IN one of her letters (the XXIXth) the Marquesa de Montemayor tries to
describe the impression that Uncle Pio "_our aged Harlequin_" made upon
her: "_I have been sitting all morning on the green balcony making you a
pair of slippers, my soul_," she tells her daughter. "_As the golden
wire did not take up my whole attention I was able to follow the
activity of a coterie of ants in the wall beside me. Somewhere behind
the partition they were patiently destroying my house. Every three
minutes a little workman would appear between two boards and drop a
grain of wood upon the floor below. Then he would wave his antennae at
me and back busily into his mysterious corridor. In the meantime various
brothers and sisters of his were trotting back and forth on a certain
highway, stopping to massage one another's heads, or if the messages
they bore were of first importance, refusing angrily to massage or to be
massaged. And at once I thought of Uncle Pio. Why? Where else but with
him had I seen that very gesture with which he arrests a passing abbé
or a courtier's valet, and whispers, his lips laid against his victim's
ear? And surely enough, before noon I saw him hurry by on one of those
mysterious errands of his. As I am the idlest and silliest of women I
sent Pepita to get me a piece of nougat which I placed on the ant's
highway. Similarly I sent word to the Café Pizarro asking them to send
Uncle Pio to see me if he dropped in before sunset. I shall give him
that old bent salad fork with the turquoise in it, and he will bring me
a copy of the new ballad that everyone is singing about the d--q--a of
Ol--v--s. My child, you shall have the best of everything, and you shall
have it first_."
And in the next letter: "_My dear, Uncle Pio is the most delightful man
in the world, your husband excepted. He is the second most delightful
man in the world. His conversation is enchanting. If he weren't so
disreputable I should make him my secretary. He could write all my
letters for me and generations would rise up and call me witty. Alas,
however, he is so moth-eaten by disease and bad company, that I shall
have to leave him to his underworld. He is not only like an ant, he is
like a soiled pack of cards. And I doubt whether the whole Pacific could
wash him sweet and fragrant again. But what divine Spanish he speaks and
what exquisite things he says in it! That's what one gets by hanging
around a theatre and hearing nothing but the conversation of Calderón.
Alas, what is the matter with this world, my soul, that it should treat
such a being so ill! His eyes are as sad as those of a cow that has been
separated from its tenth calf_."
You should know first that this Uncle Pio was Camila Perichole's maid.
He was also her singing-master, her coiffeur, her masseur, her reader,
her errand-boy, her banker; rumor added: her father. For example, he
taught her her parts. There was a whisper around town that Camila could
read and write. The compliment was unfounded; Uncle Pio did her reading
and writing for her. At the height of the season the company put on two
or three new plays a week, and as each one contained a long and flowery
part for the Perichole the mere task of memorization was not a trifle.
Peru had passed within fifty years from a frontier state to a state in
renaissance. Its interest in music and the theatre was intense. Lima
celebrated its feast days by hearing a Mass of Tomás Luis da Victoria in
the morning and the glittering poetry of Calderón in the evening. It is
true that the Limeans were given to interpolating trivial songs into the
most exquisite comedies and some lachrymose effects into the austerest
music; but at least they never submitted to the boredom of a misplaced
veneration. If they had disliked heroic comedy the Limeans would not
have hesitated to remain at home; and if they had been deaf to polyphony
nothing would have prevented their going to an earlier service. When the
Archbishop returned from a short trip to Spain, all Lima kept asking:
"What has he brought?" The news finally spread abroad that he had
returned with tomes of masses and motets by Palestrina, Morales I and
Vittoria, as well as thirty-five plays by Tirso de Molina and Ruiz de
Alarçon and Moreto. There was a civic fête in his honor. The
choirboys' school and the green room of the Comedia were swamped with
the gifts of vegetables and wheat. All the world was eager to nourish
the interpreters of so much beauty.
This was the theatre in which Camila Perichole gradually made her
reputation. So rich was the repertory and so dependable the prompter's
box that few plays were given more than four times a season. The manager
had the whole flowering of the 17th Century Spanish drama to draw upon,
including many that are now lost to us. The Perichole had appeared in a
hundred plays of Lope de Vega alone. There were many admirable actresses
in Lima during these years, but none better. The citizens were too far
away from the theatres of Spain to realize that she was the best in the
Spanish world. They kept sighing for a glimpse of the stars of Madrid
whom they had never seen and to whom they assigned vague new
excellences. Only one person knew for certain that the Perichole was a
great performer and that was her tutor Uncle Pio.
[Illustration]
Uncle Pio came of a good Castilian house, illegitimately. At the age of
ten he ran away to Madrid from his father's hacienda and was pursued
without diligence. He lived ever after by his wits. He possessed the six
attributes of the adventurer--a memory for names and faces, with the
aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible
invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with
strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt
for the dozing rich he preyed upon. From ten to fifteen he distributed
handbills for merchants, held horses, and ran confidential errands. From
fifteen to twenty he trained bears and snakes for travelling circuses;
he cooked, and mixed punches; he hung about the entries of the more
expensive taverns and whispered informations into the travellers'
ears--sometimes nothing more dubious than that a certain noble house was
reduced to selling its plate and could thus dispense with the commission
of a silversmith. He was attached to all the theatres in town and could
applaud like ten. He spread slanders at so much a slander. He sold
rumors about crops and about the value of land. From twenty to thirty
his services came to be recognized in very high circles--he was sent out
by the government to inspirit some half-hearted rebellions in the
mountains, so that the government could presently arrive and
whole-heartedly crush them. His discretion was so profound that the
French party used him even when they knew that the Austrian party used
him also. He had long interviews with the Princesse des Ursins, but he
came and went by the back stairs. During this phase he was no longer
obliged to arrange gentlemen's pleasures, nor to plant little harvests
of calumny.
