The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez
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Vicente Blasco Ibanez >> The Torrent
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And she fell silent, keeping absolutely still, her eyes turned upward,
catching the moonbeams in their tear-like moisture. From time to time
Rafael saw her quiver with a mysterious tremor; then extend her arms and
cross them behind her head of golden hair, in a voluptuous stretch that
made her white robe rustle, while her limbs grew taut in a delicious
tension. She seemed upset, ill almost; at times her panting breath was
like a sob. Her head drooped over a shoulder and her breast heaved with
countless sighs.
The youth was obediently silent, fearing lest the remembrance of his
base audacity should again come up in the conversation; and not
venturing to reduce the distance that separated them on the bench. She
seemed to divine what he was thinking and began to speak, slowly, of the
abnormal state of mind in which she found herself.
"I don't know what's the matter with me tonight. I feel like crying,
without knowing why. I am filled with a strange inexplicable happiness,
and yet I could just weep and weep. Oh, I know--it's the Springtime; all
this fragrance that whips my nerves like a lash. I really believe I'm
crazy.... Springtime! My best friend--though she has done me only wrong!
If ever I have been guilty of any foolish thing in my life, Spring was
at the bottom of it.... It's youth reborn in us--madness paying us its
annual visit.... And I--ever faithful to her, adoring her; waiting in
this out-of-the-way spot almost a year for her to come, to see her once
more in her best clothes, crowned with orange-blossoms like a virgin--a
wicked virgin who pays me back for my devotion with betrayal!... Just
see what I've come to! I am ill--I don't know why--with excess of life,
perhaps. She drives me on I don't know where, but certainly where I
ought not to go.... If it weren't for sheer will-power on my part, I'd
collapse in a heap on this bench here. I'm just like a drunken man
bending every effort to keep his feet and walk straight."
It was true; she was really ill. Her eyes grew more and more tearful;
her body was quivering, shrinking, collapsing, as if life were
overflowing within her and escaping through all her pores.
Again she was silent, for a long time, her eyes gazing vacantly into
space; then, she murmured, as if in answer to a thought of her own.
"No one ever understood as well as He. He knew everything, felt as
nobody ever felt the mysterious hidden workings of Nature; and He sang
of Springtime as a god would sing. Hans used to remark that many a time;
and it's so."
Without turning her head she added, in a dreamy musing voice.
"Rafael, you don't know _Die Walkuere_, do you? You've never heard the
Spring Song?"
He shook his head. And Leonora, with her eyes still gazing moonward, her
head resting back against her arms, which escaped in all their round,
pearly strength from her drooping sleeves, spoke slowly, collecting her
memories, recreating in her mind's eye that Wagnerian scene of such
intense poetry--the glorification and the triumph of Nature and Love.
Hunding's hut, a barbaric dwelling, hung with savage trophies of the
chase, suggesting the brutish existence of man scarcely yet possessed of
the world, in perpetual strife with the elements and with wild animals.
The eternal fugitive, forgotten of his father,--Sigmund by name, though
he calls himself "Despair," wandering years and years through the
forests, harrassed by beasts of prey who take him for one of themselves
in his covering of skins, rests at last at the foot of the giant oak
that sustains the hut; and as he drinks the hidromel in the horn offered
to him by the sweet Siglinda, he gazes into her pure eyes and for the
first time becomes aware that Love exists.
The husband, Hunding, the wild huntsman, takes leave of him at the end
of the rustic supper: "Your father was the Wolf, and I am of the race of
Hunters. Until the break of day, my house protects you; you are my
guest; but as soon as the sun rises in the heavens you become my enemy,
and we will fight.... Woman, prepare the night's drink; and let us be
off to bed."
And the exile sits alone beside the fireplace, thinking of his immense
loneliness. No home, no family, not even the magic sword promised him by
his father the Wolf. And at daybreak, out of the hut that shelters him
the enemy will come to slay him. The thought of the woman who allayed
his thirst, the sparkle of those pure eyes wrapping him in a gaze of
pity and love, is the one thing that sustains him.... She comes to him
when her wild consort has fallen asleep. She shows him the hilt of the
sword plunged into the oak by the god Wotan; nobody can pull it out: it
will obey only the hand of him to whom it has been destined by the god.
