Poor Rodríguez, Part 1

El pobre Rodríguez
Salvadora Medina Onrubia

AURORITA

“Poor Rodríguez” is what I always heard him called. Even before he deserved the nickname, everyone called him that, with love.

Later they began to say it with a touch of compassion and a touch of contempt. Both were well deserved.

But did anyone worry themselves with the question of whether he had a soul, or whether he suffered? Or by analyzing the gruesome moral problems into which that soul had sunk? For as unfortunate, as insignificant as he was, didn’t he have a right to what all other mortals have?

He was a tall man, always overwhelmed, and he never took off his enormous dark glasses. He spoke very little, in monosyllables and vague words. When I met him, he ran a bookstore, a cigarette store, a lottery-ticket store and a toy store in the room where he lived, and where he was always sitting in the darkest corner of the room.

Inexplicably, there had formed in that room some sort of philosopher-writer-anarchist circle. Poor Rodríguez undoubtedly should have been an anarchist.

He – so silent, so timid, so unhappy – lived as though he were in his element among the arguers, the troublemakers, the fighters. How they shouted at each other, how they quarreled in those days. Oh, my distant youth!

Paco went there; the poor thing was almost completely crazy from a beating he got one day while he was protesting. Everyone who passed him fancied inquisitions; he wanted to hit them all. But sometimes, when I left, he accompanied me with cautious steps all the way to the sidewalk, beckoning me mysteriously.

Gerner came too; he was a Catalan who had invented a new explosive with a base of Keely’s atomic ether.

He needed a fantastic quantity to test the idea, but first he had to construct the apparatus that would cut off the ether. The rest was child’s play.

Imbraña was a typographer who had abandoned anarchism for theosophy, and later theosophy for occultism. He had a talent: he studied astrology and created series of strange words that left us all astonished.

He discussed with Gerner an idea that had been worrying him. I could never understand if that idea was the localization of infinity in space, or the form in which infinity could be represented in space.

This infuriated Gerner, who said that upon being given a shape, infinity would no longer be infinity. Imbraña never failed to end the discussion – this I remember – by saying that he hated anarchists, that he knew them well and he only came around because they were the only people he could talk to. We didn’t listen to those rants, but Rodríguez did. He listened, enchanted and silent, to all that and much more while he brewed a special mate tea for all of us.

For all of his forty years he had lived like that, happy, in his room of scattered books, overhearing thunderous discussions, brewing mate and selling cigarettes and sealing wax, loaning books to his friends and pencils and rubber bands and notebooks to schoolchildren, who knew him and loved him, and to whom he was kind and good, like he was to everyone.

Disgrace came to him, as it does to so many, under the guise of love and from Spain, embodied in an Andalusian cousin from Cádiz – a young showgirl who had just started doing minor theatre roles – and her mother, a woman basically like all mothers of Spanish showgirls who do minor theatre roles.

Upon their arrival, Poor Rodríguez’s small and simple life began to gradually transform into something so enormous and heartbreaking that a good novelist dealing in all things modern and subtle would require volumes to explain it to us. It was then that he began to be “Poor Rodríguez.”

What happened behind those black glasses when he saw his cousin performing little kicks on the stage of La Comedia with her little gold shoes?

We never found out. What we did find out later, with obvious surprise, was that he was going to marry her. They were wed soon after.

The new wife and mother-in-law moved into the little apartment. Gone were the meetings in the bookstore where, between cups of mate, we shouted discussions about the best way to transform the face of the earth and what the basis of the Social Revolution had been.

Hearing such abominations terrified Aurorita and made her feel ill; she, fervent defender of established laws, had a terrible fear of the haughty bohemians who came to the bookstore with their bags surely full of dynamite and atomic ether, acting as though they were in their own homes.

His friends stopped coming around. Discussions couldn’t be shouted anymore, books couldn’t be sold, money couldn’t be lent, mate couldn’t be drunk. Now Rodríguez only had his Aurorita.

How she loved him, and how they bent over backwards – she and her mother – to serve him and please him. How her mother, Doña Virtudes, cooked: what stews, what paellas, what casseroles…

Rodríguez’s clothing, how tidy it became. And the shop, how it began to attract orderly and clean clients. Aurorita herself would sweep it, wearing an adorable little apron, and then she’d sit behind the counter with her crochet.

