Caesar or Nothing

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Laura made, socially speaking, a good marriage. She married the Marquis
of Vaccarone, a babbling Neapolitan, insubstantial and light. In a short
while, seeing that they were not congenial, she arranged for an amicable
separation and the two lived independent.

III

CAESAR MONCADA

AT THE ESCOLAPIANS

Caesar studied in Madrid in an Escolapian college in the Calle de
Hortaleza, where he was an intern all the time he was taking his
bachelor's degree.

His mother had gone to live in Valencia, after marrying Laura off,
and Caesar passed his vacations with her at a country-place in a
neighbouring village.

Several times a year Caesar received letters and photographs from his
sister, and one winter Laura came to Valencia. She retained a great
fondness for Caesar; he was fond of her too, although he did not show
it, because his character was little inclined to affectionate expansion.

At college Caesar showed himself to be a somewhat strange and absurd
youth. As he was slight and of a sickly appearance, the teachers treated
him with a certain consideration.

One day a teacher noticed that Caesar creaked when he moved, as if his
clothes were starched.

"What are you wearing?" he asked him.

"Nothing."

"Nothing, indeed! Unbutton your jacket."

Caesar turned very pale and did not unbutton it; but the master, seizing
him by a lapel, unbuttoned his jacket and his waistcoat, and found that
the student was covered with papers.

"What are these papers? For what purpose are you keeping them here?"

"He does it," one of his fellow students replied, laughing, "because
he is afraid of catching cold and becoming consumptive." They all made
comments on the boy's eccentricity, and a few days later, to show that
he was not a coward, he tried to go out on the balcony on a cold winter
night, with his chest bare.

Among his fellow-students Caesar had an intimate friend, Ignacio
Alzugaray, to whom he confided and explained his prejudices and doubts.
Alzugaray was not a boarder, but a day-scholar.

Ignacio brought anti-clerical periodicals to school, which Caesar read
with enthusiasm. His sojourn in a religious college was producing a
frantic hatred for priests in young Moncada.

Caesar was remarkable for the rapidity of his decisions and the lack of
vacillation in his opinions. He felt no timidity about either affirming
or denying.

His convictions were absolute; when he believed in the exact truth of a
thing, he did not vacillate, he did not go back and discuss it; but if
his belief faltered, then he changed his opinion radically and went
ahead stating the contrary of his previous statements, without
recollecting his abandoned ideas.

His other fellow-students did not care about discussions with a lad who
appeared to have a monopoly of the truth.

"Professor So-and-So is a beast; What-you-call-him is a talented chap;
that fellow is a thick-witted chap. This kid is all right; that one is
not."

In this rail-splitting manner did young Moncada announce his decisions,
as if he held the secret explanation of all things tight between his
fingers.

Alzugaray seldom shared his friend's opinions; but in spite of this
divergence they understood each other very well.

Alzugaray came of a modest family; his mother, the widow of a government
clerk, lived on her pension and on the income from some property they
owned in the North.

Ignacio Alzugaray was very fond of his mother and his sister, and was
always talking about them. Caesar alone would listen without being
impatient to the meticulous narratives Ignacio told about the things
that happened at home.

Alzugaray was of a very Catholic and very Carlist family; but like
Caesar, he was beginning to protest against such ideas and to show
himself Liberal, Republican, and even Anarchistic. Ignacio Alzugaray was
a nephew of Carlos Yarza, the Spanish author, who lived in Paris, and
who had taken part in the Commune and in the Insurrection of Cartagena.

Caesar, on hearing Alzugaray recount the doings of his uncle Carlos
Yarza various times, said to his fellow-student:

"When I get out of this college, the first thing I am going to do is to
go to Paris to talk with your uncle."

"What for?"

"I have to talk to him."

As a matter of fact, once his course was finished, Caesar left the
college, took a third-class ticket, went to Paris, and from there wrote
to his mother informing her what he had done. Carlos Yarza, Alzugaray's
uncle, received him very affectionately. He took him to dine and
explained a good many things. Caesar asked the old man no end of
questions and listened to him with real avidity.

