The Torrent by Vicente Blasco Ibanez
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Their Trinity was most closely cemented, however, by their fondness for
Rafael, the little tot destined to bring fame to the name of Brull and
realize the ambitions of both his grandfather and his father.
Rafael was a quiet, morose little boy, whose gentleness of disposition
seemed to irritate the hard-hearted dona Bernarda. He was always hanging
on to her skirts. Every time she raised her eyes she would find the
little fellow's gaze fixed upon her.
"Go out and play in _the patio_," the mother would say.
And the little fellow, moody and resigned, would leave the room, as if
in obedience to a disagreeable command.
Don Andres alone was successful in amusing the child, with his tales and
his strolls through the orchards, picking flowers for him, making
whistles for him out of reeds. It was don Andres who took him to school,
also, and who advertised the boy's fondness for study everywhere.
If don Rafael were a serious, melancholy lad, that defect was chargeable
to his interest in books, and at the Casino, the "Party's" Club, he
would say to his fellow-worshippers:
"You'll see something doing when Rafaelito grows up. That kid is going
to be another Canovas."
And before all those rustic minds the vision of a Brull at the head of
the Government would suddenly flash, filling the first page of the
newspapers with speeches six columns long, and a _To Be Continued_ at
the end; and they could see themselves rolling in money and running all
Spain, just as they now ran their District, to their own sweet wills.
Never did a Prince of Wales grow up amid the respect and the adulation
heaped upon little Brull. At school, the children regarded him as a
superior being who had condescended to come down among them for his
education. A well-scribbled sheet, a lesson fluently repeated, were
enough for the teacher, who belonged to "the Party" (just to collect his
wages on time and without trouble,) to declare in prophetic tones:
"Go on working like that, senor de Brull. You are destined to great
things."
At the _tertulias_ his mother attended evenings in his company, it was
enough for him to recite a fable or get off some piece of learning
characteristic of a studious child eager to bring his school work into
the conversation, for the women to rush upon him and smother him with
kisses.
"But how much that child knows!... How brilliant he is!"
And some old woman would add, sententiously:
"Bernarda, take good care of the child; don't let him use his brain so
much. It's bad for him. See how peaked he looks!..."
He finished his preparatory education with the Dominicans, taking the
leading role in all the plays given in the tiny theatre of the friars,
and always with a place in the first line on prize days. The Party organ
dedicated an annual article to the scholastic prodigies of the "gifted
son of our distinguished chief don Ramon Brull, the country's hope, who
already merits title as the shining light of the future!"
When Rafael, escorted by his mother and half a dozen women who had
witnessed the exercises, would come home, gleaming with medals and his
arms full of diplomas, he would stoop and kiss his father's hard,
bristly hand; and that claw would caress the boy's head and
absent-mindedly sink into the old man's vest pocket--for don Ramon
expected to pay for all welcome favors.
"Very good," the hoarse voice would murmur. "That's the way I like to
see you do ...Here's a _duro_."
And not till the following year would the boy again know what a caress
from his father meant. On certain occasions, playing in the _patio_, he
had surprised the austere old man gazing at him fixedly, as if trying to
foresee his future.
Don Andres took charge of settling Rafael in Valencia when he began his
university studies. The dream of old don Jaime, disillusioned in the
son, would be fulfilled in the third generation!
"This one at least will be a lawyer!" said dona Bernarda, who in the old
days had imbibed don Jaime's eagerness for the university degree, which
to her seemed like a title of nobility for the family.
And lest the corruption of the city should lead the son astray as it had
done Ramon in his student days, she would send don Andres frequently to
the capital, and write letter after letter to her Valencian friends,
particularly to a canon of her intimate acquaintance, asking them not to
lose sight of the boy.
But Rafael was good behavior itself; a model boy, a "serious" young man,
the good canon assured the mother. The distinctions and the prizes that
came to him in Alcira continued to pursue him in Valencia; and besides,
don Ramon and his wife learned from the papers of the triumphs achieved
by their son in the debating society, a nightly gathering of law
students in a university hall, where future Solons wrangled on such
themes as "Resolved: that the French Revolution was more of a good than
an evil," or "Resolved, that Socialism is superior to Christianity."
