Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) - Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - Страница 9

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WHEN the Arragonese laborers who had emigrated to Argentina carrying along that most cherished of their possessions, the guitar with which they accompany the couplets they improvise, saw her flit by on her pony, they made a song about “The Flower of Black River.” And at once the name was caught up by the whole countryside.

As a matter of fact her name was Celinda and she was the only daughter of the rancher Rojas. She was small for her eighteen years, but agile and energetic as a thoroughbred colt. Most of the men of the region, who, like Orientals, considered obesity an indispensable part of feminine attractiveness, merely shrugged by way of reply when someone praised the Rojas girl’s beauty. Yes, her face was right enough, mischievous looking, with delicately up-turned nose, mouth red as a blood lily, sharp white teeth, and enormous eyes that were, it might be objected by a connoisseur, a little too round. But when you got through with her face, well, for the rest she was just as slim as a boy. At a short distance you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “What’s the good of a woman who doesn’t look like one?” they inquired.

In boy’s clothes, mounted on a broncho, circling a lassoo above her head, she could ride down a wild mare or young steer with as much skill as one of her father’s peons.

Carlos Rojas, as everyone in the county knew, belonged to an old Buenos Aires family. In his youth he had led an extravagant life in several of the European capitols. But marriage and an establishment in Buenos Aires proved just as costly as his bachelor wanderings in the old world, and little by little the fortune he had inherited from his father dwindled away, spent for the most part in ostentation and unsuccessful business ventures. At the moment when he became convinced that ruin was upon him, his wife died. She had been a delicate and melancholy woman, given to writing sentimental verse which she published under a pseudonym in the fashion papers; and it was she who had selected for her daughter the romantic name of Celinda.

It became necessary then for Rojas to give up the old farm that had been in the family for several generations, and that was worth several millions. When the three mortgages on it had been paid and his other debts settled there was nothing for Rojas to do but strike out into the less civilized parts of the Argentine. When money was more plentiful he had bought a section in Rio Negro as a speculation, and to this property, which he had never seen, he now betook himself.

Farming is the last resort of many a man who has dissipated his fortune. In spite of entire ignorance of the principles, to say nothing of the practice, of agriculture, the man who has failed in other occupations expects to make a success of this most laborious and difficult of professions. Rojas, accustomed to a life of spending, believed that by transferring himself to Rio Negro he would be able to accomplish this miracle. He had never been willing to bother with the management of the farm near Buenos Aires, with its rich pasture lands capable of supporting thousands of steers. Yet now he was planning to lead the rough life of the pioneer farmer, who must conquer the wilderness if he is to live. What his ancestors had done in the rich lands near Buenos Aires, where rains are opportune, he now had to do under the brazen skies of Patagonia that rarely, throughout the whole length of the year, let more than a few drops fall on the parched prairie.

But the erstwhile millionaire bore his misfortune with immense dignity. He was a man of fifty or thereabouts, somewhat short in stature, with a nose of roman proportions, and a beard streaked with white. In the midst of his rustic surroundings he preserved something of the manners acquired by contact with a more polished society. As they said at the settlement up at the dam, it didn’t matter how Rojas dressed, you could always tell he had been born a gentleman. He always wore high boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and a poncho, and in his right hand carried a revenque or small whip.

The buildings on his ranch were of a most modest sort. They had been put up as temporary structures in the hope that a turn for the better in his fortunes would soon make it possible to improve them. But, as so often happens in rustic settlements, these makeshift buildings were destined to last even longer than some of those erected with great care as permanent ones.

Over the walls of baked brick, with no other supports, or of simple adobe, rested the roof of corrugated tin. Inside, the partitions came only part way to the roof so that air could circulate freely through the entire building. The rooms did not contain much in the way of furniture. The one used by Don Carlos as office and reception room was adorned with a few rifles and the skins of some of the pumas he had shot in the surrounding plateau lands. It was the rancher’s custom to spend most of his time inspecting the corrals close by; but now and then he would start his horse off at a gallop for a sudden descent upon the peons at the other end of the ranch. One could never be sure that they weren’t sleeping while the cattle strayed....

The lunch hour had passed, and still Celinda had not come in. Her father every now and then looked impatiently out of the door. He had no fears whatever on her account. Ever since she had come to Rio Negro, at the age of eight, she had fairly lived on horseback, treating the Patagonian plateau lands as her playhouse.

“No one is going to take any chances with Celinda,” her father used to say proudly. “She’s a better shot with the revolver than I am. And besides, there is no two-legged or four-legged beast can get away from her when she has her lassoo along. My girl is as good as any man!”

In one of his pauses at the door he caught sight of her, approaching rapidly along the dark line that plain and sky make where they meet. The little mounted figure running along the horizon looked like a small tin horseman escaped from a box of toys.

In front of her pony ran a diminutive steer. And now the group, at full gallop, was growing larger with amazing rapidity. Anything moving on that immense plain appears to the bewildered eye, unaccustomed to the optical tricks of the desert, to change its size without going through the customary gradations.

