Robledo looked sharply at her, and asked brusquely, “What is your name?”
But, her eyes on the whiskey bottle, she was thinking of something else,
and she replied absently,
“My name is Blanca, though some of the people around here call me _La
marquesa_. But ... will you buy me another drink?... Because, if we drop
in at my house later, there won’t be any whiskey like this there. We
will go there, won’t we?... It’s quite near ... though of course you
might prefer the hotel?”
She took his silence to be consent and hastened to pour out a third
glassful, which she drank with as much avidity as she had the others.
But Robledo interrupted her.
“Your name is Elena, and if people call you _La marquesa_ it is because
someone who knew you when you were married to an Italian _marqués_
recognized you.”
His words startled her so much that she removed the glass from her lips,
and looked with wide eyes at Robledo.
“Since the very first word you spoke, I felt sure that you knew me,” she
murmured.
Mechanically she set down her glass. But she suddenly made haste to
drain it, and then looked at her companion with an expression of
unfathomable amazement.
“But who are you?... Who can you be?... Who _are_ you?”
At the first question she leaned closer to Robledo, but then she drew
back as though afraid to touch him, and as she repeated the question she
raised her hands to her breasts as though making a painful effort to
awaken her memory. Finally, in a discouraged tone, she repeated,
“But there have been so many men in my life!”
Suddenly a look of anxiety came into her eyes, followed by fear and then
the expression of a frightened animal. She was afraid of the man sitting
opposite her.
“I know you now,” she murmured. “Yes, it’s you all right. You’ve
changed, but it’s still you. But I’d never have known you if you hadn’t
mentioned what you did.”
Then she seemed to take courage, and looked long at him without any
signs of fear. At last she added hoarsely,
“It would have been better if we had never met again!”
They sat in silence for several minutes. Elena seemed to have forgotten
the existence of the bottle that she was still caressing mechanically.
But finally the Spaniard’s curiosity broke into this silence.
“What happened to Moreno?”
She listened with an expression of wonder and doubt, as though she did
not understand. From her eyes one could see that she was making a
tremendous mental effort, one which stirred her to the depths.
“Moreno?... Who was Moreno?... She had known so many men!”
As though having recourse to a relieving medicament, she helped herself
to another glass of whiskey, and when she had gulped it down, her face
brightened with a smile.
“Oh, I know who you mean.... Moreno ... a poor sort of fellow, crazy. I
don’t know anything about him.”
Robledo persisted in his questions but for all her good-will the woman
opposite him could not find in the chambers of her memory any clear,
constant image of the man mentioned.
“I think he died.... He went away to his home, and he must have died
there. Did you say he never came back? Well, perhaps he killed himself.
I don’t know, I don’t remember. If I had to remember the history of all
the men I have known, I’d have been crazy years ago.... My head couldn’t
hold them....”
But Robledo, looking sternly at her, continued his questions.
“And Pirovani’s daughter?”
Again she raised her hands to her breasts ... and again her expression
indicated a tremendous mental effort.
“Pirovani ...? Oh yes! That Italian who lived in Rio Negro, and whose
money Moreno ran away with.... No, we never mentioned his daughter....
Moreno spent it all, and I showed him how to have a good time.... Poor
fool ...!”
Now she sat huddled in her chair, her head drooping on her breast. She
appeared to have shrunk; and when, raising her eyes, she met Robledo’s
stern ones, she dropped hers again to the bottle.
In the silence that followed Robledo was saying to himself--
“And to think that for this wretched rag of a creature men should have
killed each other, women wept, and I should have been made to suffer
such torments of anxiety!”
As though divining his thoughts, Elena said humbly,
“You don’t know what I’ve been through these last years.... When the war
came, they began to persecute me ... wanted to drive me out of Paris.
And they suspected me, thought I was a German spy, thought I was this,
and that and the other thing. I went to Italy, I went to many other
countries, even your country.... Aren’t you Spanish?... Don’t wonder at
the question. I don’t remember so many things.... And when I got back to
Paris, I couldn’t find a soul here I knew. Everything was different
before the war. It was another world. Every single soul I knew had died
or disappeared. I felt as though I had dropped onto another planet. How
lonely it has been!”
She sat as though overwhelmed by this new world that was beyond her
comprehension.
“And the only person I have met since then who could remind me of the
past ... is you! Better if we hadn’t met again....”
Then she continued, as though talking to herself,
“And this meeting is going to make me think of things that I thought I
had forgotten forever. Why did you came back from so far away? What
made you come over to this part of Montmartre where rich foreigners
never come, never? Oh, what a cursed chance!”
Suddenly she straightened up, and he noticed a bluish film over her
eyes.
“Let me drink. How grateful I’d be, if you would make me a present of
the rest of this bottle! I’ll need it after meeting you like this. It’s
going to make me think of too many things. I love life!... Better than
anything ... and I’m not afraid of misfortune nor poverty, if I can only
go on living ... but I’m afraid of memories, and whiskey kills them ...
or else it takes the sting out of them.... Let me drink ... don’t
refuse!”
