The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez

V >> Vicente Blasco Ibanez >> The Torrent

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

Leonora's story came back to the boy in one flash--the frank confession
she had made during the days of their mere friendship, when she had told
him everything to prevent his continuing to desire her. However much she
might adore him, he would be nothing after all but a successor to a
Russian count, and a German musician; the latest, simply among those
countless ephemeral lovers, whom she had barely mentioned but who must
none the less have left some trace in her memory. The last item in a
long inventory! The most recent arrival, coming several years late, and
content to nibble at the soggy over-ripe fruit which they had known when
it was fresh and firm. Her kisses that so deeply disturbed him! What
were they but the intoxicating, unhealthful perfume of a whole career of
corruptness and licentiousness, the concentrated essence of a world
madly dashing at her seductive beauty, as a bird of night breaks its
head against the globe of a lighthouse? Give up everything for that! The
two of them traveling about the world, free, and proud of their
passion!... And out in that world he would encounter many of his
predecessors; and they would look at him with curious, ironic eyes,
knowing of her all that he would know, able to repeat all the panting
phrases she would speak to him in the exaggerations of her insatiable
passion! The strange thing about it was that all this had not occurred
to him sooner. Blind with happiness, he had never thought an instant of
his real place in that woman's life!

How long had they been walking through the streets of Valencia?... His
legs were sagging under him! He was faint with weariness. He could
hardly see. The gables of the houses were still tipped with sunlight,
yet he seemed to be groping about in a deep night.

"I'm thirsty, don Andres. Let's go in somewhere."

The old man headed him toward the Cafe de Espana, his favorite resort.
He selected the table in the center of the big square salon under the
four clocks supported by the angel of Fame. The walls were covered with
great mirrors that opened up fantastic perspectives in the dingy room
where the gilded ornaments were blackened by the smoke and a crepuscular
light filtered in through the lofty skylight as into a sombre crypt.

Rafael drank, without realizing just what his glass contained--a poison,
it felt like, that froze his heart. Don Andres sat looking at the
writing articles on the marble table: a letter-case of wrinkled
oil-cloth, and a grimy ink-well. He began to rap upon them with the
holder of the public pen--rusty and with the points bent--an instrument
of torture well fitted for a hand committed to despair!

"We have just an hour to catch our train! Come, Rafael, be a man!
There's still time! Come, let's get out of this mess we're in!"

And he held out the pen, though he had not said a word about writing to
anybody.

"I can't, don Andres. I'm a gentleman. I've given my word; and I will
not go back upon it, come what may!"

The old man smiled ironically.

"Very well, be as much of a gentleman as you please. She deserves it!
But when you break with her, when she leaves you, or you leave her,
don't come back to Alcira. Your mother won't be there to welcome you! I
shall be--I don't know where; and those who made you deputy will look
upon you as a thief who robbed and killed his mother.... Oh, get mad if
you want to--beat me up even; people at the other tables are already
looking at us.... Why not top the whole business off with a saloon
brawl? But just the same, everything I've been saying to you is gospel
truth!..."

In the meantime Leonora was growing impatient in her hotel room. Three
hours had gone by. To relieve her nervousness she sat down behind the
green curtain at the window watching pedestrians crossing the square.

How like a small piazza of old Florence this place was, with its stately
aristocratic residences, shrouded in imposing gloom; it's grass-grown,
cobblestone pavements hot from the sun; its sleepy solitude: an
occasional woman, or a priest, or a tourist,--and you could hear their
footsteps even when they were far away! Here was a curious corner of the
_Palacio de Dos Agnas_--panels of jasper stucco with a leaf design on
the mouldings! That talking came from the drivers gathered in the hotel
door--the innkeeper and the servants were setting the chairs out on the
sidewalk as if they were back at home--in a small Italian town! Behind
the roof opposite, the sunlight was gradually fading, growing paler and
softer every moment.

She looked at her watch. Six o'clock! Where on earth could that Rafael
have gone? They were going to lose the train. In order to waste no time,
she ordered Beppa to have everything in readiness for departure. She
packed her toilet articles; then closed her trunks, casting an inquiring
glance over the room with the uneasiness of a hasty leave-taking. On an
armchair near the window she laid her traveling coat, then her hand-bag,
and her hat and veil. They would have to run the moment Rafael came in.
He would probably be very tired and nervous from returning so late.

