Amado Nervo - "The Soul Giver" (1899)

INTRODUCTION

Amado Nervo was born on August 27, 1870 in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico. After attending the Colegio San Luis Gonzaga, he moved to Mexico City in 1894 where he worked for the magazine "Azul". Over the next several years he worked as a journalist for several publications and was a co-founder of the magazine "La Revista Moderna", "Azul"'s successor.

Nervo lived in Paris between 1900 and 1904, and upon returning to Mexico was appointed to a diplomatic post in Spain which he held until 1918, when he accepted a diplomatic post to Uruguay. His health rapidly declined and he died on May 24th, 1919.

Nervo was one of the most important Mexican literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th century. Many of these stories are science fiction adjacent, and despite his national importance, few have been translated into English. "The Soul Giver", ("El donador de almas") was initially published in 1899, and is one exception, previously translated in 1999 by Michael F. Capobianco and Gloria Shaffer Melendez. However, this appears to be out of print and extremely difficult to find. 

Nervo's fourth novella, "The Soul Giver" was published in "La Revista Cómico" in five serialized installments from April to May of 1899, and republished in his 1905 anthology "Other Lives". This translation was based off the free text that can be found on the La Novela Cortela website, which also has a very thorough introduction and notes. This text can be found here: https://www.lanovelacorta.com/novelas-en-transito/el-donador-de-almas.pdf

THE SOUL GIVER

To Josefina Tornel

Amica in gaudio, soror in tenebris.

[Friend in joy, sister in darkness.]

Be careful: one playing the ghost,

turns one into a ghost

- Kabbalah maxim

THE DOCTOR'S DIARY

The doctor opened his diary, went over the written pages with a negligent glance: he came to the last one, on which his attention rested a little more, as he wanted to take the last link to which a new one must be soldered, and immediately he took up the pen. 

In the drawing room, "silence was heard," a Sunday silence, a Lutheran city's silence on a holiday. 

Mexico had withdrawn towards the Reformation, towards the theaters, towards the small villages of the Valley, and in Medinas all was peaceful: a peace of an aristocratic thoroughfare, troubled in rare intervals by the monophonic roll of a car, or by the breath of air with such indistinct melancholy blew the echo of a distant band into its homes, a motif of Carmen or Aída. 

The doctor - as we have said - took the pen and wrote what follows, after the last note in his diary:

Sunday, July 14, 1886. I'm sad and daydreaming a bit.  I have the Sunday evening melancholy. The same total absence of affection...  Not a single affection! "My kingdom" for an affection!... My cat, that taciturn friend of the celibate, makes me sick! My cook no longer innovates, or loses her hair over her stews; books tire me; it's always the same song! A horizon with more or less the same sort of thing! Guessing symptoms, vague diagnoses, prophylaxis. Nothing! "I only know that I know nothing". Newton wisely affirms that man's knowledge in relation to the unknown is like a grain of sand in relation to the ocean... 

And I know much less than Newton knew. I know above all that I am not happy... We will see: what do I desire?, because this is the essential in life; to know what we desire; to determine it with precision... Do I desire perhaps to "have a desire" like the old man of the Goncourt? No!, that old man, according to them, "was an elder", and I'm an old man at thirty. Do I desire money? Money is a perennial bride; but I have it, and I can augment it, and nobody desires what they have, or can have with relative ease. Do I desire fame, perhaps... That is, fame, a fame that goes beyond the borders of my country... et quid inde? as the ergotists say or à quoi bon?, as the French say.[Translator's note: "what good is that?" in both languages.] I remember that at sixteen I desired to have a hundred pesos to buy a horse. I got them and bought a horse, and I saw that a horse was a very small thing to ride; at twenty I desired that a beautiful woman would love me, and soon after I realized that all beautiful women were more beautiful than her. At twenty-five I desired travel, "world is wide!", I repeated with the Saxon proverb. [Translator's note: "world is wide!" is in English in the original.] And as I traveled, I was convinced that the planet is very small, and that if Mexico is a poor geographical accident in the world, then the world is a poor cosmic accident in space...

So what do I desire, well, today? 

I want to have affection different than that of my cat. A soul different than that of my cook, a soul who loves me, a soul in whom I can imprint my seal, with whom I can divide the enormous sorrow of my anxious Self... A soul... "My kingdom" for a soul! 

The doctor lit a second cigar - the subtle intuition of the reader will no doubt have guessed that he'd already lit the first - and began to smoke with desperation, as if to imprison the soul that was undoubtedly fluttering silently around the room in the wisps of blue smoke. 

The afternoon fell amidst a fiery conflagration of colors, and a purple cloud projected its burning red on the carpet through the stained glass windows. 

Surgical instruments lined up on a large table mournfully sparkled like an inquisitor's apparatus. The books slept in their cardboard enclosures with golden epitaphs. A deluded fly hovered near the window and was going to stubbornly collide with it, mad with despair at that resistant and incomprehensible transparency.

Suddenly, ring! ring! The hall's doorbell rang. [Translators note: The onomatopoeia for the doorbell in the original is "¡tlin!, ¡tlin!"]

Doña Corpus, the doctor's housekeeper - with fifty years of age and twenty-five keys - entered the study. 

- "They're looking for my lord."

- "Who?" - a grumpy yawn. "Who is it?" 

- "Señor Esteves."

(An expression of joy.)

- "Have him enter!"

Señor Esteves entered.

THE GIFT

- "Doctor" - said señor Esteves, he's tall, he's blonde, he's pale, with twenty-five years on his back and two beautiful brown eyes as ornaments, two eyes of London mist striated sometimes with tropical sun, "I've come to give you a big surprise."

- "How very well thought-out", replied the doctor; "I was starting to get irritated."

- "Before anything else, do you believe that I love you?"

- "Absolutely!"

- "That I love you with an exceptional, exclusive affection?"

- "More than can be seen..., but sit down".

Señor Esteves sat down. 

- "Do you believe that I love anyone in the world like you? Do you believe that?" 

- "Just as I believe in the existence of microbes..., but did you come to administer a sacrament to me? Or what is it that you're proposing where you're making me recite such repeated acts of faith?"

- "I simply intend to add value to my surprise."

- "Very well, continue."

- "Everything that I am - and I'm not small - I owe to you."

- "You owe it to your talent."

- "Without you, my talent would have been like those isolated flowers that saturate the solitary winds with their perfumes."

- "Poetry, we have."

- "Every man needs a man... "

- "And sometimes a woman."

- "You were my man; you believed in me, you realized 'my day will come'; you served as the sun to this poor moon of my spirit; because of you I am known, loved; for you, I live, for you..."

- "Look, that's a chapter from another book, wouldn't you say?"

- "I repeat that I simply intend to add value to my surprise."

- "Well, suppose that its value is already priceless... Listen, poet, it's true that I invented you, but if I hadn't invented you, someone else would have. I don't believe in unknown talent, as I don't believe in unknown suns. True talent always emerges; if the environment is hostile, it defeats it; if it is deficient, it creates a better environment... us? If you had turned out to be a nonentity after all, I would regret having invented you, as they say happened to God with the world on the eve of the flood. You're valuable, and you're brilliant? I am rewarded for my work and am proud of it. Gratitude is accidental. I'll accept it because it comes from you, but I don't need it for my satisfaction or my contentment... Now keep talking. "

- "Very well. One year ago; one year, you know?; I started to think every day; every day, have you noticed? about giving you a gift." - Here the doctor frowned into a scowl - "A gift worthy of you and worthy of me; an exceptional gift, and after 364 days of perplexities, musings, doubts... today I have found that gift." - A second frown in the doctor's eyebrows - "Or rather, I have not found it, I simply discovered that I possessed it, as the skeptic of the story has discovered what was going on."

- "And this gift?"

- "I came to offer it to you."

Andrés got up as if to give greater solemnity to his gift and, with a quasi-religious and moved voice, added: 

- "Doctor, I've come to give you a soul!"

The doctor got up in his turn and screwed up his black eyes - the two very black and very large eyes that the doctor had: haven't I already said this? - to those of his friend, with a surprised and restless look.

- "You've had a lot of coffee this afternoon, right?" - he asked - "You ignore me and your brain pays for it. You are in a state of perpetual hyperesthesia"...

- "This afternoon they gave me a coffee that was as yellow as thin cigar" - replied the other with simplicity - "I believe there is a plot between you and my cook... There isn't, well, such hyperesthesia. What I am telling you is true as the discovery of America, unless the discovery of America is just symbolic; I've come to give you a soul."

- "In that case, explain yourself." 

- "It seems to me that I'm speaking clearly, Rafael" - the doctor was named Rafael - "a soul is a spiritual, substantive, undivided, conscious and immortal entity."

- "Or the result of the forces that act in our body, as you will."

- "No" - said Andrés vehemently - "that's a lie! A soul is a spirit that informs the body, on which it depends only for vital functions."

- "We won't argue that point. Granted that it is a spirit, et puis après?" [Translators note: "and then afterwards?"]

- "I present you, therefore, the gift of a spirit. "

- "Masculine or feminine?"

- "Spirits don't have sexes."

- "Singular or plural?"

- "Singular."

- "Independent of the body?"

- "Independent when you want it to be."

- "And that body, if the question does not imply indiscretion, is it masculine or feminine?"

- "Feminine."

- "Old or young?"

- "Young."

- "Beautiful or ugly?"

- "And what do you care, if I'm not giving you a body, but a soul?"

- "Man, it's not too much to know the neighbors..."

- "I mustn't tell you more. Do you accept the gift?"

- "But are you talking seriously, Andrés?" 

- "I'm serious, Rafael."

- "Look upon me well."

(A pause during which they both "looked upon each other well"). 

- "Did you really not have strong coffee today?"

- "Really."

- "Well then, I'll accept it; except that..."

- "Do not ask that which I will not answer."

- "In that case I'll accept it without asking; but... have you by any chance brought this soul in your wallet? "

- "No, the soul will be yours tomorrow."

- "Another riddle?"

- "Another riddle. See you later, Rafael."

- "Man, we could have dinner together notwithstanding the gift."

- "No, we couldn't. I have an urgent task."

- "Relative to the soul?"

- "Maybe. See you later."

And after a most cordial handshake the two friends parted ways. 

The night advanced slowly, drowning the last burning sparks of the horizon in its surge.  

THE END OF THE WORLD

The doctor's diary: 

Monday, July 15th. Esteves came yesterday to offer me a soul. That fellow inspires a great inquietude in me. He has lucid delusions of a strange character. For four years he has purported to possess a psychic force, for binding wills especially. He affirms that in a short time he will make a mannequin out of every man he looks at for five minutes, without any more cogitations and volitions than those he sees fit to communicate to him. The persistence of his gaze is amazing! His beautiful gray eyes pierce into the marrow of our brain like two pins. 

