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Jacques Cartier - "Voyage de J. Cartier au Canada"

Various - "Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890"

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Schuster song pokes fun at 'Puke Watson'
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The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez

V >> Vicente Blasco Ibanez >> The Torrent




There she made the acquaintance of Hans Keller, the famous orchestra
conductor, and a pupil and friend of Wagner. The German _maestro_ became
her second love. With stiff, reddish hair, thick-rimmed eyeglasses, an
enormous mustache that drooped over either side of his mouth and framed
his chin, he was certainly not so handsome as Selivestroff. But he had
one irresistible charm, the charm of Art. With the tragic Russian in her
mind and on her conscience, she felt the need of burning herself in the
immortal flame of the ideal; and she adored the famous musician for the
artistic associations that hovered about him. For the first time, the
much-courted Leonora descended from her lofty heights to seek a man's
attention and came with her amorous advances to disturb the placid calm
of that artist so wholly engrossed in the cult of the sublime Master.

Hans Keller noticed the smile that fell like a sunbeam upon his music
scrolls. He closed them and let himself be drawn off on the by-paths of
love. Leonora's life with the _maestro_ was an absolute rupture with all
her past. Her one wish was to love and be loved--to throw a cloak of
mystery over her real self, ashamed as she now was of her previous wild
career. Her passion enthralled the musician and she in turn felt at once
stirred and transfigured by the atmosphere of artistic fervor that
haloed the illustrious pupil of Wagner.

The spirit of Him, the Master, as Hans Keller called Wagner with pious
adoration, flashed before the singer's eyes like the revealing glory
that converted Paul on the road to Damascus. Music, as she now saw
clearly for the first time, was not a means of pleasing crowds,
displaying physical beauty, and attracting men. It was a religion--the
mysterious power that brings the infinite within us into contact with
the infinite that surrounds us. She became the sinner awakening to
repentance, and yearning for the atoning peace of the cloister, a
Magdalen of Art, touched on the high road of worldliness and frivolity
by the mystic sublimity of the Beautiful; and she cast herself at the
feet of Him, the supreme Master, as the most victorious of men, lord of
the mystery that moves all souls.

"Tell me more about Him," Leonora would say. "How much I would give to
have known him as you did!... I did see him once in Venice: during his
last days ...he was already dying."

And that meeting was, indeed, one of her most vivid and lasting
memories. The declining afternoon enlivening the dark waters of the
Grand Canal with its opalescent spangles; a gondola passing hers in the
opposite direction; and inside, a pair of blue, imperious eyes, shining,
under thick eyebrows, with the cold glint of steel--eyes that could
never be mistaken for common eyes, for the divine fire of the Elect, of
the demi-God, was bright within them! And they seemed to envelop her in
a flash of cerulean light. It was He--ill, and about to die. His heart
was wounded, bleeding, pierced, perhaps, by the shafts of mysterious
melody, as hearts of the Virgin sometimes bleed on altars bristling with
swords.

Leonora could still see him as if he were there in front of her. He
looked smaller than he really was, dwarfed, apparently, by illness, and
by the wrack of pain. His huge head, the head of a genius, was bent low
over the bosom of his wife Cosima. He had removed the black felt hat so
as to catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks. His
broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an
ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels. His arrogant nose, as strong as
the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken
mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw. A gray beard ran down along the
neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age. A hasty vision it had been, to
be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained in her
memory like a landscape glimpsed at the flare of a lightning-flash. She
had witnessed his arrival in Venice to die in the peace of those canals,
in that silence which is broken only by the stroke of the oar--where
many years before he had thought himself dying as he wrote his
_Tristan_--that hymn to the Death that is pure, to the Death that
liberates! She saw him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of
the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination
like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried--the
hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a
shield of ebony--motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic
legend--and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life,
Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about
it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ray of beauty may
penetrate.

And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad _boina_ of black
velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens--souvenirs
of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case.

"You knew him--tell me how he lived. Tell me everything: talk to me
about the Poet ... the Hero."

