
At the heart of a bustling provincial theater, a shy seventeen‑year‑old girl flits through backstage corridors, adjusting ribbons and silk fans with a frantic grace. The narrator, a quiet attendant, watches her every hurried step, offering polite apologies as her ribbons brush his arm. Their interactions are a delicate dance of courtesy and reverence, punctuated by brief exchanges about mirrors and admiration. Through this lens, the story paints a portrait of youthful elegance caught between the glow of footlights and the ordinary world beyond.
The narrative drifts between the glittering spectacle of the stage and the intimate, almost secretive moments that unfold in the shadows. It captures the narrator’s fascination with the girl’s luminous eyes, the soft curve of her lips, and the unspoken promise of fleeting connection. As the curtain falls, the listener is left with a lingering sense of wonder about the fragile beauty that thrives in the quiet corners of performance.
Language
es
Duration
~2 hours (125K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Release date
2014-06-16
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1864–1916
A Spanish physician-turned-novelist, he brought sharp social observation and a restless modern energy to his fiction. His life moved between medicine, politics, and literature, giving his work a vivid sense of the world he lived in.
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