Some terrible youths, who had to get home before ten o'clock to escape a
whipping, declared themselves rabid socialists and frightened the
beadles with curses on the institution of property--all rights reserved,
of course, to apply, as soon as they got out of college, for some
position under the government as registrar of deeds or secretary of
prefecture! But Rafael, ever sane and a congenital "moderate," was not
of those fire-brands; he sat on "the Right" of the august assembly of
Wranglers, maintaining a "sound" attitude on all questions, thinking
what he thought "with" Saint Thomas and "with" other orthodox sages whom
his clerical Mentor pointed out to him.
These triumphs were announced by telegraph in the Party papers, which,
to garnish the chief's glory and avoid suspicion of "inspiration,"
always began the article with: "According to a despatch printed in the
Metropolitan press ..."
"What a boy!" the priests of Alcira would say to dona Bernarda. "What a
silver tongue! You'll see; he'll be a second Manterola!"
And whenever Rafael came home for the holidays or on vacation, each time
taller than before, dressed like a fashion-plate and with mannerisms
that she took for the height of distinction, the saintly mother would
say to herself with the satisfaction of a woman who knows what it means
to be homely:
"What a handsome chap he's getting to be. All the rich girls in town
will be after him. He'll have his pick of them."
Dona Bernarda felt proud of her Rafael, a tall youth, with delicate yet
powerful hands, large eyes, an aquiline nose, a curly beard and a
certain leisurely, undulating grace of movement that suggested one of
those young Arabs of the white cloak and elegant babooshes, who
constitute the native aristocracy of Spain's African colonies.
Every time the student came home, his father gave him the same silent
caress. In course of time the _duro_ had been replaced by a hundred
_peseta_ note; but the rough claw that grazed his head was falling now
with an energy ever weaker and seemed to grow lighter with the years.
Rafael, from long periods of absence, noted his father's condition
better than the rest. The old man was ill, very ill. As tall as ever, as
austere and imposing, and as little given to words. But he was growing
thinner. His fierce eyes were sinking deeper into their sockets. There
was little left to him now except his massive frame. His neck, once as
sturdy as a bull's, showed the tendons and the arteries under the loose,
wrinkled skin; and his mustache, once so arrogant, but now withering
with each successive day, drooped dispiritedly like the banner of a
defeated army wet with rain.
The boy was surprised at the gestures and tears of anger with which his
mother welcomed expression of his fears.
"Well, I hope he'll die as soon as possible ... Lot's of use he is to
us!... May the Lord be merciful and take him off right now."
Rafael said nothing, not caring to pry into the conjugal drama that was
secretly and silently playing its last act before his eyes.
Don Ramon, that somber libertine of insatiable appetites, prey to a
sinister, mysterious inebriation, was tossing in a last whirlwind of
tempestuous desire, as though the blaze of sunset had set fire to what
remained of his vitality.
With a deliberate, determined lustfulness, he went scouring the
District like a wild satyr, and his brutish assaults, his terrorism and
abuse of authority, were reported back by scurrilous tongues to the
seignorial mansion, where his friend don Andres was trying in vain to
pacify the wife.
"That man!" dona Bernarda would stammer in her rage. "That man is going
to ruin us! Doesn't he see he's compromising his son's future?"
His most enthusiastic adherents, without losing their traditional
respect for him, would speak smilingly of his "weaknesses"; but at
night, when don Ramon, exhausted by his struggle with the insatiable
demon gnawing at his spirit, would be snoring painfully away, with a
disgusting rattle that made it impossible for people in the house to
sleep, dona Bernarda would sit up in her bed with her thin arms folded
across her bosom, and pray to herself:
"My Lord, My God! May this man die as soon as possible! May all this
come to an end soon, oh Lord!"
And Bernarda's God must have heard her prayer, for her husband got
rapidly worse.
"Take care of yourself, don Ramon," his curate friends would say to him.
They were the only ones who dared allude to his disorderly life. "You're
getting old, and boyish pranks at your age are invitations to Death!"
The _cacique_ would smile, proud, at bottom, that all men should know
that such exploits were possible for a man at his age.
He had enough strength left for one more caress the day when, escorted
by don Andres, Rafael entered with his degree as a Doctor of Law. He
gave the boy his shotgun--a veritable jewel, the admiration of the
entire District--and a magnificent horse. And as if he had been waiting
around just to see the realization of old Don Jaime's ambition, which he
himself had not been able to fulfill, he passed away.
