The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez

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"Good, fine. That's the way to give it to him," his comrades encouraged,
nodding their sleek bald-pates in indignation against anybody who tried
to live apart from reality. Those _ideologues_ needed somebody to tell
them what was what!

And the minister, Rafael's friend, the only auditor left on the Blue
Bench, pressing his huge paunch against the desk, turned his head--an
owlish, hairy head with a sharp beak--to smile indulgently on the young
man.

The orator continued, his confidence increasing as he went on, fortified
by these signs of approval. He spoke of the patient, deliberate study
the committee had made of this matter of the ecclesiastical bud-gets. He
was the most modest, the least among them, but there were his
comrades--they were there, in truth, solemn gentlemen in English
frock-coats, with their hair parted in the middle, from their foreheads
to the napes of their necks--studious young men--who had flattered him
with the honor of speaking for them--and if they had not been more
economical, it was because greater economy had been impossible.

And the heads of the committee-men nodded as they murmured gratefully:

"Say, this fellow Brull can make quite a speech!"

The government was ready to exercise any economy that should prove
prudent and feasible, without prejudice to the dignity of the nation;
but Spain was an eminently religious country, favored by God in all her
crises; and no government loyal to the national genius could ever touch
a _centimo_ of the ecclesiastical appropriation. Never! Never!...

On the word _never_ his voice resounded with the melancholy echo that
rings in empty houses. Rafael looked in anguish at the clock. Half an
hour. Half an hour gained, and still he had not really damaged his
outline. His talk was going so well that he was sorry the Chamber was
far from crowded!... Before him, in the shadows of the diplomatic
gallery, that fan kept fluttering. Pesky woman! Why couldn't she keep
quiet and not spoil his speech!

The president, so restless and vigilant, so ever-ready with watch and
bell in hand when any of the Opposition had the floor, was now sitting
back in his chair with his eyes shut, dozing away with the confidence of
a stage director who is sure the show will go off without a hitch. The
panes of the glass dome were glowing under the rays of the sun, but they
allowed only a diffuse, green light, a discreet, soft, crypt-like
clarity to seep through into the Chamber that lay below in monastic
calm. Through the windows over the president's chair, Rafael glimpsed
patches of the blue sky, drenched in the gentle light of an afternoon of
Springtime. A white dove was hovering in the perspective of those blue
squares.

Rafael felt a slackening of his powers of endurance, as if an
irresistible languor were stealing over him. The sweet smile of Nature
peering at him through the transoms of that gloomy, parliamentary tomb
had taken him back to his orange-orchards, and to his Valencian meadows
covered with flowers. He felt a curious impulse to finish his speech in
a few hasty words, grab his hat and flee, losing himself out among the
groves of the Royal Gardens. With that sun and those flowers outside,
what was he doing in that hole, talking of things that did not concern
him in the least?... But he successfully passed this fleeting crisis. He
ceased rummaging among the bundles of documents piled up on the bench,
stopped thumbing papers so as to hide his perturbation, and waving the
first sheet that came to his hand, he went on.

The intention of the gentleman in opposing this appropriation was not
hidden from him. On this matter he had his own, his private and personal
ideas. "I understand that _su senoria_, in here proposing retrenchment,
is really seeking to combat religious institutions, of which he is a
declared enemy."

And as he reached this point, Rafael dashed wildly into the fray. He was
treading firm and familiar ground. All this part of the speech he had
prepared, paragraph by paragraph: a defense of Catholicism, an apology
_pro fide_, so intimately bound up with the history of Spain. He could
now use impassioned outbursts and tremors of lyric enthusiasm, as if he
were preaching a new crusade.

On the Opposition benches he caught the ironic glitter of a pair of
spectacles, the convulsions of a white chin quivering over two folded
arms, as if a kindly, indulgent smile had greeted his parade of so many
musty and faded commonplaces. But Rafael was not to be intimidated. He
had gotten away with an hour almost! Forward, to "Section Two" of the
outline, the part about the great national and Christian epic! And he
began to reel off visions of the cave of Covadonga; the fantastic tree
of the Reconquest "where the warrior hung up his sword, the poet his
harp," and so on and so on, for everybody hung up something there; seven
centuries of wars for the cross, a rather long time, believe me,
gentlemen, during which Saracen impiety was expelled from Spanish soil!
Then came the great triumphs of Catholic unity. Spain mistress of almost
the whole world, the sun never allowed to set on Spanish domains; the
caravels of Columbus bearing the cross to virgin lands; the light of
Christianity blazing forth from the folds of the national banner to shed
its illuminating rays throughout the earth.