He never did one thing for more than two weeks at a time even when
enormous gains seemed likely to follow upon it. He could have become a
circus manager, a theatrical director, a dealer in antiquities, an
importer of Italian silks, a secretary in the Palace or the Cathedral, a
dealer in provisions for the army, a speculator in houses and farms, a
merchant in dissipations and pleasures. But there seemed to have been
written into his personality, through some accident or early admiration
of his childhood, a reluctance to own anything, to be tied down, to be
held to a long engagement. It was this that prevented his thieving, for
example. He had stolen several times, but the gains had not been
sufficient to offset his dread of being locked up; he had sufficient
ingenuity to escape on the field itself all the police in the world, but
nothing could protect him against the talebearing of his enemies.
Similarly he had been reduced for a time to making investigations for
the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims led off in
hoods he felt that he might be involving himself in an institution whose
movements were not evenly predictable.
As he approached twenty, Uncle Pio came to see quite clearly that his
life had three aims. There was first this need of independence, cast
into a curious pattern, namely: the desire to be varied, secret and
omniscient. He was willing to renounce the dignities of public life, if
in secret he might feel that he looked down upon men from a great
distance, knowing more about them than they knew themselves; and with a
knowledge which occasionally passed into action and rendered him an
agent in the affairs of states and persons. In the second place he
wanted to be always near beautiful women, of whom he was always in the
best and worst sense the worshipper. To be near them was as necessary to
him as breathing. His reverence for beauty and charm was there for
anyone to see and to laugh at, and the ladies of the theatre and the
court and the houses of pleasure loved his connoisseurship. They
tormented him and insulted him and asked his advice and were singularly
comforted by his absurd devotion. He suffered greatly their rages and
their meannesses and their confiding tears; all he asked was to be
accepted casually, to be trusted, to be allowed like a friendly and
slightly foolish dog to come and go in their rooms and to write their
letters for them. He was insatiably curious about their minds and their
hearts. He never expected to be loved by them (borrowing for a moment
another sense of that word); for that, he carried his money to the
obscurer parts of the city; he was always desperately unprepossessing,
with his whisp of a moustache and his whisp of a beard and his big
ridiculous sad eyes. They constituted his parish; it was from them that
he acquired the name of Uncle Pio and it was when they were in trouble
that he most revealed himself; when they fell from favour he lent them
money, when they were ill he outlasted the flagging devotion of their
lovers and the exasperation of their maids; when time or disease robbed
them of their beauty, he served them still for their beauty's memory;
and when they died his was the honest grief that saw them as far as
possible on their journey.
In the third place he wanted to be near those that loved Spanish
literature and its masterpieces, especially in the theatre. He had
discovered all that treasure for himself, borrowing or stealing from the
libraries of his patrons, feeding himself upon it in secrecy,--behind
the scenes, as it were, of his mad life. He was contemptuous of the
great persons who for all their education and usage, exhibited no care
nor astonishment before the miracles of word order in Calderón and
Cervantes. He longed himself to make verses. He never realized that many
of the satirical songs he had written for the vaudevilles passed into
folk-music and have been borne everywhere along the highroads.
As the result of one of those quarrels that arise so naturally in
brothels his life became too complicated and he removed to Peru. Uncle
Pio in Peru was even more versatile than Uncle Pio in Europe. Here too
he touched upon real-estate, circuses, pleasures, insurrections and
antiques. A Chinese junk had been blown from Canton to America; he
dragged up the beach the bales of deep-red porcelain and sold the bowls
to the collectors of virtú. He traced down the sovereign remedies of the
Incas and started a smart trade in pills. Within four months he knew
practically everyone in Lima. He presently added to this acquaintance
the inhabitants of scores of seacoast towns, mining camps and
settlements in the interior. His pretensions to omniscience became more
and more plausible. The Viceroy discovered Uncle Pio and all this
richness of reference; he engaged his services in many affairs. In the
decay of his judgment Don Andrés had retained one talent, he was a
master of the technique of handling confidential servants. He treated
Uncle Pio with great tact and some deference; he understood which
errands the other should not be asked to undertake and he understood his
need for variety and intermission. Uncle Pio in turn was perpetually
astonished that a prince should make so little use of his position, for
power, or for fantasy, or for sheer delight in the manipulation of other
men's destinies; but the servant loved the master because he could quote
from any of Cervantes' prefaces and because his tongue had a little
Castilian salt about it still. Many a morning Uncle Pio entered the
Palace through corridors where there was no one to cross but a confessor
or a confidential bully and sat with the Viceroy over his morning
chocolate.
But for all his activity nothing made Uncle Pio rich. One would have
said that he abandoned a venture when it threatened to prosper. Although
no one knew it, he owned a house. It was full of dogs that could add and
multiply and the top floor was reserved for birds. But even in this
kingdom he was lonely, and proud in his loneliness, as though there
resided a certain superiority in such a solitude. Finally he stumbled
upon an adventure that came like some strange gift from the skies and
that combined the three great aims of his life: his passion for
overseeing the lives of others, his worship of beautiful women, and his
admiration for the treasures of Spanish literature. He discovered Camila
Perichole. Her real name was Micaela Villegas. She was singing in cafés
at the age of twelve and Uncle Pio had always been the very soul of
cafés. Now as he sat among the guitarists and watched this awkward girl
singing ballads, imitating every inflection of the more experienced
singers who had preceded her, the determination entered his mind to play
Pygmalion. He bought her. Instead of sleeping locked up in the wine bin,
she inherited a cot in his house. He wrote songs for her, he taught her
how to listen to the quality of her tone, and bought her a new dress. At
first all she noticed was that it was wonderful not to be whipped, to be
offered hot soups, and to betaught something. But it was Uncle Pio who
was really dazzled. His rash experiment flourished beyond all prophecy.