He has the attitudes of a hierophant, he sometimes becomes priestly. Either he is mad or he is a cocoon of future marvel, that poet. 

With the office window open, he entered the room for part of the day: of a canicular day, warmed by the sun. 

Doña Corpus showed a trace of her glasses and nose through the back door: a nose that, like Cyrano's, was in perpetual conversation with her eyebrows, two gray eyebrows under the siege of an old ivory forehead. [Translator's note: Cyrano de Bergerac (1619 - 1655), French author of a number of satires, plays and poems, including two notable works of proto-science fiction, "Comical History by Mr de Cyrano Bergerac including The States & Empires of the Moon" (1657) and "The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun" (1662). Bergerac had a large nose, which he was incredibly insecure about.]

- "This letter was brought for you," she said. 

And she added: 

- "What are we making to eat now?"

- "Whatever you want: I'm open to anything."

- "As every day I see you more listless."

- "That's precisely it... Whatever you want: brains, even." 

- "I don't know why you hate brains... "

- "I figure its like eating the thoughts of cows."

- "What things you say, señor! Its well known that you are becoming a Mason. It's more important that the world end..."

Doña Corpus was determined that the world would end as soon as possible. It was her ideal, the ideal that came and went through her life as a quinquagenarian without purpose. Night after night, after the rosary, she prayed three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys so that the final judgment would arrive as soon as possible. And when they said to her: 'When you die, you'll be given the very same', she invariably responded:

- "No, it would be better if we all died 'at once.'"

We beg the reader not to censure doña Corpus in the name of the freedom of ideas which constitutes the most precious jewel of our modern social order. 

The housekeeper did not violate any of the articles of the Constitution of '57 with her ideal; she did not violate the rights of third parties; her measure - draconian no doubt - to be legislated, would have to be reduced to this clause:

"End the world in the peremptory period of 48 hours." 

But the world, despite doña Corpus, continued to haunt the Sun, and the Sun continued to tear the ether in pursuit of Zeta Herculis, without much fanfare. 

So no one ever put a stop to the ideals of doña Corpus.

The doctor tore open the envelope of the letter. 

The letter was from a woman: an arduous web of fly legs were a little less difficult to decipher than these primordial cuneiform writings. 

It said:

Señor:

My love and master has seen fit to give me to you, and I have only to obey him. I am yours, and here I am, dispose of me as you see fit. And since you need to give me a name, call me 'Alda.' It is my spiritual name: the name that some voices from the ultra-world have given me in dreams, and by which I have forgotten mine. 

Unsigned.

THE GIFT OF AN ELEPHANT

There is a preexisting sense of awe when our spirit goes to cross the threshold of wonder. 

Our spirit is said to be like the Israelites before the thunder and lightning of Sinai: "Let's cover our faces, lest we die" 

The doctor experienced this preexisting awe, because he was "beginning to believe" in the spell. 

So are all skeptics: capable of admitting even the "retrospective" immortality of the crab, the trisection of angles, and the subjective world of Kant. 

There is no "matter" more credulous than a philosopher. 

We would not be mistaken if we said that the doctor's digestion was upset by the brains flavored by doña Corpus, the most competent busybody there can be... 

He was altered "in potentcy, virtually", intuitively... but he was altered. 

"Well," - he said to himself - "and now what do I do with a soul?" 

(The author of this story on a certain occasion asked a fool: "Do you want a dream? May I give you a dream?" And the fool, the adorable fool, answered him with an esprit unworthy of her: "Friend, that is like gifting an elephant". Well, the doctor thought the same: "A soul, but a soul is a gift of an elephant...").

"Let's see how I can use this soul: Shall I ask her for affection, that exclusive affection from which I was delirious yesterday? But if by the very reason that she is mine, I cannot demand of her more than absolute subjection, and absolute subjection is not affection... The sultan's odalisques don't love the sultan... A woman does not love except insofar as she is the master of herself, who can 'not love', can not give herself. Her own gift is a testimony of her will, influenced if you will by a powerful attraction, but capable, at least in the order of logical theories, of resisting it. 

"I have been given a spirit, we will call it that, but I have not been given affection." 

And the doctor fell into the darkest of musings. 

"Oh!" - he added, because he spoke alone. Now the entire world speaks alone. That's exactly why you have to say things out loud to add some flavor, as some autodialogicians or autodialoguistics affirm - "Oh, if I could only carry out this cerebral marriage with Alda dreamed up by Auguste Comte! There is no doubt, this is the only possible nuptials in the future, where the wonderful verse of Mallarmé is the universal motto: 

"'Helas! la chair est triste et j’ai lu tous les livres', 'Alas! the flesh is sad and I have read all the books'. [Translators note: "Brise marine" (1865)]

"Such nuptials would constitute supreme happiness. Why does love agonize in marriage? Because we possess the loved object. Not possessing it by a generous act of our will, lofty and purified, this here is the voluptuousness, par excellence.

"Who will be the one who deliberately makes a star out of a woman, who places her too far from his desires, thus making her absolutely adored? 

"Who will it be? It will be me!... But, in doing so, am I not forced by duty? I don't possess any more than Alda, given Alda exists... If I possessed Alda's 'neighbor', that is to say, the woman whose spirit bears that strange name, and with selfless exaltedness I scorned her to not to remember me as more than 'the other', of the incorporeal, of the preternatural that has been given to me, my sacrifice would be worthy of me... 

"Eh, we'll try it out!" 

And the doctor went to his bedroom, not with the aim of "trying it out", but to get dressed for his patients. 

ALDA ARRIVES

My dear Rafael:

I suppose that Alda will have already introduced herself, and that you will be happy with my gift. I must warn you that a simple act of your volition will suffice for that "soul" to leave the body it animates and come to your side. Her wonderfully developed powers of divination can be of immense use to you in your profession. I only recommend one thing: that you don't keep Alda out of her body too often. It could be dangerous. As for you not trying to put yourself in contact with that animated body, I am sure of this. To believe otherwise would be to offend you. I have given you a soul, only a soul, and it seems to me that it's already enough. 

Tomorrow I leave for Italy, and this will therefore be my farewell. I'll be back in three or four years. Goodbye. I know I'm not leaving you alone, because you'll be with "her". 

Yours,

Andrés Esteves

As soon as the doctor had read this letter, when shutting himself up "to stone and lime" in his office, he called Alda. 

An instant later he felt that Alda was by his side.

The dialogue that followed was entirely mental.

Alda greeted the doctor. 

- "How did you come here?" - this he said.

- "I fell into a hypnotic sleep."

- "And how will you explain that when you wake up?"

- "I live alone, absolutely alone, most of the day."

- "Where?"

- "In the cell of my convent."

- "Well then, are there still convents in Mexico?"

- "Many."

- "And how did Andrés get hold of you?" 

- "Andrés possesses marvellous powers that I musn't speak of."

- "Are you the only soul possessed by him?"

- "He possesses many."

- "And what does he do with them?"

- "He uses them for certain research."

- "Of what kind?"

- "Of a physical and metaphysical kind. Some, obeying his will, travel through space. I know of a certain sister of mine who must now be at one of the Milky Way's suns; another is currently touring the rings of Saturn."

- "And have you gone on voyages?"

- "Many, many! I've seen six hundred planets and two thousand suns."

- "And what reason does Andrés give for imposing those voyages on you?"

- "To perfect us and to perfect ourselves, acquiring a broad notion of the universe."

- "Say, Alda," - and the voice of the incredulous doctor trembled - "have you seen God?"

The soul shook painfully. 

- "Not yet. I'm content having a presentiment of him...  But let's drop these matters; could you use me for something?"

- "You should suggest something to me yourself."

- "Its very easy, and Andrés had already suggested it in his letter.  While I am by your side there will be no ailment that you won't correctly diagnose, that you do not heal with skill, aside from those that are fatally destined to kill."

- "Do you know that much, Alda?..."

- "During my hypnotic sleep, yes. In my waking state I'm an ignorant woman."

- "Beautiful or ugly?"

- "I don't know, I've never seen myself in a mirror and no one's told me."

- "But... in hypnosis it would be easy for you to know."

- "I don't want to know either."

"Let's agree" - thought the doctor - "that this Alda is wonderful. A woman who has never seen herself in a mirror..."

And he added, addressing her: 

- "Alda, the services you're offering me are invaluable.  Thanks to them I will be able to become a celebrity and millionaire in short order... But there is a happiness that I crave more than celebrity and millions... I need affection: an affection that for fifteen years I have been searching in vain throughout the world" - the voice of the doctor was sincerely moved - "Could you love me, Alda?"

Something like the shadow of a sigh passed through the doctor's ears. 

There was a moment of silence. 

After it, Alda replied: 

- "It's impossible!"

- "Impossible?"

- "Impossible!"

- "And why?"

- "Because love lies in willpower and I have no will of my own."

- "But what if I order you to love me?..."

- "It would be in vain! It should be the only thing that you not order me to do...  During my hypnotic state I depend on you more than the goshawk does of the Castilian's hand, and therefore my willpower is null. During my vigil I am another, another that only belongs to Christ..."

- "But does Christ allow you to subordinate yourself to my will?"

- "Undoubtedly..., in his inscrutable designs."

- "Oh, love me!"

- "Impossible!"

The doctor felt a cloud of anguish starting to float into his spirit...  infinite, infinite, infinite!

- "Alda!" - he added in a deeply sad voice - "Alda! If you loved me, your name would be as sweet to me as a compliment from a teacher's mouth! ; 'like words of one's native language heard on foreign soil!'... But I have a feeling that I am going to adore you madly and that my adoration will be my insanity."

- "Who knows!" - murmured Alda - "...who knows!"

THE NEWSPAPERS, ETC.

A clipping from a newspaper of large circulation, from the year 1886, a year in which there were not yet newspapers of large circulation among us:

They don't talk about anything else in the city except for the marvellous cures performed by Dr. Rafael Antiga, one of our medical eminences. His diagnoses are admirably lucid and his judgment is unappealable. 

The doctor refuses to take charge of healing those whose prognosis is fatal; but not mediating on such a prognosis, the patient who passes through his hands heals "without exception." 

The doctor's office, calle de Medinas, number..., vast as it is, barely manages to accommodate the countless patients from all social classes who invade it. 

Some say that our doctor uses hypnotic agents, hitherto unknown, for his cures. Be that as it may, his predictions are inexplicable due to his infallibility. 