Carlos Yarza was at that time an employee in a bank. At this epoch his
forte was for questions of speculation. He had put his mind and his will
to the study of these matters and had the glimmering of a system in
things where everybody else saw only contingencies without any possible
law.

Caesar accompanied Yarza to the Bourse and was amazed and stirred at
seeing the enormous activity there.

Yarza cleared away the innumerable doubts that occurred to the boy.

In the short time Caesar spent in Paris he came to a most important
conclusion, which was that in this life one had to fight terribly to get
anywhere.

One day, on awakening in the shabby little room where he lodged, he
found that the arms of a very smart woman were around his neck. It was
Laura, very contented and joyful to surprise her madcap brother.

"Mamma is alarmed," Laura told him. "What are you doing here all this
time? Are you in love?" "I? Bah!"

"Then what have you been doing?"

"I've been going to the Bourse."

SOUNDING-LINES IN LIFE

Laura burst out laughing, and she accompanied her brother back to
Valencia. Caesar's mother wished the lad to take his law course there,
but Caesar decided to do it in Madrid.

"A provincial capital is an insupportable place," he said.

Caesar went to Madrid and rented a study and a bed-room, cheap and
unrestricted.

He boarded in one house and lodged at another. Thus he felt more free.

Caesar believed that it was not worth the trouble to study law
seriously; and he imagined moreover that to study so many routine
conceptions, which may be false, such as the conception of the soul, of
equity, of responsibility, etc., would bring him to a shyster lawyer's
vulgar and affected idea of life. To counteract this tendency he devoted
himself to studying zoology at the University, and the next year he took
a course in physiology at San Carlos.

At the same time he did not neglect the stock exchange; his great pride
was to acquaint himself thoroughly with the details of the speculations
made and to talk in the crowds.

As a student he was mediocre. He learned the secret of passing
examinations well with the minimum of effort, and practised it. He
found that by knowing only a couple of things under each heading of the
program, it was enough for him to answer and to pass well. And so, from
the beginning of each course, he marked in the text the two or three
lines of every page which seemed to him to comprise the essential, and
having learned those, considered his knowledge sufficient.

Caesar had a deep contempt for the University and for his
fellow-students; all their rows and manifestations seemed to him
repulsively flat and stupid.

Alzugaray was studying law too, and had obtained a clerkship in a
Ministry. Alzugaray got drunk on music. His great enthusiasm was for
playing the 'cello. Caesar used to call on him at his office and at
home.

The clerks at the Ministry seemed to Caesar to form part of an inferior
human race.

At Alzugaray's house, Caesar felt at home. Ignacio's mother, a lady with
white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited
the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray's sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly
lass, was often ill.

All the family thought a great deal of Caesar; his advice was followed
at that house, and one of the operations on 'change that he recommended
making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio's mother was holding at the
time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea
of young Moncada's financial talents.

Caesar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of
studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him
from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy
themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.

The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who
expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but
it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.

As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation
and of different orders into the same plane, carried Caesar into
absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism
about the instrument of knowledge.

His negation had no reference,--far from it,--to women, to love, or
to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of
literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism
was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a
region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and
returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it
shows.

"Nothing absolute exists," Caesar told himself, "neither science nor
mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing."

Arriving at this result surprised Caesar a good deal. On finding that he
was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be
a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought
within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and
serve as a standard.

A PHILOSOPHY

Toward the end of their course Caesar presented himself one day in his
friend Alzugaray's office.

"I think," he said, "that I am getting my philosophy into shape."

"My dear man!"

"Yes. I have tacked some new contours on to my Darwinian pragmatism."

Alzugaray, in whom every treasure-trove of his friend's always produced
great surprise, stood staring naively at him.

"Yes, I am building up my system," Caesar went on, "a system within
relative truth. It is clear."

"Let's hear what it is."

"In regard to us," said Caesar, as if he were speaking of something
that had happened in the street a few minutes before, "our uncertain
instrument of knowledge makes two apparent states of nature seem real to
us; one, the static, in which things are perceived by us as motionless;
the other, the dynamic, wherein these same things are found in motion.
It is clear that in reality everything is in motion; but within the
relative truth of our ideas we are able to believe that there are some
things in repose and others in action. Isn't that so?"