The little twelve-year-old, silent and always a little sullen, devoured
work. He set her endless exercises in acting and mimicry; he set her
problems in conveying the atmosphere of a song; he took her to the
theatres and made her notice all the details of a performance. But it
was from Camila as a woman that he was to receive his greatest shock.
The long arms and legs were finally harmonized into a body of perfect
grace. The almost grotesque and hungry face became beautiful. Her whole
nature became gentle and mysterious and oddly wise; and it all turned to
him. She could find no fault in him and she was sturdily loyal. They
loved one another deeply but without passion. He resected the slight
nervous shadow that crossed her face when he came too near her. But
there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that
ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make
even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious
dream.
They travelled a great deal, seeking new taverns, for the highest
attribute of a café singer will always be her novelty. They went to
Mexico, their odd clothes wrapped up in the self-same shawl. They slept
on beaches, they were whipped at Panama and shipwrecked on some tiny
Pacific islands plastered with the droppings of birds. They tramped
through jungles delicately picking their way among snakes and beetles.
They sold themselves out as harvesters in a hard season. Nothing in the
world was very surprising to them.
Then began an even harder course of training for the girl, a regimen
that resembled more the preparation for an acrobat. The instruction was
a little complicated by the fact that her rise to favor was very rapid;
and there was some danger that the applause she received would make her
content with her work too soon. Uncle Pio never exactly beat her, but he
resorted to a sarcasm that had terrors of its own.
At the close of a performance Camila would return to her dressing room
to find Uncle Pio whistling nonchalantly in one corner. She would divine
his attitude at once and cry angrily:
"Now what is it? Mother of God, Mother of God, what is it now?"
"Nothing, little pearl. My little Camila of Camilas, nothing."
"There was something you didn't like. Ugly fault-finding thing that you
are. Come on now, what was it? Look, I'm ready."
"No, little fish. Adorable morning star, I suppose you did as well as
you could."
The suggestion that she was a limited artist and that certain felicities
would be forever closed to her never failed to make Camila frantic. She
would burst into tears: "I wish I had never known you. You poison my
whole life. You just think I did badly. It pleases you to pretend that
I was bad. All right then, be quiet."
Uncle Pio went on whistling.
"The fact is I know I was weak to-night, and don't need you to tell me
so. So there. Now go away. I don't want to see you around. It's hard
enough to play that part without coming back and finding you this way."
Suddenly Uncle Pio would lean forward and ask with angry intensity: "Why
did you take that speech to the prisoner so fast?"
More tears from the Perichole: "Oh God, let me die in peace! One day you
tell me to go faster and another to go slower. Anyway I shall be crazy
in a year or two and then it won't matter."
More whistling.
"Besides the audience applauded as never before. Do you hear me? _As
never before_. There! Too fast or too slow is nothing to them. They
wept. I was divine. That's all I care for. Now be silent. Be silent."
He was absolutely silent.
"You may comb my hair, but if you say another word I shall never play
again. You can find some other girl, that's all."
Thereupon he would comb her hair soothingly for ten minutes, pretending
not to notice the sobs that were shaking her exhausted body. At last she
would turn quickly and catching one of his hands would kiss it
frantically: "Uncle Pio, was I so bad? Was I a disgrace to you? Was it
so awful _that you left the theatre_?"
After a long pause Uncle Pio would admit judiciously: "You were good in
the scene on the ship."
"But I've been better, Uncle Pio. You remember the night you came back
from Cuzco----?"
"You were pretty good at the close."
"Was I?"
"But my flower, my pearl, _was the matter in the speech to the
prisoner_?"
Here the Perichole would fling her face and arms upon the table amid the
pomades, caught up into a tremendous fit of weeping. Only perfection
would do, only perfection. And that had never come.
Then beginning in a low voice Uncle Pio would talk for an hour,
analyzing the play, entering into a world of finesse in matters of voice
and gesture and tempo, and often until dawn they would remain there
declaiming to one another the lordly conversation of Calderón.
Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They
had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known
incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which
we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and
Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in
Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderón had
preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on
this earth.
With the passing of time Camila lost some of this absorption in her art.
A certain intermittent contempt for acting made her negligent. It was
due to the poverty of interest in women's rôles throughout Spanish
classical drama. At a time when the playwrights grouped about the courts
of England and France (a little later, of Venice) were enriching the
parts of women with studies in wit, charm, passion and hysteria, the
dramatists of Spain kept their eyes on their heroes, on gentlemen torn
between the conflicting claims of honour, or, as sinners, returning at
the last moment to the cross. For a number of years Uncle Pio spent
himself in discovering ways to interest the Perichole in the rôles that
fell to her. Upon one occasion he was able to announce to Camila that a
granddaughter of Vico de Barrera had arrived in Peru. Uncle Pio had long
since communicated to Camila his veneration for great poets and Camila
never questioned the view that they were a little above the kings and
not below the saints. So it was in great excitement that the two of them
chose one of the master's plays to perform before his granddaughter.
