I THINK THE time has come to deliver the memoirs of Pascual Duarte to the printer. To have done so before would have perhaps been over-hasty. I did not wish to precipitate their appearance, for all things require their own just time, even the correction of spelling mistakes in a manuscript, and no good can come of an undertaking conceived and carried out at a gallop. To wait any longer would also, as far as I am concerned, be lacking in justification: once begun, a matter should be brought to a conclusion, and the results made known.
I found the pages here transcribed in the middle of 1939 in a pharmacy at Almendralejo (God knows who put them there in the first place!) and from that day to this I have thought about them, brought some order into them, transcribed them, and made them make sense. The original manuscript was almost unreadable, for the writing was rough and the pages were unnumbered and in no consecutive order.
I should like to make it perfectly clear at the outset that the narrative here presented to the curious reader owes nothing to me except its transcription to a readable form. I have not corrected or added a thing, and have preserved Duarte’s account in every particular, even to its style. Certain passages, which were too crude, I have preferred to cut out rather than rewrite; this procedure deprives the reader, of course, of certain small details—but nothing is lost in not knowing them. The advantage of my clean cuts is that the reader’s gaze need not fall into a mire of repugnant intimacies; intimacies, I repeat, more in need of pruning than of polishing.
The writer of these pages, to my way of thinking, and perhaps this is my only reason for bringing him into the light of day, is a model: not a model to be imitated, but to be shunned; a model in the face of whom we need have no doubts; a model before whom we can only say:
“Do you see what he does? Well, it’s just the opposite of what he should do.”
But let us allow Pascual Duarte himself to speak, for it is he who has interesting things to tell us.