Dance Partners

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabreil Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman supplies this delightful anecdote that relates a swipe at snobbery.

One was different from the rest: Jose Laurencio Silva was the son of a midwife from the town of El Tinaco, on Los Llanos, and a fisherman on the river. Through his father and his mother he was a dark-skinned member of the lower class of pardo half-breeds, but the General had married him to Felicia, another of his nieces. During his career he had risen from a sixteen-year-old volunteer in the liberating army to a field general at the age of fifty-eight, and he had suffered more than fifteen serious wounds and numerous minor ones, inflicted by a variety of weapons, in fifty-two battles in almost all the campaigns for independence. The only difficulty he encountered as a pardo was his rejection by a lady of the social aristocracy during a gala ball. The General then requested that they repeat the waltz, and he danced it with Silva himself.

And so for day 444
01.03.2008