They rehearsed the poem a hundred times, now in the great joy of
invention, now in dejection. On the night of the performance Camila
peering out between the folds of the curtain had Uncle Pio point out to
her the little middle-aged woman worn with the cares of penury and a
large family; but it seemed to Camila that she was looking at all the
beauty and dignity in the world. As she waited for the lines that
preceded her entrance she clung to Uncle Pio in reverent silence, her
heart beating loudly. Between the acts she retired to the dusty corner
of the warehouse where no one would find her and sat staring into the
corners. At the close of the performance Uncle Pio brought the
granddaughter of Vico de Barrera into Camila's room. Camila stood among
the clothes that hung upon the wall, weeping with happiness and shame.
Finally she flung herself on her knees and kissed the older woman's
hands, and the older woman kissed hers, and while the audience went home
and went to bed the Visitor remained telling Camila the little stories
that had remained in the family, of Vico's work and of his habits.
Uncle Pio was at his happiest when a new actress entered the company,
for the discovery of a new talent at her side never failed to bestir the
Perichole. To Uncle Pio (standing at the back of the auditorium, bent
double with joy and malice) it seemed that the body of the Perichole had
become an alabaster lamp in which a strong light had been placed.
Without any resort to tricks or to false emphasis, she set herself to
efface the newcomer. If the play were a comedy she became the very
abstraction of wit, and (as was more likely) it was a drama of wronged
ladies and implacable hates, the stage fairly smouldered with her
emotion. Her personality became so electric that if she so much as laid
her hand upon that of a fellow actor a sympathetic shudder ran through
the audience. But such occasions of excellence became less and less
frequent. As her technique became sounder, Camila's sincerity became
less necessary. Even when she was absentminded the audience did not
notice the difference and only Uncle Pio grieved.
Camila had a very beautiful face, or rather a face beautiful save in
repose. In repose one was startled to discover that the nose was long
and thin, the mouth tired and a little childish, the eyes unsatisfied--a
rather pinched peasant girl, dragged from the cafés-chantants and quite
incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of
her appetites, of her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of
these was a world in itself, and the warfare between them would soon
have reduced to idiocy (or triviality) a less tenacious physique. We
have seen that in spite of her discontent with her parts, the Perichole
knew very well the joy that might reside in acting and warmed herself
from time to time at that flame. But that of love attracted her more
often, though with no greater assurance of happiness, until Jupiter
himself sent her some pearls.
Don Andrés de Ribera, the Viceroy of Peru, was the remnant of a
delightful man, broken by the table, the alcove, a grandeeship and ten
years of exile. As a youth he had accompanied embassies to Versailles
and Rome; he had fought in the wars in Austria; he had been in
Jerusalem. He was a widower and childless of an enormous and wealthy
woman; he had collected coins a little, wines, actresses, orders and
maps. From the table he had received the gout; from the alcove a
tendency to convulsions; from the grandeeship a pride so vast and
puerile that he seldom heard anything that was said to him and talked to
the ceiling in a perpetual monologue; from the exile, oceans of boredom,
a boredom so persuasive that it was like pain,--he woke up with it and
spent the day with it, and it sat by his bed all night watching his
sleep. Camila was passing the years in the hard-working routine of the
theatre, savoured by a few untidy love-affairs, when this Olympian
personage (for he had a face and port fit to play gods and heroes on the
scene) suddenly transported her to the most delicious midnight suppers
at the Palace. Contrary to all the traditions of the stage and state she
adored her elderly admirer; she thought she was going to be happy
forever. Don Andrés taught the Perichole a great many things and to her
bright eager mind that was one of the sweetest ingredients of love. He
taught her a little French; to be neat and clean; the modes of address.
Uncle Pio had taught her how great ladies carry themselves on great
occasions; he taught her how they relax. Uncle Pio and Calderón had
trained her in beautiful Spanish; Don Andrés furnished her with the
smart slang of _El Buen Retiro_.
[Illustration]
Uncle Pio was made anxious by Camila's invitation from the Palace. He
would have much preferred that she continue with her little vulgarian
love-affairs in the theatrical ware-house. But when he saw that her art
was gaining a new finish he was well content. He would sit in the back
of the theatre, rolling about in his seat for sheer joy and amusement,
watching the Perichole intimate to the audience that she frequented the
great world about whom the dramatists wrote. She had a new way of
fingering a wine-glass, of exchanging an adieu, a new way of entering a
door that told everything. To Uncle Pio nothing else mattered. What was
there in the world more lovely than a beautiful woman doing justice to a
Spanish masterpiece?--a performance (he asks you), packed with
observation, in which the very spacing of the words revealed a comment
on life and on the text--delivered by a beautiful voice--illustrated by
a faultless carriage, considerable personal beauty and irresistible
charm. "We are almost ready to take this marvel to Spain," he would
murmur to himself. After the performance he would go around to her
dressing-room and say "Very good!" But before taking his leave he would
manage to ask her where, in the name of the eleven thousand virgins of
Cologne, she had acquired that affected way of saying _Excelencia_.
After a time the Viceroy asked the Perichole whether it would amuse her
to invite a few discreet guests to their midnight suppers, and he asked
her whether she would like to meet the Archbishop. Camila was delighted.
The Archbishop was delighted. On the eve of their first meeting he sent
the actress an emerald pendant as big as a playing-card.
There was something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin
from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands;
and that was its archbishop. Between the rolls of flesh that surrounded
them looked out two black eyes speaking discomfort, kindliness and wit.
