Читать книгу The Swan of Vilamorta - Emilia Pardo Bazán - Страница 3

Segundo García, the lawyer's son, and Leocadia Otero, the schoolmistress of Vilamorta, had met each other for the first time in the spring at a pilgrimage. Leocadia had gone with some girls to whom she had taught their letters and plain sewing. Before the chorus of nymphs Segundo had recited verses for more than two hours in an oak grove far from the noise of the drum and the bagpipes, where the strains of the music and the voices of the crowd came softened by distance. The audience was as silent as if they were hearing mass, although certain passages of a tender or passionate nature were the occasion, among the children, of nudges, pinches, laughter instantaneously suppressed; but from the black eyes of the schoolmistress, down her cheeks, pitted by the smallpox and pale with emotion, flowed two large, warm tears, followed so quickly and in such abundance by others that she was obliged to take out her handkerchief to wipe them away. And returning by starlight, descending the mountain on whose summit stood the sanctuary, by sylvan footpaths carpeted with grass and bordered with heather and briars, the order of march was as follows: first the children, running, jumping, pushing one another among the heather and greeting every fall with shouts of laughter; Leocadia and Segundo behind, arm-in-arm, pausing from time to time to talk in subdued tones, almost in whispers.

A sad and ugly story was told about Leocadia Otero. Although, without actually saying so, she had given it to be understood that she was a widow, it was whispered that she had never been married; that the puny Dominguito, the little cripple who was always sick, was born while she lived in the house of her uncle and guardian at Orense, after the death of her parents. What was certain was that her uncle had died shortly after the birth of the child, bequeathing to his niece a couple of fields and a house in Vilamorta, and Leocadia, after passing the necessary examinations, had obtained the village school and gone to settle in that town. She had lived in it now for more than thirteen years, observing the most exemplary conduct, watching day and night over Minguitos, and living with the utmost frugality in order to rebuild the dilapidated house, which she had finally succeeded in doing shortly before her meeting with Segundo. Leocadia was a woman of notably industrious habits; in her wardrobe she had always a good supply of linen, in her parlor bamboo furniture with a rug before the sofa, grapes, rice, and ham in her pantry, and carnations and sweet basil in her windows. Minguitos was always as neat as a new pin; she herself, when she raised the skirt of her habit of Dolores, of good merino, displayed underneath voluminous embroidered petticoats, stiff with starch. For all which reasons, notwithstanding her ugliness and her former history, the schoolmistress was not without suitors—a wealthy retired muleteer, and Cansin, the clothier. She rejected the suitors and continued living alone with Minguitos and Flores, her old servant, who now enjoyed in the house all the privileges of a grandmother.

The iniquitous wrong suffered by her in early youth had produced in Leocadia, absorbed as she was in her bitter recollections, a profound horror of marriage and an insatiable thirst for the romantic, the ideal, which is as a refreshing dew to the imagination and which satisfies the emotions. She had the superficial knowledge of a village schoolmistress—rudimentary, but sufficient to introduce exotic tastes into Vilamorta; that is to say, a taste for literature in its most accessible forms—novels and poetry. She devoted to reading the leisure hours of her monotonous and upright life. She read with faith, with enthusiasm, uncritically; she read believing and accepting everything, identifying herself with each one of the heroines, in turn, her heart echoing back the poet's sighs, the troubadour's songs, and the laments of the bard. Reading was her one vice, her secret happiness. When she requested her friends at Orense to renew her subscription to the library for her they laughed at her and nicknamed her the "Authoress." She an authoress! She only wished she were. If she could only give form to what she felt, to the world of fancy she carried in her mind! But this was impossible. Never would her brain succeed in producing, however hard she might squeeze it, even so much as a poor seguidilla. Poetry and sensibility were stored up in the folds and convolutions of her brain, as solar heat is stored up in the coal. What came to the surface was pure prose—housekeeping, economy, stews.

When she met Segundo, chance applied the lighted torch to the formidable train of feelings and dreams shut up in the soul of the schoolmistress. She had at last found a worthy employment for her amorous faculties, an outlet for her affections. Segundo was poetry incarnate. He represented for her all the graces, all the divine attributes of poetry—the flowers, the breeze, the nightingale, the dying light of day, the moon, the dark wood.

The fire burned with astounding rapidity. In its flames were consumed, first her honorable resolution to efface by the blamelessness of her conduct the stigma of the past, then her strong and deep maternal affection. Not for an instant did the thought present itself to Leocadia's mind that Segundo could ever be her husband; although both were free the difference in their ages and the intellectual superiority of the young poet placed an insurmountable barrier in the way of the aspirations of the schoolmistress. She fell in love as into an abyss, and looked neither before nor behind.

