La Gaviota

CHAPTER XXIX

SIX months after, the Countess de Algar was in her saloon with the marchioness, her mother, occupied in putting a ribbon on her son’s straw hat, when General Santa-Maria entered.

“See, general, how well a straw hat becomes a boy at that age.”

“You spoil this child.”

“What matters it?” said the marchioness. “Do not we all spoil our children, who nevertheless become serious men? Our mother spoilt you also, my brother, and that did not prevent you from becoming what you are.”

“Mamma,” said the child, “wilt thou give me a biscuit?”

“What is this?” cried the general. “Your child tutear’s you? You adopt then, after the French fashion, this te and tu, which corrupts our manners. The grandees of Spain formerly obliged their children to call them ‘excellency.’ It was in the good old time. The tutear, in imitation of the French tutoies, makes children lose the respect they owe to their parents.”

“Eh! general – this innocent creature! Can he distinguish between thou and you?”

“It is taught him.”

“I acknowledge that my children tutear me; and if I had done the same to my mother, I had not less respected nor less loved her.”

“You have always been a good daughter; but the exception proves nothing.”

“General, in spite of your severity, your countenance seems joyous.”

“It is because I have a good piece of news to announce to you. The corvette Iberia, from Havana, has arrived at Cadiz, and to-morrow morning, most probably, we will embrace Raphael. He is fortunate, this Raphael! Hardly had he written us that he desired to revisit Spain, when a magnificent occasion presents itself, and he comes home charged with important dispatches confided to him by the captain-general of Cuba.”

The marchioness and the countess had scarcely time to rejoice at this good news, and to give expression to their happiness, when the door opened, and Raphael threw himself into their arms.

“How happy I am again to see you, my good, dear Raphael!” said the countess to him.

“Jesus!” added the marchioness, “thanks to our lady of Carmen, you are here returned to us. But what idea have you had, you who are rich, to travel by sea, as if it were but a river? I bet you have been sea-sick.”

“That is the least of it; it is nothing but an unpleasant voyage, and I have suffered more from delay and my uneasiness for those I love. I do not know if it be because Spain is a good mother, or because we Spaniards are good sons, but we cannot live far away from our country.”

“It is for both reasons, my dear nephew; it is for both,” repeated the general with ardent satisfaction.

“Cuba is a rich country, is it not, Raphael?” demanded the countess.

“Yes, cousin. Cuba is rich, and it knows how to be so, like a great lady, who has always been one, without ostentation, and parading everywhere its benefits.”

“And the women, do they please you?”

“As a general rule, all women please me: the young, because they are so; the old, because they have been so; and the little girls, because they will be so.”

“Do not generalize so; be more precise.”

“Cousin, the Cuban ladies are charming feminine lazzaroni, covered with muslins and lace, and whose little satin shoes are useless ornaments for the little feet they are destined for, as I have never seen an Havana lady on foot. They speak like nightingale’s singing, live on sugar like bees, and smoke like the chimneys of a steamboat. Their eyes are poems, and their hearts mirrors, without tin-foil. The doleful drama is not written for this country, where the women pass their life lying in a hammock balanced amidst flowers, and fanned by their slaves with fans fringed with flowers of a thousand colors.”

“Do you know that public rumor announces your marriage?”

“Dame Rumor, my dear Gracia, arrogates to herself the royal buffooneries of the olden time. Like them, she tells all that passes in her head without inquiry into the truth. But public rumor has told a lie.”

“They add, that your future wife brings you a fortune of two millions of duros.”

Raphael burst into a fit of laughter.

“Indeed, I remember that the captain-general wished to make me indorse this bill of exchange.”

“And who was to be my future cousin?”

“She was ugly as mortal sin: her left shoulder approached too conspicuously the ear on the same side, while the right shoulder was separated from the ear, its neighbor, by a distance too marked. I therefore refused the indorsement.”