A curious and eager soul was imprisoned in all this lard, but by dint of
never refusing himself a pheasant or a goose or his daily procession of
Roman wines, he was his own bitter jailer. He loved his cathedral; he
loved his duties; he was very devout. Some days he regarded his bulk
ruefully; but the distress of remorse was less poignant than the
distress of fasting and he was presently found deliberating over the
secret messages that a certain roast sends to the certain salad that
will follow it. And to punish himself he led an exemplary life in every
other respect.
He had read all the literature of antiquity and forgotten all about it
except a general aroma of charm and disillusion. He had been learned in
the Fathers and the Councils and forgotten all about them save a
floating impression of dissensions that had no application to Peru. He
had read all the libertine masterpieces of Italy and France and reread
them annually; even in the torments of the stone (happily dissolved by
drinking the water from the springs of Santa María de Cluxambuqua), he
could find nothing more nourishing than the anecdotes of Brantôme and
the divine Aretino.
The Archbishop knew that most of the priests of Peru were scoundrels. It
required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing
something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favourite
notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant;
that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having
known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he
could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses,
look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he
believed that only the widely-read could be said to _know_ that they
were unhappy. On one occasion, the iniquities in his see having been
called to his notice, he almost did something about it. He had just
heard that it was becoming a rule in Peru for priests to exact two
measures of meal for a fairly good absolution, and five measures, for a
really effective one. He trembled with indignation; he roared to his
secretary and bidding him bring up his writing materials, announced that
he was going to dictate an overwhelming message to his shepherds. But
there was no ink left in the inkwell; there was no ink left in the next
room; there was no ink to be found in the whole palace. This state of
things in his household so upset the good man that he fell ill of the
combined rages and learned to guard himself against indignations.
The addition of the Archbishop to the suppers was so successful that Don
Andrés began to think of new names. He had grown increasingly dependent
upon Uncle Pio, but waited until Camila should propose his inclusion of
her own accord. And in due time Uncle Pio brought with him that courser
of the seas, the Captain Alvarado. Generally the reunion had been
several hours under way before Camila was able to join them after her
performance at the theatre. She would arrive towards one o'clock,
radiant and bejewelled and very tired. The four men received her as they
would a great queen. For an hour or so she would carry the conversation,
but gradually reclining more and more against Don Andrés' shoulder she
would follow the talk as it flitted from one humorous lined face to the
other. All night they talked, secretly comforting their hearts that
longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a symposium was
after the manner of the high Spanish soul. They talked about ghosts and
second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about
the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about
whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment
of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to
Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news. They talked until
the sun rose, about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about
strange countries. Each one poured into the conversation his store of
wise sad anecdotes and his dry regret about the race of men. The flood
of golden light struck across the Andes and entering the great window
fell upon the piles of fruit, the stained brocade upon the table, and
the sweet thoughtful forehead of the Perichole as she lay sleeping
against the sleeve of her protector. There would ensue a long pause, no
one wishing to make the first move to go, and the glances of them all
would rest upon this strange beautiful bird who lived among them. But
Uncle Pio's glance had been upon her all night, a quick glance from his
black eyes, full of tenderness and anxiety, resting on the great secret
and reason of his life.
But Uncle Pio never ceased watching Camila. He divided the inhabitants
of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who
had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no
capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to
be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. They were
a kind of straw population, filling the world with their meaningless
laughter and tears and chatter and disappearing still lovable and vain
into thin air. For this distinction he cultivated his own definition of
love that was like no other and that had gathered all its bitterness and
pride from his odd life. He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady
through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and
from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of
living. There was (he believed) a great repertory of errors mercifully
impossible to human beings who had recovered from this illness.
Unfortunately there remained to them a host of failings, but at least
(from among many illustrations) they never mistook a protracted
amiability for the whole conduct of life, they never again regarded any
human being, from a prince to a servant, as a mechanical object. Uncle
Pio never ceased watching Camila because it seemed to him that she had
never undergone this initiation. In the months that followed her
introduction to the Viceroy he held his breath and waited. He held his
breath for years. Camila bore the Viceroy three children, yet remained
the same. He knew that the first sign of her entrance into the true
possession of the world would be the mastery of certain effects in her
acting. There were certain passages in the plays that she would compass
some day, simply, easily, and with secret joy, because they alluded to
the new rich wisdom of her heart; but her treatment of such passages
became more and more cursory, not to say embarrassed. He presently saw
that she had tired of Don Andrés and had returned to a series of
furtive love-affairs with the actors and matadors and merchants of the
town.
She became more and more impatient of acting and another parasite found
its way into her mind. She wanted to be a lady. She slowly contracted a
greed for respectability and began to refer to her acting as a pastime.
She acquired a duenna and some footmen and went to church at the
fashionable hours. She attended the prize days at the University and
appeared among the donors of the great charities. She even learned to
read and write a little. Any faint discrimination against, her as a
bohemian she challenged with fury. She led the Viceroy a horrible life
with her passion for concessions and her gradual usurpation of
privileges. The new vice displaced the old and she became noisily
virtuous. She invented some parents and produced some cousins. She
obtained an undocumented legitimatization of her children. In society
she cultivated a delicate and languid magdelinism, as a great lady
might, and she carried a candle in the penitential parades, side by side
with ladies who had nothing to regret but an outburst of temper and a
furtive glance into Descartes. Her sin had been acting and everyone
knows that there were even saints who had been actors,--there was Saint
Gelasius and Saint Genesius and Saint Margaret of Antioch and Saint
Pelagia.
