gaspar ruiz, who could with ease bend apart the heavy iron bars of the prison, was led out with others to summary execution. “every bullet has its billet,” runs the proverb. all the merit of proverbs consists in the concise and picturesque expression. in the surprise of our minds is found their persuasiveness. in other words, we are struck and convinced by the shock.
what surprises us is the form, not the substance. proverbs are art—cheap art. as a general rule they are not true; unless indeed they happen to be mere platitudes, as for instance the proverb, “half a loaf is better than no bread,” or “a miss is as good as a mile.” some proverbs are simply imbecile, others are immoral. that one evolved out of the naive heart of the great russian people, “man discharges the piece, but god carries the bullet,” is piously atrocious, and at bitter variance with the accepted conception of a compassionate god. it would indeed be an inconsistent occupation for the guardian of the poor, the innocent and the helpless, to carry the bullet, for instance, into the heart of a father.
gaspar ruiz was childless, he had no wife, he had never been in love. he had hardly ever spoken to a woman, beyond his mother and the ancient negress of the household, whose wrinkled skin was the colour of cinders, and whose lean body was bent double from age. if some bullets from those muskets fired off at fifteen paces were specifically destined for the heart of gaspar ruiz, they all missed their billet. one, however, carried away a small piece of his ear, and another a fragment of flesh from his shoulder.
a red and unclouded sun setting into a purple ocean looked with a fiery stare upon the enormous wall of the cordilleras, worthy witnesses of his glorious extinction. but it is inconceivable that it should have seen the ant-like men busy with their absurd and insignificant trials of killing and dying for reasons that, apart from being generally childish, were also imperfectly understood. it did light up, however, the backs of the firing party and the faces of the condemned men. some of them had fallen on their knees, others remained standing, a few averted their heads from the levelled barrels of muskets. gaspar ruiz, upright, the burliest of them all, hung his big shock head. the low sun dazzled him a little, and he counted himself a dead man already.
he fell at the first discharge. he fell because he thought he was a dead man. he struck the ground heavily. the jar of the fall surprised him. “i am not dead apparently,” he thought to himself, when he heard the execution platoon reloading its arms at the word of command. it was then that the hope of escape dawned upon him for the first time. he remained lying stretched out with rigid limbs under the weight of two bodies collapsed crosswise upon his back.
by the time the soldiers had fired a third volley into the slightly stirring heaps of the slain, the sun had gone out of sight, and almost immediately with the darkening of the ocean dusk fell upon the coasts of the young republic. above the gloom of the lowlands the snowy peaks of the cordillera remained luminous and crimson for a long time. the soldiers before marching back to the fort sat down to smoke.
the sergeant with a naked sword in his hand strolled away by himself along the heap of the dead. he was a humane man, and watched for any stir or twitch of limb in the merciful idea of plunging the point of his blade into any body giving the slightest sign of life. but none of the bodies afforded him an opportunity for the display of this charitable intention. not a muscle twitched amongst them, not even the powerful muscles of gaspar ruiz, who, deluged with the blood of his neighbours and shamming death, strove to appear more lifeless than the others.
he was lying face down. the sergeant recognised him by his stature, and being himself a very small man, looked with envy and contempt at the prostration of so much strength. he had always disliked that particular soldier. moved by an obscure animosity, he inflicted a long gash across the neck of gaspar ruiz, with some vague notion of making sure of that strong man’s death, as if a powerful physique were more able to resist the bullets. for the sergeant had no doubt that gaspar ruiz had been shot through in many places. then he passed on, and shortly afterwards marched off with, his men, leaving the bodies to the care of crows and vultures.
gaspar ruiz had restrained a cry, though it had seemed to him that his head was cut off at a blow; and when darkness came, shaking off the dead, whose weight had oppressed him, he crawled away over the plain on his hands and knees. after drinking deeply, like a wounded beast, at a shallow stream, he assumed an upright posture, and staggered on light-headed and aimless, as if lost amongst the stars of the clear night. a small house seemed to rise out of the ground before him. he stumbled into the porch and struck at the door with his fist. there was not a gleam of light. gaspar ruiz might have thought that the inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. in his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. “open the door!” he cried. “open in the name of god!”
an infuriated voice from within jeered at him: “come in, come in. this house belongs to you. all this land belongs to you. come and take it.”
“for the love of god,” gaspar ruiz murmured.
“does not all the land belong to you patriots?” the voice on the other side of the door screamed on. “are you not a patriot?”
gaspar ruiz did not know. “i am a wounded man,” he said apathetically.
all became still inside. gaspar ruiz lost the hope of being admitted, and lay down under the porch just outside the door. he was utterly careless of what was going to happen to him. all his consciousness seemed to be concentrated in his neck, where he felt a severe pain. his indifference as to his fate was genuine.
the day was breaking when he awoke from a feverish doze; the door at which he had knocked in the dark stood wide open now, and a girl, steadying herself with her outspread arms, leaned over the threshold. lying on his back, he stared up at her. her face was pale and her eyes were very dark; her hair hung down black as ebony against her white cheeks; her lips were full and red. beyond her he saw another head with long grey hair, and a thin old face with a pair of anxiously clasped hands under the chin.
