DANIELA
A monologue from the
play by Angel Guimera
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NOTE: This monologue is reprinted
from Masterpieces of Modern Spanish Drama. Ed. Barrett
H. Clark. New York: Duffield & Co., 1917. |
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RAMON: It's an absolute lie, the whole story. We have
not abandoned her. As a child she was left without father or
mother when she was seven years old. Her mother, a good woman,
was unfortunate in love, and set her heart on a worthless fellow,
one of those glib, smooth-tongued wretches, half French, half
Spanish, who hail from nobody knows where. Well, one day they
were married. Years later, she died from a blow that he gave
her, and the man, for he was a smuggler, was found dead one morning
in a gully on the French border, half across the line from Spain,
slain in a drunken brawl. As for the girl, she was brought home
to us and she became to me--a sister. But she was a strange child,
always making a great outcry, passionate and wild, impetuously
stamping and weeping about, so that one day my father went to
lay hands on her to control her; and, because I defended her
and held him off, he became angry with me, till, choking with
rage, he could no longer bear to see her in the house. She, seeing
how his passion had possessed him, for she was very near thirteen
then and seemed much older, one day, when a party of mountebanks
or jugglers were passing through the village, disappeared, and
when it came to be vesper time we could not find her. Nowhere
Daniela! I ran through the streets distracted--everywhere about.
At first I thought I would go mad, for I feared she had fallen
from some cliff or that the rapid current of the river had carried
her away. I wanted to kill myself, believing that she was dead.
We had lived so much together I did not really know her; I was
too young to understand. Like a fool, for days I wandered through
the villages and towns, until, at last, one night I learned that
she had been seen crossing the frontier in a tartana with those
same mountebanks, laughing, chattering there on the seat beside
them, carousing in their arms, and shamelessly making merry.
And this, this woman--this is she, that Daniela you know, for
whom I would have given up my life, and who has never once since
so much as troubled herself to think of me, no, not once, nor
of her home. And now that she finds herself sick and poor, without
resources, cast-off, rejected, despised, she has the shamelessness
to propose to return home again to me and present herself again
in my house. Ah! How does it appear to you now, gentlemen? Is
it another story? Let her die and be buried in the deepest hole
in the ground as befits such a thing, rather than that after
what has happened, she should again enter my house. I have my
wife, I have my children, we are happy because we believe in
God and have done wrong to no man, no, not in all our lives,
but good--nothing but good--and to that, you can all bear witness.
MORE
MONOLOGUES BY ANGEL GUIMERA |