The girl was close at hand now, uttering cowboy cries and cracking her lassoo in order to excite the steer to a quicker pace and rush him through the gate of the corral. With a great snort he dove through the opening in the wooden stakes, whereupon Mlle. Celinda dropped lightly from her horse and came to greet her father. But the latter, after kissing her cheek, held her away from him, and looked severely at her.

“Haven’t I told you that I didn’t want to see you wear men’s clothes? Trousers are for men, just as skirts are for women. I won’t have a daughter of mine looking like a movie actress!”

Celinda received her father’s reproof with lowered eyes, and an air of graceful hypocrisy. Dutifully promising to dress as he required, she restrained the amusement his allusion caused her, for as a matter of fact, she scarcely ever thought of anything but those movie actresses in knickerbockers that figure so largely in American films; for their sake she had taken many a five hour gallop to Fuerte Sarmiento, the nearest town, where, on a sheet hung up in the only hotel, wandering film operators showed films which Celinda watched with breathless attention. It wasn’t that the stories were so interesting, but what a good idea they gave her of the prevailing styles!

As they lunched Don Carlos inquired of his daughter if she had been near the camp at the dam. How was the work getting on?

The hope, which daily grew brighter, of becoming rich again, had, of late, changed Rojas from the gloomy and discouraged man he had been for so many years, into one capable now of smiling once more. If the engineers of the Argentine government succeeded in damming the Rio Negro, the canals even then under construction, according to the plans of a fellow named Robledo and his partner, would irrigate the lands that these two engineers had bought; and since those lands adjoined his own, he, too, would benefit from the irrigation system, and the value of his property would go up by leaps and bounds.

Celinda listened to her father’s comments on the engineering work and its possible consequences for themselves with the indifference youth generally exhibits toward money matters. But the discourse of Don Rojas on riches and what could be done with them was cut short by the arrival of a mulatto of overflowing proportions, fat cheeked, with slanting eyes, her coarse black hair gathered into a thick braid that undulated along the elevations and declivities of her back and then hung free, endeavoring apparently to reach the ground.

Before coming into the dining room she deposited a bag full of clothes at the door. Then she made a rush for Celinda, kissed her, and even spattered some of her tears over her:

“My pretty little one! My baby, my own little Señorita!”

When Celinda first came to the ranch the mulatto had been hired to take care of her, and it had been a real hardship for the woman to leave the girl. But she had never been able to get on with Don Carlos. The rancher was abrupt in his manner of giving orders, and would take no argument from women, especially when they had reached a certain age.

“The boss is a gay old boy,” Sebastiana confided to her friends. “I’m getting too old for him, and it’s the younger ones that catch all the smiles and pretty speeches, while all I get is sharp words and threats of the rebenque!”

When she had finished exclaiming over Celinda, the mulatto looked at Don Carlos with an indignation that was comical in effect.

“Well, since the boss and I can’t get on together, I’m going to the dam to keep house for the Italian contractor!”

Rojas shrugged to indicate that she could go wherever she pleased for all of him, and Celinda followed her old servant to the front door.

The afternoon was half gone when Don Carlos, who had been taking his siesta in a huge canvas armchair, and reading several of the Buenos Aires newspapers, which the train brought out to the desert three times a week, left the ranch house.

Hitched to a post of the portico which shaded the door was a horse. The rancher smiled as he noticed that the animal bore a side saddle. In a moment Celinda appeared, wearing a black riding skirt. She tossed her father a kiss from the end of her riding whip, and then, without setting foot in the stirrup or accepting a helping hand, with one leap she landed on the saddle, and the horse started off at full gallop toward the river.

But his rider did not let him go very far. Celinda dismounted in a grove of willows where a second horse, the same one she had ridden that morning with a cross saddle, was waiting for her. Dropping her skirt and the rest of her feminine costume, she stood revealed in knickerbockers, riding boots, and a boyish shirt and necktie. She smiled as she thought of how she was disobeying “the old man,” as, in accordance with local custom, she called her father.

But how surprised that other man would be to see her in a feminine riding skirt! No, she didn’t want to surprise him that way.... He had always seen her in boy’s clothes and so he always treated her with the friendly confidence he would have for someone of his own sex. Who could tell what would happen were he to see her wearing skirts, just like a young lady? He might grow shy and begin being tremendously polite, and finally stop seeing her altogether!

So she left her girl’s clothes on the horse she had ridden to the willows, gaily mounted the other, and pressing her slim feet against his flanks, tossed her lassoo in the air, making spirals of rope above her head.

And now the Flower of Rio Negro was galloping along the river bank through the aged willow trees that droop their festoons of delicate green over the gliding water. This solitary river roadway, that stretched from the storm-beaten peaks of the Andes, on the Pacific side, to its wide outlet in the Atlantic, had been named Black River because of the dark-colored plants which covered its bed, giving a greenish tinge to the snow waters of the distant mountains.