As she speaks the wandering savage gazes at her in ecstasy, as if she
were a white vision revealing to him the existence of something more
than might and struggle in the world. It is the voice of Love. Slowly he
draws near; embraces her; clasps her to his heart, while the door is
pushed open by the breeze and the green forest appears, odorous in the
moonlight--nocturnal Springtime, radiant and glorious, wrapped in a
mantle of music and perfume.
Siglinda shudders. "Who has come in?" No one--and yet, a Stranger has
entered the hovel, opening the door with an invisible hand. And Sigmund,
at the inspiration of Love, divines the identity of the visitant. "It is
Springtime laughing in the air about your tresses. The storms are gone;
gone is the dark solitude. The radiant month of May, a young warrior in
an armor of flowers, has come to give chase to bleak Winter, and in all
this festival of rejoicing Nature, seeks his sweetheart: Youth. This
night, which has brought you to me, is the unending night of Spring and
Youth."
And, Leonora was thrilled as she heard in her memory the murmur of the
orchestra accompanying the song of tenderness inspired by Spring; the
rustle of the forest branches benumbed by the winter, now swaying with
the new sap that had flowed into them like a torrent of vitality; and
out on the brightly lighted _plazoleta_ she could almost see Sigmund and
Siglinda clasping in an eternal unseverable embrace, as she had seen
them from the wings of the opera, where she would be waiting as a
Valkyrie to step out and set an audience wild with her mighty
"_Hojotoho!"_
She was feeling the same loneliness and yearning that Sigmund felt in
Hunding's hovel. Without a family, without a home, wandering over the
world, she longed for someone to lean on, someone to clasp tenderly to
her heart! And it was she who unconsciously, instinctively, had drawn
closer to Rafael, and placed her hand in his.
She was ill. She sighed softly with the appealing entreaty of a child,
as if the intense poetry of that memory of music had shattered the frail
remnant of will that had kept her mistress of herself.
"I don't know what's the matter with me to-night. I feel as though I
were dying.... But such a sweet death! So sweet!... What madness,
Rafael! How rash it was of us to have seen each other on such a
night!..."
And with supplicating eyes, as if entreating forgiveness, she gazed out
into the majestic moonlight, where the silence seemed to be stirring
with the palpitation of a new life. She could divine that something was
dying within her, that her will lay prostrate on the ground, without
strength to defend itself.
Rafael, too, was overwhelmed. He held her clasped against his breast,
one of her hands in his. She was weak, languid, will-less, incapable of
resistance; yet he did not feel the brutal passion of the previous
meeting; he did not dare to move. A sense of infinite tenderness came
over him. All he yearned for was to sit there hour after hour in contact
with that beautiful form, clasping her tightly to him, making her one
with him, as a jewel-case might guard a jewel.
He whispered mysteriously into her ear, hardly knowing what he was
saying; tender words that seemed to be coming from someone within him,
thrilling him with a tingling, suffocating passion as they left his
lips.
Yes, it was true; that night was the night dreamed of by the immortal
Poet; the wedding night of smiling Youth and of martial May in his armor
of flowers. The fields were quivering voluptuously under the rays of the
moon; and they, two young hearts, feeling the flutter of Love's wings
about their hair, why should they sit unresponsive there, blind to the
beauty of the night, deaf to the infinite caress that was echoing from
all around?
"Leonora! Leonora!" moaned Rafael.
He had slipped down from the bench. Before he was aware of it, he found
himself kneeling at her feet, clutching her hands, and thrusting his
face upward without daring to reach her lips.
She drew weakly back, protesting feebly, with a girlish plaint:
"No, no; it would hurt me.... I feel that I'm dying."
"You belong to me," the youth continued with an exaltation
ill-suppressed. "You belong to me forever; to gaze into your dear eyes,
and to murmur in your ear, your sweet, beautiful, name, and die, if need
be, here. What do we care for the world and its opinions?"
And Leonora with weakening resistance, continued to refuse:
"No, no.... I must not. It's a feeling I can't explain."
And that was so. The gentle quiver of Nature under the kiss of
Springtime, the intense perfume of the flower that is the emblem of
virginity, had transfigured that madcap singer, that adventuress of a
career so checkered, who had been violently thrust into her first
experience of passion, and now for the first time felt the blush of
modesty in the arms of a man. Nature, intoxicating her, shattering her
will, seemed to have created a strange virginity in that body so
familiar with the call of passion.
"Oh, Rafael, what is happening to me?... What's happening to me? It must
be love; a new love that I did not think I should ever know.... Rafael ...
