Esclavita was crossing the hall when she heard her young master’s voice
calling her:
“Esclavita!”
“I am coming.”
“Come quickly! Your presence is required to relieve me from an appalling
situation.”
The girl entered the student’s room and found him standing in his shirt
sleeves in the middle of the floor, his waist-coat in one hand while the
other was tightly clasped, as if it held some precious object.
“A moment ago,” he cried tragically, opening his hand, in which was a
small mother-of-pearl button, “this precious button flew with
lightning-like swiftness from my collar. Can you secure it in its place
again without inflicting with the murderous steel a mortal wound upon my
throat?”
Esclavita smiled, and, putting her hand into her pocket, took out her
needle-case, spool, and thimble. This latter was open at both ends, like
the thimbles used by the peasantry. She put it on quickly, with equal
quickness threaded her needle, knotted the thread, and took between her
thumb and forefinger the little pearl button. She pulled out the threads
where the button had come off, set the button in its place, and inserted
the needle. Here began the difficulties of the undertaking. It was
impossible to draw the needle straight through without pricking the
young man’s chin, smooth and clean as a woman’s. He pretended to be
making desperate efforts to assist in the operation, accompanying them
by comical grimaces and cries of, “Help! She is severing my carotid
artery! she is piercing my jugular vein! she is performing the
dangerous operation of tracheotomy upon me without my having the croup!”
And the girl, smiling, but undisturbed, would say, “Hold your head up a
little--take care, now--there, that will do; I will soon be through.” At
last, with a triumphant gesture, she twisted the thread around the
button to form the stem, fastened it by a stitch or two, and then broke
it off.
[Illustration: “Hold your head up a little--take care, now--there, that
will do.”]
“Hurrah! Victory! Now button it for me.”
The slender fingers, marked with the pricking of the needle, passed over
the throat of the student, who broke into fresh cries:
“Oh! Oh! Oh! she is p-i-i-i-nching me.”
As soon as the collar was buttoned, however, he said softly, as if he
were begging her to render him some important and difficult service:
“Esclavita, deign to encircle my neck with this halter.”
Esclavita took the silk necktie, and as she put it around the young
man’s neck their glances met. During the previous operations this had
not happened, for Rogelio’s head had been turned aside, as far as his
fits of laughing would permit; but now it could not be avoided, for
Esclavita’s face was raised, and Rogelio, taller than she, looked, of
necessity, into her eyes, green, shot with golden lights; and the
parting of the hair, straight and even, like a furrow cut through a
field of ripe grain; and her rounded forehead, smooth and fine, and the
little blue veins in her temples and eyelids. He inhaled her sweet
breath, that intoxicated him for a moment, as if he had opened a jar of
oxygen.
It was but for a moment, but it was a moment which seemed to Rogelio a
year. Childhood, with its butterfly lightness, its blue and silvery
skies, was left behind forever. Esclavita, having finished tying the
cravat, drew back to a little distance, the better to observe the effect
of the bow.
It was as if the communication between the wire and the battery had been
interrupted. Rogelio came to his senses. “How disgraceful!” he thought.
“What a vexation for my mother!”
The precepts of morality, which others learn as a rational necessity
and a compulsory duty, or as a part of their religion, Rogelio, who as
an only son, had been petted and spoiled, had learned through the medium
of his feelings. All his ideas of decorum, of goodness, of rectitude,
had come to him by this indirect but pleasant path. “Ah! what a grief it
would be to me, child, if you were to do such or such a thing!” his
mother used to say. “Heavens! what a mortification for me if you should
commit this or that fault!” Thus it was that, without being conscious of
it, what Rogelio first considered in all his actions was the effect they
would be apt to produce on his mother’s feelings; and this was now his
first thought when the vertigo passed away that had obscured his reason,
while the girl was close beside him. When Esclavita had left the room
his very want of confidence in himself made him take an honorable
resolve, that of avoiding fresh temptations and still greater dangers.
These resolutions are difficult to keep when the temptation is close at
hand. Rogelio felt his first desire return to him continually, and the
same fumes mount into his brain, like puffs of hot air. At table; when
she came to his room, bringing the light, or some message, or his linen,
he could not help devouring her with his eyes, following the perfect
lines of her slender form, noting the grace and lightness of her
movements. The stronger and more passionate his desire, the more
embarrassed did he feel himself in the girl’s presence. When with her it
seemed to him impossible that he should ever venture to pay her a
serious compliment; while in the solitude of his own room at night,
unable to sleep, and tossing about restlessly in his narrow bed, he felt
himself equal to any undertaking, no absurdity seemed to him
unreasonable, and he even thought--strange effect of passion--that it
was his bounden duty to do what in the light of day he regarded as a
crime and an act of madness. “And then,” he said to himself, “no one can
call me a child any longer, and I shall be fully convinced myself that I
am not one.” This absurd idea vanished in the morning, when his mother,
according to her old affectionate habit, brought him his chocolate. When
he saw Doña Aurora, dressed in her plaid morning gown, come into his
room with the tray in her hands, when he tasted the fresh biscuit, the
spoiled child felt all the power of the moral law imposing itself upon
him with apodictic force; and precepts, unknown or denied a few moments
before, now presented themselves to him clearly, significantly, plainly.
“To give mamma cause for grief--it makes me shudder even to think of it;
it would be unpardonable. Even though she should not discover it I
should fancy she was reading it in my eyes, in my very breathing. And
she would discover it,--she would discover it, there is not a doubt of
it. Mamma is very shrewd, easy-going and good-natured as she appears. No
one can throw dust in her eyes. She knows me so well that before the
words were out of my mouth she can tell what I am going to say. As she
cares for no one and thinks of nothing but me. God grant I may never
give her cause for grief.”
