Mona and Other Tales Read Online Free Page A

to be the backer.”
    At that moment, Delfín slid down the tower and was now hanging dangerously by his fingers from the edge of the open window.
    â€œWatch out!” Alfredo screamed, looking toward the window and trying to avert his character’s fall.
    â€œI thought we poets were the only crazy ones,” said the lady poet, staring intently at Alfredo, “but now I see that novelists are too—perhaps twice as crazy.”
    â€œThree times as crazy!” proclaimed Alfredo, running to Delfín’s aid at the window, just as Berta González and Nicolás Landrove entered the room.
    Alfredo felt embarrassed to have Nicolás, Berta, and Delfín Prats (whose life he had just saved) see him surrounded by all these people instead of being at work with them; therefore, feeling more and more under pressure to remove himself and his characters from the scene, he decided to say good-bye to his hostess and to the rest of the guests instead of waiting for the famous discussion to begin. Followed by Narcisa, who was now intent on sniffing his leg, he walked over to them.
    But a strange tension permeated the tower. Suddenly nobody was paying any attention to Alfredo. Worse, he seemed to have become invisible. In her tinkling tones, the celebrated poetess had just communicated something to Gladys and her friends, and they all made faces as if surprised or offended. Alfredo did not need a writer’s observational skills to realize that they were talking about him, and not favorably.
    â€œHe’d better leave!” he heard Gladys Pérez Campo mutter in a low, indignant voice.
    But even if he understood (albeit with some measure of surprise) that those words referred to him, Alfredo felt so confused that he was not able to absorb them. Besides, the words had not been spoken directly to him, although they were certainly intended for his ears. Gladys’s good manners and social standing would not allow her to make a public scene, much less force one of her guests to leave. Therefore, still with the intention of rescuing his characters (who were now, for their part, completely ignoring him), Alfredo pretended not to have noticed and tried to blend in with the conversation. But the countess gave him a look of such withering scorn that the confused writer took refuge in a corner and lit a cigarette. But wouldn’t it be a sign of very poor breeding to leave without saying good-bye to the host and the other guests?
    On top of everything else, right at that moment Delfín Prats opened the door to the spiral staircase, and Daniel Fernández and Olga Neshein came in. Holding hands and without even looking at Alfredo, they joined Nicolás Landrove and Berta González del Valle, both of whom had already had a few drinks and were well on their way to getting drunk. Once again Alfredo felt Narcisa’s tail brushing against his legs.
    The five characters of his story (by now, at least, he knew that these people were worth only a story) took great pleasure in walking around the room, eyeing everything with a mixture of curiosity and calculation. Alfredo concentrated all his energy on trying to make them leave. But they just would not obey. On the contrary, they mingled with the most prominent of the guests, the true elite, introducing themselves to one another, bowing and curtseying, and exchanging pleasantries.
    From the corner where he was hidden behind a huge tropical palm and obscured by the smoke from his cigarette, Alfredo carefully observed his five characters and discovered that none was dressed as he had decided. Olga, supposedly shy and sweet, had arrived wearing too much makeup and a tight miniskirt; she was gesticulating wildly, making faces and laughing too hard at a joke that the director of Reunification of Cuban Families had just told her. Meanwhile, Berta and Nicolás, the paragons of “unshakable integrity,” according to Alfredo’s vision of them, were