All the bells of the city tolled mournfully.
The Party weekly came out with a black border a palm wide; and from all
over the District folks came in droves to see whether the powerful don
Ramon Brull, who had been able to rain upon the just and unjust alike on
this earth, could possibly have died the same as any other human being.
III
When dona Bernarda found herself alone, and absolute mistress of her
home, she could not conceal her satisfaction.
Now they would see what a woman could do.
She counted on the advice and experience of don Andres, who was closer
than ever to her now; and on the prestige of Rafael, the young lawyer,
who bade fair to sustain the reputation of the Brulls.
The power of the family continued unchanged. Don Andres, who, at the
death of his master, had succeeded to the authority of a second father
in the Brull house, saw to the maintenance of relations with the
authorities at the provincial capital and with the still bigger fish in
Madrid. Petitions were heard in the _patio_ the same as ever. Loyal
party adherents were received as cordially as before and the same favors
were done, nor was there any decline of influence in places that don
Andres referred to as "the spheres of public administration."
There came an election for Parliament, and as usual, dona Bernarda
secured the triumph of the individual whose nomination had been dictated
from Madrid. Don Ramon had left the party machine in perfect condition;
all it needed was enough "grease" to keep it running smoothly; and there
his widow was besides, ever alert at the slightest suggestion of a creak
in the gearing.
At provincial headquarters they spoke of the District with the usual
confidence:
"It's ours. Brull's son is as powerful as the old man himself."
The truth was that Rafael took little interest in "the Party." He looked
upon it as one of the family properties, the title to which no one could
dispute. He confined his personal activities to obeying his mother. "Go
to Riola with don Andres. Our friends there will be happy to see you."
And he would go on the trip, to suffer the torment of an interminable
rally, a _paella_, during which his fellow partisans would bore him with
their uncouth merriment and ill-mannered flattery. "You really ought to
give your horse a couple of days' rest. Instead of going out for a ride,
spend your afternoon at the Club! Our fellows are complaining they never
get a sight of you." Whereupon Rafael would give up his rides--his sole
pleasure practically--and plunge into a thick smoke-laden atmosphere of
noise and shouting, where he would have to answer questions of the most
illustrious members of the party. They would sit around, filling their
coffee-saucers with cigar-ash, disputing as to which was the better
orator, Castelar or Canovas, and, in case of a war between France and
Germany, which of the two would win--idle subjects that always provoked
disagreements and led to quarrels.
The only time he entered into voluntary relations with "the Party" was
when he took his pen in hand and manufactured for the Brull weekly a
series of articles on "Law and Morality" and "Liberty and Faith,"--the
rehashings of a faithful, industrious plodder at school, prolix
commonplaces seasoned with what metaphysical terminology he remembered,
and which, from the very reason that nobody understood them, excited
the admiration of his fellow partisans. They would blink at the articles
and say to don Andres:
"What a pen, eh? Just let anyone dare to argue with him.... Deep, that
noodle, I tell you!"
Nights, when his mother did not oblige him to visit the home of some
influential voter who must be kept content, he would spend reading, no
longer, however, as in Valencia, books lent him by the canon, but works
that he bought himself, following the recommendations of the press, and
that his mother respected with the veneration always inspired in her by
printed paper sewed and bound, an awe comparable only to the scorn she
felt for newspapers, dedicated, every one of them, as she averred, to
the purpose of insulting holy things and stirring up the brutal passions
of "the rabble."
These years of random reading, unrestrained by the scruples and the
fears of a student, gradually and quietly shattered many of Rafael's
firm beliefs. They broke the mould in which the friends of his mother
had cast his mind and made him dream of a broader life than the one
known to those about him. French novels transported him to a Paris that
far outshone the Madrid he had known for a moment in his graduate days.
Love stories awoke in his youthful imagination an ardor for adventure
and involved passions in which there was something of the intense love
of indulgence that had been his father's besetting sin. He came to dwell
more and more in the fictitious world of his readings, where there were
elegant, perfumed, clever women, practicing a certain art in the
refinement of their vices.