Dr. Antiga will become a millionaire in short order, traveling the world to cure desperate cases. 

We know that he will be leaving for Europe soon. 

- "Alda, for spirits there are no distances. Could you come to me if I called you from Paris?"

- "If you called me from Sirius I would come just as quickly..."

- "Alda, you are my God, you are my everything... love me!"

- "Impossible!"

- "I adore you..."

- "Impossible!"

- "I suffer a great deal..."

- "Impossible!"

A translation of an entrefilet that appeared in March 1887 in Le Journal from Paris: 

A week ago, arriving in the metropolis, and staying at the Grand Hotel is the Mexican physician, Monsieur Rafael Antique,  - a spelling error in the surname Antiga -, who has been noted for his accurate diagnoses, and for the infallible certainty of his therapeutic procedures. Last Thursday, in a session held at the Salpêtrière, attended by several medical experts, he diagnosed more than twenty rare cases, which had been presented to him for this purpose, and prescribed treatments whose results have been astonishing in their speed. 

Doctor Antique - Antiga - is a tall, slightly dark man of thirty; he wears a beard "like that of the prince of Wales"; he dresses very elegantly, "despite being an American", and does not have his fingers full of rings. Before diagnosing a case, he abstracts deeply, as if he were consulting "someone" within himself, and an infinite vagueness passes through his beautiful black eyes. He looks like an ecstatic fakir. Some say that he is Jewish, and a possessor of Solomon's secrets; of course it is not the doctor who affirms this..., cela va sans dire. [Translators note: "that goes without saying"]

The entrefilet continues in a blague tone:

Doctor Antiga’s Wonders. [Translators note: This line is in English in the original text.]

Title of an entrefilet from the Times, from London, which praises to the point of hyperbole (not at odds with John Bull's characteristic phlegm) the "famous Mexican doctor" for his "Truly Wonderful..." cures. 

And enough of the press. 

Thus, the newspapers that see the reddish light of the Boreal sun for six months  - a huge sun, which seems to lend its breast of fire to the moon - like those that come out into the flaming light of the tropics; the same as the spiritual Latin newspapers, which in four pages say as much as there is to say and "something more" than the American "protocols", which in sixteen pages usually say nothing, all dealt with the Mexican physician during the years 1886 to 1890, the honor of this unprecedented country, in particular, and of Latin America - the classic land of pronouncements -, in general. 

In 1890, the reader, if they please, will meet the doctor again in the circumstances which will be expressed immediately. 

SISTER TERESA 

Rafael had just treated a complicated case of hysteria in a great lady of the Moscow court, of a surname "bristling with F's" and, confined in the drawing room of his villa - a large villa and a large drawing room - in the light of four incandescent bulbs which caricatured the day and outsmarted the night, in the vast room upholstered in nile green silk and sumptuously furnished, he conversed with Alda. [Translators note: "bristling with F's": Russian surnames ending in -ov were often transliterated at this time into languages that use the Latin alphabet as -off, such as Baloff, Romanoff, Yablokoff, etc. Modern transliterations/translations of Russian typically will favor using -ov, which is consistent with how the names are written in Russian.]

There is not a man who isn't familiar with the prodigy, the same Moses as a village sacristan; and the doctor attended without astonishment, without amazement, without fear, the frequent epiphany of that soul that from one hemisphere came to the other at the simple mental call of its owner. 

It begins by retreating before the abyss and ends in "familiarity with the abyss". By the force of riding in Alborack, the fear of Alborack is lost. 

Rafael could truly say: "The prodigy and I are intimate friends." 

Four years of triumph, four years of exhibition, of medical theatrics - emphasis and theatrics are indispensable even to the true sages of the world -, had made him a universal celebrity. 

Maddened and intoxicated by the honors; dazzled by the halo of prestige that coruscated on his head; seduced by the red mouths that smiled at him everywhere, by the caressing pupils that ignited all the pyrotechnics of their glances to dazzle at him; through the white shoulders and the white hands, blue with patrician blood, how little did the beautiful Galen think, that there, very far away, in the old city of the Mexican kings, in the dismantled cell of a colonial convent, a young woman and... perhaps beautiful, who because of him, slept for long hours in a mysterious slumber, which in the convent was called ecstasy, and brought intrigue to the community, to the superior, to the chaplain, to the archbishop and half a dozen "distinguished ladies of Mexico", who had taken under their protection the "lambs of God", placing a merciful fence of silence and dissimulation between them and the Laws of Reform! 

The nun, who in religion was called Sister Teresa and in this century had no name, had appeared one day in the parlor of the house, with a recommendation for the prioress, signed by a fashionable father, and with a bundle of humble garments of clothing under her arm. 

Where did she come from? I could not say. She was almost like an idiot. She could barely string two words together; but her immense dark eyes spoke for her with gazes of infinite sweetness and strangeness. Those gazes were not of this world, "they came from a distant homeland." 

The nuns loved her and tried to instruct her in the things of God, but she learned little about "those things"; she was "gone." 

They secreted her away with the monastic certificate of a sister followed by a name: that of the founder of the order, the wonderfully illuminated of Ávila - the learned and high woman who flourished in a high and learned century -, and they let her run along in peace through the monotonous course of the rule and the liturgies, from which that life was not life. 

But if Sister Teresa didn't know how to speak, she did know how to be in ecstasy. Her delusions, at first rare, became frequent and became common after the day Esteves donated the young woman's soul to the doctor. 

The nuns had been edified. An old friar who vegetated in the sacristy of Santo Domingo, shrouded in his swallowlike frock, was consulted by the superior; he was a great theologian and experienced in the secrets of mysticism, and he was assured, after laborious observation and technical examination, that the ecstasies of that nun were of a good, and not a diabolical character: God permitted them for the glorification of his servant and the benefit of the community, and the community should rejoice that God was glorified in Sister Teresa, and Sister Teresa was glorified in Him and for Him. 

The prioress, having heard this definition ex cathedra, murmured a Jesuit ad majorem Dei gloriam; the community answered amen and the nun continued to dream in her sleep on the oak and cowhide seat of her cell...  but growing thinner..., growing thinner; turning pale... turning pale, while the doctor crowned himself with glory and the poet Andrés Esteves traveled the earth, followed by a procession of spirits chained to his power, like Orestes with his perennial retinue of Eumenides. 

But that night the doctor was sad. He was in one of those lucid moments, in which Caesar remembers that he is mortal, and when Solomon, dressed in pomp, murmurs: "All is vanity." 

Well now, when the doctor remembered that "all is vanity", he felt nostalgic for "affection". He was reputed to be isolated in the midst of infinity.  He felt like an orphan and abandoned to the brains of doña Corpus, who followed him everywhere with a legion of kitchen assistants at her service, each day happier because each day, the end of the world and the subsequent final judgment was approaching. 

That night Alda had already murmured in the ear of Rafael ear three times - we say "in the ear" for clarity - : "It's late, I must return to my cell."

But the doctor had replied: 

- "No, wait still, wait." 

And Alda waited. 

- "Tell me" - suggested the doctor, "is there no way for you to love me?"

- "There is no way."

- "But... have mercy on me! I'm going crazy. This subjection of yours is horrible, this implacable subjection of yours, without 'a drop' of love!" - for Rafael, love, like medicinal drugs, was wont to be a matter of drops. 

- "I can't love you... you well know that!"

- "And yet it's necessary that you love me, do you hear? It's necessary!"

- "It's necessary and impossible, in that case."

- "Alda" - and the doctor waved his arms in the void as if he wanted to grasp that spirit rebellious to love and docile to command, who was always by his side without willpower... and without affection - "Alda, let's bargain tonight... I will renounce my wealth and my fame. I will give the former to the poor and confine the latter to the most distant and the most discreet refuge on earth. I will leave my dreams like a blue rag that can't be used anymore. I will do what you want...  I will even give up ever seeing the body that serves as a prison... But you, on the other hand, will be mine, you will come to me as the wife turns up at the call of the husband; I will love you when you are with me, in high contemplation and in flawless reverie; I will look for you when you are far away, with the anguished perplexity of Hoffmann's character who had lost 'his shadow.' You'll come to me whenever you want and my soul will always say 'welcome!'...  Do you want to? Ah! Want it for the love of God! Want it in the name of the enigmatic destiny that has brought us together!... Want it and I'll be good!, I'll be a believer!, I'll be humble!... I love you! I love you! I love you!" [Translators note: E.T.A. Hoffmann - "The Story of the Lost Reflection," 1815]

And transfigured by anguish, which is the tabor of spirits, the doctor knelt on the thick carpet of the room. 

Alda "sighed" once more and once more murmured: 

- "Impossible!"

The doctor then, thanks to a very explainable transition - the one who is writing this can explain it anyway -, stood up and, with a wave and a gesture of a character from a novel, said dryly to Alda: 

- "Go away!"

Then, broken, torn to pieces by emotion - a poor translation of brisé par l'émotion - he fell onto a couch, exactly like those women who faint. 

But behold, three minutes later "he felt" the presence of Alda again, who "for the first time", came without being called. 

- "Why have you come?" asked Rafael. 

- "Sister Teresa is dead!"

- "And who is Sister Teresa?"

- "Sister Teresa is me..."

- "Dead!"

- "Remember that you shouldn't have kept me by your side for too long, and that I haven't abandoned you for twenty-four hours..."

- "But... this can't be! Return to the body and animate it."

- "I can't! My body has been buried..."

- "Buried!" - cried the doctor at the height of astonishment. 

- "Buried... and decomposing already."

- "And now...?" moaned Rafael. 

- "And now!" moaned Alda.

And "now", the author closes the seventh chapter of this "thing" that forms whatever this despicable book is. 

AND NOW...?

Alda and the doctor found themselves in a situation analogous to that of two children who have just broken a plate. 

- "And now?" - the latter turned to ask.

- "And now!" - the former turned to exclaim.

The anguish and perplexity of that man and that "half-woman" grew with a shadowy horror. 

If doña Corpus had been present during such an ineffable grief, she would have murmured: 

"It's more important that the world end!" 

But doña Corpus mumbled paternosters in her room, asking God to preserve her in His sanctifying grace, in the midst of these heretical lands through which the doctor had dragged her down, like a poor boat dismantled. 

- "I need to be incarnated in someone" - said Alda finally -, "or I'll certainly go off into eternity..."

- "But in what body am I to incarnate you now, woman?"

- "In anyone, to be sure; do you imagine that I'm to remain floating in the void until you please? Alas, my time has not come. God does not call me yet. I've died from an unforeseen accident... There is no place for me in infinity..."

- "But I don't have a way to make a body for you... and, as for those made by nature, they all have souls..."

