Juanita la Larga: a Novel

Chapter 22

Chapter 22 H er rehabilitation took Juanita a long time and, in addition, not a few sacrifices, difficulties, and struggles with her willpower . The hardest thing for her was having to live, especially at first, in complete solitude. She got bored and feared that she would come down with jaundice . She neither could nor wanted to turn the clock back and talk once more, and renew friendships, with the girls that she had known all her life, girls who, having been offended, might have rebuffed her one after the other. Still less could she associate, even if she wished to, with girls of blue blood and with the daughters of wealthy farmers , both because of her mother’s lowly standing and because of her illegitimate birth and the bad reputation attributed to her by all the townspeople. Juanita even had to lose Antoñuelo’s company and friendship. And this came about not only to stop feeding the gossip mill, but also because Antoñuelo behaved very foolishly and she was obliged to send him packing, and for good. Two days after Father Anselmo had preached his famous sermon, Antoñuelo returned from his carousals. At the time, people in the town talked about nothing except the scandal that Juanita had created and about the severe and well-deserved lesson she had received from Father Anselmo. At the square and in the shade of the poplars that grow on the hillside near the church, where young people gather and chat, several friends and acquaintances teased him relentlessly on account of 114 Juanita la Larga 115 the ridiculous and unflattering role that they assumed he had played by waiting on and worshiping, practically like a deity, a wench who scorned him and who accepted—who knows to what extent—the gifts and love of a happy rival. The relationship between Juanita and Antoñuelo may seem improbable to the person who gives it superficial thought, but I believe that one like theirs is more natural and frequent than is imagined. The two had lived hand in glove since infancy. There was very little difference between them in age, and it is not an exaggeration to say that they had grown up together. Antoñuelo was coarse, illmannered , debauched, and insolent; he was not very bright and had such an intractable disposition that not even his father could cow him. But Juanita’s friendship was grounded in these very defects. She had acquired, and retained, such ascendancy over that boy that she managed to make him respect, fear, and obey her like a dog its master. It never occurred to her to love Antoñuelo as a woman loves a man. And since on the one hand he considered her a superior being and on the other he had amorous instincts that were crude in the extreme, Antoñuelo sought to satisfy the latter on easier objects, and without realizing it, and ignoring his nature and his name, he devoted a pure, ideal, and platonic affection to Juanita. Such feelings, if one considers them carefully, are not extraneous to the souls of the most ordinary individuals. All or almost all men have a thirst, a need to venerate and worship something. The spiritual man, the wise man, the circumspect man, each understands easily and worships a metaphysical entity: God, virtue, or knowledge. But the uncultured man, who scarcely knows, and then in a confused way, what knowledge is, what virtue is, and what God is, without reflecting devotes that affection, which is almost instinctive in him, to a visible, corporeal idol, one of substance. Juanita was this idol for Antoñuelo. Juanita was also his oracle. He listened to her warnings and admonitions with religious respect, and in good faith promised himself and promised on the spot to accept them as a norm for his conduct. Whenever Antoñuelo was in Juanita’s presence he felt subjugated by her influence, dazzled by her superior intelligence, and bound to her will. Unfortunately, as soon as he found himself elsewhere the beneficial influence disappeared, and the brutal instincts and depraved passions came back in a mad rush and loosened or broke the ties and cast into oblivion the good advice and charges that Juanita had given him. Removed from the fascination and the spell that almost miraculously had preserved him as a rational being, Antoñuelo turned into an idiot and a...