And as Robledo remained silent, Elena took possession of the bottle and
filled her glass twice in succession, but now she drank slowly, enjoying
each drop that crossed her palate. And as she drank she pointed out the
girl who was still smoking and coughing.
“They’re all like that here ... morphine, cocaine, all that kind of
thing is what they go in for. But I’m old-fashioned. Drugs make me sick.
This is the only thing for me!”
And her hands lovingly caressed the neck of the whiskey bottle. A
strange lucidity animated her face more and more as she drank. But, at
finding herself the undisputed owner of the whiskey, she wanted to be
alone to enjoy it quietly, and she said to Robledo,
“Go away now, and forget me. If you want to give me something, I’ll be
grateful of course. But if you don’t I’ll be content with the bottle.
That’s a princely gift ... go away Robledo ... you don’t belong here.”
But he paid no attention to her words. He still wanted to prod her
memory, to draw from it another episode of her mysterious past.
“And Canterac?... Did you ever meet Captain Canterac again?”
But the name was even less effective in bringing her memory to life than
the others he had mentioned. To help her out he recalled the park made
in her honor on the banks of the Rio Negro.
“That was a unique party! I remember.... But other men have done even
more extravagant things for me than that ... still it was an original
idea.... Poor captain! I saw him a great many times afterward. I think
he’s a general now. What did you say his name was?”
She went on talking about what she remembered of him but Robledo
discovered that she was confusing Canterac with some other officer whom
she had known. She was making one person of two whom she had met in
different periods of her life.
Robledo was practically certain that Canterac had died. For some time,
the unhappy Frenchman had wandered from one to another of the republics
on the Pacific coast, making a scant living, now in the Chilian
saltpeter mines, now in the mines of Bolivia and Peru. When the war
broke out he returned to France to join the army. And there like so many
others he had died, in the performance of some act of obscure heroism.
And this woman who had so tragically turned the current of his life, not
only had kept no clear image of him in her memory; she could not even
remember his name!
But as Robledo’s questions pursued her one by one, her memory freed
itself somewhat from its torpor, and some of the images stirred by his
proddings were now crowding in on her mind. Suddenly it was she who had
a question to ask.
“What’s the name of that American boy, a friend of yours, wasn’t he? I
really think he was the only man of all the men who have run after me
that I ever cared for, perhaps because he never really cared anything
about me. Sometimes, at long, long intervals, I have thought of him....
Did he marry?”
Robledo nodded.
“That’s all you need tell me. As I sit here looking at you it seems as
though the years that had passed were passing again, but in a reverse
direction, and I am beginning to remember everything.... That young
man’s name was Richard, and he’s probably married the girl from the
Pampas ... they called her by the name of some flower....”
But these memories, the only ones capable of surging up clear and
living, aroused in her the embittered sadness of hopeless envy. Other
women were prosperous, yes ... and happy; but she had chosen to forget
... why must she be reminded?
She glanced down at herself with a kind of pitying contempt, as though
seeing herself for the first time. She, who for long years had thought
Elena the center of creation, now saw herself sunk very low, and divined
that there were even lower depths to which she was destined to descend.
Other women might find melancholy pleasure in summoning the past to
mind. For them it was like a sweet old tune, or the perfume of faded
flowers. But for her the past was a pack of raging wolves that would
pursue her until death. Only by living in a state of stupor could she
escape the torture of their fangs. And for her only those days were
endurable when she succeeded in drugging her mind with alcohol.
Apparently she wanted the relief afforded by seeing someone else
symbolize the despair she felt. She pointed to the other woman, who,
half-drunk, was dozing on the settee.
“I’ll be like that soon.”
Her face darkened as though the shadow of her last hours had passed over
it. She lowered her eyes, as she added,
“And then, death.”
Robledo kept silence. He had quietly taken his bill-fold from one of his
pockets and was counting something under the table. She, meanwhile, went
on murmuring the thoughts that normally she would have kept to herself.
“Perhaps some one will put a few lines in the papers, announcing the
death of the so-called ‘_marquesa_,’ and perhaps half a dozen people in
the whole world will remember me, perhaps not even so many. And
meanwhile I shall stay at the bottom of the river, forever. And what
shall I have amounted to?”
Robledo picked up one of her hands and under cover of the table pressed
a roll of bills into it. She guessed at once what it was.
“I oughtn’t to take it,” she protested. “I take money only from those
who don’t know me....”
But she nervously tucked the bank notes into her blouse; and as she did
so her eyes, which had suddenly brightened, gave the lie to the tone of
resigned dignity with which she offered excuses for accepting the gift.
But now Robledo was looking at her pityingly. The once fair Elena....
