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.
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