There was a fashionable watering place in the hills not far from Santa
María de Cluxambuqua. Don Andrés had travelled in France and had
thought to build himself a little mock Vichy; there was a pagoda, some
drawing-rooms, a theatre, a little arena for bull-fights and some French
gardens. Camila's health had never known a shadow, but she built herself
a villa in the vicinity and sipped the hateful waters at eleven o'clock.
The Marquesa de Montemayor has left a brilliant picture of this _opéra
bouffe_ paradise with the reigning divinity parading her fierce
sensitiveness along the avenues of powdered shell and receiving the
homage of all those who could not afford to offend the Viceroy. Doña
María draws a portrait of this ruler, stately and weary, gambling all
through the night in sums that would have raised another Escurial. And
beside him she sets the portrait of his son, Camila's little Don Jaime.
Don Jaime, at seven years, was a rachitic little body who seemed to have
inherited not only his mother's forehead and eyes, but his father's
liability to convulsions. He bore his pain with the silent bewilderment
of an animal, and like an animal he was mortally ashamed when any
evidences of it occurred in public. He was so beautiful that the more
trivial forms of pity were hushed in his presence and his long thoughts
about his difficulties had given his face a patient and startling
dignity. His mother dressed him in garnet velvet, and when he was able
he followed her about at a distance of several yards, extricating
himself gravely from the ladies who tried to detain him in conversation.
Camila was never cross to Don Jaime and she was never demonstrative.
When the sun was shining the two could be seen walking along those
artificial terraces in silence, Camila wondering when the felicity would
begin that she had always associated with social position, Don Jaime
rejoicing merely in the sunlight and anxiously estimating the approach
of a cloud. They looked like figures that had strayed there from some
remote country, or out of an old ballad, that had not yet learned the
new language and had not yet found any friends.
Camila was about thirty when she left the stage and it required five
years for her to achieve her place in society. She gradually became
almost stout, though her head seemed to grow more beautiful every year.
She took to overdressing and the floors of the drawing-rooms reflected a
veritable tower of jewels and scarves and plumes. Her face and hands
were covered with a bluish powder against which she drew an irritable
mouth in scarlet and orange. The almost distraught fury of her temper
was varied by the unnatural sweetness of her address in the company of
the dowagers. In the earliest stages of her progress upward she had
intimated to Uncle Pio that he was not to be seen with her in public,
but finally she became impatient even of his discreeter visits. She
conducted the interviews with formality and evasion. Her eyes never
crossed his and she angled for pretexts to quarrel with him. Still he
ventured out once a month to try her patience and when the call had
become impossible he would climb the stairs and finish the hour among
her children.
One day he arrived at her villa in the hills and, through her maid,
begged for an opportunity to talk with her. He was told that she would
see him in the French gardens a little before sunset. He had come up
from Lima on a strange sentimental impulse. Like all solitary persons he
had invested friendship with a divine glamour: he imagined that the
people he passed on the street, laughing together and embracing when
they parted, the people who dined together with so many smiles,--you
will scarcely believe me, but he imagined that they were extracting from
all that congeniality great store of satisfaction. So that suddenly he
was filled with the excitement of seeing her again, of being called
"Uncle Pio," and of reviving for a moment the trust and humour of their
long vagabondage.
The French Gardens were at the southern end of the town. Behind them
rose the higher Andes and before them there was a parapet overlooking a
deep valley and overlooking wave after wave of hills that stretched
toward the Pacific. It was the hour when bats fly low and the smaller
animals play recklessly underfoot. A few solitaries lingered about the
gardens, gazing dreamily into the sky that was being gradually emptied
of its colour, or leaned upon the balustrade and looked down into the
valley, noting in which village a dog was barking. It was the hour when
the father returns home from the fields and plays for a moment in the
yard with the dog that jumps upon him, holding his muzzle closed or
throwing him upon his back. The young girls look about for the first
star to fix a wish upon it, and the boys grow restless for supper. Even
the busiest mother stands for a moment idle-handed, smiling at her dear
and exasperating family.
Uncle Pio stood against one of the chipped marble benches and watched
Camila coming towards him:
"I am late," she said. "I am sorry. What is it you wish to say to me?"
"Camila,--" he began.
"My name is Doña Micaela."
"I do not wish to offend you, Doña Micaela, but when you let me call
you Camila for twenty years, I should think----"
"Oh, do as you like. Do as you like."
"Camila, promise me that you will listen to me. Promise me that you will
not run away at my first sentence."
At once she burst out with unexpected passion: "Uncle Pio, listen to me.
You are mad if you think you can make me return to the theatre. I look
back at the theatre with horror. Understand that. The theatre! The
theatre, indeed! The daily payment of insults in that filthy place.
Understand that you are wasting your time."
He answered gently: "I would not have you come back if you are happy
with these new friends."
"You don't like my new friends, then?" she answered quickly. "Whom do
you offer me in their stead?"
"Camila, I only remember ..."
"I will not be criticized. I don't want any advice. It will be cold in a
moment, I must go back to my house. Just give me up, that's all. Just
put me out of your mind."
"Dear Camila, don't be angry. Let me talk to you. Just suffer me for ten
minutes."
He did not understand why she was weeping. He did not know what to say.
He talked at random: "You never even come to see the theatre, and they
all notice it. The audiences are falling away now, too. They only put on
the Old Comedy twice a week; all the other nights there are these new
farces in prose. All is dull and childish and indecent. No one can speak
Spanish any more. No one can even walk correctly any more. On Corpus
Christi Day they gave _Belshazzar's Feast_ where you were so wonderful.
