The child that had just emerged from her womb was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. Although she had been taught not to get attached to him, Alina's heart broke when he was quickly carried out of the delivery room wrapped in a towel.

The medical team was also trained to avoid as much as possible the contact of the laboring woman with the baby, so they had placed a sheet in front of them as a screen. But providence arranged that, in the movement of the baby's extraction, the midwife also unintentionally pulled the sheet allowing that fleeting glance thanks to which, still exhausted, the mother was able to admire the beauty of that little brown miracle. 

Her other two daughters, who were waiting for her at home, were as blonde as the sun. They were born bald, although they soon grew long manes that Alina took great pains to brush every morning before going to school. How she loved to caress those silky golden strands while she listened to them tell those things that only a mother tells a mother in a family hairdressing session! By the way, how would they be? After two weeks in the clinic for risk of pre-eclampsia, she had forgotten their voices and their smell. 

The agency managing the surrogacy was very concerned about the health of its "associates" and had forced her to go into hospital, so the girls had to stay with their paternal grandmother, the only family they had left in Kiev. The mother-in-law had happily overcome the depression caused by the loss of her only son, Dmytro, on the Donbas front. Her granddaughters and daughter-in-law had been her ladder out of the pit of mental illness. Her meager pension barely gets her to the 7th of every month and now, after the news that Russia recently bombed a queue of pensioners waiting to collect it, she doesn't even dare to go.   

As she was being prepared for the episiotomy, Alina began to have horrible thoughts about the child's future. She knew that the parents who had commissioned him were well off. The 14,000 euros she would receive, equivalent to three times the average annual salary, was only a portion of the total amount of expenses involved in renting their services. With so much money, she was sure that the child would lack nothing materially, but she could not help imagining him being mistreated, abused or unwanted. 

The sharp pain of the first stitch of the suture (anesthesia is rationed in hospitals in times of war) forced her to throw her head back in a reflex action that caused her gaze to cross with that of a Madonna at the head of the bed. It was an icon of Perpetual Help, that image in which the child Jesus, frightened at the sight of the nails and other instruments of the passion carried by angels, runs to seek the protection of his mother. 

-Oh, another stitch, another nail. Help, mother! -Alina cried inside, gritting her teeth and wishing she could hide, like the child, under Mary's mantle. What kind of mother gives birth to a child to give it to others? -she blamed herself. That fat, beautiful child, who only knows me, how can you give him to someone you don't know how he will be cared for? 

But he justified himself by thinking of his two blondes who would not be without a glass of milk for breakfast for years to come.

-Besides, the brown one is not mine," he continued, excusing himself, "it doesn't carry my genes. 

But he was so beautiful! She was so proud to have brought him into the world, and the pain of the separation, which had only lasted a few minutes, kept growing. 

-And how many more times will he be looking for me and I won't be there to help him! Oh, my baby! Oh, my brown one! she cried aloud.

-Calm down, Alina, he is fine," an assistant calmed her down. He is with his parents who are going to love him very much and you are going to see your daughters again tomorrow and take them out for ice cream as you told me yesterday.

Words of consolation were useless, he no longer wanted that ice cream with his blondes. He no longer wanted the "compensation for the inconvenience" as they euphemistically called in the agency the humiliating exploitation of poor women, which is what they really do. His daughters and his mother-in-law? they would get ahead, he thought. 

Looking again at the Byzantine icon, he prayed wholeheartedly: "Mary, you know the pain of losing a son. You too had to give up your son for others. You who saw your spotless lamb led to the slaughter, do not let anything bad happen to mine, give him a mother, the best mother, be his mother. Take care of him wherever he goes and tell your son to forgive my bad head. I am sorry, very sorry". 

She had not finished saying the sentence when the door of the delivery room opened again and the head of the agency appeared, looking as if something was wrong. 

-Hello Alina," the businesswoman approached sweetly, "How are you? They told me it was a very good delivery in the end, despite the high blood pressure and the stitches.... 

-Yes, thank you, this one was quicker than the previous ones," he replied. How is the child, have his parents seen him yet?

-You see, Alina, there's a problem....

-Problem, what problem? Tell me he's okay, please tell me nothing has happened to him.

-It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. She just... She has a small defect, something that could not be detected in the ultrasound, a hemangioma on her arm. It's no health problem just a spot on the skin that... Well, it's not perfect and the parents have rejected him because they're embarrassed that the kids are going to mess with him when he goes to school. Besides, they are instagramers and wanted to take a lot of pictures of him and that was not going to be possible. Since they don't have a money problem, they will try again. 

-It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen!