And as if this hymn to enlightening Christianity, chanted by an orator
who could now hardly see across the gloomy hall, had been a signal, the
electric lights went on; and the statues, the escutcheons, and the
harsh, blatant figures painted on the cupola, sprang forth from
obscurity.

Rafael could hardly contain his joy at the facility with which his
speech was developing. That wave of light which was shed over the hall,
in the middle of the afternoon, while the sun was still shining, seemed
to him like the sudden entrance of Glory, approaching to give him the
accolade of renown.

Caught up now in the real torrent of his premeditated verbosity, he
continued to relieve himself of all that he had learned by cramming
during the past few days. "In vain does _su senoria_ fatigue his wits.
Spain is and will remain a profoundly religious country. Her history is
the history of Catholicism: she has survived in all her times of storm
and stress by tightly embracing the Cross." And he could now come to the
national wars; from the battles in which popular piety saw Saint James,
on his white steed, lopping off the heads of the Moors with his golden
cutlass, to the uprising of the people against Napoleon, behind the
banner of the parish and with their scapularies on their bosoms. He did
not have a word to say about the present. He left the pitiless criticism
of the old revolutionist intact. Why not? The dream of an ideologue! He
was absorbed in his song of the past, affirming for the hundredth time
that Spain had been great because she had been Catholic and that when
for a moment she had ceased to be Catholic, all the evils of the world
had descended upon her. He spoke of the excesses of the Revolution, of
the turbulent Republic of '73, (a cruel nightmare to all right-thinking
persons) and of the "canton" of Cartagena (the supreme recourse of
ministerial oratory),--a veritable cannibal feast, a horror that had
never been known even in this land of _pronunciamientos_ and civil wars.
He tried his best to make his hearers feel the terror of those
revolutions, whose chief defect had been that they had revolutionized
nothing.... And then came a panegyric on the Christian family, on the
Catholic home, a nest of virtues and blessings, whereas in nations where
Catholicism did not reign all homes were repulsive brothels or horrible
bandit caves.

"Fine, Brull, very good," grunted the minister, his elbows stretched
forward over his desk, delighted to hear his own ideas echoing from the
young man's mouth.

The orator rested for a moment, with his glance sweeping the galleries
now bright with the electric lighting. The woman in the diplomatic
section had stopped fanning herself. She was following him closely. Her
eyes met his.

Of a sudden Rafael nearly fell to his seat. Those eyes!... Perhaps an
astonishing resemblance! But no; it was she--she was smiling to him with
that same jesting, mocking smile of their earlier acquaintance!

He felt like the bird writhing on the tree unable to free itself from
the hypnotic stare of the serpent coiled near the trunk. Those
sarcastic, mischievous eyes had upset all his train of thought. He tried
to finish in some way or other, to end his speech as soon as possible.
Every minute was an added torment to him; he imagined he could hear the
mute gibes that mouth must be uttering at his expense.

Again he looked at the clock; in fifteen minutes more he would be
through. And he spurted on at a mad pace, with a hurried voice,
forgetting the devices he had thought of to prolong the peroration,
dumping them out all in a heap--anything to get through! "The
Concordate... sacred obligations toward the clergy ... their services
of old ... promises of close friendship with the Pope ... the generous
father of Spain ... in short, we cannot reduce the budget by a _centimo_
and the committee stands, by its proposals without accepting a single
amendment."

As he sat down, perspiring, excited, wiping his congested face
energetically, his bench companions gathered around him congratulating
him, shaking his hands. He was every inch an orator! He should have gone
deeper into the matter and taken even more time! He shouldn't have been
so modest!

And from the bench below came the grunt of the minister:

"Very good, very good. You said exactly what I would have said."

The old revolutionist arose to make a short rebuttal, repeating the
contentions of his original speech, of which no denial had been
attempted.

"I'm quite tired," sighed Rafael, in reply to the felicitations.

"You can go out if you wish," said the minister. "I think I'll answer
the rebuttal myself. It's a courtesy due to so old a deputy."

Rafael raised his eyes toward the diplomatic gallery. It was empty. But
he imagined he could still make out the plumes of a woman's hat in the
dark background.

He left his bench hastily and hurried to the corridor, where a number of
deputies were waiting with their congratulations.

Not one of them had heard him, but they were all profuse in their
flattering remarks. They shook his hand and detained him maddeningly.
Once more he thought he could descry at the end of the corridor, at the
foot of the gallery staircase, standing out against the glass exit-door,
those black, waving plumes.

