Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/175

 when we were small, and the youngest fell sick; his illness became serious, and my parents, in their anxiety, wished to leave nothing undone. One day, when we were all at table, we missed the dessert. "Isn't there any dessert?" one of us asked. "No," my mother answered. "We can't afford it. We have to buy medicine for your baby brother." Soon afterward the baby boy died. Time passed, conditions became normal again, and the dessert reappeared on the table. We children clapped our hands. "We have dessert again! We have dessert!" My father and mother looked at each other sadly—it was a look that imposed silence upon us all, agonizing silence. We felt as if we had been eating our baby brother instead of the dessert. Now you understand why the thought of a family of my own in which these childish ferocities might be repeated, appalls me. Their cruelty is so elemental that it does not outrage, but brings tears.

. Yes, life is cruel. If these things produced so deep an impression upon you that you have never been able to forget them, think what they must have meant to your father and mother. A child can never know the anguish that parents feel when they see their children suffer, when they hear them complain of life, of the lack of so many things, to which they believe themselves entitled simply through having been born, because they see others about them who have them, simply because they were born. At such a time, even the love through which we brought them into the world, weighs upon our hearts like remorse. We have not the courage to call them ungrateful, we prefer rather to blame ourselves. If our children could only know that we are so eager to see them happy that even their ingratitude, horrible though it may be in a child, does not wound us so deeply as it does to see them suffer, and to realize that we are pow-