Brothers
es parte de la colección de historias de Sherwood Anderson The Triumph of the Egg. El libro fue publicado en 1921 después de
la exitosa Winesburgh,
Ohio.
… For a month,
two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered every morning in our
village, have been filled with the story of a murder. A man there has murdered
his wife and there seems no reason for the deed. The tale runs something like
this—
The man, who is
now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged, worked in a bicycle
factory where he was a foreman and lived with his wife and his wife's mother in
an apartment in Thirty-second Street. He loved a girl who worked in the office
of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she
first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman,
a heavy impassive
looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world.
Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the
building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a desk by another window. He
sat at his desk making out sheets containing the record of the work done by
each man in his department. When he looked up he could see the girl sitting at
work at her desk. The notion got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely.
He did not think of trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He
looked at her as one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in
October when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is
a pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be
thinking about as she sits there by the window at work."
In his imagination the
foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his apartment in Thirty-second
Street and into the presence of his wife and his mother-in-law. All day in the
shop and during the evening at home he carried her figure about with him in his
mind. As he stood by a window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the
lake, the girl was there beside him. Down below women walked in the street and
in every woman he saw there was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as
she did, another made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the
women he saw except his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl he had
taken inside himself.
The two women in
his own house puzzled and confused him. They became suddenly unlovely and
commonplace. His wife in particular was like some strange unlovely growth that
had attached itself to his body.
In the evening
after the day at the factory he went home to his own place and had dinner. He
had always been a silent man and when he did not talk no one minded. After
dinner he with his wife went to a picture show. There were two children and his
wife expected another. They came into the apartment and sat down. The climb up
two flights of stairs had wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside her
mother groaning with fatigue.
The
mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a servant in the
home and got no pay. When her daughter wanted to go to a picture show she waved
her hand and smiled. "Go on," she said. "I don't want to go. I'd
rather sit here." She got a book and sat reading. The little boy of nine
awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po. The mother-in-law attended to
that.
After the man
and his wife came home the three people sat in silence for an hour or two
before bed time. The man pretended to read a newspaper. He looked at his hands.
Although he had washed them carefully grease from the bicycle frames left dark
stains under the nails. He thought of the Iowa girl and of her white quick
hands playing over the keys of a typewriter. He felt dirty and uncomfortable.
The girl at the
factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her and the thought excited
her a little. Since her aunt's death she had gone to live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in
the evening. Although the foreman meant nothing to her she could in a way use
him. To her he became a symbol. Sometimes he came into the office and stood for
a moment by the door. His large hands were covered with black grease. She
looked at him without seeing. In his place in her imagination stood a tall slender young man. Of the foreman she
saw only the grey eyes that began to burn with a strange fire. The eyes
expressed eagerness, a humble and devout eagerness. In the presence of a man
with such eyes she felt she need not be afraid.
She wanted a lover
who would come to her with such a look in his eyes. Occasionally, perhaps once
in two weeks, she stayed a little late at the office, pretending to have work
that must be finished. Through the window she could see the foreman waiting.
When everyone had gone she closed her desk and went into the street. At the
same moment the foreman came out at the factory door.
They walked
together along the street a half dozen blocks to where she got aboard her car.
The factory was in a place called South Chicago and as they went along evening
was coming on. The streets were lined with small unpainted frame houses and
dirty faced children ran screaming in the dusty roadway. They crossed over a
bridge. Two abandoned coal barges lay rotting in the stream.
He went by her side
walking heavily and striving to conceal his hands. He had scrubbed them
carefully before leaving the factory but they seemed to him like heavy dirty
pieces of waste matter hanging at his side. Their walking together happened but
a few times and during one summer. "It's hot," he said. He never
spoke to her of anything but the weather. "It's hot," he said.
"I think it may rain."
She dreamed of
the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young man, a rich man owning
houses and lands. The workingman who walked beside her had nothing to do with
her conception of love. She walked with him, stayed at the office until the
others had gone to walk unobserved with him because of his eyes, because of the
eager thing in his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to
her. In his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never
attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was safe with
him.
In his apartment
in the evening the man sat under the electric light with his wife and his
mother-in-law. In the next room his two children were asleep. In a short time
his wife would have another child. He had been with her to a picture show and
in a short time they would get into bed together.
He would lie
awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of a bed where, in
another room, his mother-in-law was crawling between the sheets. Life was too
intimate. He would lie awake eager, expectant —expecting, what?
Nothing.
Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out of bed and sit on
the po-po. Nothing strange or unusual or lovely would or could happen. Life was
too close, intimate. Nothing that could happen in the apartment could in any
way stir him; the things his wife might say, her occasional half-hearted
outbursts of passion, the goodness of his mother-in-law who did the work of a
servant without pay—
He sat in the
apartment under the electric light pretending to read a newspaper—thinking. He
looked at his hands. They were large, shapeless, a working-man's hands.
The figure of
the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he went out of the apartment
and walked in silence through miles of streets. It was not necessary to say
words. He walked with her by a sea, along the crest of a mountain. The night
was clear and silent and the stars shone. She also was a star. It was not
necessary to say words.
Her eyes were
like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out of dim, star lit
plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the stars," he thought.
"She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the stars she breathes, she
lives, like myself she has being."
One evening,
some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the bicycle factory killed
his wife and he is now in the courts being tried for murder. Every day the
newspapers are filled with the story. On the evening of the murder he had taken
his wife as usual to a picture show and they started home at nine. In
Thirty-Second Street, at a corner near their apartment building, the figure of a
man darted suddenly out of an alleyway and then darted back again. The incident
may have put the idea of killing his wife into the man's head.
They got to the
entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a dark hallway. Then quite
suddenly and apparently without thought the man took a knife out of his pocket.
"Suppose that man who darted into the alleyway had intended to kill
us," he thought. Opening the knife he whirled about and struck at his
wife. He struck twice, a dozen times— madly. There was a scream and his wife's
body fell… (Paragraphs from Brothers,
by Sherwood Anderson)
Para saber
IC (Illinois Central) es uno de los primeras vías
clase I en Estados Unidos. Proviene de los fracasados intentos de organizar una
línea para unir el norte con el sur en Illinois. En 1850 el presidente Fillmore
firmó una donación para la construcción de la vía. En 1856, al finalizar la
vía, IC fue la más larga en el mundo. La vía principal iba desde Cairo, al sur
del estado, hasta Galena, en el norte.
Palabras
reemplazadas
stolid fancy
weariness
Vocabulario
rooming house: a house where rooms can be rented.
Slender, slight, slim imply a tendency toward thinness. As applied to the human
body, slender implies a generally
attractive and pleasing thinness. Slight
often adds the idea of frailness to that of thinness. Slim implies a lithe or delicate thinness.
Recursos
Brothers,
para leer el cuento en Internet.
Brothers,
para escuchar la historia.
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