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The Strange Friend of Tito Gil

Chapter 18: CONCLUSION.
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About This Book

A young man who once served as a favored page in a noble household loses his protector and returns to his father's trade as a shoemaker, yet remains devoted to the noblewoman he loved. The narrative follows his displacement from courtly ease to humble labor, his regular pilgrimages to the cathedral where he watches for her, and the small community ties that sustain him. Encounters with former companions and the arrival of an unusual, ambiguous friend prompt reflections on social rank, constancy of feeling, personal dignity, and the ways chance and loyalty reshape an ordinary life.

CONCLUSION.

A few hours afterward the earth burst like a shell. The stars nearest it, attracted fragments of the destroyed mass, and assimilated with them, not however without causing tremendous cataclysms, such as deluges, and breakings away from its axis.

The moon, almost intact, became a satellite of either Venus or Mercury. In the mean time the Day of Judgment for the family of Adam and Eve had come to pass, and the souls of the wicked were transported to other planets, there to commence a new life.

What greater punishment!

Those who purified themselves in this second existence obtained the glory of returning to the bosom of God, when those planets disappeared.

But those who did not so purify themselves passed on to perhaps a hundred other worlds, where they wandered as we, in ours.

That afternoon, the spirits of Tito and Elena entered the Promised Land hand in hand, free, forever, from sorrow and penitence; saved and redeemed; reconciled with God, participants in His beatitude, heirs to his glory....


For the rest, I can end my story as is the custom with old people, saying: “I went, and I came but they told me nothing.”