M'hijo el dotor by Florencio Sánchez: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

In the early twentieth century, on a ranch in Uruguay, Doña Mariquita won’t let anyone make a noise for fear of waking “m’hijo el dotor”, my son the doctor: Julio, who studies in Montevideo and spends barely a month a year in the country. His father, Don Olegario, a hard-working, proud old gaucho, cannot forgive his city manners: getting up at eleven, treating him as an equal, patting him on the back when he is being scolded, signing himself Julio instead of Robustiano. Meanwhile Julio is secretly kissing Jesusa, the family’s goddaughter, who is also courted by Don Eloy, the village storekeeper.

The old man already knows that Julio took money from a bank on Don Eloy’s signature and let the note go unpaid. A letter from his compadre Rodríguez, Julio’s godfather, which Jesusa reads aloud, confirms his suspicions: Julio is always asking for money, did not hand over all the proceeds from some steers and, what is more, is courting Sara, Rodríguez’s daughter. Jesusa bursts into tears without saying why. Father and son quarrel: Julio insists he is of age and free, that “Todo evoluciona, viejo” (“Everything evolves, old man”); Olegario, his pride wounded, ends up striking him with his riding whip.

Months later the family travels to Montevideo so that a doctor can see Olegario, ill and embittered since the quarrel and no longer on speaking terms with his son. There Jesusa hears Sara say that Julio means to ask for her hand, while her godfather, suspecting nothing, wants to marry her to Don Eloy. She is keeping a secret she will not be able to hide much longer.

Florencio Sánchez wrote M'hijo el dotor in 1903 and it opened that same year to great success in Buenos Aires; it was the play that made his name. It is a rural drama of the River Plate in which country and city collide, the gaucho father and the university son, the authority of the past and the freedom of the present. Julio says it outright: “Todo evoluciona, viejo; y estos tiempos han mandado archivar la moral, los hábitos, los estilos de la época en que usted se educó…” (“Everything evolves, old man; these times have shelved the morals, the habits, the ways of the age you were brought up in”).

The play never gives anyone the whole truth: Olegario is violent but honest, Julio has modern ideas and uses them to excuse abandoning Jesusa, and it is she who shows real greatness. The thinker José Ingenieros saw in it the conflict between an old ethics and a new one. The characters speak like the Uruguayan country people of the time, and that living speech, together with a generational conflict that has not aged, explains why it is still read.

Florencio Sánchez was born in Montevideo on 17 January 1875 and died in Milan, Italy, on 7 November 1910, of tuberculosis. A journalist and anarchist activist, he lived and worked between Uruguay and Argentina.

In just a few years he staged plays such as Canillita, La gringa (1904) and Barranca abajo (1905), one of the bleakest tragedies of River Plate theatre, of which he is considered one of the founders.