Not at once did the girl Paquita return to the camp of the Gitanos. Her
low broad brow clouded with sullen anger, her dusky eyes somber and
morosely smoldering, she clambered swiftly down the rocks of the
watercourse. In the precipitancy of her descent, in the headlong hurry
and indecorum with which she moved through swale and sunlight and
between boulders and clumps of rhododendron, there was yet something of
cold decision and steadfastness to purpose. She came out, at last, on
the tiny beach of white sand beside the pool.
A red cloth on a rock caught her eye. She snatched it up and clenched it
to her heart. It was the head-kerchief of Jacinto Quesada. When but
lately he had sat and gloomed on that boulder above the pool, he had
dropped it from his pocket and gone off unawares.
She replaced the red headcloth upon the boulder. It lay there in a
crumpled crimson heap, and it pulsed a little as its folds eased out. It
looked like a dying heart.
From some recess in her bosom, the girl Paquita drew forth a small
moleskin sack on a string and shook its contents out upon the top of the
rock. There was a looking-glass, smaller than the palm of her small
brown hand. There was a flint and a bit of steel. There was a chunk of
lodestone, the magnetic iron-ore which the Gypsies of Spain call _La
Bar Lachi_ and which they claim is possessed of a thousand magical and
miraculous properties. There were, also, a half dozen other uncouth
Rommany charms and talismans.
She propped the hand-glass upright against the crumpled head-kerchief.
She fell to her knees before it. With an unwavering and strangely
intense gaze, with a stark contemplation, she stared into the eyes
reflected from the mirror.
Five minutes, then ten snailed painfully by. The process of
self-hypnosis went on. She was like one transfixed by a hooded cobra.
Her body grew gradually rigid, and her breathing ever deeper and slower.
At last she seemed not to breathe at all. Her eyes vacant and numbly
fixed, she rose slowly to her feet.
She crossed the tiny beach of clean white sand. She stooped with a
fluent graceful flexure at the brim of the pool, filled her hands with
wet sand, and slowly pressed and molded that wet sand into an uncouth
little image of a man.
The diminutive effigy she deposited upon the beach, setting it upright
on its vaguely defined and overbroad feet. A second time, she stooped at
the water's edge, filled her hands with sand, and again packed and
shaped that wet sand into a squat little figure. Only this time the
effigy bore a crude but easily perceived resemblance to a woman.
She deposited the one image on the beach beside the other. She gathered
dry leaves and scraps of tinder-rot and made two little piles of them,
each before a tiny figurine. She returned to the boulder, swathed the
lodestone in the red headcloth and, lodestone and cloth in hand, bore
them back across the beach. And everything was done with extreme
slowness, with acute and painful deliberation. She was like a
somnambulist in a walking sleep.
She fetched the flint and the steel from the boulder. She could execute,
it seemed, only one errand at a time. She dropped to her knees above one
of the tiny piles of dry leaves and tinder-rot, and busied herself with
the flint and steel. So soon as the one leafy hillock commenced to burn
bravely, she translated its flame. The other little bonfire cackled with
a like eagerness and gusto.
Stepping back from her uncouth little idols and tiny sacrificial fires,
she undid a catch here and another catch there, and her shoulders and
then her hips emerged from the green gown, and the gown fell in a
swishing billow about her brown bare feet. Clad only in her olive-pale,
satin-smooth and satin-glowing skin, she stepped out of the atoll of
green cloth and commenced a slow and strange dance there upon the sands.
It was not a dance voluptuous or obscene. It was a solemn dance of
statuesque attitudes, and flowing flexures, and ceremonious pauses. Very
like was it to some ritualistic dance of the sacerdotal dancing boys of
the Cathedral of Toledo. And yet there was in it a taint of sorcery and
demonolatry.
She stooped at the water's edge to dip therein her hands. Dancing on,
she shook a few drops of water from her finger tips down upon the
flames. Smoke arose, a gust of smoke for each trinity of drops. The
while her eyes remained fixed and vacant and she danced slowly, she
chanted a sort of weird incantation in the gerigonza of the Zincali.
Her voice was very low and came as with great effort. This was the
rigmarole she chanted, translated from the Romany, which is descended
from the Sanskrit and which it much resembles:
"To the Mountain of Olives one morning I hied,
_Three_ little black goats before me I spied,
Those _three_ little goats on _three_ cars I laid,
Black cheeses _three_ from their milk I made;
The _one_ I bestow on the lodestone of power,
That save me it may from all ills that lower;
The _second_ to Mary Padilla[1] I give,
And to all the witch hags about her that live;
The _third_ I reserve for Asmodeus[2] lame,
That fetch me he may whatever I name."
[Footnote 1: Mary de Padilla, a notorious witch of Medieval Spain and
mistress of Peter the Cruel of Castile (1333-1369).]