Rafael, my own boy!"
And weeping softly, she took his head in her hands, pressed her lips to
his, and then fell back in her seat with eyes distended, maddened with
the joy of that kiss.
"I belong to you, Rafael! Yours ... but forever. I have always loved you
from the first, but now ... I adore you.... For the first time in my
life I say that with all my soul."
Hardly able to realize his good fortune, Rafael was thrilled by a deeply
generous sentiment. There was nothing he would not give to that
woman....
"Yes; you belong to me forever.... I will marry you."
But in his dreamy, wild intoxication he saw the artiste's eyes open wide
in surprise, as a sad smile flitted across her lips.
"Marry me And why?... That's well enough for other women; but me you
must love, my darling child, ever so much, as much as you can.... Just
love me!... I believe only in Love!"
V
"But my dear child, when are we getting to this island of yours?... It
bores me to be here sitting on this seat, so far away from my little
boy, watching his arms get tired from all that rowing. I must kiss him..
even if he says no! It will rest him, I am sure."
And rising to her feet, Leonora took two steps forward in the white
boat, though threatening to upset it, and kissed Rafael several times.
He lay aside the oars and laughingly defended himself.
"Madcap! We'll never get there at this rate. With rests like this we
make very little progress, and I've promised to take you to my island."
Once again he bent to the oars, heading out toward midstream over the
moonlit water, as if to vouchsafe the groves on either bank an equal
pleasure in the romantic escapade.
It had been one of her caprices--a desire repeated during his visits to
the Blue House on some afternoons, in the presence of dona Pepa and the
maid, and on every night, as he passed through the opening in the hedge
where Leonora's bare arms were waiting for him in the darkness.
For more than a week Rafael had been living in a sweet dream. Never had
he imagined that life could be so beautiful. It was a mood of delicious
abstraction. The city no longer existed for him. The people that moved
about him seemed like so many spectres: his mother and Remedios were
invisible beings. Their words he would hear and answer without taking
the trouble to look up.
He spent his days in feverish impatience for night to come--that the
family might finish supper and leave him free to go to his room, whence
he would cautiously tip-toe, as soon as the house was silent and
everybody was asleep.
Indifferent to everything foreign to his love, he did not realize the
effect his conduct was having on his mother. She had noticed that his
door was locked all morning while he slept off the fatigue of a
sleepless night. She had already tired of asking him whether he was ill,
and of getting the same reply:
"No, mama; I've been working nights; an important study I'm preparing."
It was all his mother could do on such occasions to restrain herself
from shouting "Liar!" Two nights she had gone up to his room, to find
the door locked and the keyhole dark. Her son was not inside. She would
lie awake for him now; and every morning, somewhat before dawn, she
would hear him softly open the outside door and tip-toe up the stairs,
perhaps in his stocking-feet.
The female Spartan said nothing however, hoarding her indignation in
silence, complaining only to don Andres of the recrudescence of a
madness that was upsetting all her plans. Through his numerous henchmen
the counselor kept watch upon the young man. His spies followed Rafael
cautiously through the night, up to the gate of the Blue House.
"What a scandal!" exclaimed dona Bernarda. "At night, too! He'll wind
up by bringing her into this house! Can it be that that simpleton of a
dona Pepita is blind to all this?"
And there was Rafael, unaware of the storm that was gathering about his
head, no longer deigning even to speak to Remedios, or look at her, as
with her head bowed like a sulky goat, she went around stifling her
tears at the memory of those happy strolls in the orchard under dona
Bernarda's surveillance.
The deputy had eyes for nothing outside of the Blue House; his happiness
had blinded him. The one thing that annoyed him was the necessity of
hiding his joy--his inability to make his good fortune public, so that
all his admirers might learn of it.
He would willingly have gone back to the days of the Roman decadence,
when the love affairs of the powerful became matters of national
adoration.
"What do I care for their gossip" he once said to Leonora. "I love you
so much that I'd like to see the whole city worship you in public. I'd
like to snatch you up in my arms, and appear upon the bridge at high
noon, before a concourse stupefied by your beauty: 'Am I or am I not
your "_quefe_"?' I'd ask. 'Well, if I am, adore this woman, who is my
very soul and without whom I could not live. The affection which you
have for me you must have also for her.' And I'd do just as I say if it
were possible."