"Yes. That is, I think so," replied Alzugaray, who was beginning to
wonder if the whole earth was trembling under his feet.

"Good!" Caesar continued. "I am going to pass from nature to life: I
am going to assume that life has a purpose. Where can this purpose be
found? We don't know. But what can be the machinery of this purpose?
Only movement, action. That is to say, struggle. This assertion once
made, I am going to take a hand in carrying it out. The things we call
spiritual also are dynamic. Who says anything whatsoever says matter and
force; who says force affirms attraction and repulsion; attraction and
repulsion are synonymous with movement, with struggle, with action. Now
I am inside of my system. It will consist of putting all the forces near
me into movement, into action, into struggle. What pleasure may there be
in this? First, the pleasure of doing, the pleasure, we might call
it, of efficiency; secondly, the pleasure of seeing, the pleasure of
observing.... What do you think of it?"

"Fine, man! The things you start are always good." "Then there is the
moral point. I think I have settled that too."

"That too?"

"Yes. Morals should be nothing more than the true, fitting, and natural
law of man. Man considered solely as a spiritual machine? No. Considered
as an animal that eats and drinks? Not that either. Man considered as a
complete whole. Isn't that so?"

"I believe it is."

"I proceed. In nature laws become more obscure, according as more
complicated objects of knowledge turn up. We all clearly see the law
of the triangle, and the law of oxygen or of carbon with the same
clearness. These laws appear to us as being without exception. But then
comes the mineral, and we begin to see variations; in this form it
exerts one attraction, in that form a different one. We ascend to
the vegetable and find a sort of surprise-package. The surprises are
centupled in the animal; and are raised to an unknown degree in man.
What is the law of man, as man? We do not know it, probably we shall
never know it. Right and justice may be truths, but they will always
be fractional truths. Traditional morality is a pragmatism, useful and
efficacious for social life, for well-ordered life; but at the bottom,
without reality. Summing all this up: first, life is a labyrinth
which has no Ariadne's thread but one,--action; secondly, man is upheld
in his high qualities by force and struggle. Those are my conclusions."

"Clever devil! I don't know what to say to you."

Alzugaray asserted that, without taking it upon him to say whether his
friend's ideas were good or bad, they had no practical value; but
Caesar insisted once and many times on the advantages he saw in his
metaphysics.

ENCHIRIDION SAPIENTIAE

Caesar remained in the same sphere during the whole period of his law
course, always seeking, according to his own words, to add one wheel
more to his machine.

His life contained few incidents; summers he went to Valencia, and
there, in the villa, he read and talked with the peasants. His mother,
devoted solely to the Church, bothered herself little about her son.

Caesar ended his studies, and on his coming of age, they gave him his
share of his father's estate.

Incontinently he took the train, he went to Paris, he looked up Yarza.
He explained to him his vague projects of action. Yarza listened
attentively, and said:

"Perhaps it will appear foolish to you, but I am going to give you a
book I wrote, which I should like you to read. It's called _Enchiridion
Sapientiae_. In my youth I was something of a Latinist. In these pages,
less than a hundred, I have gathered my observations about the financial
and political world. It might as well be called _Contribution to
Common-sense, or Neo-Machiavellianism_. If you find that it helps you,
keep it."

Caesar read the book with concentrated attention.

"How did it strike you?" said Yarza.

"There are many things in it I don't agree with; I shall have to think
over them again."

"All right. Then keep my _Enchiridion_ and go on to London. Paris is a
city that has finished. It is not worth the trouble of losing one's time
staying here."

Caesar went to London, always with the firm intention of going into
something. From time to time he wrote a long letter to Ignacio
Alzugaray, telling him his impressions of politics and financial
questions.

While he was in London his sister joined him and invited him to go to
Florence; two years later she begged him to accompany her to Rome.
Caesar had always declined to visit the Eternal City, until, on that
occasion, he himself showed a desire to go to Rome with his sister.

IV

PEOPLE WHO PASS CLOSE BY

_THE SAN MARTINO YOUNG LADIES_

Arrived at Rome, Laura and Caesar went up to the hotel, and were
received by a bald gentleman with a pointed moustache, who showed them
into a large round salon with a very high ceiling.

