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The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez

V >> Vicente Blasco Ibanez >> The Torrent




Meantime, the _pariahs_, those who never arrive, the "bohemians" of
Milan--when they are left alone console themselves with tales of famous
comrades, of contracts they themselves refused to accept, pretending
uncompromising hauteur toward impresarios and composers to justify their
idleness; and wrapped in fur coats that almost sweep the ground, with
their "garibaldis" on the backs of their heads, they hover around
Biffi's, defying the cold draughts that blow at the crossing of the
Gallery, talking and talking away to quiet the hunger that is gnawing at
their stomachs; despising the humble toil of those who make their living
by their hands, continuing undaunted in their poverty, content with
their genius as artists, facing misfortune with a candor and an
endurance as heroic as it is pathetic, their dark lives illumined by
Hope, who keeps them company till she closes their eyes.

Of that strange world, Rafael had caught a glimpse, barely, during the
few days he had spent in Milan. His companion, the canon, had run across
a former chorister from the cathedral of Valencia, who could find
nothing to do but loiter night and day about the Gallery. Through him
Brull had learned of the life led by these journeymen of art, always on
hand in the "marketplace", waiting for the employer who never comes.

He tried to picture the early days of Leonora in that great city, as one
of the girls who trot gracefully over the sidewalks with music sheets
under their arms, or enliven the narrow side streets with all those
trills and cadences that come streaming out through the windows.

He could see her walking through the Gallery at Doctor Moreno's side: a
blonde beauty, svelte, somewhat thin, over-grown, taller than her years,
gazing with astonishment through those large green eyes of hers at the
cold, bustling city, so different from the warm orchards of her
childhood home; the father, bearded, wrinkled, nervous, still irritated
at the ruin of his Republican hopes; a veritable ogre to strangers who
did not know his lamb-like gentleness. Like exiles who had found a
refuge in art, they two went their way through that life of emptiness,
of void, a world of greedy teachers anxious to prolong the period of
study, and of singers incapable of speaking kindly even of themselves.

They lived on a fourth floor on the _Via Passarella_--a narrow, gloomy
thoroughfare with high houses, like the streets of old Alcira, preempted
by music publishers, theatrical agencies and retired artists. Their
janitor was a former chorus leader; the main floor was rented by an
agency exclusively engaged from sun to sun in testing voices. The others
were occupied by singers who began their vocal exercises the moment they
got out of bed, setting the house ringing like a huge music-box from
roof to cellar. The Doctor and his daughter had two rooms in the house
of _Signora Isabella_, a former ballet-dancer who had achieved notorious
"triumphs" in the principal courts of Europe, but was now a skeleton
wrapped in wrinkled skin, groping her way through the corridors,
quarreling over money in foul-mouthed language with the servants, and
with no other vestiges of her past than the gowns of rustling silk, and
the diamonds, emeralds and pearls that took their turns in her stiff,
shrivelled ears. This harpy had loved Leonora with the fondness of the
veteran for the new recruit.

Every day Doctor Moreno went to a cafe of the Gallery, where he would
meet a group of old musicians who had fought under Garibaldi, and young
men who wrote _libretti_ for the stage, and articles for Republican and
Socialist newspapers. That was his world: the only thing that helped him
endure his stay in Milan. After a lonely life back there in his native
land, this corner of the smoke-filled cafe seemed like Paradise to him.
There, in a labored Italian, sprinkled with Spanish interjections, he
could talk of Beethoven and of the hero of Marsala; and for hour after
hour he would sit wrapt in ecstasy, gazing, through the dense
atmosphere, at the red shirt and the blond, grayish locks of the great
Giuseppe, while his comrades told stories of this, the most romantic, of
adventurers.

During such absences of her father, Leonora would remain in charge of
_Signora Isabella_; and bashful, shrinking, half bewildered, would spend
the day in the salon of the former ballet-dancer, with its coterie of
the latter's friends, also ruins surviving from the past, burned-out
"flames" of great personages long since dead. And these witches, smoking
their cigarettes, and looking their jewels over every other moment to be
sure they had not been stolen, would size up "the little girl," as they
called her, to conclude that she would "go very far" if she learned how
to "play the game."