“You were wrong,” said the countess, “above all, knowing that – ” She did not finish. She had seen pass over the frank and open countenance of her cousin the expression of a bitter recollection.

“Is she happy?” he demanded.

“As much as one can be in this world. She lives very retired, since above all she expects soon to be a mother.”

“And he?”

“Entirely changed, since the marriage. He is a model of a husband. The family have received him as a returned prodigal son.”

“And Eloisita?”

“Hers is a lamentable history. She secretly espoused a French adventurer, who called himself cousin of the Prince of Rohan, coadjutor of Alexander Dumas, and sent by the Baron Taylor to purchase artistic curiosities, and who, unfortunately, is called Abelard. She saw in the name of her beloved and in her own the decree of destiny commanding their union; and in this man, at the same time literary, artistic, and of princely family, she believed she saw the ideal being who had appeared to her in her beautiful dreams of gold, and a happy future. She regarded her parents, who opposed this union, as the tyrants of a melodrama, of ideas retrograde, and filled with obscurity.”

“And of Spainishism,” added the general, ironically. “And the learned señorita, nourished by novels and poetic flowers, united herself to this grand swindler, already twice married, as we learned later. After the lapse of some months, after having dissipated the money she had given him, he abandoned her at Valence, where her unfortunate father went to seek her, and to take her back, dishonored, but neither married, nor widow, nor maid. You see, my nephew, to what leads this mad love of strangerism.”

“And our A. Polo, our eternal point of exclamation, what has become of him?”

“He has become a political man,” replied Gracia.

“I know it,” replied Raphael; “I know also that he has written an ode against the throne, under the pseudo name of Tyranny.”

“Poor tyranny,” said the general, “all the world make fagots of the fallen tree.”

“I know, besides,” pursued Raphael, “that he wrote another poem against Prejudice, in which he comprehended the fatal presage of the number thirteen, the infallibility of the Pope, the upsetting of a salt-cellar, and conjugal fidelity. If I do not cite the text, I cite at least the spirit of this chef-d’œuvre which public opinion will class among – ”

“Among?”

“We will see, when they have destroyed this society, with what they will replace it.”

“I know indeed that our A. Polo has composed a satire (he felt himself carried towards this point, and for a long time he has felt growing on his forehead the horns of Marsias), a satire, I say, he declares it to be an act of hypocrisy, all claims of tithes, or the rights of convents.”

“Eh! Well, my dear nephew,” said the general, “these lucubrations will give him sufficient merit to be received in an opposition journal.”

“I understand that much, general, and I can imagine what will happen; it is a comedy played every day: he made of his pen the jaw-bone of an ass, and, armed with this jaw-bone, he will bravely attack the Philistines of power.”

“You have been a good prophet,” affirmed the general; “I do not know how he will get on. But at present he is a personage; he has money, he gives the ton, he is strong.”

“And the duke, will I meet him at Madrid?”

“No, but you may see him, on your way, at Cordoval, where he is at this moment with his family.”

“The duke has finished by following my advice,” said the general; “he has abandoned public life. Everybody of slight importance ought to-day, like Achilles, to retire within their tents.”

“But, my uncle, is it then the fashion to retire?”

“They say that the duke,” interrupted the countess, “is entirely devoted to literature. He writes for the theatre.”

“I bet that the title of his first piece will be, ‘The goat returns always to the mountain,’ ” said Raphael, in the ear of his cousin, alluding to the loves of Maria and Pepe Vera, which everybody knew.

“Hold your tongue, Raphael,” said the countess, “we ought to act with our friends as the sons of Noah did with their father.”

“And Marisalada, has she mounted to the capitol in a chariot of gold, drawn by her fanatical admirers?”

“She has lost her voice, caused by a severe attack of pleurisy; did you not know that?”

“I was so far from knowing it that I bring her magnificent offers from Havana. What does she do?”