It was a theatrical salon, with antique furniture and large red-velvet
arm-chairs with gilded legs. The enormous mirrors, somewhat tarnished
by age, made the salon appear even larger. On the consoles and cabinets
gleamed objects of majolica and porcelain.

The big window of this salon opened on the Piazza Esedra di Termini.
Caesar and Laura looked out through the glass. It was beginning to rain
again; the great semi-circular extent of the square was shining with
rain.

The passing trams slipped around the curve in the track; a caravan of
tourists in ten or twelve carriages in file, all with their umbrellas
open, were preparing to visit the monuments of Rome; strolling pedlars
were showing them knick-knacks and religious gewgaws.

Caesar's and Laura's rooms were got ready and the manager of the hotel
asked them again if they had need of nothing else.

"What are you going to do?" said Laura to her brother.

"I am going to stretch myself out in bed for a while."

"Lunch at half-past twelve."

"Good, I will get up at that time."

"Good-bye, _bambino_. Have a good rest. Put on your black suit to come
to the table."

"Very well." Caesar stretched himself on the bed, slept off and on,
somewhat feverish from fatigue, and at about twelve he woke at the noise
they made in bringing his luggage into the room. He got up to open the
trunks, washed and dressed, and when the customary gong resounded, he
presented himself in the salon.

Laura was chatting with two young ladies and an older lady, the Countess
of San Martino and her daughters. They were in Rome for the season and
lived regularly in Venice.

Laura introduced her brother to these ladies, and the Countess pressed
Caesar's hand between both of hers, very affectionately.

The Countess was tiny and dried-up: a mummy with the face of a
grey-hound, her skin close to her bones, her lips painted, little
penetrating blue eyes, and great vivacity in her movements. She dressed
in a showy manner; wore jewels on her bosom, on her head, on her
fingers.

The daughters looked like two little blond princesses: with rosy cheeks,
eyebrows like two golden brush-strokes, almost colourless, clear blue
eyes of a heavenly blue, and such small red lips, that on seeing them,
the classical simile of cherries came at once to one's mind.

The Countess of San Martino asked Caesar like a shot if he was married
and if he hadn't a sweetheart. Caesar replied that he was a bachelor and
that he had no sweetheart, and then the Countess came back by asking if
he felt no vocation for matrimony.

"No, I believe I don't," responded Caesar.

The two young women smiled, and their mother said, with truly diverting
familiarity, that men were becoming impossible. Afterwards she added
that she was anxious for her daughters to marry.

"When one of these children is married and has a _bambino_, I shall be
more contented! If God sent me a _cheru-bino del cielo_, I shouldn't be
more so."

Laura laughed, and one of the little blondes remarked with aristocratic
indifference: "Getting married comes first, mamma."

To this the Countess of San Martino observed that she didn't understand
the behaviour of girls nowadays.

"When I was a young thing, I always had five or six beaux at once;
but my daughters haven't the same idea. They are so indifferent, so
superior!"

"It seems that you two don't take all the notice you should," said
Caesar to the girls in French.

"You see what a mistake it is," answered one of them, smiling.

The last round of the gong sounded and various persons entered the
salon. Laura knew the majority of them and introduced them, as they
came, to her brother.

_OBSERVATIONS BY CAESAR_

The waiter appeared at the door, announced that lunch was ready, and
they all passed into the dining-room.

Laura and her brother were installed at a small table beside the window.

The dining-room, very large and very high, flaunted decorations copied
from some palace. They consisted of a tapestry with garlands of flowers,
and medallions. In each medallion were the letters S.P.Q.R. and various
epicurean phrases of the Romans: "_Carpe diem. Post mortem nulla
voluptas_," et cetera.

"Beautiful decoration, but very cold," said Caesar. "I should prefer
rather fewer mottoes and a little more warmth."

"You are very hard to please," retorted Laura.

Shortly after getting seated, everybody began to talk from table to
table and even from one end of the room to the other. There was none of
that classic coolness among the people in the hotel which the English
have spread everywhere, along with underdone meat and bottled sauces.