But Rafael did not come!... She felt an impulse to go out and look for
him; but where? She had not been in Valencia since she was a child. She
had forgotten the streets. Then she might actually pass Rafael on the
way without knowing it, and wander aimlessly about while he would be
waiting for her at the hotel. No. It would be better to stay there!

It was now dusk and the hotel-room was virtually dark. She went to the
window again, trembling with impatience, filled with all the gloom of
the violet light that was falling from the sky with a few red streaks
from the sunset. They would surely lose the train now! They would have
to wait until the next day. That was a disappointment! They might have
trouble in getting away!

She whirled nervously about as she heard someone calling from the
corridor.

"Madame, madame, a letter for you!"

A letter for her!... She snatched it feverishly from the bell-boy's
hand, while Beppa, seated on a trunk, looked on vacantly, without
expression.

She began to tremble violently. The thought of Hans Keller, the
ungrateful artist, suddenly rose in her memory. She looked for a candle
on the chiffonier. There was none. Finally she went to the balcony and
tried to read the letter in the little light there was.

It was his handwriting on the envelope--but tortuous, labored, as if it
were the product of a painful effort. She felt all her blood rush back
upon her heart. Madly she tore the letter open, and read with the haste
of a person anxious to drain the cup of bitterness at a single draught,
skipping a line here and a line there, taking in only the significant
words.

"My mother very ill.... I must go home for a day or two ... my duty as a
son ... we'll soon meet again." And then all the cowardly, conventional
excuses that chivalry has created to soften the harshness of
desertion--the promise to join her again as soon as possible; passionate
protestations that she was the only woman in the world he loved.

Her first thought was to go back to Alcira at once, walk there if
necessary, find the scamp somewhere, throw the letter into his face,
beat him, claw him to pieces!

"Ah, the wretch! The infamous, cowardly, unspeakable wretch!" she cried.

Beppa had found a candle. She lighted it. And there her mistress
was--staggering, deathly pale, her eyes wide open, her lips white with
anguish! Leonora began to walk up and down the apartment, taut and
strained, as if her feet were not moving at all, as if she were being
thrust about by an invisible hand.

"Beppa," she groaned finally, "he has gone. He is deserting me."

The maid did not care about the desertion particularly. She had been
through that before. She was thinking about Leonora, waiting for the
impending crisis, studying the anguished countenance of her mistress
with her own placid, bovine eyes.

"The wretch!" Leonora hissed, pacing back and forth in the chamber.
"What a fool, what a complete, unconscionable fool I have been! Giving
myself to that man, believing in that man, trusting that man, giving up
my peace of mind, the last relative I had in the world for that man!...
And why would he not let me go off alone? He made me dream of an eternal
springtime of love, and now he deserts me.... He has tricked me ... he
is laughing at me ... and I can not hate him. Why did he insist on
rousing me when I was there alone, quite peaceful, forgetting
everything, sunk in a placid indulgent calm!... The cool fraud that he
was!... But what do I care, after all?... It's all over. Come Beppa,
cheer up! Hah-hah! Come, Beppa! We're off! We're off! We're going to
sing again! Off over the whole globe. Good-bye to this rat-hole forever!
I'm through educating children! Now for life again! And we'll drain them
dry, the brutes! Kick them about like the selfish donkeys they are!
Well, well! I can't believe I've been taken in this way! Isn't it a
joke? The best joke you ever heard! Ha, ha, ha! And I thought I knew the
world ...! Ha, ha! Ha, ha!..."

And her laugh was audible distinctly down in the square. It was a wild,
shrill, metallic laughter, that seemed to be rending her flesh! The
whole hotel was in commotion, while the actress, with foaming lips, fell
to the floor and began to writhe in fury, overturning the furniture and
bruising her body on the iron trimmings of her trunks.

PART THREE

I

"Don Rafael, the gentlemen of the Committee on the Budget are waiting
for you in the second section."

"I'll be there directly."

And the deputy bent low over his desk in the writing-room of the
Congress, went on with his last letter, adding one more envelope to the
heap of correspondence piled up at the end of the table, near his cane
and his silk hat.