"I had excellent teachers," said Leonora, in speaking of that period of
her youth. "They were good souls at bottom, but they had very little
still to learn about life. I don't remember just when I began to see
through them. I don't believe I was ever what they call an 'innocent'
child."

Some evenings the Doctor would take her to his group in the cafe, or to
some second balcony seat under the roof of _La Scala_, if a couple of
complimentary tickets happened to come his way. Thus she was introduced
to her father's friends, bohemians with whom music went hand in hand
with the ideas and the ideals of revolution, curious mixtures of artist
and conspirator; aged, bald-headed, near-sighted "professors," their
backs bent by a lifetime spent leaning over music stands; and swarthy
youths with fiery eyes, stiff, long hair and red neckties, always
talking about overthrowing the social order because their operas had
not been accepted at _La Scala_ or because no _maestro_ could be found
to take their musical dramas seriously. One of them attracted Leonora.
Leaning back on a side-seat in the cafe, she would sit and watch him for
hours and hours. He was a fair-haired, extremely delicate boy. His
tapering goatee and his fine, silky hair, covered by a sweeping, soft
felt hat, made her think of Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I of England
that she had seen in print somewhere. They called him "the poet" at the
cafe, and gossip had it that an old woman, a retired "star," was paying
for his keep--and his amusements--until his verses should bring him
fame. "Well," said Leonora, simply, with a smile, "he was my first
love--a calf-and-puppy love, a schoolgirl's infatuation which nobody
ever knew about"; for though the Doctor's daughter spent hours with her
green golden eyes fixed upon the poet, the latter never suspected his
good fortune; doubtless because the beauty of his patroness, the
superannuated _diva_, had so obsessed him that the attractions of other
women left him quite unmoved. How vividly Leonora remembered those days
of poverty and dreams!... Little by little the modest capital the Doctor
owned in Alcira vanished, what with living expenses and music lessons.
Dona Pepa, at her brother's instance, sold one piece of land after
another; but even such remittances were often long delayed; and then,
instead of eating in the _trattoria_, near _la Scala_, with dancing
students and the more successful of the young singers, they would stay
at home; and Leonora would lay aside her scores and take a turn at
cooking, learning mysterious recipes from the old _danseuse_. For weeks
at a time they would live on nothing but macaroni and rice served _al
burro_, a diet that her father abhorred, the Doctor, meanwhile,
pretending illness to justify his absence from the cafe. But these
periods of want and poverty were endured by father and daughter in
silence. Before their friends, they still maintained the pose of
well-to-do people with plenty of income from property in Spain.

Leonora underwent a rapid transformation. She had already passed her
period of growth--that preadolescent "awkward age" when the features are
in constant change before settling down to their definitive forms and
the limbs seem to grow longer and longer and thinner and thinner. The
long-legged spindling "flapper," who was never quite sure where to stow
her legs, became the reserved, well-proportioned girl with the
mysterious gleam of puberty in her eyes. Her clothes seemed, naturally,
willingly, to curve to her fuller, rounding outlines. Her skirts went
down to her feet and covered the skinny, colt-like appendages that had
formerly made the denizens of the Gallery repress a smile.

Her singing master was struck with the beauty of his pupil. As a tenor,
Signor Boldini had had his hour of success back in the days of the
_Statuto_, when Victor Emmanuel was still king of Piedmont and the
Austrians were in Milan. Convinced that he could rise no higher, he had
come to earth, stepping aside to let those behind him pass on, turning
his stage experience to the advantage of a large class of girl-students
whom he fondled with an affectionate, fatherly kindliness. His white
goatee would quiver with admiring enthusiasm, as, playfully, lightly, he
would touch his fingers to those virgin throats, which, as he said,
were his "property." "All for art, and art for all!" And this motto, the
ideal of his life, he called it, had quite endeared him to Doctor
Moreno.

"That fellow Boldini could not be fonder of my Leonora if she were his
own daughter," the Doctor would say every time the _maestro_ praised the
beauty and the talent of his pupil and prophesied great triumphs for
her.

And Leonora went on with her lessons, accepting the light, the playful,
the innocent caresses of the old singer; until one afternoon, in the
midst of a romanza, there was a hateful scene: the _maestro_, despite
her horrified struggling, claimed a feudal right--the first fruits of
her initiation into theatrical life.