How long did this complete, perfect happiness last? A month, a year?

Aurorita grew tired of her life. Or so said her mother. The girl had been born with the temperament of an artist, and she missed the theatre. Such things happen when a woman abandons her art for a man. And she’d done it for a ragamuffin tobacco salesman.

Aurorita started to have tremendous anxiety attacks.

If only she’d at least have a baby – Doña Virtudes said with a sigh.

Poor Rodríguez went with her to every possible doctor to return to their house with the certainty that if they never had children it would be exclusively his fault, who wasn’t fit to be a father.

This was what his mother-in-law threw at him, on top of the profound contempt she crushed him with at every opportunity.

Every time Aurorita had any kind of accident, or complained, or refused to smile, her mother made a quiet mental note of it. She was a martyr of her prudence; she didn’t complain. She did nothing more than sigh deeply and look at him with reproach.

Each of these sighs and looks threw his fatherly shortcomings in his face. No matter what the incident, we came to expect that sigh and that look, and Poor Rodríguez slinking around corners as if he were directly responsible to his mother-in-law for his natural failing.

And so it was that Doña Virtudes decided that Aurorita should return to the theatre. She no longer even had a childish hope to sustain herself.

It was her life that had made her sick …

It grated on her to have to watch her daughter sit and rot there, to drown her future in some indecent back room. It was a cruel trick that she was worth so much and could have earned enough to live like a princess, but they had to leave it to others to put bows in their hair, while the two of them, never escaping fatigue, worked all day like the lowest of the low.

Poor Rodríguez understood that his mother-in-law was right.

Aurorita wasn’t a bad person. And she was pretty. One day the two women put on their Sunday finest and went out to see about a contract. After that, as if by magic, the bookstore was infested with anonymous actors who told dirty jokes, admired Aurorita’s genius and smoked.

Poor Rodríguez, hidden away as always in the darkest corner of the room behind his black glasses, was known as the vague and forgettable being whom they never saw …

He, undoubtedly, thought about his friends, about those strenuous discussions that made the world seem like it emerged anew, and about all of those thunderous explosives that could, if only they’d been invented, shoot him into outer space.

Love and Gaby

Gaby y el amor

Salvadora Medina Onrubia

In the twenty-five years of Gaby’s life, only one minute had had the profundity of all the hours that form a destiny. In Gaby’s twenty-five years of life, only one minute …

And to be able to arrive at that minute, I have to tell her whole story.
Her story?... It’s really an unimportant story; there’s nothing in it that could act as a cliché for some tormented modern psychologist.
The heroines in all the magazine novellas are just like Gaby. Or we find them in the theatre, as the cheesy, mediocre heroines of earnest and weepy dramas.
In her life, she simply exists. She walks down Florida Avenue, goes to the stores, to the flower stands. She was educated by nuns; she knows how to embroider and play the piano. Just now she’s cut her long hair.
Among all of the Gabys out there, the one in my story is without a doubt the most beautiful. Golden blonde hair, blonde, so blonde, warm and soft, fluffed up like tangled silk.

Silence and Darkness

Silencio y oscuridad

Silvina Innocencia Ocampo

Luminous letters on the front of the building announced: “SILENCE AND DARKNESS.” The sign demanded attention. Those older than fifty were not allowed to enter; the spectacle could bring on depression or a heart attack. Those younger than fourteen weren’t allowed either, for they could throw noisemakers, cause a ruckus and bother the audience. In the fresh, celestial theatre, seated on cushioned seats, spectators closed their eyes according to the instructions handed out at the theatre’s entrance; later – always according to the instructions – so that the shock wasn’t too great upon opening their eyes, they leaned their heads back to contemplate what they hadn’t seen in a long time: absolute darkness; and to hear what they also hadn’t heard in a long time: total silence.

