“El Matrimonio
de Sylvia” es otra novela de Upton Sinclair. A continuación veremos unos
párrafos del primer capítulo. La vida de una mujer sufrida y llena de
sacrificios es como comienza la novela. Sylvia y la narradora comparan sus
vidas…
“I am telling
the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to tell it without mention of
myself; but it was written in the book of fate that I should be a decisive
factor in her life, and so her story pre-supposes mine. I imagine the
impatience of a reader, who is promised a heroine out of a romantic and
picturesque "society" world, and finds himself beginning with the
autobiography of a farmer's wife on a solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I remember that Sylvia found me
interesting. Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager questions and
her exclamations, I am able to see myself as a heroine of fiction.
I was to Sylvia
a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first
"common" person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the
reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a
soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things
she desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that had
been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her
modern attitude and her common-sense.
My girlhood was
spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight children, and he drank.
Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about that at the age of seventeen I ran
away with a boy of twenty who worked upon a neighbour's farm. I wanted a home
of my own, and Tom had some money saved up. We journeyed to Manitoba, and took
out a homestead, where I spent the next twenty years of my life in a
hand-to-hand struggle with Nature which seemed simply incredible to Sylvia when
I told her of it.
The man I
married turned out to be a petty tyrant. In the first five years of our life he
succeeded in killing the love I had for him; but meantime I had borne him three
children, and there was nothing to do but make the best of my bargain. I became
to outward view a beaten drudge; yet
it was the truth that never for an hour did I give up. When I lost what would
have been my fourth child, and the doctor told me that I could never have
another, I took this for my charter of freedom, and made up my mind to my
course; I would raise the children I had, and grow up with them, and move out
into life when they did.
This was when I
was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of it by lamp-light, in the
darkness of our Northern winters. When the accident came, I had been doing the
cooking for half a dozen men, who were getting in the wheat upon which our
future depended. I fell in my tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and
white while the men ate supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was
my life in those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which
Sylvia listened to the story. But these things are common in the experience of
women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman has toiled since
civilization began.
We won out, and
my husband made money. I centred my energies upon getting school-time for my
children; and because I had resolved that they should not grow ahead of me, I
sat up at night, and studied their books. When the oldest boy was ready for
high-school, we moved to a town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I had
become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to describe. But I
still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was my salvation, in a
way—it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize the free library.”
Libro: El
Matrimonio de Sylvia En inglés: Sylvia´s Marriage Autor: Upton
Sinclair
Vocabulario:
Homestead: casa,
granja
Afar off: a lo lejos
drudge: esclava
granary: granero
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