Segundo had had in Santiago, during his college days, youthful intrigues, adventures of a not very serious nature, such as few men escape between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, occasionally taking part, also, in what in that romantic epoch were called orgies. Notwithstanding all this, however, he was not vicious. The son of a hysterical mother, whose strength was exhausted by repeated lactations, and who at last succumbed to the debility induced by them, Segundo's spirit was much more exacting and insatiable than his body. He had inherited from his mother a melancholy temperament and innumerable prejudices, innumerable instinctive antipathies, innumerable superstitious practices. He had loved her, and he cherished her memory with veneration. And more tenacious even than his loving remembrance of his mother was the invincible antipathy he cherished for his father. It would not be true to say that the lawyer had been the murderer of his wife, and yet Segundo clearly divined the slow martyrdom endured by that fine nervous organization, and had always before his eyes, in his hours of gloom, the mean coffin in which the dead woman was interred, shrouded in the oldest sheet that was to be found.

Segundo's family consisted of his father, an aunt, advanced in years, two brothers, and three sisters. The lawyer García enjoyed the reputation of being wealthy—in reality this fortune was insignificant—a village fortune accumulated penny by penny, by usurious loans and innumerable sordid privations. His practice brought him in something, but ten mouths to feed and the professional education of three sons swallowed up not a little. The eldest of the boys, an officer in an infantry regiment, was stationed in the Philippine Islands, and, far from expecting any money from him, they were thankful if he did not ask for any. Segundo, the second in age as well as in name, had just been graduated—one lawyer more in Spain, where this fruit grows so abundantly. The youngest was studying at the Institute at Orense, with the intention of becoming an apothecary. The girls spent the days running about in the gardens and cornfields, half the time barefooted, not even attending Leocadia's school to save the slight expense that would be incurred in procuring the decent clothing which this would necessitate. As for the aunt—Misía Gáspara—she was the soul of the house, a narrow and sapless soul, a withered old woman, silent and ghost-like in appearance, still active, in spite of her sixty years, who, without ceasing to knit her stockings with fingers as yellow as the keys of an old harpsichord, sold barley in the granary, wine in the cellar, lent a dollar at fifty per cent. interest to the fruit-women and hucksters of the market, receiving their wares in payment, measured out the food, the light, and their clothing to her nieces, fattened a pig with affectionate solicitude, and was respected in Vilamorta for her ant-like abilities.

It was the lawyer's aspiration to transmit his practice and his office to Segundo. Only the boy gave no indication of an aptitude for stirring up law-suits and prosecutions. How had he achieved the miracle of passing with honor in the examinations without ever having opened a law-book during the whole term, and failing in attendance at the college whenever it rained or whenever the sun shone? Well, by means of an excellent memory and a good natural intelligence; learning by heart, when it was necessary, whole pages from the text-books, and remembering and reciting them with the same ease, if not with as much taste, as he recited the "Doloras" of Campoamor.

On Segundo's table lay, side by side, the works of Zorrilla and Espronceda, bad translations of Heine, books of verse of local poets, the "Lamas-Varela," or, Antidote to Idleness, and other volumes of a no less heterogeneous kind. Segundo was not an insatiable reader; he chose his reading according to the whim of the moment, and he read only what was in conformity with his tastes, thus acquiring a superficial culture of an imperfect and varied nature. Quick of apprehension, rather than thoughtful or studious, he had learned French without a teacher and almost by intuition, in order to read in the original the works of Musset, Lamartine, Proudhon, and Victor Hugo. His mind was like an uncultivated field in which grew here and there some rare and beautiful flower, some exotic plant; of the abstruse and positive sciences, of solid and serious learning, which is the nurse of mental vigor—the classics, the best literature, the severe teachings of history—he knew nothing; and in exchange, by a singular phenomenon of intellectual relationship, he identified himself with the romantic movement of the second third of the century, and in a remote corner of Galicia lived again the psychological life of dead and gone generations. So does some venerable academician, over-leaping the nineteen centuries of our era, delight himself now with what delighted Horace and live platonically enamored of Lydia.

Segundo composed his first verses, cynical and pessimistic in intention, ingenuous in reality, before he had reached the age of seventeen. His classmates applauded him to the echo. He acquired in their eyes a certain prestige, and when the first fruits of his muse appeared in a periodical he had, without going beyond the narrow circle of the college, admirers and detractors. Thenceforth he acquired the right to indulge in solitary walks, to laugh rarely, to surround his adventures with mystery, and not to play or take a drink for good-fellowship's sake except when he felt in the humor.

And he seldom felt in the humor. Excitation of the senses, of a purely physical nature, possessed no attraction for him; if he drank at times through bravado, the spectacle of drunkenness, the winding-up of student orgies—the soiled tablecloth, the maudlin disputes, his companions lying under the table or stretched on the sofa, the shamelessness and heartlessness of venal women—repelled him and he came away from such scenes filled with disgust and contempt, and at times a reaction proper to his complex character sent him, a sincere admirer of Proudhon, Quinet, and Renan, to the precincts of some solitary church, where he drew in with delight long breaths of the incense-laden air.

