“You sound quite overjoyed … Most weird …”
“My dear friend, I have spent a long time in the British Museum Library today meditating on the nature of justice. I skimmed through a pile of grandiloquent tomes and every one stated the idea that justice is extremely important and as natural, say, as my existence or yours. I was soon convinced and marveling. Nonetheless, after leaving the library and taking a short stroll through this tranquil park I have seen a monstrous penguin devour a healthy sparrow that was full of life and full of love for its fellow sparrows. I don’t know if you noticed how the strange animal succeeded in catching the sparrow: fascinated by a passing beetle, the sparrow had decided it wanted a nibble and was thus distracted. I’m not in any way rejoicing over what happened. On the other hand, I’m not particularly partial to displaying huge stocks of hypocritical sentimentality. I am simply acknowledging the facts. Sparrows eat beetles, penguins eat sparrows. Why did it all take place? Who knows? Perhaps God merely punished the fixated sparrow …”
“There are days when you seem to have a monopoly over the commonplace …”
“My dear Vinyals, you are young, you are a dentist and a scientist and it is only natural that sentimentality should blind you to the nature of truth. We converse about a penguin and a sparrow and you find my remarks rather coarse. But the fact is one hears what I just said about these animals said every day about people, and people are shocked but they accept that life is so. You may say it is dangerous to compare like with unlike. I’m not so sure. When cast against the horizons of eternity, humanity’s hustle and bustle is as futile as the penguin’s stately waddle and its acts are as absurd as the sparrows’ voluptuous, morning chirrups. And if God, who is almighty and omniscient, as you are aware, dear Vinyals, condemns and forgives people, why can’t he do the same for sparrows? Or do you arrogantly believe, like so many distinguished yet blinkered men, that God only worries about beings who wear winged collars? You are mistaken. God worries about every living thing and still finds there are too many hours in the day. You are too young to have known Sra Boniquet, Adela, to her friends, now a retired widow living in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. Nevertheless, I will give you a profile of this extraordinary lady who has remained etched on my memory, even after all these years. Adela Boniquet, the wife of Boniquet the architect, was a woman who always longed for more. When I made her acquaintance she wasn’t far off forty and was always on the boil. She was a tall, plump woman, honey-natured, soft-skinned, with black tresses, eyes the color of Indian ink with the dreamiest of expressions. She was known to have three official lovers: in the morning a gentleman wearing a white glass-buttoned piqué waistcoat paid her a visit — he was a mere South American consul; in the afternoon, from five to six, a fire-raising, radical town councilor called on her; and in the evening, a poet and famous philosopher would drop by, taking advantage of the time her husband spent with friends at his gentlemen’s club. It was a harmonious, natural cycle that was never interrupted. You might perhaps conclude that Adela was happy to receive all this attention, that she gave her thanks to heaven and blessed the gift of exuberant promiscuity. If you do, you are sorely mistaken. I can tell you that Adela never spurned approaches in the street or high society and it was relatively easy to win her over with an insistent stare. She led a life obsessed by the pleasures of the flesh and subjected herself to their natural laws with bovine meekness. Boniquet the architect was an absentminded, slightly chaotic man. As long as his supper was on the table at half past eight, he had a change of clothes every two days, and no one touched the papers in his study, he never complained about his lot. Who can doubt he loved his wife? Perhaps he had never told her so. But nor had he ever said as much to the umbrella he took with him when it rained, and how he loved that umbrella! They had the most cordial of relationships, but lived separate lives. I have never met anyone with such a lack of interest in architecture as Adela. Conversely, Sr Boniquet never found the time to inquire how his wife spent her day. His forte was metal and concrete fatigue.”
“…”
“In this way Adela enjoyed fifteen glorious years of emotional splendor, and her aggressive overtures towards numerous members of the opposite sex made their minimal contribution to dispelling the dreary, drowsy pall that floats over the big metropolis. Her extravagant behavior was the talk of the town. A friend in the architect’s circle hinted vaguely to Sr Boniquet that there was gossip, and, as he was with friends, he made strenuous efforts to pretend that he was annoyed. The moment he left them, however, he forgot all about it. On his way up to his flat he bumped into the philosopher on his way down and bid him a warm farewell. It was only four or five days later that he recalled that he was a cuckold. He summoned Adela and gingerly told her what he’d heard. Adela was livid and retorted that she’d never forget what he’d said or how furious it had made her, however many years went by. It would cost him dear. She forced him to apologize and added that she would never forgive him. The architect cursed the bones of the friend who’d made him suffer so. The second he was out in the street, his mind filled with contractors, metals, and reinforced concrete, as if nothing had happened. A few days later, in the midst of all this, when visiting a house he was constructing on the Diagonal, the roof — one he had calculated so carefully — collapsed on top of him. The day before yesterday I went to give my condolences to Adela. She tearfully described the scene her husband had provoked and, as if summing up the depths of her sorrow at his unfortunate, untimely death, she remarked: “God has justly punished him.”
“What exactly are you implying?” asked Vinyals the dentist, visibly shaken, after a short pause.
“Oh, nothing very much: that Sra Boniquet had remarked à propos of her husband that God had punished him …”
“You are a nasty cynic …”
“So how would you prefer me, Vinyals, my susceptible friend? You are simply sentimental. You don’t like to hear the truth. Whenever I try to take the cotton wool from your ears and help you to understand what reality is like, you retreat indignantly. You look the way I’d expect you to look if I had revealed a vaccination had been discovered that meant people would never suffer from toothache again. You are the victim of the worst possible dysfunction: emotional dysfunction. Obviously you are surprised when you discover that to be the case. That’s because the dysfunction is rife and is mistakenly thought to be the natural state of things.”
“Are you serious or in jest?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Don’t start again! I am surprised you say I am sentimental. I rather felt I was an individual shaped by the realism imparted by my particular branch of science. You seem to forget that I am a professional dentist who has made every effort to grasp the philosophical problems his profession raises … I see you are laughing …”
“No, not at all, I am not laughing …”
“You must be aware that every technical intervention involves an ethical dilemma.”