The uncouth, sunburned orchard-girls inspired him with revulsion as if
they had been women of another race, creatures of an inferior genus. The
young ladies of the city seemed to him peasants in disguise, with the
narrow, selfish, stingy instincts of their parents. They knew the exact
market price of oranges and just how much land was owned by each
aspirant to their hand; and they adjusted their love to the wealth of
the pretender, believing it the test of quality to appear implacable
toward everything not fashioned to the mould of their petty life of
prejudice and tradition.
For that reason he was deeply bored by his colorless, humdrum existence,
so far removed from that other purely imaginative life which rose from
the pages of his books and enveloped him with an exotic, exciting
perfume.
Some day he would be free, and take flight on his own wings; and that
day of liberation would come when he got to be deputy. He waited for his
coming of age much as an heir-apparent waits for the moment of his
coronation.
From early boyhood he had been taught to look forward to the great event
which would cut his life in two, opening out new pathways for a "forward
march" to fame and fortune.
"When my little boy gets to be deputy," his mother would say in her rare
moments of affectionate expansiveness, "the girls will fight for him
because he is so handsome! And he'll marry a millionairess!"
Meanwhile, in long years of impatient anticipation, his life went on,
with no special circumstance to break its dull monotony--the life of an
aspirant certain of his lot, "killing time" till the call should come
to enter on his heritage. He was like those noble youngsters of bygone
centuries who, graced in their cradles by the rank of colonel from the
monarch, played around with hoop and top till they were old enough to
join their regiments. He had been born a deputy, and a deputy he was
sure to be: for the moment, he was waiting for his cue in the wings of
the theatre of life.
His trip to Italy on a pilgrimage to see the Pope was the one event that
had disturbed the dreary course of his existence. But in that country of
marvels, with a pious canon for a guide, he visited churches rather than
museums. Of theatres he saw only two--larks permitted by his tutor,
whose austerity was somewhat mollified in those changing scenes.
Indifferently they passed the famous artistic works of the Italian
churches, but paused always to venerate some relic with miracles as
famous as absurd. Even so, Rafael managed to catch a confused and
passing glimpse of a world different from the one in which he was
predestined to pass his life. From a distance he sensed something of the
love of pleasure and romance he had drunk in like an intoxicating wine
from his reading. In Milan he admired a gilded, adventurous bohemia of
opera; in Rome, the splendor of a refined, artistic aristocracy in
perpetual rivalry with that of Paris and London; and in Florence, an
English nobility that had come in quest of sunlight and a chance to air
its straw hats, show off the fair hair of its ladies, and chatter its
own language in gardens where once upon a time the somber Dante dreamed
and Boccaccio told his merry tales to drive fear of plague away.
That journey, of impressions as rapid and as fleeting as a reel of
moving-pictures, leaving in Rafael's mind a maze of names, buildings,
paintings and cities, served to give greater breadth to his thinking, as
well as added stimulus to his imagination. Wider still became the gulf
that separated him from the people and ideas he met in his common
everyday life. He felt a longing for the extraordinary, for the
original, for the adventuresomeness of artistic youth; and political
master of a county, heir of a feudal dominion virtually, he nevertheless
would read the name of any writer or painter whatsoever with the
superstitious respect of a rustic churl. "A wretched, ruined lot who
haven't even a bed to die on," his mother viewed such people; but Rafael
nourished a secret envy for all who lived in that ideal world, which he
was certain must be filled with pleasures and exciting things he had
scarcely dared to dream of. What would he not give to be a bohemian like
the personages he met in the books of Murger, member of a merry band of
"intellectuals," leading a life of joy and proud devotion to higher
things in a bourgeois age that knew only thirst for money and prejudice
of class! Talent for saying pretty things, for writing winged verses
that soared like larks to heaven! A garret underneath the roof, off
there in Paris, in the Latin Quarter! A Mimi poor but spiritual, who
would love him, and--between one kiss and another--be able to
discuss--not the price of oranges, like the girls who followed him with
tender eyes at home--but serious "elevated" things! In exchange for all
that he would gladly have given his future deputyship and all the
orchards he had inherited, which, though encumbered by mortgages not to
mention moral debts left by the rascality of his father and
grandfather--still would bring him a tidy annuity for realizing his
bohemian dreams.
