Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue

eating moodily in solitude, and weeping over Isabel after his third bottle of sweet wine at night.
    His friends talked it over, concluded that the affair was growing desperate; it was high time someone should tell him the true cause of his pain. But everyone wished the other would be the one chosen. And it came out there was not a person in the group, possibly not one in all Mexico, indelicateenough to do such a thing. They decided to shift the responsibility upon a physician from the faculty of the university. In the mind of such a one would be combined a sufficiently refined sentiment with the highest degree of technical knowledge. This was the diplomatic, the discreet, the fastidious thing to do. It was done.
    The doctor found Rubén seated before his easel, facing the half-finished nineteenth figure of Isabel. He was weeping, and between sobs he ate spoonfuls of soft Toluca cheese, with spiced mangos. He hung in all directions over his painting-stool, like a mound of kneaded dough. He told the doctor first about Isabel. “I do assure you faithfully, my friend, not even I could capture in paint the line of beauty in her thigh and instep. And, besides, she was an angel for kindness.” Later he said the pain in his heart would be the death of him. The doctor was profoundly touched. For a great while he sat offering consolation without courage to prescribe material cures for a man of such delicately adjusted susceptibilities.
    “I have only crass and vulgar remedies”—with a graceful gesture he seemed to offer them between thumb and forefinger—“but they are all the world of flesh may contribute toward the healing of the wounded spirit.” He named them one at a time. They made a neat, but not impressive, row: a diet, fresh air, long walks, frequent violent exercise, preferably on the crossbar, ice showers, almost no wine.
    Rubén seemed not to hear him. His sustained, oblivious murmur flowed warmly through the doctor’s solemnly rounded periods:
    “The pains are most unendurable at night, when I lie in my lonely bed and gaze at the empty heavens through my narrow window, and I think to myself, ‘Soon my grave shall be narrower than that window, and darker than that firmament,’ and my heart gives a writhe. Ah, Isabelita, my executioner!”
    The doctor tiptoed out respectfully, and left him sitting there eating cheese and gazing with wet eyes at the nineteenth figure of Isabel.
    The friends grew hopelessly bored and left him more and more alone. No one saw him for some weeks except the proprietor of a small café called “The Little Monkeys” whereRubén was accustomed to dine with Isabel and where he now went alone for food.
    Here one night quite suddenly Rubén clasped his heart with violence, rose from his chair, and upset the dish of tamales and pepper gravy he had been eating. The proprietor ran to him. Rubén said something in a hurried whisper, made rather an impressive gesture over his head with one arm, and, to say it as gently as possible, died.
    His friends hastened the next day to see the proprietor, who gave them a solidly dramatic version of the lamentable episode. Ramón was even then gathering material for an intimate biography of his country’s most eminent painter, to be illustrated with large numbers of his own character portraits. Already the dedication was composed to his “Friend and Master, Inspired and Incomparable Genius of Art on the American Continent.” “But what did he say to you,” insisted Ramón, “at the final stupendous moment? It is most important. The last words of a great artist, they should be very eloquent. Repeat them precisely, my dear fellow! It will add splendor to the biography, nay, to the very history of art itself, if they are eloquent.”
    The proprietor nodded his head with the air of a man who understands everything.
    “I know, I know. Well, maybe you will not believe me when I tell you that his very last words were a truly sublime message to you, his