Of the Ephemeral Past

This man from the provincial casino who saw Carancha receive one day, has his skin withered, his hair gray, eyes veiled by melancholy, under the gray mustache, lips of weariness, and a sad expression that is not sadness, but something more and less: the emptiness of the world in the hollowness of his head. He still wears a Corinthian velvet jacket and buttoned pants, and a Cordovan hat the color of polished and turned caramel. Three times he inherited and three times he lost his fortune to the mountain; twice he became a widower. He only comes alive in forbidden chance on the green reclined carpet, or when recalling the afternoon of a bullfighter, the luck of a gambler, or if someone tells the tale of a gallant bandit, or the feat of a bloody thug. He yawns at banal politics, curses the reactionary government, and predicts that the liberals will come as the stork returns to the bell tower. A bit of a farmer, he waits for the sky and fears the sky; sometimes he sighs thinking of his olive grove, he looks uneasily at the sky if the rain is late. The rest, taciturn, hypochondriac, a prisoner in the Arcadia of the present, bores him; only the smoke of tobacco simulates some shadows on his forehead. This man is not from yesterday, nor from tomorrow but from never; from the Spanish stock. He is not the ripe fruit, nor rotten, he is a vain fruit of that Spain that passed and has not been that which today has a gray head...