And the musician, no less moved, described the Master as he had seen him
in the best of health; a small man, tightly wrapped in an
overcoat--with a powerful, heavy frame, however, despite his slight
stature--as restless as a nervous woman, as vibrant as a steel spring,
with a smile that lightly touched with bitterness his thin, colorless
lips. Then came his "genialities," as people said, the caprices of his
genius, that figure so largely in the Wagner legend: his smoker, a
jacket of gold satin with pearl flowers for buttons; the precious cloths
that rolled about like waves of light in his study, velvets and silks,
of flaming reds and greens and blues, thrown across the furniture and
the tables haphazard, with no reference to usefulness--for their sheer
beauty only--to stimulate the eye with the goad of color, satisfy the
Master's passion for brightness; and perfumes, as well, with which his
garments--always of oriental splendor--were literally saturated; phials
of rose emptied at random, filling the neighborhood with the fragrance
of a fabulous garden, strong enough to overcome the hardiest uninitiate,
but strangely exciting to that Prodigy in his struggle with the Unknown.

And then Hans Keller described the man himself, never relaxed, always
quivering with mysterious thrills, incapable of sitting still, except at
the piano, or at table for his meals; receiving visitors standing,
pacing back and forth in his salon, his hands twitching in nervous
uncertainty; changing the position of the armchairs, rearranging the
furniture, suddenly stopping to hunt about his person for a snuff-box or
a pair of glasses that he never found; turning his pockets inside out,
pulling his velvet house-cap now down over one eye, now back over the
crown of his head, or again, throwing it into the air with a shout of
joy or crumpling it in his hand, as he became excited in the course of a
discussion!

And Keller would close his eyes, imagining that he could still hear in
the silence, the faint but commanding voice of the Master. Oh, where was
he now? On some star, doubtless, eagerly following the infinite song of
the spheres, a divine music that only his ears had been attuned to hear!
And to choke his emotion, the musician would sit down at the piano,
while Leonora, responsive to his mood, would approach him, and standing
as rigid as a statue, with her hands lost in the musician's head of
rough tangled hair, sing a fragment from the immortal _Tetralogy_.

Worship of Wagner transformed the butterfly into a new woman. Leonora
adored Keller as a ray of light gone astray from the glowing star now
extinguished forever; she felt the joy of humbleness, the sweetness of
sacrifice, seeing in him not the man, but the chosen representative of
the Divinity. Leonora could have grovelled at Keller's feet, let him
trample on her--make a carpet of her beauty. She willed to become a
slave to that lover who was the repository of the Master's thoughts; and
who seemed to be magnified to gigantic proportions by the custody of
such a treasure.

She tended him with the exquisite watchfulness of an enamored servant,
following him, on his trips in the summer, the season of the great
concerts, to Leipzig, Geneva, Paris; and she, the most famous living
prima donna, would stay behind the scenes, with no jealousy for the
applause she heard, waiting for Hans, perspiring and tired, to drop the
baton amid the acclamations of the audience and come back-stage to have
her dry his forehead with an almost filial caress.

And thus they traveled about Europe, spreading the light of the Master;
Leonora, voluntarily in the background, like a patrician of old, dressed
as a slave and following the Apostle in the name of the New Word.

The German musician let himself be adored, receiving all her caresses of
enthusiasm and love with the absent-mindedness of an artist so
preoccupied with sounds that at last he comes to hate words. He taught
his language to Leonora that she might some day realize a dream of hers
and sing in Bayreuth; and he grounded her in the principles that had
guided the Master in the creation of his great characters. And so, when
Leonora made her appearance on the stage one winter with the winged
helmet and the lance of the Valkyrie, she attained an eminence in
Wagnerian interpretation that was to follow her for the remainder of her
career. Hans himself was carried away by her power, and could never
recover from his astonishment at Leonora's complete assimilation of the
spirit of the Master.

"If only He could hear you!" he would say with conviction. "I am sure He
would be content."

And the pair traveled about the world together. Every springtime she, as
spectator, would watch him directing Wagnerian choruses in the "Mystic
Abyss" at Bayreuth. Winters it was he who went into ecstasies under her
tremendous "_Hojotoho_!"--the fierce cry of a Valkyrie afraid of the
austere father Wotan; or at sight of her awakening among the flames for
the spirited Siegfried, the hero who feared nothing in the world, but
trembled at the first glance of love!