Such preoccupations made life as a party leader, tied down to the petty
interests of a constituency, quite unthinkable! At the risk of angering
his mother, he fled the Club, to court the solitude of the hills and
fields. There his imagination could range in greater freedom, peopling
the roads, the meadows, the orange groves with creatures of his fancy,
often conversing aloud with the heroines of some "grand passion,"
carried on along the lines laid down by the latest novel he had read.
One afternoon toward the close of summer Rafael climbed the little
mountain of San Salvador, which lies close to the city. From the
eminence he was fond of looking out over the vast domains of his family.
For all the inhabitants of that fertile plain were--as don Andres said
whenever he wished to emphasize the party's greatness--like so many
cattle branded with the name of Brull.
As he went up the winding, stony trail, Rafael thought of the mountains
of Assisi, which he had visited with his friend the canon, a great
admirer of the Saint of Umbria. It was a landscape that suggested
asceticism. Crags of bluish or reddish rock lined the roadway on either
side, with pines and cypresses rising from the hollows, and extending
black, winding, snaky roots out over the fallow soil. At intervals,
white shrines with tiny roofs harbored mosaics of glazed tiles depicting
the Stations on the _Via Dolorosa_. The pointed green caps of the
cypresses, as they waved, seemed bent on frightening away the white
butterflies that were fluttering about over the rosemary and the
nettles. The parasol-pines projected patches of shade across the burning
road, where the sun-baked earth crackled and crumbled to dead dust under
every footstep.
Reaching the little square in front of the Hermitage, he rested from the
ascent, stretching out full length on the crescent of rubblework that
formed a bench near the sanctuary. There silence reigned, the silence of
high hill-tops. From below, the noises of the restless life and labor of
the plain came weakened, softened, by the wind, like the murmuring of
waves breaking on a distant shore. Among the prickly-pears that grew in
close thicket behind the bench, insects were buzzing about, shining in
the sun like buds of gold. Some hens, belonging to the Hermitage, were
pecking away in one corner of the square, clucking, and dusting their
feathers in the gravel.
Rafael surrendered to the charm of the exquisite scene. With reason had
it been called "Paradise" by its ancient owners, Moors from the magic
gardens of Bagdad, accustomed to the splendors of _The Thousand and One
Nights_, but who went into ecstacies nevertheless on beholding for the
first time the wondrous _ribera_ of Valencia!
Throughout the great valley, orange groves, extending like shimmering
waves of velvet; hedges and enclosures of lighter green, cutting the
crimson earth into geometric figures; clumps of palms spurting like jets
of verdure upward toward the sky, and falling off again in languorous
swoons; villas blue and rose-colored, nestling in flowering gardens;
white farmhouses half concealed behind green swirls of forest; spindling
smokestacks of irrigation engines, with yellow sooty tops; Alcira, its
houses clustered on the island and overflowing to the opposite bank, all
of whitish, bony hue, pock-marked with tiny windows; beyond, Carcagente,
the rival city, girdled in its belt of leafy orchards; off toward the
sea, sharp, angular mountains, with outlines that from afar suggested
the fantastic castles imagined by Dore; and inland, the towns of the
upper _ribera_ floating in an emerald lake of orchard, the distant
mountains taking on a violet hue from the setting sun that was creeping
like a bristly porcupine of gold into the hot vapors of the horizon.
Behind the Hermitage all the lower _ribera_ stretched, one expanse of
rice-fields drowned under an artificial flood; then, Sueca and Cullera,
their white houses perched on those fecund lagoons like towns in
landscapes of India; then, Albufera, with its lake, a sheet of silver
glistening in the sunlight; then, Valencia, like a cloud of smoke
drifting along the base of a mountain range of hazy blue; and, at last,
in the background, the halo, as it were, of this apotheosis of light and
color, the Mediterranean--the palpitant azure Gulf bounded by the cape
of San Antonio and the peaks of Sagunto and Almenara, that jutted up
against the sky-line like the black fins of giant whales.
As Rafael looked down upon the towers of the crumbling convent of La
Murta, almost hidden in its pine-groves, he thought of all the tragedy
of the Reconquest; and almost mourned the fate of those farmer-warriors
whose white cloaks he could imagine as still floating among the groves
of those magic trees of Asia's paradise. It was the influence of the
Moor in his Spanish ancestry. Christian, clerical even, though he was,
he had inherited a melancholy, dreamy turn of mind from the very Arabs
who had created all that Eden.
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