He elbowed his way through the crowds, deaf to all congratulations,
brushing aside the hands that were proferred to him.

Near the door he stumbled into two of his associates, who were looking
out with eyes radiant with admiration.

"What a woman? Eh?"

"She looks like a foreigner. Some diplomat's wife, I guess!"

III

As he came out of the building he saw her on the sidewalk, about to step
into a vehicle. An usher of the Congress was holding the carriage door
open, with the demonstrative respect inspired by the goldbraid shining
on the driver's hat. It was an embassy coach!

Rafael approached, believing, from the carriage, that it still might
prove to be a case of an astonishing resemblance. But no; it was she;
the same woman she had always been, as if eight hours and not eight
years had passed:

"Leonora! You here!..."

She smiled, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to see him
again.

"I saw you and heard you. You did very well, Rafael: I enjoyed it."

And grasping his hand in a frank, hearty clasp of friendship, she
entered the carriage with a rustle of silk and fine linen.

"Come! Won't you step in too?" she asked, smiling. "Join me for a little
drive along the Castellana. It's a magnificent afternoon; a little fresh
air won't do any harm after that muggy room."

Rafael, to the astonishment of the usher, who was surprised to see him
in such seductive company, got in; and the carriage rolled off. There
they were, together again, sitting side by side, swaying gently back and
forth with the motion of the soft springs.

Rafael was at a loss for words. The cold, ironic smile of his former
lover chilled him. He was flushed with shame at the thought of how he
had treated that beautiful creature the last time they had seen each
other. He wanted to say something, and yet he could not find a way to
begin. The ceremonious, formal _usted_ she had employed in inviting him
into the carriage embarrassed him. At last he ventured, timidly, also
avoiding the intimate _tu_!

"Imagine our meeting here! What a surprise!"

"I got in yesterday; tomorrow I leave for Lisbon. A short stop, isn't
it! Just time for a word with the director of the _Real_; perhaps I'll
come next winter to sing _Die Walkuere_ here. But let's talk about you,
illustrious orator.... But I may say _tu_ to you, mayn't I?" she
corrected--"for I believe we are still friends."

"Yes, friends, Leonora.... I have never been able to forget you."

But the feeling he put into the words vanished before the cold smile
with which she answered.

"Friends; that's it," she said, slowly. "Friends, and nothing more.
Between us there lies a corpse that prevents us from getting very close
to each other again."

"A corpse?" asked Rafael, not catching her meaning.

"Yes; the love you murdered.... Friends, nothing more; comrades united
by complicity in a crime."

And she laughed with cruel sarcasm, while the carriage turned into one
of the avenues of Recoletos. Leonora looked vacantly out upon the
central boulevard. The rows of iron benches were filled with people.
Groups of children in charge of governesses were playing gaily about in
the soft, golden splendor of the afternoon.

"I read in the papers this morning that don Rafael Brull, 'of the
Finance Commission,' if you please, would undertake to speak for the
Ministry on the matter of the budget; so I got down on my knees to an
old friend of mine, the secretary of the English embassy, and begged him
to come and take me to the session. This coach is his.... Poor fellow!
He doesn't know you, but the moment he saw you stand up to speak, he
took to his heels.... He missed something though; for really, you
weren't half bad. I'm quite impressed. Say, Rafael, where do you dig up
all those things?"

But Rafael looked uneasily at her cruel smile and refused to accept her
praise. Besides, what did he care about his speech? It seemed to him
that he had been for years and years in that coach; that a whole
lifetime had gone by since he left the halls of the Congress. His gaze
was fixed on her in admiration, and his astonished eyes were drinking in
the beauty of her face, and of her figure.

"How beautiful you are!" he murmured in impulsive enchantment. "The same
as you were then. It seems impossible that eight years can have flown
by."

"Yes; I admit that I bear up well. Time seems not to touch me. A little
longer at the dressing table--that's all. I'm one of the people who die
in harness, so to speak, making no concessions, so far as looks go, to
old age. Rather than surrender, I'd kill myself. I intend to put Ninon
de Lenclos in the shade!"

It was true. Eight years had made not the slightest impression on her.
The same freshness, the same robust, energetic slenderness, the
identical flames of arrogant vitality in her green eyes. Instead of
withering under the incessant parching of passion's flame, she seemed to
grow stronger, hardier, in the crucible.

She measured the deputy with sarcastic playfulness.