“Now, when she can no longer sing,” replied the general, “she will follow without doubt the counsels of the ant: she will learn to dance.”

“But where is she?” repeated Raphael, insisting; “I have a letter to deliver to her from her husband.”

“From her husband!” cried at once the marchioness, the countess, and the general.

“Have you seen him?” demanded the marchioness, with interest.

“He embarked in the same vessel with us for Havana. How he was changed! how sad he was! you would not have recognized him. A little time after our arrival he died of yellow fever.”

“He died! poor Stein!” said the countess.

“The death of this good man,” said the general, “will fall entirely on the conscience of this accursed singer.”

“I, who believe myself invulnerable,” replied Raphael, “and without ever having had the epidemic, I went to see him so soon as I learned he was ill. The attack was so violent that I found him almost at his last extremity; always calm, always filled with serene goodness, he thanked me for my visit, and said to me that he was happy in seeing, before he died, a loved face. He asked me for paper and a pen, and, almost dying, he traced some lines which he asked me, as the last request of a dying man, to convey to his wife. The vomiting soon followed, and he died with one hand clasped in those of the priest, the other in mine. I confide to you this letter, my dear Gracia; send it by a trusty man to Villamar, where, I suppose, Marisalada will have retired near to her father. Here is this letter, which I have often read, as one reads a holy hymn.”

The countess opened the paper, and read —

“Maria, thou whom I have loved, and who I love still; if my pardon can save you from remorse, if my benediction can render you happy, receive them both. I send them to you from my death-bed.

CHAPTER XXX

IF the reader, before quitting us perhaps forever, will follow us, we will revisit Villamar, after the lapse of four years, that is to say in the summer of 1848, this pretty and tranquil village placed on the border of the sea; and we will narrate to him the grave events, public and private, which have happened during all that time.

We commence by recounting the vicissitudes of the unlucky inscription which gave so much trouble to the alcalde, and which was almost effaced by one of those showers of Andalusia, more calculated to submerge the earth than to fructify it.

The alcalde, fearing that his patriotism, like that of the inscription, might be effaced, would revive a noble sentiment, and he believed he would attain his object in giving to the street known as the Calle Real, the name of Calle de los Hijos de Padilla.

This change brought about the following émeute:

One of the inhabitants of this street, named Cristobal Padilla, had died, and his children continued to inhabit the house of their father; but the Lopez, the Perez, and the Sanchez were living in the same street, and they protested against the preference accorded to Padilla. The alcalde hastened to explain to them that the Sons of Padilla formed, in former times, an association of freemen, and that it was named in honor of them. They answered, that they were also as much freemen as the Padillas, and that, if the alcalde persisted in his idea, they would appeal for justice to the government. The alcalde sent them all to the devil. Then, after a second émeute, an émeute of women this time, led by Rosa Mistica, equally on account of the change of name, he wrote under the signature of El Patrioto Modelo, to a leading journal of the capital, an article, in which, after having praised his own civic rule and his courage, he spoke of the harvest of melons and calabashes.

To return to our narrative: The tower of the fort San Cristobal was in ruins, and with it the hopes of Don Modesto, who had always nourished the idea of one day seeing his fort placed on a scale with that of Gibraltar, Brest, Cadiz, Cherbourg, Malta, and Sebastopol.

But nothing so much astonished our friends at Villamar as the change brought about in the shop of the barber Ramon Perez. Ramon, some time after the death of his father, which happened a month or two after the departure of the Gaviota, could not resist the desire to proceed to Madrid, to follow the ingrate, who had sacrificed him for a stranger.

He went, and was absent two weeks.

These two weeks passed, he returned, and with him brought —

1st, An exhaustless supply of lies and bragging.

2d, An infinite variety of songs and Italian scraps, horrible to listen to.

3d, An assumption of the fashionable, impudent airs, and a free-and-easy manner capable of provoking the unfortunate inhabitants of Villamar, whose ears and jaws, more unfortunate still, retained for a long time the traces of these dangerous acquisitions.

