More from Vigoleis...

Slow-going but only because it's long and I'm too busy at work. I read in snatches: coffee houses, restrooms, between classes, before bed.

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Another excerpt:

The scene had something of the atmosphere of a burial service, complete with weeping in the congregation. Julietta wept for joy over the symbolic promotion of her papa.  Pilar wept for reasons we shall leave unexamined here. Beatrice and Zwingli behaved like Protestants at a Catholic mass: they were decorous but uninvolved in the liturgy. And I? My eyes, too, remained dry, but I felt my chest starting to expand and was suddenly seized by the impulse to deliver a short speech, something I hadn't dared to do since I committed an oratorical faux pas at my parents' silver wedding anniversary dinner. Here I could make the attempt without causing misunderstandings about my actual intent, unlike on that earlier occasion when, as a growing young man making his first Faustian pilgrimage through Western intellectual history, I had recently arrived at Spengler's morphological theory of the destiny of civilizations. Here in the little bedchamber I was understood well enough, in spite of my stammering and slips of the tongue, precisely because my tiny Spanish vocabulary was unequal to the task.