"Poor Rafael! I'm sorry I can't say as much for you. How you've changed!
You look almost like a Knight of the Crown. You're fat! You're bald! And
those eyeglasses! Why, I could hardly recognize you in the Chamber. How
my romantic Moor has aged! You poor dear! You even have wrinkles!..."

And she laughed, as if it filled her with intense joy, the joy of
vengeance, to see her former lover so crestfallen at her portrayal of
his decrepitude.

"You're not happy, are you! I can see that. And yet, you ought to be.
You must have married that girl your mother picked for you. You
doubtless have children.... Don't try to fib to me, just to seem more...
what shall I say ... more interesting! I can see it from the looks of
you. You are the _pater familias_ all over. I am never mistaken in such
things!... Well, why aren't you happy? You have all the requisites for a
personage of note, and you will shortly be one. I'll bet you wear that
sash to hold your paunch in! You are rich, you make speeches in that
horrid, gloomy, cave. Your friends back home will go into ecstasies when
they read the oration their honorable deputy has delivered; and I
imagine they're already preparing fireworks and music for a reception
to you. What more could you ask for?"

And with her eyes half-closed, smiling maliciously, she waited for his
reply, knowing in advance what it would be.

"What more can I ask for? Love; Leonora, the love I once had ... with
you."

And with the vehemence of other days, as if they were still among the
orange-trees of the old Blue House, the deputy gave way to his eight
years of longing.

He told her of the image he nourished in his sadness. Love! The Love
that passes but once in a lifetime, crowned with flowers, and followed
by a retinue of kisses and laughter. And whosoever follows him in
obedience, finds happiness at the end of the joyous pathway; but
whosoever, through pride or selfishness, lags by the wayside, comes to
lament his folly and to expiate his cowardice in an everlasting life of
tedium and sorrow! He had sinned, grievously. That he would confess! But
could she not forgive him? He had paid for his deliquency with eight
long, monotonous, crushing, meaningless years, one suffocating stifling
night that never broke into morning. But they had met again! There was
still time, Leonora! They could still call back the Springtime of their
lives, make it burgeon anew, compel Love to retrace his footsteps, pass
their way again, stretching forth his sweet hands of youth to them!

The actress was listening with a smile upon her lips, her eyes closed,
her head thrown back in the carriage. It was an expression of intense
pleasure, as if she were tasting with delight the fire of love that was
still burning in Rafael, and that, to her, meant vengeance.

The horses were proceeding at a walk along la Castellana. Other
carriages were going by and the people in them peered back at the coach
with that beautiful, unknown woman.

"What is your answer, Leonora? We can still be happy! Forget the past
and the wrong I did you! Imagine it was only yesterday that we said
good-bye in the orchard, and that we are meeting again today to begin
our lives over again from the beginning, to live together always,
always."

"No," she replied coldly. "You yourself just said so: Love passes but
once in a lifetime. I know that from cruel experience. I have done my
best to forget. No, Love has passed us by! It would be sheer folly for
us to ask him to hunt us up again. He never comes back! Our most
desperate effort could revive barely the shadow of him. You let him
escape. Well, you must weep for your loss, just as I had to weep for
your baseness ... Besides, you don't realize the situation we are in
now! Don't you remember what we talked about on our first night there in
the moonlight? 'The arrogant month of May, the young warrior in an armor
of flowers, seeks out his beloved, Youth.' Well, where is our youth now?
Quite frankly, you can find mine on my dressing-table! I buy it at the
perfumer's; and though that gentleman is quite skilled at disguising me,
there's an oldness of the spirit underneath, a terrible thing I don't
dare think about, because it frightens me so. And yours, poor
Rafael--you just haven't any, not even the kind you can buy! Take a good
look at yourself! You're ugly, to put it mildly, my dear boy! You're
lost that attractive slimness of your younger days. Your dreams make me
laugh! A passion at this late date! The idyll of a middle-aged siren and
a bald-headed father of a litter of children, with a paunch, with a
paunch, with a paunch! Oh, Rafael! Ha, ha, ha!"

The cruel mocker! How she laughed! How she was avenging herself. Rafael
grew angry at this cutting, ironic resistance. He began to flame with a
more excited passion.... The ravages of time made no difference. Could
not Love work miracles! He loved her more than he had ever loved her in
the olden days. He felt a mad hunger for her. Passion would give them
back the fires of youth. Love was like a springtime that brings new sap
to branches grown numb in the winter's cold. Let her say "Yes," and on
the instant she would behold the miracle, the resurrection of their
slumbering past, the awakening of their souls to the future of love!