Through fear of her father Leonora kept silent. What might he not do on
finding his blind confidence in the _maestro_ so betrayed? She sank into
resigned passivity at last, and continued to visit Boldini's house
daily, learning ultimately to accept, as a matter of professional
course, the repulsive flattery of refined vice.

Poor Leonora entered on a life of wrong through the open door, learning,
at a single stroke, all the turpitude acquired by that shrivelled
_maestro_ during his long career back-stage. Boldini would have kept her
a pupil forever. He could never find her just well enough prepared to
make her debut. But hardly any money was coming from Spain now. Poor
dona Pepa had sold everything her brother owned and a good deal of her
own land besides. Only at the cost of painful stinting could she send
him anything at all. The Doctor, through connections with itinerant
directors and impresarios _a l'aventure_, "launched" his daughter
finally. Leonora began to sing in the small theatres of the Milan
district--two or three night engagements at country fairs. Such
companies were formed at random in the Gallery, on the very day of the
performance sometimes,--troupes like the strolling players of old,
leaving at a venture in a third-class compartment on the train with the
prospect of returning on foot if the impresario made off with the money.

Leonora began to know what applause was, what it meant to give _encore_
after _encore_ before crowds of rustic landowners, dressed in their
Sunday clothes, and ladies with false rings and plated chains; and she
had her first thrills of feminine vanity on receiving bouquets and
sonnets from subalterns and cadets in small garrison towns. Boldini
followed her everywhere, neglecting his lessons, in pursuit of this, his
last depraved infatuation. "All for art, art for all!" He must enjoy the
fruits of his creation, be present at the triumphs of his star pupil! So
he said to Doctor Moreno; and that unsuspecting gentleman, thankful for
this added courtesy of the master, would leave her more and more to the
old satyr's care.

The escape from that life came when she secured a contract for a whole
winter in Padua. There she met the tenor Salvatti, a high and mighty
_divo_, who looked down upon all his associates, though tolerated
himself, by the public, only out of consideration for his past.

For years now he had been holding his own on the opera stage, less for
his voice than for his dashing appearance, slightly repaired with pencil
and rouge, and the legend of romantic love affairs that floated like a
rainbow around his name--noble dames fighting a clandestine warfare for
him; queens scandalizing their subjects by blind passions he inspired;
eminent divas selling their diamonds for the money to hold him faithful
by lavish gifts. The jealousy of Salvatti's comrades tended to
perpetuate and exaggerate this legend; and the tenor, worn out, poor,
and a wreck virtually for all of his pose of grandeur, was able to make
a living still from provincial publics, who charitably applauded him
with the self-conceit of climbers pampering a dethroned prince.

Leonora, playing opposite that famous man, "starring," singing duets
with him, clasping hands that had been kissed by the queens of art, was
deeply stirred. This, at last, was the world she had dreamed of in her
dingy garret in Milan. Salvatti's presence gave her just the illusion of
aristocratic grandeur she had longed for. Nor was he slow in perceiving
the impression he had made upon that promising young woman. With a cold
calculating selfishness, he determined to profit by her naive
admiration. Was it love that thrust her toward him? As, so long
afterwards, she analyzed her passion to Rafael, she was vehemently
certain it had not been love: Salvatti could never have inspired a
genuine feeling in anyone. His egotism, his moral corruptness, were too
close to the surface. No, he was a philanderer simply, an exploiter of
women. But for her it had been a blinding hallucination nevertheless,
fraught, during the first days, at least, with the delicious
exhiliration, the voluptuous abandonment of true love. She became the
slave of the decrepit tenor, voluntarily, just as she had become her
_maestro's_ slave through fear. And so complete had her infatuation
been, so overpowering its intoxication, that, in obedience to Salvatti,
she fled with him at the end of the season, and deserted her father, who
had objected to the intimacy.

Then came the black page in her life, that filled her eyes with
anguished tears as she went on with her story. What folks said about her
father's end was not true. Poor Doctor Moreno had not committed suicide.
He was altogether too proud to confess in that way the deep grief that
her ingratitude had caused him.

"Don't talk to me about that woman," he would say fiercely to his
landlady at Milan whenever the old _danseuse_ would mention Leonora. "I
have no daughter: it was all a mistake."