[Footnote 2: Asmodeus, an evil demon. Appears in later Jewish traditions
as "king of demons." Also Beelzebub and Apollyon. Familiarly called the
genius of matrimonial unhappiness, or jealousy.]
The rhythm of that solemn dance grew ever more sprightly. Her languor
dropped from her like a discarded shift. Faster and faster her brown
bare feet beat the sands. She leaped ecstatically in air. Suddenly the
dance ended in a whirl of exaltation. Then, for a long minute, she stood
like one petrified, like a statue sculptured in onyx, her brown arms
upflung, her face uplifted and sublimated. And in the voice of a
demoniac, she screamed:
"Oh, _el buen Baron_! O Asmodeus the Lame! Send an evil upon the
arrogant head of the stripling Quesada, he who tore the heart from my
virgin breast and then ground it beneath his heel as though it were a
ball of dung! Accursed was the salt placed in his mouth in the church
when he was baptized, the vile Busno! He is too disdainful of me, too
contemptuous! Send a black evil upon him and his, O Asmodeus! O
Apollyon! By the three black little goats and the three black little
cheeses, I invoke you!
"Humble him, break his heart of arrogant cold granite by making those he
loves most fondly fall into fevers and die like flies in a frost! Send
an evil of hideous disease upon those about him! Make those about him
fall ill of horrid discharges and cramps of the stomach; then weaken
them by causing them to vomit a gray pasty whey; then turn their bodies
to blue and purple, and then let them die within twelve or twenty-four
hours!
"Break his spirit as my father breaks the spirit of a proud black
stallion, O Asmodeus the Lame! Do this for thy handmaid and votaress, do
this for Caste Sonacai, known to the Busne as Paquita, the child of
Flammenco Chorolengro, hetman of the clan of Barolengro and count of the
people of Zend!"
You must know that the Gypsies of Spain practice a magic of two kinds.
Their magic of the first kind is compounded of pure bunkum and fraud.
Always in public do they practice this charlatanry and upon gullible
Gentiles whom they hope to hocus-pocus and swindle out of a few pesetas.
When they tell a buena ventura, or fortune, by crossing the dupe's palm
with a piece of the dupe's gold, this is the sort of arrant nonsense
they practice. The Hokkano Baro, the Great Trick, is another of their
thieves' devices. The Ustilar Pastesas and the Chiving Drao are still
others. In not one of the swindling tricks mentioned do they use any
true clairvoyancy or authentic warlockry; it is all sleight-of-hand and
humbuggery. At this kind of magic the Gypsies laugh loudest themselves.
Those who in public practice magic in order to hoodwink others, always
practice in secret another sort of magic which they consider the true
magic, and in which they devoutly believe. This is dogma. Did not the
priests of ancient Egypt make magic in public to the cat-headed god
Bast, the bull Ptah, and the lioness Sakhmi whom they despised as images
of stone and machinery, but to whom they salaamed that the ignorant
rabble might continue to be hoodwinked? And did not those same priests
make magic in secret to the one true God? Thus with the Gypsies. In
secret they practice another and second kind of sorcery which they
believe in with a fanatic faith!
And that was the kind of magic the girl Paquita practiced in secret down
on the tiny beach by the oleander-arcaded pool. Her execration solemnly
concluded, the beautiful and youthful dealer in the warlockry of the
Roms became again a hot wind of action. Swiftly she ran to the pool,
filled her cupped hands with water, and as swiftly came back again.
The fires had died down into twin nests of coals. She cast no water upon
them. What water she carried in her cupped hands, she threw upon that
little sand image which resembled a man.
Without pausing to watch the havoc she played with her handiwork, she
repeated the action, this time throwing water upon the little effigy
which looked vaguely like a woman. Then, her midnight-black hair falling
about her face and her dusky eyes burning from beneath the obscuring
oily threads with a strange sibylline fire, she crouched on her brown
bare heels before the two sodden hillocks of sand.
Now, when standing upright, the two little images of sand had seemed
mated divinities, bound together by a common majesty. In their downfall
and watery ruin, however, one might say that they had become
antagonized; there was that in the way they fell which suggested a
coldness between them, a rift, a void. In melting and crumbling, the two
watersoaked little images had fallen gently away from each other.
Paquita got up and shook back the hair from her face. Her face was
flushed, her eyes glowing with glad triumph. She laughed long and
arrantly.
"It is written in the sands!" she exclaimed. "She will never have
Jacinto Quesada for her bridegroom. It is written; it has been shown to
me! Never will those two lie down together on the bed of marriage! And a
plague--even that hideous plague I asked for--shall come upon them; a
plague of low fevers and cramps of the stomach; a plague that shall
color their bodies blue and purple!"