But artists' passions are like flowers, fragrant, but quickly
languishing. The rough German musician was a simple person, unstable,
fickle, ready to be amused at any new plaything. Leonora admitted to
Rafael that she could have lived to old age submissively at Keller's
side, pampering his whims and selfish caprices. But one day Keller
deserted her, as she had deserted others, to take up with a sickly,
languid contralto, whose best charms could have been hardly comparable
to the morbid delicacy of a hot-house flower. Leonora, mad with love and
jealousy, pursued him, knocking at his door like a servant. For the
first time she felt the voluptuous bitterness of being scorned,
discarded, until reaction from despair brought her back to her former
pride and self-control!

Love was over. She had had enough of artists; though an interesting sort
of folk they were in their way. Far preferable were the ordinary, normal
men she had known before Keller's time! The foolisher--the more
commonplace--the better! She would never fall in love again!

Wearied, broken in spirit, disillusioned, she went back into her old
world. But now the legend of her past beset her. Again men came,
passionately besieging her, offering her wealth in return for a little
love. They talked of killing themselves if she resisted, as if it were
her duty to surrender, as if refusal on her part were treachery. The
gloomy Macchia committed suicide in Naples. Why? Because she did not
capitulate to his melancholy sonnets! In Vienna there had been a duel,
in which one of her admirers was slain. An eccentric Englishman followed
her about, looming in her pathway everywhere like the shadow of a fatal
Destiny, vowing to kill anybody she should prefer to him.... She had had
enough at last! She was wearied of such a life, disgusted at the male
voracity that dogged her every step. She longed to fall out of sight,
disappear, find rest and quiet in a complete surrender to some boundless
dream. And the thought--a comforting, soothing thought, it had been--of
the distant land of her childhood came back to her, the thought of her
simple, pious aunt, the sole survivor of her family, who wrote to her
twice every year, urging her to reconcile her soul with God--to which
end the good old Dona Pepa was herself aiding with prayer!

She felt, too, somehow, without knowing just why, that a visit to her
native soil would soften the painful memory of the ingratitude that had
cost her father's life. She would care for the poor old woman! Her
presence would bring a note of cheer into that gray, monotonous
existence that had gone on without the slightest change, ever. And
suddenly, one night, after an "Isolde" in Florence, she ordered Beppa,
the loyal and silent companion of her wandering life, to pack her
things!

Home! Home! Off for her native land! And might she find there something
to keep her ever from returning to the troubled stirring world she was
leaving!

She was the princess of the fairy tales longing to become a shepherdess.
There she meant to stay, in the shade of her orange-trees, now and then
fondling a memory of her old life, perhaps, but wishing eternally to
enjoy that tranquillity, fiercely repelling Rafael, therefore, because
he had tried to awaken her, as Siegfried rouses Brunhilde, braving the
flames to reach her side.

No; friends, friends, nothing else! She wanted no more of love. She
already knew what that was. Besides, he had come too late....

And Rafael tossed sleeplessly in his bed, rehearsing in the darkness the
story he had been told. He felt dwarfed, annihilated, by the grandeur of
the men who had preceded him in their adoration of that woman. A king,
great artists, handsome and aristocratic paladins, Russian counts,
potentates with vast wealth at their command! And he, a humble country
boy, an obscure junior deputy, as submissive as a child to his mother's
despotic ways, forced to beg for the money for his personal expenses
even--he was trying to succeed them!

He laughed with bitter irony at his own presumptuousness. Now he
understood Leonora's mocking tone, and the violence she had used in
repulsing all boorish liberties he had tried to take. But despite the
contempt he began to feel for himself, he lacked the strength to
withdraw now. He had been caught up in the wake of seduction, the
maelstrom of love that followed the actress everywhere, enslaving men,
casting them, broken in spirit and in will, to earth, like so many
slaves of Beauty.




III


"Good morning, Rafaelito ... we are seeing each other betimes today....
I am up so early not to miss the marketing. I remember that Wednesday
was always a great event in my life, as a child. What a crowd!..."

And Leonora, with the great swarming cities far from her mind, was
really impressed at the numbers of bustling people crowding the little
square, called _del Prado_, where every Wednesday the "grand market" of
the Alcira region was held.