This was his daily grind, the boresome drudgery of every afternoon; and
around him, with similar expressions of disgust on their faces, a large
number of the country's representatives were busy at the same task.
Rafael was answering petitions and queries, stifling the complaints and
acknowledging the wild suggestions that came in from the District--the
endless clamor of the voters at home, who never met the slightest
annoyance in their various paths of life without at once running to
their deputy, the way a pious worshipper appeals to the miracle-working
saint.

He gathered up his letters, gave them to an usher to mail, and
sauntering off with a counterfeit sprightliness that was more
counterfeit as he grew fatter and fatter with the years, walked through
to the central corridor, a prolongation of the lobby in front of the
_Salon de Conferencias_.

The Honorable senor don Rafael Brull, member from Alcira, felt as much
at ease as if he were in his own house when he entered that corridor,--a
dark hole, thick with tobacco smoke, and peopled with black suits
standing around in groups or laboriously elbowing their way through the
crowds.

He had been there eight years; though he had almost lost count of the
times he had been "duly elected" in the capricious ups and downs of
Spanish politics, which give to Parliaments only a fleeting existence.
The ushers, the personnel of the Secretariat, the guards and janitors,
treated him with deferential intimacy, as a comrade on a somewhat higher
level, but as much of a fixture as they were to the Spanish Congress. He
was not one of those men who are miraculously washed into office on the
crest of a reform wave, but never succeed in repeating the trick, and
spend the rest of their lives idling on the sofas of the Conference
Chamber, with wistful memories of lost greatness, waiting to enter
Congress afternoons, to preserve their standing as ex-deputies, and
forever hoping that their party will some day return to power, so that
once again they may sit on the red benches. No, don Rafael Brull was a
gentleman with a District all his own: he came with a clean, undisputed
and indisputable certificate of election, whether his own party or the
Opposition were in the saddle. For lack of other discoverable merit in
him, his fellow-partisans would say: "Brull is one of the few who come
here on honest returns." His name did not figure brilliantly in the
Congressional record, but there was not an employee, not a journalist,
not a member of the "ex-honorables" who, on noticing the word "Brull" on
all the committees, did not at once exclaim: "Ah, yes! Brull ... of
Alcira."

Eight years of "service to the country." Eight years of lodging-house
life, while yonder lay a sumptuous home adorned with a luxuriousness
that had cost his mother and his father-in-law half a fortune! Long
seasons of separation from his wife and his children--and without
amusements, to avoid spending money lest the folks at home suspect him
of dereliction in public--and private--duty! What a dog's life his eight
years as deputy had been! Indigestion from the countless gallons of
sugared water drunk at the Congressional bar; callouses on his feet from
endless promenades along the central corridor, absentmindedly knocking
the varnish off the tiles of the wainscoating with the tip of his cane;
an incalculable quantity of _pesetas_ spent on carriages, through fault
of his supporters, who sent him trotting every morning from one Ministry
to the next, asking for the earth, and getting a grain of sand!

He had not as yet gotten anywhere in particular; but according to
Chamber gossip he was a "serious" well-balanced young man, of few words,
but good ones, and sure some day to be rewarded with a Portfolio.
Content with the role of safety and sanity that had been assigned to
him, he laughed very seldom, and dressed soberly, with not a dissonant
color to brighten his black attire. He would listen patiently to things
that did not concern him in the least, rather than venture a personal
opinion with the chance of going wrong--satisfied with premature
wrinkles, premature corpulency, and premature baldness, since nothing
could be more respectable than a thoughtful face, a conspicuous paunch,
and a pate that could shine with venerable brilliancy under the lamps of
the Chamber. At thirty-four, he looked more like forty-five. When he
spoke he would remove his spectacles with a gesture he had carefully
imitated from the deceased leader of "the Party." He would never take
the floor without prefacing his remarks with: "My understanding is ...,"
or "I have my own humble opinion on this matter...." And this was what
don Rafael Brull had learned in eight years of parliamentary assiduity!