Thus this criminal in thought studied Doña Aurora’s countenance
attentively, fearful lest some glance he might chance to cast at
Esclavita should betray him. At times he exposed himself to the risk of
attracting attention by going to the opposite extreme, affecting not to
look at the girl, and avoiding even the contact of her dress when she
waited on him at table. It is true that this simple contact affected
him so powerfully as to cause him pain from the intensity of the
emotion. His was the passionate desire of youth that has not learned
either how to control itself or how to attain its object. After avoiding
Esclavita for two or three days, he would devise some excuse to go and
surprise her in the little room where she ironed and where the basket
containing the mending was kept, and when he was there, the only thing
that occurred to him to do was to sit down in a chair and cheat his
passionate longing by contemplating the girl who, rosy and perspiring,
her right arm curved out firmly, leaned with all her weight on the iron
as she smoothed the bosoms and the cuffs of his shirts. When the impulse
to embrace her became too violent, Rogelio would rise and take refuge in
his little study. There, on the polished desk were the hateful
text-books, printed on brown paper with worn and blurred type,
[Illustration: “Contemplating the girl who ... leaned with all her
weight on the iron.”]
exhaling aridity and tedium from their musty leaves and gray covers.
Rogelio had never had any liking for these books, but now, whenever he
opened one of them to go over a lesson, a thick fog seemed to envelop
his faculties, and a sort of moral dissolution to take place in his
spirit, where a rebellious voice would whisper softly such heresies as
these: “Go, child, give up those futilities, renounce that dry,
worthless, empty, sapless science of the schools. Real life and humanity
are something altogether different from this. This pretended nourishment
for the mind is a collection of antiquities, the rind of a lemon which
the hand of history has been squeezing dry for nineteen centuries. All
that you are studying is out of date. They wish to store your mind with
mummified remains, dusty rags, and old cobwebs. They wish to fill your
head with antiquated juridical rubbish, and they desire that at a bound
you should be as old as your mother’s guests, Lain Calvo, Nuño Rasura,
and the honorable Puppet. They would have you be of wood, like him. No,
you are of flesh and blood, you are a man; life calls to you, and life,
at your age, in default of a pursuit which would unfold your faculties
harmoniously is--Esclavita.”
To these vague promptings, translated here into plain and vulgar speech,
the student responded by yawning, rising nervously from his chair, and
taking down from the book-shelf a novel or the latest number of _Madrid
Comico_, which, throwing himself on the bed, he would eagerly devour,
seeking thus to forget his feverish longings.
He had not the resource of a cigar, for he belonged to the younger
generation who do not smoke; and who, unless God take pity upon them,
will come in time to faint like an Englishwoman at the smell of a
Havana. He was deprived of this sweet soother of impatience, this great
counselor in trouble, this powerful sedative, this most spiritual of
material distractions. One day he thought about it a great deal. “What
would happen to me if I should smoke?” he said to himself. “The first
thing would be that I should grow dizzy, perhaps sick at my
stomach--yes, there is not the least doubt of it. And then mamma would
know that I had been smoking, from the smell. No, the remedy is worse
than the disease.”
The idea of smoking, which pleased him, because there was something
manly and rakish about it, suggested another expedient, more effective,
besides being easy and pleasant to put in practice. How was it that it
had never occurred to him before when it was so simple, so extremely
simple, and even so natural and right, and especially when it would be
so efficacious as a consolation in his present suffering. “Why, the only
thing to be wondered at is, that I should not have a sweetheart
already,” he said to himself. “Every one I know has one. And they are
quite right. If I had one, I should get rid of these crazy notions. I
shall take a sweetheart, yes, indeed. There is nothing wrong in having
a sweetheart, and even if mamma should find it out, she will not be
vexed on account of it. One nail drives out another. That will be my
chief distraction.”
The post being created, it now only remained to find some one to fill
it. Rogelio passed in mental review all the young ladies with whom he
was acquainted. Some of them were ugly; others were already engaged;
this one was too old; that one was never to be met outside her house;
one would turn him into ridicule; another would require him to prove his
affection for her by performing some difficult task. He remembered at
last that in a little street opening on to the Calle Ancha de San
Bernardo, just in front of his house, there lived three or four young
girls, daughters of an employee in the Colonial Department. They were
not bad-looking, especially the youngest, a pale blonde, whose
complexion, eyes, and hair were all the same color, which was becoming
to her, giving her a certain resemblance to the Infanta Eulalia. Rogelio
looked at her occasionally, receiving prompt payment of every one of his
glances. “The little blonde will suit me,” he thought. “It will not be
necessary for me even to move from the dining-room.” Accordingly, the
very day on which the thought occurred to him he took up his post before
breakfast by the window, and, opening it slightly, looked toward the
windows of the third floor opposite. At one of them was the blonde,
dressed in a soiled and crumpled morning-gown of dotted percale. On the
railing of the window hung various undergarments, more than half worn,
drying, and on a bureau he could see some bottles covered with dust, the
empty cage of a lark, some old rags, and an old shoe. As he contemplated
this interior, in no wise resembling a Dutch interior, Rogelio
abandoned his purpose of looking there for a sweetheart. He remained for
the space of ten minutes or so, perplexed. Then he said to himself: “I
shall look somewhere else, that’s all. As for remaining without a
sweetheart, I cannot make up my mind to that; it would be absurd.”