En usted están todas las mujeres del mundo

“En usted están todas las mujeres del mundo” is an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, placed at the opening of “La corbata de Lorenzo Quart.” It frames a chapter that turns from an order to attack a church to an intimate account of Lorenzo Quart’s habits and formation, bringing the novel’s language of desire into proximity with a life governed by clerical discipline.

Text and Placement

The phrase appears as a standalone epigraph, followed by the attribution to Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. The chapter title, “La corbata de Lorenzo Quart,” immediately directs attention from the expansive claim about women to a small, personal object: Quart’s tie. The juxtaposition sets an intimate register against the controlled routine that the chapter proceeds to describe.

Relation to Lorenzo Quart

Quart owns only one tie at a time: a navy-blue silk one, bought at a shirt shop on Via Condotti, one hundred and fifty paces from his home. He chooses a traditional cut, slightly narrower than current fashion, and replaces it with an identical tie when it becomes worn or dirty. This restrained pattern of use makes the epigraph’s sweeping image of women contrast with the measured, repeatable details of his daily life.

The same chapter describes Quart’s wider reliance on rules. He arranges his life around an assumed code and traces that discipline back to the seminary, where he accepted the Church’s discipline as an effective ordering principle. It offered security, a future, and a cause in which to exercise his abilities. Against that background, the epigraph introduces a language of emotional expansiveness beside a character whose habits are defined by regulation and control.

Literary Function

The epigraph’s breadth is not explained by the cited passage itself, so its effect rests on placement rather than a stated interpretation. Set above a portrait of a priest whose carefully repeated choices include buying the same tie again and again, it creates a suggestive contrast between the many women invoked by the phrase and Quart’s disciplined, rule-bound existence. The reference to Conrad supplies a literary frame for the chapter without, on the available evidence, establishing a specific woman or romantic episode to which the words refer.