Caesar devoted himself for the first few moments to ethnology.

"Even from the people you find here, you can see that there is a great
diversity of ethnic type in Italy," he said to Laura. "That blond boy
and the Misses San Martino are surely of Saxon origin; the waiter, on
the other hand, swarthy like that, is a Berber."

"Because the blond boy and the San Martines are from the North, and the
waiter must be Neapolitan or Sicilian.

"Besides, there is still another type: shown by that dark young woman
over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What
is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great
elegance in their movements. They are like actors giving a good
performance."

Caesar's observations were interrupted by the arrival of a dark, plump
woman, who came in from the street, accompanied by her daughter, a blond
girl, fat, smiling, and a bit timid.

This lady and Laura bowed with much ceremony.

"Who is she?" asked Caesar in a low tone.

"It is the Countess Brenda," said Laura.

"Another countess! But are all the women here countesses?"

"Don't talk nonsense."

At the other end of the dining-room a young Neapolitan with the
expression of a Pulcinella and violent gestures, raised his sing-song
voice, talking very loud and making everybody laugh.

After lunching, Caesar went out to post some cards, and as it was
raining buckets, he took refuge in the arcades of the Piazza Esedra.

When he was tired of walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room,
turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of
Proudhon's book on the speculator.

And while he read, there came from the salon the notes of a Tzigane
waltz played on the piano.

_ART, FOR DECEIVED HUSBANDS_

Caesar was writing something on the margin of a page when there came a
knock at his door. "Come in," said Caesar.

It was Laura.

"Where are you keeping yourself?" she asked.

"Here I am, reading a little."

"But my dear man, we are waiting for you."

"What for?"

"The idea, what for? To talk."

"I don't feel like talking. I am very tired."

"But, _bambino; Benedetto_. Are you going to live your life avoiding
everybody?"

"No; I will come out tomorrow."

"What do you want to do tonight?"

"Tonight! Nothing."

"Don't you want to go to the theatre?"

"No, no; I have a tremendously weak pulse, and a little fever. My hands
are on fire at this moment."

"What foolishness!"

"It's true."

"So then you won't come out?"

"No."

"All right. As you wish."

"When the weather is good, I will go out."

"Do you want me to fetch you a Baedeker?"

"No, I have no use for it."

"Don't you intend to look at the sights, either?"

"Yes, I will look willingly at what comes before my eyes; it wouldn't
please me if the same thing happened to me that took place in Florence."

"What happened to you in Florence?"

"I lost my time lamentably, getting enthusiastic over Botticelli,
Donatello, and a lot of other foolishness, and when I got back to London
it cost me a good deal of work to succeed in forgetting those things and
getting myself settled in my financial investigations again. So that
now I have decided to see nothing except in leisure moments and without
attaching any importance to all those fiddle-faddles." "But what
childishness! Is it going to distract you so much from your work, from
that serious work you have in hand, to go and see a few pictures or some
statues?"

"To see them, no, not exactly; but to occupy myself with them, yes.
Art is a good thing for those who haven't the strength to live, in
realities. It is a good form of sport for old maids, for deceived
husbands who need consolation, as hysterical persons need morphine...."

"And for strong people like you, what is there?" asked Laura,
ironically.

"For strong people!... Action."

"And you call lying in bed, reading, action?"

"Yes, when one reads with the intentions I read with."

"And what are they? What is it you are plotting?"

"I will tell you."

Laura saw that she could not convince her brother, and returned to the
salon. A moment before dinner was announced Caesar got dressed again in
black, put on his patent-leather shoes, looked at himself offhandedly in
the mirror, saw that he was all right, and joined his sister.

V

THE ABBE PRECIOZI

_THE BIG BIRDS IN ROME_

The next day Caesar awoke at nine, jumped out of bed, and went to
breakfast. Laura had left word that she would not eat at home. Caesar
took an umbrella and went out into the street. The weather was very dark
but it held off from rain.

Caesar took the Via Nazionale toward the centre of town. Among the
crowd, some foreigners with red guide-books in their hands, were walking
with long strides to see the sights of Rome, which the code of worldly
snobbishness considers it indispensable to admire.

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