As George listened to him, and observed him, he thought: "Can Christine be happy with that man? Can she love him? Dear Christine, the affectionate, melancholy creature, whom I have so often seen weep from sudden effusions of tenderness, to be tied for life to that heartless creature, almost an old man, soured by the silly wrangles of provincial politics! And she has not even the consolation of finding comfort in maternity; she must be racked with worry and anguish for her child—sickly, anæmic, always pensive. Poor creature!"
He gave his sister a look full of sympathetic kindness. Christine smiled at him over the roses, inclining her head slightly to the left, with a graceful movement peculiar to her.
Seeing Diego by her side, he thought: "Who would believe they were of the same race? Christine has largely inherited the amiability of her mother; she has her mother's eyes, and, above all, has her ways and gestures. But Diego!" He observed his brother with that instinctive repulsion that every being feels in the presence of an uncongenial, contradictory, absolutely opposite being. Diego ate voraciously, without once raising his head from above his plate, wholly absorbed in his work. He was not yet twenty, but he was thick-set, already heavy on account of a commencing embonpoint, and his face was congested. His eyes, small and grayish, beneath a low forehead, did not reveal the slightest intellectual light; a yellow down covered his cheeks and strong jaws, and cast a shadow on his projecting, sensual mouth; the same down was noticeable also on his hands, the badly kept nails of which attested a disdain for personal cleanliness.
"Can I love him?" thought George. "Even to address a single insignificant word to him—even to respond to his simple greeting, I have to surmount an almost physical repugnance. When he speaks to me, his eyes never meet mine; and if by chance our eyes do meet, he averts his immediately with a strange precipitation. He reddens before me almost continually, and without apparent cause. How curious I am to know his sentiments regarding me! Without a doubt, he hates me."
By a spontaneous transition, his attention was transferred to his father, to the man whose traits Diego most truly inherited.
Stout, sanguine, powerful, the man seemed to exhale from his whole body an inexhaustible warmth of carnal vitality. His jaws were heavy, his mouth thick-lipped, imperious, full of a vehement respiration, his eyes restless and malignant-looking; his nose was swollen, freckled, and twitched spasmodically; every feature of his face bore the impress of a violent and cruel nature. Every gesture, every attitude, had the abruptness of an effort, as if the whole muscular system of his massive body was in continual struggle with the encumbering fat. His flesh, that coarse stuff full of veins, nerves, tendons, glands, and bones, full of instincts and necessities; the flesh that sweats and stinks; flesh which deforms and sickens, ulcerates and is covered with wrinkles, pimples, warts, and hairs; that bestial stuff, flesh, flourished in him with a species of impudence, and inspired in the refined visitor an unconquerable repulsion. "No, no," said George to himself. "Ten or fifteen years ago he was not like that. I remember distinctly that he was not like that. This growth of latent and unsuspected brutality appears to have occurred slowly, progressively. And I—I am that man's son!"
He observed his father. He noticed that at the angle of his eyes, on his temples, the man had a number of wrinkles, and beneath each eye a swelling, or species of violet-colored pouch. He noted the short neck, swollen, congested, apoplectic. He perceived that the mustache and hair bore traces of dye. The beginning of old age in the voluptuary, the implacable work of vice and time, the vain and clumsy artifice to hide the senile grayness, the menace of a sudden death—all these sad, miserable, and tragic things of human life filled the son's heart with profound distress. An immense pity entered into his heart, even for his father. "Blame him? But he suffers, too. All this flesh, which inspires such a strong aversion in me, all this heavy mass of flesh, is inhabited by a soul. What anguish he may have felt, and what weariness! He certainly has a terrible fear of death." Suddenly, he had a mental vision of his father in his death agony. An attack had overthrown him, stricken him mortally; he panted, still alive, livid, mute, unrecognizable, his eyes full of the horror of death; then, as if stricken to earth by a second blow of the invisible sledge-hammer, he lay motionless, a mass of inert flesh. "Would my mother weep?"
"You are not eating anything," his mother said to him. "You do not drink. You have eaten almost nothing. Perhaps you are not well?"
"No, mother," he replied. "I have no appetite this morning."
The sound of something dragging itself along near the table caused him to turn. He perceived the decrepit tortoise, and remembered the words of Aunt Joconda: "She became lame like me. Your father, with a blow of his heel——"