What a pathetic sight! She had swept over the southern seas like a great
albatross, proud of its snowy plumage and the strength of its wings,
plunging down with merciless voracity on the prey it glimpses between
the waves, strong with the belief that the universe has been created
solely to be devoured by it; she had been a majestic, proud Atlantic
eagle, salt from the wide sweeps of the ocean, possessing the
tough-fleshed elasticity of the carnivores.... But the acid of the years
had dissolved the proud illusion all youth possesses of its immortality;
and the eagle that had so many times haughtily planed upward into the
infinite blue, was now obliged to feed on the ocean’s offal as the tide
brought it in to the shore. And when cold and darkness drove it towards
the light, its failing wings bruised themselves against the glass
guarding the fire. Weary, it had gone in search of the window that sent
out into the night the warm glow of the hospitable hearth; and it had
encountered the lens of the lighthouse, hard and unfeeling as any wall,
made to withstand the fury of tempests. And in one of these encounters
it would fall with wings incurably broken, and the sea below, the
surging sea of life, would bear away its body on its tides, with an
indifference as complete as that with which it had earlier borne away
the relentless creature’s victims....
And then Robledo found himself considering his friends and himself as
well, as though they too were animals. Oxen they were, well-fed,
tranquil and good, like the cattle out in the pastures irrigated by the
colony ditches, fat and plain like them, oppressed with wellbeing. They
possessed the virtues characteristic of all those whose maintenance is
assured, and who, safe from all risk, need never injure others in order
to live. And thus they would continue placidly, without violent
pleasures, but also without pain, to the last hour....
And who of all these would have the better justified their existence?...
That woman of novellesque biography, whose brain was incapable of
remembering exactly either her origin or her adventures? Or they, those
peaceful ruminants, who had done on earth what it was required of them
that they do, and who as a result had won a degree, at least, of
happiness?...
But he was not allowed to go on with his meditations. The waiter had
been summoned to the street by a man gesticulating from the other side
of the window, and now he came back with a worried expression to murmur
a few words in the proprietress’s ear.
“Fly away, my doves!” the woman suddenly cried out from behind her
counter to the clients nearest her. Then excitedly she explained that
the police were making a haul of all the women of the quarter, and might
visit her establishment. A faithful friend had just brought the warning.
The consumptive girl threw away her cigarette, and escaped like a
frightened doe. As she went she broke into even more painful coughing.
The drunken woman opened her eyes, looked about her, and closed them
again, murmuring,
“Let them come! A decent woman can sleep just as well in the police
station as here!”
Elena made haste to run for cover. But even though she was scared, she
walked toward the door with a certain dignity at the thought that there
was a man behind her. She did not wish to be confused with the others.
When he found himself alone, Robledo gave the waiter a bank-note, and
went away without waiting for the change. Arrived on the boulevard, he
looked unavailingly this way and that. Elena had disappeared.... He
would never see her again.... When she died he would receive no news of
her death. He would have to live all the rest of his life without
knowing for a certainty whether she were still alive.... Yet, after this
encounter it was easy to divine her end. Undoubtedly she was of the
number of those who leave this life by tragic means but without noise,
without anyone’s even mentioning their names.
“And so this is Elena,” he said to himself. “An Elena, who, like the
heroine of the poets of old, brought about war between men, in a far
away corner of the globe....”
Doubt was troubling him with its questions. Had this woman been really
bad, fully conscious of her perversity? Had she been simply hungry for
the pleasures of life, and ambitious, making her way over the fallen
bodies of others without knowing what she was treading under foot?
While he was looking for a taxi, he said to himself by way of
conclusion,
“It would have been better if she had died twelve years ago. What does
she go on living for?”
He smiled sadly as he thought of the relative importance and
unimportance of human values, and personages, according to the circles
in which they move.
“And this poor human rag was just as important as Homer’s heroine, in
that half-civilized land where women are few!... But what would the men
who did so many mad things for her sake say now, if they were to see her
as I have seen her today?”
* * * * *
When he reached the hotel, Watson and Celinda had just returned from
their afternoon’s outing.
Two servants were following Celinda, bearing enormous packages,
evidently the trophies of the afternoon’s shopping.
Watson looked impatiently at his watch.
“Nearly seven, and we have to dress, and eat something before going to
the opera. When women once get into a shop there’s no getting them out
of it!”
Celinda soon disposed of her husband’s pretended ill-humor, and together
the young couple went into the adjoining room to dress for dinner.
“Are you coming with us?” asked Watson.
“No,” Robledo replied. “I am getting old, and it bores me to get into
evening clothes and white gloves just to listen to music. No, I’d rather
stay at the hotel. I’ll see to it that they put Carlos to bed in good
order ... and anyway I promised him a story.”
While he talked he felt all the uneasiness of uncertainty ... should he
tell Celinda and her husband about the afternoon’s chance meeting?...
Would it be more prudent to tell it only to Watson?
On the rare occasions when their conversation had included allusions to
Torre Bianca’s wife, Celinda usually so light-hearted and even-tempered,
had frowned as though she could not bear even the name of the
_marquesa_.
Perhaps now the knowledge of the detested woman’s abject state would
cause her a cruel satisfaction.... But Robledo repented of this thought.
Celinda surely had no room for feelings of revenge in her happiness! And
if so, news of the _marquesa_ could only cause her the discomfort of an
unpleasant memory.
Why revive the past?... Let life go on!...
And Robledo gave all his attention to making up the marvellous story
that he was going to tell to his young friend and chief heir.
FINIS.