There was yet another incident which would turn my head during that
fateful journey. On passing through the Calle de Alcalá a man got
on with his wife. He sat down next to me. He was a man who seemed
affected by some strong and recent emotion and I could even believe
that, from time to time, he raised his handkerchief to his eyes to
wipe away invisible tears which were no doubt being shed behind the
dark green lenses of his unusual spectacles. After a short time he
said in a low voice to the person I took to be his wife:
"They suspect that she was poisoned, there's no doubt about it. Don
Mateo's just told me. Poor woman!"
"How terrible! That's what I thought too," answered his wife.
"What else can you expect from such savages?"
"I won't leave a stone unturned till I get to the bottom of this
business."
I, who was all ears, also said in a low voice: "Yes, sir, she was
poisoned. There's proof of it."
"What? You know? Did you know her too?" said the man with the
green specs, turning towards me.
"Yes, sir. And I do not doubt that her death was a violent one, no
matter how hard they try to make us believe it was food poisoning."
"I'm of the same opinion. What an excellent woman! But how do you
know all this for a fact?"
"I know, I know," I replied, extremely pleased that this man at least
did not think I was mad.
"You'll make a declaration to the court then, for the judge has
already started to sum up."
"I'll be happy just to see these rascals get what's coming to them.
I'll make that declaration, yes, I will, sir."
My moral blindness had reached such a point that I ended up completely
taken in by this event half dreamed, half read about, and believed it
as I now believe I'm writing with a pen.
"Indeed I will, sir, for it is necessary to clear up this mystery so
that the perpetrators of this crime can be punished. I will declare
that she was poisoned by a cup of tea, the same as the young man."
"Did you hear that, Petronila?" said the bespectacled man to his wife.
"By a cup of tea."
"Yes, it surprises me," the lady answered. "What terrible things
those monsters were capable of!"
"It's true, sir. With a cup of tea. The Countess was playing the
piano."
"What countess?" the man asked, interrupting me. "The countess. The
woman who was poisoned."
"The woman in question was no countess."
"Come off it. You too are one of those determined to hide the facts
in this case."
"This was no countess or duchess, but simply the woman who did my
laundry for me, the wife of the pointsman at Madrid North station."
"A laundress, eh?" I said roguishly. "You won't make me swallow that
one."
The man and his wife looked at me quizzically and muttered some words
to each other. From a gesture that I saw the woman make I understood
that she had formed the deep conviction I was drunk. I opted not
to argue and said nothing, content to despise such an irreverent
supposition in silence as befits great souls. My anxiety knew no
bounds. The Countess was not absent for a moment from my thoughts
and she had started to interest me by reason of her sinister end as
if all that had not been a morbid expression of my own impulse to
fantasize, forged by successive visions and conversations. Finally,
to understand to what extreme my madness carried me, I am going to
relate the ultimate occurrence on this journey of mine. I shall say
with what extravagance I put an end to the painful combat of my
understanding caught in a battle with an army of shadows.
The tram was entering the calle de Serrano when I chanced to look
through the window opposite where I was sitting into the street,
weakly lit by street lights, and I saw a man go by. I shouted with
surprise and foolishly exclaimed the following:
"There he goes. It's him, Mudarra, the principal author of so many
crimes."
I ordered the tram to stop and alighted or rather jumped through the
door, colliding with the feet and legs of the passengers. I
descended to the street and ran after that man, shouting:
"Stop him! Stop him! Murderer!"
You can imagine what the effect of these words would have been in
such a tranquil neighbourhood. The man in question, the same one I
had seen in the tram that afternoon, was arrested. I, for my part,
did not stop shouting:
"He's the one who prepared the poison for the Countess, the one who
murdered the Countess."
There was a moment of indescribable confusion. He affirmed that I
was mad, but we were both placed in police custody. Afterwards I
lost all notion of what was happening around me. I do not remember
what I did that night in the place where they locked me up. The
most vivid recollection that I have of such a strange event was to
have awoken from the deep sleep I fell into, a veritable drunken
stupor morally produced, I know not how, by one of the passing
phenomena of alienation that science now studies with great care
as one of the heralds of madness.
As you can surmise the event did not have consequences because the
unsympathetic person I baptized with the name of Mudarra was an
honourable grocer who had never in his life poisoned any countess.
But for a long time afterwards I persisted in my self-deception
and was wont to exclaim: "Poor countess. Whatever they say, I'll
stick to my guns. No-one will persuade me that you did not end
your days at the hand of your irate husband."
Months needed to pass for the shadows to return to the unknown place
from whence they had come forth driving me mad and for reality to
gain the ascendance in my head. I always laugh when I remember that
journey and all the consideration I had lavished beforehand on my
dreamed-of victim I now devoted to--who do you think?--my travelling
companion on that anguished expedition, the irascible English woman,
whose foot I dislocated when I hastily left the tram to run after the
alleged butler.