Now it was shameful."
There was a pause. A beautiful procession of clouds, like a flock of
sheep, was straying up from the sea, slipping up the valleys between the
hills. Camila suddenly touched his knee, and her face was like her face
twenty years before: "Forgive me, Uncle Pio, for being so bad. Jaime was
ill this afternoon. There's nothing one can do. He lies there, so white
and ... so surprised. One must just think of other things. Uncle Pio, it
would be no good if I went back to the theatre. The audiences come for
the prose farces. We were foolish to try and keep alive the Old Comedy.
Let people read the old plays in books if they choose to. It is not
worth while fighting with the crowd."
"Wonderful Camila, I was not just to you when you were on the stage. It
was some foolish pride in me. I grudged you the praise that you
deserved. Forgive me. You have always been a very great artist. If you
come to see that you are not happy among these people you might think
about going to Madrid. You would have a great triumph there. You are
still young and beautiful. There will be time later to be called Doña
Micaela. We shall be old soon. We shall be dead soon."
"No, I shall never see Spain. All the world is alike, Madrid or Lima."
"Oh, if we could go away to some island where the people would know you
for yourself. And love you."
"You are fifty years old and you are still dreaming of such islands,
Uncle Pio."
He bent his head and mumbled: "Of course I love you, Camila, as I always
must and more than I can say. To have known you is enough for my whole
life. You are a great lady now. And you are rich. There is no longer any
way that I can help you. But I am always ready."
"How absurd you are," she said smiling. "You said that as boys say it.
You don't seem to learn as you grow older, Uncle Pio. There is no such
thing as that kind of love and that kind of island. It's in the theatre
you find such things."
He look shamefaced, but unconvinced.
At last she rose and said sadly: "What are we talking about! It is
growing cold. I must be going in. You must be resigned. I have no heart
for the theatre." There was a pause. "And for the rest?... Oh, I do not
understand. It is just circumstance. I must be what I must. Do not try
to understand either. Don't think about me, Uncle Pio. Just forgive,
that's all. Just try to forgive."
She stood still a moment, searching for something deeply felt to say to
him. The first cloud reached the terrace; it was dark; the last
stragglers were leaving the gardens. She was thinking of Don Jaime, and
of Don Andrés and of himself. She could not find the words. Suddenly
she bent down and kissed his fingers and went quickly away. But he sat
for a long time in the gathering clouds trembling with happiness and
trying to penetrate into the meaning of these things.
Suddenly the news was all over Lima. Doña Micaela Villegas, the lady
that used to be Camila the Perichole, had the small-pox. Several hundred
other persons had the small-pox also, but popular interest and malignity
were concentrated upon the actress. A wild hope ran about the town that
the beauty would be impaired that had enabled her to despise the class
from which she sprang. The news escaped from the sick-room that Camila
had become ludicrous in homeliness and the cup of the envious
overflowed. As soon as she was able she had herself carried from the
city to her villa in the hills; she ordered the sale of her elegant
little palace. She returned her jewels to their givers and she sold her
fine clothes. The Viceroy, the Archbishop, and the few men at court who
had been her sincerest admirers besieged her door still with messages
and gifts; the messages were ignored and the gifts were returned without
comment. No one but her nurse and maids had been permitted to see her
since the commencement of her illness. As an answer to his repeated
attempts Don Andrés received a large sum of money from her with a
letter compounded of all that is possible in bitterness and pride.
Like all beautiful women who have been brought up amid continual
tributes to her beauty she assumed without cynicism that it must
necessarily be the basis of anyone's attachment to herself; henceforth
any attention paid to her must spring from a pity full of condescension
and faintly perfumed with satisfaction at so complete a reversal. This
assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty
had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love
save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity
and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry,
remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it
has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred,
through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the
loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love
than the child that lost a dog yesterday. As her friends continued in
their efforts to draw her again into society she grew more and more
angry and dispatched insulting messages to the city. It was said for a
time that she was retiring into religion. But new rumours that all was
fury and despair on the little farm, contradicted the old. For those
near to her the despair was fearful to behold. She was convinced that
her life was over, her life and children's. In her hysterical pride she
had given back more than she owed and the approach of poverty was added
to the loneliness and the gloom of her future. There was nothing left
for her to do but to draw out her days in jealous solitude in the center
of the little farm that was falling into decay. She brooded for hours
upon the joy of her enemies and could be heard striding about her room
with strange cries.
Uncle Pio did not allow himself to be discouraged. By dint of making
himself useful to the children, by taking a hand in the management of
the farm and by discreetly lending her some money he obtained his
entrance into the house and even into the presence of its veiled
mistress. But even then Camila, convinced in her pride that he _pitied_
her, lashed him with the blade of her tongue and derived some strange
comfort from heaping him with sneers. He loved her the more,
understanding better than she did herself all the stages in the
convalescence of her humiliated spirit. But one day an accident befell
that lost him his share in her progress. He pushed open a door.
She thought she had locked it. For just one hour a foolish secret hope
had come to her; she wondered whether she could make a paste of chalk
and cream to spread upon her face. She who had sneered so often at the
befloured grandmothers of the court wondered for a few moments whether
she had learned anything on the stage that would aid her now. She
thought she had locked the door and with hurried hands and beating heart
she laid on the coat, the grotesque pallor, and as she gazed into the
mirror and recognized the futility of her attempt she caught the image
of Uncle Pio standing in the door amazed. She rose from the chair with a
cry and covered her face with her hands.
