In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

RAI LROADS
The world of railroads is a world of random encounters. This is the
premise of a story written by Azorfn, one of the most popular Spanish
authors, and published in the Madrid magazine Blanco y Negro. During
a ten-minute stop on a train ride, a man named Adolfo leaves his compartment
to buy some refreshments at the station restaurant. The service
is slow, he begins to run out of time, and then he gets caught up in an
argument with the waiter. A young woman, the daughter of the restaurateur,
intervenes; her appearance becomes a turning point in Adolfo's
life. Attracted by her beauty, he ignores the voices of his friends urging
him to hurry back to the platform-and the train leaves the station with
all of his luggage. But Adolfo soon celebrates his wedding, and he will
be the owner of the restaurant until his wife dies, twenty years later.
In the second part of Azorfn's narrative, readers learn that the story
they have followed thus far is being told by Adolfo to Antonio and Pepe,
two young fellow travelers, while they are approaching the very same
station that he left on the spur of the moment as a widower only a short
time ago: "When my wife died, everything was over for me. Even the
restaurant in the train station was unbearable ... One day, as the express
train was stopping, I boarded a car to greet a friend . . . And I
didn't get off ... The train started up and I stayed on board" (Blanco y
Negro, 131). There is a moment of profoundly reflective silence, and
then Adolfo puts the story into perspective with an even more profound
philosophical observation: "As Heraclitus said, 'Time is a little boy who
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