Without taking my eyes off the bundle of books I started to think
about the relationship between the news I had had from the mouth
of Don Cascajares and the scene I had just read in that scandal
sheet, a roman feuilleton no doubt translated from some silly novel
by Ponson du Terrail or Montépin. It may be silly I said to myself,
but the fact is I'm interested in this countess who has fallen
victim to the nastiness of an insufferable butler who only exists
in the disturbed mind of some novelist born to terrify simple souls.
And what will he do to take his revenge? He'd be capable of framing
some atrocity to bring to an end in sensational style such a chapter.
And what will the count do? And that young man Cascajares mentioned
on the tram and Mudarra in the serial, what will he do? Who is he?
What is there between the countess and that unknown gentleman? I'd
give my eye teeth to know.
These were my thoughts when I raised my eyes and looked over the
inside of the tram with them. To my horror I saw a person who made
me shake with fear. While I was engrossed in the interesting reading
of the feuilleton, the tram had stopped several times to take on or
let off passengers. On one of these occasions this man had got on
whose sudden presence now produced such a strong impression on me.
It was him, Mudarra, the butler in person, sitting opposite me, with
his knees touching my knees. I took a second to examine him from
head to toe and saw in him the features I had already read about.
He could be no-one else: even the most trifling details of his
clothing clearly indicated it was him. I recognized his dark and
lustrous complexion, his unruly hair, the curls of which sprang up
in opposite directions like the snakes of Medusa. His deep-sunk
eyes were covered by the thickness of his bushy eyebrows and his
beard was no less unkempt than his hair, while his feet were twisted
inwards like those of parrots. The same look in a nutshell, the
same man in his appearance, in his clothes, in the way he breathed
and in the way he coughed, even in the way he put his hand into his
pocket to pay his fare.
Suddenly I saw him take out a letter writing case and I noticed that
this object had on its cover a great gilded M, the first letter of
his surname. He opened it, took out a letter and looked at the
envelope with a demonic smile and I even thought I heard him mutter:
"How well I've imitated the handwriting!" The letter was indeed a
small one with the envelope addressed in a feminine scrawl. I
watched him closely as he took pleasure in his infamous action until
he saw that I had indiscreetly and discourteously stretched my face
in order to read the address. He gave me a stare that hit me like
a blow and put the letter back in the case.
The tram kept going and in the short time it had taken me to read
an extract from the novel, to reflect on such strange occurrences
and to see Mudarra in the flesh, a character out of a book, hard to
believe in, made human and now my companion on this journey, we had
left behind the calle de Alcalá, were currently crossing the Puerta
del Sol and making a triumphal entrance into the calle Mayor, making
a way for ourselves between other vehicles, making slow-moving covered
waggons speed up and frightening pedestrians who, in the tumult of
the street and dazed by so many diverse noises, only saw the solid
outline of the tram when it was almost on top of them. I continued
to look at that man as one looks at an object of whose existence one
is uncertain and I did not take my eyes from his repugnant face till
I saw him get up, ask for the tram to stop and get off, losing sight
of him then among the crowd on the street.
Various passengers got off and got on and the living décor of the
tram changed completely. The more I thought of it, the more alive
was the curiosity that event aroused in me, which I had to begin with
considered as forced into my head exclusively by the juxtaposition of
various feelings occasioned by my erstwhile conversation and subsequent
reading, but which I finally imagined as indubitably true.
When the man in whom I thought to see the awful butler got off the
tram, I was still thinking about the incident with the letter and I
explained it to myself as best I could, hoping not to have on such a
delicate matter an imagination less fertile than the novelist who
had written what only moments before I had read. Mudarra, I thought,
desirous of taking his revenge on the countess, that unfortunate
lady, had copied her writing and written a letter to a certain
gentleman of her acquaintance. In the letter she had given him a
rendezvous in her own home. The young man had arrived at the time
indicated and shortly afterwards the husband, whom the butler had
warned so that he would catch his unfaithful wife in flagrante
which was in itself an admirable idea! An action, which in life has
points for and against, fits snugly in a novel like a ring on a
finger. The lady would faint, the lover would panic and the husband
would commit an atrocity and, lurking behind a curtain, the face of
the butler would light up diabolically.
As an avid reader of numerous bad novels, I gave that twist to what
was unconsciously developing in my imagination on the basis of the
words of a friend, the reading of a piece of torn-off paper and the
sight of someone I had never laid eyes on before.