-Yes, it is, Alina, I think like you," he dramatized. The child is a cutie. You see... It is foreseen in these cases that, when the child has to be offered in a new adoption, the surrogate mother will be asked first. You will receive, of course, the compensation we had agreed upon, with a small bonus that will be charged separately to the parents for the return. Do you agree?

-Do I agree? -she answered with a smile from ear to ear and sitting up as if she hadn't just given birth. Bring me the child right now, he is mine and mine alone and no one has ever wanted him and no one will ever want him more than me. 

With a gesture of relief, the businesswoman quickly left the room, returning immediately with the child in her arms.

As the mother held him to her breast, the baby seemed to recognize her at once and began to shake his head, trying to squeeze out the first colostrum. Alina couldn't stop looking at every crease of his skin and stroking that clump of black hair on his head. And the spot on his arm? On closer inspection, it is in the shape of a star, like the one Our Lady is wearing on her head in the icon up there. 

-This will be your sign, Dmytro," she whispered to her newborn, stroking his spot as she nursed him, "the sign of the mother of another brown child; a little lamb without a spot, whom she had to give up with much pain to save many, but who was then returned to her to live with her forever.

In the excellent biography written by Yuri Felshtinsky, it is stated that Orwell, who had traveled in 1937 to the Spanish Civil War under the pretext of studying the role of the Catholic Church in the war, found in his contact with anarchism and communism in Catalonia the source of his future rejection of the roots of totalitarianism and bureaucratic collectivism. About a conversation with an Anglican vicar who visited him, he stated with his characteristic irony that he had to admit that it was true "about the burning of churches, but that he was very happy to hear that they were only Catholic churches." 

Anticommunism

In 1946, he published together with other authors in the Forward newspaper an open letter in which they asked that the Moscow trials of 1936-1938, in which the defendants (close collaborators of Lenin and Trostski) were held responsible for maintaining direct relations with the authorities of the Nazi Reich and the Gestapo; the German-Soviet friendship treaties; the murder of Polish civilians and soldiers in the Katyn forest at the hands of the Soviets, etc., be addressed in the Nuremberg trials. The letter had no repercussions because the British and American governments of the time were not interested in confronting the USSR. 

Until the last day of his life, Orwell kept jotting down in a notebook an expanding list of individuals in the West who, in his opinion, were either underground communists or agents of Soviet influence. His anti-communist sentiments grew more acute during his last months of life, eventually sending a list of 36 people to an old acquaintance who worked in the Information Research Department, whose aim was to combat communist propaganda in the British Empire.

Final disease

As D. J. Taylor wrote in an article in The GuardianEvery afternoon in January 1950, a small procession of visitors could be seen making their way, one by one, through the cheerful squares of North Bloomsbury to the University College London hospital where Eric Arthur Blair, known worldwide as George Orwell, was dying. 

The British writer had been at UCH and in the hospital for almost four months since the beginning of the previous year. Two decades of chronic lung problems had resulted in a diagnosis of tuberculosis. In a Gloucestershire sanatorium six months earlier, he had nearly died, but recovered sufficiently to be transferred to London and cared for by the distinguished chest specialist Andrew Morland. 

Fortunately, money, the absence of which had troubled Orwell for most of his adult life, was no longer an issue. 1984published the previous June, had been a great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Sixteen years younger than Orwell, with a string of previous mistresses, Sonia Brownell seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of second wife to the writer, widowed since the death of Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1945. But the marriage was celebrated in the presence of the hospital chaplain, the Rev. WH Braine, in Orwell's room on October 13, 1949. Present were David Astor, Janetta Kee, Powell, a doctor and Malcolm Muggeridge, a left-wing writer friend of Orwell's who would eventually convert first to Christianity and almost at age 80 to Catholicism. 

In the early hours of Saturday, January 21, Orwell died of a massive pulmonary hemorrhage. The news spread throughout the weekend. "G. Orwell is dead and Mrs. Orwell, presumably, is a wealthy widow." noted Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Nancy Mitford. Muggeridge, then working at the Daily Telegraph, wrote a couple of commemorative paragraphs for the Peterborough column. "I thought of him, as of Graham [Greene], that popular writers always express in an intense way some romantic longing....".

Will

The deceased turned out to have made a will three days before his death, in the presence of Sonia and his first wife's sister, Gwen O'Shaughnessy. Materially, he was transferring his literary estate to Sonia. A substantial life insurance policy would take care of his adopted son, Richard, who was then in the care of his aunt, Orwell's sister Avril. Orwell, who during his lifetime considered himself an agnostic, although he recognized the importance of Christianity to Western civilization, arranged for him to be buried according to the rites of the Church of England and for his body to be interred (not cremated) in the nearest cemetery. The task of arranging all this fell to Powell and Muggeridge. 