The new Conservative leader, seeing that he could always depend on
Brull's vote and that Alcira elections cost "the Party" nothing, had a
certain consideration for Rafael. He was a soldier always on hand for
roll-call, whenever a new Parliament was formed. He would present
himself with his certificate of election, whether his party, with all
the insolence of victory, occupied the benches on the Right, or hungry
and defiant, and reduced in numbers, was huddled on the Left, determined
to find fault with everything the reigning Ministry did. Two sessions as
part of the minority had won him a certain intimacy with the leader in
that frank comradeship that Oppositions always have, since, from leader
down to the most silent member, all the deputies "out of power" are on a
level. Besides, in those two seasons of misfortune, to aid in the
destructive tactics of his faction, he put little interpellations to the
government, at the openings of the sessions when the crowds were small;
and more than once he heard from the pale smiling lips of the chief:
"Very good, Brull; that was to the point." And such congratulations
were duly echoed in his home city, where rustic imagination did the
rest.

In addition, a few parliamentary honors had come his way; the "Grand
Cross" had been given him, as it is given to most deputies of a certain
length of service--from membership, eventually, on committees charged
with representing the legislative branch of the government at formal
public functions. If an "Answer to the Message" was to be taken "to the
Palace," he was one of those chosen for the purpose; and he trembled
with emotion to think of what his mother, his wife, all the people down
yonder at home would say if they could see him riding there in the
sumptuous carriage of state, preceded by bright-liveried horsemen and
saluted by trumpets blaring the royal march! He was also usually among
the delegates who came out on the staircase of the Congress to welcome
Their Majesties on the opening of a parliament. Finally, for one
session, he was on "the Committee for the Interior," an appointment that
raised his prestige a thousand percent among the ushers.

"That fellow Brull," they would say in the Chamber, "will be somebody
the day his party returns to power."

Well, now "the Party" was in power again. During one of those ordered,
calculated "changes of direction" to which Spain lives subject, because
of its parliamentary system of party weights and party balances, the
Conservatives captured the premiership; and Rafael went on the budget
committee. There he would do something more than make interpellations
when he opened his mouth to speak. In fact he had to win his spurs,
justify his filling one of those posts which, according to report, his
chief was holding for him.

The green deputies, the younger set constituting the new majority, elect
and triumphant through grace of the Ministry of the Interior, respected
him and deferred to what he said, much as students listen to a tutor who
they know receives his orders from the master directly--the
subordination of freshmen, as it were, to the sophomore who knows the
rules.

Whenever a vote was being taken and the Opposition was excited over the
chance of putting the government in the minority, the Premier would look
about anxiously over the hall for Brull.

"See here, Brull, better bring your people in; we're going to have a
close call."

And Brull, proud at being noticed thus, would dash out like a streak of
lightning while the bells were ringing and the ushers were running about
summoning the deputies to vote. He would make the rounds of the desks in
the writing rooms, elbow his way into groups in the corridors; and
filling with self-importance because of the authority conferred upon
him, he would rudely shoo the ministerial flock off toward the Chamber,
grumbling fogeywise and assuring them that "in his time," when he was
serving his first term, there was "far better discipline." When the vote
was all in and the victory won, he would sigh with satisfaction. He had
saved the government! And perhaps the nation!

At times a residue of the sincerity and frankness of his character as a
boy would rise to the surface in him. Then cruel doubts would assail his
faith in himself. Weren't they all playing a stupid comedy there
without the slightest wit or sense in it? Really was what they said and
did there of the slightest importance to the country--to anybody?

Standing in the corridor, he would feel the nervous flutter of the
journalists about him--those poor, intelligent, attractive, young
fellows, who found it so hard to make a living. From the press-gallery
they would sit and look down on the legislators the way birds in the
treetops must look down on the wretchedness of the streets below,
laughing at the nonsense those solemn baldpates were talking! Could a
farce on the stage be more amusing?

To Rafael those "intellectuals" seemed to bring a breeze from out of
doors into the close, sordid, vitiated air of the Chamber. They stood
for the thought of the world outside--the idea fatherless, unsponsored,
the aspiration of the great masses--a breath of fresh air in the
sick-room of a chronic invalid forever dying, forever unburiable.