The lawyer García made no protest against his son's literary inclinations because he regarded them as a passing amusement proper to his age, a youthful folly, like dancing at a village feast. He began to grow uneasy when he saw that Segundo, after graduation, showed no inclination to help him in the conduct of his tortuous law-suits. Was the boy, then, going to turn out good for nothing but to string rhymes together? It was no crime to do this, but—when there was not a pile of law-papers to go through and stratagems to think of to circumvent the opposing party. Since the lawyer had observed this inclination of his son he had treated him with more persistent harshness and coldness than before. Every day at table or whenever the occasion offered, he made cutting speeches to him about the necessity of earning one's own bread by assiduous labor, instead of depending upon others for it. These continual sermons, in which he displayed the same captious and harassing obstinacy as in the conduct of his law-suits, frightened Segundo from the house. In Leocadia's house he found a place of refuge, and he submitted passively to be adored; flattered in the first place by the triumph his verses had obtained, awakening admiration so evidently sincere and ardent, and in the second place attracted by the moral well-being engendered by unquestioning approval and unmeasured complacency. His idle, dreamy brain reposed on the soft cushions which affection smoothes for the beloved head; Leocadia sympathized with all his plans for the future, developing and enlarging them; she encouraged him to write and to publish his verses; she praised him without reserve and without hypocrisy, for, for her, whose critical faculty was situated in her cardiac cavities, Segundo was the most melodious singer in the universe.

Gradually the loving prevision of the schoolmistress extended to other departments of Segundo's existence. Neither the lawyer García nor Aunt Gáspara supposed that a young man, once his education was finished, needed a penny for any extraordinary expense. Aunt Gáspara, in particular, protested loudly at every fresh outlay—after filling her nephew's trunk one year she thought he was provided with shirts for at least ten years to come: clothes had no right to tear or to wear out, without any consideration, in that way. Leocadia took note of the wants of her idol; one day she observed that he was not well supplied with handkerchiefs and she hemmed and marked a dozen for him; the next day she noticed that he was expected to keep himself in cigars for a year on half a dollar, and she took upon herself the task of making them for him, furnishing the material herself gratis. She heard the fruit-women criticising Aunt Gáspara's stinginess; she inferred from this that Segundo had a poor table, and she set herself to the task of devising appetizing and nutritious dishes for him; in addition to all which she ordered books from Orense, mended his clothes, and sewed on his buttons.

All this she did with inexpressible delight, going about the house with a light, almost youthful step, rejuvenated by the sweet maternity of love, and so happy that she forgot to scold the school-children, thinking only of shortening their tasks that she might be all the sooner with Segundo. There was in her affection much that was generous and spiritual, and her happiest moments were those in which, as they sat side by side at the window, his head resting on her shoulder, she listened, while her imagination transformed the pots of carnations and sweet basil into a virgin forest, to the verses which he recited in a well-modulated voice, verses that seemed to Leocadia celestial music.

The medal had its obverse side, however. The mornings were full of bitterness when Flores would come with an angry and frowning face, her woolen shawl twisted and wrinkled and falling over her eyes, to say in short, abrupt phrases:

"The eggs are all used; shall I get more? There is no sugar; which kind shall I buy—that dear loaf sugar that we bought last week? To-day I got coffee, two pounds of coffee, as if we had a gold mine. I won't buy any more cordial—you can go for it yourself—I won't."

"What are you talking about, Flores? What is the matter with you?"

"I say that if you like to give Ramon, the confectioner, twenty-four reals a bottle for anisette, when it is to be had for eight at the apothecary's, you can do so, but that I am not going to put the money in that thief's hand; he will be asking you five dollars a bottle for it next."

Leocadia would come out of her reverie with a sigh, and go to the bureau drawer for the money, not without thinking that Flores was only too right; her savings, her couple of thousand reals laid by for an emergency, must be almost gone; it was better not to examine into the condition of the purse; better put off annoyances as long as possible. God would provide. And she would scold the old woman with feigned anger.

"Go for the bottle; go—and don't make me angry. At eight the children will be here and I have my petticoat to iron yet. Make Minguitos his chocolate; you would be better employed in seeing that he has something to eat. And give him some cake."

"Yes. I'll give him some, I'll give him some. If I didn't give the poor child something——" grumbled the servant, who at Minguitos' name felt her anger increase. In the kitchen could be heard the furious knock given to the chocolate-pot to settle it on the fire and the angry sound of the mill, afterward, beating the chocolate into froth. Flores would enter the room of the deformed boy, who had not yet left his bed, and taking his hand in hers, say:

"Are you warm, child? I have brought you your chocolate; do you hear?"

"Will mamma give it to me?"

"I will give it to you."

"And mamma—what is she doing?"

"Ironing some petticoats."

The little humpback would fix his eyes on Flores, raising his head with difficulty from between the double arch of the breast and back. His eyes were deep set, with large pupils; on his mouth, with its prominent jaws, rested a melancholy and distorted smile. Throwing his arms around the neck of Flores, and putting his lips close to her ear:

"Did the other one come yesterday?" he asked.

"Yes, child, yes."

"Will he come again to-day?"

"He'll come. Of course he'll come! Stop talking, fillino, stop talking and take your chocolate. It's as you like it—thin and with froth."

"I don't think I have any appetite for it. Put it there beside me."