"Go away. Go away out of my house forever," she screamed. "I never want
to see you again." In her shame she drove him out with blasphemy and
hatred, she pursued him down the corridor and hurled objects down the
stairs. She gave her farmer orders that Uncle Pio was forbidden to come
into the grounds. But he continued for a week trying to see her again.
At last he went back to Lima; he filled in the time as best he could,
but he longed to be by her as a boy of eighteen would long. At last he
devised a stratagem and returned up into the hills to put it into
effect.
One morning before dawn he arose and lay on the ground below her window.
He imitated in the darkness the sound of weeping, and, as nearly as he
could, of a young girl's weeping. He continued in this for the whole
quarter of an hour. He did not let his voice rise above that degree of
loudness which Italian musicians would represent by the direction piano,
but he frequently intermitted the sound trusting that if she were asleep
it would insinuate itself into her mind as well by duration as by
degree. The air was cool and agreeable. The first faint streak of
sapphire was appearing behind the peaks and in the east the star of
morning was pulsating every moment with a more tender intention. A
profound silence wrapped all the farm buildings, only an occasional
breeze set all the grasses sighing. Suddenly a lamp was lit in her room
and a moment later the shutter was thrown back and a head wrapped in
veils leaned far out.
"Who is there?" asked the beautiful voice.
Uncle Pio remained silent.
Camila said again in a tone edged with impatience:
"Who is there? Who is there weeping?"
"Doña Micaela, my lady, I beg of you to come here to me."
"Who are you and what do you want?"
"I am a poor girl. I am Estrella. I beg of you to come and help me. Do
not call your maid. I pray you, Doña Micaela, to come yourself."
Camila was silent a moment, then said abruptly: "Very well," and closed
the shutter. Presently she appeared around the corner of the house. She
wore a thick cloak that dragged in the dew. She stood at a distance and
said: "Come over here to where I am standing,--Who are you?"
Uncle Pio rose up. "Camila, it is I,--Uncle Pio. Forgive me, but I must
speak to you."
"Mother of God, when shall I be free of this dreadful person!
Understand: I want to see no one. I don't want to speak to a soul. My
life is over. That is all."
"Camila, by our long life together, I beg of you to grant me one thing.
I shall go away and never trouble you again."
"I grant you nothing, nothing. Stay away from me."
"I promise you I shall never trouble you again if you listen to me this
once." She was hurrying around to the door on the other side of the
house and Uncle Pio was obliged to run beside her to make sure that she
heard what he was saying. She stopped:
"What is it then? Hurry. It is cold. I am not well. I must go back to my
room."
"Camila, let me take Don Jaime for a year to live with me in Lima. Let
me be his teacher. Let me teach him the Castilian. Here he is left among
the servants. He is learning nothing."
"No."
"Camila, what will become of him? He has a good mind and he wants to
learn."
"He is sick. He is delicate. Your house is a sty. Only the country is
good for him."
"But he has been much better these last few months. I promise you I
shall clean out my house. I shall apply to Madre María del Pilar for a
housekeeper. Here he is in your stables all day. I shall teach him all
that a gentleman should know,--fencing and Latin and music. We shall
read all...."
"A mother cannot be separated from her child like that. It is
impossible. You are crazy to have thought of it. Give up thinking of me
and of everything about me. I no longer exist. I and my children will
get on as best we can. Do not try to disturb me again. I do not want to
see any human being."
Now it was that Uncle Pio felt obliged to use a hard measure. "Then pay
me the money that you owe me," he said.
Camila stood still, confounded. To herself she said: "Life is too
fearful to bear. When may I die?" After a moment she answered him, in a
hoarse voice: "I have very little money. I will pay you what I can. I
will pay you now. I have a few jewels here. Then we need never see one
another again." She was ashamed of her poverty. She took a few steps,
then turned and said: "Now I see that you are a very hard man. But it is
right that I pay you what I owe you."
"No, Camila, I only said that to enforce my request. I shall take no
money from you. But lend me Don Jaime for one year. I shall love him and
take every care of him. Did I harm you? Was I a bad teacher to you in
those other years?"
"It is cruel of you to keep urging gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. I
was grateful,--good, good! but now that I am no longer the same woman
there remains nothing to be grateful for." There was a silence. Her eyes
were resting on the star that seemed to be leading forth the whole sky
in its wonder. A great pain lay at her heart, the pain of a world that
was meaningless. Then she said: "If Jaime wishes to go with you, very
well. I shall talk to, him in the morning. If he wishes to go with you,
you will find him at the Inn about noon. Good night. Go with God."
"Go with God."
[Illustration]
She returned to the house. The next day the grave little boy appeared at
the Inn. His fine clothes were torn and stained now and he carried a
small bundle for change. His mother had given him a gold piece for
spending-money and a little stone that shown in the dark to look at in
his sleepless nights. They set off together in a cart, but soon Uncle
Pio became aware that the jolting was not good for the boy. He carried
him on his shoulder. As they drew near to the bridge of San Luis Rey,
Jaime tried to conceal his shame for he knew that one of those moments
was coming that separated him from other people. He was especially
ashamed because Uncle Pio had just overtaken a friend of his, a
sea-captain. And just as they got to the bridge he spoke to an old lady
who was travelling with a little girl. Uncle Pio said that when they had
crossed the bridge they would sit down and rest, but it turned out not
to be necessary.