- "You don't believe that! Look for a beautiful woman, vain and self-idolatrous, and surely I will be able to incarnate in her."

- "Magnificent idea! But where could I find a woman like that?"

- "They're abundant! Come on then, let's find her immediately! I'm cold, a coldness from beyond the grave, the coldness 'of a worm on a dead man'! Have mercy on me! Didn't you say that you love me? Now I too can love you, as no one has ever loved you... Sister Teresa no longer exists. I am the master of my will and therefore of my affections. I will adore you with the adoration that you have dreamed of in your years of solitude and moral emptiness... Come on, in the name of that love which you thirsted for, give me a body, a body to animate, or I'll have to abandon you forever!"

The doctor scratched his head, neither more nor less than all the men who had been in predicaments as tight as his... 

At that time the room's great pendulum sang two o'clock in the morning with robust and solemn inflections. 

- "Two o'clock!..." - murmured Rafael - "But you do understand that at this time, and with this cold, a Russian winter, it is impossible to find 'a beautiful woman, vain and self-idolatrous'! They're all asleep..."

- "And yet, it's necessary for you to find her... soon, soon, do you hear? I feel a great shadow approaching, trying to envelop me in its folds... Have pity on me!..., ah!"

- "Alda!"

- "Rafael! Rafael!"

- "Alda!"

- "It's impossible!"

- "It's imperative!"

The wind was entangled in the distant fir trees, sobbing a lied from the North. 

It slept completely wrapped in a white silence... 

Suddenly: 

- "Listen, Rafael" - sobbed Alda -,"there's no time to lose.  The great shadow is coming. I have only one resource left and I'm going to make use of it. 

- "And that resource is?"

- "I'm not going to tell you. But its necessary for you to sleep."

- "To sleep!"

- "To sleep... It's the only way to save me."

- "Explain!"

- "I can't! If you love me, sleep!"

- "Are you sure that's how I can save you?"

- "Completely sure."

- "But..."

- "Don't argue, for God's sake! Sleep! Sleep!"

The doctor went to get a bottle of a narcotic, put a few drops in half of a glass of water, and drank the contents. 

Moments later he reclined on the sofa and fell into a profound lethargy. 

What happened then is brief and obvious to state. 

Alda, with a subtlety of a totally spiritual nature, incarnated in the left hemisphere of the doctor's brain, leaving the doctor's spirit confined to the right hemisphere. 

And when Rafael woke up, late in the day, thanks to the only case of such since the world has been the world, he had two souls... 

THE SELF AND MYSELF [Translators note: In Spanish "Yo y yo", the wordplay is a bit lost in English.]

From Count Xavier de Maistre to Lindau, as well as before and after them, many philosophers have spoken of an alter ego which forms a strange duality with ourselves, sometimes one struggles with it and sometimes one unites with it in an intimate marriage; which more frequently loves to argue than to be in harmony, and which seems to alternatively take advantage of primitive individuality, the cells of the brain. 

We all feel in our conscience these two "personalities" who are called "the self" and "the other". 

We all listen to their dialogues, their controversies, their complaints. They tend to kiss each other with warmth, and also tend, like badly matched and ill-mannered marriages, to "throw plates at one another". 

But surely no man has ever felt the presence of these two "thinking principles" with such precision and in such an overwhelming fashion as when the doctor got up. 

There was something unbelievable in his brain! There were two "understandings" and two "wills" at the same time... 

Remembering the scene of the previous night and uneasy about its denouement, the "right hemisphere" of Rafael thought: 

- "And Alda? What happened to Alda?" 

And the "left hemisphere" responded: 

- "I'm here."

The "right hemisphere" was then shaken with horror, understanding what had just happened...  It's lost, lost forever!

- "What will become of me!" - it said.

- "Whatever God wants" - the left hemisphere replied - "For now, I feel happy, 'well met, madam.'" 

- "Well 'met, sir', you should say" - affirmed the right hemisphere with a ring. 

- "And why is that?"

- "Because I belong to the masculine gender!"

- "No, certainly, you only belong halfway!"

- "I'm a man!"

- "I'm a woman!"

- "But then" - said the right hemisphere with infinite desolation - "what will become of us! This is a case of intellectual hermaphroditism!"

- "It's better than better... Look, all the ancient gods - and I've just learned this thanks to the knowledge that 'our brain' has on the subject - have understood masculine and feminine principles. For their part, the poets, who are the beings most similar to the gods, have in themselves each principle. Virility and delicacy alternate and merge in their spirit. Why do women love poets? Because they recognize in poets 'something of themselves'... What are you lamenting about, then? You were wise, you were young, you were beautiful, you were famous and rich; today you are something else: you are almost a god..."

The doctor - or rather, his right hemisphere - was flattered and did not reply. 

There was a pause in the dispute.

- "But" - Rafael hinted later - "I love you and..."

- "And what!"

- "By loving you, it's inevitable that I will love myself."

- "Certainly; but are you somehow disgusted by this form of love?"

- "It just seems unusual to me."

- "Don't think that... In reality, when a man loves a woman, he doesn't love her anymore than what he gives himself, from illusion, from beauty... The irises that color her, the hyacinth tunic that dresses her, the segment of the moon that crowns her... so he loves himself by loving her, and he ceases to love her when he has stripped her of that garment with which he first adorned her... As for the woman, she 'falls in love with the love she inspires', that is: with herself too. So where is the strangeness?..."

- "How well you think, Alda!"

- "I'm arguing from your brain, Rafael. I don't know more than what you know now... since I'm no longer floating in infinity..."

- "And do you love me?"

- "I adore you..."

- "Give me a kiss!"

- "Take it."

And the doctor "gave himself" a kiss... mentally. (How does one kiss oneself in any other way? Only women know how to kiss themselves on the lips, through the calm sea of a mirror!) 

DIGRESSIONS

If Napoleon hadn't hesitated for an hour at Waterloo, he wouldn't have been defeated. 

A single moment of hesitation in life's solemn moments has formidable repercussions. 

The doctor hesitated in that instant when Alda conjured him to find a body in which to incarnate her, and the consequences were fatal. 

It must be said, even when the reader "loses the illusion" for the hero. Rafael Antiga was a philosopher, the worst thing you can be in this world. 

Nature, who could have well given him warts or protuberances, was good enough to provide him with a well calibrated cranial cavity, filled with a quality brain, and there was the trouble. 

Otherwise the doctor would have possessed an exact notion of existence; he would have been a practical man; he would have avoided relations with Andrés - the most affable unbalanced person that had ever been seen in Mexico - and Alda would not be where she was, occupying half of his brain without paying rent. 

But God ordered things differently and Rafael, who could have been a man of benefit to humanity: grocer, calicot, moneylender, graduate, employee, clubman or something like that, from a very early age had engulfed himself in books, dressed himself up in theories, traveled through Utopia and, when he was on the edge of the abyss, Andrés plunged him into it, as Michael did to Satan.[Translator's note: "clubman" in English in the original.]

Andrés and Rafael were classmates. As they were the only ostracized brains in the school, they understood each other later. 

Andrés was poor and Rafael was rich. 

Andrés was a poet and Rafael was a philosopher. 

Andrés was blond and Rafael was brown-haired. 

Would anyone be surprised that they loved each other? 

Without Rafael, Andrés would have remained for some time in the shadow, but Rafael brought him into the light. He edited a book for him entitled The Eternal Poem, which was translated into French, English and German, and was sold everywhere and was known everywhere, except in Mexico, where it served as a hippodrome for the flies in the Bouret, Budin and Buxó shopwindows - the three B's from where, like three pairs of shackles, the poor hope of profit is seized from our authors. [Translator's note: Three popular bookstores in Mexico City.]

Not content with this, Rafael edited a second book by Andrés: The Inner Kingdom, a symbolist novel that Beston published - according to the spanish edition - in stereotypically very ugly volumes, but in those that had circulated throughout the world. [Translator's note: "according to the spanish edition" in English in the original.]

Soon Andrés wrote in Spanish, as Armando Palacio Valdés put it: to be given a pretext to be translated into English and French. 

The Yankees paid him in the peso of gold - american gold - for his stories, his novels, his articles, and he was famous without Mexico, which was too occupied with the works of the gutter to give him any notice. [Translators note: "american gold" in English in the original.]

Bourget says, drawing from I don't know where, that no matter how rare true love is, true friendship is rarer still. 

Rafael's and Andrés' was one of these oddities. 

Andrés lived dedicated to literature and the occult - was he born to the occult like Huysmans, like Jules Bois, like Péladan? No, like Péladan, no! - and supposedly obtained marvellous results. In this there was something to distract the poor man in this giant tenement called Mexico. [Translators note: Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), French novelist, Jules Bois (1868-1943), French occult author, Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918), French novelist and Martinist.]

Rafael lived dedicated to the "philosophy of medicine" (?), waiting for a woman's soul that never came - until it did come! - and writing in humorous-pessimistic periods in his diary, sprinkled with the well-known phrase, a parody of that from Richard III in the defeat at Bosworth: "My Kingdom for a... soul". [Translator's note: The line is in English in the original, followed by a Spanish translation of "Mi reino por un... alma".]

Weren't the two of them to understand each other? 

Yes, of course. 

And they understood each other. 

But, like "whoever loves you dearly will make you cry", Andrés was going to make Rafael cry - or rather, the right hemisphere of Rafael's brain - tears of blood, as those who continue reading will see. 

There are gifts that are not made with impunity. You can't play with lightning; you can't joke about the miracle... 

Alda was a tremendous gift - "The one whom one should never find" - More tremendous than the end of the world imagined by doña Corpus...

And enough of this digression. 

HONEYMOON

There is no way to express the contentment and delight of the two hemispheres of the doctor's brain.

They loved each other! And what luck! Like anyone who isn't God, they had been given the love of one another throughout the extension of time and throughout all the infinity of the universe!

The doctor was, in effect, like a god! He loved himself with love of the same; with a Japanese placidity from which Buddha contemplates his rotund abdomen, so the doctor contemplated himself, despite not being Japanese. 

The whole universe was inside him, it was in his brain. His brain was a closed garden, where Adam and Eve - Rafael and Alda - kissed each other continuously, I beg your forgiveness for this anthropomorphism, and others that the author has fallen, and will fall into. 

Who is not happy after being married? 

Ah, the poets never dreamed of a more intimate fusion of two beings! 

To be the same body with two souls! To have one's loved one in oneself, to possess her in oneself! To caress her, to caress oneself!... To smile at her, to smile at oneself to glorify her, to glorify oneself!... 

