But he was left, as a trace in the spirit, I don’t know what of fatigue and cloudiness, as in the crystal glass that has contained dense liquors of different colors. She was still and quiet, her eyes gloomy, like a convalescent child.
Alberto, who was possessed by the emotion of the professional before the unusual case, of the bibliophile before the incunabula or of the ornithologist before the white blackbird, and had seen in what portentous terms Veronica possessed the beautiful passive virtues of the most exquisite receptivity, determined to subdue her still to new experiments. He took to the effect paper and pencil and began to draw as if without purpose and to kill time. To thep. 123 Instantly, Verónica, whose instinctual curiosity was always on the lookout like that of puppy cats, approached the young man, placed her hands on his shoulders and applied to follow with gestures and body movements the turns that Alberto was printing in pencil. First, Alberto drew lines at random: straight, curved, mixed, broken; and from the pressure on her shoulders of Veronica’s hands, she understood that the girl’s entire psychic and organic life was converging towards the lines in the process of being formed, as if she aspired to become a pure geometric scheme; no other way than that the billiard player seems as if he aspires to become a simple mechanical law when, with various lineage of contortions and without awareness of what he is doing, he follows the path of the ball, as if it were suggested by it.
Those incongruous lines, by Alberto’s art, were becoming women in dancing attitudes, in dancers who, not because they were, had lost their pristine schematic nature, but rather the line from which they were born seemed to impose an internal law, a character, on the activity. of the figure; and thus, next to the Egyptian dancer, of a priestly hieraticism, obedient to the rule of the straight line, the Hindustani bayadier undulated, slave to a voluptuous and invisible ellipse, like the stars.
“How well you paint, boy!” This is getting through the eyes. I warn you that I get sick from dancing. But at home they insist that if I have so much cooking and that I lose the beat, and the sea and its boats. Instead they say that Pilarcita is the noplusultra. Of course, a lot of braiding of feet, and come twists and pirouettes that looks like a lobster. He could not: he has been attending Juanito, el Marica’s academy for two years . But, son, I don’t call thatp. 124dance. The dance has to say something, don’t you think? You have to feel it, and I feel it. The other … bah! Sounds like a sewing machine to me.
-You want to dance?
“Dance what?” And music?
“I hum whatever you want.”
Veronica didn’t need more. She stepped into the middle of the cabinet, gathered her skirt a little over her kidneys, and shouted with sudden vehemence:
“Come on from there!”
Alberto hummed a tango, then a garrotín, and when he observed, as he had foreseen, that Verónica had lost her mind, like a bacchante, and completely surrendered to the emotion of the dance, he sang sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, pieces by Wagner and Brahms : how much came to mind. Veronica danced without respite, as possessed by successively of all the primal feelings of the human race, in her authentic simplicity and energy, anger, terror, ecstasy, joy, sorrow, lust, and all of them fitted well with him. air of music; Verónica stylized them, not only with the expression of the face, but also with each and every one of its members. Alberto stopped and Verónica stopped short.
“Well, boy, this is why you can’t judge, because the truth is, damn if I know what I did.” This was an improvisation. You have to see me with music, you know? And he wiped his damp forehead.
—You dance very well, Veronica, because you dance for pleasure and not for vanity; because you forget what you do and don’t offer yourself in a show; because you dance as if you needed to dance to dance and not to dazzle money men.
—That’s the chipén, boy: I dance because it comes from within me.
—And above all you dance well, because you dance well. You will be a great dancer.
p. 125
“Get out there, crazy!”
“For now, do you dare to debut in two or three days?”
-What do you say?
“Nothing, you’re going to debut because I want it.”
-But man…
“The Parish circus opens in a few days.” The businessman, and especially the manager, are my friends. Today I write the letter …
“But … do you think I can?”
—When you do dance, I wish you
A wave of the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function.
—Latinitos, are you crazy?
“No shit, girl.” These words are from the same author as Othello, and they mean: «When I see you dance, I would like you to be a wave of the sea, so that from now on you could not do anything other than dance. Dance, dance even more; dance always, and do nothing but dance. ”
“But what about the suit, Alberto?”
-Do not worry; I take care of him.
“If you don’t have a room.”
—The company will pay you; I mean that I will tell you how to dress.
—Cabalito; then I go out to the public, he gives me a fool and goodbye Madrid.
“He won’t give you a fool.” You dance, and dance with all your soul, like David before God.
-King David? The one who said…?
-The same.
“And was he a dancer?”
-Sometimes.
“Oh, what a man!”
“Yes, it was an uncle.”
p. 126″No, if the uncle is you, I mean.”
—In you, Veronica, giving yourself to everyone and everything is to such a degree that vice becomes a virtue.
