It was a great affair, the wedding of Don Jose with Maria del Alcazar.
All the retired and active matadors of Seville came to the wedding in
their bespangled clothes, for they understood what the populace refused
to understand. They knew what premonitions were and how they acted on a
matador in the ring. It was easy to cheer and easier to hoot, but bulls
carried death on the tips of their horns.
A week later the two newly married were in the Saragoza adobe. It
was not much better than the home in which their people had lived in
the Triana. Still, Maria thought it was very beautiful. The bare mud
walls she decorated with her eyes, which reflected all the beauties
they had absorbed. And through them she projected her dreams, the
delicate traceries and colorings, and the mosaic and the stalactite of
the ceilings. And she was happy. For there were no working-men tearing
down and repairing and touching with brutal hands what was about her.
And from the top of the hill the olive groves and vineyards and the
tall cypress trees that stretched below her were even more beautiful
than the gardens in which she had roamed. And the serpentining, snaking
river below, shimmering with the blue of the sky in the sunlight,
was like the limpid water pools and bathing places of the Alcazar.
Indeed, it was more the Alcazar than anything else. And it was hers. No
working-men, no visitors, disturbed her.
Jose was busy building sheds for the sheep. And evenings his powerful
arms were delicately wrapped about her. He appreciated her love and was
flattered that she could be so happy in such poor surroundings. And he
wondered what there was in him that she, the most beautiful woman in
the world, should be able to stay with him in so desolate a place, away
from all the things she had been accustomed to. In his eyes she was not
a poor girl, the daughter of a keeper, that he had married. She was
Maria del Alcazar, the one raised in surroundings so beautiful there
was none the like of them in the world. Evenings, when the work was
done, the two lovers would face each other, sitting outside their hut.
And one evening Don Jose said:
“There never happened a better thing to me than to have been gored by a
bull.”
To which Maria quietly answered, seizing the hands of the man near her:
“And yet I hate bulls.”
But the courage did not return to Don Jose. Month succeeded month.
And after the long winter was over, the first winter they had passed
together, he was approached to appear again in the ring. Refusing, he
wondered whether the courage would ever return to him again. He hung
his head when the man tried to convince him by saying:
“You, who have received the applause of thousands and thousands while
so young, should now live in the company of sheep and mules on the top
of a hill! You who have received thousands of _pesetas_ for one hour of
work, and been glorified by the whole of Spain, should now work so hard
with the hope of getting a pittance at the end of the year! And your
wife, Don Jose. Don’t forget your wife.”
But Don Jose shook his head and answered:
“Not this year.”
And when the men who had come to engage him left his house, they
said to each other: “Many a good matador has become better and more
courageous to win the woman he loved, only to become a coward for fear
of losing her.”
Maria was happy that he refused. She did not understand why every time
these men returned Jose should be so sullen and dark. Oh, were they
not happy there on top of the mountain? And were they not living in
the most beautiful palace that man had ever built? If it was true the
Alcazar had never been built, but had been conjured up by the wand of
some great magician, an even greater magician had conjured the greater
Alcazar she was living in now. She had always, she realized now, missed
something when she had been living in the Alcazar of Seville. Now she
knew what she had missed. There were only walls and ceilings. Even the
phantoms she conjured were cold despite all the warm colors about them.
But there on the Saragoza Hills she had realized and filled out her
dream. Draperies, heavy silks came down, called by the magic of her
love, and covered everything, and uncovered greater beauties on softer
backgrounds.
But Jose walked about sullenly, muttering to himself:
“It was a bad day for me when that bull gored me. It was a bad day for
me when that bull gored me.” He missed the applause, the cheering, the
excitement. And yet he did not have the courage.
And one day, when he had returned from the village at the foot of the
hill, instead of recalling as he had frequently done the beautiful days
during which Maria had sat at his bedside, he spoke angrily to her,
and she could recognize the smell of _aguardiente_, burning water, on
his breath.
“It was because of you that I was gored by the bull! I was thinking of
you instead of the beast before me! You are the cause of my misfortune!”
And suddenly, when she reëntered the hut, the walls appeared as they
really were, dirty mud walls. The ceilings which she had enlarged and
domed with her eyes, and beamed and wrought with mosaics, appeared to
her as they really were, cracked, low, and ugly. The rickety bed which
stood in the corner, which had been to her like the richest couch of
the most beautiful sultana, was nothing but a squalid heap of rusty
iron, rags, and mattresses. The low-burning lamp had lost its mystic
quality. It was but an ill-smelling kerosene lamp. All the riches
of the adobe were gone. It had been conjured by the magic wand of a
sorcerer, and been dispelled by a few ugly words. And so she lay down
and wept.
When she awoke in the morning, the squalor of her surroundings was even
more appalling. The sheep, which had been so beautiful, were now ugly.
And the mountain and the river and the olive groves and the vineyards
were nothing but ugly, brown, crooked cripples scorching in the hot
sun. It was worse than the Triana mud huts in which she had lived. And
Jose himself, Jose himself, what a different man he was! An unwashed,
unkempt, rag-clothed stranger, with a hard voice and an evil odor.
A few months later, another group of men came to induce Don Jose to
appear again in the bull-ring. He assured them he would do so the
following spring.
“But where is Doña Maria, his wife, of whose beauty we have heard so
much? The woman we have seen could not have been she, for she looked so
much older and anything but beautiful.” The men looked at one another
outside.
Indeed, where was she?
For none of them realized that a single year could have changed a woman
so much. She wandered about mute, listless. Her eyes were lusterless
and her gaze vacant.
And he did get back his courage the following spring. And he again
became the favorite of the people. There were pictures of him hanging
in every store and every home from one end of Spain to the other. He
was piling up great wealth and had furnished a beautiful apartment,
more beautiful than he had ever expected to live in, with a profusion
of silks and carpets and silver vases and copper urns. He thought Maria
had been made unhappy by the poverty of her surroundings, the fool.
It was all in vain. He could not make it as beautiful as the Alcazar.
It was squalid, poor, ugly, decrepit tinsel compared with the gold of
the palace, and more so when compared with the gold of her dreams,
which he had destroyed once forever.
When he had withdrawn from the ring rich and honored, she returned to
her father’s home. And before she was thirty, when her father died,
unable to leave the Alcazar, she sat outside its gates. Her face
withered. The skin of her hands dried up like parchment. She still sits
there, wrapped in rags, begging from the tourists.
But after sundown the Alcazar is hers.