True, sometimes, many and such physiological miseries made the doctor blush through the ministry of his half-brain. 

- "What will Alda think of me right now!" - he said to himself.

He was reflecting more on the consolation that Alda too, in her first mortal life, had been subjected to such miseries, a sad patrimony of human pettiness; who even now took part in them, and thus the blush alleviated a little bit.

Naturally, where the reciprocated lover began, the professional augur ended. The doctor sent the serene highnesses with surnames "bristling with F's" off for a walk; the Teodorovnas, Alexandrovnas and the other Slavic "ovnas"; he officially announced that he was no longer offering treatment - and how could he heal if he has "eaten" the oracle? Alda in his brain would no longer possess, from now on, more knowledge than is stored in that brain - and he confined his life within the four walls of his study, while spring brought more beautiful scenes for his idyll. 

The first week of that strange marriage was spent in conjugating the verb to love, and not only mentally but also with the lips. 

For this Alda and Rafael alternated in the use of "their" mouth. 

- "I love you!" - this was said by the movement of the half of the brain that corresponded to the doctor. 

- "I adore you!" - answered the same by the order and virtue of the left hemisphere. 

And so "both" could hear the caressing inflection of their "own" phrases. 

The first days were such of vehemence of their protests, oaths and promises, that both were wont to "snatch the word", that is, snatch the vocal organ that emitted it; but afterwards (ah, for a very short time!) the dialogues were more perfect, more relaxed, gaining in unction what they lost in impetus. 

When Alda spoke, she knew how to extract musical inflections from that virile throat in which the woman revealed herself; and it was a delight "to hear herself" then, especially because the phrases that she used were those that the doctor had used in "her" case; those from the lips of an adored woman that he put in his dreams so many times. 

Spanish emerged, fluid and caressing, with all the melodies of the Mexican diminutives, with all the expression of the superlatives, with all the opulence of the verbs; and if we resist copying one of those erotic parliaments, one of those tender chants, it is because we have always believed that passionate dialogues should not be written except as notes on a staff, to be said by the violins and the violas, the flutes and the divine oboes, the woodwinds and the brass, in the form of symphonic pomp of a great orchestral motif. Anything else is mockery and profanation! 

There is a Russian proverb that says - we'll cite it since the doctor lives in Russia - "Carry a cat in your heart". Have you not ever carried "a cat" in your heart, pious and discreet reader? Something that ruthlessly scratches you day and night, in all the delicate fibers of the noblest of your entrails? 

Well, pretend that the doctor - the two personalities who were in the doctor - carried the opposite of a cat in his heart.

- "A mouse?"

- "Ah, no! something very beautiful... well, he was carrying a bird of paradise, which may not be the opposite of a cat, but is a near divine bird!"

Rafael's only regret was that Alda did not remember anything about her terrestrial life, her dark and mysterious adolescence and her conventual retreat, during which she passed like a daydream through the dreamy gloom of the cloisters. Such a phenomenon, which is highly explicable considering that fantasy is not a power of the soul but a material faculty that remains in the grave, prevented certain reminiscences that would have given a note of tenuous and sympathetic sadness to that "subjective" idyll. Alda could remember only with the doctor's memory; but this, which excluded the melancholic hue of Sister Teresa's reminiscences, also excluded retrospective jealousy, which is the worst jealousy that can be given to oneself, and it went from one to the other! 

INTERPLANETARY RAMBLINGS

But if she could remember neither her youth nor her adolescence on Earth, she could talk about her frequent and long voyages in the sky, and hearing her speak of these things was imponderable enchantment and unspeakable solace. 

She related her voyage to the worlds of our solar system: 

To Mars, where the atmosphere is subtle and very pure, where its low density allows the beings who inhabit it to have the divine privilege of flight; where the vegetation is red and the seas are of a prodigious lilac; where there are wonderful canalworks to communicate with the oceans and carry the water coming from the melting poles, throughout the entire face of the planet; where humanity, more beautiful and perfect than ours, has already solved all the social and religious problems that worry us here, and worships God "in Spirit and in truth".

To Jupiter, where nature has just gone through its first geological crises; where the turbulent seas, from which life has emerged much later, curdle archipelagos of algae that disappear in short order; and they curl and shake, furious at finding neither the cliffs of a rock nor the sands of a beach to lick with an infinite caress... 

To Venus, where all is green, a green that covers an immense spectrum of hues; where man has barely emerged, hairy and athletic, carving with flint in the shadows of great hospitable caverns, and fighting tirelessly with primordial monsters...

To Neptune, where humanity is even more civilized than on Mars; where man loves his fellow man "as himself" and God manifests Himself to His creatures through signs of the highest poetry and the most subtle delicacy.

To Saturn, where the body, once mortal, has been simplified and refined until it is possible to contemplate, through its transparent flesh, the distant and trembling fire of the stars; where dwellings are made of a solid air from a soft shade of turquoise; where poets and their loved ones wander in the light of countless moons and various concentric halos made of multi-colored fluids displaying all the shades of the iris; where ultraviolet light is an agent accumulated everywhere and chained to the service of civilization.

To Selene, where humanity, after attaining the maximum perfection to which it had been destined, was slowly and sweetly extinguished, and focused its immense telescopes in vain towards the Earth to send her a greeting that the Earth - still shaken by gigantic plutonic convulsions and devoid of animated life - could not, alas! receive...

She also related her wonderful excursions through the suns, as if walking through a jewelers, of indescribable precious stones: to Andromeda, where a blonde star revolves around an emerald star, around which a blue sun revolves, a dreamy sun; to Cygnus, where Albireo shows off the miracle of two suns, one yellow, the other dark blue; to Delphinus, where a topaz-colored sun revolves around an indefinable green luminary... To the stars of Hercules, where our solar system is going... in pursuit of a mysterious destiny... To the white suns, which are the youth of the cosmos; to the yellow suns, which are the matured; to the red suns, which are the elderly..., to the nebulae, which are the hopeful...

From what has been said, even the least poetic of our readers will see that the divisions between Alda and the doctor were those that absorb, that subjugate, that seize, without allowing for an instant to remember the sad miseries of the Earth.

Saint Paul approached the seventh heaven and, as he affirms, "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," nor is the mind capable of assessing what it contains for the future reward of the just. 

Alda, happier than Saint Paul, had traveled to six hundred planets across forty systems..., she had bathed her invisible plumage in the shifting lights of Sirius and, in the red glows of Aldebaran, she had powdered her wings in the golden dust of the Milky Way; she had sent a kiss to each of the geometric constellations that roll about in the ether, pulling from it vibrations of a formidable and august music...

Because in the universe, everything sings. Nothing moves without producing a vibration in that imponderable fluid which invades space; neither the grain of sand that slips from the mound raised by the ant, nor the Sun that roams the eternal line of its parabolic orbit. 

"The heavens sing the glory of Jehovah" - says the psalmist. 

And that great symphony of worlds, that gigantic choir of infinity, Alda had heard. She still felt saturated with its divine harmony and filled Raphael's spirit with it... 

And Rafael was permanently going mad.

DESCENSUS AVERNO [Translators note: "Descent to Avernus", from the Aeneid, book 6, line 126, "Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno", or "Trojan son of Anchises, easy is the descent to Avernus", Avernus being the entrance to the underworld.]

Up to this time and place, if the reader has contemplated  - maybe with anger and envy - the marvellous idyll of Rafael, he could say about Alda what is said in the Book of Wisdom: "Venerunt autem mihi omnia bona pariter cum illa". "All good things came to me along with her" (Wisdom 7:11). [Translators note: Bible citation from Nervo.]

Riches, that was already something. 

Fame, that was something else. 

Love, that was still quite a lot. 

Faith... that was everything! 

In effect, the doctor became a believer. 

At one time - and what doctor is not a bit materialistic! - he had taken pleasure in speaking and writing like Ingersoll, the weathered Yankee atheist, in an emphatic and indigestible style of dogmatism: "Man is a machine in which we put what we call food, and produces what we call ideas. Think of that wonderful chemical reaction by virtue of which bread was transformed into the divine tragedy of Hamlet!"  (The Gods, p. 47). [Translators note: Citation in the original.]

But now Rafael believed in the individual, conscious, spiritual and immortal soul - how could one not believe in it? - and he only asked God that the miracle which He had deigned to operate in his brain would not cease until death, and that the love which glorified his life, like the lamp of Pritaneus, would never ever be extinguished. 

However, it was not like that. 

Honeymoons, even those that are as exceptional as that of "our hero" (the cliché that all novelists use to designate the main character of their novels), have their last quarter and their conjunction. 

The doctor's had them, and thus, was very brief. 

The differences between him and Alda arose over a trifle, as all differences arise within marriage, which, according to Byron, comes from love, like vinegar from wine. 

Alda, according to Rafael, would not let him "get a word in edgeways". 

When she reclaimed the mouth, the only mouth both of them possessed, she was wont to give such a good account from it, that three hours later she was still speaking. Since she had so much to say, the work was to begin... 

True, her conversations were always captivating, capable of capturing the most elusive of audiences with her lips, but in the long run, could fatigue Mirabeau and Gambetta themselves. [Translators note: Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), Léon Gambetta (1838-1882), two noted orators.] 

Furthermore, the doctor was a philosopher and, like all philosophers, he liked to be heard, he needed a "public" and Alda was an impatient "public", waiting only for the slightest pause to become a speaker. 

In a parliament she would have been invaluable. 

At first Rafael, out of gallantry, gave her the floor as many times as she wanted; but later it was necessary to reach an agreement, dividing in half the hours in which they could speak. However, Alda was the first to break the agreement and the pact, which until then was very cordial between the two, soured greatly. 

Furthermore, Alda was engrossing and capricious in everything: woman at last! 

When the right hemisphere wanted to sleep, the left hemisphere insisted on reading. And what reading! Fantastic novels, like those of Hoffmann, Poe and Villiers; never scientific books! 

I don't know if I've said that the doctor hated the piano. Well, it occurred to Alda to study the piano. She liked to wrap herself in melodies like all truly superior female souls. 

She soon intervened even in Rafael's vices. He hated cigarettes, according to what he knew - and this he knew from the same brain that she "operated" - bringing amnesia with her.

Now, Rafael passionately loved cigarettes. 

Sweets seduced her and the doctor hated sweets...

In short, these spiritual "Siamese twins" ended up making life unbearable for themselves.

This did not prevent them from sometimes remembering their first hours of love and, as "deep down" such love still burned, they kissed each other with delirium. 

But after the kiss came the bite, that is, the doctor bit his own lips... 

This could not continue in such a way! 