There are different gradations of silence just as there are different gradations of darkness. Everything was calculated so as to avoid startling the public too much. There had been suicides before. At first, one could hear the infinitesimal singing of crickets, which gradually diminished until the ear got used to it, and then it would surge once again from silence’s terrifying depths. Then, the subtlest whisper of leaves could be heard, rising and falling until arriving at the chromatic scales of wind. After that, one could hear the whisper of a silk skirt, and finally, before arriving to the abyss of the silence, the murmur of pins falling on a tile floor. The silence and darkness technicians had managed to invent noises analogous to the silence in order to arrive, gradually, at silence. A light rain of broken glass over cotton served these ends for a time, but without satisfactory results; the far-off crumpling of silk paper seemed better but wasn’t quite right either; sometimes the first inventions are the best ones.

At the theatre’s entrance, colored markings on enormous maps of the world showed the sites where silence could best be heard, and the years in which it was distorted, according to statistics. Other maps indicated the places where one could obtain the most complete darkness, with important historical dates up to its extinction.

Many people didn’t want to see the spectacle, as important and fashionable as it was. Some said that it was immoral to spend so much money in order to see nothing; others said that it didn’t make sense to readjust to what they’d lost so long ago; others, the stupidest of them all, exclaimed, “Let’s return to the age of cinema.”

But Clinamen wanted to go to the theatre of darkness and silence. She wanted to go with her boyfriend to find out whether she really loved him. “The world has become aggressive for lovers,” she exclaimed, dressed in a miniskirt. Light passed through the doors, sounds came from various distances.

“Only in the ancient darkness and silence will I know to tell you whether I love you,” Clinamen said to her boyfriend. But Clinamen’s boyfriend knew that everything his girlfriend did she did out of timidity. He didn’t take her to the theatre of silence and darkness, and they never found out that they did love one another.

The House of Embroiderers

La casa de bordados
Salvadora Medina Onrubia


It’s a small shop decorated with dark papers. Dark wood, blue curtains, two or three cushions make it comfortable for the women who prefer to do their shopping in this discreet and almost elegant environment. The old Jewish widow dressed in black, who is the owner there, understands her business well.


It also sells useful work items, lace, silk flowers, stockings, gloves. She has a salesgirl to help her. She’s an insignificant girl, neither ugly, nor pretty, without the freshness of youth, and without precise forms beneath her simple black salesgirl’s uniform.


Obligated to be in that dark room all day, to always smile, to make herself seem happy in order to squeeze one more cent from clients under the watchful stare of the Jewish owner, her personality is a blur.


In the free moments when there are no people in the shop, she sews or knits. She raises a corner of the curtain and feels the light’s rays. She always works with her head leaning on one shoulder. Her pulled-back silky brown hair reveals her pale, wide forehead and the imperceptible Mona Lisa smile on her lips.


She bears an extraordinarily close resemblance to La Gioconda.


I am sure her boyfriend tells her this all the time and that it’s because of this that he’s in love with her.


Her boyfriend must be a poet. Or painter. He wears a wide hat, a black scarf and his hair in a mane. He’s very tall, very thin, has feverish eyes and the hands of a man. Every afternoon he waits for her on the corner, or leans against a tree almost in front of my house. When she comes out, they sink arm-in-arm into the tree-lined street.


I know that the modesty of her classic smile looks with sadness at the stately garden, the flowery castle, the sumptuous cars, the suits and the hats of the yard that faces her. That she thinks about the tragic poverty of her bohemian boyfriend …
Life: You are blind. Blind as the blindfolded child. And crazy. More crazy than Aeschylus the Immortal. And you distribute your gifts accordingly.


Bibí says it …how very much she’d like to sing and dance, raising her paws above the scaffold and above the orchestras of the theaters filled with lights and people applauding her … And Gloria? Gloria Brena who has so much talent, so much talent. And me? How many things you gave me that I didn’t want, that I didn’t need.


Among them, my multi-faced soul that likes everything and holds onto nothing; the curse that all, all of my desires become living things in my hands.


Life: I’ve only wanted a simple and modest soul, a small, dark, laborious life, a sad and thoughtful smile, a poor, very poor, bohemian boyfriend who loves me very much … Who recites feverish verses by the light of the stars; verses that I don’t understand …


Life, among so many things, so many things that you gave me, humility never came.