The
Big Sleep es una novela de detectives de Raymond Chandler, la
primera en mostrar al detective Philip Marlowe. Se caracteriza por su
complejidad, con traiciones y secretos revelados. El título, The Big Sleep, se refiere a la muerte.
It was about
eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look
of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my
powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black shoes,
black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and
sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private
detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
The main hallway
of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which
would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass
panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and
didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair… I was still
staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It
wasn't the butler coming back. It was a girl.
She was twenty
or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale
blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating.
Her hair was a fine yellowish wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of
pageboy hair curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost
no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her
mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith
and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too tight lips. Her
face lacked color and didn't look too healthy.
"Tall,
aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't
mean to be."
Her eyes
rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short
acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
"Handsome
too," she said. "And I bet you know it."
I grunted.
"What's
your name?"
"Reilly,"
I said. "Doghouse Reilly."
"That's a
funny name." She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me
along her eyes…
I didn't say
anything. So the butler chose that convenient moment to come back through the
French doors and see me holding her.
It didn't seem
to bother him. He was a tall, thin, silver man, sixty or close to it or a
little past it. He had blue eyes as remote as eyes could be…
She was gone
before I could draw a long breath and let it out.
The butler said tonelessly: "The General will see
you now, Mr. Marlowe."
I pushed my
lower jaw up off my chest and nodded at him. "Who was that?"
"Miss
Carmen Sternwood, sir."…
The path took us
along to the side of the greenhouse and the butler opened a door for me and
stood aside. It opened into a sort of vestibule that was about as warm as a
slow oven. He came in after me, shut the outer door, opened an inner door and
we went through that. Then it was really hot. The air was thick, wet, steamy
and enriched with the sickly smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass
walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on
the plants… in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down
and on the rug was a wheel chair, and in the wheel chair an old and obviously dying
man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but
which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung
above the mantel in the hall. The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the
bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the
outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution. His long narrow body was
wrapped—in that heat—in a traveling rug and a faded red bathrobe…
The butler stood
in front of him and said: "This is Mr. Marlowe, General."
The old man
didn't move or speak, or even nod. He just looked at me lifelessly. The butler
pushed a damp wicker chair against the backs of my legs and I sat down. He took
my hat with a deft movement.
Then the old man
dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well and said: "Brandy, Norris.
How do you like your brandy, sir?"
"Any way at
all," I said.
The butler went
away among the abominable plants. The General spoke again, slowly, using his
strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of
stockings.
"I used to
like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a
third of a glass of brandy beneath it. You may take your coat off, sir. It's
too hot in here for a man with blood in his veins."
I stood up and
peeled off my coat and got a handkerchief out and mopped my face and neck and
the backs of my wrists. St. Louis in August had nothing on that place. I sat
down again and I felt automatically for a cigarette and then stopped. The old
man caught the gesture and smiled faintly.
"You may
smoke, sir. I like the smell of tobacco."
I lit the
cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a
rathole. The faint smile pulled at the shadowed comers of his mouth...
"You are
looking at a very dull survival of a rather extravagant life, a cripple
paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There's very
little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly
worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the
orchids are an excuse for the heat…
"Tell me
about yourself, Mr. Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?"
"Sure, but
there's very little to tell. I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once
and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in
my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator
once. His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me
you wanted to see me. I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's
wives."… (The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler, chapters 1 and 2)
Vocabulario
Doghouse Reilly: No pude encontrar el significado, o
lo que quiso decir Marlowe con esto. Doghouse
Reilly, de acuerdo a la opinión de
algunos, podría haber sido algún personaje conocido en la década del ´30 en
Estados Unidos.
En “Sparknotes.com”
se intenta explicar este nombre, aunque no me pareció que quedara claro: … “A
pesar de la fachada de rudo que Marlowe quiere imponer en su interior es
sensible. Vemos esto claramente cuando le dice a Carmen que su nombre es Doghouse Reilly, aunque su nombre real es Philip Marlow. Doghouse Reilly parece el nombre de una calle…”
Recursos
Si
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clásicos ingleses
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