Unbeknown to Salvatti, who became terribly grasping as he saw his power
waning, Leonora would send her father a few hundred francs from London,
from Naples, from Paris. The Doctor, though in direst poverty, would at
once return the checks "to the sender" and, without writing a word;
where-upon Leonora paid an allowance every month to the housekeeper,
begging her not to abandon the old man.

The unhappy Doctor needed, indeed, all the care the landlady and her old
friends could give him. The _povero signor spagnuolo_--the poor Spanish
gentleman--spent his days locked up in his room, his violoncello between
his knees, reading Beethoven, the only one "in his family"--as he
said--"who had never played him false." When old Isabella, tired of his
music, would literally put him out of the house to get a breath of air,
he would wander like a phantom through the Gallery, distantly greeted
by former friends, who avoided closer contact with that black
despondency and feared the explosions of rage with which he received
news of his daughter's rising fame.

A rapid rise she was making in very truth! The worldly old women who
foregathered in the ballet-dancer's little parlor, could not contain
their admiration for their "little girl's" success; and even grew
indignant at the father for not accepting things "as things had to be."
Salvatti? Just the support she needed! An expert pilot, who knew the
chart of the opera world, who would steer her straight and keep her off
the rocks.

The tenor had skilfully organized a world wide publicity for his young
singer. Leonora's beauty and her artistic verve conquered every public.
She had contracts with the leading theatres of Europe, and though
critics found defects in her singing, her beauty helped them to forget
these, and one and all they contributed loyally to the deification of
the young goddess. Salvatti, sheltering his old age under this prestige
which he so religiously fostered, was keeping in harness to the very
end, and taking leave of life under the protecting shadow of that woman,
the last to believe in him and tolerate his exploitation.

Applauded by select publics, courted in her dressing-room by celebrated
men and women, Leonora began to find Salvatti's tyranny unbearable. She
now saw him as he really was: miserly, petulant, spoiled by praise.
Every bit of her money that came into his hands disappeared, she knew
not where. Eager for revenge, though really answering the lure of the
elegant world she glimpsed in the distance but was not yet a part of,
she began to deceive Salvatti in passing adventures, taking a diabolical
pleasure in the deceit. But no; as she looked back on that part of her
life with the sober eye of experience, she understood that she had
really been the one deceived. Salvatti, she remembered, would always
retire at the opportune moment, facilitating her infidelities. She
understood now that the man had carefully prepared such adventures for
her with influential men whom he himself introduced to make certain
profits out of the meeting--profits that he never declared.

After three years of this sort of life, when Leonora had reached the
full splendor of her beauty, she chanced to become the favorite of
fashion for one whole summer at Nice. Parisian newspapers, in their
"society columns" referred, in veiled language, to the passion of an
aged king, a democratic monarch, who had left his throne, much as a
manufacturer of London or a stockbroker of Paris would leave his office,
for a vacation on the Blue Coast. This tall, robust gentleman with a
patriarchal beard--the very type of the good king in fairy tales--had
not hesitated to be seen in public with a beautiful _artiste_.

That conquest, fleeting though it had been, put the finishing touch on
Leonora's eminence! "Ah! La Brunna!" people would declare
enthusiastically. "The favorite of king Ernesto.... Our greatest
artist." And troops of adorers began to besiege her under the keen,
mercenary eyes of the tenor Salvatti.

About this time her father died in a hospital at Milan--a very sad end,
as Signora Isabella, the former ballet-dancer, explained in her letters.
Of what had he died?... The old lady could not say, as the physicians
had differed; but her own view of the matter was that the _povero signor
spagnuolo_ had simply grown tired of living--a general collapse of that
wonderful constitution, so strong, so powerful, in a way, yet strangely
susceptible to moral and emotional influences. He was almost blind when
admitted to the hospital. He seemed quite to have lost his mind--sunk in
an unbreakable silence. Isabella had not dared to keep him in her house
after he had fallen into that coma. But the strange thing was, that as
death drew near, his memory of the past suddenly cleared, and the nurses
would hear him groan for nights at a time, murmuring in Spanish with
tenacious persistency:

"Leonora! My darling! Where are you?... Little girl, where are you?"

Leonora wept and wept, and did not leave her hotel for more than a week,
to the great disgust of Salvatti, who observed, in addition, that tears
were not good for her complexion.

