Forces that made things look beautiful were certainly part of a “Merciful Dispensation.” Memory was one of these forces. How exquisite, probably, life at Plasencia would look some day!
It would take a lot of mellowing, she thought, with a little smile. Again it was a question of the swarm of tiny details: beauty, evidently, requiring their elimination.
But, for instance, the interplay of emotions at tea that afternoon—was it woven from the tiny brittle threads of unimportant details, or was it made of a more resisting stuff?
Why was the Doña equally irritated that she, Teresa, ignored young men, and that Concha ran after them—like a tabby-cat in perpetual season? No—that was disgusting, coarse, unkind. There was nothing ugly about Concha’s abundant youth: she was merely normal—following the laws of life, no more disgusting than a ripe apple ready to drop.
There came into Teresa’s head the beginning of one of Cervantes’s Novelas Exemplares, which tells of the impulse that drives young men, although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their home and wander across the world, “... nor can meagre fare and poor lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat exhaust them.”
And, added Teresa, rich in the wisdom of a myriad songs and stories, they are probably fully aware, ere they shut behind them the door of their home, that some day they, too, will discover that freedom is nought but a lonely wind, howling for the past.
Il n’y a pour l’homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir ... yes, but to realise that, personally, emotionally—to feel as one the three events—three simultaneous things making one thing that is perpetually repeated, three notes in a chord—and the chord Life itself ... an agonising sense of speed ... yes, the old simile of the rushing river that carries one—where? But every life, or group of lives, is deaf to the chord, stands safe on the bank of the river, till a definite significant moment, which, looked back upon, seems to have announced its arrival with an actual noise—a knocking, or a rumbling. To Teresa, it seemed that that moment for them all at Plasencia had been Pepa’s death, two years ago—that had been what had plunged them into the river. Before, all of them (the Doña too) had lived in Eternity. Now, when Teresa awoke in the night, the minutes dripped, one by one, on to the same nerve, till the agony became almost unbearable; and it was the agony of listening to a tale which the narrator cannot gabble fast enough, because you know the end beforehand—yes, something which is at once a ball all tightly rolled up that you hold in your hand and a ball which you are slowly unwinding.
She looked towards the house—the old ark that had so long stood high and dry; now, it seemed to her, the water had reached the windows of the lowest story—soon it would be afloat, carrying them all ... no, not her father. He, she was sure, was still—would always be—outside of Time.
But Concha—Concha was there as much as she herself.
Why did she mind in Concha the same intellectual insincerities and pretensions, the same airs and graces, that she had loved in Pepa?