 the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he
would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: »Vous autres
gentilhommes!« in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nostromo! »You
hombres finos!« Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a
certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage
had to be more ancient still. He is a man with the weight of countless
generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. ... Like the People.
    In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and
generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the
obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with something
despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man of the People,
their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within. Years
afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the
country, going about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the
modernized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending
the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting,
the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the
wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his
breast, he remains essentially a man of the People. In his mingled love and
scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying
betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People, their
undoubted Great Man - with a private history of his own.
    One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention: and that is
Antonia Avellanos - the beautiful Antonia. Whether she is a possible variation
of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm. But, for me, she is.
Always a little in the background by the side of her father (my venerated
friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to
say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental
Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued
life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans
of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and
daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only
being capable of inspiring a sincere