Alone in the world!... Her own wrong-doing had killed her poor father!
No one was left now except her good old aunt, who was "existing" far
away in Spain, like a vegetable in a garden, her stupid mind entirely on
her prayer-book. Leonora vented her anguish in a burst of hatred for
Salvatti. He was responsible for her abandonment of her father! She
deserted him, taking up with a certain count Selivestroff, a handsome
and wealthy Russian, captain in the Imperial Guard.

So she had found her destiny! Her life would always be like that! She
would pass from stage to stage, from song to song, belonging to
everybody--and to nobody!

That fair Russian, so strong, so manly, so thoroughly a gentleman, had
loved her truly, with a passionate humble adoration.

He would kneel submissively at her feet, like Hercules in the presence
of Adriadne, resting his chin on her knees, looking up into her face
with his gray, kindly, caressing eyes. Timidly, doubtfully, he would
approach her every day as if he were meeting her for the first time and
feared a repulse. He would kiss her softly, delicately, with hushed
reserve, as if she were a fragile jewel that might break beneath his
tenderest caress. Poor Selivestroff! Leonora had wept at the thought of
him. In Russia and with princely Russian sumptuousness, they had lived
for a year in his castle, in the country, among a population of sodden
_moujiks_ who worshipped that beautiful woman in the white and blue furs
as devotedly as if she had been a Virgin stepping forth from the gilded
background of an ikon.

But Leonora could not live away from stageland: the ladies of the rural
aristocracy avoided her, and she needed applause and admiration. She
induced Selivestroff to move to St. Petersburg, and for a whole winter
she sang at the Opera there, like a grand dame turned opera singer out
of love for the work.

Once more she became the reigning _belle_. All the young Russian
aristocrats who held commissions in the Imperial Guard, or high posts in
the Government, spoke enthusiastically of the great Spanish beauty; and
they envied Selivestroff. The count yearned moodily for the solitude of
his castle, which held so many loving memories for him. In the bustling,
competitive life of the capital, he grew jealous, sad, melancholy,
irritable at the necessity of defending his love. He could sense the
underground warfare that was being waged against him by Leonora's
countless admirers.

One morning she was rudely awakened and leapt out of bed to find the
count stretched out on a divan, pale, his shirt stained with blood. A
number of gentlemen dressed in black were standing around him. They had
just brought him in from a carriage. He had been wounded in the chest.
The evening before, on leaving the theatre, the count had gone up for a
moment to his Club. He had caught an allusion to Leonora and himself in
some words of a friend. There had been blows--then hasty arrangements
for a duel, which had been fought at sunrise, with pistols. Selivestroff
died in the arms of his mistress, smiling, seeking those delicate,
powerful, pearly hands for one last time with his bleeding lips. Leonora
mourned him deeply, truly. The land where she had been so happy with the
first man she had really loved became intolerable to her, and abandoning
most of the riches that the count had given her, she went forth into the
world again, storming the great theatres in a new fever of travel and
adventure.

She was then just twenty-three, but already felt herself an old woman.
How she had changed!... More affairs? As she went over that period of
her life in her talk with Rafael, Leonora closed her eyes with a shudder
of modesty and remorse. Drunk with fame and power she had rushed about
the world lavishing her beauty on anyone who interested her for the
moment. The property of everybody and of nobody! She could not remember
the names, even, of all the men who had loved her during that era of
madness, so many had been caught in the wake of her stormy flight across
the world! She had returned to Russia once, and been expelled by the
Czar for compromising the prestige of the Imperial Family, through an
affair with a grand duke who had wanted to marry her. In Rome she had
posed in the nude for a young and unknown sculptor out of pure
compassion for his silent admiration; and she herself made his "Venus"
public, hoping that the world-wide scandal would bring fame to the work
and to its author. In Genoa she found Salvatti again, now "retired," and
living on usury from his savings. She received him with an amiable
smile, lunched with him, treated him as an old comrade; and at dessert,
when he had become hopelessly drunk, she seized a whip and avenged the
blows she had received in her time of slavery to him, beating him with a
ferocity that stained the apartment with gore and brought the police to
the hotel. Another scandal! And this time her name bandied about in a
criminal court! But she, a fugitive from justice, and proud of her
exploit, sang in the United States, wildly acclaimed by the American
public, which admired the combative Amazon even more than the artist.