world that is materialistic, speed-dizzy; a peculiar life lived all on the outside; of bestial appetites of the flesh; sterile; filled with foolish emotions, plebeian ideals; and an alarming and useless scattering of spiritual energy.”