Their judgment always differed from that of the country's
representatives. His Excellency senor don What's-his-Name was in their
eyes, a mud-eel, and in their lingo a _congrio_; the illustrious orator
What-do-you-call-him, who took up a sixteen-page sheet in the
Congressional Record every time he spoke, was a _percebe_, a "barnacle
on the keel of Progress"; every act of parliament struck them as a bit
of balderdash, though, to hold their jobs, they praised it to the skies
in their articles. And why was it that the country, in some mysterious
way, would always think eventually what those boys thought, so long, and
only so long, as they remained boys? Would they have to come down from
their scats in the press-gallery to the red benches on the floor before
the real will of the country would make itself felt?

Rafael Brull finally realized that national opinion was present on the
floor, among his fellow members, also, but like a mummy in a
sarcophagus: bound hand and foot in rhetoric and conventional utterance,
spiced, embalmed with proprieties that made any outburst of sincerity,
any explosion of real feeling, evidence of "bad taste!"

In reality everything was going well with the Ship of State. The nation
had passed from action to talk, and from talk to passivity, and from
passivity to resignation. The era of revolutions was gone forever. The
infallible system of government had proved to be this mechanism of
pre-arranged "crises" and amicable exchanges of patronage between
Liberals and Conservatives, each member of the party in power and each
member of the party out of power knowing just what he was to say and
just what he was to get.

So, in that palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as
showy as the mansion of a millionaire _parvenu_, Rafael was condemned to
spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and
orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might be realized.

Nothing noteworthy had occurred during those eight years. His life had
been a muddy, monotonous stream, with neither brilliancy nor beauty in
its waters, lazily meandering along, like the Jucar in winter. As he
looked back over his career as a "personage," he could have summed it up
in three words: he had married.

Remedios was his wife. Don Matias was his father-in-law. He was
wealthy. He had control over a vast fortune, for he exercised despotic
rule over his wife's peasant father, the most fervent of his admirers.
His mother seemed to have put the last of her strength into the
arrangement of that "marriage of convenience." She had fallen into a
senile decrepitude that bordered on dotage. Her sole evidence of being
alive was her habit of staying in church until the doors were closed and
she could stay no longer. At home she did nothing but recite the rosary,
mumbling away in some corner of the house, and taking no part in the
noisy play of her grandchildren. Don Andres had died, leaving Rafael
sole "boss" of "the Party." He had had three children. They had had
their teeth, their measles, their whooping-cough. These episodes, with a
few escapades of that brother of Remedios, who feared Rafael's paunch
and bald head more than the wrath of don Matias, were the only
distractions in a thoroughly dull existence.

Every year he bought a new piece of land. He felt a thrill of pride when
from the top of San Salvador--that Hermitage, alas, of such desperate
and unfading memory!--he looked down upon the vast patches of land with
orange-trees in straight rows and fenced in by green walls, that all,
all, belonged to him. The joy of ownership, the intoxication of property
had gone to his head.

As he entered the old mansion, entirely made over now, he felt the same
sense of well-being and power. The old chest in which his mother used to
keep her money stood where it had always stood; but it was no longer
devoted to savings hoarded slowly at the cost of untold sacrifice and
privation to raise mortgages and temporize with creditors. Never again
had he tip-toed up in the dark to rifle it. Now it was his own. And at
harvest time it became literally crammed with the huge rolls of
banknotes his father-in-law paid over in exchange for the oranges of the
Brull orchards. And Rafael had a covetous eye on what don Matias had in
the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died.
Acquisitiveness--money and land--had become his one, his ruling passion.
Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical,
meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule,
hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day. At the
bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay. Eight
years of unbroken familiarity had finally inoculated him with most of
the obsessions and most of the predilections of his wife.

The shrinking, timorous little she-goat that used to gambol about with
him in pursuit, the poor child who had been so wistful and downcast
during the days of his wantonness, had now become a woman with all the
imperious obstinacy, all the domineering superiority of the female of
the species as it has evolved in the countries of the South. Cleanliness
and frugality in Remedios took the form of unendurable tyranny. She
scolded her husband if he brought the slightest speck of dust into the
house on his shoes. She would turn the place upside down, flay all the
servants alive, if ever a few drops of oil were spilled from a jar, or a
crumb of bread were wasted on the table.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21