He had fought many a duel in his time, and so keen was he to maintain the laws governing a man’s personal dignity that he became a living rule book on affairs of honor, and if anyone had any doubts about the intricate etiquette of dueling, the great Don Lope would be consulted and he would opine and pronounce with priestly authority, as if he were giving his opinion on an important theological or philosophical problem.

The point of honor was, for Don Lope, the be-all and end-all of the science of living, which he rounded off with a series of totally conflicting views. While his disinterestedness might be considered a virtue, his scorn for the State and for Justice, as human organisms, could not. He loathed the legal profession, and as for the footling employees of the tax office, who stood between the institutions and the taxpayer with outstretched hand, he believed them to be suitable fodder for the galleys. In an age in which paper ruled rather than steel, an age overrun with empty formulae, he deplored the fact that gentlemen were no longer allowed to carry a sword with them in order to deal with those throngs of impertinent good-for-nothings. Society, he believed, had created various mechanisms whose sole object was to support mere idlers and to persecute and rob wellborn gentlefolk.

Given these beliefs, Don Lope was wholeheartedly in favor of smugglers and thieves, and had it been in his power, he would definitely have sided with them in a tight spot. He hated the police, both secret and uniformed, and heaped insults on guards and customs officers alike, as well as those half-wits in charge of “public order,” who, in his opinion, never protected the weak from the strong. He tolerated the civil guard, although he—damn it—would have organized them quite differently, giving the members legal and executive powers, as knights of the one true religion on the highways and byways of the land. As for the army, Don Lope’s ideas verged on the eccentric. As he saw it, the army was merely a political instrument, one that was both stupid and costly to boot, whereas it should, in his view, be a religious and military organization, like the old knightly orders, drawn from the people, with service being obligatory and with hereditary leaders, generalships being handed down from father to son, in short, such a complex, labyrinthine system that not even he could understand it. As regards the church, he thought it was little more than a bad joke played by the past on the present, which society was too timid or stupid to reject. Not that he was irreligious; on the contrary, his faith was far stronger than that of many who go sniffing around altars and clinging to the skirts of the priests. The ingenious Don Lope had no time for the latter at all, because he could find no place for them in the pseudo-knightly system concocted by his idle imagination; he used to say: “We are the true priests, we who watch over honor and morality, we who fight for the innocent, we, the enemies of evil, hypocrisy, and injustice . . . and base metal.”

There had been episodes in this man’s life that would have exalted him in a high degree, and had anyone—with nothing better to do—decided to write his biography, those glowing examples of generosity and self-denial would have helped obscure, up to a point, the darker side of his character and conduct. And we should speak of these, as the antecedents and causes of what we will describe in due course. Don Lope was always a very good friend to his friends, a man who would do anything to help loved ones who found themselves in desperate straits. Helpful to the point of heroism, he put no limits on his generous impulses. His knightliness verged on vanity, and vanity always has a price—just as the luxury of good intentions is always the most expensive—and Don Lope’s fortunes suffered as a result. His family motto, “Give your shirt to your friend,” was not a mere rhetorical affectation. He may not have given his shirt, but he had often, like Saint Martin, given half his cloak away, and quite recently, his shirt—that most useful of items because closest to our skin—had been at grave risk.

A childhood friend, whom he loved dearly, Don Antonio Reluz by name, a comrade in certain more or less respectable acts of chivalry, put good Don Lope’s altruistic fervor—for that is what it was—fully to the test. When Reluz fell in love with and married a very distinguished young lady, he rejected his friend’s knightly ideas and practices, judging that they neither constituted a profession nor put food on the table, and so he devoted himself to investing his wife’s meager capital in profitable business deals. He did quite well the first few years. He became involved in the buying and selling of barley, in contracts for military supplies, and other such honest trades, upon which Garrido looked down with lofty disdain. Around 1880, when both had crossed over into their fifties, Reluz’s star suddenly waned, and every deal he made went bad on him. In the end, he was laid low by a faithless colleague, a treacherous friend, and overnight that blow left him penniless, dishonored, and, worse still, in prison.

“You see!” Don Lope said. “Now are you convinced that you and I are not made to be mere hawkers? I warned you at the start, but you took no notice. We don’t belong in the modern age, dear Antonio, we are too decent to be involved in such dealings. Leave them to the rabble.”

These were not the most consoling of words, and Reluz listened without blinking, saying nothing, wondering how and when he would fire the bullet with which he intended to put an end to his unbearable suffering.

Garrido was quick to respond, and immediately offered to make the supreme sacrifice of his shirt.

“To save your honor, I would give you the . . . Besides, you know that this is not a matter of favors, but of duty; we are true friends, and what I do for you, you would do for me.”

Although the debts that had muddied Reluz’s good name hardly amounted to a king’s ransom, they were enough to demolish the rather shaky edifice of Don Lope’s very small fortune, for Don Lope, entrenched in his altruistic dogma, did the decent, manly thing, and sold off first a small property he had in Toledo, then his collection of old paintings, which were not perhaps of the first order, but whose value lay in the hours of pleasure and amusement they represented.

“Don’t worry,” he said to his sad friend. “Stand firm in the face of misfortune and, besides, I have done nothing of particular merit. In these putrescent times, people treat the most basic of obligations as if they were displays of virtue.