- "Well, I said that a soul was a gift of an elephant" - affirmed the unfortunate Rafael - "Who put a blindfold over my intellect for me to accept this gift, my God! Ah! Andrés! Andrés! What a great wrong you have done me!... I lived quietly with doña Corpus' brain soups, my philosophies and my patients... Why did it occur to you to be grateful? May all the devils take you, unhinged poet..., Romanist, esthete, symbolist, occultist, neo-mystic or whatever you are!..."

But Andrés could not hear these reproaches. Lost in Padua, the most melancholic city in Italy, among old books and friendly souls, the poet spent his days carving out mysterious rhymes inspired by his surrounding spirits. 

Perhaps he did not even remember his childhood friend, nor the gift, the primary origin of so many intoxications and ultimately of so many misfortunes! 

And doña Corpus?

Ah, the "apocalyptic" doña Corpus, was never so much as then desiring the final judgment! 

Well, hadn't that "lovesick" doctor gone mad? When he wasn't yet consulting! He spent all God's day locked up "under seven keys" in the consulting room, talking to himself, gesturing and measuring the room with great strides. Sometimes his face looked like that of an angel, according to the celestial expression that was noticed on him - doña Corpus noticed this celestial expression through the keyhole  - But sometimes it looked like the face of a demon trampled on by Saint Michael... 

The freemasons of Mexico were to blame for everything! The doctor would end up in San Hipólito. [Translators note: The first psychiatric hospital facility in the Americas, founded in 1569.]

It's more important that the world end...

DIVORCE IS IMPOSED

True, with a little bit of self-control, Alda and Rafael could have reached matrimonial peace, that peace that someday would arrive at its own pace, when both "belligerent powers" tire of tragedy and opt for salvation through the monotony of a union without love, but also without crisis, seeing life from now on go by "like the cow watching the train pass". [Translators note: A reference to the 1892 short story "Goodbye, Lamb!" by Clarín, real name Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901)]

But the doctor and Alda loved each other in spite of everything, and love is perhaps nothing more than a charming form of hatred between the sexes, of that secular hatred that was born with man and that will continue in aeternum. 

Oh yes, the sexes hate each other! The kiss is nothing more than a variation of the bite. Love, in its impulses, has unprecedented ferocities. The fervid hugs of a lover suffocate... like those of a bear. Have you ever seen a young mother kiss her son until she makes him cry, kissing him furiously, almost in a rage, causing him harm? Well, he would do the same with his beloved, if he had the strength to do so. 

And even the peculiar phrases of love are ferocious: the instinct of anthropophagy that culture has not yet been able to annihilate from humanity frequently appears in them: "I would devour you with kisses." "He devoured her with his eyes"... are said frequently, as if digestive assimilation was the quintessential form of fusion between lovers... 

Thus, Alda, who, through her soul we suppose, still carried within her many feminine instincts, and Rafael, who, though ill will was virile, they hated loving each other and loved hating each other. 

The aggressive dialogues multiplied, and although their reconciliations were all the more beautiful as their disgusts were stronger, they were leaving a sediment of bitterness, a deep aftertaste of sadness in both spirits. 

They arrived, by force, at the deplorable conclusion that most modern marriages reach, when children are not involved, and sometimes even when they are involved: divorce!, the legal infirmary of the incompatibilities of character. 

In the "conscience" of Alda and the doctor, this was the only remedy for their troubles and if Rafael dared not address the issue, Alda approached it with the resolve that, in difficult cases, characterizes women: 

- "It's sad..." - replied the doctor. 

- "Sad, but necessary." 

- "But how can we do it?"

That's the rub: how to do it? [Translators note: "That's the rub", literally "that's the busilis", a colloquial term, meaning something along the lines of "crux of the matter", derived from the Latin phrase "in diēbus illis", or "in those days".]

One night, after an arduous debate on the meaning of the readings, in which the doctor saw with amazement that Alda reached into his own knowledge to mercilessly rebut him, with a sudden movement, the doctor took hold of a small revolver on the desk that opened its dark mouth, placed there more as a bibelot than as a weapon, and taking it to his right temple he exclaimed:

- "This is the only way to get divorced!" 

But Alda calmly replied: 

- "You're fooling yourself! I would follow you for all eternity. We would always be together like Paolo and Francesca..."

- "So..."

- "Furthermore, you have no right to kill yourself." 

- "What do you mean I have no right!" 

- "It's clear: I possess half of your brain and that half doesn't want to die. "

- "And what qualifies you to possess it?"

- "By right of conquest! Isn't that the best qualification to possession right now? Well, put the question to England and the United States. If you could commit suicide by halves it would be a different matter..."

- "That's impossible."

- "Give yourself hemiplegia."

- "Alda!"

- "Look; there is another way: that I incarnate in a woman. But for that we need a man: Andrés. He is the only one who could work the miracle."

The doctor's mind had calmed down and he replied: 

- "You speak well. So it's still possible for us to be happy, you with your body, I with mine, and that we love each other without any dark clouds... because, after all, I love you! Perhaps you are the only one I can love... 'semi-personalized' in me, I would end up hating you until my death; incarnated in a female form I would adore you with infinite adoration!"

- "For my part, I would once again belong to you as before, I would be subject to your mandate; I would again be your augur and again I would travel through infinity; even more so: as my body and spirit together would form a 'civil' person and not a 'canonical' one, my body would belong to you as well as my soul."

- "Let's look, then, for the 'giver'."

- "Let's look for him."

- "Do you know his whereabouts?"

- "Before I incarnated in your brain, I was in Padua."

- "Let's go, then."

And that night doña Corpus received the order to prepare the suitcases. 

EN ROUTE

The doctor able was never able to test the degree of popularity that he had reached in Europe like when had he left Russia.

All the newspapers, "without distinction in color", the same ones that on his arrival told him: "Dobropojalovat!", that is, "welcome!" (the most genuine expression of Slavic hospitality), upon learning of his departure, with affectionate effusion they wished him a Schiaslivago pouti!, that is: "Have a good trip!" 

The doctor was forced to respond by means of a daily: "Spassibo za vasché gosteprumst vo!". "Thanks for your hospitality!", and even to add, was already at the station where many important persons and many ladies with surnames ending in “ovna”, grateful for his knowledge, accompanied him in: “Da zdravstvouiete Rossia!”. "Long live Russia!" 

(We beg the reader not to try to pronounce these sentences. They would lose much of their charming expression). [Translators note: Nervo's transliteration of common Russian phrases are spelled quite differently than modern transliterations. Indeed if pronounced as written would also sound quite different to modern Russian as well.]

From Russia to Italy there was no news. As soon as he arrived in Padua, Rafael ran in search of Andrés, but Andrés had left the day before for Alexandria. 

Without mercy for the weary limbs of doña Corpus, the doctor left for Alexandria; but there he found out that Andrés had left the day before for Cairo. 

Without delay he left for Cairo, arrived, and learned that Andrés had left the same day for the Holy Land. 

As it became known later, the poet went to seek the high priest Josephus, a descendant of Melchizedek, in Jerusalem to consult with him about something regarding the Kabbalah.

It is unnecessary to say that the doctor left for the Holy Land, this time to the great satisfaction of doña Corpus, who proposed to ask Christ, before his very tomb, for the arrival of the final judgment. 

In Jerusalem, at last, the poet and the doctor met. 

They met in a Franciscan convent, built in the Garden of Olives, where the poet had found fraternal hospitality. 

- "Rafael!"

- "Andrés!"

Andrés was "almost" the same. Put the fatigued expression of four more dreamy years on his face, and you can contemplate his "true effigy". 

After the first exclamation, the right hemisphere of the doctor's brain - upon previous agreement with the left - said: 

- "I'm very unhappy!"

- "I know everything" - Andrés interrupted. 

- "You know everything!... how?"

- "Have you forgotten that Alda isn't the only soul that I've possessed?..."

- "What a gift you've given me!"

- "Hum! It's all your fault, my friend!"

- "Mine!"

- "It's clear. If you hadn't detained Alda for twenty-four hours in your office!"

- "It's true... but I have purged that guilt well! If you only knew, ah, if you only knew!"

- "I repeat, I know everything!" 

- "Good" - and the doctor began to get excited - "well, if you know everything, you must also know that I'm desperate! I can't do it anymore!  It's necessary that you tear this 'foreign body' out of my brain, I mean, this intruding soul, if you don't want it to kill me!"

Andrés smiled an enigmatic smile. 

- "Don't be impatient" - he said. 

- "Impatient!... And does what I'm suffering from seem minor to you then? Does this exceptional existence I lead seem like a frivolity to you?... Is that how it seems to you...?"

- "Calm down and listen: in your place I wouldn't complain about luck. You have realized the most perfect union. You possess your beloved in yourself. None before you have enjoyed this privilege; none will enjoy it after... The exceptionality of your life constitutes the beauty of your life... However, do you want me to untie you from Alda? It's possible that I am given to do it, but I won't do it without you reflecting a little bit. My duty in this case is that of the judge who tries to reconcile badly matched marriages before pronouncing a judgment of divorce. Think about it well, Rafael. The matrimony that is in your brain is priceless; it transforms you into a god... Still, you insist?"

- "I insist."

- "Well, what do you want me to do with Alda?" 

- "That you embody her in a woman, young and beautiful. I wouldn't dislike a Jewish woman" - the doctor added shyly. 

He shouldn't have said that! 

Alda intervened, contravening her pact of silence: 

- "No, never that. I'm angry with the Jews! They are the race that crucified Christ."

- "It is true," said Andrés, "but very beautiful; Where else to find his type of that ideal line of the nose, those wonderful green eyes worthy of the madrigal, of Gutierre de Cetina?"

- "I'd prefer a French one! Remember that I was Latin. Oh, the chic of the French..."

- "Enough!" - Andrés interrupted with a certain authoritarian tone. - "Let's not discuss aesthetics. Before proceeding to the avatar you've requested of me, I must make some very important observations.

"Listen you, Alda; listen you, Rafael."

CELESTIAL MUSIC

"If the ancient tradition of the Hebrews (or Kabbalah)[Author note: Pure Hermetism, ad pedem litterae.] [Translators note: Latin phrase "at the foot of the letter".] is to be believed," - began Andrés - "there is a sacred word, which gives the mortal who discovers the true pronunciation of it, the key to all the divine and the human sciences.  

"Such a word, which the Israelites have never uttered and which the high priest says once a year amidst the cries of a profane people, is the one found at the end of all initiations, the one that radiates in the center of the flaming triangle; is, ultimately: 

[Image: Four hebrew letters, modern English transliteration: He, vav, he, yod. Nervo spells them as "Hi, vo, hi, iod."]