Their sashes bulging with money bags, peasants were coming into town to
buy supplies for the whole week out in the orange country. Orchard women
were going from one stall to the next, as slender of body and as neatly
dressed as the peasant girls of an opera ballet, their hair in
_senorita_ style, their skirts of bright batiste gathered up to hold
their purchases and showing fine stockings and tight-fitting shoes
underneath. Tanned faces and rough hands were the only signs to betray
the rustic origin of the girls; because those were prosperous days for
the orange growers of the District.

Along the walls hens were clucking, ranged in piles and tied together by
the feet. Here and there were pyramids of eggs, vegetables, fruit. In
"shops" that were set up in the morning and taken down at night,
drygoods dealers were selling colored sashes, strips of cotton cloth and
calico, and black woolsey, the eternal garb of every native of the
Jucar valley. Beyond the Prado, in _El Alborchi_, was the hog market;
and then came the _Hostal Gran_ where horses were tried out. On
Wednesdays all the business of the neighborhood was transacted--money
borrowed or paid back, poultry stocks replenished, hogs bought to fatten
on the farms, whole families anxiously following their progress; and new
cart-horses, especially, the matter of greatest concern to the farmers,
secured on mortgage, usually, or with cash saved up by desperate
hoarding.

Though the sun had barely risen, the crowd, smelling of sweat and soil,
already filled the market place with busy going and coming. The
orchard-women embraced as they met, and with their heavy baskets propped
on their hips, went into the chocolate shops to celebrate the encounter.
The men gathered in groups; and from time to time, to "buck up" a
little, would go off in parties to swallow a glass of sweet brandy. In
and out among the rustics walked the city people: "petty bourgeois" of
set manners, with old capes, and huge hempen baskets, where they would
place the provisions they had bought after tenacious hagglings;
_senoritas_, who found in these Wednesday markets a welcome relief from
the monotony of their secluded life at home; idlers who spent hour after
hour at the stall of some vendor friend, prying into what each marketer
carried in his basket, grumbling at the stinginess of some and praising
the generosity of others.

Rafael gazed at his friend in sheer astonishment. What a beauty she was!
Who could ever have taken her, in that costume, for a world-famous prima
donna!

Leonora looked the living picture of an orchard girl: a plain cotton
dress, in anticipation of spring; a red kerchief around her neck; her
blond hair uncovered, combed back with artful carelessness and hastily
knotted low on the back of her head. Not a jewel, not a flower! Only her
height and her striking comeliness marked her off from the other girls.
Under the curious, devouring glances of the whole market throng, Rafael
smilingly greeted her, feasting his eyes on her fresh, pink skin, still
radiant from the morning bath, inhaling the subtle, indefinable
fragrance that hovered about that strong, healthy, youthful person.

She was constantly smiling, as if bent on dazzling the bumpkins, who
were gaping at her from a distance, with the pearly flash of her teeth.
The market-place began to buzz with admiring curiosity, or the thrill of
scandal. There, face to face, in view of the whole city, the deputy and
the opera singer were talking and laughing together like the best of
friends!

Rafael's supporters--the chief officials in the city government--who
were loitering about the square, could not conceal their satisfaction.
Even the humblest of the constables felt a certain pride. That beautiful
fairy was talking with "the Chief," smiling at him, even. What an honor
for "the Party!" But after all, why not? Everything considered, don
Rafael Brull deserved all that, and more! And those men, who were very
careful to keep silent when their wives spoke indignantly of the
"stranger," admired her with the instinctive fervor that beauty
inspires, and envied the deputy his good fortune. The old orchard-women
wrapped the couple in caressing glances of approval. There was a
handsome pair! What a fine match!

The town ladies in passing by would draw up full height and pretend not
to see them. On meeting acquaintances they would make wry faces and say
ironically: "Did you see?... here she is, in full sight of everybody,
casting her fly for dona Bernarda's son!" What a disgrace! It was
getting so a decent woman hardly dared go out of doors!

Leonora, quite unconscious of the interest she was arousing, chattered
on about her shopping. Beppa, you see, had decided to stay at home with
her aunt that morning; so she had come with her gardener's wife and
another woman--there they were over there with the large baskets. She
had no end of things to get--and she laughed as she read off the list. A
regular housewife she had become, yes, sir! She knew the price of
everything and could tell down to a _centime_ just what it was costing
her to live. It was like those hard times back in Milan, when she had
gone with her music roll under her arm to get macaroni, butter or coffee
at the grocer's. And what fun it all was!... However, Leonora observed
that, without a doubt, her audience was interpreting her cordial offhand
way with Rafael in the worst light possible. She gave him her hand and
took leave. It was growing late! If she stood there much longer the best
of the market would be carried off by others--if she found anything at
all left! "Down to business, then! Good-bye!"