4th, The most absurd tendencies to copy the king of barbers, Figaro, whom, unfortunately, he had seen represented at the theatre of Seville.

Ramon Perez had also brought from his journey one thing which he revealed to nobody: a magnificent kick, which was bestowed upon him one evening, under the windows of Marisalada.

Thanks to one circumstance, which we learned later, the barber had come into possession of a considerable sum of money. Then his souvenirs of Figaro and of Seville rose up in his mind more intensely. He embellished his shop with Asiatic luxury, associated with disorder the most ridiculous. He hung against the walls three engravings: a Telemachus, large as a drum-major; a Mentor, with a full beard; and a lank Calypso. He believed and affirmed that they were St. Peter and the Magdalen. The wags said that every thing was remodelled at Ramon’s except his razors; but Perez said that the device of the age was, “Appear, rather than be.”

He had a sign painted of such huge dimensions that he was obliged to construct two pillars to sustain it.

Now that the reader knows what had passed at Villamar, let us follow with him the thread of actualities.

One day, Ramon sang, accompanying himself on the guitar. It was not a song of the country, but a melancholy romance entitled Atala. It was a frightful thing to hear the trills, the cadences, the flourishes of all sorts, which he resorted to, to render the music unnatural. Don Modesto, moved by a sentiment of gratitude towards the man who shaved him for nothing, alone listened to Ramon’s singing, when suddenly the door of the back shop was opened wide, and there was seen going out a woman, with an infant in her arms, and another who followed her weeping. This woman, pale, meagre, and of coarse manners, was dressed in a robe of light muslin, and an old barege shawl, and her long hair escaped from her comb, descending in disorder to her feet. Her feet were dressed in satin shoes, worn down at the heels. And she wore in her ears large gold ear-rings.

“Hush! hush! Ramon,” she cried in a coarse voice, “do not stun my ears. I would rather prefer to hear the croaking of all the ravens on the coast, and the mewing of all the cats in the village, than to hear this mutilation of serious music. I have already told you to sing only the songs of the country. Your voice is sufficiently flexible, and it is always good for that; but there is not a living soul who could support your pretensions to the graces of an artist. I tell you this, and you know if I am competent or not to express an opinion. You so bore me with your stupid vocalization, that, if you continue it, I will quit this house, never to return to it. Be silent!” she added, striking the infant, who had begun to cry, “you bray like your father.”

“Go, then, by all the saints!” replied the barber, wounded in what his amour propre cherished as most dear. “Go, run away, and never return until I recall you: in this way you will run for a long time without stopping.”

“Dare you speak to me thus, you beardless chin! – to me, whom the grandees of Spain, ambassadors, and the entire court recall to their memory.”

“If all the world saw you to-day, be sure they would not desire to listen to you, or think of you.”

“Why have I married this booby, who, after having spent the allowance I had from the duke, now insults me – me, the celebrated Maria Santalo, who made such a noise in the world?”

“It will be better for you if you make no more,” said Ramon.

At these words the woman sprang upon her husband, who, filled with fear, had not time to save himself.

In going out he ran against a new personage, whom he upset. Hardly had Maria perceived the ludicrous rencontre when her anger gave place to the loudest laughter.

This personage was Momo, whose cheeks were bandaged with an old handkerchief, and frightfully swollen. He had come to Ramon, who to his quality of barber joined that of dentist, to have a tooth extracted.

“What horrible vision!” cried Maria. “You would frighten fear itself. Have you come to exhibit yourself for money?”

“I came to have a tooth taken out, and not to be insulted. But Gaviota you have been, Gaviota you are, and Gaviota you will be.”

“If you have come here to have extracted that which is really bad, Ramon must commence with your heart.”

“See then, who speaks of heart! A daughter who left her father to die in the arms of strangers, without sending even the slightest assistance!”