"And your wife? And your children?" Leonora asked, brutally, as if she
wished to bring him back to realities, with a smarting lash from a whip.

But Rafael was now beside himself, drunk with the nearness of all that
beauty, and with the waves of perfume that filled the interior of the
carriage.

Wife? Family? He would leave everything for her: family, future,
position. It was she he needed to live and be happy!

"I will go with you; everybody is a stranger to me when I think of you.
You, you alone, are my life, my love!"

"Many thanks," Leonora answered curtly. "I could not accept such a
sacrifice.... Besides, all that sanctity of the home you were just
talking about a few moments ago in the Chamber? And all that Christian
morality, without which civilization would go to the damnation bow wows!
How I laughed when I heard you say that. How you were stuffing those
poor ninkampoops!..."

And again she laughed cruelly, at the contrast between his pious words
in Congress and his mad idea of forsaking everything to follow her
around the world. Oh, the hypocrite! She had felt, as she sat listening
to him, that his speech was a pack of lies, a mess of conventional
trumpery and platitudes! The only one there who had spoken with any real
sincerity, any real virtue, was that little old man, whom she had
listened to with veneration because he had been one of her father's
idols!

Rafael was crushed with bitter shame. Leonora's flat refusal, her
pitiless mockery of his speech, had brought him to realize the enormity
of his baseness. She was avenging herself by bringing him face to face
with the abjectness of his mad, hopeless passion, which made him capable
of committing the lowest deeds!

Dusk was gathering. Leonora ordered the driver to the Plaza de Oriente.
She was stopping in one of the houses near the Opera where many
theatrical people lodged. She was in a hurry! She had a dinner
engagement with that young man from the Embassy, and two musical critics
were to be introduced to her.

"And I, Leonora? Are we not to see each other any longer?"

"As far as my door, if you wish, and then ... till we meet again!"

"Oh, please, Leonora, stay here a few days! Let me see you! Let me have
the consolation of talking to you, of feeling the bitter pleasure of
your ridicule, at least!"

Stay a few days!... Her days did not belong to her. She traveled from
one end of the world to the other, with her life marked off to the tick
of the clock. From Madrid to Lisbon--an engagement at the San
Carlos--three performances of Wagner! Then, a jump to Stockholm! After
that she was not quite sure where she would go; to Odessa, or to Cairo.
She was the Wandering Jew, the Valkyrie galloping along on the clouds of
a musical tempest, from frontier to frontier, from pole to pole,
arrogant, victorious, suffering not the slightest harm to health or
beauty.

"Oh, if you only would! If you would let me follow you! As your friend,
nothing more! As your servant, if necessary!"

And he grasped her hand, passionately, thrusting his fingers up her
sleeve, fondling the delicate arm underneath her glove. She did not
resist.

"There! Do you see, Rafael?" she said, smiling coldly. "You have touched
me, and it's useless; not the slightest thrill. You're as good as dead
to me. My flesh does not tingle at your fondling. In fact, I find it all
decidedly annoying!"

Rafael realized that it was true. She had once trembled madly under his
caresses. Now she was quite insensible, quite cold!

"Don't worry, Rafael. It's over, spelled with a capital _O_. It's not
worth wasting a moment's thought on. As I look at you now I feel the way
I do when I see one of my old dresses that, in its time, I went mad
over. I see nothing but the defects--the absurdities of the fashion that
is out of date. Our passion died as it should properly have died.
Perhaps your deserting me was for the best. It was better for you to
default in the full splendor of our honeymoon than to have broken with
me afterwards, when I should have moulded my nature forever to your
caresses. We were brought together ... oh, by the orange perfume, by
that cursed Springtime; but you were not meant for me, nor was I ever
meant for you. We are of different breeds. You were born a bourgeois. I
am an out-and-out bohemian! Love and the novelty of my kind quite,
dazzled you. You struggled hard, you beat your wings, to follow me, but
you fell to earth from the very weight of your inherited traits. You
have the appetites and the ambitions of people like you! Now you imagine
you are unhappy! But you'll find you're not when you see yourself become
a personage,' when you count the acreage of your orchards over, when you
see your children growing up to inherit papa's power and fortune. This
business of love for love's sake, mocking at law and morality, scorning
life and peacefulness, that is our privilege, the privilege of us
bohemians--the sole blessing left to us mad creatures whom society looks
upon--quite properly, I suppose--with disdainful mistrust. Each to his
own! The poultry to their quiet roost, where they can fatten in the sun;
the birds of passage to their wandering life of song, sometimes in a
flowering garden, sometimes in the cold and storm!"

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