"A word that, as can be seen, consists of four Hebrew letters. 

"This name serves in the Sepher Bereschit or Genesis, of Moses, to designate the divinity, and its grammatical construction is such that it recalls the attributes that men have been pleased to give to God. 

"Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet represents a number; in particular: 

yod = I = 10

he = E = 5

vav = V = 6

"The complete word is 'ieve.'

"Yod (I) represents, well, 10; or that which is the same, the active principle par excellence. The Self = 10.

"He (E) represents the passive principle par excellence. The non-Self = 5.

"The vav (V), the middle term, the bond that unites the active to the passive. The relation between the Self and the non-Self = 6.

"The Brahman" - continued Andrés -, "according to a wise orientalist, explains the three presences of God at length, while the name of Jehovah expresses them in a single word, which contains the three tenses of the verb to be united by means of a sublime combination: havah, 'it was'; hovah, 'being' or 'it is'; and je, that when in front of the three radical letters of a verb it indicates the future in Hebrew: 'it will be'.

- "You are speaking to me in Greek, Andrés."

- "I'm speaking to you in Hebrew, Rafael." 

- "I don't understand you, Andrés" - we judge that neither does the reader. 

- It is very easy, Rafael, but in short, for me to operate the prodigy, it is necessary that I correctly pronounce the sacred word which I have cited for you. Thanks to this word, I have chained the soul of Sister Teresa, a poor girl whom I met begging in the streets of Mexico, and who through my ministry, obtained her entrance to the convent where it was convenient for me to live in custody. Thanks to it I have chained more than ten souls, who are my companions, my sisters, my mentors..."

- "And this word, Andrés?" - asked the doctor in anguish. 

- "Andrés, and this word?" - questioned Alda with curiosity.

- "This word... I've forgotten how to pronounce."

THE CELESTIAL MUSIC CONTINUES

"Don't despair" - Andrés said when he saw the effect of his answer on the doctor's face - "If I have forgotten the pronunciation of that magic word, the Israelite Josephus, descendant of Melchizedek" - who they say didn't have it - "will remember it; if Melchizedek Junior doesn't remember it, 'my souls' will give it to me, the good sisters who go with me everywhere, and if my souls do not know it, my books will tell me. Ah! Just wait a minute and don't despair. I have to find what we are looking for."

Andrés went to the white stone nave, where the high priest lived. 

This priest, questioned by the poet, remained speechless for a few moments as if perplexed. Then, without a doubt wanting to dazzle the visitor with his oriental erudition: 

- "My son" - he said - "I know all of the divine and human sciences. I have read and meditated on all the holy books of the East. Those from China such as: the I-Ching, the book of the kuas of Fohi; the Chi-King, the book and its hymns; the Chu-King, the book of history; the Ly-Ky, the book of rites; the Tchun-Tsieu, or history of the twelve principalities, by Confucius; the S S E-Chu, that is, the four moral books of Confucius and Mencius; the Tao-Te-King, the book of reason, and the Kaning-Pién, or the book of rewards and penalties. I have read the holy books of Persia: the Zend-Avesta and the Boun-Dehechs; the sacred books of India, that is, the Vedas: the Rigveda, the book of the science of hymns or praises of the gods, which is made up of about ten thousand couplets; the Yadjurveda, the book of the science of the offerings, that is made up of 86 chapters in prose, on the ritual of the sacrifices; the Samaveda, the book of the science of lyrical prayers, the most sacred of all, and which has the hymns that are sung, that is, the psalms of the Indians; the Atharvaveda, or the priest's book of science, containing seven hundred hymns; the Upanishads or theology of the Vedas; and the Laws of Manú. I have read the code of Mohammedanism, or the Koran, and have penetrated all the mysteries of the Bible: how could I not know how to pronounce that word?  Let me put on my priestly garments, let the rational burn with all the divine igniscence of its gems in my chest, and I will tell you."

A few minutes later the poet heard from the lips of the Levite, three times, the prestigious word. 

- "With it you can unleash" - he added - "those tormenting nuptials of two spirits, of which you speak, those nuptials that the pale Ashthophet, the one with the dark wings, of ancient Egypt, seems to have presided over. But it is necessary that before formulating it, you look for a feminine body for Alda; Otherwise, you will mercilessly cast her into eternity!..."

- "But it's impossible to find a woman's body without a soul, father!"

- "Don't believe that; and of all luck there are some whose soul is so proportioned that a new one would not interfere with them. Seek, seek, and if you can't find, come back to me. Perhaps a spirit as powerful as Alda could form a body herself, a subtle body such as those glorified in the last day will be, a body similar to those that condensed in the three angels which became visible to Abraham, the angel who fought with Jacob, the archangel Gabriel and the archangel Raphael, making use of the organic elements that nature treasures."

THE AVATAR

Andrés returned to Alda and Rafael to tell them about his conversation with Josephus and the three began to talk. 

- "I said I want the body of a Frenchwoman" - exclaimed Alda. 

- "But where could we find this body?" - asked Rafael- "It would be necessary to return to Paris and, the truth is, in these conditions of duality, I can't make the trip! The separation is imposed. The sooner the better. I am very unhappy!"

- "The problem is difficult" - observed Andrés.

- "Very difficult!"

- "Oh, very difficult!"

At that moment doña Corpus entered the ranch, in search of the doctor. 

Andrés looked at her for a moment and, slapping himself on the forehead, exclaimed: 

- "Eureka!"

- "What do you mean eureka?" - asked Rafael.

- "We already have a subject." 

- "Who?"

- "Doña Corpus!"

- "But that's absurd!"

- "And why is that? Do you think that a soul like Alda wouldn't be able to animate, vitalize, and transform this poor, decrepit body?"

- "No!" - Alda burst out-; "never that"! 

- "But are you sure my housekeeper could be transformed?" - asked the doctor. 

- "If she drank the water from the Fountain of Youth, why not?"

- "That's a lie" - said Alda.

- "Enough!" - Andrés ordered, addressing her, "shut up and obey." 

- "And you, Rafael, explain to doña Corpus what will be necessary so that she understands. The poor thing looks at us with an astonishment worthy of a better face."

- "I can't agree to this... I had dreamt of something else."

- "It's not about dreams now, it is simply about solving a very abnormal situation. Let us incarnate Alda, then there will be no shortage of what we can do... Come on, give an explanation to doña Corpus."

- "Doña Corpus" - Rafael began - "you must know that, for reasons that are difficult to break down, I have two souls in my body: would you like me to pass you one, at cost?"

- "But you're crazy!"

- "Or about to be, if you don't accept!"

- "I don't understand."

- "And what does it matter that you don't understand? Accept and in peace..."

- "Child, the truth is, I didn't think you were making fun of this poor old woman... It's more important that the world end."

- "Look, the world will end when it wants to, but my patience has run out. Do you accept or no?"

 - "But, child of my heart, if I have my own soul, why would I want another?"

- "What abounds does not harm" - murmured Andrés. 

- "But are you sure you have a soul, doña Corpus?" - Rafael questioned.

- "What, do you think that I'm not a daughter of God and heir to His glory?"

- "Well, you don't have one."

- "How do I not have one!"

- "Look, Rafael" - interrupted Andrés - "these discussions lead nowhere. Doña Corpus" - he added, facing the old woman - ,"the doctor is in grave danger of eternal damnation if you do not accept. If you are a Christian, you must save him; don't you want to? I'll note that your complaisance could bring you to... youth!"

Faced with this argument, doña Corpus hesitated: 

- "But won't anything happen to me?"

- "Nothing, its our guarantee to you."

- "So, do what you like with me." 

Andrés did not wait any longer; he laid out his fluid-laden hands about her and the poor old woman fell into a hypnotic sleep. Then, with all the solemnity of the occasion, the poet spoke the tremendous word, mentally commanding Alda the avatar he desired. 

The doctor gave a cry and fell full length on the pavement. Doña Corpus responded to that cry with a groan and, moments later, the former returned to a normal and powerful life; the latter... the latter heavily slumped down. 

The trial had been too harsh for her fifty and some years.

Doña Corpus was dead, dead from an excess of soul, from "spiritual congestion!" 

The world was over for her!

ALDA WANTS TO LEAVE

Have you seen the fright and indecision of a canary, suddenly free from its cage, which can be described in the uncertain spirals of its clumsy flight, colliding with the walls of the house, ascending and descending chirping sadly, not managing to flee towards the rectangle of blue sky that frames the patio, feeling drunk with oxygen and the sun, and flapping its ocher wings with fever, pretending to be a flake of gold that flutters in the atmosphere? 

For something similar, the miserable soul was detached again from the flesh and prey, however, by the imperious fluid of Andrés. She lurched in space; solicited by an unknown aspiration, she extended her flight to infinity, and when she began to gain momentum, the young magician's will held detained her from the cycle from which she yearned, as a child holds, by means of a thread, the inflated globule of hydrogen that rises rapidly in the air. 

- "Leave me, let me go" - said the miserable soul through the mind of Andrés -; "God no longer wants me to continue my pilgrimage through this world. Let me go" - she repeated through the mind of Rafael-, "you've seen that we haven't been able to be happy and that everything's in vain... I feel the divine beauty of the perennial light, and I want to go and lose myself in it forever..."

But the doctor, who, quite segregated from Alda, returned to loving her precisely because he no longer possessed her, because she could escape him, because she was "another", different from him, joined his will to that of the poet to tell her: 

- "Stay! No, no don't go!"

- "The world is sad."

- "I will ask of him, for our love, a glass of delights, a radiant cup for your lips."

- "No, no you won't... You have no power for that much!"

- "Alda, I need an ideal for my life; I am made of such luck that I cannot live without an ideal... My existence without end, without affection, would row with the painful indecision of a blind bird, of an ungoverned ship... Without you I have nothing left but my evils!"

Andrés intervened again. 

- "Make an end of your evils" - he said philosophically -. "Epictetus affirms that it is in our power to accept evil as good, or even more so, to receive all evil with indifference."

But Rafael was not about philosophy then. 

- "Stay! Don't go!" he repeated wistfully, with the mechanical, monotonous inflection of a wayward child asking for a toy. "How did you say that you loved me!"

- "It's true, I loved you, I love you still perhaps! But, is it my fault that when all the splendors from above are revealed to me again, when they somehow dazzle me in such a way, and attract me, and with such force they demand me, that the very idea of returning to that sick life and those colorless affections of the earth, fills me with anguish?