And the young man saw her make her way, followed by the two country
women, through the crowds, pausing at the booths, welcomed by the
vendors with their best smiles, as a customer who never haggled;
interrupting her purchases to fondle the filthy, whining children the
poor women were carrying in their arms, and taking the best fruits out
of her basket to give to the little ones.

And everywhere general admiration! "_Asi, sinorita_!--Here, my dear
young lady!" "_Vinga, dona Leonor_!--This way, dona Leonora!" the
huckstresses cried, calling her by name to show greater intimacy. And
she would smile, with a familiar intimate word for everybody, her hand
frequently visiting the purse of Russian leather that hung from her
wrist. Cripples, blind beggars, men with missing arms or legs, all had
learned of the generosity of that woman who scattered small change by
the fistful.

Rafael gazed after her, smiling indifferently in acknowledgment of the
congratulations the town notables were heaping on him. The
_alcalde_--the most hen-pecked husband in Alcira, according to his
enemies--affirmed with sparkling eyes that for a woman like that he was
capable of doing almost any crazy thing. And they all joined in a chorus
of invidious praise, taking it for granted that Rafael was the
_artiste's_ accepted lover; though the youth himself smiled bitterly at
the thought of his real status with that wonderful woman.

And she vanished, finally, into the sea of heads at the other end of the
market-place; though Rafael, from time to time, thought he could still
make out a mass of golden hair rising above the _chevelures_ of the
other girls. Willingly he would have followed; but Don Matias was at his
side--don Matias, the wealthy orange exporter, father of the wistful
Remedios who was spending her days obediently at dona Bernarda's side.

That gentleman, heavy of speech and heavier still of thought, was
pestering Rafael with a lot of nonsense about the orange business,
giving the young man advice on a new bill he had drawn up and wanted to
have introduced in Congress--a protectionist measure for Spanish
oranges. "Why, it will be the making of the city, boy! Every mother's
son of us swimming in money!" as he guaranteed with his hand upon his
heart.

But Rafael's gaze was lost in the distant reaches of the Prado, to catch
one more fleeting glimpse of a golden head of hair--proof of Leonora's
presence still! He found it hard to be courteous, even, to this man who,
according to authentic rumor, was destined to be his father-in-law. Of
all the drawling trickling words only a few reached his ears, beating on
his brain like monotonous hammer blows. "Glasgow ... Liverpool ... new
markets ... lower railroad rates ... The English agents are a set of
thieves ..."

"Very well, let them go hang," Rafael answered mentally. And giving a
mechanical "yes, yes!" to propositions he was not even hearing, he gazed
away more intently than ever, fearing lest Leonora should already have
gone. He felt relieved, however, when a gap opened in the crowd and he
could see the actress seated in a chair that had been offered her by a
huckstress. She was holding a child upon her knees, and talking with a
tiny, wretched, sickly creature who looked to Rafael like the
orchard-woman they had met at the hermitage.

"Well, what do you think of my plan?" don Matias asked.

"Excellent, magnificent, and well worthy of a man like you, who knows
the question from top to bottom. We'll discuss the matter thoroughly
when I return to the Cortes."

And to avoid a second exposition, he patted the wealthy boor on the
back, and wondered why in the world Fortune should have picked such a
disgusting man to smile on.

The whole city had known don Matias when he went around in peasant's
clogs and worked a tiny orchard he had secured on lease. His son, a
virtual half-wit, who took advantage of every opportunity to rifle the
old man's pockets and spend the money in Valencia with bull-fighters,
gamblers and horse-dealers, went barefoot in those days, scampering
about the roads with the children of the gipsies encamped in _El
Alborchi_. His daughter--the now well-behaved, the now modest, Remedios,
who was passing day after day at complicated needlework under the
tutelage of dona Bernarda--had grown up like a wild rabbit of the
fields, repeating with shocking fidelity all the oaths and vile language
she heard from the carters her father drank with.