The April sun shone on the window-sill, lit up my mother's gray hair,
lightly touched Juliana's temples. The very white curtains were waving
to and fro, reflected in the luminous window-panes. The lofty elms on
the lawn, covered with young leaves, produced a murmur, at times loud,
at times soft, on which the shadows, more or less stationary, regulated
their swing. From the wall of the house, covered with thousands of
bunches of violets, arose a paschal odor, like an invisible vapor of
incense.
"How penetrating that odor is!" murmured Juliana, passing her hand over
her brow and half-closing her eyes. "It makes one dizzy!"
I was between her and my mother, a little in the rear. A desire seized
me to put my arms around both and lean out of the window. In that
familiar and simple act I wished to put all the tenderness that swelled
my heart, and make Juliana understand a multitude of inexpressible
things and, by that one gesture, reconquer her entirely. But I was
restrained by an almost infantile feeling of timidity.
"Look, Juliana," said my mother, pointing to the top of the hill, "look
at your dear Lilacs. Can you see them?"
"Yes, yes."
And, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand, she made an effort to
see better. I, who was watching her, remarked a slight trembling of her
lower lip.
"Can you see the cypress?" I asked her, with the intention of increasing
her agitation by this suggestive question.
And I saw once more, in imagination, the venerable old cypress, whose
trunk rose amid a rose-bush, and whose top sheltered a nest of
nightingales.
"Yes, yes; I see it, but with difficulty."
The Lilacs stood out white against its background of foliage half-way up
the slope. The chain of hills rolled away in the distance in a noble,
peaceful, undulating line, and the olive-tree plantations on their sides
appeared of extraordinary lightness, like a kind of greenish fog piled
up in motionless shapes. The trees in blossom, dotted here and there
with bouquets of red and white, broke the uniformity. The sky seemed to
pale from minute to minute as if a stream of milk were being continually
spread in and mixed with its fluid atmosphere.
"We will go to the Lilacs after Easter; everything there will be in
flower," I said, trying to revive in that soul the dream which I had so
brutally shattered.
I dared to draw closer to her, and put my arms around Juliana and my
mother, and lean out of the window, advancing my head between theirs in
such a manner that the hair of each brushed me. The spring, the purity
of the air, the nobleness of the country, the peaceful transfiguration
of every creature by the season's maternal influence, and that sky, that
sky of divine paleness, more divine in measure as it became paler--all
awoke in me such a new sentiment of life that I thought, with an
internal tremor: "Can it be possible? Can it be possible? After all
that has happened, after all that I have suffered, after so many
transgressions, can I still find enjoyment in life? Can I, then, still
_hope_? Can I still have a presentiment of happiness? From whence does
this blessing come to me?" It seemed to me that all my being was
relieved, became expanded, became dilated beyond its limits, with a
subtle, rapid, and continuous vibration. Nothing can convey an idea of
the feeling developed in me by the imperceptible sensation of a hair
grazing my cheek.
We remained several minutes in this attitude, without speaking. The
elms moaned. The constant thrill of the thousands of yellow and violet
flowers that carpeted the wall beneath our window enchanted my eyes. A
heavy and warm perfume arose in the sunshine with the rhythm of a
breath.
All at once Juliana drew back, and grew pale. Her eyes looked troubled,
her mouth was contracted as if with nausea. She said:
"That odor is terrible. It makes one giddy. Are you not affected by it
too, mother?"
She turned round, tottered a few steps, and left the room hastily. My
mother followed her.
I watched them as they passed through the corridors, still dominated by
what rested of my former sensations, lost in the dream.
*II.*
My confidence in the future increased from day to day. It was as if I
had forgotten everything. My soul, too fatigued, no longer remembered
its sufferings. At certain periods of complete abandon, all became
disintegrated, diluted, dissolved, lost in the original fluidity, became
unrecognizable. Then, after these strange internal decompositions, it
seemed to me that a new principle of life had entered into me, that a
new power had penetrated me.
A multitude of sensations, involuntary, spontaneous, unconscious, and
instinctive, made up my real existence. Between the exterior and the
interior there was established a play of minute actions and
instantaneous minute reactions, that vibrated in endless repercussions,
and each one of these incalculable repercussions became converted into
an astonishing psychic phenomenon. My entire being was modified by the
slightest odor of the circumambient atmosphere, by a breath, by a
shadow, by a flash of light.
The great maladies of the soul, like those of the body, renew a man, and
the convalescences of the mind are not less charming nor less miraculous
than the physical convalescences. Before a small, flowering shrub,
before a branch covered with small buds, before a vigorous shoot growing
out of an old and almost dead trunk, before the most modest
metamorphoses accomplished by spring, I stopped, artless, ingenuous,
stupefied.
Often, in the morning, I went out with my brother. At that hour,
everything was cool, graceful, unconstrained.
Federico's company purified me and strengthened me not less than the
good country air. Federico was then twenty-seven years old; he had
almost always lived in the country, where he led a sober and laborious
existence, and the earth seemed to have communicated to him its mild
sincerity. He was in possession of the rule of life. Leon Tolstoi, as
he kissed his fine, serene brow, would have called him, "My son."