"Silly boy ... adorable child," she had replied, showering him with
kisses, brushing his dark beard with her soft, quivering lips.
And it was during one of their meetings--when their words were broken
by sudden impulses of affection, and their lips were tightly pressed
together--that Leonora had expressed her capricious desire.
"I'm stifling in this house. I hate to caress you inside four walls, as
if you were only a passing whim. This is unworthy of you. You are Love,
who came to seek me out on the most beautiful of nights. I like you
better in the open air. You look more handsome to me then, and I feel
younger."
And recalling those trips down the river about which Rafael had told her
so many times when they were only friends--that islet with its curtains
of reeds, the willows bending over the water and the nightingale singing
from its hiding-place--she had asked him, eagerly:
"What night are you going to take me there? It's a whim of mine, a wild
idea; but, what does love exist for, if not to make people do the
foolish things that sweeten life?... Carry me off in your boat! The bark
that bore you there will transport the two of us to your enchanted
island; we will spend the whole night in the open air."
And Rafael, who was flattered by the idea of taking his love publicly
down the river, through the slumbering countryside, unfastened his boat
at midnight under the bridge and rowed it to a canebrake near Leonora's
orchard.
An hour later they emerged through the opening in the hedge, arm in arm,
laughing at the mischievous escapade, disturbing the majestic silence of
the landscape with noisy, insolent kisses.
They got into the boat, and with a favoring current, began to descend
the Jucar, lulled by the murmur of the river as it glided between the
high mudbanks covered with reeds that bent low over the water and
formed mysterious hiding places.
Leonora clapped her hands with delight. She threw over her neck the silk
shawl with which she had covered her head. She unbuttoned her light
traveling coat, and inhaled with deep enjoyment the moist, somewhat
muggy breeze that was curling along the surface of the river. Her hand
trembled as it dipped into the water from time to time.
How beautiful it was! All by themselves, and wandering about, as if the
world did not exist; as if all Nature belonged to them, to them alone!
Here they were, slipping past clusters of slumbering houses, leaving the
city far behind. And nobody had suspected that passion, which in its
enthusiasm had broken its chains and left its mysterious lair to have
the heavens and the fields for sympathetic witnesses. Leonora would have
wished that the night should never end; that the waning moon, which
seemed to have been slashed by a sword, should stop eternally in the sky
to wrap them forever in its feeble, dying light; that the river should
be endless, and the boat float on and on until, overwhelmed by so much
love, they should breathe the last gasp of life away in a kiss as
tenuous as a sigh.
"If you could only know how grateful I am to you for this excursion,
Rafael!... I'm happy, so happy. Never have I had such a night as this.
But where is the island? Have we gone astray, as you did the night of
the flood?"
No! At last they reached the place. There Rafael had spent many an
afternoon hidden in the bushes, cut off by the encircling waters,
dreaming that he was an adventurer on the virgin prairies or the vast
rivers of America, performing exploits he had read about in the novels
of Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid.
A tributary joined the Jucar at this point, emptying gently into the
main stream from under a thicket of reeds and trees that formed a
triumphal arch of foliage. At the confluence rose the island--a tiny
piece of land almost level with the water, but as fresh as green and
fragrant as an aquatic bouquet. The banks were lined with dense clumps
of cane, and a few willows that bent their hairy foliage low over the
water, forming dark vaults through which the boat could make its way.
The two lovers entered the shade. The curtain of branches concealed them
from the river; a bare tear of moonlight managed to filter through the
mane of willows.
Leonora felt a first sense of uneasiness in this dark, damp, cave-like
haunt. Invisible animals took to the water with dull splashes as they
heard the boat's bow touch the mud of the bank. The actress clutched her
lover's arm with nervous pleasure.
"Here we are," murmured Rafael. "Hold on to something and get out.
Careful, careful! Don't you want to hear the nightingale? Here we have
him. Listen."
It was true. In one of the willows, at the other side of the island, the
mysterious bird was trilling from his hiding place, a dizzying shower of
notes, which broke at the crescendo of the musical whirl-pool into a
plaint as soft and long-sustained as a golden thread stretched in the
silence of the night across the river, that seemed to be applauding
with its hushed murmur. To get nearer, the lovers went up through the
rushes, stopping, bending over at each step, to keep the branches from
crackling underneath their feet.
Favoring moisture had covered the islet with an exuberant undergrowth.
