Spanish Stories of the Romantic Era by Stanley Appelbaum

Author:Stanley Appelbaum [Appelbaum, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2006-09-14T17:00:00+00:00

ways caught all or most of our middle class, and all of our lower class. His patriotism is such that he’d give all the charms of foreign lands for one inch of his homeland. This blindness makes him adopt all the consequences of such a thoughtless affection; so that he maintains that there are no wines like Spanish wines, in which he may be correct, and that there’s no education like Spanish education, in which he may very well be wrong; as a concomitant of maintaining that the sky of Madrid is extremely clear, he’ll maintain that our lower-class women are the most enchanting of all females; in short, he’s a man who lives on extreme opinions, in which he more or less resembles a female relative of mine who adores hunchbacks because she once loved a man with a rather visible growth between his shoulder blades.

So then, there’s no talking to him about those social usages, those signs of mutual respect, those urbane circumlocutions, that delicacy of conversation which establishes a precious harmony among men by saying only that which is calculated to please and always repressing what might give offense. He adores telling anybody and everybody off, as he likes to say, and when he has a grudge he throws it in the other person’s face; since his standards are all confused, he says that a cumplimiento, a polite remark, consists of cumplo and miento (“I do my duty” and “I tell a lie”); he calls courtesy hypocrisy and decency foolishness; he applies a bad nickname to every good thing; to him the language of delicacy is practically Greek: he believes that all you need to do in order to be well bred is to say “may God keep you” when you enter a room and add “by your leave” whenever you make a move; to ask everyone how his whole family is and to say good-bye to everyone individually; all customs he’ll take care not to neglect, just as he’ll take care not to make pacts with Frenchmen. In conclusion, he’s one of those men who don’t know how to get up and say good-bye unless someone else is also doing so, who humbly leave their hat under a table and call it their “head,” and who when they’re unfortunately out in company without a walking stick to help them, would give anything not to have hands or arms, because they really don’t know where to put them, or what to do with their arms among company.

Two o’clock arrived, and since I knew my Braulio, I didn’t think it necessary to spruce up too much when going to dine with him; I’m sure it would have irritated him; all the same, I didn’t want to do without a colored dress coat and a white handkerchief, something indispensable on a birthday in homes like his: above all, I dressed as slowly as I could, as slowly as a wretched criminal confesses at the foot of the scaffold; he’d

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