We walked across the fields, without an object, exchanging but few
words. He praised the fertility of our domains, explained to me the
innovations introduced in their cultivation, pointing out the progress
made. The cottages of our peasants were large and airy and coquettishly
kept. Our stables were full of healthy and well-nourished cattle. Our
dairies were admirably equipped. Often, on the way, he stopped to
examine a plant, and his virile hands could touch with the greatest
delicacy the little green leaves at the tip of a new shoot. At times we
passed through an orchard. The peach-trees, apple-trees, pear-trees,
cherry-trees, plum-trees, and apricot-trees bore on their branches
thousands of flowers, and, below, the transparency of the rosy and
silvery petals metamorphosed the light into a sort of humid atmosphere,
into an indescribable thing, divinely graceful and hospitable. Through
the small interstices of these light garlands smiled the blue sky.
While I was admiring the flowers, he was already anticipating the future
treasure suspended from the branches, and said:
"You will see--you will see the fruit."
"Yes, I shall see it," I repeated to myself, inwardly. "I shall see the
flowers fall, the leaves born, the fruit grow, color, ripen, and fall."
It was from my brother's mouth that this affirmation first issued, and
it assumed for me a grave importance, as if it presaged I know not what
promised and expected happiness, that was certain to arrive during the
period of the vegetal labor, at the period separating the flower from
the fruit. "Even before I manifested my intention to do so, it already
seems natural to my brother that, henceforth, I should live here, in the
country, with him and our mother; for he said I shall see the fruit of
his trees. He is _sure_ I shall see them. So it is quite true that a
new life has begun again for me, and that my innate sensation does not
deceive me. In fact, everything, now, is being accomplished with a
strange, unusual facility, with an abundance of love. How I love
Federico! Never have I loved him so much before." Such were the
soliloquies that I indulged in, soliloquies somewhat disconnected,
incoherent, at times puerile, because of the singular disposition of
soul that made me recognize in no matter what insignificant fact a
favorable sign, a happy prognostication.
My keenest joy was in knowing myself to be far removed from the past,
far from certain places and certain persons, freed forever. Sometimes,
in order to better enjoy the peace of this vernal country, I imagined to
myself the space that separated me now from the shadowy world in which I
had suffered so many and such culpable sufferings. Sometimes, too, a
confused fear seized me again, compelled me to restlessly seek about me
the motives of my present security, forced me to place my arm on my
brother's arm, and read in his eyes the indubitable and protecting
affection.
I had a blind confidence in Federico. I should have liked not only that
he should love me, but that he should dominate me. I should have liked
to cede to him my right as the elder, because he was more worthy, to
submit to his advice, to have him for a guide, to obey him. At his
side, I should not have run the peril of being lost, since he knew the
right way and trod it with an infallible step. And, more than that, he
was strong of arm, he would have defended me. He was the exemplary
man--good, energetic, sagacious. To me, nothing equalled in nobleness
the sight of his youth devoted to the religion of "to act
conscientiously," consecrated to the love of the Earth. One would say
that his eyes, in the continual contemplation of verdant nature, had
borrowed something of its limpid vegetal color.
"Jesus of the soil," I called him one day, smiling. That was on a
morning pregnant with innocence, one of those mornings that evoked the
images of primordial daybreaks at the infancy of the world. My brother
was speaking to a group of laborers at the edge of a field. He spoke
standing, taller by a head than those around him, and his calm gesture
indicated the simplicity of his words. Old men grown white in wisdom,
mature men already on the confines of old age, were listening to the
young man. All bore on their knotty bodies the mark of the great common
toil. As there were no trees in the vicinity, and as the wheat was low
in the furrows, their attitudes were fully outlined in the sanctity of
the light. When he saw that I was coming towards him, he dismissed his
men in order to come forward to meet me. And then fell spontaneously
from my lips this salutation:
"Jesus of the soil, hosanna!"
To every vegetable growth he paid infinite attentions. Nothing escaped
his penetrating and, so to speak, omnispective regard. During our
matinal walks, he stopped at every step to remove from some leaf a
snail, a caterpillar, or an ant. One day, while carelessly walking
along, I struck the plants with the end of my stick, and at every blow
the ends of the verdant stems flew in all directions. That gave him
pain, since he took the stick from my hands, but with a gentle movement,
and he blushed, thinking perhaps that his pity might seem to me an
exaggeration of sickly sentimentality. Oh! that blush on that manly
face.
Another day, as I was breaking off a flowering branch from an
apple-tree, I surprised in Federico's eyes a shadow of sorrow. I
stopped immediately, and withdrew my hands, saying:
"Does it displease you..."
He burst into a laugh.
"Not at all, not at all. You may despoil the entire tree."
Yet the broken branch, held by several live fibres, hung down the trunk,
and, truly, that wound, moist with sap, had an appearance of a thing in
pain; those fragile flowers, flesh-colored with pale spots, like bunches
of simple roses, grown from a germ henceforth condemned, continued to
thrill in the breeze.
Then, so as to excuse the cruelty of my aggression, I said:
"It is for Juliana."
And, breaking the last live fibres, I detached the broken branch.
*III.*
I carried this branch to Juliana, and many others besides. I never
returned to the Badiola without a load of flowered gifts.
One morning, as I was carrying a bunch of hawthorns, I met my mother in
the vestibule; I was somewhat out of breath, heated, disturbed by a
slight intoxication.
"Where is Juliana?" I asked.
"Upstairs, in her room," she answered, laughing.