Leonora repressed exclamations of glee as she found her feet caught in
meshes of reeds or received the rude caresses of the branches that
snapped back, as Rafael went ahead, and brushed against her face. She
called for help in a muffled voice; and Rafael, laughing also, would
hold out his hand to her, taking her finally to the very foot of the
tree where the nightingale was singing.
The bird, divining the presence of intruders, ceased his song. Doubtless
he had heard the rustle of their clothing as they sat down at the foot
of the tree, or the tender words they were murmuring into each other's
ear.
Over all, the silence of slumbering Nature reigned--that silence made up
of a thousand sounds, harmonizing and blending in one majestic calm; the
murmur of the water, the stirring of the foliage, the mysterious
movements of unseen creatures crawling along under the leaves or
patiently boring their winding galleries in the creaking trunks.
The nightingale began again to sing, timidly, like an artist afraid of
an impending interruption. He uttered a few disconnected notes with
anxious rests between them--love sighs they seemed, broken by sobs of
passion. Then gradually he took courage, regained self-confidence, and
entered on his full song, just as a soft breeze rose, swept over the
island, and set all the trees and reeds rustling in mysterious
accompaniment.
The bird gradually grew intoxicated with the sound of his own trilling,
cadenced, voice; one could almost see him up there in the thick
darkness, panting, ardent, in the spasm of his musical inspiration,
utterly engrossed in his own beautiful little world of song, overwhelmed
by the charm of his own artistry.
But the bird had ceased his music when the two lovers awoke in a tight
embrace, still in ecstasy from the song of love to which they had fallen
asleep. Leonora was resting a dishevelled head on Rafael's shoulder,
caressing his neck with an eager, wearied breathing, whispering in his
ear, random, incoherent words that still were vibrant with emotion.
How happy she was there! Everything comes for true love! Many a time,
during the days of her unkindness to him, she had looked out from her
balcony upon the river winding down through the slumbering countryside;
and she had thought with rapture of a stroll some day through that
immense garden on Rafael's arm--of gliding, gliding down the Jucar, to
that very island.
"My love is an ancient thing," she murmured. "Do you suppose, I have
been loving you only since the other night? No, I have loved you for a
long, long time.... But don't you go and get conceited on that account,
_su senoria_! I don't know how it began: It must have been when you were
away in Madrid. When I saw you again I knew that I was lost. If I still
resisted, it was because I was a wise woman; because I saw things
clearly. Now I'm mad and I've thrown my better judgment to the winds.
God knows what will become of us.... But come what may, love me, Rafael,
love me. Swear that you'll love me always. It would be cruel to desert
me after awakening a passion like this."
And, in an impulse of dread, she nestled closer against his breast, sank
her hands into his hair, lifted her head back to kiss him avidly on the
face, the forehead, the eyes, the lips, nibbling playfully, tenderly at
his nose and chin, yet with an affectionate vehemence that drew cries of
mock protest from Rafael.
"Madcap!" he muttered, smiling. "You're hurting me."
Leonora looked steadily at him out of her two great eyes that were
a-gleam with love.
"I could eat you up," she murmured. "I feel like devouring you, my
heaven, my king, my god.... What have you given me, tell me, little boy?
How have you been able to fascinate me, make me feel a passion that I
never, never felt before?"
And again they fell asleep.
Rafael stirred in his lover's arms, and suddenly sat up.
"It must be late. How many hours have we been here, do you suppose?"
"Many, many hours," Leonora answered sadly. "Hours of happiness always
go so fast."
It was still dark. The moon had set. They arose and, hand in hand,
groping their way along, they reached the boat. The splash of the oars
began again to sound along the dark stream.
Suddenly the nightingale again piped gloomily in the willow wood, as if
in farewell to a departing dream.
"Listen, my darling," said Leonora. "The poor little fellow is bidding
us good-bye. Just hear how plaintively he says farewell."
And in the strange exhiliration that comes from fatigue, Leonora felt
the flames of art flaring up within her, seething through her organism
from head to foot.
A melody from _Die Meistersinger_ came to her mind, the hymn that the
good people of Nuremberg sing when Hans Sachs, their favorite singer, as
bounteous and gentle as the Eternal Father, steps out on the platform
for the contest in poetry. It was the song that the poet-minstrel, the
friend of Albrecht Duerer, wrote in honor of Luther when the great
Reformation broke; and the prima donna, rising to her feet in the stern,
and returning the greeting of the nightingale began:
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