The thousand-year-old erosion of the swift stream had cut a deep gash, two or three leagues wide in certain places, in the Patagonian table land. The river slid along through this cut between two banks of earth brought down by the stream in the flood season. These banks were of a rich and light soil, extremely fertile wherever the river water reached it. But beyond this point the ground rose to form steep, yellow, sinuous walls that gazed unblinkingly at one another across the gliding black water; and beyond these heights stretched the mesa, that region where icy cold alternates with suffocating heat, where hurricanes torment the harsh vegetation that will yield a living only to those flocks that can scour many leagues of that arid plain.

All the life of the region was concentrated in the wide fissure carved by the river waters across the desert. The two strips of soil on its banks represented so many thousand miles of fertile earth brought down by the river from its wanderings in the Andes. And it was in one part of this great cleft that the government engineers were at work in an attempt to raise the level of the waters the few yards necessary in order to inundate the adjoining lands.

Celinda was uttering sharp cries to excite her horse; it seemed as though she must share her delight with him. In a little while she was going to meet what interested her most in that whole wide countryside! As she followed a turn in the river bank, the surface of the stream suddenly widened before her eyes, forming a quiet and solitary lake. At its farthest limit, at the point where the banks pressed in and disturbed its waters, were outlined the iron profiles of several great derricks, and the tin or straw roofs of a settlement. This was the little town that had grown up near the dam, a town of houses that had risen but a slight distance above the ground, with not a single second story to break the monotonous level of its roof line.

But Celinda’s curiosity stopped short of the settlement. Reining in her horse, she walked him through several squads of men working at some distance from the river, at the point where the level of the ground began to rise abruptly.

These peons, some of them Europeans, others half-breeds, were removing and heaping up the soil which they took from the ditches that were to become part of the irrigation system. Two ditching machines, with a great roar of motors, were also attacking the ground in an attempt to facilitate this human labor.

Celinda looked about her with keen exploring eyes, and turning her back on the workmen she went toward a man she had spied on a small elevation of ground. He sat on a canvas folding chair, before a small table; his sombrero lay at his feet which were encased in thick muddy boots, as rough and serviceable as the rest of his clothing. His head on his hand, he was studying the charts spread out before him.

He was one of those blond clear-eyed young men who remind us of the Greek youths immortalized in sculpture, and who for some unexplainable reason reappear, with surprising frequency, in the northern races of Europe. Straight-nosed, with curly hair growing low over his forehead, and a firm and powerful neck line, he was an unexpected apparition in that barren spot. So absorbed was he in his calculations that he did not notice Celinda’s arrival.

She still had her lassoo in her hand, and with the cunning and noiseless step of an Indian, she began to climb up the slope. Not the slightest sound betrayed her approach. Within a few yards of her goal she straightened up, laughing silently at her prank, and giving the lassoo a few vigorous preliminary swings, she suddenly let it fly. The noose poised over the youth and descended upon him in a flash. Then it tightened, pinning down his arms, and a slight jerk nearly upset him.

Angrily he looked about him, his fists doubled up, his muscles tense; then suddenly he burst out laughing. To complete her impudent performance, Celinda was gently tugging at the lassoo, and in order not to be overturned, there was nothing for the youth to do but move towards her. When he stood close beside her she looked up at him apologetically.

“It’s such a long time since we’ve seen one another ...! Tanto tiempo! I thought I’d better get you on the other end of this rope, so you can’t get away!”

The youth looked his astonishment. In a drawling voice that made his slow Spanish sound amusingly foreign, he exclaimed.

“Such a long time! Why, what about this morning?”

“Tanto tiempo!” She mimicked his accent. “Well, what of it, you ungrateful gringo? Is it such a small matter to you that we haven’t seen one another since this morning?”

Then they both burst out laughing, like two children.

By this time they had reached the hitching post where she had left her horse. Hurriedly she sprang to his back, as though it made her feel uncomfortable and helpless to stand on the ground. Besides, in spite of his six feet and over, this point of vantage made it possible for her to look down at him.

The rope was still wound about his arms and shoulders, but Celinda determined to let her captive go.

“Listen, don Ricardo, I’m going to set you free, but only so you can do a little work!”

With a quick twist she tossed the rope off his shoulders. But as though her presence robbed him of all initiative, the youth remained motionless before her. Majestically she offered him her hand.

“Don’t be ill-bred, Mr. Watson! That is for you to kiss. You seem to be losing all your manners out here in the desert.”

Amused by the girl’s mock gravity, the young engineer bent over her hand. But his air of treating her with the good-natured condescension an older person displays toward a mischievous child, annoyed her.

“One of these days I’m going to get really cross with you, and then you’ll never see me again. You always treat me as though I were a little girl, when I’m not! I’m the first lady of the land, I’m the Princess Flor de Rio Negro!”