"Ah, you don't know, you can't comprehend the delight of fluttering through limitless space, of being a perennial dragonfly of those great pale-flowered corymbs called constellations; to listen to the psalm of the worlds that rotate, to melt into the phosphorescent mane of comets, to visit orb after orb, finding with amazement that creation always begins, that we are always on the threshold of the universe and that we have to tour it with the quickness of light, the subtlety of ether and the tenuity of perfume!... And you want me to return to animate a poor brain mass, to unite with a body chained by gravity, enervated by 15,500 kg of atmospheric pressure, subject to disease, old age and death!... No! No! Let me go, wander, wander perpetually! I am driven by the instinct of Ahasverus, Carthaphilus, Isaac Laquedem or whatever it is called: this instinct empowers all free souls, as it empowers all gleams, all sounds, all winds... God puts it in them, that they look for Him. This mitigated instinct in life is what we call ideal, art, love. The ideal, art and love are nothing more than the 'presentiment of infinity'! This instinct is what prevents us from rest, happiness, equanimity in the enormous ergastulum of the planet... Let me go free!"

But the doctor did not understand this reasoning and murmured sadly: 

- "Don't go!"

GOODBYE

Doña Corpus was already resting in her final slumber under the sacred land that moistened the blood of the Just, and still that poor feminine spirit, like a mad butterfly, wandered through the lower layers of the atmosphere, without freedom and without destiny, pleading sweetly:

- "Let me go free."

Andrés remembered the Israelite's advice and suggested: 

- "Look, Alda, try to form a body; condense clouds, chain gases, select everything that the human body is composed of: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, iron, phosphate, sodium, potassium, calcium; or, well, dress yourself in a subtle way like the angels who deigned to appear before the shepherds..."

- "I can't" - responded Alda -. "I don't have the strength for it... Let me go!"

- "Why don't you unite" - added Andrés - "with that mob of invisible sisters, who surround me when I untie them from their bodies?"

- "I can't do that either. They still have a body, a prison, I have nothing, nothing more than the strong desire to merge with the eternal light."

- "No, not that! You will not leave!" - insisted Rafael with anguish - "I love you! Continue by my side! I will give you private and perennial worship... You will be my guardian angel, my well-loved soul! Stay! Stay! Now I love you more than ever..."

- "I have told you, oh! no, I mustn't, and now I'll tell you that it is too late, Rafael, too late! You're like all men: when they have hope within themselves, daughter of heaven, they embitter it with their pettiness and selfishness, they belittle it and drive it away and, when they watch its wings of light disappear from a distance, they call upon it and sob for her! Senseless! What did it matter to sacrifice a little of your pride before the ineffable happiness of having me with you, before the miraculous fusion of your spirit and mine! Crazy! You had made the sublime union par excellence and you have broken the spell yourself. Your love affair would have been superior to that of the book revealed by Gautier. Espirita was in your own brain and you disdained her, and now she's leaving... it's necessary for the 'giver' to consent to her leaving... The inadequate focus from which all life emanates attracts her; infinity awaits her... Faced with the delusions of love that the 'beyond' offers you, what are your affections worth, poor fool? Leave me! Let me go free!"

Andrés, who understood and was extremely moved by this mental dialogue, said to Rafael:

- "She's right. I'd hate to do violence to this poor spirit. Agree to release her."

- "But can't you see that I'm going to be alone, absolutely alone, if she leaves?"

- "Ah!, no" - interrupted Alda-, "From time to time, I'll descend to your abode. I'll come in the mornings, with pleasant smelling auras, and in the afternoons, with the last gold of the sunset. You will hear me in the passing breeze, you will breathe me in the perfume that floats, you will contemplate me at the dawn; you will feel me in the joy of your consoled spirit. I'll shine in the tears of gratitude of the poor whom you help, in the smile of the sick whom you relieve, in the look of the unfortunate whom you encourage. I will be caught in the harmonious networks of the verses that move you, I will sing in the lullaby of the orchestras, I will tremble in the throat of the birds, I will cry in the solemn vibrations of the bell that prays the Angelus, I will laugh in the crystalline gurgles of the fountains, I will glow in the jewel green of the meadows, I will burn in the pale fire of the stars and my virtue will be the one that tells you in all the bitter moments of life: 'Ora et spera! Redemption is near! Work and do good; sow germs of love, that tomorrow will bloom in eternity like great roses'.. No more will I call myself Alda for you, but you'll have to call me Lumen, because your light will be there, and as the light I will be in all things. And when you approach the final trance, I will come to you to comfort you, I will give you my hand to bridge that tremendous abyss that separates life from eternity, 'and like two notes that form a chord', like two strands of light that they form a ray, like two colors that form a tone, we will then unite forever in infinity and together we will follow the scale of perfection to which we are destined..." [Translators note: "Ora et spera": "Pray and trust". "Lumen": reference to Camille Flammarion's 1887 "Lumen"]

The light was moving away softly, the breezes were saturated with the caustic smell of Judean gums and the acrid perfume of primitive flowers. 

- "Agree, Rafael" - Andrés begged. 

Rafael was silent, captivated despite himself by that mad pantheism. 

- "Ennoble your love with martyrdom" - Andrés added. "Life is brief... Death will redeem you from your loneliness and anguish."

- "Agree, Rafael" - repeated Alda.

Rafael summoned all his energy and muttered in a strangled voice: 

- "So, well..."

Then he burst into sobs. 

- "Alda" - Andrés then uttered - "Alda, I release you and free you; fly away to that infallable light that awaits you, and pray for us who remain in this valley of tears: 'in hac lacrimarum valle'". [Translators note: The phrase popularized in the hymn Salve "Regina".]

Alda sighed:

- "Thank you!"

The doctor felt between his lips, like the shadow of freshness, faint and chaste, of a goodbye kiss: a ghost of a kiss... 

And the liberated soul, the noble emancipated spirit, left afterwards, like a dream fading away. 

Andrés and Rafael remained motionless in the room. 

Rafael was sobbing, Andrés musing. 

Ahead of them was the setting sun. 

Behind them, in the indecisive limbs of the past, was the memory... 

POETRY, WE HAVE

Did Alda (who was called Lumen in her definitive spiritual life) keep the promise made to her beloved? 

We can asses that yes, thanks to omnividence, which is the author's privilege, we find a page of Rafael's diary, written in 1892, and after a humorous paragraph that among other things says: "I made Mexico as rich as any of los Cuatrocientos de la Quinta Avenida (The four hundred of the fifth Avenue), but as poor from peace as before. In Veracruz the customs officers didn't search my luggage, and on the train I bought some oranges from a boy and he didn't give me change; this made me understand that I was already in my country"; we find, I say, the following verses, undoubtedly conceived by Rafael, but to which Andrés must have given literary form, since the doctor was not very skilled in versification ailments, was dedicated to his absent sweetness, and entitled:

Faint

An echo very distant,

An echo very discreet,

An echo very gentle:

the ghost of an echo...

 

A sigh very sad,

A sigh very intimate,

A sigh very tender:

the shadow of a sigh...

 

A perfume very vague,

A perfume very sweet,

A perfume very mild;

a soul of a perfume..

 

These are the strange signs that announce 

the ineffable presence of Lumen. 

 

Woe to me if I do not note 

the echo so far distant, 

the sign so intimate,

the perfume so vague!...

 

Lumen is once again a thread of the moon, 

dissolving all in a ray! 

 

This is the story of 'The Soul-Giver', which I have had the pleasure and melancholy to tell you about. Keep it in your heart, and pray to heaven that, when the chimera reaches you, you'll caress it with humble spirit and in high contemplation, so that it does not avert itself from you and you will love it when it leaves... 

Deo gratia, feliciter, amen! [Translators note: "By God's grace, happily, amen!"]

México, 1899

THE PEDANT AND HIM

Pedant.- Why do you call this story 'The Soul-Giver?' Take a good look: the giver hardly projects his silhouette in the book, and as for the given souls, they are reduced to one. 

Him. - There is an incontrovertible right, and it is to baptize. Why, is your name - just a guess - Fernando? Fernando means brave warrior, and you are neither brave nor warrior. Why is your last name White? A dark man, honest like you, should not be called that. However, you are within your rights. The names are very common. 

My nouvelle is called The Giver, in the first place, because that is what I like to call it and, secondly, because at the end of it, the one who gives still lives, and whoever gives, logically, can continue to give. If you were to succeed in creating an atom, you would be a creator of atoms, because the virtue that resides in you is the one that, exercised once and in the capacity to exercise others, gives you the name. 

Pedant.- Why are you speaking of things before the United States conquests of '98? 

Him.- I'm not referring to Hawaii or the Philippines or Puerto Rico or Cuba... I was speaking of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and upper California... You'll forgive me. 

Pedant.- Why do you produce so much? 

Him.- Because my beloved is multiparous and from the times when fertility was considered a nobility and sterility an ignominy. She neither she suffers from the waist, nor does she require restorative emulsions; nor does she need, like Rachel, slaves that conceive for her, nor does she adopt strange offspring, like the Pharaoh's daughter, although that offspring could be called Moses. 

Pedant.- What school do you intend to follow? 

Him.- Listen: I love Asunción, because of the enamel on her teeth and the aristocracy of her hands, similar to those of Isolde; to Lidia, for the brightness of her eyes, and to Elena, for the roses of the color, I love Blanca because of her long hair, like Margarita de Provenza's, and blonde like Princess Guinevere's; to Antonia, for the sound and cadence of her movements, and to Ana, for the music of her words and the power of her kisses. Neither Asunción, nor Lidia, nor Elena, nor Blanca, nor Antonia, nor Ana are individually considered perfection. United they form it and united I look for them. My inheritance is great and my harvest is rich. 

Pedant.- Why do they fight you as if you were many? You are one. 

Him.- It is me and my children. Sarah hated her servant, because her servant, conceiving, condemned her barrenness. Hagar fled to the desert for the crime of being fertile. 

Pedant.- Why are you always quiet? To be mute is to abide. 

Him.- I am not quiet, I work; I am not mute, I write. I believe in work and in silence: in the former, because it succeeds; in the second, because it disdains. 

Pedant.- Your book could be developed further. 

Him.- You say: develop, Flaubert said: "condense". I prefer Flaubert. Our age is that of the novella. The train flies... and the wind flips through the books. The story is the literary form of the future. 

Pedant.- Writing literature in Mexico is like "plowing the ocean", if I have to use Bolívar's phrase. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, a capitalist... and you are nothing. Your work will die without giving you life. 

Him.- All of us are what he makes of us. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote these verses: 

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell. [Translators note: This verse in English in the original.]

Pedant.- You were able to save yourself this reply, complying with your canon of silence. 

Him.- Suppose you needed it to nurture two more pages to complete the last installment, and that everything is a matter of regent.