“And whose fault?” replied Maria. “Yours, ugly peasant, who left Madrid without delivering your message, and spread everywhere the report of my death, because you mistook a theatrical representation for a reality. In consequence of which, on my arrival here all Villamar took me for a spectre from the other world.”

“Theatrical representation! yes, you have always so said. But if Telo had not missed you, and if your husband had not cured you, you would long ago have been food for worms, for the repose of honest people who know you.”

“You do not enjoy this repose; and you will not enjoy it for a long time to come. I will live a hundred years to torment you.”

Momo, as his only reply, shrugged his shoulders with contempt, and in a sententious voice pronounced —

“Gaviota you have been, Gaviota you are, and Gaviota you will be.”

When Don Modesto, stunned by the noise of the quarrel, heard the laughter which succeeded the tones of violent anger, he profited by the occasion to sneak away from the battle-field. He had scarcely escaped from the dispute between Momo and Maria, when new terrors assailed him, at the sight of the single eye of Rosita, an eye full of severity and of menace. Don Modesto went, and seated himself in a corner, and, like a bird, who sees a storm approaching, hides his head under his wing, he bent down his head, and waited.

“It was very becoming,” said Rosita, “and very dignified, in a man of your age, and of your importance, one of the first authorities of the place, a man who has seen his name printed in large letters in the Gazette, to go near these people, near these brainless fools, not to say worse, and to commit yourself with this woman, whose marriage is but a long scandal.”

“But, Rosita, I am not committed to the quarrel, it was she who came in where I was.”

“If you had not been at this bad barber’s, at the house of this everlasting singer; if you had not stopped there, with open mouth listening to his paltry songs, you would not have been exposed to being a witness of such a shameful scene.”

“But, Rosita, you forget that I must be shaved now and then, under pain of otherwise being mistaken for a pioneer; that this good Ramon Perez shaves me for nothing, as his father did before him; and that both politeness and gratitude demand of me that I listen with patience when he sings.”

“I tell you that it is an abomination to see you among such people, like intimates.”

“Rosita, can you speak thus of Ramon, who shaves me for nothing, and of Marisalada, whom ministers and generals have applauded, and who has been so good as to put a cockade on my hat?”

“Yes, a cockade big as a salad! She mocks you. Ah! she is good, this woman, who let her father die in a garret, all alone, in misery and forgetfulness, while she sang herself hoarse on the stage.”

“But, Rosita, if she were ignorant of the gravity – ”

“She knew he was ill, that should have been sufficient. While a father suffers, a daughter should not sing. Ah! she is good, this woman, in her conduct forcing her husband to fly to the Indies to die there of shame and grief.”

“He died of the yellow fever.”

“Yes, she is good! And she was the only one who did not come to watch poor old Maria in her last illness; old Maria, who had so much loved her, and who had heaped on her a thousand kind acts. She was the only one absent at the funeral, the only one who did not pray for her either in the church, or at the burial-ground.”

“It was immediately after her confinement, and it would have been an imprudence at that time.”

“What do you understand about going out soon after confinement?” interrupted Rosita, exasperated by the ardor which Don Modesto exhibited in defending his friends. “Have you ever had any children?”

“No, for – ”

“And when brother Gabriel died, soon after old Maria, was it not this Gaviota who dared to laugh, saying, that it was at the theatre only she thought people died of grief and love? This woman is accursed.”

“Poor brother Gabriel!” said Don Modesto, agitated by the souvenirs which his hostess revived. “Every Friday he came to pray for a good death from the Lord of Good-help; after the decease of his benefactress he came every day. It was I, who met him one Friday, in the morning, on his knees, near the grating of the chapel, his head resting on the bars. I approached – he was dead! Died as he had lived, without noise, and unconscious. Poor brother Gabriel, thou hast died without having seen the walls of your convent rebuilt – and I, I will die also without seeing my fort rebuilt.”