Both friends attempted to engage the services of the Reverend Rose, vicar of Christ Church, Albany Street NWI. Astor's influence secured a plot in the graveyard of All Saints' Church, Sutton Courteney, Oxfordshire. Muggeridge noted in his diary the fact that Orwell died on Lenin's birthday and was buried by the Astors, "which seems to me to cover the whole range of his life."

Funeral

The funeral was set for Thursday, January 26. The evening before, Powell and his wife, visited the Muggeridge's after dinner, taking Sonia with them, "obviously in poor condition". At their last meeting, the day after Orwell's death, Sonia had been overcome with grief. Muggeridge decided that "I would always love her for her real tears....".

He left a detailed account of the next day's events: Fred Warburg greeting mourners at the door of the church, the cold atmosphere, the congregation "largely Jewish and almost entirely non-believer." who had difficulty following the Anglican liturgy. Powell chose the hymns: "All people that on earth do dwell," "Guide me, o thou great Redeemer," and "Ten thousand times ten thousand." "I do not remember why." Powell later wrote, "perhaps because Orwell himself had spoken of the hymn, or because he was, in his own way, a kind of saint, even if he was not one of shining robes."

Both Powell and Muggeridge found the occasion enormously distressing. Muggeridge, in particular, was deeply moved by Powell's chosen reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Then the dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it." He returned to his home near Regent's Park to read the sheaf of obituaries written by, among others, Symons, VS Pritchett and Arthur Koestler, seeing in them already. "how the legend of a human being is created".

I have spent 25 years studying Cervantes, 8 of them exclusively. I have defended and published a doctoral thesis on the Quixote. I have read dozens of books and articles about the author and his work. I have published a monograph on love in the Quixotean edition of The curious impertinent, y I have published six book chapters, seventeen articles and a prologue on aspects of Cervantes, and I have presented fourteen papers or communications at conferences. Finally, I have also given seminars and conferences on the one-armed man of Lepanto and even led guided tours. 

After these years of study, the proposal of Cervantes' homosexuality seems strange and impostured to me. Our author had a natural daughter, was married, and paid special attention to women: his work is full of strong female characters. I do not use this to prove that he was not homosexual, but I do affirm that it is neither shown nor demonstrated that he was.

It is clear that since the beginning of this third millennium a particular obsession with homosexuality has emerged. But it makes no sense to reread the past based on the prejudices of the present. I remember a magnificent doctoral course directed by a wise professor at the University of Granada. It dealt with the mysticism of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. A student raised the possible homosexuality of the apostle St. John, Jesus' favorite. The professor explained that not every relationship of friendship had to be sexualized, that our current prism suffered from a certain distortion in relation to these issues.

I have no special interest in denying Cervantes' homosexuality, but it is surprising the tendency to turn everyone into a homosexual. It seems as if such a prototype should displace the hero, the athlete, the wise man, the orator, the martyr, the saint, the knight, the donna angelicata, the courtier and the discreet. Because these anthropological models that I have just mentioned are so because of their actions, not because of their sexual orientation. The merit of the human being lies, as Cervantes precisely defended, in virtue, and not in blood (and I add, not in sex).

Cervantes was held captive in Algiers for five years. He tried to escape unsuccessfully on several occasions, and he never slipped up: he acknowledged the facts. Paradoxically, he did not receive the punishment that those escapes deserved. And some think that one cause of the leniency towards him could be in his homosexuality. It is a hypothesis. Cervantes carried with him some letters, one of them from Don Juan de Austria, which presented him as a brave soldier, which caused a higher ransom to be demanded for him and, probably, that he was treated with greater tolerance, besides his strong personality made him a very unique person. In any case, a hypothesis is not proof. It is a very contemporary attitude that the critical subject neutralizes or kills the object. But it is fairer for the subject to respect the object, whether texts or people.

However. We own his writings. As I said, I have published a study of love in the Quixote. The conception of love that emerges from Cervantes' great novel is wonderfully humanistic, a synthesis of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Latin thought, with the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance being the cornerstone on which this cartography of love rests. Love emerges not only as a mere sentiment ("love in young men for the most part is not, but an appetite", we read in chapter 24 of the first part of the Quixote), but a knowledge, a will, a surrender in freedom.

As a good man of the golden century, Cervantes is captivated by beauty, particularly feminine beauty, an ecstasy that is rooted in the troubadour, stylnovist and pertarchist lyric. The quixotic epicenter is rather the friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho: a love of friendship that should not be confused with erotic love, nor with love of necessity. The Banquet Plato's De amicitia of Cicero or The four loves by C. S. Lewis, among many other works, can illustrate the marvelous and polyphonic mosaic of love in the European tradition. 

The monotonous obsession with sex is a contemporary "contribution". But the reading of Cervantes or other classics could free us from this corset, already so tiresome.